FIDESIC IS ONE of a new generation of startup companies seeking to leverage Web service technology to create a digital service. Fidesic’s mission is to automate the workflow of invoices for small and medium-size companies. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Fidesic CEO Naseem Tuffaha and company CTO Bassam Saliba talk about the role Web services — and in particular Microsoft’s .Net technology — played in helping them create their service. Prior to co-founding Fidesic, Tuffaha was director of Web services evangelism for Microsoft and Saliba was co-founder of the Bill Present Group within Microsoft. InfoWorld: What does Fidesic do exactly? InfoWorld: Why is this important to small to mid-size companies? Tuffaha: Cash flow is king to the small to mid-size market. They can get paid faster and get paid predictably, and therefore manage their cash flow better. The benefits around electronic payments are extreme in this business setting. InfoWorld: What role will Web services play in terms of delivering your service? Tuffaha: You can think about our Web service along two lines. We’ve built integration with accounting systems like Great Plains, Peachtree, or Quick Books, and those local applications that reside on the customer site talk directly to our Web service. That enables us to present this full electronic invoicing and payment solution to the customer. But let’s think about other application developers who need to incorporate a payment or invoicing capability within their application. What they can effectively do is just call into our service and access the full set of capabilities that we’ve built. They don’t need to build it on their own. What Web services enable us to do are, No. 1, solve the problem more effectively for our own customers, but also No. 2, create more opportunities for us and third parties to add value-added services to their respective offerings. InfoWorld: What is your relationship with Microsoft today? Tuffaha: We are completely .Net centric. We’ve bet the farm on .Net. Our infrastructure is all based on Windows 2000, .Net enterprise servers, XML, and SOAP. InfoWorld: Are you worried about potentially competing with Microsoft’s myServices offering, otherwise known as Hailstorm, down the road? Tuffaha: No, they’re not going to offer something similar to this. There are capabilities that they have that could enhance our solution. For example, some of the notification services that are part of Hailstorm are things that are interesting to us. We could call into the .Net service rather than go and build that whole notifications infrastructure ourselves. So there are things there that we will increasingly rely on over time as they become available. But they’re not doing anything that competes with us, and the relationship has been quite a positive one. InfoWorld: Most people think Web services today are only appropriate for inside the firewall integration because of latency and security issues. What’s your experience? Tuffaha: If you look at the way we’ve engineered our integration with Great Plains, for example, they’re passing the information over the wire. There is incredible benefit for their customers in doing that and the latency isn’t an issue. Performance is quite good. Security is quite good. Our customers can feel confident that this is going to work. We’ve designed it only assuming that this interaction is going to happen across the wire, not just behind the firewall. To be honest, that’s one of the real benefits of Web services to begin with. When you look at previous communication architectures like DCOM, for example, it’s hard to send that over the wire. You couldn’t tunnel it through HTTP. With Web services, the model is loosely coupled and completely built around Internet protocols. So we’re able to deliver a solution that works for customers who previously couldn’t interact electronically. Saliba: Latency hasn’t been an issue for us. The actual amount of data that you need to transfer tends to be relatively small except for the invoice. A payment instruction is 50 [bytes] or 100 bytes or so. InfoWorld: What do you think are the next big challenges associated with Web service then? Tuffaha: The business models that need to emerge to support this new technology delivery model. So, for example, Great Plain’s partners are excited about the fact that their business model can be built around an ongoing subscription service, so they can get revenue every month vs. just the one-time installation and service revenue that they would normally get with a product or module. I think there’s real opportunity there, but again, these are new business models and so people need to get comfortable with them. Saliba: Probably the one area where we have spent a fair amount of time is on the authentication between different services. Seeing that effectively resolved in a more generic way would be very helpful by either VeriSign or someone like Microsoft working with them. Technology Industry