Grand Central facilitates communication

GRAND CENTRAL COMMUNICATIONS is in the business of enabling applications and platforms to easily communicate across enterprises. President and CEO Craig Donato and VP of engineering and CTO John McDowall sat down with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and News Editor Mark Jones to explain how Grand Central’s Web services network makes connections between organizations reliable and easier to implement.

InfoWorld: Give us an update on what Grand Central is doing.

InfoWorld: Whether they’re tightly coupled or not, they need to be reliable.

Donato: It needs to be reliable and loosely coupled because the whole idea of Web services outside the firewall [means] you’re not in control. How do you make it such that you can change things without requiring a partnership change? How you can change your infrastructure without having to go to your partner and say, “By the way, we’re upgrading and [so] will you please change all your formats.” That does not scale past the firewall.

InfoWorld: We’ve talked with people like [BEA’s] Adam Bosworth who say that Web services do not solve that problem completely.

By asynchronous buffering I mean we buffer to allow people to poll into the network — whether it’s buffering or allowing people to poll to alleviate the firewall problem. We can send you a message [and] you can say, “I’m not going to open my firewall, I’m just going to poll into the network to get things off the queue.” You can then say, “Give me a catalog of all the messages they have” so you can prioritize. [That] once again [gets] back to the loosely coupling and ease of deployment — no firewall configurations [are needed]. You poll into the network and poll things out of the network.

InfoWorld: How do you differentiate yourselves from a product like BizTalk Server? What is the value-add of your service?

Donato: If you assume the world’s going to be homogenous, the value of Grand Central becomes small. If the world is heterogeneous, the value’s huge.

InfoWorld: I’m not talking about two endpoints with BizTalk Server. I’m talking about BizTalk Server consuming via its connector base a variety of protocols and transports and converting it to XML and then outputting it in a similar way.

Donato: You can do that if you want to do it all yourself, because then you have point-to-point connections. If I want to change my security policy, you’re not responsible for implementing those. So every time you add a partner, you add more responsibility into your hub rather than delegating it out into the partner.

InfoWorld: But do your partners trust you that much?

Donato: That’s a part of our value proposition. We need to build that trust. … And from an infrastructure perspective, our goal is to extend the management capabilities on the edge by providing the data to allow them to have that shared visibility, that visibility at the other end of the network — real-time monitoring, reporting alerts, and forcing their access and availability policies. Making sure that the other end of the network is fulfilling those policies and then simplifying the whole provisioning process of getting a partner on board, which even in the most basic ways people aren’t even clear whose job it is to provision — is that my job or your job?

InfoWorld: How far out to the edge are we talking?

Donato: We like people to acknowledge receipt of the message and also acknowledge understanding of the message, which gives you a transactional context at the edge. So I can say, “I received a message,” and your first transaction bracket [will] say, “I want to process this message,” and acknowledge the fact that you actually processed it successfully.

InfoWorld: Why would companies not hand this over to IBM Global Services or to Microsoft with Accenture and let them handle it?

Donato: Well, IGS is going to charge you quite a lot of money. If I go to my partner and say, “You have to install some new software,” there’s [also] a hardware cost, there’s a software cost, there’re training costs, and there’re maintenance costs. And it’s time to market. To convince you to go and do this is hard, because if I’m Java and you’re Microsoft and I tell you install a Java box, you’d go, “I can’t touch this.” You go to an IT shop and tell them to do something that they don’t understand already [and] the lead time [needed] is enormous. We go in and say, “What do you have today? We’ll plug into that.” Anywhere from an Excel spreadsheet to FTP to BEA to IBM to SAP to Microsoft. That reduces the barriers to entry significantly.

InfoWorld: Do you have plans to offer your product as a service that larger enterprises can manage based on your best practices?

Donato: We’ve evaluated in the long run whether or not we would be able to take the thing and have it resold by telecom providers or system integrators. That’s certainly a distribution opportunity for us down the road. It’s a little early to do that. It wouldn’t make sense to take what we have and sell it as software. But for someone that would want to operate it — conceptually it’s like a telecom service or resource — it could work.

InfoWorld: We talked to [Netscape’s] Marc Andressen a couple of years ago and he said exactly what you just said. Now they’re about to show us their software doing exactly that.

Donato: I think the difference is that we don’t necessarily perceive what we’re doing as providing a hosted application. It’s more a piece of shared infrastructure. We’re trying to focus on meet-in-the-middle capabilities [and] how we unlock the shared infrastructure potential for this. We think the time is right because of the Internet and lightweight standards to tie into applications to enable business-to-business integration.

InfoWorld: Where do the telcos leave off and where do you begin — and is that line moving?

Donato: [Telcos] have got their hands full with a variety of issues right now, and I think this might [make] a sizeable impact to their business maybe in the 2005-2006 timeframe. A number of us have worked with telecom providers and you probably don’t want to depend on them for distribution if you’re trying to grow a visionary, early adopter business. Down the road, I think it’s a very viable way for us [to go] because our services can staff into any IP network.

InfoWorld: I imagine the telcos would be able to start picking up more of the data management capabilities?

Donato: We think that a lot of the lower-level stuff — the business-class transport management stuff — is going to get commoditized. Where our focus is, in terms of our IPs and the meet-in-the-middle stuff, that’s [located] a little higher on the stack. I think the security reliability issues will get handled first.

InfoWorld: You don’t see the telcos climbing up into that space?

Donato: I think they will. [But] it’s going to be harder for them to climb up into this capability, and by the time they have a desire to do that — if they ever do — we’ll hopefully be selling them services to do so.

InfoWorld: Do you have any plans to work with directory players such as Novell or Sun?

Donato: We’ve talked to Sun a little bit but [not as much] as Novell. For what we do, Novell probably scales a lot better. But going back to standards, whether it be things like WS-Correlation, even WS-Security fits well in our model. What we’ve been glad to see is the standards have come out; they haven’t obviated the need for something like Grand Central — they’ve underscored the need for it.

InfoWorld: How do you integrate across firewalls and managed services?

Donato: The first thing is you configure it. [You] connect to Grand Central on both sides. The question is how [do] you want the connection to work? [Do] you want to have it asynchronous [or] synchronous? [Do] you want to poll into Grand Central? [Do] you want to open it on the firewall and get real-time delivery of the data? This is a simple configuration. There are a lot of advantages to that because things like denial-of-service attacks can be pushed off on Grand Central because you’re just exposing a service. We’ll handle the queuing and all that other sort of thing. It offloads a lot of burden. You have to manage either zero or one connection that’s secured to us.

InfoWorld: Aren’t you are taking on yourself the burden of ensuring the relationships between companies when you may not have necessarily a reliable trust relationship with one of those partners?

Donato: We check it. If you tell me you don’t want any traffic and somebody’s sending data over HTTP using a password to clear, we’ll not let that traffic flow. [You set the policy,] we enforce it.

InfoWorld: As you collect multiple players in your web of trust, do you see that becoming an opportunity to provide outsourced services?

Donato: We’re primarily a service. We don’t really believe becoming a software company is where our sweet spot is, because we have an advantage today [of being able] to go to SAP and IBM and BEA and they don’t see us as a competitor because we’re not selling software. If we start selling software we start to compete with some of our best partners.

InfoWorld: Are we at a stage where each node in the network is capable of handling a higher level of transactional capability?

Donato: The compensation is the hard part. That’s where we’re going to provide the infrastructure to at least deliver the compensation message; the worst of that comes in an e-mail and then you start it. Once again, it’s bridging the gap of somebody who has a very sophisticated system and somebody who has a very, very dumb system. You can make sure that there’s actually a shared context that raises the boat for everybody.

InfoWorld: What do you see as the impact of the standards process on this?

McDowall: I think the standards are moving in the right direction. The WS stack assumes there’s something in the middle. The first thing you do is send out and get a coordination ID from a coordination service. So I think a lot of the standards have started moving in our direction, because I honestly don’t know of any other way of doing this. Within firewalls it’s hard enough to get the CIO [with] his big stick [saying], “Do it all my way or else.”

Donato: Outside the firewall it [used to] be multiple CIOs saying, “Do it my way or else.” This is not going to work [anymore]. You’ve got to have something in the middle that says, “I can mediate the differences and make sure you’re all working at the same level of reliability and security.”

InfoWorld: How might this manifest itself then in additional services in the future?

McDowall: We’re not going to wait for the standards to evolve because I think we’re getting to that critical point in standards where agreements get harder and harder. Even [with] just WS-Security, which seems fairly simple, there’s a bifurcation between Microsoft and IBM. And that’s a fairly simple issue. [If] you take coordination transactions, the issues become much more complex. Until we start deploying real work-world cases, it’ll [take] a while for these standards to crystallize. We’ve tried the transactions in synchronous [mode]; people are going to try and do this. I’ve seen this happen before, and it took a huge, long transaction system for [one of] our investment bank [customers] because they tried to do it synchronously and it failed miserably. The only way to do this is through a long-lived [asynchronous] transaction, and we’re going to build up the shared understanding. It’s going to be an education process.

Donato: A lot of the activity we see is very portal-facing, very customer-facing. Web services [are transitioning] from being very content-[oriented] to starting to edge into maybe some very simple transactions. Even if it’s content, it’s starting to be transactional content. It’s an issue that [customers] are starting to hit. If we can provide a very pragmatic way to solve that, especially in a way that’s adaptable as the standards evolve, we see a lot of value in that.