Next-gen application integration CIOs frequently cite application integration as their top IT spending priority. Not surprisingly, a top IT spending priority for CIOs creates a host of vendors trying to solve the problem. Commerce One’s Conductor is the latest offering in this space, which already includes UAN (Universal Application Network), Grand Central Communications’ Web Services Network, and Flamenco WSM (Web Services Management).UAN is an application interconnection bus developed cooperatively by Siebel, IBM, Vitria, webMethods, and others. UAN software connects various applications within your organization. Grand Central’s Web Services Network is a hosted service through which partners can exchange messages on a subscription basis. And Flamenco WSM is a peer-to-peer solution where each peer operates a Web-services adapter that connects to other Flamenco peers.Web services are the foundation for all this work in application integration, but we’re only beginning to see the benefits of Web services. Web services differ from past integration technologies because of the standard way that program APIs are exposed. Exposed APIs allow for interoperability, but just as important is the ability to bolt new functionality onto existing applications. Web services create an abstraction layer where applications are seen as black-box nodes on a network. Data and transaction streams are seen as application layer messages on the network. These messages can be conditioned, filtered, and modified in real time as they flow between these nodes. Commerce One and other vendors are building software that takes advantage of this networked view of applications, providing general-purpose software that can be used to integrate a wide range of applications. These application-layer switches and proxies extend the base applications without modifying them. Progress in this area is not unlike what happened with networks themselves. At first, computers were retrofitted with network interfaces, and a few applications were changed to allow network access. Now we see entire classes of software built from the ground up to take advantage of networked computers.In the short term, we’ll see the continued effort to expose existing monolithic applications through Web services APIs and hook them together. In the long term, we’ll see applications built to exploit “application networks.” It’s difficult to predict what these apps might be, but Web services will create more opportunity than simply connecting the multitude of ERP and CRM systems. Software Development