The
Politics Of Web Services Standards
Watching the politics of Web
Services standards is a fascinating game. It has its own rules:
-
Ignore minor players.
It does matter, ultimately, how many players sign up for
competing standards (including the smaller guys), but until the
big guys decide what they're doing, it doesn't count.
-
Forget traditional rivalries.
You know that IBM and Sun partner on Java and that Sun
and Microsoft never have a good word to say about each other,
right? Well when it
comes to Web Services standards, which partners with whom is a
lot trickier. It
seems to depend on lots of things and the rules change abruptly.
-
Remember the overriding rule.
All these guys are in this game to make money.
Web Services won't work without strong standards.
If any one really important player refuses to play,
everyone's revenues are at risk.
That's the bottom line.
That means expect the politicking (behind the scenes, of
course) to elevate to amazing levels until a satisfactory
compromise is reached and the game can continue.
-
The goal is to get a strong
enough set of Web Services standards so that everything everyone
writes will interoperate, but with enough flexibility that
different vendors can still offer product differentiation (you
knew that would happen didn't you?).
With that in mind, please note
that the W3C standard for business process management (Choreography)
that had previously been promoted by Sun, Oracle and its partners
(including HP, WebMethods, Cisco, BEA) seems to be loosing ground to
the OASIS business process standard (BPEL) promoted by IBM,
Microsoft, BEA, SAP, and Siebel and its new partners Sun and Oracle.
We'd like to think this happened
because customers told Sun and Oracle that they were planning on
following a single standard. However,
industry sentiment indicates it has more to do with the fact that
OASIS allows vendors to consider including IP that carries royalties
in standards whereas W3C does not.
(back to top)
