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Web Services Roadmap for the On Demand Business cont'd

On Demand Business

IBM has initiated a strategic business change which over the next five years will have profound impacts on how it engages with its customers. This change is a move to provide end to end business process support to their customers, which includes the entire life cycle of a business process, spanning business design through to operational management.

By on demand, IBM means the delivery and execution of a business process when and where it is required in the most efficient and cost effective manner. On demand encapsulates a number of fashionable business trends. First, the on demand business needs to be a Real Time Enterprise (RTE) where events are responded to as they happen. This requires more real time systems behaviour. No more weekly updates or working off yesterday's out of date information. Acting in real time often requires Straight Through Processing (STP) to remove time wasting steps (typically human) from the process. We can argue about just how real time things need to get, but there is little doubt that optimizing the enterprise's use of resources through Just In Time (JIT) approaches are beneficial to the bottom line. But JIT requires Business Process Optimization (BPO). There is little point in implementing JIT Manufacturing for example if the sales order business process and inventory management are not brought into line. However, few businesses are an island, and they work with many partners up and down the supply chain. So BPO more often requires a broader look at Supply Chain Optimization (SCO). Each of these business buzzwords is highly related and dependent. It is hard to deliver one without addressing the others.

On demand also means dealing with peaks and troughs, constantly shifting requirements, and requires the agility to not just transition to this new world on a one time basis, but to constantly optimise processes and use of resources. To meet this challenge, organizations will increase levels of outsourcing, yet must at the same time demand higher levels of integration from their partners to deliver STP and SCO. Businesses, and their processes, will become increasingly virtual so that they can constantly reconfigure themselves on demand.

Primarily, this will require greater levels of automation of business processes. If they are to be executed quickly, they require minimal human intervention. Achieving the on demand business is therefore dependent on information technology. But for the IS department to meet the businesses needs in the future it too must undergo a similar transformation. Cycle times to deliver new systems or updates must be drastically reduced. Capacity must be available JIT. Down times or interruptions in service must be averted. In other words, IS needs to become an on demand business too, and requires just as much BPO as any other part of the business.

As such, we can view on demand from two complimentary perspectives which we can term,

  1. On Demand Business Processes. The business processes behaviour outlined above.

  2. On Demand Operating Environment. Providing an IT and IS infrastructure that delivers resources on demand, efficiently, and cost effectively.

The IBM On Demand Operating Environment

IBM defines the on demand Operating Environment as a "flexible, open, integrated infrastructure for rapid deployment and integration of business applications and processes, virtualization of resources, and for automated, resilient systems". As most of IBM customers' systems are built in a heterogeneous platform, it is based on open standards like Web Services and the OGSA framework. There are three key capabilities:

  • Integration creates business flexibility and the collaboration between people, processes and information by combining disparate, unconnected data, applications and processes.

  • Virtualization improves the utilization of IT, information and people assets because it allows customers to treat resources as a single pool, accessing and managing those resources across their organization more efficiently, by effect and need rather than physical location.

  • Automation improves availability and resiliency, while reducing the complexities of managing IT and lowering IT management costs, based on the policies set for the business.

The IS Department Challenge

Desirable as the on demand business may be, many enterprise customers will however still have what they perceive as more mundane requirements, and will see the challenge of delivering an on demand business as considerable. For example

  • Many will still be focused for example on internal Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) projects. EAI alone doesn't deliver the on demand business. Can they solve EAI and on demand requirements in one go?

  • Besides EAI, large enterprises will have been presented with a number of options in recent years that additionally address B2B and distributed computing requirements, each delivering incompatible solutions to the underlining problems of integration. Is on demand going to require another different technology solution?

  • The reuse of existing assets is key. Though they may not all deliver optimal support for the on demand business, the cost and time to replace them is too high. Can they be reused yet again?

  • The typical IBM customer will also have a heterogeneous environment that mixes not only diverse IBM platforms but those from several other vendors too. Will on demand require yet another layer of software infrastructure to be delivered onto every platform?

  • Are the skills required difficult to acquire? Is the learning curve to get developers up to best practices steep?

Web Services are Key

IBM's vision for on demand business is critically dependent upon Web Services. Though aspects of on demand could be delivered through a diversity of niche (and typically proprietary) technologies, it is clear that Web Services will play a central role. For example

  • It provides a single ubiquitous messaging/communications infrastructure based on open standards, that should be common to all participants in on demand business scenarios,

  • Web Services provide high levels of automation to the solution delivery process. Automation is going to be central to on demand business. Not just enabling automation of the business processes in support of the business, but automating the development, discovery and usage of Web Services by the IS department.

  • Provides mechanisms for publishing Service descriptions and dynamic Service discovery, which facilitates on demand assembly of solutions and aggregation of new Services

  • Is being used at the core of autonomic and grid computing approaches which will provide amongst other things resilience and scalability in on demand business implementations

  • More specifically, there are emerging Web Service protocols that enable the operation of the on demand business
    • BPEL - dynamic location of business process execution
    • WS-Addressing - redirect service requests. For example to dynamically relocate implementations
    • WS-Security - provides federated security support
    • WS-ReliableMessaging - guaranteed message delivery
    • WS Distributed Management - support SLA in an federated on demand environment

Importantly, Web Services provides solutions for more immediate requirements of enterprise customers, and with careful application can provide an infrastructure that enables a transition path to full enterprise-wide on demand business implementation. Many customers will see some of their current projects as steps towards on demand business with a focus on enabling some aspect of the various business buzzwords outlined earlier. However, basing those projects on proprietary technologies without the application of Web Services, and more importantly without taking a SOA approach, is likely to mean those solutions will have to be reengineered in future.

Consequently, Web Services are increasingly core to IBM's strategy, helping them deliver solutions to customer current and future needs. Web Services hide the diversity of the platforms and systems behind a standard interface, enabling new solutions to be assembled on demand from existing and new assets regardless of their implementation.

IBM's leadership role in driving towards open standards for Web Services is well known. As key contributors to, and usually instigators of the majority of Web Service protocols together with Microsoft, IBM is in a strong position to influence the standards process to meet the requirements of their customers and deliver early support in their products and services. We believe that open standards will be essential to free the on demand business from the constraints of otherwise being locked in to vendors proprietary solutions.

Besides their central role in core Web Service protocol standards, IBM have also formed a set of Web Services Industry Councils (WSIC). These address the specific needs of different vertical industries, where for example increasing B2B integration will drive business partners towards greater consensus on the semantics of the information they exchange and the collaborative processes they share. The initial focus will be on financial services, manufacturing, distribution and retail, and public sector.

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