As the CTO of a technology integrator, I help customers derive tangible business value from technology solutions. Web services holds a lot of promise in this regard. After shedding some light on what's new about Web services, this article will present our view on the .NET versus J2EE debate and highlight areas where our customers are recognizing business value today with Web services technologies.

What's Really New Here?
Web services is a new approach to architecting and using software - the most recent in a long line of software paradigms that promised to make it easier to construct, connect, and reuse software systems. The predecessors to Web services included such technologies as structured programming, object-oriented programming, binary component standards like COM/DCOM and CORBA/ IIOP, EAI middleware, and others. Each of these approaches tried to address some of the pains of software development, and each enjoyed varying degrees of success.

Web services builds on the technologies and learnings of its predecessors, adding the concept of software as a service, the use of standard technologies (XML, SOAP, and WSDL), and the use of the Internet as the delivery vehicle for software. These three factors are what's new, and their combination is what positions Web services to have a breakthrough impact on software development.

Focus on Business Capability
The service concept of Web services can potentially close the gap between business people and technology people. A software service that performs a well-defined business function is more easily understood by a business person than the mishmash of applications, databases, and Web sites that might be used to provide that function. Business people can talk about the cost, sourcing, and exploitation of Web services in terms that are meaningful to them.

Web services can be combined to implement complex business workflows and create business value chains and can also be discovered dynamically through UDDI registries. This aspect of Web services is probably the furthest out on the timeline, but it's tremendously powerful as a vision to build value chains based on changing business circumstances. For example, if a company's supplier were unable to provide parts required to fulfill a big order, the company could dynamically search for other suppliers to meet that need and electronically connect with them to complete the transaction.

Practical Approach to Reusing Software
Web services provides a practical approach to software reuse compared to the somewhat unwieldy component technologies of the past. Web services standards are broadly available on most computing platforms, which allows for maximum reuse of existing software investments since almost any legacy code can be wrapped as a Web service.

Web services can also be consumed by end users or other Web services to form a chain of services, and they can operate through firewalls, which makes it possible to implement business workflows that leverage existing code across organizational boundaries. And because Web services can be placed in UDDI directories, organizations will eventually have a broader base of candidates when making software "buy-versus-build" decisions.

Potentially Unlimited Reach
Through the use of a simple URL, you can invoke a Web service anywhere in the world. With the explosion of IP-enabled mobile devices, Web services will have the potential to reach billions of devices and enable an unlimited set of work and personal computing scenarios. This would not have been possible without the Internet and the use of standards like XML.

Still Version 1 Technology
With all its potential, Web services is still in the very early stages of technical maturity and customer adoption. Web services today can address many EAI scenarios but aren't yet ready to natively support real-time, reliable, high-security business transactions. Also, most customers aren't properly equipped with the IT capabilities to develop, deploy, and operate Web services. There are several standards organizations actively working on enhancing XML and SOAP specifications, and technology vendors have announced aggressive roadmaps to support Web services. The success of Web services will be based on the success of these efforts as well as the ability to maintain use of standard technologies while adding new capabilities. On the business side, Web services depends on the network effect - in other words, the value proposition increases geometrically based on the number of organizations that standardize on XML formats and deploy reusable Web services.

The .NET vs J2EE Debate
As organizations evaluate this new approach, the debate around choice of vendors, platforms, and tools is sure to arise. While Web services operate across multiple platforms and vendor products, individual project teams will tend to pick a preferred solution stack for their software development. Usually, this leads to the .NET versus J2EE debate, with Microsoft as the .NET provider and vendors such as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and BEA in the J2EE camp.

In order to implement Web services, organizations should consider the programming model, software product offerings, and preexisting Web services provided by the different vendors. The .NET and J2EE programming models generate a lot of discussion, but the real dollars are spent on software products that provide capabilities like databases, portals, e-commerce, caching, content management, etc. While most vendors have comprehensive software offerings, Avanade's experience has been that the .NET Enterprise Servers from Microsoft provide equivalent or better capabilities at a fraction of the cost of competing offerings. A number of independently conducted benchmarks demonstrate this as well (www.tpc.org). Microsoft also has existing services that can be leveraged as building blocks of Web services.

On the programming model topic, Microsoft's .NET offers more programming languages and has the best developer tools. It runs only on the Windows operating system and achieves scalability through multiple high-end hardware providers. J2EE offers a wide range of operating systems and hardware but is limited to Java, and the developer tools aren't as rich.

In our experience in examining the total solution stack, J2EE doesn't provide much portability over .NET. This is because different J2EE application servers have proprietary features that don't translate universally and aren't available across all the operating systems that support the Java language.

We've also found that the ASP.NET technology has a particularly strong value proposition for improving Web site performance and developer productivity. Some benchmark numbers comparing .NET with J2EE are available at www.gotdotnet.com/team/compare/veritest.aspx. In summary, both J2EE and .NET can support implementation of Web services in the enterprise. .NET has a compelling value proposition, and organizations should consider it for new projects.

Where Are Customers Seeing Value?
We've helped many customers recognize value from Web services technologies. To date, this has been in the areas of implementing intracompany and intercompany workflows in an effective and efficient manner, managing cost of ownership of legacy systems, and reducing time-to-market for new business functions through use of a Web-services middleware layer.

i-Deal (www.i-deal.com) is a company that automates the process of raising capital in the global fixed income and equity markets. Their business platform is designed to increase the speed and efficiency of this complex, multiparty business process. Avanade worked with i-Deal to architect and implement their Web-based offering in less than six months. Using XML and .NET technologies, i-Deal was able to securely and reliably implement their service without needing to worry about the technical details of all the external systems they need to connect with.

We've also leveraged our application integration expertise and solution assets to successfully design, build, and deploy workflows that connect our customers' enterprise applications to other internal and external applications. The ability to deliver personalized and dynamic information from these workflows to front ends like enterprise portals and Microsoft Office has a significant benefit for employee productivity.

At the Australian government Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR), www.dewrsb.gov.au, we helped develop Web services that integrate and aggregate information about job seekers and job opportunities. This information resides in multiple mainframe applications and is made available through a Web service to authorized users of the department and to other public- and private-sector organizations. These services are registered in http://uddi.microsoft.com and allow users and applications to submit or query for job openings. With a Web services abstraction layer, DEWR can now provision new business capabilities more quickly and economically than they would have been able to with just the mainframe environment. They can also reach a much broader audience through the use of UDDI-advertised Web services.

Conclusion
Web services provides a compelling value proposition to IT departments and has tremendous potential to become a technology with breakthrough business impact. Web services allows organizations to reassess their approach to software development and make strategic decisions on sourcing and partnerships. Web services products and proof points have started to emerge this year, but it will take a good 12-18 months before they prove themselves in the marketplace. Organizations should be aggressive in evaluating Web services solutions, but pragmatic in adoption to ensure positive ROI with every step.

Author Bio
Ashish Kumar is the CTO of Avanade, Inc., a technology integrator focused on delivering solutions based on the Microsoft enterprise platform. Avanade's customers include Global 2000 companies and emerging market-makers seeking solutions for technology infrastructure and enterprise application development. Ashishk@avanade.com