Thankfully, a group of smaller, more pragmatic Web-services disciples is helping to bring Web services into sharper focus for the rest of us. Net-native software-as-services vendors — vendors that have designed their offerings to be Internet-based, online service offerings from day one — are putting Web services into action, supplying real-life examples of the benefits that Web services can provide.

Born and Bred for Web Services
Having come of age in the Internet era, most of these vendors developed their solutions with Web technologies and protocols, such as Java and XML, from the ground up. From their perch on the forefront of the open-standards movement, they saw that Web services presented many opportunities. To begin with, as market newcomers, their customers would almost certainly need to link their new, Net-native solutions with legacy data and applications. Because they had no legacy customers to try to hold onto, it was in their best interests to make it painless for their applications to "talk" to other applications.

In addition, by building easy-to-use, standard integration capabilities into their solutions, they would be able to help their customers extend selected business processes to external constituents. They could, in turn, position this as a competitive advantage against many traditional packaged-software rivals, whose solutions often require custom programming to let customers link to external parties.

Today, it appears that Net-native vendors' eagerness for, and familiarity with, standard object-oriented programming and Web-services standards are giving them a leg up in using Web services to integrate and automate business processes, and to synchronize data among their solutions, third-party applications and legacy systems. Web services are quickly becoming "real" to customers that use Net-native software-as-services solutions, as illustrated by the following examples:

• Atomz, which provides Web site-management software as an online service, has used Web services to assist customer CBS Worldwide. CBS Worldwide uses remote-controlled indexing to tell Atomz Search when it adds new pages to its CBSNews.com Web site, so that visitors can get the latest search results. Meanwhile, Dairy Management, another Atomz customer, uses remote-controlled deployment interfaces so that its Web site production servers can use content managed by Atomz Publish.

• Dorado (see our June 2002 report, Anatomies of Profitable Software-as-Services Providers: Secrets for Success, for a detailed profile), which offers a Web-based mortgage demand-chain-management solution, has introduced .MOR Web Services to its mortgage banking customers. Dorado's .MOR Web Services provides customers with mortgage-industry-specific Web services and Web-services-enabled applications; common, pretested integration adaptors; and a Web-services-integration server and development tools. This enables customers to quickly develop and deploy unique lending solutions throughout their wholesale, retail and agent sales channels.

• Intacct, which provides online accounting solutions, has more than 50 partners integrating vertical business applications with its solutions via Intacct XML2 tools (see our January 2002 SummitVision article, "Does Intacct's Online Accounting Formula Add Up?"). For instance, Clarity, which provides Web-based retail point-of-sale (POS) solutions, is integrating its POS application with Intacct's accounting system.

• OpenAir, which provides a Web-based professional-services-automation solution, created a recruitment module in conjunction with PeopleWise (owned by LexisNexis Group). Using Web services, the two vendors integrated PeopleWise's background checking module in less than two weeks to build the connected, single-sign-on module.

Other Net-native vendors are queuing up for Web services, too. Salesnet, for instance, which provides Web-native sales-force automation (SFA) software, recently announced the availability of its Web-services API based on Microsoft's .NET Web-services platform. Meanwhile, rival SFA service vendor UpShot is also working with Microsoft .NET tools to make it easier to integrate third-party applications with its solution.

Web Services in the Real World
With so much to gain from Web services, and so little to lose, we expect that this category of vendors will provide a treasure trove of real-world Web-services applications.