Weekly Review: ASPs Tip Web Services Scale

Web services are important not for what they are, but because of what they're able to link together. Used correctly, the technology makes it possible to connect up best-of-breed resources that were previously inaccessible to each other. As in any network, there's a tipping point at which the value of all those resources becoming available to each other starts to escalate rapidly.

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"Atomz and WebSideStory designed their applications from the start as Web-based services, so there's no adjustment required to bring them into the service-oriented ethos of Web services; they already got there long ago." Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

Most adopters of Web services technology are a long way from reaching that tipping point. Enterprises have only just started to deploy a few limited pilot projects. They're content to wait until there's more agreement on standards and best practice before committing themselves fully to technologies that still appear relatively immature.

ASPs Among Early Adopters
Among ASPs, in contrast, there's already a massive commitment to Web services. Net-native ASPs in particular have eagerly adopted the technology, because they recognized it would solve the challenges they faced in achieving integration with each other and with their customers' existing applications and data stores. From the beginning, they had architected their software for delivery as a service. All they needed was to find sufficient agreement on standard interfaces to begin to reap the network effect of linking those resources together.

Even though many Web services standards are still the subject of debate, the core interfaces are already fully defined — and have been for several years. The data formatting standard of XML is more than five years old, and the Web protocol of HTTP — which carries not only Web pages but also the URIs and SOAP messages that transmit Web services — is twice as old. Equally important, the browser-based mechanisms that allow users to select and initiate Web-based processes are now well-established — the underlying technologies of JavaScript and HTML forms are both now eight years old.

ASPs are now combining all of these capabilities to enable some very slick processes that utilize multiple resources, linked at several different layers. Even USinternetworking, the pioneering application outsourcer, has got in on the act. If you sign up on its Web site for its quarterly newsletter, the form you fill in isn't saved to its own servers. Instead, when you press the submit button, your browser sends the information to Eloqua, a Net-native ASP that specializes in customer acquisition services.

Keep a close watch on your browser's location bar, and you'll see that Eloqua then forwards your browser to the servers of sales automation ASP Salesforce.com, where your details are added to USi's prospect database, before finally returning your browser to the USi home page. Blink, though, and you'll miss all of this, because the location bar is the only place you'll see evidence of the rapid round-trip. The only Web pages displayed belong to USi.

Even more is going on behind the scenes of this transaction. By pressing the submit button, you triggered an event that updated databases at both Eloqua and Salesforce.com. The latter's XML interfaces offer a variety of options for then passing that information back to USi's internal Siebel implementation, either by triggering a real-time message, or by including it in a regular batch update. Naturally, a real-time message would be preferable, but because Siebel, unlike salesforce.com, isn't architected from the ground up to be services-ready, most users are obliged to opt for the cheaper, simpler — but less satisfactory — batch alternative.

Already, this is an impressive piece of application integration, passing data from a Web-based form to three separate databases, as well as triggering processes in three discrete applications. But this just scratches the surface of what ASPs are achieving today thanks to their Net-native aplomb as they forge ahead with Web services. Let's add a new layer of sophistication by injecting another best-of-breed service into the mix.

Many people believe the ability to monitor and co-ordinate business processes will become the most far-reaching result of deploying Web services. By making it easier to link up diverse resources, Web services make it easier to track and adjust what's happening in a business, enhancing its efficiency and responsiveness. This will be the spur that powers Web services adoption past the critical tipping point, once enough separate resources have been linked together.

Most enterprises are waiting for standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which IBM and Microsoft recently donated to the OASIS standards organization, before they embark on projects of this kind. But ASPs, using today's Web services standards along with core Web standards such as HTTP and JavaScript, are already empowering their customers with real-time business process monitoring and management.

The Process of Landing Customers
For any business with a Web site — whether it's USi selling enterprise application outsourcing, or an online outdoor lifestyle retailer like BackcountryStore.com — one of the most important business processes the Web site can help to fulfil is converting prospects into customers. The end point of that process might be collecting prospect data from a form or it might be accepting an online credit card payment, but what comes before? Two leading ASPs this week teamed up to provide an innovative new set of answers to that question.

WebSideStory has been one of the pioneers of online Web traffic analytics, using the now stable and surprisingly powerful JavaScript language to gather information about Web site visitor behavior in real time. Its HitBox software transmits details of every click on a customer's Web site to its powerful database servers. The other key standard in this application is HTTP, which makes a rich seam of information about the visitor's browser configuration available to HitBox, along with a "cookie" mechanism that enables HitBox to keep a separate track of each unique visitor's behavior.

The result is a form of what some analysts grandly call "business activity monitoring." Using HitBox Commerce, users can track the paths visitors take before they purchase (or not purchase), thus helping to analyse which pages or features are most effective in helping that process, and which do most to hinder it.

By teaming up with Atomz this week (see Atomz, WebSideStory Integrate Search, CMS and Analytics, WebSideStory has now added the capability to fine-tune those pages and features based on the feedback it provides. Atomz is a leading provider of Web site management capabilities, offering best-of-breed search and site publishing applications, along with additional tools designed to maximize a Web site's commercial effectiveness.

Using Atomz alongside HitBox, customers of these two best-of-breed ASPs now have the power to evaluate and fine-tune Web site features and campaigns in real time, not only getting instant feedback on visitor behavior, but also able to instantly adjust and republish pages or functions that aren't working effectively — in other words, real-time business process manipulation. And because both providers are ASPs, these capabilities are available for implementation within days, without having to install any new hardware or systems.

Moving Beyond the Sales and Marketing Phase
But there's more, because what the two companies have launched this week is merely the initial, sales-and-marketing phase of their alliance. What I've described so far was already possible for any customer independently signing up to both services. The only difference now is that the two companies will work together to raise awareness of what can be achieved by harnessing their separate applications in a co-ordinated way. What's more interesting is the development that will be happening behind the scenes.

Both applications already use XML to store and access data, giving them a common standard for data integration. Collecting real-time traffic data from HitBox for Atomz to publish is one possibility (for example, a ranking of today's most popular pages, or top referrals). HitBox also supports the embedding of custom tags in its data streams, so that information from other applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, can be passed into its data store along with the visitor behavior statistics. Some of this data could be passed back, for example, to tailor Atomz Search results depending on which pages the visitor has already seen, or depending on which site they had previously visited.

The vast range of potential linkages is a direct result of these ASPs' Net-native pedigrees. They've designed their applications from the start as Web-based services, so there's no adjustment required to bring them into the service-oriented ethos of Web services; they already got there long ago. Now that the core standards of Web services provide a robust foundation for exchanging data, they and their customers are ready to forge ahead past the Web services tipping point, leaving those who rely on more traditional software architectures far behind them.

The Road Ahead
In racing ahead, of course, they will also be first to encounter some of the new challenges posed by integrating multiple discrete applications. The biggest of these will be overcoming the ease-of-use barrier. One of the first major development tasks facing these two pioneers will be dovetailing their two user interfaces together, so that customers can implement HitBox functionality into their Web page layouts without having to leave the Atomz design console. That will be a tough nut to crack, and demonstrates that passing the tipping point for Web services is going to be more like setting out on an adventurous journey than arriving at a safe destination.

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