STRATEGIES

June 7, 2002

If you wanted to understand where Web services technology has come from, you could do worse than study the history of infrastructure software vendor Iona. The Dublin, Ireland-based company's platform embodies many of the hopes and aspirations of those at the leading edge of enterprise application infrastructure over the past 10 years.

Long Before Web Services ...
The dream of creating applications by assembling building-block components from multiple sources finally seems close to realization with the advent of Web services. But it would be wrong to suppose this is a new idea born out of the Web. Software architects have been chasing the dream for several decades, eager to improve the speed, effectiveness and productivity of software development.

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"Few applications in the real world, however — especially at an enterprise level — are built from scratch. Enterprises build on their existing infrastructure rather than discarding it, and Iona's platform remains a robust platform for doing just that. Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

Iona was established at what seemed at the time to be on the cusp of success in that quest — more than 10 years ago now, back in 1991. The Object Management Group (OMG), an independent industry group founded by 3Com, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Unisys and others, had just released its specifications for CORBA. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture defined how to build software objects that could be linked together across a network. No longer would enterprises have to build monolithic applications from scratch every time they wanted to automate a new business process. CORBA would allow them to join existing applications together and plug in new functionality as the need arose.

Although reality turned out to be altogether too unpredictable for CORBA to fulfill all of its promise, it would be wrong to say that the specification was unsuccessful. Iona's platform, which is based on CORBA, today supports some of the world's biggest distributed applications. Aircraft maker Boeing's implementation, for example, links 7,000 servers and supports some 70,000 users.

"We believe this is quite probably the largest distributed application in the USA," Iona's vice president of product marketing John Rymer told ASPnews. But he won't swear to it, because Iona suspects some of its telco customers — which include AT&T, MCI and Verizon — may be running bigger deployments. "Those are already very large, and they provide dialtone, so they're very reliable," he added.

Striking Like a Cobra
Founded with the sole aim of building a CORBA-compliant Object Request Broker (ORB) — a middleware server that effectively acts as a virtual "traffic cop," managing the connections between applications — Iona is now the undisputed leader in that field, with 90 percent of the CORBA market, according to Rymer, and more than 4,500 customers worldwide.

But, of course, times have changed over the past decade, and today there are many alternatives to CORBA. In the early 1990s, Iona refined its ORB, adding security and resilience features to earn enterprise credibility. "And then the Web burst on the scene and you had a whole new set of requirements, and you also had the emergence of Java," said Rymer.

Much of the thinking that had gone into CORBA — and the experience gained during its many teething problems — was ploughed back into these new technologies, ultimately resulting in the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) specification, which forms the foundation of most of today's high-end application servers, including those from market leaders BEA and IBM.

Today's distributed applications are built using software components, which are easier to link to than CORBA's software objects. Anyone setting out to build a distributed application from scratch today will most likely do it either on a J2EE server platform, or using Microsoft's component architecture, which these days is known as .NET. And of course the standards framework that is emerging to define how these distributed software components interact with each other is known as Web services.

A Practical Platform
Few applications in the real world, however — especially at an enterprise level — are built from scratch. Enterprises build on their existing infrastructure rather than discarding it, and Iona's platform remains a robust platform for doing just that. Having acquired several smaller companies to add the necessary Java and XML skills and technologies, Iona late last year launched its current server line-up, designed to help enterprises integrate all their many applications.

"Customers [have started] to view integration as a platform problem," said Rymer. Whereas previously they looked for point solutions — such as EAI (enterprise application integration) to integrate applications within the enterprise, and B2B to connect to applications at partners and customers — they are now looking for a unified environment where they can manage integration side by side with new application development.

"This is a community that is integrating existing applications to create new value," explained Rymer. "We think this community will really start to pop. They won't be building new applications, so much as extending existing applications using XML."

The strategy enables Iona to focus primarily on its existing installed base for new business. "Iona's seeing a broader set of integration needs than it had in the past," said Rymer. "Web services are a great complement to CORBA. By exposing a set of CORBA objects as Web services, it's very easy [for example] for a Microsoft developer to access them."

For the moment, most of those integration projects are within individual enterprises — largely because customers are still learning about Web services. "They're working inside the firewall because this is all new," said Rymer. "The design issues are not very well understood. They're just learning — it's early days."

But there's "tremendous momentum" in B2B integration, which the company expects to tap as the technology becomes more accepted, he said. "B2B is not dead."

Where's Web Services Headed?
Even inside corporations, Web services allows people to tackle integration issues that were previously beyond the pale, because the architecture allows components to be linked without having to specify strict parameters. Many organizations have separate divisions that have completely different IT infrastructures and business structures, said Rymer. "Tightly coupled integration is politically impossible in those circumstances."

"Loose coupling [using Web services] means they can retain their autonomy," he explained. "We're seeing progress in some of these organizations for the first time ever."

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