WebSphere Revolution

“Microsoft and IBM, usually bitter rivals, on Wednesday demonstrated how their competing software packages can interact using Web services and pledged cooperation in establishing additional standards.” —CNET News, September 2003 Portfolio IBM had been experimenting with an emerging set of open standards known as Web services (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI). This standard called for programmers to write collections of modular, self-contained programs called “services.” These services were able to discover and interact with other services over a network without additional programming. Craig recalls, “So we said, what if we bridge these worlds what if we bring together Web services with J2EE?” They realized that the Web services concept could be used to enable legacy applications to communicate over the Web with other legacy applications as well as new applications. This held the promise of dramatically simplifying the application integration chore. So IBM publicly endorsed the Web services standards (SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI). At a New York press event on September 17, 2003 set up just for the occasion, Steve Mills and then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates shared a stage to jointly announce their support for Web services. The companies demonstrated an automotive parts supplier application that linked software from IBM and Microsoft via Web services standards. Soon after the event, IBM donated its Web services code base to the Apache open source project. This created an open ecosystem around Web services and invigorated the standard. Within a year, IBM had also added full Web services support to WebSphere Application Server. However, that was not enough. It was possible to faithfully implement the Web services standards and still not achieve interoperability due to implementation subtleties. So IBM joined with other companies (including Microsoft, BEA Systems, SAP, Oracle, etc.) to form the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) consortium to promote interoperability between the Web services implementations of multiple companies. As the team continued to evolve WebSphere and Web services, they had another epiphany. It became clear to them that the concept of service orientation was bigger than just the application server that this pattern was more broadly applicable to all sorts of middleware. So IBM began looking closely at the business value of the service oriented architecture (SOA) model. In fact, IBM was already heading in the direction of SOA by virtue of its support for the Web services standards and the SW-I which were also fundamental to SOA. As Paul Brunet, then guiding marketing strategy for WebSphere, explains, “We needed to help customers with the broader implementation leveraging the standards leveraging interoperability and hence the reason that more and more we started focusing on SOA.” For example, there was a life insurance company that was an early adopter of SOA. They wanted to use the functions provided in their mainframe applications in new ways and they leveraged Web services standards to do that. Once they had a growing set of Web services their thinking started to evolve to a more high-level architectural view they naturally found themselves moving into SOA. The same thing was true for many early adopters. It was a natural next step in the world of open standard technology. “There were those who saw the challenges and walked away. There were also those who saw the challenges and stepped up to them those are the technical leaders of the WebSphere team today.” —Craig Hayman, IBM Vice President of WebSphere 2002 IBM acquires CrossWorlds and Holosofx. 2003 IBM and Microsoft publicly announce support for the Web services standards. 2003 The Hubble Telescope detects the oldest known planet. 42

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of WebSphere Revolution

WebSphere Revolution Table of Contents The Rise of Internet Business WebSphere Takes the Stage WebSphere Application Server Evolves Beyond the Application Server WebSphere and On Demand Business New Flexibility through SOA An Eye Toward the Future

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