Mr Brad Kassell - Regional Program Manager, Emerging Technologies, Software Group, IBM Asia Pacific shares his views on web services.

Q: What are web services?

Brad: Web services are a thin, universal interface that allows for common communications using consistent and standardised technologies that enable integration across platforms, operating systems, and applications.

Q: Are there any applications or services that function better online?

Brad: Given that web services are a universal integration mechanism, they can be used for a wide range of applications or services. The key criterion for success is that the web service provides a meaningful business result. The so-called "granularity" of a web service determines its fitness for purpose and ultimately its success.

Q: Governments are strong proponents of web services. Why is this so and are such services really that important?

Brad: Governments are enthusiastic about web services for two primary reasons. Firstly, web services are based on open standards, which governments actively support. Secondly, governments need to integrate their IT systems across a very wide range of agencies, corporations, and third parties - web services are the cheapest and most effective way to do this.

Q: What needs to be in place within a company to take advantage of web services?

Brad: Given the relative maturity of web services, most software development tools support the creation and consumption of web services, so the technology itself is proven. What really needs to be in place is a business mind-set that allows these web services to be defined in terms of business value or outcomes. The ability to think about one's IT infrastructure as a collection of services, as opposed to a set of dedicated applications/packages is the most important predictor of success.

Q: How can they be better promoted?

Brad: Web services only deliver value when they are consumed (i.e. used). To that end potential service consumers need to be able to identify web services, as well as understand exactly what that service does. Similarly, the user needs to have some degree of comfort around the performance and reliability of a service if they are going to use it. The primary consideration for promoting web services is whether they are going to be published inside or outside of your organisation. For internal use (or within your extranet) service definitions are normally stored in some form of central registry where they can easily be identified and used. If your web services are being published externally, the organisation typically provide a pre-packaged "toolkit" which provides documentation and examples for the use of said web services - this is the approach that public facing companies like eBay and Amazon take.

Q: How can the public take advantage of such things?

Brad: Generally speaking the public would normally be unaware of how any given service is delivered (i.e. web services are an underlying infrastructure technology) however their existence is usually manifested by the availability of a wider range of discrete services (or features/functions) that users can access. In many situations "power users" might be able to incorporate publicly available web services into their own personal applications (e.g. web sites, spreadsheets, database applications, eBay/Amazon storefronts).