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XML and Web Services In The News - Thursday 23 May 2002 Survey: IT budgets still in flux Information technology budgets remain in flux, with many being cut in the last three months, according to a survey released Wednesday by Goldman Sachs and Gartner. The survey of 369 attendees at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo earlier this month found that 60 percent had their IT budgets "adjusted" with decreases being the norm. And IT budgets appear to be undergoing further tweaking. Less than half of the respondents (46 percent) said they expected their IT budgets to remain flat for the rest of the year with the remainder split between increases and decreases. The study did hint that there could be a slight spending increase toward the end of the year, as companies try to burn up their budgets. Not all tech markets are expected to be hit as hard: Goldman Sachs is predicting that security, storage and Web services providers should see some increase in spending from customers. J.D. Edwards 5 Released with Web Services Support Better organization, more functionality, integration and services across ERP, SCM, CRM and more. J.D. Edwards has announced general availability of J.D. Edwards 5, a modular group of products that reflects the company's fast-broadening footprint from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor to a solution provider with a full range of enterprise applications. J.D. Edwards 5 includes ERP; supply chain management (SCM); customer relationship management (CRM); Supplier relationship management (SRM); business intelligence (BI); collaboration and integration; and tools and technology. Sun's Super Bundle Taking aim at BEA and IBM, Sun delivers Solaris 9 operating system with built-in application server engine. Emerging from last year's doldrums, Sun Microsystems today announced a juiced-up Solaris 9 OE operating system that touts a built-in application server and other e-business tools. "Solaris 9 OE is out in front and pulling away," says a proud Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Specifically, Sun integrated into Solaris 9 OE its J2EE-compliant Sun ONE Application Server 7 and Sun ONE Directory Server. All of this makes it easier for Solaris 9 users to build and deploy application and Web services at lower integration, testing, support and management costs, according to Sun. In fact, companies buying Solaris 9 receive the other products at virtually no additional cost. Accenture to roll out Web services tools Accenture has outlined the first details of its upcoming Web services and application development platform designed to help corporate users develop and deploy Web services for the Microsoft .net environment as well as for J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition). One of the big competitive advantages for both Accenture and its corporate IT shops having a single common platform on which a development team spread around the world can develop and test applications from theirs or any other company, requiring only a browser. Accenture has 42 development centres around the world where it works in tandem with corporate accounts to create Web services, with plans for additional centres. "When you think about the major trends going on with IT services today, many of them involve outsourcing. So for a company like Accenture to have one place it can tie together a development workforce to a single job is a major strategic advantage," said Michael Corrado, Accenture's communications director in New York. Some analysts see the commitment by a company of Accenture's status as one more indication of the growing awareness, if not importance, of Web services to overall IT strategies. Sun to launch compilers for Solaris 9 Sun Microsystems on Wednesday will ship its Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) Studio 7, Compiler Collection, which is optimised for the new Solaris 9 operating environment and Web services. The compilers support the C, C++, and Fortran languages and feature a new licensing scheme. Built for the Sparc hardware architecture and equipped with command-line Unix interfaces, the compilers offer a 22% performance increase over previous versions. Support for multiple languages underscores Sun's commitment to multi-language support in Web services architectures, according to Sun. Info Builders Jumps into Web Services New York's largest software company, Information Builders, is updating a major portion of its WebFOCUS product for the next generation of EDI, commonly referred to as Web services. But EDI (which stands for electronic data interchange, the "lingua franca" of supply chain management in the business world) is just the tip of the iceberg with Information Builders' move to embrace Web services. The business information and middleware software company is looking to maintain its edge in the next evolution of integrating business data on different computing platforms, much the way it has in the recent past with its use of XML across its middleware products. During its Summit 2002 User Conference in Baltimore Tuesday, the company said its WebFOCUS software can now be published through Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces. That means its WebFOCUS product, which integrates and pipes data to a variety of computing devices, can also deploy services from UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) registries. Can we trust Microsoft on Web services? I don't Just prior to launching my investigative report on whether Microsoft and IBM were plotting to take over the Internet, I received a phone call from my colleague and fellow columnist David Coursey, asking me if I had forgotten to take my daily medication. He had good reason to wonder whether I had lost my mind. I'll be the first one to admit that the idea that two companies--even ones as big as Microsoft and IBM--could conspire to take over the Internet on the basis of software patents and royalties is, well, "out there." Casting further doubt upon my theory was Coursey's subsequent interview with Microsoft platform strategy group general manager Charles Fitzgerald, who said: "While this may be disappointing to some conspiracy theorists, Microsoft has absolutely no ambition, plan, or desire to collect a royalty on Internet traffic." Fitzgerald went on to say, "Burdening the underlying standards with additional costs would both undermine this strategy and fly in the face of our business strategy of delivering high-volume, low-cost software." W3C starts gospel tour of Europe The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) began its European tour in Paris yesterday, to spread its "gospel" of interoperability. "This tour is a reminder," said Marie-Claire Forgue, spokeswoman for W3C in Europe. "We are fighting for interoperability so the Web does not divide and is not taken over by giant companies that want to control the Web." Other events in the European Commission-sponsored tour are planned for Vienna, Dublin and Brussels. W3C team members, accompanied by local guest speakers, talk about W3C specifications, such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and their uses. The W3C, which now has around 500 member organisations worldwide, was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee to develop common protocols that promote the evolution and ensure interoperability of the World Wide Web. W3C has developed more than 40 technical specifications for the Web's infrastructure. Ignoring testing could lead to Web services disaster Before it can work well, a Web services must work, period. One analyst firm warns that unless testing plays a prominent role in development cycles, many Web services may be cast aside before they achieve their full potential and after they've already cost companies lots of cash and man hours. A new report, "Web Services: A Nightmare For Testers," from London-based analyst firm Ovum states that unless designers build Web services with testing in mind, hard-to-find bugs may plague the reliability and quality of end products. Gareth Johnson, an Ovum analyst and author of the report, said a worst-case scenario likely wouldn't bring down a company's entire Web infrastructure. Still, the strain of heavy use could result in unreliable performance or even render a Web service unusable, negating a company's investment. Worse yet, when companies eventually rely on Web services to convey critical data, such as in medical emergencies, the failure of a Web service could have dire results. Revisiting SGML on the web Four years after the publication of XML 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, Edd Dumbill opens the XML Europe 2002 conference by questioning whether XML has become the "SGML on the Web" which it was meant to be. Web Services and Virtual Enterprises: Virtual Building Blocks The notion of "virtual enterprises" has been around for quite some time and in some ways most IT efforts are concentrated on realizing some of the features of virtual enterprises, even without recognizing or labeling them as such. The meaning of the term "virtual enterprise" itself has undergone several versions or modifications. Some synonyms include "virtual corporation", "virtual organization", and, more recently, "extended enterprises". In this article, we'll take a look at how Web Services can help us to create a virtual enterprise. |
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