Infravio exec explains why run-time management of Web services is the next big challenge for IT
See correction below
INFRAVIO IS A startup company that has identified Web services management infrastructure as a major new opportunity. To address that requirement, the company at Demo 2002 this week rolled out a new platform for Web services life cycle management. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Infravio vice president of engineering Jim Bole talks about why run-time management of Web services is the next big challenge for IT.
InfoWorld: Why do you think there is an opportunity for a startup company in this space?
Bole: Our perspective on what’s going on with this whole technology area is that there’s a lot of interesting, initial, early traction. But as Web services get real and start to roll into the enterprise, we think there’s an opportunity for our company to make this stuff enterprise-class in terms of scalability, performance, and making it manageable from the standpoint of total cost of ownership and life cycle.
InfoWorld: What is Infravio’s approach to this problem?
Bole: You can take existing assets like an application server or an IDE [integrated development environment] and expose those as Web services by just throwing a SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] wrapper on it. But when you start exposing hundreds of these things and you need to worry about interrelationships between them and orchestrating them, you’d better take a model-driven game to make it all work and stitch together. Our core platform provides the ability to input existing model definitions in a variety of mechanisms. It then generates a set of run-time Web services with all the definitions and all the middleware logic that goes with it.
InfoWorld: What are the model definitions?
Bole: UML [Unified Modeling Language] is one. DTE [Data Terminating Equipment] is another one that we’re actually getting a lot of traction on lately in that we’re able to take an existing Rosetta.net PIF, bring it into the system, and expose it as a set endpoint right out of the blocks. The code is then generated in the process of finding that model, linking it to a set of middleware, and it’s all instrumented with a lot of manageability. On the front of it, we’re saying “Do whatever you want to do, just run whatever you want to do and then load it into this environment.”
InfoWorld: How does this environment keep track of Web services as they become available?
Bole: We can register a remote Web service. We essentially have a UDDI [Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration] component to our product. We can do name space validation against that and we can do schema validation between the two schemas. The cool part is it’s all XML, way down into the gut of it, so we can transform between schemas.
InfoWorld: How robust is UDDI?
Bole: There’s not really a versioning model in UDDI today, which is the biggest challenge in this whole game. Our repository is accessible as a UDDI directory. We’ve got some extensions in there so we can do our job. That’s going to be the focal point, ultimately, for a lot of this registry and look-up service that’s out there, which is why we think it’s important our product supports it today. But the standards aren’t there yet to really open it up so that it can be generic.
InfoWorld: How are your early customers currently using this environment?
Bole: The product is being used now in five or six pilots that we have running, and those pilots are doing mostly run-time management now. In terms of traction, people are sort of beyond the toy level now. The guys that are really immersed in it are really thinking about how this is going to affect their enterprise and architecture.
InfoWorld: Given all the companies working on Web services technology, what makes you think Infravio will be successful?
Bole: We tend to break things into two distinct pieces. One is life cycle management, which is talking about change management and dependency control and all of that. And there are really two discrete aspects of that. One is development time and the other is run time. The interesting thing about Web services is you’ve really got a run-time dependency issue. We think that that’s the open space in the whole game. You’re going to have people like Rational on the development side that are going to try and push in that direction. The app server guys, meanwhile, are worried about management of the execution environment, but their ability to go cross-platform is a big challenge because you’ve got different levels of dependency access. We see a lot of different players coming into this space, but we don’t see people looking at it a little more holistically, like we’ve been thinking about it.
Correction
In this interview, we misreported the acronyms DTD (Document Type Definition) and RosettaNet PIP.
