Who’s winning the web services war?

It isn’t every day that the main protagonists in web services share a platform but when they do it’s a safe bet they will agree and disagree on a few key points. This was in evidence this week from HP, IBM, Microsoft and Sun at the EEMA annual conference.

The good news is that user organisations now, by and large, ‘get’ the whole concept and that, in the words of IBM, “web services is really good technology”.

The bad news: we’re going to see vendor jostling at the highest level for some time and – you won’t be surprised here – the idea of the seamlessly connected extended enterprise won’t happen overnight, despite “good technology” such as XML, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL and a dozen other acronyms and approaches.

So, who to believe on the standards front?

Conventional wisdom – okay, conventional short-hand by, among others, the media – pits Microsoft on one side with its .Net technology against most of the rest of the world on the other, backing Java in the form of J2EE.

In the latest grand prix event this week IBM seemed to come off best. Bob Sutor, Big Blue’s big web services guru, positioned web services as part of the company’s overall ‘Ebusinees on demand’ strategy. He admitted IBM mainly backs J2EE but accepted .Net cannot be ignored. In short, he came across as a pragmatist.

Meanwhile, if you approached the subject cold, presentations from both Microsoft and Sun would have left you thinking theirs was the only ingredient necessary to fulfil the potential of web services – though of course this potential rests on enterprises speaking to one another with all sorts of heterogeneous systems, even internally in most cases.

This positioning will take a while to work itself out. Who’s got the upper hand now? Much of the industry will say the Java camp, in one large corner, but others - including prominent analyst houses - have praised Microsoft, speaking of a refreshing openness.

The presence of users at the EEMA event, most notably from several European governments, showed at least one thing: Web services is being taken on board at the highest level but everyone would still benefit from a clearer vendor and standards landscape.