The Bloor Perspective: Thank you India, McCashless fast food, and web services wars

Indian expatriates have been most vulnerable to recent dramatic changes in the demand for IT skills. At one time, Silicon Valley could not get enough people to cater for developments that seemed to have a golden future and were scooping up Indian workers like there was no tomorrow. Now that companies such as Cisco are laying people off, visiting workers are often the first to go. So much so that a new interpretation of B2B has been coined - back to Bangalore.

Sadly, Bangalore is not such a good place to go back to at present. India has been very successful in building a thriving software industry on its educational and intellectual capital. Numerous small software outfits have sprung into existence, complementing huge and better-known companies such as Infosys and Wipro. At present, the big companies are believed to be working on internal projects to keep their staff busy, waiting to see what new work can be gained from around the world. In that situation, though, they are not interested in adding new staff from the 300,000 or so Indians currently working in the US.

Some respite is coming from Japan, which is now acknowledging that it cannot provide sufficient skilled staff for its own IT developments. Traditionally reluctant to rely on foreigners, the government is now considering relaxing immigration controls. Likely targets for recruits will be China, India and Korea. But, in the past, the rules for foreign workers attempting to gain entry to these countries have been so difficult that no one qualified. Now, the pressure is so great that ways are being found to circumvent the regulations.

When it comes to third generation mobile technology, if enthusiasm is the criterion, Japan is well in the lead. Just over 3,000 people are about to join a trial of the new system, chosen out of an amazing 150,000 desperate applicants. There have already been delays, and technology glitches are expected. Transfer speeds are not likely to match initial hopes, reducing the possibilities for video content. Yet while Europe is becoming sceptical, Japan still believes that the problems will be quickly resolved, resulting in a range of new, popular services. It looks as though the east, and Japan in particular, is the place to be.

A Speedpass to go, please

In the Chicago area of the US more than 400 McDonalds burger stores have agreed to offer customers the choice of using a Speedpass transponder to pay for their meal at drive-thru windows. The Speedpass system provides users with a gadget that can be kept on their key rings. This device automatically sends a signal to a customer's credit card account adding the cost of the purchase to their next bill.

The system has already been piloted in several stores and the next stage of mass usage will decide whether the fast food chain will implement the system nationally and eventually internationally.

There is, without any doubt at all, a huge potential for electronic payment systems. After all, credit and debit cards are used for an ever-larger percentage of commercial transactions with cash becoming used in comparatively low value situations. It remains to be seen quite what the electronic payment device of choice will be. Small, smart devices such as the Speedpass system are one possibility. Others include the mobile phone, dedicated electronic wallets, smart credit cards and even software carried on a palm type handheld. Even the sci-fi type ideas of chips implanted into the human body or even some form of DNA scanning system cannot be ruled out in the longer term.

Electronic money and smart, automatic payment systems are coming and the McDonalds experiment is just the beginning. Any new system will have to prove it is completely secure and trustworthy, but these technical limitations are becoming more readily addressed. The uptake of such electronic payment systems will probably be extremely rapid in those sectors of society affluent enough to take part. After all, the 'free market' will cater well for people with disposable income readily to hand. It will be a much more difficult task to create a system that will accommodate the poor.

The IBM v BEA app server bout

IBM is competing strongly in the market for building ebusiness infrastructure. The latest WebSphere application server is a core piece of technology. But in terms of innovation, a good deal of attention is being attracted by web services.

The competition for the application server market is primarily against archrival BEA Systems and its Weblogic software. Both BEA and IBM have enjoyed an excellent reputation for effective, reliable platform software. Recently, IBM seems to have been making the running and version 4.0 of WebSphere continues that trend with strong performance claims from IBM. Doubtless BEA will be planning its response. Common also to both companies has been an effort to make available complementary suites of software to support all aspects of serious ebusiness deployments.

A critical aim has been to find ways to couple software without requiring absolute precision at the interfaces. XML has been the spur to this process. There are obvious conceptual problems and the history of attempts to record metadata in data dictionaries should be a warning against foolish over-optimism. Yet experience is growing through the work that has already been done, primarily in the deployment of XML within vertical market sectors.

There is another problem of which we all lack experience. The wilder projections of web services applications involve the construction of IT processes that incorporate software provided by entirely independent and uncoordinated organisations. The only commonality is supposed to be the interface standards. The technical and political problems that could arise in such attempts are currently unimaginable.

Combining business processes from separate organisations in arbitrary ways is likely to create situations where simple cooperation may not be the best strategy for a participant. Competitive issues, economic advantage and even possible dishonesty will become critical, matters that generally do not arise significantly in traditional systems.

IBM is playing down these extravagant applications, and concentrating its efforts on controlled situations. Linking a company and its branch offices is far less problematic. Even linking to agents in a firmly structured way to achieve specific purposes stays within the boundaries of what can presently be understood. Yet it seems inevitable that there will be some attempts to go far beyond what is currently practical. Try not to be involved in one.