Commerce One Flips its Web Services Switch

If you were a electronic marketplace proprietor in the late ’90s, you were
likely confident that you were going to make good money. The prospect that
you could build a virtual marketplace, match buyers and sellers in an
industry, help them consummate transactions, and make money by charging a
small fee might have seemed like a sure bet.


Scores of firms were lining up to use your services to procure goods. But
something happened along the way to the bank. The money dried up, and firms
like Commerce One, Ariba and Verticalnet, who competed ferociously for new
customers, felt the hit. Hard. But in truth, there were other problems. Many
of these bold e-marketplace specialists underestimated how hard it would be
to integrate all the systems involved because of disparate hardware and
software.


So, the time comes to reduce expenses by selling off chunks of your business
that were giving you headaches and cutting staff to comply with the wishes
of investors fearful of red ink in a decidedly bear market. You do that. You
concede defeat and vow to redouble your efforts in the battle to stay alive.


Boiled down, that’s the situation Commerce One found
itself in. The Pleasanton, Calif. company has retrenched to become a serious
Web services player, and if this week’s arrival of its bet-the-company
Conductor platform is any indication, it’s made strides. Still, analysts say
it has a long way to go.


Conductor: Making Sure Businesses Stay on Their Rails


Commerce One’s Conductor helps companies speed the flow of such business
processes as supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management
(CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), making customer and partner
interaction easier. Sounds a lot like products integration concerns such as
webMethods and SeeBeyond make, right? Not exactly. Conductor is largely
different because its features are specifically tuned to Web Services
infrastructure (choreographies, routing, transformation).


A composite system, Conductor’s architecture makes many applications
viewable through a single graphical user interface (GUI). This pares the
time and cost of writing and using composite applications, as compared to
employing myriad business process management (BPM), enterprise application
integration (EAI), portals, identity management and various design tools.
This service-oriented approach is the direction many enterprise software
firms are heading to stay competitive. The terrain includes larger firms
like IBM and BEA Systems and BPM and workflow firms such as Intalio, Oak
Grove Systems, Handysoft and Savvion.


Jeff Watts, vice president of marketing at Commerce One, explained some
fundamental differences between Commerce One’s former approach to
e-marketplaces and the current practice his firm is betting on.


“Marketplaces have always been how to implement and execute business
processes on the inside of the firewalls and outside,” Watts said. “With the
composite approach, we are looking at how to run business processes across a
system to reach predictable resolutions. It’s like a journey across the
wilderness.”


Watts said a practical application of Conductor in terms of exposing
functionality as Web services is in invoice management, where the customer
gets the invoice, and needs to reconcile it with the purchase order.
Conductor will use appropriate applications to match the invoice against the
purchase order to make sure the customer received what goods he was supposed
to.


Sanjay Chikarmane, vice president of product marketing at Commerce One, said
Conductor provides everything that their MarketSite portal product provided
and more.


“MarketSite only provided conducted and transaction,” Chikarmane said. “It
certainly was useful, but Conductor also provides their customer new
services in area of collaboration.” He said a difference between Conductor
and traditional integration products, is that Conductor adds another layer
of connectivity, providing not only integration but BPM and workflow. But
IBM has all of these products, right, after its myriad acquisitions, such as
CrossWorlds and Holosofx. Well, yes, Chikarmane said. “They aren’t unified.
You need their Global Services to put it all together.” And that costs
money.


One aspect that pulls business processes together within Conductor is its
Registry. The brain of the platform, Registry defines user and system
interfaces as services. It maintains full definitions of user roles and
access, systems, business processes, data schemas, transformation maps,
choreographies, rules and security requirements. These may be modified as
required by the enterprise customer, which Chikarmane said is another key
differentiator between its platform and that of rivals, whose systems are
hand-coded and must be updated manually. That traditional method costs money
and time.

Now that you’ve met the Conductor, please learn more about it on Page 2


Watts said the Registry ostensibly becomes a “storage hub of all moving
parts,” because software is updating all of the time. “Buying and selling
touches every single system. Business systems are not isolated. This is not
Castro’s Cuba — applications are linked to internally and externally.”


“We allow for the abstract attributes of business processes that can
change,” Chikarmane said. “Conductor is centralized, so the total cost of
ownership is lower for the customer.” This was no easy task.


Chikarmane said Commerce One learned to move toward something like
Conductor, with its brainy Registry, the hard way. “It was a pain to make
changes when you’re trying to link 5 applications. Even worse, partners who
were connecting had no control within the partner organization. There was no
control over what users would do within the enterprise.”


Conductor also supports Web services standards, including many of the those
that have yet to reach fruition, because that’s the way it was written — to
be open to changes reflected by an evolving market niche. For example, in
the connectivity layer, Registry supports UDDI and in the
semantics level, XML Common Business Library (XCBL). Then there is the layer
for business processes. On that score, Conductor supports Business Process
Execution Language for Web Services, Version 1.0 (BPEL4WS).


Still, Chikarmane and Watts acknowledge Web services have a ways to go
before they are secure and reliable, both key features of business process
management. Commerce One brought in Baltimore Technologies and VeriSign for
security, Sonic Software for messaging, Actional for integration, Contivo
for data mapping, Cognos for analytics and Satyam for systems integration,
to bolster its Web services endeavor.


What analysts are saying


While Commerce One spokespeople are pumped about their new product, analyst
opinion varies from enthusiastic to skeptical. It has brought in outside
parties, such as


ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald
Schmelzer, who covers the XML and Web services space, said is encouraged by
the company’s Conductor effort.


“The company is really focusing on the notion of using Web Services and SOAs
to build composite applications as the future for their company,” Schmelzer
said. “Rather than working in proprietary or closed e-procurement or
marketplace type environments, Commerce One sees that the rapid growth in
the adoption of Web Services and SOAs for B2B integration will require the
sort of knowledge that Commerce One has gleaned for building composite
applications comprised of discrete services. That’s the focus with their
Conductor platform. But rather than just building a process definition and
execution tool, the company is also leveraging their deep knowledge of
particular verticals to create processes and documents that meet specific
needs, thus offering them a bit of a leg-up on their competition.”


Shawn Willet, principal analyst at Current Analysis, said Commerce One
could attract existing customers to go to Conductor, and noted the firm can
ship the new platform as a basis for a new version of the
sourcing/procurement applications and then encourage users to use it for new
projects.


But he cautioned Commerce One against jumping into a space where so many
uncertainties exist, with so broad a platform.


“It needs to pare down the ambitious plans and narrow its focus. Already it
has said it will target a few verticals and that is positive. But it then
needs to identify Composite Web Services Applications that are applicable to
these markets and concentrate on real business problems and/or industry
initiatives in this area where they company may need a new platform (for
example, UCCNet). Sample processes, interfaces and templates will be
helpful.”


As for relying on Web services, Willett said most IT managers are receptive
to Web Services and want to cut costs associated with traditional
integration solutions and of purchasing new software applications. Commerce
One, he said, must respond to those concerns.


Forrester Research may be the most skeptical of all, taking into account the
overall struggles the software sector has faced of late. The firm predicted
technological immaturity, such as the absence of robust security standards
for Web services, will thwart strong Web services platform sales. meaning
demand for the Conductors of the world will not take off in 2003 due to
technical hurdles such as the absence of robust security standards. Adding
salt to the wounds of stymied progress, Forrester expects that CIOs will buy
Web services platforms from infrastructure vendors such as like IBM and
Microsoft, as opposed to independent software vendors. The research firm
conceded Web services will lower the cost of B2B integration, eventually
maiking it a lucrative business, but the caveat is that demand for Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messaging across the firewall
will take time to snowball.


Commerce One’s Watts and Chikarmane said they’ll take that bet.

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