Web Services Current Trends and Future Opportunities

ID NO: U0853756 - 1 -

WEB SERVICES – CURRENT TRENDS AND FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES

MAREPALLY ARUNKUMAR REDDY

NOVEMBER 2009

SUBMITTED TO: UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON

IMM031 INTERNET APPLICATIONS AND WEB SERVICES 1

ID NO: U0853756 - 2 -

WEB SERVICES – CURRENT TRENDS AND FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES

INTRODUCTION:

Web Services are influencing a majority of IT-based Industries as well as those that depend on software-based services. Important constituents of web services technologies like SOAP, WSDL and UDDI offer ingredients that help in establishing business automation.

Almost all the IT majors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA and others have web services on their agenda. This is reflected in the products and services that are being proposed and implemented. These companies are actively implementing web services related specifications. Apart from the primary specifications like SOAP, WSDL and UDDI there are specifications which are very crucial like Web Service Reliability and Web Service Security are of importance to the enterprise.

IBM, MICROSOFT, SUN MICROSYSTEMS have described web services with respect to three vocabularies like Simple Object Access Protocol(SOAP), Web Services Description Language(WSDL), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration(UDDI). Another way of describing Web Services with respect to Technology as well as Business Automation is defined as:

The software components that use more than one of the following technologies – SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI in distributed computing. Implementing any of the technologies such as SOAP, UDDI and WSDL is referred a web service. Usage of all of them is not essential [Gartner].


ID NO: U0853756 - 3 -

ABSTRACT:The coursework that is being discussed here is about Web Services- Current Trends and Future Opportunities. Long before the Information Technology depended on more traditional ways of business conducting transactions. This included sales of products as well as services. The development of internet and World Wide Web changed the services scenario but initially it was adopted by research academies, schools and educational institutions. Later the acceptance of Web Services by business community provided a huge boost to the Internet. The possibility of business automation is the most attractive aspect of web services. The feature of web services in financial and banking industry is expanding its opportunities in a wide range of areas. It also helps in creating newer opportunities to transact business between cooperating and interacting business communities.

Key Words: Web Services, Web Technologies, Interoperability

Web Services: Offering services through web brings the business several significantadvantages. Availability and accessibility of services on the internetbackbone is the most prominent among such advantages. Among the otherimportant advantages, scale and distribution of the customers presentunique opportunities for the business to expand and grow at a faster pace.At the same time, scale and distribution of customers could be achallenging issue for the services provider. Since the advantages outweighthe challenges, business and industries appear to be increasingly dependenton the web for growth and globalization.

The web and internet offer a unique medium for businesses to reach beyondgeographical boundaries. The immediate consequence was the growth and


ID NO: U0853756 - 4 -

proliferation in the business-to-customer (B2C) market. However, internetand web effect did not spawn the same kind of proliferation and growth inthe business-to-business (B2B) market, as the medium of communicationremained a stumbling block in the realization of business automation. Web services essentially involve three categories of business. They are Service provider, Service Requester and Service Broker. A provider could be an Industry, Business or a Company capable of providing service. Similarly a requester could be a Company or Business that is in need of the service, whereas the broker is a place, entity or a system that helps both service provider and service requester to explore each other.

Fig: Interaction between Service Provider (SP), Service Requester (SR) and Service Broker (SB)


SP

SB

SR

INTERNET

INTERNET

Find

Bind

Publish

SOAP

SOAP

Soap

ID NO: U0853756 - 5 -

Current Trends:

Interoperability is the key to business automation. It may be defined as the ability of an application to interface and communicate with other applications on disparate systems without much of integration and development effort. The technology of web services promises the interoperability among business applications deployed on disparate systems of business partners, collaborators and make these available widely.

The Introduction of extensible Markup language (XML) laid the foundation for an attempt to forge interoperability by using a text based mark-up language.

Future opportunities:

Web services have the potential to streamline almost any industry or business organizations. A number of industries have already adopted web services technology. A few of the industries that are benefited by web services are

Supply Chain Management(SCM) and Logistics Retail Financial Services and Banking Industry Manufacturing Telecommunications Education(E-Learning) Utilities Pharmaceutical

All these industries initially used different ways to satisfy the customers but as Web Services emerged these industries have adopted and increased their performance in business automation.


ID NO: U0853756 - 6 -

New technologies are emerging day by day in Web Services and future opportunities are increasing when it comes to business like suppliers, banks, couriers, shipping etc so that the business processes among them is error free and efficient. As the business grows and evolves, the need for the services continues to grow among all the related business companies and collaborators.

The technology of XML based web services is shaping up to meet this requirement. Web services appear to deliver the promise of interoperability among related business groups to bring about business automation.

Some of the important constituents of Web Services Technologies are:

SOAP WSDL UDDI XML(Fundamental concept that is driving the entire web

services paradigm) RPC

SOAP– Simple Object Access Protocol: SOAP is an XML- based specification and protocol. SOAP is designed to be simple and extensible. SOAP helps ininterchanging data in a localized and shared environment.The best part of this protocol is its ability to move XML data over thewire and specifies a set of rules for the application on the target systemto initiate some action, upon the delivery of XML data. SOAP can becompared with similar protocols (IIOP) for CORBA, Java Remote MethodProtocol (JRPM) for RMI and object Remote Procedure call (ORPC) for DCOM.


ID NO: U0853756 - 7 -

WSDL – Web Services Description language: Web Services Description language (WSDL) isanother XML terminology that forms one of the segments of webservices. As the name itself coveys, WSDL is the XML description of theservice.

WSDL is an XML file, which describes services. More precisely, WSDLdocument provides all the necessary information about the services, theirnames, service locations, parameters accepted for each of the service etc.Web services in WSDL are referred as communication between twoapplications. Web services could be defined as a set of communication endpoints capable of exchanging information.

UDDI – Universal Description, Discovery and Integration:

Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) are a specification that is designed to manage business andservices-related information. Organizations and enterprises, based on thisspecification, will be able to store, modify, update, share and exploit keybusiness and services information among the partners, collaborators andother related business organizations.

UDDI is a specification as well as a service. The UDDI services helps the companies to store, share and exploit business and service information, while UDDI specifications helps the companies to create applications that aid in storing, modifying, sharing and exploring business information, thereby helping companies progress towards business automation.

XML – Extensible Markup Language: XML is a Meta language to represent the data or a piece of information using markup. XML forms the fundamental concept that driving the entire web services paradigm. It is simple, text based, self descriptive language. There are many XML standards which are followed by many industries and can be categorized into either Message Oriented or Document Oriented Specifications.

It is also referred as Meta language which can be used to describe the logical structure of unlimited variety of data and documents in different ways.


ID NO: U0853756 - 8 -

RPC – Remote Procedure Call: The term procedure call is referred to the function/method/procedure invocationduring the runtime environment of a local system. Remote Procedure Call,also referred to as RPC, is a term that describes invocation of amethod/function/procedure on a remote system. RPC is neither aspecification nor a standard. It is just a technique that is proposed tomake remote applications to communicate.

In Remote Procedure Call, the Client and Server exist on heterogeneous systems, and the client and server can be connected on local or wide area networks and also on the internet

Figure 1 Synchronous method appeal in Client/Server Environment.

In RPC there are two parts which provide the communication infrastructure: Stub and the Skeleton. Stub is the communication infrastructure at the Client end and Skeleton is the communication infrastructure at the Server end.


ID NO: U0853756 - 9 -

Figure 2 Synchronous Method appeal in distributed Environment

IMM031 INTERNET APPLICATIONS AND WEB SERVICES

SkeletonSkeleton

ServerServer

9

ClientClient

StubStub

ID NO: U0853756 - 10 -

Web Services Application Scenario

Case Study: Financial Services and E-banking:

Financial and Banking Industries are seen as the early adopters of new technologies. As the new technologies appeared on the horizon and proved valuable, the financial industry incorporated the same to provide value added services to the customers. Call centres, ATMs, Internet Websites for desktop access (online information) etc. are some of the examples that states the eagerness in this industry to adopt and implement the new technologies.The immediate need for the banking industry is to address the issue of channel services like Customer Preferences, Interaction history, Transaction Management etc into a coherent, scalable and flexible multi-channel architecture using Web Services technology. The opportunity for web services in financial services and banking institutions is to create a universal approach to integration of the assets of banking business. These banking assets could be applications, processes or people.

Fig: Web Services and XML as Data Exchange Format

IMM031 INTERNET APPLICATIONS AND WEB SERVICES

ATMLOGIN

E-MAIL SERVICE

XML

10

INTERNET

INTERNET

CALL CENTRES

CREDIT CHECK

ID NO: U0853756 - 11 -

Adoption of Web Services by Financial Services and Banking Industry:

Areas of Adoption:Any service can be enabled as a web service. For the financial services and banking industry, there are many areas that can be addressed by the web services technology. Resolving the proliferation of channels for achieving coherent and flexible multi-channel architecture can be one of the candidates for web services.

Speed of Adoption:A number of organizations in this industry seem to be progressing and going steadily after they have adopted the new technologies in web services. The extent of adoption of web services technology has been from a full scale mission critical business implementation to just-evaluation [Gartner] [W. Haseman] [1].

Radical Adopters:Lloyds TSB and Fair Isaac are important ones among the early radicals offering services in the new market. These organizations are known to have launched a full blown web services mode of delivering services among the business collaborators.

Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance is offering asset based lending finances and as part of their function, Lloyds TSB was conducting credit rating and payment performance checking for their prospective customers. This exercise was slow, time-consuming and long procedure. However, after they implemented these functionalities as web services, the results seems to be better than encouraging First Check, the web services implementation of Lloyds TSB claims to have resulted in cost benefit, elimination of manual errors, enhanced processing among other benefits[Web Services, an Introduction B V Kumar, S V Subrahmanya] [www.ltsbcf.co.uk] [2].


ID NO: U0853756 - 12 -

Fig: Page for Online Internet Access to the users and Services like Credit Check, Mobile Services, and E-mail etc are provided.


ID NO: U0853756 - 13 -

Fig: Page for Confidentiality, Authentication and Authorization i.e. User ID and Password services for customers.


ID NO: U0853756 - 14 -

Another radical has been Fair Isaac. Fair Isaac is in the business of providing a variety of services such as ‘Predictive Modelling’, ‘Decision Analysis’, ‘Intelligence Management’, ‘Decision Management’ etc. to leading banks and credit card institutions. Implementing these services as web services, accordingly, has resulted in increased volume, increased transaction and better efficiency [www.fico.com][Web Services, an Introduction B V Kumar, S V Subrahmanya].

Fig: Page for Online Transactions and Credit Check for leading Banks.


ID NO: U0853756 - 15 -

Factors Affecting the Adoption of Web Services Technology in Financial and Banking Industry:

Favourable Factors:

The financial services and Banking Industry seems to be in a state of flux and the adoption of web services technology seems to be predictable, gradual and steady.A few factors to affect the adoption of web services are:

Business Automation Cost and Improved Efficiency Faster Time-to-Market Standards-based Flexibility

Business Automation: The possibility of achieving ‘Interoperability’ among the multiple participants, systems, applications appear to be driving towards business automation. Elimination of manual processing, slow services delivery and frequent disruptions in services have attracted many companies to look forward towards web services for business automation.

Cost Savings and Improved Efficiency:Implementing reusable web services has been seen as a long-term benefit in terms of the cost and delivery of services.

Faster Time-to-Market:Software tools and Integrated Development Environments (IDE) can help speed up in building the web services.

Standards-based:As the web services evolve the banking industry has to set up their standards as well as agree the standards of Interoperability and information interchange.

Flexibility:Developing enterprise applications using service oriented architecture (SOA) provides sufficient flexibility. XML based web services provide additional flexibility in terms of Interoperability.


ID NO: U0853756 - 16 -

Turn Off Factors:Some of the factors which are not favourable are:

Security Performance Reliability Technology Divide

Security:As all the XML based data and documents are text based, they are actually human readable. This is something which could be risk in terms of the exposure of business data.

Performance:As the web services deal with SOAP, clients and servers need efficient SOAP processors and these processors are successful only to some extent and performance is a cause of concern.

Reliability:Many organizations and groups are addressing the reliability part of the web services as there are many lapses as well as many overlapping regions between the organizations and groups.

Conclusion:Financial services and banking industries are among the verticals that are set to exploit the power of web services to the fullest extent. The financial services and banking industries are improving their ability to absorb the newer technology and use the same to scale up themselves in terms of providing better services to clients; they are now in a unique position to benefit by web services. The financial and banking industry are actively considering exploiting web services in the areas of Multi Channel(Channel here is considered to Business Partners, organizations, groups and Multi Channel here in Business Industry refers to Multiple ways to reach a customer needs).


ID NO: U0853756 - 17 -

References:

[1]. http://www.gartner.com/it/section.jsp?type=press_releases&format=xhtml&year=2005&show_archived=true[2].http://www.bankingtech.com/bankingtech/article.do?articleid=20000078941

http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006.html

http://symposium.gartner.com/docs/symposium/itxpo_orlando_2002/documentation/sym12_37h.pdf

http://www.atwebo.com/category_s~z.htm

http://etutorials.org/Mobile+devices/mobile+wireless+design/Part+Four+Beyond+Enterprise+Data/Chapter+18+Other+Useful+Technologies/

http://www.tml.tkk.fi/Publications/Thesis/ahokas.pdf

http://www.financeit.unsw.edu.au/docs/JoshThesis.pdf

http://ta.ba.ttu.edu/naggarwal/Projects/XML/Reports/Announcements%202001%20Q3-report.pdf

www.ltsbcf.co.uk

http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/spatial-data-standards.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VCY-3VW1TFV-4&_user=132444&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000011018&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=132444&md5=d94e4ab8a9139eec70710383e56cd442







http://www.ltsbcf.co.uk/



http://www.financeit.unsw.edu.au/docs/JoshThesis.pdf

http://www.tml.tkk.fi/Publications/Thesis/ahokas.pdf




http://www.atwebo.com/category_s~z.htm



http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006.html

http://www.bankingtech.com/bankingtech/article.do?articleid=20000078941

http://www.bankingtech.com/bankingtech/article.do?articleid=20000078941

http://www.gartner.com/it/section.jsp?type=press_releases&format=xhtml&year=2005&show_archived=true



ID NO: U0853756 - 18 -

http://web-services.gov/

Angelini, P., G. Maresca, et al. (1996). "Systemic risk in the netting system." journal of banking and finance 20(5): 853-868.

Aggarwal, N. and E. Walden (2005). Standards Setting Consortia: A Transaction Cost Perspective.

Ahokas, T. "Using XML In Making Legacy Application Data Accessible Through Web Services."

B V Kumar, S V Subrahmanya (1999). Web Services An Introduction.

Zaslavsky, I., R. Marciano, et al. (2000). XML-based spatial data mediation infrastructure for global interoperability.

Curbera, F., M. Duftler, et al. (2002). "Unraveling the Web services web: an introduction to SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI." IEEE Internet computing: 86-93.

Peppard, J. (2000). "Customer relationship management (CRM) in financial services." European Management Journal 18(3): 312-327.

Zheng, K., D. Kenneth, et al. (2006). A Service-Oriented Architecture in a Multi-Agency Environment: A Case Study in Enterprise Dynamics, IEEE Computer Society.


http://web-services.gov/

Documents

Web Services Current Trends and Future Opportunities