Web services and real-time integration (2024)

Will Web services open the floodgates for real-time enterprise applications, making them cheaper and easier to implement? Hewitt Associates and its clients will be among the first to find out. Hewitt, a Lincolnshire, Ill.-based consulting and outsourcing firm specializing in HR benefits administration, is launching a set of Web services this month to give its corporate clients and third-party partners real-time access to benefits data on the 15 million participants it serves.

“We’re fully committed,” explains Hewitt Chief Technology Strategist Tim Hilgenberg, who says that production code is in place and that the first clients will be up and running by the end of January. “We were looking for an open standards-based approach, and we didn’t want proprietary software or data protocols.”

Hewitt currently provides its clients’ employees access to their benefits data such as pensions, 401Ks, and annual enrollments via the Web and phone — IVR (interactive voice response) systems and live operator. But its clients have been developing their own HR portals and asking to plug the Hewitt data into those portals on a real-time, single sign-on basis. They have also asked Hewitt to make the real-time data accessible to third parties who provide value-added services such as 401K investment advice. Previously, third parties could only access the data on a high-latency, batch basis or via the company’s IBM CICS gateway.

“The challenge was, How do we do it in a secure, open, ubiquitous way?” Hilgenberg says. The firm chose to put a Java wrapper on the existing CICS environment and to expose the data as a Web service using Apache SOAP 2.2 and a “trusted party” security model with client-and server-side certificates and digitally signed SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) requests.

“We did most of the work ourselves,” Hilgenberg says. “We had all the IBM infrastructure in place and just needed the servlets.” The firm is now also looking at using Web services to acquire new employee data from its clients’ HRMS (human resources management systems) on a continuous basis, rather than via the current weekly batch transfer.

A taste of things to come? Yes, says Craig Donato, CEO of Grand Central Communications in San Francisco, one of several startup companies providing software infrastructure and services to facilitate the creation of real-time Web services. “Web services is about commoditizing and democratizing integration,” Donato says. “[It’s] about real-time input from thousands of data sources, using standards-based protocols and data formats.”

Web services-based real-time apps will be cheaper and easier to deploy, says Donato, and more loosely coupled. “You can change the way your end works, and it doesn’t break my end,” Donato explains. “When any app has a standard machine interface is when the whole thing explodes.”

Especially appealing is the promise of easily linking processes across multiple business partners, says venture capitalist Peter Nieh, whose firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has made a number of real-time-related investments. “It makes a lot of intellectual sense,” says Nieh, “[to have] a fully distributed system and division of labor.” But he warns that it won’t work for heavyweight integration. “If you’ve just done an acquisition and you’re trying to integrate an Oracle system with an SAP system, you’re not going to do that with Web services.”

In theory XML, SOAP, and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) could unify the tower of babel of EAI (enterprise application integration) adapters and messaging architectures, displacing a lot of costly custom development work. But that will require leading ISVs to build out full SOAP support and large enterprises to get more aggressive with their Web services experiments, which today are largely inside the firewall.

Some EAI vendors argue that the hard work of integrating with existing enterprise applications will be little changed by Web services. Others label current Web services prototypes “science experiments.” But in an environment where companies such as Hewitt are being asked by customers to provide more real-time links, and IT managers everywhere are searching for more affordable ways to integrate and get more out of the systems they already own, Web services may be a set of standards whose time has come.

— David L. Margulius