Web services are being touted as offering a wide range of benefits to organisations. But are Australian CIOs and IT managers in the implementation stage, or still assessing the options?

Respondents to a recent IT Manager channel poll offered a range of responses in their approaches to Web services, with some already implementing solutions while others were still assessing the options.

Jon Barnett, director at Amity Solutions, believes that waiting for further Web services standards to be completed before considering adoption would be a mistake. "Preparation of IT infrastructure capable of delivering Web services, as well as servicing existing data delivery needs, will require thought and planning," Barnett said.

However Barnett also argues that, although the basics of Web services have stablised, there remains some work to be able to string Web services functions together into a complete, complex transaction with session tracking, non-repudiation and integrity guarantees. "There are sufficient existing infrastructure components available for organisations to implement their own proprietary messages to achieve long transactions, while still [being] compliant with the basic Web services protocol," he added. "Such an approach is flexible enough to allow adoption of a standard when one emerges".

Barnett believes another challenge for organisations is to have a coherent and scalable mid-tier infrastructure. "[This] provides a single point for the assembly of corporate services," he said. "While the use of Web services for coupling systems together will increase, subsets of the same data will continue to be consumed by and supplied by other meansâ€"such as through standard Web applications, WAP and even flat files".

At the moment, Barnett believes that we're seeing projects that are extending systems by individually assembling the same corporate data. "Multiple points of data assembly and increasing load demands will weaken the cohesiveness of the infrastructure and the integrity of data," he said. "There is a need to prepare IT systems now for the introduction of Web services.

Another respondent--an IT manager from South Australia--said that he thought the importance of Web services related directly to the sector which the organisation worked in. He said that if a group of its customers were interested in Web services, it would have greater interest.

Yet Web services specifications continue to garner attention, with recent reports focussing on efforts to better define technical details surrounding the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL).

Concerns have been expressed by some commentators that differences between backers of different standards group could fragment the process of setting up new, uniform standards.

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