The dynamic duopoly is at it again.

Late last week, IBM and Microsoft published two more seminal Web services specifications--WS-Coordination and WS-Transactions--which will together establish a common business process framework for B2B interaction.

For process management app development, IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft's XML Language (XLang) will also be merged into the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, creating BPEL4WS, which may be the most ridiculous acronym yet. Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services technical marketing for Microsoft, hopes that the industry will embrace this new trio of specs "as the standard way of doing business-to-business communications."

The degree to which these two mammoth companies are working hand in hand to craft the future of Web services is nothing short of amazing. Who--aside from Sun Microsystems--would try and stand in their way? Certainly not BEA Systems, which joined IBM and Microsoft in making the announcement. In fact, the new WS-Transactions spec appears to be little more than the Business Transaction Protocol (BTP) first submitted by BEA to the OASIS standards committee in March 2001, except with an IBM/Microsoft-sanctioned "WS-" in front of it. (Check out this great BTP primer on the OASIS site.)

VanRoekel provides a simple example to explain the relationship between WS-Coordination and WS-Transactions: "If I'm building an engine I'm going to order parts from lots of different vendors. What WS-Coordination does is ... make sure [the requesting message] arrived at the vendor. If the vendor can satisfy the order, maybe it will send a message back to me saying, 'Yes, I've got that part in stock.' WS-Transactions sits above that and says if one of those vendors can't supply a part for the engine--maybe like a piston or something--I'm going to roll back the entire order. And it gives me standard, two-phase-commit transactional support and more complex stuff that might exist in work flow."

The union of WSFL and XLang is just as significant as the two new protocols. The greatest value of Web services inside and outside the firewall will be rapid development of ad-hoc, XML-based applications--and BPEL4WS will provide a more standardized method of doing that, simply by merging two accepted languages into one.

So what's missing from this rosy picture? Development work on overlapping B2B business process protocols--ebXML, the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), and the freshly minted Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI)--seems to have been overlooked. Why? Probably because all three are backed by Sun. Although IBM's director of dynamic e-business marketing for IBM, Karla Norsworthy, told me that IBM and Microsoft were drawing on the work of many others, she declined to be specific, even omitting any mention of BEA's development of BTP.

The reaction from Sun to the IBM/Microsoft announcement was more muted than usual. "This announcement appears to have significant overlap with existing industry standards currently under development," said Ed Julson, Sun's XML and Web services manager, referring in particular to Sun's submittal of WSCI to the W3C last week. "Sun invites Microsoft and IBM to work with Sun to drive convergence in this area, since this is clearly in the best interests of the industry at large and our respective customers."

When asked about the significance of other standards such as WSCI, Microsoft's VanRoekel explained that the IBM/Microsoft "WS-" specifications are being architected to work together.

I'm willing to bet that when this stuff is ultimately marketed to CIOs, the implication will be that if you step outside the "WS-" specs, you do so at your own risk. And where will the interoperability of tools for developing Web services be validated? At the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organisation founded and controlled by IBM and Microsoft.

It's pretty obvious what's going on here. First and foremost, IBM and Microsoft badly want to get Web services moving, so they're doing what dominant players always do: using their market position to railroad standards and enlist the assistance of important players like BEA along the way (or VeriSign, as happened with WS-Security). Releasing robust security and B2B process management specs back-to-back creates real momentum. Meanwhile, IBM and Microsoft feel the need to marginalize the nettlesome Sun, which they view not only as an irritating competitor but also as an impediment to hammering out standards everyone can agree on.

Of course, there's another, darker interpretation. Although Microsoft, IBM, and BEA say they haven't decided to which standards organisation they will submit their latest specs, it seems clear that WS-Coordination and WS-Transactions will go to OASIS, since that's where BTP was hashed out over the past year. Within the last six weeks, WS-Security and UDDI have also landed there. Why is OASIS suddenly so attractive? Could it be because the W3C has been moving in the direction of a royalty-free policy while OASIS is not? Yes, it's true that IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign have already pledged to make WS-Security royalty-free. But no law compels them to keep their word.

Call me naive, but I prefer to believe that the motive for retaining rights and keeping a tight rein on the WS-I isn't the desire to charge licensing fees. I think IBM and Microsoft want control, pure and simple, so they can get the Web services juggernaut off the dime. If I'm wrong, and the dynamic duopoly really is reserving the right to make a buck off standards, it should heed the words of Bill Flood, director of engineering for Sybase e-business and a vocal WS-I member.

"My prediction is that if standards are attached to royalty concerns, they will lose their effectiveness," Flood says. "The industry will go into a 'self-correcting' mode and come up with technology that is free from these concerns. The industry is capable of coming up with standards that keep one vendor's hands out of another's pockets."

When it comes to Web services standards, are the newly allied IBM and Microsoft a force for good or for evil? Tell us through Talk Back!

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