Web services — not just for geeks

OTOi, Executive Team | One to One Interactive
December 18, 2002

If you've been paying even modest attention to Industry buzz, it's likely that you've at least heard about web services. While much of the focus of the web services discussion has been in the areas of cutting costs and supply chain integration, web services could also have a revolutionary impact on marketing and sales. This will happen when marketing and sales professionals invest effort to understand how web services function and how they can be used to re-engineer the marketing and sales value chain, just as others will use web services to re-engineer other components of the value chain.

In some ways, it feels like looking through a crystal ball trying to figure out how web services will impact marketers. Like any new technology, it's often difficult to predict where all the trails lead. Few predicted the revolution wrought by the Internet starting in 1994 with its commercial birth - few of us had even heard of an e-mail address 12 years ago — now we all have at least two or three.

As web services are deployed and marketers begin to use them to accomplish today's tasks better and faster, new opportunities will open up and further expand our ability to enhance the sales and marketing experience. The end result will be improved customer and prospect relationships that result in more and faster closing sales opportunities.

Championed by Industry leaders like Microsoft and IBM, web services aim to make it easier for software applications to communicate with each other. Some will ask: Isn't that what we pay systems integrators to do? The answer is: Not anymore.

Here are a few formal definitions of web services:

1. Forrester: Software designed to be used by other software via Internet protocols and formats.
2. Gartner: Loosely coupled software components that interact with each other dynamically via standard Internet technologies.
3. Microsoft: Web services are very small, reusable application components that can be shared seamlessly among Web sites as services.

The idea behind web services is to use Internet Standards (XML, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI1) to connect applications, regardless of platform ² or device. Using these standards, our own developers can quickly "web service-enable" an application, allowing other applications to find and interact with it to consume the information it provides.

The IT view on the value proposition for web services is interoperability. Web services allow companies to connect disparate systems more easily and economically than ever before. So, instead of investing months or years of time on systems integration (and therefore, in many cases, not doing it), organizations will be able to invest just hours or days.

For marketers, I suggest that a better way to think of the value proposition for web services is information velocity and "oomph" (a "technical" term described below). Information velocity results in sales cycle acceleration and measurable process efficiency while "oomph" results in higher impact user experiences that are more immersive, richer than ever before, and truly on-demand.

Information velocity is achieved as content (data, pictures, text, etc.) is "exposed" using XML and other Internet Protocols. By exposing this information using web services, other applications can more easily find and consume the information ³. Using web services, data will be able to move in real time to applications needing it without requiring heavy investments into systems integration. Business, data, and content processes can be automated efficiently and effectively to equip marketers with the kind of information needed to make decisions and create value added relationships with customers and prospects.

For example, you want to pull data from the "custom built" customer information system, your PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel and Oracle financial systems, to allow sales/marketing staff to use that information in a new marketing program developed to sell an investment protection program to the newest customers. Using normal systems integration methodology, such an effort would cause massive disruption, politically and financially, to most organizations lacking an already integrated infrastructure. But this effort would be simple using web services and could be accomplished quickly.

"Oomph" is attained through the richer and more transparent interaction possible with web services. As web services become the standard in software architecture, user experiences will become more immersive, truly on-demand and device agnostic. These qualities will allow marketers to create device agnostic strategies and programs based on explicit or implicit preferences of customers and prospects. In fact, application vendors (e.g. Microsoft, Siebel, Peoplesoft, SAP, etc.) are already embedding XML web services within their applications architecture.

For example, Microsoft has XML services within its latest version of Office and plans to further embed the ability for its many software applications to take advantage of web services information management. One of the key benefits web services delivers is a reduction in information overload. Because applications can be improved to better manage information, you will be able to deliver more relevant and robust information to any and all customers and prospects quickly as desired, regardless of platform or device.

See some of the demos ⁴ at these links for examples of the rich experience web services can take advantage of:

An example of a more high-impact user experience

a. http://www.altio.com/products/altioinaction/altioinaction.htm

Examples of how large companies today are leveraging web services in various parts of their infrastructure

a. http://www.microsoft.com/net/business/netinaction.asp

b. http://www-3.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservices/tci_svideos.html

This chart ( http://www.microsoft.com/net/business/needtoknow.asp) shows where web services can fit in the communications process.

Web services promise to enable applications to deliver richer and deeper interaction than now possible. Marketers who are equipped to apply web services will be able to create a competitive advantage and enhance their ability to use information to accelerate sales cycles and create richer, more connected relationships with customers and prospects.

For more information, contact mdonnelly@onetooneinteractive.com or surf the resources below.

Resources

1. WS-I Web Services Interoperability organization - www.ws-i.org
2. UDDI.org - www.UDDI.org
3. World Wide Web Consortium — www.W3C.org
4. Webservices.org — www.webservices.org
5. Microsoft — http://www.microsoft.com/net
6. IBM - http://www-3.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservices

¹ XML is a standardized text format blessed by W3C that describes how data and content are described and transported over the web. Web Services leverage two Internet Standards (Simple Object Access Protocol or "SOAP" and Web Services Description Language "WSDL") and one future standard hopeful, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration or "UDDI". SOAP and WSDL are official standards of the W3C and UDDI is a separate initiative sponsored under the banner of the UDDI.org.
² By platform, I am referring to the entire IT infrastructure supporting a particular application including code language, database, web server, operating system, hardware type, software vendor, etc.
³ For example, today one of the larger exchanges, with the help of one of the larger web services companies, has developed the ability for investors to populate financial information of any number of publicly traded companies with a one-button command from Excel. The investor can then work within Excel to manipulate and analyze the data at their convenience.
⁴ Some of these demos may require the installation of a plug in.

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