News

Web services pioneer takes long view of 'UDDI in the sky'

• By Rich Seeley
• October 23, 2002

The vision of public UDDI registries where enterprises could search for direct connections to far-flung Web services is little more than a futuristic goal, according to a pioneer of the technology.

But that does not mean UDDI is dormant, contends Rajiv Gupta, CEO at Confluent Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., and the former general manager of HP's e-Speak Division, a group credited with pioneering Web services.

In Gupta's view, a UDDI hierarchy is developing that will link private corporate UDDI registries to public registries. Gupta said he spent time talking to potential customers for his company's newly announced Web services products and found UDDI alive and well, although not in the expansive format that he calls ''UDDI in the sky.''

''The UDDI in the sky -- this one big UDDI registry we're going to go to -- I think it is not dormant but it is not as active,'' he said. ''The UDDI standard for registry is where you maintain the service information people are adopting. But they are adopting in the context of private UDDI registries.''

As developers within enterprises seek to take advantage of the reuse capabilities available through Web services, their own corporate UDDI registry is where they will go to find out if other departments have components they can plug into their applications, in Gupta's view.

''A UDDI registry, or a registry that conforms to the UDDI protocols, is a useful place for me to do asset management,'' he said. ''This is the place where I keep information about which applications or services are available in my enterprise. Then, the next time I want to do something, I can first look to see if I can leverage any work that's been done by a different department or division inside my enterprise. So the private UDDI registry is certainly something people are using and it is being widely adopted.''

In the B2B context where corporations might look for a Web service, such as credit verification, to link into an application, Gupta sees the hierarchical model for UDDI emerging.

''I expect that what will happen is people will end up using the public UDDI registries potentially as a way of connecting with a partner's private UDDI registry,'' he said. ''So it will almost be like a hierarchy where I have private UDDI registries in companies and to get from one to another, I might use a public UDDI registry. I think that is what people are going to be looking at first before they take all their internal services and register them with this public UDDI registry in the sky.''

Gupta's company, Confluent Software (formerly Corporate Oxygen Inc.), this week unveiled its initial product, a platform that provides management and analysis of corporate Web services.

For more information, click on http://www.confluentsoftware.com.