News

CA's Gupta: Web services boosting on-demand computing

• By Rich Seeley
• July 16, 2003

With the spread of Web services and the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), traditional point-to-point integration is evolving into what Yogesh Gupta, CTO at Computer Associates, calls the "dynamically integrated environment."

This use of Web services is a key element in the creation of CA's vision of on-demand computing, stated Gupta in his keynote address at CA World, the annual user conference of Computer Associates, in Las Vegas this week.

"If somebody wants to dynamically do things, and they want to instantaneously do things and they want to work with service providers based on need at that instant, based on business requirements at that instant, the only way that will happen is through Web services," he said.

In the futuristic on-demand model Gupta envisions, a business could decide to outsource its payroll processing and make the change almost instantaneously through the payroll processor's Web services offering.

This can lead to radical change from current business processes where a seemingly simple task like switching banks for automatic paycheck deposit can now take weeks, he said. That is because current banking and payroll services require human intervention, whereas the SOA model would simply match business rules with available Web services and make a link untouched by human hands.

Web services are also reviving the mainframe, proving that, yet again, the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated, Gupta said.

"One of the things we are seeing is that people are wrapping legacy applications with Web services," Gupta said. "We at CA have done this with our support applications, our customer interaction applications -- wrapped them in Web services. Thousands of our customers are actually accessing those systems today to find out product information and to update their account information online. And those are Web services that actually sit on top of our existing applications, many of them on the mainframe."

Audio of Gupta's technology keynote is available at www.cai.com/caworld.