Reliability and its attendant weaknesses have a common cause: the Internet and, more specifically, the HTTP communication standard, which just isn't a good fit for Web services. The big issue with HTTP is that it is connectionless and eventless, and it can't handle distributed transaction coordination the way common object request broker architecture (CORBA) can. In the middleware platforms of CORBA and COM (component object model), tightly coupled, internal software development worlds, data delivery is guaranteed. But the Web services world is loosely coupled - delivery isn't guaranteed. Or not yet anyway. Ted Schadler, a group director at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, compares HTTP to a telegraph line and says that the machine-to-machine transactions in a Web services world require an open-line, telephone-like connection. Unfortunately, no one has figured out how to do that yet.

To be fair, HTTP works pretty well most of the time. But when you're considering sending sensitive business data, pretty well isn't reliable enough. "It's like the U.S. mail," says Hewitt's Hilgenberg. "It will get there 99 percent of the time, but if you want to guarantee delivery, you have to send it certified. HTTP is reliable 99 percent of the time, but there is a chance you could lose packets. For financials, you can't do that."

Prasuna Dornadula, senior vice president and CTO of CareTouch, a health services company in Concord, Calif., has set up a VPN in order to run a Web service that lets CareTouch patients schedule an appointment with any one of 5,000 physical therapists in northern California. The dedicated connection allows Dornadula to use IBMIBM's MQseries middleware to guarantee delivery. While the setup works for scheduling physical therapy sessions, Bernhard Borges, managing director for PWC Consulting's advanced technologies group in New York City, says that it doesn't make sense to use a messaging tool for the large financial transactions that Web services will eventually be used for. "The best you can do [with MQ] is know I handed it off," he says, "I don't know if you read it or not." Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

So Where Does This Leave the CIO?

Assuming that the current level of industry cooperation continues, the current performance and security limitations shouldn't hold back Web services for long. Forrester's Schadler says that the Internet makes Web services so cheap that whatever problems there are now will eventually be solved. "Saying people won't use Web services over the Internet because of HTTP is like saying no one will use e-mail because the addresses are too hard to remember," he says.