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StrikeIron Inc., developer of the Web Services Business Network (WSBizNet), announced a Web Services Marketplace that can simplify the selling and buying of Web services for a broad audience of providers and users, while simultaneously supporting commercial Web services integration by ISVs and solution providers. (Read the article, "StrikeIron Launches Web Services Marketplace" here.) We sat down with Bob Brauer to talk about his vision of a Web Services Marketplace.

Q: Tell us about your Web Services Marketplace initiative.

Brauer: This is in the new release of Web Services Business Network 2.0. It's a big step forward for us. It's the introduction of our Web services commercialization platform.

A way to think about it is as the “eBay” of Web services. We have a set of Web services -- some that we provide, some we're making available from our publishers -- that people can come to our site and subscribe to them on an as-needed basis, for as little or as much as they like.

Q: eBay seems to be a good analogy for the service you are offering.

Brauer: Actually, eBay is not entirely accurate, but in a very general way, it makes sense. What we're talking about is a marketplace. It's a meeting point where creators of Web services and subscribers to those Web services, the users, can actually meet. We facilitate that process.

Q: So the services you offer are external to the firewall, versus the internal SOAs many vendors are focusing on?

Brauer: We made a specific point to distinguish between external and the internal use of Web services. The external Web services play into our marketplace concept. Companies are building SOAs today, including the necessary infrastructure to manage both hardware and software. Once that's in place, it's fairly easy to extend the SOA by pulling in external services that provide additional benefit above and beyond the Web services they are using.

Q: Companies, then, will be able to integrate these external services into their own internal SOAs?

Brauer: What we are providing, through our partners and ourselves, are a bunch of new Web services that we're calling external Web services that you can hook in through your existing SOA. For example, things like our live tax rates, or our address verification Web service. Different things where it makes a lot more sense for companies to hook into our Web service, rather than having to rebuild and update and gather the data themselves.

Q: What do you now offer through the Marketplace and directory?

Brauer: If you come to our site today, we have existing Web services that we provided, from ourselves, and also from some of our third-party partners. We’ve added self-publishing features, and have automated the ability for our integration partners to take the Web services that are now available in our marketplace and hook it into their own applications. So if you had a software application that needed to use Web services, you could take our Marketplace Web service, which is essentially an API to our Marketplace, take any Web service that exists in the marketplace, and build it into your application.

One of the major things that we're introducing here is the ability to self-publish a Web service that you have. You will be able to come to our site, walk through a series of wizard steps, and set your pricing the way that you want people to be able to use your Web service. We'll walk you through the steps, and you can submit it, and we do a review, and then it will be made available for other people to begin using, and hook into their applications or Website through our network.

Q: What does StrikeIron provide to a publisher that submits a service to your network?

Brauer: We handle all the billing, the usage, keeping track of how much people are using, provide the reporting to do that, collect the revenue, then we take a few pennies for each transaction, then the rest of the revenue will be sent to you.

Q: What’s the revenue split between StrikeIron and the publisher?

Brauer: We retain 30 percent of the transaction. If you publish through our site, you're going to get 70 percent of the revenue for that Web service. That 30 percent doesn't entirely go to us. Some of that goes to the ISVs that participate on our site.

Q: This simplifies things for Web services subscribers as well, then.

Brauer: We provide a whole single bill concept. If there's 20 different external Web services that you want to make use of, you can pay one bill, pay one way, and have one set of consistent behavior from the 20 Web services, rather than 20 bills and 20 sets of behavior. So it makes sense that a platform like this is really going to merge in the center of this ecosystem.

Q: How do you vouch that a service will be available to customer? Do you provide a service-level agreement to subscribers?

Brauer: We have uptime agreements that we require of our publishers that they have to adhere to and maintain. There are some ways to do it contractually. Some of our providers currently have chosen to host their Web service on our platform, so that's an option as well. We monitor the services to make sure they're always up. If uptime is not kept, then we reserve the right to not allow that publisher to make Web services available. Then we pass on that agreement to people that are using that Web services. They also get notified through our notification process if a Web service does go down, so they're aware of the downtime. For any Web service on there, you can check the uptime for the last 30 days to get a pretty good idea. Also, one of things we don't have yet, but we hope to have with the next release, is a community commentary on the services.

Q: Do you use a specific registry technology to support the Marketplace? Can potential subscribers use UDDI to find your offerings?

Brauer: We have a UDDI interface, so people that are using UDDI to discover Web services will be able to hook into us to do that. We also built our own registry that's customized for our own needs, to store our stuff internally. We recognize that a lot of people are using UDDI-based registries, and we’d like to make it easy for people to be able to include our Web services marketplace as a category within our UDDI.

Q: Is anybody using UDDI remote interface yet?

Brauer: No, but it is available as part of this new release.

Q: Have you considered offering a private UDDI registry, or hosted registry that companies can rent from you?

Brauer: We do have a facility for things like the private UDDIs or private directories. People can take advantage of this as part of our platform. But we’re not emphasizing that in this release. We’re focusing more on the commerce side, as the eBay of Web services.

Q: How about the possibility of hosting internal corporate SOAs?

Brauer: Potentially. We see that as an opportunity, but what we don't want to have to do is take our platform, zip it up, and try to make it work on 50 different behind-the-firewall configurations, databases, and operating systems and so forth. We've established a leadership position with the Web services marketplace concept, so we plan to continue to focus on that. At the end of the day, our revenue model is based on the amount of transactions that we can drive through the platform.

Q: The idea of a Web services marketplace or directory has a lot of potential. In fact, Amazon seems to be interested in this space, as they’ve filed a patent for a Web services directory. Are they a potential competitor?

Brauer: Amazon has been a partner of ours for a while. They have filed a patent application for some components of a Web services-type marketplace, which is fairly detailed, and we've looked through it. We've got a completely different architecture and platform, and the concept of a Web services marketplace was first published by the W3C back in 2001.

Q: Getting back to the eBay analogy, do you eventually see entire new businesses – selling Web services – being created within the ecosystem created by this new Marketplace, such as we see within eBay?

Brauer: We clearly believe that opportunity exists. That day will come, and we hope to be at the center of that. This means a fundamental change of underlying business models, utilizing a service-oriented architecture that is creating all kinds of new business opportunities. There's an opportunity for this commercialization platform to handle things like microtransactions, multiple users, the authentication of users, billing, and all the things that you would actually expect.