Prior to joining Systinet, Erickson served as an executive vice president at webMethods (Profile, Products, Articles) and also held executive positions at Baan, Filenet Corp./Watermark Software, and MRO Software Inc. Among Systinet?s products is Systinet Registry, a UDDI-compliant registry for SOAs. Earlier this month, Erickson met with InfoWorld"s Editor in Chief Steve Fox, Test Center Executive Editor Doug Dineley, Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr, and Editor at Large Paul Krill to discuss his views on the phases of Web services, Web services standardization, and alliances with other vendors.

InfoWorld: Can you talk about your view on Web services?

Erickson: We?re looking at the Web services world or SOA world as a three-phase evolution. And (what) we?ve seen in the first phase involved people (who) rather than building this API and RPCs with some proprietary protocol, build it using Web services.

The second phase is what we call the business services phase, so moving from a Web service to a business service. And the difference here is that people now are starting to say, well, rather than just build these interfaces onto existing applications, we?re actually going to design something from the ground up with a notion of reuse, with a notion of providing some real value.

And the best example is one of our customers, and unfortunately, some of our customers don?t allow us to share their names. One of our customers is a financial services organization, just say one of the Big Five globally. And they have a compliance requirement where to prevent money laundering they want to do compliance management of wire transfers, and they operate in 120 countries around the world. But they want everybody to use the same service for obvious reasons. And compliance, of course, is a big issue across all kinds of corporations these days. And the enterprise architects in these companies (are) starting to realize (that) creating a business service where compliance might be a compelling need seems to make sense.

Web services management ? is what we call the third phase, and that still needs some more standards to get into play. I mean that needs things like WS-Addressing. So the first phase has just really done Web services and then created some business services. But what they haven?t done is helped us with what an SOA?s supposed to really be about, which is interoperability between these endpoints or applications, if you want to call them that, to the extent that not everything has to be known by the person building the endpoint at the time they build it.

InfoWorld: Do you think there are too many standards efforts going on in Web services?

Erickson: Well, good question, and it?s certainly confusing, and it?s confusing for us as a company trying to keep up with all of them. Are there too many? I?m a perpetual believer that dialogue is good, but I do believe that some standards will survive and others won?t. I do believe you need to have dialogues between parties to create some kind of interoperability capability.

All of these draft standards are evolving. And so what happens is you quickly realize to create a true Web services, there?s a lot of information you have to have about it so that it can be considered for reuse and used in a broader context. And there?s a whole variety of, let?s say, systems probably isn?t the right word, but interested parties. And one of our customers called it the SOA cloud. Interested parties in the SOA cloud, the management vendors, the security vendor, the identity vendor, all want to know information about that service so that they can interoperate. And very quickly you start to realize, well, where is that information going to be stored? And that?s one of our main value propositions, and in discussions with the analysts and our customers, they?re starting to come to the realization (that) there is a notion here of a registry repository where this information needs to be stored.

InfoWorld: Would that be UDDI?

Erickson: UDDI has its issues, but perhaps UDDI is the alternative that exists today to start us along the path. UDDI really is only a schema, you know? And it?s a way to look into the database.

InfoWorld: So when you say this registry repository is standards-based, what you mean is that you can query it using open standards like XQuery?

Erickson: Like XQuery, like UDDI. You have to have some kind of facility to put a taxonomy in there that other applications throughout the enterprise can recognize.

InfoWorld: And how much can a business service really describe itself, and what it can do via WSDL? This is one thing I?ve never been completely clear on, is how far can you push WSDL, because Web services is just an interface. And if you?re talking about data types and all this other kind of stuff, then you?re talking about getting into XML schema and all these other things that don?t really directly relate to Web services.

Erickson: Well, yes. It?s interesting you mention that because the context around what you?re talking about is in fact our whole supposition for a different need for tools to enable this business services evolution. You?ve just come up with a lot of our value proposition around our go-to-market strategy, which is, how much can you do in a WSDL and where else, what else do you need to get the job done?

Because you do need other things. You need to be able to provide policy information with that, you need to be able to provide different types of management about how it?s operating. You need to be able to provide information about security and identity ? (Web services) management from our perspective will include things like, if we?re going to revise it, what types of things we need to know to revise it. If you are on the runtime side, you need to know who?s using it, what?s the state of it, all these other factors.

And our point, and the reason for cooperating with AmberPoint (Inc.) -- and we?ve got some dialogues with the other players in this space too -- is that we want to ensure that we collaborate with these companies to do the right thing. So one of the first things we?re doing is creating a technical brief on WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) to UDDI mapping. So in other words, how do you take the WSDM standards and put them into a repository? How does that look?

InfoWorld: Haven?t you also had an alliance with Actional (Corp.)?

Erickson: We (have) had an alliance with Actional in the past.

InfoWorld: Do you see any other alliances happening?

Erickson: We do see some more, we?re in discussions with some of what we call the ?classic management vendors.?

InfoWorld: This is a question I usually ask the newer Web services management vendors. Are you watching for any potential acquisitions (of Systinet) by a large company that might want to buy a technology like yours instead of developing it in-house? Do you see the company as a whole as maybe an acquisition target?

Erickson: Well, actually now it?s interesting you mention that. I don?t know how much you know about Warburg Pincus, who are our investors. They?re a rather large, even perhaps you could say old-fashioned type of private equity firm rather than a true venture capital, in that we?re part of a very large US$5 billion fund that they have.

I asked them that question because in some of our discussions with our partnerships, which we can?t announce today but we?re starting to accelerate on, I said, so, invariably when you get into this kind of discussion with (other vendors), they?re going to say, well, rather than partner with you, what if we buy you? What are your motivations? And I mean I just joined the company five months ago and I didn?t come on board to (flip) the thing. I moved my family from Australia. But I needed to check with them as well, and I mean it?s very clear. They said, yes, not only did we just hire you, but we just put $10 million more in you back in May, in Systinet.

And our motivation is not to (sell Systinet). The motivation is to try to create some real value in the SOA space because we believe that there?s going to be a play, and we?re going to use (Systinet) as kind of the vehicle to achieve that. We believe that there?s an opportunity that when a paradigm shift happens there is an opportunity for a new company to emerge.

If you go through time you can see this repeatedly again. There has been a new major player in the software industry appearing when there?s paradigm shifts because some of the older players fail to make the transition, whether it?s in the hardware transition from mainframes to (minicomputers) to micros, whether it?s been software transitions from mainframe to client/server to all along the way. Because (however) Pincus was involved in BEA (Systems Inc.), they?re the company that funded BEA, they have a similar vision -- (that) we can do this again. And that?s kind of their mantra, I guess, of the scenario.

So the quick answer to your question is, no, we?re not out there trying to find a company to buy us.