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April 30, 2002
The Promise of UDDI

If you build Web services, will the users come?

Tamara Carter
"When should you get involved with Web services?" Mark Colan, an e-business evangelist for IBM, asked the audience at his class "All About UDDI" on Wednesday morning at SD West's Web Services World. "Now," he answered, "so you'll be in a good position when it really gets off the ground."
April 2002: The Promise of UDDI "When should you get involved with Web services?" Mark Colan, an e-business evangelist for IBM, asked the audience at his class "All About UDDI" on Wednesday morning at SD West's Web Services World. "Now," he answered, "so you'll be in a good position when it really gets off the ground."

While the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) specification, part of which emulates a yellow pages directory, certainly offers the promise of greater profit and interactivity by bringing companies and available Web services together, the sparse audience at Colan's talk didn't offer much proof that the public is jumping on the UDDI bandwagon. Colan acknowledged that the public UDDI registry is "very hit or miss." As it exists today, the registry may be filled with experiments, bogus information or spam, in addition to useful services.

Looking Ahead
Despite his evangelical role, Colan doesn't think the registry will truly become useful until 2004, the year he believes "we'll really get serious" about Web services. Until that magic date, private UDDI may provide companies with a way to usefully use Web services. According to Colan, you could use UDDI behind your firewall, for example, enabling employees to search within the company for internal or approved service providers and automate transactions beyond current intranet approaches.

A more useful and target-rich UDDI, Colan prognosticated, could be an "e-marketplace UDDI" where access could be restricted to a certain industry and certain players. Despite his peek into the future, however, Colan didn't enlighten the audience to the possible reasons for UDDI's slow adoption.

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