[ebxml-dev] BPSS and WSCI

[Assaf Arkin <arkin@intalio.com>]

I would like to address several of the issues that were raised regarding the
WSCI specification on this mailing list, as this seems to be a major point
for discussion.

BEA, Intalio, Sun and SAP have together elected to pursue the development of
the WSCI specification since we believe it addresses a pressing need in the
Web services space that is not currently addressed by any royalty-free,
public specification that is part of the Web services stack.

We are aware that at first glance there appears to be an overlap between
WSCI and BPSS, but we view the two stacks as complementary and coexisting,
as they attempt to solve different problems and approach the solution from
different perspectives.

We believe that WSCI is more adequate in addressing the specific needs of
the Web services stack, where one would focus on the WSDL operations and the
choreography of these operations, whereas BPSS addresses the needs of B2B
collaborations and focuses on B2B transactions and trading agreements
between business partners.

We are actively working to explore collaboration between the various
specifications, and this effort also entails other industry groups that are
taking an active role in addressing enterprise business processes. We
believe that all these groups are working towards a common standard and
together could work to solve a larger problem of business processes that
encompass trading partners, human workflow and application software.

There is no one standard that can attempt to solve all problems, rather a
combination of standards that could work together, each addressing a
specific problem area, and together offering customers an end-to-end
solution. We do not view the existence of any one standard as preventing or
otherwise hindering any tool vendor from supporting other standards.

We are aware of concerns regarding specifications that are proprietary and
vendor specific. Fundamental to our effort, all parties participating in the
development of the WSCI specification has agreed upfront to make the
specification available on a royalty free basis and allows all vendors to
implement that specification.

I would encourage you all to take a close look at the IPR statement that
appears at the top of the WSCI specification, and also to consider the other
work done by the vendors with relation to open, royalty-free standards.

regards,
arkin


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Assaf Arkin                                          arkin@intalio.com
Intalio Inc.                                           www.intalio.com
The Business Process Management Company                 (650) 577 4700