Enabling Services

The success of Web services requires that many utility services become commoditized, so that each organization is not responsible for developing its own. Service providers will have to have these services in their catalog of offerings and are required for fee-based Web services. Let's say your organization has developed a strong portfolio-management Web service but wants to outsource its infrastructure to a Web services hosting provider. As the owner of the service, you will require the hosting provider to have services that support functionality such as billing, metering, provisioning, and security.

Table 16.6 lists some of the services your service provider should offer, either through local access or by remotely aggregating other providers' services. These enabling services could become business opportunities for the right software vendor. Enabling services are also part of the criteria for developing fee-based Web services. Fees are necessary to sell software as a service. Enabling services are the foundation of that goal.

Table 16.6: Enabling Services
Service	Description
Security	User authentication, authorization, encryption, signing, and nonrepudiation services
Key management	Support for digital certificates and other forms of public/private key infrastructures
Logging	A general-use logging service, where activities can be recorded and categorized (e.g. . critical, audit, diagnostic)
Time	The ability to make sure all services used are synchronized
Transformation	The ability to transform incoming and outgoing data between formats such as ebXML, EDI, industry-standard XML, and so on
User management	The ability to add, modify, suspend, and delete users and their attributes
Credit check	The ability to validate a user's creditworthiness
Payment	Support for capturing differing payment instruments (credit cards, checks, Pay Pal, etc.) and reconciling with accounts receivable
Currency	The ability support real-time currency conversion
Provisioning	The ability to associate user accounts with fee-per-use plans for particular services
Order management	Support for tracking service requests. This could include items such as purchase order handling. Should also handle requests that can be fulfilled asynchronously.
Fulfillment	A generic fulfillment service may be required. This could be a simple as delivering an email for electronic products to interfacing with shipping companies such as FedEx or DHL.
Bill presentment	Users of services are moving toward a household model, whereby charges from different parties are aggregated into a single statement. The bill presentment service could also become a fee-based service.