Choreology's Cohesions product will support WS-Coordination+Transaction

Contact: Katy Birch
Choreology Ltd.
+44 (0)870 739 0056
katy.birch@choreology.com

London, 14 August 2002—Choreology Ltd today welcomed the 9 August announcement by IBM, Microsoft and BEA of two proposed specifications: Web Services Coordination+Transaction. The new specifications are a response to growing awareness of market demand for reliable application coordination technology.

Choreology will support the WS-C+T specifications in its Cohesions product, when they are ready and available for third-party implementation. Cohesions already supports the Business Transaction Protocol (BTP), which is an OASIS Committee Specification.

"Our job is to deliver business transaction management at the application level. We insulate customers from inevitable flux in the standards arena. We hide the details of particular coordination protocols under the hood of the Cohesions product, and if standards change we'll help to protect customers' applications from adverse impact—for example, by transparent protocol bridging," said Choreology’s CEO, Alastair Green.

Coordinating legacy, Web Service and future applications
Choreology's forthcoming product,Cohesions 1.0, enables coordination of cross-application updates, including applications delivered as Web Services. In the future it could enable reliable ebXML business transactions, Grid coordinations, or wireless transactions.

"We recognize that Web Services are going to play a major role in interfacing applications. We also know that large organizations will never deploy a single paradigm across the board. In keeping with that, our product will implement Web Service-specific standards, as they mature, such as the new WS-Coordination+Transaction. The Cohesions product currently uses the more flexible, finished BTP standard from OASIS—so our product can already work in SOAP and non-Web Service environments,” Alastair Green added.

Towards a single, open, royalty-free standard for Web Service transactions
Choreology Ltd has worked intensively over fifteen months with vendors such as HP, Sun, Oracle, BEA, IONA, Seebeyond and Sybase in the OASIS Business Transaction technical committee to help create BTP, the first and most advanced specification to support interoperable business transaction management for Web Services.

"We are very keen to work with IBM, Microsoft, BEA and all the other vendors, large and small, in an open, public-review standards consortium. We would like to see a single standard that combines the best features of BTP with those of the new specs," commented Dr. Peter Furniss, Choreology's Chief Scientist, and editor of the BTP specification. "For example, the new WS-C+T drafts contain useful initial work on the integration of security and transactions, an area where BTP is weak: we'd like to see that carried forward as part of a single standard initiative."

Choreology Ltd is strongly in favour of licence-free and royalty-free standards. "Customers need to know that large vendors don't hold a sword of Damocles over the industry's head when it comes to using standards-based software," Alastair Green remarked.

Dr. Furniss cited a recent statement by Bill Cox (who is Technical Director Architecture and Standards at BEA), made in support of BEA’s candidate in the election to the Board of the OASIS consortium. "Bill Cox stated: 'We at BEA encourage Zero-Cost standards, sometimes known as RANDZ or RF IPR.' At Choreology we agree with that BEA policy. We hope to see a single, royalty-free standard for business transactions emerge soon."

Product First
Choreology’s Cohesions 1.0 product will allow customers to obtain a new level of certainty and consistency for information dispersal and updates across application systems. While standards evolve and crystallize, companies will be able to take immediate advantage of this product solution.

ENDS

Notes for Editor
BTP – Business Transaction Protocol 1.0, an OASIS Committee Specification.
www.oasis-open.org/committees/business-transactions

Web Services Coordination and Transaction (IBM, Microsoft, BEA).
http://dev2dev.bea.com/techtracks/ws-coordination.jsp
http://dev2dev.bea.com/techtracks/ws-transaction.jsp
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-coor/
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/aug02/08-09BEAPR.asp