The Web Services Interoperability Organization Friday announced that it has re-elected a Sun Microsystems Inc. representative to its board of directors.
At the WS-Is Spring Community Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, the WS-I re-elected Mark Hapner, chief Web services strategist at Sun, to the board of directors, where he will serve another two-year term.
When the group, led by IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp., formed in early 2002, there was an effort to exclude Sun from membership at the board level. Sun joined WS-I in October 2002, and Hapner was later nominated for a board slot and voted in as a board member in March 2003 for a two-year stint.
The Santa Clara, Calif., systems vendor quickly got to work contributing to specifications, and it released the first platform for WS-I-compliant Web services applications—the J2EE 1.4 Software Developer Kit and Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.2—in September 2003.
“All that angst and fear about Sun and the issues around head-butting seems to have been a red herring,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, of Waltham, Mass. “Basically, vendors will get along if it is in the best interests to do so, and the Web services/SOA [service oriented architecture] opportunity is just too big to be having conniptions about vendor love fests. So, viva cooperation.”
/zimages/4/28571.gifClick herefor a rundown of four new Web services standards.
Also at the meeting, Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group Inc., gave a keynote presentation entitled “Interoperability Issues in the Real World,” and WS-I members Hewlett-Packard Co., Layer 7 Technologies Inc. and Webify Solutions Inc. demonstrated the business and technical value of the WS-I deliverables at the meetings technical showcase.
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