Smart Services Bundle

If I had any doubts about the momentous shift from packaged software to software as a service, Patrick Grady, CEO of Rearden Commerce, dispelled them. Rearden's first offering, Employee Business Services (EBS), is a new class of application that couldn't exist unless it was hosted by the provider.

Grady first described EBS to me in January, when Rearden was ending five years of stealth mode. He called EBS 'HailStorm on a Java platform,' a reference to Microsoft's failure to evolve Passport into a hosted identity service. HailStorm initially targeted consumers, but EBS goes after business and adds two things that Microsoft never proposed: An on-demand marketplace of business services and a hosted enterprise application to control and analyze the purchase of those services by employees. (These features were hook enough for Rearden to catch several early customers - including Whirlpool and Motorola.)

EBS draws a circle around a huge area of business spending in which enterprise software has failed to gain traction - travel, shipping, teleconferencing, and meals and entertainment - and provides a means for ordering those services according to individual preferences and company policy. The backend of Rearden's platform is a services 'grid,' in which providers from DHL to OpenTable.com plug in via Web services. EBS is customized to each user by default. First, management must rationalize its policies and procedures for services  procurement. Then, a policy or procurement manager uses the EBS interface to enter those company policiesand workflows for groups of users within the organization.

A Java-based, event-driven service- oriented architecture (SOA) then breaks business processes into a set of reusable Web services. According to Grady, much of the effort creating EBS involved isolating a set of 80 common denominator business services attributes as well as creating Services Business Language (SBL), an orchestration language cooked up primarily by Satnam Alag, Rearden's chief architect, and his team.

Alag has an interesting answer as to why Rearden didn't use Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which most of the industry seems to have endorsed for Web services orchestration: "BPEL doesn't really make sense within an on-demand, internal services orchestration." For one thing, in the contained environment of EBS, he doesn't have to worry about orchestrating services across a ragtag infrastructure of legacy systems, as BPEL was designed to do. "The moment you simplify the problem a little bit in terms of an on-demand infrastructure, the problem gets a lot more manageable and more scalable," Alag says. The benefit for customers is theoretically huge. Instead of filling in shipping labels or making phone reservations business users fill in Web forms and choose from preferred providers. Grady estimates that the savings in hard costs should run up to 20 percent and that the elimination of manual procedures should save much more. And because Rearden runs one huge instance of EBS with many accounts across a virtualized infrastructure, every time the company adds a service  provider, it becomes instantly available to all customers. It's stunning to see so much of the potentialof Web services rolled into one offering:  Software as a service, B2B transactions over the Internet, mass customization, a thoroughly componentized application infrastructure and a HailStorm-like paradigm that puts the user first. Rearden may or may not succeed as a business, but it's already broken more newground in one place than I've seen in a long, long time. CIO