An Interview with Norm Judah of Microsoft
ASCET: How does the Microsoft .NET initiative fit with supply chain?
Judah:
We've looked at supply chain and how various companies communicate with each
other, particularly how large companies communicate with medium and small ones.
What we've seen is that many of the supply chain successes have been in connecting
different parts of large companies or in large hub companies dictating standards,
like EDI. But the vast numbers of supply chains are essentially broken because
the smaller companies can't communicate. We're trying to understand why.
We think there are four dimensions to providing the necessary integration.
The first dimension is being able to tie the supply chain systems into existing
back-end systems. For a small company, those systems could just be Excel, or
for a medium-sized company, they could be something like Great Plains, or all
variants in between. Why do we integrate those back-end systems? Because being
able to run a supply chain, but not being able to tie an order into a back-end
system, doesn't do anything. The second dimension is communication. What we're
doing with .NET is providing a technology framework, an application framework,
and an infrastructure that will allow those two things to happen easily.
A lot of the work that we're doing revolves around adopting common standards
and driving new initiatives and new standards with other companies — either
other technology companies or end-user companies. So we'll provide native support
within the .NET environment . We want to make it easy for people to write applications
that allow them to integrate and to communicate.
ASCET: How will Microsoft .NET help with supply chain collaboration?
Judah: What we're trying to do is to allow any supplier and any customer to easily and simply communicate with one another. What we're not working on at this point is addressing the semantic issues or the transformational issues. We can provide the transformations — you can tell us how to transform and we can do that — but we don't provide the direct interface to the business. The standard that we're using is "Web Services," which allows companies to publish their company's information in a directory.
ASCET: What's the RosettaNet accelerator?
Judah: We have focused on several accelerators that are based on our BizTalk Server. The BizTalk Server is about providing a generalized transformation engine, an generalized communication engine, not about addressing any of the specific issues of how to tie together various companies, be it in the RosettaNet environment around high-tech, or the healthcare environment around HIPAA and others. So the family of accelerators that we have developed includes a BizTalk Server that has been highly customized and specialized to a particular community. You'd use the RosettaNet accelerator if you were participating in the high-tech supply chain and you subscribed to the RosettaNet standards. Then you could install the BizTalk accelerator for RosettaNet and you'd be able to tie in — in a very simple and easy way — because it understands the RosettaNet protocols and the RosettaNet documents. The same would true for the healthcare industry through the HIPAA interface. You can expect to see other accelerators coming out from us that are vertical implementations of specializations that address particular communities.
ASCET: Will Microsoft's .NET work with legacy SCM systems?
Judah: Yes, it has to. The back-end integrations into these legacy systems, which are really running today and are part of the real world, are able to unite existing back-end ERP systems or existing supply chain systems . This is a key part of what we need to be able to do. We're addressing this in two ways: by providing a particular interface through the BizTalk Server, such as an interface into the SAP system, or trying to navigate through some of the standards. We're also working with the other independent software companies on a set of standards and a set of specifications that we can all use and interface with.
We recently announced an initiative called WSI (Web Services Integration),
which is a community of companies — I believe that in excess of 100 companies
have already signed up — using a test suite to guarantee that if you write
your Web services in a particular way, you will be able to interoperate. One
of the problems with many of the standards that we have today is that they're
very general and nonspecific. You can write a sub-space Web service in lots
of different ways, and what WSI is about is creating a specification that will
guarantee interoperability. Customers would demand that, and if you had a software
product from one company to integrate into software from another provider, as
well as your own custom developed applications, you'd have some degree of certainty
that those three applications would integrate with each other clearly.
