Extranets are the grail of global business -- Java and a host of other standard components will make them a reality
Pick a business guru at random and you will find that he or she has written a compelling book about the brave new world of commerce in the twenty-first century. This is the land of the catchy phrase and pithy epithet, where concepts are flexible enough to withstand constant revision as reality impinges upon prediction. Call it the learning organization, the virtual corporation, or the third-wave economy: Everyone has described some survival strategy for a world of accelerating change and ever-increasing competition.
Senior executives buy these tomes to read at the beach over their all-too-brief summer holidays. As the leaves change color in the fall, corporate structures explode into chaos as hired guns descend on the corporate world to implement the latest organizational theory. Upwardly mobile employees pepper their memos for the next six months with selections from the official lexicon of transformational terms. The weary ones who have seen it all before chuckle knowingly about “getting religion” or “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Somehow, business goes on.
Today, the most agile among the business literati are embracing the extranet as the electronic realization of their corporate vision. An extranet is defined as a collaborative network that uses Internet technology to link businesses with their suppliers, customers, or other businesses that share common goals. The extranet promises to integrate the operational systems of the corporation with those of other companies that make up its distribution network. The result is a complete, electronically integrated supply chain. Customers are kept abreast of each new product, pricing program, and delivery schedule. A customer order results in an extended electronic dialog: Parts are ordered, manufacturing hums, products flow to the shipping department, and the corporate coffers are automatically credited as the FedEx truck pulls away from the loading dock. Such is the vision.
Selling atoms not just bits
Today, this vision is being implemented but only within tight boundaries. The reality is that electronic commerce has developed more slowly than was originally forecast, and Nicholas Negroponte knows why. He writes persuasively in his book
Being Digital
about the changes being made in the world economy by the increasing influence of digital technology and communications networks. The problem is simply a matter of bits versus atoms.
As it exists today, the digital economy is based on the transfer of bits across a network. Stocks, bonds, and mutual funds trade effortlessly over the network because nothing material changes hands. Bits that represent the holdings of one entity are reassigned to another. Databases are updated, reports generated, but very few atoms must be moved from one location to another. The financial services market has been the initial beachhead for electronic commerce, because everything that is produced and transferred can be represented digitally as bits.
Selling shoes, socks, and washing machines over the network creates a more challenging set of issues. Undoubtedly, it is possible to place an order for a thousand pairs of argyle socks over some site on the World Wide Web. The host company may even electronically transfer that request to an order-processing department. Ultimately, however, someone has to take 2,000 individual socks out of inventory, put them in a shipping container, send them to the customer, and order some new socks from the manufacturing plant to keep the warehouse fully stocked. In short, a lot of multi-colored atoms must be moved through space and time in concert with the electronic messages that document the transaction. Making electronic commerce a reality for all those companies that sell hard goods means they must be better integrated with their supply chain. They need to migrate their existing operational systems to Internet technology and integrate these systems with those of their partners — otherwise, orders will be taken rapidly but fulfilled slowly. These companies need extranets.
Extranets are real, and the vision described above is becoming a reality in some companies. However, for those companies developing intranets, the move to integrate Internet technologies with their operational systems is slow. The challenge? Existing Internet and intranet sites were designed for information retrieval, not operations.
Crossing corporate boundaries
Enhancing operational systems with Internet technologies is the next major phase in the Internet’s development. Unless companies are better integrated with their customers and suppliers, electronic commerce will be limited to bits. Bits are grand, and they represent an increasing percentage of the world economy. However, everyone in the world eats atoms, drinks atoms, sleeps on atoms, and, until the advent of some Star Trekian utopia, they must be transported as set of contiguous atoms.
Developing intranet applications can be a challenge, but the designer or architect can make some assumptions about their network and computing infrastructure. Computers, operating systems, and usage profiles are known, and network bandwidth can at least be estimated. Software can be optimized around this knowledge, and reliable systems built.
Extranets have a different design center. Regardless of how dominant a company is in its market, it cannot directly control the computing environment of all its partners and suppliers. Smart extranet designers will develop software that treats external systems as black boxes with “standard” interfaces. The goal of ubiquitous access from heterogeneous environments means those “standards” must be real.
Setting the extranet standard
Luckily, de facto and de jure standards are emerging for extranets. Of course, there are the fairly obvious ones: TCP/IP, HTTP, and LDAP. But other standards are equally important, and many of them have already been developed or are working their way through the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) process now. Specifically, the PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) and L2TP (Layer 2 Forwarding) protocols are under review as approaches to providing tunnels through the Internet for secure inter-business-communications. Tunneling is an important issue, because no matter how broad the coverage of a corporate WAN, at some point extranet transmissions will cross a firewall and venture through an unsecured Internet frontier.
Most existing extranet standards presuppose a “pull” design center. In reality, this is only true when the system is designed for information retrieval: browsing price books or parts catalogs, for example. This could ultimately prove to be a glass ceiling for extranets. Browsing is a good metaphor for recreation and research, but it is not the most productive use of corporate resources. As the market evolves, the principal goal of extranets will be to dynamically publish relevant information to individuals depending on who they are and what they do. Most extranets will be push environments. Here standards are just beginning; Microsoft, Pointcast, BackWeb, and others have proposed the CDF (Channel Definition Format), which defines a standard push channel markup language. CDF is an application of the XML (Extensible Markup Language) standard produced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The key(s) to extranet development
In the final analysis, beyond the standards issue, the two most important issues in extranet development are security and cross-platform operation. Here, Java has much to offer. Work is underway on a wide variety of security standards (X.509 digital certificates, seem to be in the lead). However, whatever algorithms one chooses, and whatever protocols support them, Java is still one of the premier languages for developing secure internetworking applications, and it continues to be the best for cross-platform operation.
Conclusion
The extranet is in its infancy, but it is too good an idea not to happen. Without extranets, effective electronic commerce will be limited to the financial services market and other vendors of bits. A number of key technologies and standards must fall into place before extranets become ubiquitous. As always, write your applications in Java, and don’t worry about it.
