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IBM and Microsoft have pulled the plug on the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
(UDDI) public registry. The shutdown comes more than five years after an impressive list of partners announced UDDI in September,
2000.
In the heady days of the dot com era, many tech companies pursued the goldmine of e-business over the Internet. Many technology companies positioned themselves as
software providers for business-to-business (B2B) integration and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce. As XML gained traction, there was a wave of initiatives to develop
specifications and vocabularies as the technology underpinnings for global e-business.
The purpose of the UDDI initiative was to provide an electronic registry to facilitate Internet commerce using interoperable, XML-based technology. Registries were
expected to be the key technology for overcoming barriers to the adoption of global e-business. With great fanfare, IBM, Microsoft and the UDDI partners announced UDDI
would enable businesses to discover other businesses, and the services they provide, by using an Internet-based registry. The combination of XML, SOAP, Web Services
Discovery Language (WSDL) and UDDI find and publish APIs was supposed to be the vehicle for a new wave of web commerce.
During UDDI's infancy, I was the chair for several software conferences that hosted UDDI tutorials. The instructors were two of the key
UDDI developers, IBM's Andrew Hately and Microsoft's Dan Rogers. Those sessions received a positive response and Microsoft also ran
UDDI workshops in Europe and North America. There was enthusiasm for UDDI in the early years.
UDDI was one of two electronic business registry technologies that enjoyed widespread industry backing. The other was a registry standard developed by ebXML initiative
of the United Nations and OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). The UDDI partners donated the UDDI specification to OASIS, which
published the UDDI 2.0 and 3.0 specifications.
Besides contributing to the UDDI specifications, IBM, Microsoft and SAP also operated UDDI registries that accepted public registration of businesses and their web
services. NTT Communications Corporation began operating Asia's first public UDDI registry in 2002.
The public UDDI registries were an effective tool for testing UDDI software. Private UDDI registries gained traction as a tool for enterprise application
integration (EAI).
Whither UDDI?
The public UDDI registry grew to include 50,000 entities but the vision of UDDI as a global e-business registry never materialized. The post-9/11 economic downturn put
a damper on the prospects for global e-markets, but there has been slow, steady progress in that direction. The adoption rate for e-business messaging and registry technologies, such
as UDDI, is greater in Asia and Europe than in North America. For example, the Australian Government and Standards sponsor BizDex, a national B2B registry.
After a few years, it became apparent that private registries had become UDDI's biggest success. Although
they will no longer provide public registries, IBM and Microsoft continue to support the UDDI specification and private registries. IBM bundles UDDI 3.0 with WebSphere
Application Server and some of its Rational developer tools.
Microsoft provided a UDDI Data Export Wizard (below) for retrieving data from the public registry before the January 12, 2006 deadline.
Besides IBM and Microsoft, there are other UDDI implementations from Novell, Systinet and the Apache Software Foundations. A notable early Java implementation, James
Tauber's jUDDI, is now Apache jUDDI.
Where are they now?
The shutdown of the public UDDI registries reminds us technology doesn't always change corporate and business cultures. One reason XML became a hot technology was
many organizations felt it would overcome interoperability problems and enable the growth of B2B applications and Internet-based exchanges. This would, in turn, fuel
an explosion of global e-business that would dramatically alter traditional business models. Venture capitalists funded startups and existing companies scrambled to
be a contender in the race to provide B2B, e-commerce and web services technologies.
The original UDDI partnership included American Express, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, Great Plains, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, NEON, Nortel
Networks, NTT Communications, Sabre Holdings, SAP AG, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO and VeriSign. The success of some UDDI partners was closely tied to an expected return
from investing in technology for Internet e-commerce and the anticipated global electronic market.
Events such as dot com failures, the Wall Street and Enron scandals and the downturn of the global economy had a dramatic effect on some
UDDI partners. The original UDDI partner list also included Andersen Consulting, Ariba, Bowstreet, Cargill Inc., Clarus Corp., Commerce One, CommerceQuest, CrossWorlds
Software, Descartes, Extricity Software, i2, Internet Capital Group, Loudcloud, match21, Rational Software Corp., RealNames Corporation, Ventro Corp., Versata, VerticalNet
and webMethods.
Resources
Apache jUDDI
OASIS UDDI site and UDDI 3.0
spec
UDDI Data Export Wizard download.
UK Engineering Task Force UDDI evaluation
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