WS-I Gathers for Spring Community Meeting; Advances Technical Work; Re-elects Sun Microsystems to Board of Directors

Business Wire, March 11, 2005

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Members of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) gathered this week in Vancouver, B.C. for WS-I's 2005 Spring Community Meeting. This week's meeting included a keynote presentation by Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, a presentation by WS-I Chairman Tom Glover and technical showcase presentations by members demonstrating the value of WS-I profiles, sample applications and testing tools.

"Three times each year, members of the WS-I community have a valuable opportunity to meet face-to-face with the rest of the organization," said Tom Glover, WS-I Chairman. "At these meetings, the organization's technical work is significantly advanced, our committees have an opportunity to meet in person and our technical 'Birds of a Feather' gatherings are held."

Anne Thomas Manes, a renowned technologist in the Web services space, gave a keynote presentation entitled "Interoperability Issues in the Real World" during the opening session on Wednesday. Previously, she was the chief technology officer at Systinet and before that pioneered Sun Microsystems' Web services strategy. Manes has participated in standards development at W3C, OASIS, JCP, UDDI.org and WS-I. She is also on the editorial board of Web Services Journal and is the author of the book "Web Services: A Manager's Guide," published by Addison Wesley.

WS-I members HP, Layer 7 Technologies and Webify Solutions demonstrated the business and technical value of the WS-I deliverables at the Technical Showcase. WS-I's deliverables include profiles, which provide guidelines for using Web services specifications together for best operability, sample applications, which demonstrate Web services applications that conform to WS-I profiles, and testing tools, which are used to determine whether the messages exchanged with a Web service conform to WS-I profiles.

Sun Microsystems Re-elected to Board

This week, the Board of Directors ratified the re-election of Mark Hapner, chief Web services strategist at Sun Microsystems to the Board of Directors. Hapner will serve another two-year term.

Since its formation in February 2002, the WS-I community has continued to grow and companies around the world participate in WS-I either as Contributing Members, Associate Members or Advocates. Since the Advocate program was launched in December 2004, 60 companies have joined WS-I in that membership category alone. Standards development organizations are important contributors to WS-I and have their own Associates membership category. WS-I has recently welcomed the HR-XML Consortium to the Associates program. The HR-XML Consortium is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the development and promotion of a standard suite of XML specifications to enable e-business and the automation of human resources-related data exchanges.

About WS-I

WS-I is an open industry organization committed to promoting consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. The organization unites a diverse community of Web services companies to provide guidance, recommended practices and supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services. For more information, please visit http://www.ws-i.org, or e-mail info@ws-i.org.