Press Release

OASIS Members Advance Reliable Message Delivery for Web Services

WS-Reliability Specification Submitted to OASIS

Boston, MA, USA; 26 February 2003 — Members of the OASIS standards consortium announced plans to collaborate on the development of a generic and open model for ensuring reliable message delivery for Web services. The new OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM) Technical Committee will work to establish a standard, interoperable way of achieving reliability at the SOAP messaging level and potentially with other messaging protocols.

The WS-Reliability specification, published by Fujitsu, Hitachi, Oracle, NEC, Sonic Software, and Sun Microsystems, will be submitted as input for the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee. Other contributions are welcome. The group plans to work closely with related OASIS Technical Committees, such as the ebXML Messaging Services and the Web Services Security teams, and with relevant efforts of other organizations, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Services Architecture Working Group.

According to Thomas Koulopoulos, Delphi Group CEO, "Through WS-RM, OASIS is once again demonstrating a leadership role in the movement towards building a services-based architecture. The initiative is a critical step forward in creating a solid foundation for virtualization and the underlying, broad-based processes that are critical to its adoption."

"Interoperability, ease-of-implementation, and ease-of-use are our fundamental goals," stated Tom Rutt of Fujitsu, chair of the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee. "We are determined to build on existing standards wherever possible so that the results of our work will interoperate and not overlap with Web services specifications that are being developed by other open, recognized, standards bodies."

The OASIS Reliable Messaging specification will address message persistence, acknowledgement and resending, elimination of duplicate messages, ordered delivery, and delivery status awareness for sender and receiver applications. It will provide WSDL definitions for reliable messaging, and the message formats will be specified as SOAP headers and/or body content.

Members of the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee include Commerce One, Cyclone Commerce, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IONA, NEC, Oracle, SAP, See Beyond, Sonic Software, Sun Microsystems, webMethods, WRQ, and others.

Under the rules adopted by the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee, each participant has agreed to provide a free license to any of its intellectual property rights which someone building a product to the final technical specification would need. Participation in the technical committee remains open to all organizations and individuals, and OASIS will host an open mail list for public comment.

Industry Support for WS-RM

"Fujitsu is committed to contribute its expertise in high reliability communication and messaging software to the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee in order to realize an open, royalty-free reliable messaging specification for Web services," said Yasushi Ishida, General Manager of Strategy and Technology Division, Software Group for Fujitsu Limited. "We have already demonstrated the high level of our commitment to this goal by our involvement in the collaborative publication of the initial WS-Reliability draft specification, and by our leadership role in the formation of the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee. We are also very honored to have Tom Rutt of Fujitsu serve as chair of this group."

"As a supplier of XML-based messaging technology for more than three years, IONA is very pleased to support the proposal to charter a technical committee at OASIS to develop a royalty-free reliable messaging specification for Web services," said Eric Newcomer, CTO at IONA. "A reliable messaging standard is key to wider adoption of Web services in mission critical applications."

"Reliable messaging based on open standards is essential for Web services to meet real-world business needs," said Don Deutsch, Vice president of Standards Strategy and Architecture for Oracle Corporation. "Oracle is pleased to co-sponsor the OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging Technical Committee and to contribute our enterprise software expertise to this effort."

"By providing an open standard for a SOAP-based reliable transport, WS-Reliability will help accelerate adoption of asynchronous Web services, making them relevant for an even wider range of standards-based integration across the extended enterprise and cross-company collaboration challenges. Sonic Software is pleased to be a sponsor of the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee," said Dave Chappell, vice president and chief technology evangelist, Sonic Software.

"Sun is pleased to work with other industry leading vendors to sponsor this essential OASIS effort," said Mark Bauhaus, vice president Sun ONE Java Web Services. "The WS-RM work is a tremendous step forward in terms of enabling complex business-to-business transaction and real time enterprise application integration. We encourage industry participation and input from those vendors who share our unequivocal commitment to open and royalty-free Web services standards."

"At WRQ, we believe that the WS-Reliability standard is a significant step in moving the industry closer to business-ready Web services," said Scott Rosenbloom, chief strategist at WRQ. "To make that happen, the industry needs to take Web services standards to the next level. Once reliable messaging is added, more companies can confidently take advantage of Web services technology to simplify interoperability among enterprise systems."

About OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org)

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. OASIS produces worldwide standards for security, Web services, XML conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps and interoperability within and between marketplaces. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 2,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries.

For more information:

Carol Geyer Director of Communications OASIS (www.oasis-open.org) carol.geyer@oasis-open.org +1.941.284.0403