Registry of choice?

Can a small and young, yet ambitious company define the Web services registry standard? That's what Infravio, which was started by two Stanford students(and brothers) in 1999, intends to accomplish.

As Phil Wainright notes at Loosely Coupled, registries are one of the higher-level SOA layers thatWeb services players are beginning to address. "This is where everything gets recorded," he explains. "Some people might class it as two layers; there's certainly a lot going on here. The recording includes identity information as well as policy settings. There may be taxonomies here too. The common factor across all these functions is that we're talking about a trusted system of record, which is why we use the word 'registry', with its implication of some kind of formal registration process."

Infravio, which is basedin Cupertino, California, is backed byVC firms such asWalden International and Crystal Ventures as well as Nasdaq-tradedNetIQ Corp. Infravio's client baseincludes Providence Health System, Sabre, and British American Tobacco.

The first version of Infravio's Web Services registry product line, known as X-registry, was recently applied to drive capabilities atSabre's Travel Network portal.

"We believe there's an opportunity for a start-up company to be the Web services registry of choice,to be the de facto Web services registry, and that's what we're aiming to do at this point," says CEO Srinivas Balasumbramanian."A lot of us, including some very big players, believe 2005 is going to be The Year of Web Services...and the registry market should blossom within the next year or two."