Registry-Related News (Grand Central)

["Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@bah.com>]

I'm a bit behind on my regular industry research, but just came across
this registry-related news that I'd like to share only for our general
awareness. A vendor named Grand Central recently set up its own
"business services directory" [1] - about mid-way, under heading "Grand
Central's Business Services Directory", it states:

<Excerpt>
"...Grand Central announces its Public Directory Service. With Release
4.0, Grand Central Communications is building the industry's largest,
high-quality, easy-to-use directory of shareable, reusable Web services
and making it publicly available. Now enterprises and third parties can
dynamically discover, access, reuse and share virtually any service and
business process - from tax calculations to credit checks - in
real-time. This creates a powerful, shared platform for business
integration, which becomes even richer in value as the number of
participants, services and business processes grows."
</Excerpt>

I want to emphasize that this directory [2] is not based on UDDI or
ebXML - Anne Thomas Manes emphasizes this general point (the UDDI
aspect) in a recent Line56 article [3]:

<Excerpt>
"But Anne Thomas Manes, VP and research director at Burton Group, thinks
Grand Central should have stuck with UDDI when building its platform
rather than take the proprietary approach. "You could build this based
on an LDAP directory or on your own database but why go through this
modeling process of trying to figure out what to put in and set up tools
so people can go search the registry?" she says. "Use the standard, it's
just much easier, especially since most Web service tooling has the
capability of going out and browsing a registry and many tools also
provide automatic systems to register things."
</Excerpt>

Joe

[1] http://www.webservices.org/index.php/article/articleview/1298/1/2/
[2] http://www.grandcentral.com/directory/
[3] http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=5257