WS-I to Announce Election Results.(Web Services Interoperability Organization)

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) will announce the results of its board elections Wednesday, sources said.

WS-I officials said the election results are in after the membership voted on who should fill two new slots on the WS-I board of directors.

Initially, WS-I officials had said the results would be announced Friday, and an announcement on the formation of a new working group focused on the WS-I Basic Security Profile was to be made earlier in the week, but so as not to muddle the news, the security news will be announced next week, sources said.

However, of the nominees in the running, sources say two prospects tend to stand out. Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Mark Hapner, the company's lead architect for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and chief Web services strategist for Java Web services; and Andy Astor, vice president of Web services at webMethods Inc., are viewed as front-runners by some observers. VeriSign Inc. had been considered a front-runner, but the company missed some working group meetings during the nomination period and became ineligible to run for this year's election. VeriSign will have another opportunity to run for the board in next year's elections.

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm, said: "It would be ironic if Sun did not get in because Sun is the reason they are having this election in the first place."

WebMethods' Astor said he believes his company deserves a WS-I board seat and would perform well on the board because "WS-I is in the business of making Web services interoperate across platforms and webMethods is too. The missions of the two are quite strikingly similar. We have been doing Web services integration since before Web services had a name."

When the WS-I formed in February of last year, webMethods immediately became a member and has since contributed to WS-I in many ways, including serving as editor of the WS-I Basic Profile and participating in the group focusing on ...