Sun, WebMethods win WS-I election

Sun Microsystems and webMethods have won coveted seats on the board of directors of the Web Services Interoperability Organisation (WS-I), which is developing profiles and recommended practices for using Web services to integrate systems.

Winning the seats were Sun chief Web services strategist, Mark Hapner, and vice-president of enterprise Web services at webMethods, Andy Astor. On April 1 they will join representatives of founding board members Accenture, BEA Systems, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Sun has a two-year seat and webMethods has a one-year seat. The original members, however, have permanent seats.

The 166 WS-I member organisations conducted voting last week. The WS-I is not disclosing precise voting results. Cape Clear Software, Nokia, SeeBeyond Technology and VeriSign were unsuccessful in bids to serve on the board.

The WS-I was founded in February 2002. Sun originally did not participate in the organisation, after it was not offered a board seat despite its Java language being a major Web services deployment platform.

Sun began participating as a member company last year.