If you’d like to know what financial market data web services and mashups can really do for you in plain English, then check out the latest NetworkWorld interview with the expert (our CEO Stephane!).

Click on the image above to go to the NetworkWorld podcast.

One of the toughest things to explain about what we do… is what we actually do…because it can be really obscure and difficult to communicate to non-developers. After giving all the marketing-speak of how we lower TCO, get rid of IT headaches etc, a lot of people come back with “Uh, yeah, but what do you actually DO?”

So, we’ve been working hard to create some pictures that simply, yet accurately describe what we do, and so far this is what we have come up with.

What are financial Web services or Cloud services?

The idea for this picture is that we help companies do the following:

• come to our website, sign up, try and buy our Web services on-demand like Salesforce.com
• since it’s all over the Web, there is no in-house software etc. requried
• get your data by the song (service) instead of a CD (feed) like iTunes
• to make it easier to build financial apps and websites

(Note: for the lawyers, the trademarks above remain the property of their respective owners)

Then, just when we think we’ve done it, they ask: “So, what is this Splice mashup community thingy then?”  This is the picture we came up with for this question…

Splice Web services on-demand community mashup platform

We’re still working on this one, so any help is appreciated.

After almost two years of stealth development, we are launching Splice, the first on-demand Web services mashup platform for serious developers of professional financial websites and applications…you!

Splice takes advantage of Web services standards to create a drag-and-drop Web services development studio for mashing up a set of Web services into a unique service tailored to a specific application need…a splice. We’ve also built a community around it, so developers can share their splices and re-use splices from others to make development even easier. The Splice initial release supports the following:

• Combine many services into a single call.
• Integrate private and 3rd party web services.
• Format a service to exactly fit your application.
• Re-use Splices to power any application.
• Share your services with other developers.

Click on the image for a larger version.

The idea for Splice initially came from our clients. While our baseline Web services often meet their needs out-of-the-box, some requested that we customize them to better fit their requirements. Common requests included optimizing for performance (lower XML verbosity), reducing the numbers of calls needed to collect multiple data sets, or customizing outputs. Rather than keep doing this on a one-off basis, we decided to empower you to do it yourself.

The best news is that Splice is not only free to try, it is also free to use for existing clients under Standard support or above. You can create and operate one free splice per service under subscription.

Please register and let us know what you think!

SOAP has had a little bit of bad rap lately. Some people think it is too complicated compared to its cousins REST and POX (plain old XML). The truth is that it all depends on the development environment you use. To prove our point, Xignite made this video that shows how you can integrate a web service in your application in less than 60 seconds and 3 lines of code. Watch it on YouTube:

Here is a higher quality Flash Version.

I recently had the opportunity to meet with the senior IT management team of one of one of the countries’ largest commercial banks. This was an open, round table discussion involving multiple Silicon Valley startup companies who—like us—try to woo similar-sized enterprises into using their latest and coolest wares. The CTO started saying that in the old days, standard software was supposed to meet 80% of a firm’s need, with the remaining 20% requiring customizations to fit the firm’s process. “With packaged software these days”, he said “it is more like 50%/50%. This forces us to spend a lot of time customizing things, while we are actually trying to be more agile and more responsive to changing market conditions.”

This comment struck a chord with me. Many IT executives now understand that re-usable web services finally offer the promise to address those changing needs. Instead of buying a standard app that only does 50% of the job, the firm can build a custom application from re-usable web services. If you can buy most of the services you need, you get the best of both worlds: the fit of
a custom app for less than the price of a standard app.

That’s all nice and good, but there is a big assumption built in: you must be able to purchase most of the services you need without having to customize them much. Otherwise you are back to where you started. And there lies the problem with the state of the web service industry today. Dana Gardner made it clear on his ZDNet blog last month: “There are either not many services available or the services are too general and not specific to a specialized vertical industry or a niche function.”. Dana further states that 80% of those services need to be customized. This type of problem could seriously hamper the success of composite applications in IT America.

Since we have been delivering web services for a while, we saw that problem coming a while back. This is why we not only offer a broad and deep set of integrated web services sharply focused on a specialized industry and function (financial market and industry data–in case you did not notice), but we also engineer those services with the needs of the composite application designer and developer in mind. Our goal is to make those re-usable components so integration-ready that you just have to drop them “as-is” in your composite applications. We still have ways to go, but we will get
there.

And what’s the payoff you say? Gardner again puts it best: “The higher [developers] can drive the percentage of reuse, the more scale and productivity they gain. They become the go-to organization for cost-efficient applications in a specific industry, or for specialized business processes.”