New York's largest software company, Information Builders, is updating a major portion of its WebFOCUS product for the next generation of EDI, commonly referred to as Web services.

But EDI (which stands for electronic data interchange, the "lingua franca" of supply chain management in the business world) is just the tip of the iceberg with Information Builders' move to embrace Web services.

The business information and middleware software company is looking to maintain its edge in the next evolution of integrating business data on different computing platforms, much the way it has in the recent past with its use of XML across its middleware products.

During its Summit 2002 User Conference in Baltimore Tuesday, the company said its WebFOCUS software can now be published through Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces. That means its WebFOCUS product, which integrates and pipes data to a variety of computing devices, can also deploy services from UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) registries.

The strategy is to make sure that its software products that were built primarily for business Web environments can be deployed to leverage large or small amounts of data in an emerging Web services world, regardless of computing environments.

An example of an updated WebFOCUS usage might be an organization that turns its own financial statements into a range of Web services. Investment managers would dial up the statements on a site, plug in parameters such as date ranges, product lines and regions, and receive a customized real-time financial statement that can be directly embedded into a research document.

The ability to update its data integration software for a coming era of open source computing platforms is a critical issue with Information Builders. Not only does it need to maintain market share with its installed base of major corporate and government customers, it also needs to continue evolving to maintain interoperability with other major Web services players. As such, the WebFOCUS products are embracing IBM, Sun, and Microsoft products and registries as part of its cross-platform strategy.

Already the announcement has Information Builders positioning its upgraded WebFOCUS to government agencies that might have been bogged down by the work of customizing applications in order to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.

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Because of an Application Programming Interface baked into WebFOCUS, no hand coding or programming is necessary, for example. The API enables third parties to reach into the agency's data, regardless of its location, and deliver it to citizens in customized formats, the company said.

Information Builders said the same functionality regarding automated self-service information retrieval works with e-mail delivery, documents formatted in HTML, PDF, XML, Excel 2000 and Excel Pivot Table. It also includes knowledge mapping features that tunnel into databases for contextually-related documents or pages.

The company has released an early preview at its User Summit this week. Full services support for the updated WebFOCUS is expected in stages across several releases planned for this year.