IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems and Tibco on Thursday released a pair of Web services specifications designed to answer questions about reliability that have been dogging the emerging technology.

The announcement comes just two weeks after the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards formed its Web Services - Reliable Messaging Technical Committee to work on an almost identical specification.

IBM, Microsoft and their partners ignored a March 11 deadline to join that effort, which is being led by Fujitsu, Hitachi, Oracle, NEC, Sonic Software and Sun.

Instead, IBM, Microsoft and their partners unveiled WS-ReliableMessaging, the same name used by OASIS, and WS-Addressing. The two protocols are designed to guarantee the delivery of messages between applications that may be separated by a number of intermediaries and distributed over a number of platforms. Each of the specifications is an extension to Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and can be used over any transport technology, such as HTTP.

The lack of standard protocols for reliability, security, management and business process workflow are the major inhibitors to corporate adoption of Web services technology for integrating systems across corporations.

Microsoft and IBM’s work on reliability for Web services is a continuation of the pair’s push to develop industry standards to help enrich the platforms and tools they are developing to support Web services.

Last April, the pair, along with VeriSign, introduced WS-Security, which is now on a standards track at OASIS. Then in August, the duo along with BEA Systems unveiled a specification for business process workflow called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), which has yet to be submitted to a standards body.

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