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| Home - Industry Article - Jan 03 Issue |
How to Win at Web Services |
By Murthy Nukala and M.R. Rangaswami, The Sand Hill Group
The software industry has invested a significant amount of time and money in Web Services. But are all vendors equally committed to the future of this technology? The Sand Hill Group set out to find out.
The San Francisco Bay Area investment and consulting firm confidentially interviewed 117 executives at 76 major corporations and enterprise software vendors about their current and future plans to adopt Web Services, as well as their opinions about the technology.
Some results are surprising. Some aren’t. But the insight gained from these experts during this make-or-break phase in the development of Web Services technology will guide the enterprise software business for the next two years. Keen vendors will leverage this knowledge as they jockey for position in the Web Services era. The major findings are discussed below.
Is it Real?
Web Services is a Small But Important Piece of the Solution Superset.
It’s real — or at least part of it will be. The study found that both customer and vendor participants believed Web Services standards — SOAP, WSDL and a security standard — will become adopted. Respondents estimate that by late 2003, emergence of stable standards and a viable security model will coax the mass market to test out the technology.
Web Services are best defined as software components that respond to service requests using a set of open standards that today include SOAP and WSDL. The Solution Superset addresses the overall problem of application integration and interoperability. It is a combination of Web Services standards, semantic standards, and proprietary vendor products built to create, manage and run Web Services.
The problem is that much of the Superset is still fantasy. Respondents felt that other Web Services standards — such as those which would govern workflow or transactional integrity — would never gain widespread use. And Web Services does not address the thornier problem of semantic standards for application connections. Proprietary vendor products will be developed to address technological shortcomings but these efforts are still nascent today.
Several technologies and standards bodies have previously tried to tackle distributed component computing. But Web Services has several advantages over prior efforts: The ubiquity of the Internet, a large group of developers, and the ability to separate the interface description from its functionality. Most importantly, Web Services
is driven by vendors and business people with bottom lines to feed.
Interestingly, both customers and vendors remain bullish about the technology despite its technical obstacles: 87 percent of interviewees were confident that these would be overcome. Indeed, overall adoption of Web Services will depend on three main events: Lowering this technological risk, providing evidence of real business benefits and becoming adopted by the enterprise software industry.
EAI is Dead. Long Live EAI.
Web Services Will Redefine the Market for Integration Products.
Web Services will fuel the growth of two new integration markets, called “EAI Lite” and “B2B Lite”. These solutions will address enterprise customers’ integration needs that do not justify the investment of an EAI or EDI solution but require more semantic integration than an enterprise portal.
A detailed analysis of 60 Web Services projects found these two Lite applications accounted for 44 percent of the projects studied.
EAI Lite is being used to establish quick, low cost, internal connections between disparate applications and between applications and users. B2B Lite projects focused on streamlining interactions between a corporation and its many channel partners or suppliers outside the firewall.
Contrary to popular opinion, Web Services will not replace EAI products and services. The study found Web Services will be adopted by, and become inseparable from, the entire integration continuum: From portals offering visual integration on the one extreme, to EAI or EDI vendors providing deep semantic integration on the other.
In fact, both portal vendors and EAI vendors surveyed have already adopted Web Services standards. Participants estimated that Web Services would lower the total cost of a typical EAI project by an average of 10 percent to 15 percent.
However, Web Services will propel the growth of EAI Lite and B2B Lite even further, which will create an opportunity for platform vendors to move into the integration market. Long term, this will pose a significant threat to EAI vendors. Both customers and vendors surveyed reported plans for increased integration efforts but only a constant demand for EAI products and services.
Web Services will also serve as a catalyst for bringing the Business Process Management
(BPM) market to fruition. Currently shackled by tough interoperability challenges, BPM will be helped by Web Services standards adoption and will be driven to high growth when application vendors expose their functionality as business services.
Application vendors and platform vendors will compete with EAI vendors for the BPM market. The study details the strategies these vendors are using to enter this market. It concluded that application vendors are most likely to dominate the BPM market, with EAI vendors (high–performance) and platform vendors (low–end) also carving niches out for themselves.
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