This kind of “service-oriented” approach to systems integration,an alternative to merely seeking to build a better API,is what will drive the Web services opportunity for solution providers in the next few years, said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at research firm ZapThink. The service-oriented integration market is projected to skyrocket to $6.2 billion by 2006, from $435 million in 2001, according to ZapThink.

Security, too, remains a big hurdle. Even with broad acceptance of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) single sign-on standard, the lack of a definition for standard security frameworks is a stumbling block to Web services adoption, said ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

Read more at: CRN