Street Makes Forays Into Utility Computing

“When you talk about utility computing or on-demand computing, these are still nebulous terms that can mean different things in different contexts,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink Llc.

Wall Street firms are looking at all the possible approaches, however, because utility computing can save money and improve flexibility, he said. “The cost savings come fundamentally because when you go out and buy computers, you have to buy enough computers to handle peak demand,” he said. “That’s usually the most important time for your systems to work. That means that, most of the time, they’re sitting mostly idle. That’s money being wasted. Utility computing is a way to deal with those peak demands.”

Read more at: Securities Industry News

Seeing The Light

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

“Wacky World of Web Services”

Current revenues from Web services are puny – just $380 million for all of 2001, according to estimates from ZapThink LLC, a Waltham, Mass.-based market research group. But ZapThink expects that to balloon to more than $15.5 billion once software services over the Internet become prevalent.

Read more at: TheDeal.com