BEA Systems Ships All-In-One App Platform For ISVs

In delivering SOA tools for the Java enterprise platform, BEA competes with IBM and Oracle Corp., which have been eating into BEA’s market for SOA-enabled applications, Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said.

“The challenge BEA has is that they are having trouble addressing the market outside of their comfort zone: application developers,” Schmelzer said via e-mail. “BEA has historically sold only to the application developers, and SOA is a story that needs much broader buy-in from enterprise architects, security administrators, network administrators, and other parts of the organization that are required to participate in the development and creation of the SOA.”

Schmelzer sees the ISV-tailored product as an attempt to attract this audience through resellers and other indirect channels.

“It might work out, but they really need to alter their image as a platform for building SOAs on top of BEA’s application server product based on J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition),” Schmelzer said. “That message doesn’t play as well in an environment of IT heterogeneity.”

Read more at: TechWeb

Group Presses For Immediate Action On Key Web Services Specification

“There are two different camps, and they are looking to come to an agreement,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Zapthink.

A bigger question is whether it makes sense for both W3C and OASIS to both be working on very similar specifications, said Zapthink’s Bloomberg. “There has been a general transition from the W3C over to OASIS for work on Web services standards,” he said. “WC3 hammered out SOAP and WDSL, but lately has been concentrating on semantic integration.” OASIS on the other hand, lets any three vendors to start a working group, and has a lot more “Darwinian” approach to standards. “They either evolve or die,” said Bloomberg.

Read more at: Web Services Pipeline (CMP)

Web Services Management

Of all the markets that the rush to capitalize on Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) spawned, the space known as Web Services Management (WSM) is likely the most turbulent. Marked by a large number of new entrant vendors and cutthroat competition for a steadily increasing number of customers, WSM products have come to offer a core set of functionality as well as many of the key capabilities necessary for companies to build and run SOAs.

In spite of significant press and early adopter attention to the vendors in this space, there have been too many vendors chasing too few deals, and as a result, most WSM vendors have reconfigured their product and marketing strategies at least once, as they seek the right niche to build the customer traction so critical to their survival. As a result, the WSM market is filled with short-term fragmentation, as vendors jockey for position, and longer-term consolidation, as incumbent vendors make strategic acquisitions and build their WSM capabilities as the market matures.

This report provides WSM vendors with the perspective they need to focus their market and product strategies for the next one to two years, and it illustrates the complete WSM landscape for end-users, enabling them to understand which vendors will be able to provide the capabilities they require, both now and as they build out their Service-Oriented Architectures.

ZapThink: Web Services Management Market Set To Expand Dramatically; Growth Tempered by Fragmentation of Market Leading to Dominance by Incumbent Vendors

“Companies are coming to understand that Web Services Management is critical for both the operation of Web Services as well as SOAs,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. “As a result, vendors in this space are finding customer traction by offering a range of different capabilities, from monitoring, to SOA enablement, to metadata management.”

Read more at: BusinessWire

Web Security Protocols Pass Muster

According to OASIS meeting minutes, the spec had been briefly held up because of some disagreement with regard to a technical issue from a Hitachi committee member over Universal Resource Identifiers (URI), a member of a universal set of names in registered name spaces and addresses referring to registered protocols or name spaces. The WS-Security committee passed it with the idea of resolving the URI issue later.

ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg said the passage is an important milestone in the development of interoperability standards. The analyst, whose firm covers XML and Web services issues, told internetnews.com the hiccup is a typical occurrence when vendors come together to hammer out a standard as important as WS-Security, and illustrates how much of a challenge reaching consensus on such standards can be. The resulting standards promise to be robust and widely applicable.

For OASIS, the move to embrace SOAs, (define) which may serve as the underpinning for Web services development, marks a departure from the organization’s previous approach of pushing ebXML alone for supporting global Web-based transactions, according to ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

“At first, it seemed that the group was presenting a competitive alternative to Web Services with their ebXML specifications, and as a result, the specifications languished with lack of adoption,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “They have now taken a much more positive tack with their whole-hearted adoption of SOA as the cornerstone of their ebXML message, and with it, a much more positive stance towards inclusion with Web Services specifications.”

Read more at: internetnews.com

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Service-Oriented Process

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Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

OASIS Stamps Approval on ebXML CPPA

Not all analysts harbor the same optimism for ebXML, however. If ebXML’s function sounds a lot like Web services, it’s because it’s true. That is one of the reasons why ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer told internetnews.com many industry analysts are skeptical as to how readily ebXML will be adopted. While Sun and major players are backing it, Schmelzer said Microsoft and IBM prefer to support Web services standards, which are more general in nature, to the B2B-oriented ebXML protocol.

That said, Schmelzer said “a lot of us analysts think ebXML will find its way in the Web services arena” but how that might happen is unclear.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Service-Oriented Management Technology Landscape

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.