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.

Chasing bugs away

“Really, the issue of software as a whole is essentially [that] software is still handmade. It’s developers getting together and still hammering it out by hand,” says ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg. He advocates XP (extreme programming) and “agile” software methodologies that “more tightly link developers to the users who will use the final product.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

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.

Service-Oriented Management

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.

ZapNote: Empirix

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Testing Web Services

Web Services today are often little more than software components wrapped in SOAP interfaces, and as such, today’s software testing tool vendors need only add simple XML support to their product lines to offer Web Services testing capabilities to their customers. However, over the next five years or so, Web Services herald a shift in distributed computing toward loosely coupled, standards-based, Service-oriented architectures. Testing these architectures and the Web Services that constitute them is another matter entirely. Only a few testing tool vendors have any expressed strategy for offering testing tools that work in a Service-oriented environment, and no vendors have a clear product roadmap that addresses all the Web Services testing needs that enterprises will face between now and 2006. Zapthink recommends that testing vendors evaluate their Web Services testing capabilities based not on current requirements, but upon emerging requirements for Web Services testing.

Testing Web Services

Web Services today are often little more than software components wrapped in SOAP interfaces, and as such, today’s software testing tool vendors need only add simple XML support to their product lines to offer Web Services testing capabilities to their customers. However, over the next five years or so, Web Services herald a shift in distributed computing toward loosely coupled, standards-based, Service-oriented architectures. Testing these architectures and the Web Services that constitute them is another matter entirely. Only a few testing tool vendors have any expressed strategy for offering testing tools that work in a Service-oriented environment, and no vendors have a clear product roadmap that addresses all the Web Services testing needs that enterprises will face between now and 2006. Zapthink recommends that testing vendors evaluate their Web Services testing capabilities based not on current requirements, but upon emerging requirements for Web Services testing.

Service-Oriented Management

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.