WebMethods Combines The Old And New

“What WebMethods is trying to do is merge [its products] into one platform from a marketing perspective,” Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said. “But from the customer’s view and a technology perspective, they are very different.”

WebMethods and other vendors associated in the late 1990s with the “enterprise application integration” market have had a difficult time convincing companies that they can offer better technology than can startups that have built products based on new standards from the ground up, such as Systinet, Actional, and Fiorano Software, Schmelzer said.

Read more at: TechWeb

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

ESB: Just another TLA?

Analyst firms are often fond of creating new terms that define constantly shifting markets. After all, such new terms help to categorize vendor companies into segments that they can easily quantify and explain in the context of the greater IT marketplace. They also help the analyst groups organize themselves and …

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.

ZapNote: Fiorano Software

While there has been much attention played to early Web Services entrants and vendors of products that enable Service-Oriented Architectures, there have been few companies to pull together all the requisite components required to meet the needs of enterprise architects looking to build SOAs that deliver on the promise of business agility. Fiorano Software may be one of the first vendors to do so. The company has leveraged their early visibility and dominance in JMS-compliant messaging to deliver a feature-rich, powerful solution for process-driven, Service-Oriented Integration. In addition to a robust messaging platform, the company has recently unveiled an integration solution that combines visual, process-driven development of composite applications with an SOA-based integration core that can meet the needs of enterprise architects searching for an SOA solution.