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.

More firms using Web services to integrate legacy apps

Products from the established mainframe players “make sense if you have investments in those technologies” that you plan on keeping for the long-term, says Ron Schmeltzer, senior analyst with consultancy ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass. But if you have older technology and are not looking to upgrade, it might make more sense to go with an independent software vendor for Web services help.

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SOA Tools and Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

The future of Web services

At the moment, most Web services projects are skunkworks operations, says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, a consulting firm in Waltham, Mass. “A lot of Web services use is on the grass-roots level, where developers are learning the technology,” he says. “This doesn’t have much effect in the data center, at least not yet.” Most companies are still in “dabbling” mode, he says.

Forrester’s Schadler believes that “Web services are a kind of magical technology” to help standardize the systems management function for a wide range of corporate resources — server farms, database, storage and the like.

To prepare for these changes, data center folks would be well-served to take a few steps. First, work with your existing system management vendors to understand what they have planned for Web services extensions to existing products. For instance, “IBM is reworking Tivoli to be more Web services-oriented,” says ZapThink’s Bloomberg. “But it’s not like IBM is going to do it all by itself; they’re working with AmberPoint.”

Read more at: TechTarget