Is now the time to manage Web services?

In the meantime, vendors in the Web services management arena have been playing a near-constant game of musical chairs. “There are a lot of vendors, and they’re all trying to figure out their niche,” explained Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at consultancy ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “They’re all changing their story and moving around,” trying to figure out the most appropriate mix of features to meet customers’ needs.

Another big difference from even a year ago, noted ZapThink’s Bloomberg, is that “last year we saw soup-to-nuts functionality,” where every vendor implemented virtually every feature one could ever want in a management package. Now, however, some suppliers are starting to specialize in certain niches — managing or creating service-level agreements, for instance, or audit and version control. Some are targeting security as a core feature, while others are working to ensure that their management suites work with existing Web security leaders like VeriSign and Netegrity.

Read more at: Application Development Trends

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