BPEL: Why Everyone Is Doing It

With this backing, and in less than two years since being unveiled, BPEL has become the de-facto orchestration language standard, bypassing a number of alternative specifications such as BPML and WSCI. Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink says “It’s a foregone conclusion that BPEL is becoming the accepted standard for business process execution. It addresses 80 percent of the need, and people are rallying behind it. BPEL’s a done deal.”

Read more at: Web Services Pipeline (CMP)

Liberty Alliance Touts Adoption Of Identity Standard

Wednesday’s announcement showed that the alliance was making progress in building the foundation for widespread adoption of its technology, Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said. Beyond information technology products, Liberty will have to show that major retailers, banks, credit card companies and more are also adopting the technology, since those are the companies that will have direct contact with consumers.

That, however, is expected to take time, since companies have only recently started installing identity-management software, Schmelzer said. Those systems will have to be in place first, before they can start using Liberty standards in sharing customer data during transactions.

“Companies have yet to build good, robust identity management systems in general, but that’s rapidly changing,” Schmelzer said. “Companies are implementing them very rapidly. That’s a really hot growth area.”

In the meantime, Liberty Alliance has a potential competitor in the Web Services-Federation Specification under development by IBM, Microsoft Corp., BEA Systems Inc., RSA Security Inc. and Verisign Inc., Schmelzer said.

Nevertheless, IBM supporting Liberty is an “important step, and a positive one” he said. “There’s nothing negative about this announcement.”

Read more at: TechWeb

SOA: From an Idea to Reality

ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg says that more companies than ever are implementing SOAs.

Jason Bloomberg is a senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, a research and analysis firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts that specializes in SOA, along with other XML and Web services technologies and their impact on future business. He has a diverse background in eBusiness technology management and industry analysis, including serving as a senior analyst in IDC’s eBusiness Advisory group, as well as holding eBusiness management positions at USWeb/CKS (later marchFIRST) and WaveBend Solutions (now Hitachi Consulting). He has authored many magazine articles and books.

Jason talked with FTPOnline about the current state of SOA.

Read more at: FTP Online

Coming of Age

“There’s been an overall lull for IT spending, but Web services has been a bright spot,”
says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, which forecasts sales of $4.4
billion in 2005 and $43 billion in 2010 for Web services and related technologies such
as identity management and Web services security.

Read more at: The Daily Deal

SCO’s Game Face

“Although the Web Services market is still emerging, many companies today are finding substantial business value in their Web Services initiatives, both in terms of reduced cost and increased agility,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in a statement. “SCO understands the potential of this market and how Web Services technologies can help companies solve a range of application and legacy integration problems. The company is making solid moves to roll out its innovative Web Services-based products like the SCOx Web Services Substrate to its SCO UNIX customers and resellers.”

Read more at: internetnews.com

New Web services registry talks to business managers

As enterprises build their first Web services, few budget any resources for registries.

“It’s not obvious to those who are looking at building an SOA, but those who have built an SOA, it’s obvious you need a directory,” said ZapThink LLC senior analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

Read more at: TechTarget

ZapThink: Client-side Web Technologies Inadequate to Meet Evolving Needs of Web Services

ZapThink: Client-side Web Technologies Inadequate to Meet Evolving Needs of Web Services
New Class of Rich and Smart Clients Evolving to Solve Next-Generation Computing Needs

WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 3, 2004–The Internet and Web have provided immense scalability and manageability benefits to computer users for a decade now, but at a price – poor support for rich interactivity. Now, companies are increasingly demanding a rich set user experience capabilities that include visual interactivity elements and instant access to information, interaction with distributed and remote applications, and integration with local desktop applications. ZapThink concludes in its report entitled “Rich and Smart Clients for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs)” that today’s Web technologies are wholly inadequate to meet the needs of emerging standards-based, loosely coupled, distributed applications.

“Simply put, today’s corporate portals must move beyond Web-based thin client technologies,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “Rather, companies must leverage the power of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures to offer rich clients that provide deep interactivity, yet retain the scalability and manageability benefits that browsers provide.”

ZapThink’s report analyzes a new class of rich client vendor offering and several approaches to providing rich clients that in part rely upon SOAs to provide the optimal combination of rich user interaction and low cost of ownership through standards-based distributed computing. The report identifies the windows of opportunities as well as market growth predictions for new entrants and incumbent vendors.

Other key findings of the report include:

• Rich clients will supplant portals as the primary interface to Web Services and Service-oriented functionality in the enterprise by the end of 2007.
• The total opportunity for rich clients for SOAs is over $923 million by 2010.
• The window of opportunity for new entrants in the rich client market will start to wane with the release of the Microsoft Longhorn update of windows in the 2006-2007 timeframe.
• The increasing adoption of sometimes-connected devices, mobile computing, asynchronous computing, and e-Forms will mandate widespread and rapid adoption of rich clients.

The report, available on ZapThink’s website at www.zapthink.com, discusses several companies, including Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), Altio, Apple, AT&T, Citrix, Curl, Cysive, DreamFactory, FileMaker, Focus Solutions, General Interface, Harmonia, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, JackBe, Kinitos, Laszlo Systems, Lucent, Macromedia (NASDAQ: MACR), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Motorola, Mozilla, Nexaweb, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), Oracle, Plumtree, RatchetSoft, SAP, SCO Group (NASDAQ: SCOX), Siebel, Softricity, TiVo, Vignette, and Vultus.

Read more at: ZapThink Press Release

Rich and Smart Clients for Service-Oriented Architectures

Companies originally moved to adopt standards-based technologies like those underlying the Web and the Internet as a way to achieve distributed computing functionality at a very low total cost of ownership. However, these companies had to forego many of the user interface and productivity advantages that other distributed computing methods, such as traditional client/server applications, used to give them. As a result, companies continue to struggle to address the issue of how to realize the benefits of rich clients in conjunction with the benefits of distributed, low-cost applications.

While companies have long delivered application functionality to Web browsers, users are now coming to expect increasingly greater interactivity from this presentation tier. They are demanding a set of rich user experience capabilities that include visual interactivity elements and instant access to information, interaction with distributed and remote applications, and integration with local desktop applications. Businesses today want to gain the operational and cost advantages of Internet and Web Services technologies, but don’t want the limitations that Web browsers impose on user interfaces.

This report discusses and analyzes approaches to providing the optimal combination of rich client interaction and low-cost interaction through standards-based distributed computing. In addition, this report will present an approach to designing SOAs that appropriately abstract presentation layer considerations and enable users to choose the user interfaces that are most appropriate to their business needs without having to change any underlying business logic.

Identity & Access Management

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Tech Update Software Infrastructure

Decision-makers have a new vendor to consider thanks to Novell’s January release of an identity management solution. “The Nsure Identity Manager is well positioned to be a leader in the enterprise identity management space alongside Netegrity and Oblix,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for ZapThink.

Read more at: ZDNet