IT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel

The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.

Read more at: ZDnet

Oracle Fusion: The ‘Frankenstein’ of SOA?

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for IT analysis firm ZapThink, said that Oracle is taking the Frankenstein approach to SOA. “They’ve been working on building out their SOA offering for a while by assembling various parts from various different companies. We liken them to the Frankenstein of the SOA world. The question is will it all work when they’re done?”

ZapThink’s Bloomberg said he doubted that Oracle’s new offerings would topple IBM from the SOA throne. “I would say that IBM is always the company to beat,” said Bloomberg. “They have been a thought leader in the SOA space for quite a while now. Oracle is really trying to catch up. Oracle really has its sights set more on the business applications space than the integration space.”

Read more at: SD Times

Oracle Buys Oblix to Secure Web Services

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said Oblix was a solid company because of its ID and Web services management, which it picked up from its acquisition of Confluent Software a year ago. But Oblix never gained on companies like SOA Software and AmberPoint in the Web services management space.

Now Bloomberg is curious if Oracle will use Oblix to flesh out its service-oriented architecture (SOA) (define) line.

“This move by Oracle begs the question: was there something wrong with Oblix’ WSM capabilities, or does Oracle not understand how vital WSM is in an overall SOA product strategy?” Bloomberg said. “The jury is still out on whether Oracle can truly put together a coherent SOA strategy that will be competitive with the likes of IBM, BEA Systems and Microsoft.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Actional and Westbridge Merge To Provide Integrated SOA Security and Management

ZapThink estimates there was approximately $194.3 million in Web-services management revenue in 2003, a number that is expected to leap to $1.4 billion this year and to $8.8 billion by 2005, reflecting both the growing use of the software and the larger role of dominant players in selling it. ZapThink expects the market to reach $30.4 billion by 2010.

Read more at: Web Services Pipeline

Web services pose identity management challenges

“The better idea is that you’re really supposed to separate the notion of identity of who you are from the specific system,” said Schmelzer. “You should have an identity that is separate from the portal and the ERP system and the CRM system. But somehow [those applications] have to respect that identity.”

“There is this whole area of enterprise identity management that is really burgeoning because of this context issue,” Schmelzer added.

The key to separating the notion of identity from specific systems is implementing an architecture that supports policy-driven identity management, explained Jason Bloomberg, also a senior analyst with ZapThink.

“You need to have an enterprise-wide sense of who the users are and what they’re entitled to do that cuts across different applications,” Bloomberg said. “And it has to be a way that maintains the policies that apply to those users.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Datapower XS40 XML Security Gateway: Comprehensive XML & Web Services Security on a Hardened Network Device

XML appliances have recently emerged as a category of network device that can address XML and Web Services security and performance issues that traditional network appliances cannot. To properly secure XML traffic, a device must operate on the content of the messages that pass through the network, and take appropriate action on parts of each message.

Clearly, such content-based operations are resource intensive, which is the primary reason for solving such problems on dedicated hardware devices like the DataPower XS40 XML Gateway. DataPower’s XS40 appliance can handle a wide range of XML security, performance, transformation, and routing, functionality, all at wirespeed, in a security hardened appliance that requires little skill to install and administer.

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

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

Web Services Players Primed for Acquisitions

Analysts with an XML and Web services research firm have concluded that the busy Web services management sector has become fragmented and is primed for consolidation in the near future.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the sector, according to ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg.

“What’s happening is the players in the space have been shifting around, trying to find that appropriate niche, that customer pain that they can address better than anyone else,” he said. “The category of Web services management is becoming less and less well defined as the vendors who had identified themselves in that category are now addressing different sets of problems.”

According to Bloomberg, companies building software to manage runtime requirements for service-oriented architectures (define) are gaining traction, largely because they have zeroed in on specific areas of the Web services management space.

Read more at: Internetnews