Group Presses For Immediate Action On Key Web Services Specification

“There are two different camps, and they are looking to come to an agreement,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Zapthink.

A bigger question is whether it makes sense for both W3C and OASIS to both be working on very similar specifications, said Zapthink’s Bloomberg. “There has been a general transition from the W3C over to OASIS for work on Web services standards,” he said. “WC3 hammered out SOAP and WDSL, but lately has been concentrating on semantic integration.” OASIS on the other hand, lets any three vendors to start a working group, and has a lot more “Darwinian” approach to standards. “They either evolve or die,” said Bloomberg.

Read more at: Web Services Pipeline (CMP)

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

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.

SeeBeyond Ends Era of Proprietary Integration Software With SeeBeyond ICAN Suite 5.0

Commenting on recent webMethods acquisitions and technology leadership changes, Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC points out, “This seems to suggest that WebMethods is making some strategic changes in their product strategy, which has to happen. If not, WebMethods, like the Titanic, is steaming right into the iceberg.” (1)

Read more at: SeeBeyond Press Release

Waning EAI Market Turns to Project-Based Integration

Conversely, one research firm believes service-oriented processes may some day sound the death knell for EAI. ZapThink published their results in a study this past April.

“If you’re thinking of it from the bottom-up as a bunch of systems that you’re trying to integrate, you’re going to need a bunch of expensive systems to make it happen,” said ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer. “By approaching a Service-Oriented Architecture from a business process perspective, it will buy you all of the things people are trying to solve with integration products today.”

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Strategies for Achieving Real-Time Enterprise Application Integration

The vision of many enterprise integration vendors is to be the standard service-oriented integration platform provider for the enterprise. In fact, it is a large opportunity for many of these vendors to extend their leadership in the integration market. A recent ZapThink survey indicates that the market opportunity will be about $6.2 billion by 2006.

Read more at: Web Services Journal

Service-Oriented Architecture Consulting for Professional Services Organizations

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) represent an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that promises a flexible IT environment that leads to business agility. As companies look to leverage the business advantages of Web Services to address strategic business needs, they are increasingly looking to build SOAs. However, SOAs require special skills and expertise. When companies do not have such skills in-house, they turn to consultants, system integrators, and other professional services organizations.

The movement to SOAs present both opportunities and threats to consulting firms: on the one hand, there will be an increased demand for architectural consulting, business process consulting and the implementation tasks associated with building SOAs. On the other hand, as SOAs take hold and Service-oriented process solutions supplant integration solutions, the market for system integration will dry up, requiring system integrators to change their business focus.

This report analyzes the market for SO

Service-Oriented Architecture Consulting Partnership Landscape

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) represent an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that promises a flexible IT environment that leads to business agility. As companies look to leverage the business advantages of Web Services to address strategic business needs, they are increasingly looking to build SOAs. However, SOAs require special skills and expertise. When companies do not have such skills in-house, they turn to consultants, system integrators, and other professional services organizations.

The movement to SOAs present both opportunities and threats to consulting firms: on the one hand, there will be an increased demand for architectural consulting, business process consulting and the implementation tasks associated with building SOAs. On the other hand, as SOAs take hold and Service-oriented process solutions supplant integration solutions, the market for system integration will dry up, requiring system integrators to change their business focus.

This report analyzes the market for SO

Service-Oriented Architecture Consulting for Enterprise End-Users

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) represent an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that promises a flexible IT environment that leads to business agility. As companies look to leverage the business advantages of Web Services to address strategic business needs, they are increasingly looking to build SOAs. However, SOAs require special skills and expertise. When companies do not have such skills in-house, they turn to consultants, system integrators, and other professional services organizations.

The movement to SOAs present both opportunities and threats to consulting firms: on the one hand, there will be an increased demand for architectural consulting, business process consulting and the implementation tasks associated with building SOAs. On the other hand, as SOAs take hold and Service-oriented process solutions supplant integration solutions, the market for system integration will dry up, requiring system integrators to change their business focus.

This report analyzes the market for SO

Service-Oriented Architecture Consulting

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) represent an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that promises a flexible IT environment that leads to business agility. As companies look to leverage the business advantages of Web Services to address strategic business needs, they are increasingly looking to build SOAs. However, SOAs require special skills and expertise. When companies do not have such skills in-house, they turn to consultants, system integrators, and other professional services organizations.

The movement to SOAs present both opportunities and threats to consulting firms: on the one hand, there will be an increased demand for architectural consulting, business process consulting and the implementation tasks associated with building SOAs. On the other hand, as SOAs take hold and Service-oriented process solutions supplant integration solutions, the market for system integration will dry up, requiring system integrators to change their business focus.

This report analyzes the market for SOA within professional services organizations from three perspectives: from the point of view of the consulting firm, who must understand how its business must change; from the perspective of the enterprise user, who must select and manage a consultant; and from the point of view of software vendors who wish to work with consultants to help them meet the needs of their customers.