StrikeIron Releases MarketPlace API for ISVs

“StrikeIron offers a compelling solution for ISVs to extend and differentiate their solutions by enabling “smart consumer” applications that can now be integrated with live data from StrikeIron’s extensive and diverse catalog of Web services,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, in a press release.

Read more at: TMCnet

StrikeIron building a Web services marketplace

“I call it ‘economy of services,’” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “You locate, buy and sell services for use, and you have a consolidated place to pay for it. Say you were consuming 50 services from 50 different companies, you’d have 50 contracts to work out. [StrikeIron] built a business model around this. You could go to vendors and buy it yourself, but they’re aggregating [these services], providing a single place to maintain licensing, pay for it and, as they add more services, you’ll have access to it.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

StrikeIron: Enabling the Service Economy

Companies are starting to discover the benefits of loosely coupled, composable, reusable Services —the ability to dramatically reduce the cost of integration, increase agility, and enable the governance of distributed systems. However, as they seek to build reusable Services, they face the challenge of quickly locating, understanding, and utilizing existing Services. Furthermore, third-party firms have already developed many of the Services that businesses need for their day-to-day operations, and those Services may be accessible on a pay-as-you-go basis.

This increasing desire to build and exchange Services for mutual business benefit inspired StrikeIron to build a Service marketplace where Service providers can expose Services for consumption by third-parties and consumers can search, pay for, and reliably transact with those Services — in essence, an economy for reusable Services.

New Directories Put UDDI on the Shelf

Creating applications such as Gaglione’s will be the key to making UDDI use widespread, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, an analysis firm that specializes in Web services. Bloomberg said he believes that although the specification isn’t widely used now, using the directory could lead to widespread creation of service-oriented architectures.

“What we like to say is that UDDI is the ugly duckling of the core Web services standards,” he said. “Remember what happened with the ugly duckling? He turned out to be more beautiful than the others. UDDI can lead to dynamic discovery of services. In order to build an SOA, you have to build loosely coupled services.”

Many of these services may change and move, he said. So UDDI could facilitate this architecture by dynamically locating resources instead of requiring developers to hard-code their changing locations, he said.

“Instead you say, ‘Whenever I need this service, I’m going to look it up,’” he said.

Read more at: SD Times

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

StrikeIron Hopes To Strike Gold With Web Services User Interface For Java

“The StrikeIron Web Services Analyzer for Java and Web Services Developer Kit for Java demonstrate StrikeIron’s leadership in providing cross-platform tools that make using Web Services faster and easier for business users and developers,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst of ZapThink LLC. “StrikeIron’s products are valuable tools for improving productivity and reducing the development costs associated with Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures.” “By adding support for the Java environment, now there is a way for a much broader audience to take advantage of Web services,” said Richard Holcomb, CEO of StrikeIron. “StrikeIron’s new products allow companies to empower Java users to become self-sufficient in accessing information, integrating desktop applications and assembling new applications.”

Read more at: eBizQ

StrikeIron Selected for XML Thought Leadership List

StrikeIron, a provider of software and Web services, has been selected by analyst firm ZapThink to join the ZapThought Leadership Program.

The ZapThought Leadership Program recognizes companies in the XML, Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture markets that are dedicated to helping their customers implement these emerging technologies and develop more flexible architectures.

“StrikeIron is delighted to be recognized as an industry thought leader and to serve in the company of such well-respected peers,” said CEO Richard Holcomb. “ZapThink has been an important influence in the industry by providing market leading insight and intelligence about the progress and direction of Web services, Service-Oriented Architectures and the companies working to provide tools and services to enable this market. StrikeIron has incorporated ZapThink’s service as a vital component in all our market, customer and development work.”

Read more at: LocalTech Wire

StrikeIron Recognized as a Web Services Thought Leader

“StrikeIron is changing the way companies use Web services by making them more accessible to a wider audience,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at ZapThink LLC. “We’re very excited about the StrikeIron Web Services Analyzer, as well as StrikeIron’s upcoming new products and services that will advance the utilization of Web services and the construction of Service-Oriented Architectures.”

Read more at: BusinessWire

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.