Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.

Web Services Management

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Perspective: XML’s ticking time bomb

Now is the time to begin controlling XML, because it is on a serious roll. Spending on XML-related technologies and Web services by financial services companies is projected to reach $985 million in 2002 and grow to $8.3 billion by 2005, according to ZapThink, an XML and Web services research and analysis firm.

Read more at: CNet (News.com)

Startups tackle XML traffic

“In the last three months or so we’ve seen a number of startups emerge, addressing these challenges,” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “And it is likely that we’ll soon hear more from Cisco Systems, Lucent, Nortel, and 3Com.”
According to Schmelzer, content inspection is an intensive task, particularly when it comes to avoiding latency. In a report issued in July, Schmelzer calls this new class of products “XML proxies,” or hardware and software solutions that listen for XML traffic on the network. He added they can operate as an XML gateway or as applications on the network.

Read more at: InfoWorld

“Vendors poke, prod XML traffic”

“XML traffic is really inefficient,” says Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. “It’s usually 10 times larger than what you could do equivalently with a binary file.”

Not only is XML traffic less efficient, but its processing requirements also differ from switching and network protocol routing, Schmelzer says. Rather than simply scanning packet headers, XML-aware devices need to understand, parse, filter and process XML content, he says.

Read more at: Network World

Securing & Managing XML & Web Services in the Enterprise

There are two related forces that are transforming information technology today: the rapid growth of XML traffic on the network, and the widespread adoption of Web Services as a way of reducing the cost of integration and moving traditional enterprise architectures to flexible, Service-oriented architectures. Enterprises must plan ahead if they want to be able to manage the XML and Web Services on their networks. Even more importantly, enterprises must take care to provide uninterrupted security for their IT environments. In the face of these changes, XML and Web Services introduce new security concerns for the IT manager, and new technology tools, including XML firewalls, offer the missing pieces of security that today’s enterprises need.

Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.

SOA 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.