Web services standards march forward

“If you want to do anything serious with Web services you need security, reliable messaging, process [execution] and management,” says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “The fangs are coming out now among the vendors because these things are so important to Web services adoption.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Security experts take safe option and agree

You know when something is really fundamental and important— and not quite working yet- when no vendor wants to rock
the boat. It seemed that we were in such an area at the “Web Services Security — Is It Enough?” panel chaired by Jason Bloomberg
(of analysts Zapthink) at the XML & WebServices 2003 show at Olympia in March (hands up time — the show organisers
are the people behind ADA, but, hey, if it’s interesting it’s interesting). The panel included security experts such as Mark
O’Neil of Vordel, freelance Microsoft authors such as Andy Olsen and, for good measure, Patrick Gannon, OASIS President and CEO — and they all agreed about everything.

Read more at: Application Develpoment Advisor

Overview of Web Services Security

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Overview of Web Services Management

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Taming Web services

Although it appears that both camps have a role to play, some market watchers believe the traditional management vendors will eventually hold sway. Analysts at ZapThink LLC, a Waltham, Mass., market research firm, contend that the start-up management vendors have a two-year window before larger, more established vendors dominate the market.

Read more at: Federal Computer World

Westbridge pulls in $10M

“XML and Web services traffic runs on today’s network relatively unimpeded,” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, a Web services-focused research firm in Waltham, Mass. “The biggest challenge for companies rewriting applications so that they can be accessed easily by suppliers and other outside parties is making sure those accessing the network are authorized and authenticated. Westbridge has a pretty robust, effective software offering that addresses the issue.”

Jason Bloomberg, a colleague of Schmelzer at ZapThink, expects XML traffic on the network to increase significantly over the next few years, which would drive the security market. The company expects the XML and Web services security market to grow from around $120 million in 2002 to more than $4 billion by 2006.

Read more at: The Daily Deal

XML firewall appliance on tap from Reactivity

“Companies need to have this kind of security for business-to-business Web services,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink. “But it is also needed for inside the enterprise because most security issues facing companies are internal.” Bloomberg says it makes sense for Reactivity to offer a hardware/software combination of its technology. “Hardware goes in the data center where it is much easier to manage, and it provides additional speed benefits. These proxies have to work at wire speed,” he says.

Read more at: Network World

DataPower Secures XML

Another challenge is that standards for securing XML aren’t in place yet. At least one source says that could make it harder for DataPower and its competitors to sell their products.

“It’s more of a sales challenge than a technology challenge,” says analyst Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink LLC, a market researcher specializing in XML. In the absence of firm standards, customers may balk, even though DataPower and others make their products flexible enough to accommodate standards changes as they evolve.

Read more at: Light Reading

Les produits de sécurisation des services web arrivent

Il encapsule tout type d’information structurée et représente 2 % du trafic internet à l’heure actuelle, mais devrait monter à 25 % en 2006, selon le cabinet d’analystes ZapThink.

Read more at: 01 Informatique (French)

Service-Oriented Management Technology Landscape

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.