Is now the time to manage Web services?

In the meantime, vendors in the Web services management arena have been playing a near-constant game of musical chairs. “There are a lot of vendors, and they’re all trying to figure out their niche,” explained Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at consultancy ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “They’re all changing their story and moving around,” trying to figure out the most appropriate mix of features to meet customers’ needs.

Another big difference from even a year ago, noted ZapThink’s Bloomberg, is that “last year we saw soup-to-nuts functionality,” where every vendor implemented virtually every feature one could ever want in a management package. Now, however, some suppliers are starting to specialize in certain niches — managing or creating service-level agreements, for instance, or audit and version control. Some are targeting security as a core feature, while others are working to ensure that their management suites work with existing Web security leaders like VeriSign and Netegrity.

Read more at: Application Development Trends

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

HP Joins SOA Fray With BEA

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for SOA and Web services research firm ZapThink, said HP is making its play at the right time.

“It’s definitely not too late for HP to move into the SOA space in a big way,” Bloomberg told internetnews.com. “In fact, their timing is probably quite good, considering that the number of enterprises who are now considering SOAs has spiked over the last few months. It didn’t make sense for the likes of HP to offer a strong SOA story through last year, because they weren’t yet getting strong demand for such products from their customers.”

Bloomberg said SOAs have been on HP’s roadmap for OpenView for well over a year, as evidenced by the Talking Blocks acquisition.

“Now the time is right for HP, as well as CA, to move into leadership positions in the Web Services Management space — with IBM Tivoli not far behind,” he continued. “As for the small players — Actional, AmberPoint, Blue Titan, Digital Evolution, Flamenco Networks, Infravio, NetIQ, and Westbridge Technology — the clock is ticking.”

Read more at: InternetNews.com

ZapNote: MphasiS

The MphasiS Group is a global IT professional services firm based in New York, NY and Bangalore, India. Their business falls into three core competencies: Business Process Outsourcing, Application Management, and Application Integration. Within their Application Integration competency is their Architecture Practice, which is the company’s “think tank” for SOA design.

MphasiS’ Architecture Practice has completed several SOA design engagements for Global 2000 companies around the world, and many of those projects have led to technology implementations within the Application Integration group. This ZapNote provides the details of three such projects in the financial services industry.

Startups swimming against Web services management tide

A research report from ZapThink LLC of Waltham, Mass., released this week said that even if startups are successful in the growing market, they’re likely to become targets of opportunity for big players like Computer Associates International Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company and IBM.

ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg offered in the report strategies for startups like Flamenco Networks, Infravio, Blue Titan Software and Westbridge Technology Inc. He also predicts the market will consolidate by next year when the incumbent “big players” fuse the market into three or four major companies.

“It showed in our report that a lot of these vendors are looking for niches where they can offer value to their customers, so they tend to offer a bunch of different things,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: TechTarget

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

Sarvega adding security appliances to XML lineup

“Chances are that we will see a convergence where performance, security and routing all happen on the same box,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink. “Right now it is Sarvega and DataPower pulling out ahead.” But he says traditional networking powers such as Cisco and its competitors will get into the competition at some point.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Westbridge Technology Partners With Layer N Networks to Provide Industry Leading SSL Acceleration for XML Web Services

“Performance is a critical requirement for processing XML on the network,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC. “Westbridge and Layer N provide cutting-edge technologies that remove many of the security and performance barriers for using XML and Web Services. This highly scalable solution will help further drive adoption of XML and Web Services in organizations with large scale Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture initiatives.”

Read more at: Westbridge Press Release