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

Services-Oriented Management (SOM) Expert(s):

Services-oriented management is still a new an emerging space, and it’s very difficult to see a clear market leader. There are a number of companies who appear to stand out more than others, although a general critisism is that too many vendors only provide products with management support for SOAP-based services only, and therefore these products will be unable to provide services-oriented management to the entire enterprise infrastrucure. Many analyst firms provide a breakdown of the overall market, and analyst firms such as ZapThink, The Burton Group, Forrester, Gartner, and others are all preparing new reports in this area.

Read more at: TechTarget

Bonus Edition: Web services management, part two

“If you only have test implementations, and don’t have any Web services in real production environments, then you don’t need to look at management tools,” believes Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with the consulting group ZapThink, which specializes in Web services. “And if you have a Web service for a very specific task, like tying SAP to Siebel, then you don’t need them, either.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Bonus Edition: Web services management

Web services have unique properties that make them particularly difficult to manage, according to Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with the consulting group ZapThink, which specializes in Web services.

“They’re different from other applications in that one of their advantages is that they’re loosely coupled and dynamically bound, and really are only an interface between applications. So when you say you need to manage them, you’re talking about managing an interface.” Making management even more difficult, he says, is that if the Web service provides links to an external service, you don’t have any control over that external service, and “how can you manage something over which you have no control? And how can you test it without putting it into production?”

Read more at: TechTarget

Service-Oriented Process

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Overview of Web Services Management

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Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

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

Blue Titan Vies For Niche In Web Services Management

Blue Titan is far from the only ISV trying to tackle Web services management ahead of the demand for the technology. Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Waltham, Mass.-based research firm ZapThink, estimates there are at least 10 startups focused on some aspect of Web services management.

Read more at: CRN