Chapter Summary


There are three general approaches to obtaining Web services products and services. First, you can purchase a turnkey, all-inclusive application server that includes application development environment tools and utilities as well as other value-added software (such as personalization or business process management software). Second, you can use a do-it-yourself approach using either point (a la carte) software products or open-source products that you and your organization take responsibility for integrating. And third, you can employ a professional services firm (and let them choose the approach for architecting Web services environments for you).

In practice, however, most of the early, real-world competition in the Web services space is coming from the providers of turnkey application server environments. These Web services platform providers are:

  1. Vendors that build and sell completely integrated systems software, application development environments, hardware, and services.

  2. Vendors that build application development environments that can be sold on multiple different systems platforms [these are generally vendors that in the past built Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) environments].

Vendors that include hardware, software, and services include IBM (with WebSphere); Sun (with Sun ONE); and HP with NetAction. Vendors that build application development environments include BEA and Microsoft (these vendors focus on software sales not necessarily on professional services revenues and not at all on hardware revenue.

Other approaches to building Web services environments include building your own using point products, and finding a professional services firm that excels in Web services development and deployment. The build-your-own approach involves finding and integrating the tools and utilities needed to build Web services applications, but it costs considerably less than buying a completely integrated application development suite from application server vendors. The primary benefits are the following:

  • Using open-source software can be considerably less expensive than purchasing a complete soup-to-nuts application server.

  • Using point products (single software products that are designed to address a particular need versus the previously described application server approach that requires that customers purchase several products sometimes a whole development suite of products) can be more efficient.

  • By purchasing single point product solutions (like an application development language or a compiler) an organization pays only for what it uses (versus paying for a complete bundle of applications and tools which it may or may not use). This approach can often be considerably less expensive but it also involves more integration work for the enterprise.

The professional services approach involves finding a services firm that can build and deploy Web services applications for your organization. The upside is that your organization may be able to get products to market more quickly and/or increase the size of its application portfolio very rapidly. The downside is that you may pay top market rates for Web services developers (in other words, it could prove costly).

Another approach that has not yet surfaced but probably will become popular is the ASP approach. Whole enterprises will be able to form their business models around specific industries and ASPs will be able to build entire specialized application portfolios for these companies using Web services applications automatically found and programmatically integrated over the Internet. Using this approach, businesses will be able to farm out their IT functions and focus specifically on providing services germane to their specific industries.

At present several vendors are fighting for market share in the turnkey application server marketplace. Fewer can be found in the point-product solutions arena, and still fewer in the Web services professional services market segment (so few that in fact this market probably does not exist yet). And no ASPs can yet be found in Web services development and infrastructure provisioning. Still, as this market evolves, competition will arise.

There are no "winners" to declare at present, although IBM is leading the Java-based vendor charge into the application server marketplace, while BEA (the former statistical market leader in terms of number of application server environments sold) is facing very stiff competition from both IBM and now Microsoft.

An issue that goes beyond "market leadership" is that none of us "win" if one vendor has the slickest, bestest, richest implementation of Web services while other vendors have poor implementations. Our goal is to have the majority of information system and software vendors support Web services such that all vendors' systems and software platforms and applications can interoperate with those of other vendors. When this happens, true cross-platform program-to-program communications will be achieved and we will see our corresponding business models and approaches to computing change forever.



Web Services Explained. Solutions and Applications for the Real World
Web Services Explained, Solutions and Applications for the Real World
ISBN: 0130479632
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 115
Authors: Joe Clabby

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