Chapter 8: The Web Services Vendor Landscape

OVERVIEW

“The biggest gap in the world is the gap between the justice of a cause and the motives of the people pushing it.”
John P. Grier

This chapter provides a high-level snapshot of vendors actively developing a presence in the burgeoning Web services market. Here we map categories of software and hardware vendors to a typical IT architecture and describe, at a high level, how vendors are positioning themselves to compete in the Web services market. It will become apparent that certain software categories, and associated vendors, are in an enviable position to influence the Web services market—given their current position in the IT value chain— while the emergence of Web services will likely imperil others.