Summary

Today s Web Services are primarily behind the firewall. In fact, most Web Services are being deployed as low-cost integration alternatives. Vendors are integrating Web Services into their solutions and betting their future on this technology, but the overall adoption rate is slower than expected due to the IT slowdown .

The 10x factor makes Web Services a disruptive technology. You ll be betting on your application server vendor (i.e., Oracle). Web Services are not just for integration ”they anchor a new software architecture. There are still plenty of opportunities in the Web Service space, such as service-level agreements (SLAs), for intracompany integration and service-oriented architectures, security, pricing models, monitors (for response times, load balancing, etc.), load balancing and failover, data integrity, and so much more.

One real strength of the Web Services model is that they can use your existing infrastructure and code base. This makes Web Services totally nondisruptive to implement within your environment.

We believe that every vendor (that has hopes of surviving in the future) will rewrite all of their APIs to make them Web Services. This will allow the likes of Oracle Applications, and software from PeopleSoft, Siebel, SAP, Baan, and others to integrate right out of the box.

Standards are a key part of the future if the service-oriented architecture is going to be successful. Fortunately NUMEROUS groups are working to come up with standards by industry. Without this, messages will be proprietary ”making it more difficult to commoditize software products. These standards are similar to EDI X12 standards. If you re part of an industry, join a standards group . There are hundreds of groups out there (by industry) today. Our goal here is to give you a better feel for just how powerful Web Services (and Oracle JDeveloper 10 g ) are and why we believe they are the next big things for IT.