Intellectual hot property
- Article 47 of 77
- Information Age, September 2002
Web services could offer a way for IT departments to turn their in-house technology expertise into a revenue stream.
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Although public directories of web services will help to bring in potential users of organisations' web services and thus generate additional revenue, trusted third parties that act as brokers of web services could help departments that want to offload those difficulties. Bank of Ireland, for example, relies on development partner Orygen to market its web services capabilities on to other companies.
But IDC research manager Karen O'Brien warns that organisations need to balance out the competitive advantage their software gives them versus how much money they can generate from reselling it. “They may want to keep their most highly customised applications private, but be willing to share some [less strategic] software,” she advises. Compass's Tennant, meanwhile, maintains that it is not the software modules that make up a system that matter, but the combination of modules used, so it is unlikely that an organisation will lose much competitive advantage simply by selling on standalone web services components.
Smart421's Hopper believes that, in most cases, IT departments will find their software too specific to their own needs to sell on. “So few organisations have been able to develop software that is truly generic. Web services are inextricably linked to the plumbing in an organisation. It's hard to have clarity of vision and develop a generic architecture,” he says.
For this reason, few organisations have made the jump from implementing web services to selling them on for commercial benefit. As Tennant at Compass concludes: “If you have the belief that your offering has market viability and your organisation has the commercial and managerial skills to sell in the outside world, then marketing web services is a potentially lucrative revenue stream.”
Unless they possess that belief, organisations will have to restrict their enthusiasm for web services to the confines of the IT department.
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