Advisors disagree over web services’ future
- Article 3 of 7
- XML & Web Services newsletter, August 2004
Some analysts see a rapid upsurge in web services use. Others warn that take up is being slowed down by complexity, cost and process issues. Who is right?
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When it comes to implementing new technologies, businesses don't like to act in isolation; they look for validation from peers and analysts.
That is what makes the latest batch of research reports concerning web services so confusing. According to one set of research, the technology is overwhelmingly popular with enterprises. But according to another, 40% of enterprises have no plans to use web services at all.
Only when the customer looks behind the headlines and more closely at the latest figures and statistics does it becomes clear that, in spite of some wariness, web services is now genuinely becoming a mainstream technology.
The chief web services cheerleaders are the young US technology advisory firm Nemertes Research and the long established research group, the Yankee Group.
Nemertes says that 75% of the IT using organisations it surveyed are using web services to communicate with trading partners, customers and suppliers. And the Yankee Group, known for its bullish forecasts, says that 70% of new IT spending is on deploying standards-based integration technologies to connect the enterprise with those groups, too.
The main sceptic is AMR Research, a company with more extensive and deeper ties to its clients in the user community: its research suggests 40% of organisations have not deployed web services in their organisation and have no plans to do so. And of those that have, 73% have fewer than five web services projects in production.
Caught in the middle is the giant thought-leader, the Gartner Group, which says that sales of web services-enabled software products and related services will grow from $61 billion to $316 billion between 2003 and 2007.
Clearly, they cannot all be right. Or can they?
A look at the small print shows that there is less difference between them than at first sight. Nemertes' research is based on a survey of 35 medium and large enterprises with annual revenues of over $500 million - too small and skewed a sample to give a true idea of web services' popularity.
The Yankee and Gartner research focuses on web services spending. And this in itself can be misleading. For example, Gartner doesn't specify whether the strong upsurge in web services software expenditure is the result of interest in web services per se, or a by-product of the increasing web services enablement of enterprise software that these organisations might be buying anyway. Today, all middleware platforms increasingly use web services.
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