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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Most intriguingly, Gartner's research suggests that the majority of the spending ($271 billion) will be on web services consultants. In conjunction with Yankee's research (which only specifies that a high proportion of the total IT spend by all organisations will be on integration technologies), this suggests that web services technology is not the cheap integration tool initially hoped for. As with previous innovations, users are going to be offered, and will presumably buy, a lot of handholding and help.
Unfortunately for those more zealous web services advocates, and importantly for those treading warily and watching watch everyone else is doing, AMR's sceptical approach looks justified. Its research, moreover, is based on a large and broad sample size for it to be valid.
AMR's position is not that web services is not going to be important, but that the costs and complexities will be greater than many people have realised and that adoption will be slower than has been widely forecast.
Taken together, these analysts' research paints a clear picture: while web services is becoming more popular, it is also proving to be more expensive than initially marketed; take up is still in its earlier stages.
A secondary finding is that web services will initially be of much greater use to larger organisations than to their smaller counterparts, not least because of the complexities.
Web services is not matching up to its initial hype - how could it? But with even AMR's sceptical position suggesting that 60% of organisations are already implementing the technology, it is also clear that web services is not already mainstream, then it very soon will be.
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