Some of the elements that make up Web services may still be lacking, but enough of the standards are available to make Web services a real option for business, Meta Group VP Michael Barnes said this morning.
Speaking at a Meta Group executive briefing in Johannesburg, Barnes said Web services are immediately an option for internal use in order to simplify and increase collaboration between systems.
"Web services are for real. There is also a ridiculous amount of hype, but standards are rapidly stabilising and other new standards are quickly filling in the gaps."
Barnes said the growth of Web services is taking place in an environment in which corporate IT focus is moving away from development towards customisation and integration. "There is a steady trend away from pure build strategies towards more of a build, expand and integrate strategy."
Most businesses, he said, cannot simply replace existing systems to achieve an end-to-end solution but need to integrate existing systems.
Utilising Web services is one of the key ways to achieve greater levels of integration, said Barnes, although he cautioned that it is not the only integration strategy and will not immediately make existing enterprise integration strategies redundant. However, one of the advantages Web services have over integration strategies is that they are capable of dealing with disparate systems and do not rely on a common platform or development tool. Web services standards are quickly becoming integrated into even commercial off-the-shelf applications, paving the way for rapid adoption of Web services in the coming years, he said.
"You should be looking at Web services standards in any projects you are doing today. Web services are a standard way of connecting remote applications together, and while you may not need that capability today, you may well in the future. Web services future-proof your applications."
Barnes said the original hype of Web services being made publicly available "may still happen one day, but for now they are most likely to find use inside organisations and behind firewalls". He said Web services hosted internally and from point-to-point between business partners is likely to be the norm for the next couple of years, with more publicly available Web services only becoming a reality in 2005.
Barnes said there are still many stumbling blocks to the widespread adoption of Web services. The two most important are the lack of security standards and quality-of-service guarantees. Until these are stabilised, he said, Web services would largely remain "behind the firewall where perhaps security is less of an issue", and where service delivery levels can be closely monitored and controlled.
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