Analysts send mixed messages on web services
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'Web services is a roaring success' or 'web services won't deliver for years'. Which view is correct?
'Web services is a roaring success' or 'web services won't deliver for years'. Which view is correct?
It depends on which influential analyst group you listen to. 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.
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 ever-bullish Yankee Group says that 70% of new IT spending is on deploying standards-based integration technologies to connect enterprise with those groups, too.
AMR Research, a company with more extensive and deeper ties to its clients in the user community, is more sceptical: it says 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, Gartner, 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 can't all be right. Or can they? A look at the small print shows that there is less difference between these analysts than at first sight.
They all agree that web services is going to be huge, but also that a lot of the technology involved will be introduced by stealth, packaged in with new software.
They also agree it is not going to be easy. A lot of the spending is going to be on services - that is, getting help to implement a technology that had been billed as low-cost and low-pain.
