Research and Markets: State of the Web Services Marketplace: Opportunities, Strategies, Business Models and Future Outlook.

Business Editors

DUBLIN, Ireland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 21, 2004

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com) has announced the addition of State of the Web Services Marketplace: Opportunities, strategies, business models and future outlook to their offering.

Web services are fast emerging as a disruptive enterprise computing technology with the promise of facilitating seamless and flexible interactions across applications both within and across the firm boundaries. The compelling reason for the adoption of Web services is that they are designed to support application-to-application interaction. Compare this to the other popular Web applications such e-mail and instant messaging, which support human-to-human communication or browsers, which support human-to-application communication. Web services technology allows applications to communicate with other applications without human assistance or intervention. This is achieved by using standard Internet protocols. Two key aspects of Web services are that they are invoked and delivered through the Internet and it provides a standard interface for applications to interact. Web services have the potential to facilitate applications and information to be delivered over the Internet, which can be accessed by disparate devices from handhelds to large servers. Web services are self-contained business applications that can be published, located and invoked by other applications over the Internet. As the applications follow the standards, it enables the applications from different businesses to interoperate. Web services offer a company the capability of conducting business electronically with potential business partners in multitude of ways at reasonable cost.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) applications have been successful in point-to-point integration efforts. They, however, have some drawbacks, as they are complex and expensive to implement because they rely on proprietary technologies, which are also expensive to acquire, operate, and maintain. However EAI like approaches are not suitable for dynamic environments, which need generic, flexible processes, which can be reused. Web services bridge some of these gaps as they are not proprietary and are standards based. Web services can integrate applications written in different languages as well as running on disparate platforms, thereby offering a low cost, efficient way to expose business functionality with new interfaces. This allows enterprises to effectively reuse business functionalities and reduce the time to respond to business challenges, while also protecting their IT investments.

Web services go beyond reducing the operational cost and improving productivity to reducing IT costs within and across firms. Web services are finding the largest application in the creation of internal as well as external application portals, thereby reducing support costs as well as improving productivity by providing users with a single source for their applications. Web services facilitate the interaction of applications without the need for human intervention. The SOA would allow the service producers to cheaply store and replicate past work by componentizing them, so they can be reused without additional effort, producers save the cost of repeating that work. With the network costs coming down, the service requestors can access the components in a very affordable manner. In today's context, it is the simple Web services, which have found immediate usage. However, in future, the Web services are expected to allow the service requestors to access full-featured, off-the-shelf software suites catering to purchasing, distribution, forecasting, financials, supply chain management etc. to automate their business processes.

In this report we analyze the strategies, products as well as market position of the following key vendors: IBM, Microsoft, SUN, Oracle, HP, BEA, Iona, Borland, Tibco, Seebeyond, Webmethods, Cape Clear, Systinet, Infravio, Altoweb, Bowstreet, TME, Blue Titan, Flamenco Networks, Kenamea, Talking Blocks, Grand Central Networks, Interwoven, Plumtree, Volera, Chutney, Mind Electric, Red-gate, Parasoft, Empirix, Primordial, West Global, Infravio, Microfocus, Relativity Technologies, Seagull Software, Seec, Hostbridge, Biztalk

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c1372