This latest buzz word embraces a range of offerings likely to be served up by systems integrators, ERP vendors and ISPs this year. However there’s a need to be cautious of hype and ambitious vendors who’re still figuring out how to make their latest offerings work with the diverse systems and needs of business.

Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts says web services are clearly poised to drive productivity gains, making it easier for companies to collaborate internally and with business partners, through the interconnection of software systems regardless of what platform they're running on.

"Web services technologies can save millions in integration costs today, but companies must proceed cautiously," says Simon Yates, Forrester senior analyst and author of a new report, The Web Services Payoff.

However, he warns about the lack of security standards the need to be mindful of technology barriers, such as vendors who can't yet articulate clear business values as they put a web services veneer on existing products.

Web services architecture allows software applications to be used by other software within an organisation or with business partners.  Major vendors supporting it include Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun and others.

Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Web services models are already geared up for delivery of Web services but the changeover requires new industrial strength hardware as well with a separate server for database and application server rather than trying to run them both on the one box.

Web services will replace application servers, enterprise application servers, customer relationship management servers, and business process automation servers and will need system resources well beyond existing minimal hardware requirements.

Your network will need to be robust and you’ll need to increase your RTAM and network storage capacity. The rewards will be there if the groundwork is put in and include greater efficiency through making network programming significantly easier as well as enable developers to quickly modify network programs.

Forrester says web services will ease collaboration, but executives must watch out for immature technology and vendor hype.

Craig Roth, senior program director at META Group, a leading research and consulting firm says increasingly large organisations are embracing a platform-based approach that defines a common stack of products and technologies that all enterprise applications can leverage.

"The e-business stack continues to add layers as new technologies emerge, such as application server, portal framework, Web services and integration. And the e-business platform vendors will continue to subsume functionality as common features are recognized."

Although Web services technology lets companies interconnect software systems more quickly and cheaply, streamlining business collaboration, Web services "won't bring flexibility to 30 years of proprietary systems overnight."

Forrester says executives should take a practical approach and choose activities that promote visibility, like inventory alerts, and lay the foundation for more complex collaboration as technology barriers fall.

"In the past year, new specifications have emerged to standardize basic Web services that open up broad growth and cost-cutting opportunities," said Frank E. Gillett, senior analyst at Forrester and author of a Forrester report, "Start Using Web Services Now." "Companies should exploit these standards now to build simple links between internal apps and their business partners."

Web services are being widely touted by vendors as the "new solution" for enterprise application integration. But, says Forrester, until 2004 when the performance of Web services improves and standards for security, auditing and transactions stabilize, "traditional EAI technologies will prevail."

Forrester is looking toward 2006 as the year when standards will have sufficiently matured enough to give execs the confidence to apply Web services technologies to complex, transactional business processes and to relationships with "qualified but previously unknown parties."

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For more information about Web services:

Read this report (PDF format) from the CBDi Forum; it is aimed at IT management and senior professionals responsible for the design and architecture of business systems, from both a technical implementation and a business process perspective. Web services - Right Here, Right Now

To learn more about Application Integration Servers and solutions available in New Zealand, see the following;

• Tranzsoft  
• IBM WebSphere

By Keith Newman - January, 2002