Pros and cons
Short implementations offer potentially huge cost savings, but changing technology makes it difficult to commit, says Michael F. Reed of TechnologyEvaluation.com. It's too soon to jump into .Net, and SOAP and UDDI are still immature., he says.
Web services are one of the most perplexing technologies of the year. Many IT managers understand that Web services can improve their infrastructure, increase return on investment, and decrease deployment time, but they are afraid to commit because the market is too young and don't know which vendor to trust.
Con: The vendors are changing. Major players in this area include Sun Microsystems (Java), Microsoft (.Net initiative), IBM, iPlanet, and niche players such as SAP, which announced its own Web services at Sapphire '01 in June. Customers have trouble separating fact from fluff, which makes it difficult to commit.
Con: The technologies are in flux. Java technology is mature and well accepted. IBM uses Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Microsoft has come out with the .Net architecture, which is immature but may hold promise. Even though it doesn't quite exist yet, many managers are adopting a wait-and-see attitude towards .Net so that they cannot be accused of choosing unwisely. Additional confusion is added by the immaturity of technologies such as SOAP and UDDI.
Pro: The potential for cost savings with an out-of-box solution can be huge. After some of the major implementation debacles of the last few years, most companies understand the value of a short implementation time. If they can purchase a product that promises quick returns and a lower IT investment, they have a hard time ignoring it.
Anticipate business issues
Web services technology may seem complicated, but the business issues surrounding it are even more so, says Randy Heffner of Giga. Connecting seamlessly with customers and partners raises a lot of potentially thorny questions that will require a lot more attention from IT managers than building the right technology skills.
Stay focused
Technology issues with Web services are relatively simple compared to the business issues, and therein lies the greatest challenge for IT managers: ensuring appropriate and robust Web services implementations by keeping development teams focused first on the right business issues. The basic idea of Web services is simple: use widely supported, Internet-friendly technologies to connect your systems with customers, partners, and suppliersââ,¬"no matter what technology is used for the systems on their end. But the business issues mount rapidly.
With vertical industry standards for Web services yet to develop, which Web services design has the greatest likelihood of adoption by your partners? How will your systems use dynamic registry lookup without committing you to unknown, untrusted business partners? If your primary partner's Web service isn't available when you need it, do your business policies require you to retry after a time or fail-over immediately to an alternative service? How will you and your partners test Web service connections before going into production?
Will Web services be used simply to more efficiently do business that you already do, or will they be used to open new business models and opportunities? Will you implement Web services while standards are immature and adoption is thin or wait until more of your potential partners are Web-services ready?
Beyond building the right technology skills for their team, IT managers will have a much greater challenge leading teams to anticipate and address the new Web services spin on business and design issues.
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Most technologies take 1 to 2 years to get going. Web Services will probably get going about 2004. However it is wise to get training and have a test bed to play around with the technology before the hard-headed blue-chips hit contractors for work. Don't give into the usual Aussie apathy and let the US or UK guys get the work when instead we should be building up our local talent and keeping the money here!! Break the dead-lock of low-tech Australia!!