Speech Summaries

David Truog Principal Analyst Forrester Research, Inc.

Wake Up To Web Services

David Truog, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, defined Web services as software designed to be used by other software via Internet protocols and formats. Companies must adopt Web services standards now, in order to take advantage of the fundamental impact they will have on both business and technology landscapes in the future.

David explained that Web services standards will redraw the technology landscape and will leave behind the standards of yesteryear -- TCP/IP, HTTP, UDDI, and even CORBA. The new Web services standards of tomorrow are unlike any of the rest. Web services are an organic, incremental approach based on the Internet design principles of interoperability, evolution, and decentralization.

What is the future of Web services? The fundamental impact Web services will have is a decrease in interaction costs, which in the long term will affect organizations in three ways. First, it will trigger more flexible business partnering as business networks will begin cooperating in real time over the Net. Second, Web services will bring about a more modular software architecture; because of lowered interaction costs, best-of-breed app assembly will become more affordable to firms. And third, Web services will enable the X Internet as Internet servers will start sending executable code that will deliver rich experiences to users. Billions of devices will connect to the Net that sense, analyze, and act on the world. In summary, the major impact of Web services will be that interaction costs will drop, transforming business partnering, software architecture, and the Net. The time for Web services is now. Firms must come up with an action plan, or risk falling behind.

Questions And Answers

Q: How will Web services affect security issues with SOAP and UDDI? And when will we see movement in these areas?
A: This is the same as the early days of any standard adoption; now is the time when they aren't widely adopted, but standards for security will appear in layers. And this comes back to what I was saying about the evolutionary characteristics of Web services. One problem will be solved at a time.

Q: Standards have lead to commoditization. As vendors adopt Web services, will their margins erode?
A: Not everyone built the same light bulb; but they did start innovating to make the bulb last longer. Standards make it possible to integrate at a lower cost, and what that means for users is that it gives large vendors less of a lock-in grip, causing small vendors to have more opportunities. A good example is J2EE standards; companies can get pieces of the pie from other vendors that are J2EE-compliant. The emergence of Web services standards will not erode margins; instead it will force vendors to get creative.