Web Services in the Wall Street Journal. "Web services is a catchall term for software that allows different computer systems to communicate seamlessly through the Web...[Chief Executive Stratton Sclavos of VeriSign] estimates that deployment of Web services in new IT projects today is still in the single digits percentage-wise, but that it could rise to 30% in three years. He thinks that there is a compelling reason for more companies to adopt Web services -- to more efficiently use their technology resources -- but that the move to widespread adoption might be a five- to 10-year process. 'We don't need to overhype it too early," Mr. Sclavos says.'" [Source: Yahoo! Singapore Finance]
Posted Sunday, March 30, 2003 8:52:31 PM

CDBI Report. Lawrence Wilkes at CDBI has released a good 20-page report. (Free with simple registration.) His key qualitative findings include:

• Web services are being used for many different purposes which in many respects run counter to conventional wisdom.
• Several organizations showed that once they had completed basic infrastructure and pilot activity, the relatively straightforward nature of web services allowed for rapid rollout to many more projects.
• Organizations are "making haste slowly," adopting web services for sound business and technical reasons, but only where it makes sense and where this is a demonstrable ROI.

The Tortuous Path to SOA. Phil Wainewright looks at the state-of-the-art in service-oriented architecture adoption. "Everyone seems to be buying into the concept of moving to service-oriented architectures, but it's probably going to be a good few years before any large organization has actually completed the journey." He reports on last week's Gartner's IT Symposium. [Source: LooselyCoupled.com]
Posted Friday, March 28, 2003 7:39:42 AM

PC Forum: Web-Services Business. Jeremy Allaire posted his notes from a panel moderated by John Hagel with Jerry Hale (CIO Eastman Chemical), John McKinley (ex-CIO of Merrill Lynch), and Tony Scott (CTO General Motors). There are some good one-liners in Jeremy's report including, "We don't trust UDDI."
Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2003 2:56:27 PM   

The Missing Pieces. Paul Krill of InfoWorld reported from last week's Software Development Conference in Santa Clara. "If the audience was anything close to representative, Web services still have a long way to go before they are widely adopted. Asked for a show of hands on who was actually using Web services in production applications, only about five persons raised their hands among the audience of approximately 150 to 200 people."

From the article, it sounds like a lively debate ensued among the panelists from Sun, IBM, BEA, and other firms.
Posted Friday, March 28, 2003 7:06:39 AM

Gurley on BPM. Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital provided an introduction to business-process management. Nothing new here, but it's a good and optimistic overview for those approaching a loosely coupled world from the business side rather than strictly via the technology. [Source: News.com]
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2003 2:16:11 PM

WorldCom May Go Grid. "WorldCom, whose accounting-fraud disclosures last year led to a $107 billion bankruptcy-protection filing...is talking to Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and researchers at the open-source grid computing Globus Project about applying the technology to help customers build hosted data centers capable of deploying more computers when demand is high -- say, around Christmas for a retailer -- then taking those machines offline when usage ebbs, lowering costs." [Source: InformationWeek.com]
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2003 10:29:38 PM

Service-Oriented Thinking. David Smith, a VP and web-services evangelist at Gartner Inc., says IT departments exploring the value of web services need to focus on the services that the technology can provide to their enterprise. He dubbed this approach 'service-oriented thinking.' [Source: ADTmag.com]
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2003 1:55:48 PM

Web Services Get Practical. According to E-Commerce Times, "The hype surrounding web services...has faded. In its wake [the wake of the hype, I assume] has come slow but steady adoption as businesses find ways to leverage web services to increase efficiency and improve customer relationships."
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2003 11:52:58 AM

The Myth of Loosely Coupled Web Services. David Chappell wrote in his Opinari newsletter: "Which of these three statements is true?

  1. Web services are inherently loosely coupled.
  2. Loosely coupled communication is better than tightly coupled communication.
  3. The WS-Reliability spec will help usher in a world of loosely coupled web services."

His answer: none of them.
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2003 5:51:23 AM

SearchWebservices.com. Brent Sheets reprinted an excerpt from my new book on TechTarget. I'll be doing a webcast on their site in April, as well as publishing some future excerpts.
Posted Monday, March 24, 2003 5:22:04 PM

Microsoft Quits W3C Choreography Group. That's right, according to Paul Krill at InforWorld. "Microsoft's Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services at the company, in Redmond, Wash. , said [last] week that two Microsoft research officials attended the meeting to determine the scope of the group's work in reference to contract language. The officials discontinued participation after finding out the group's work on contract language did not coincide with theirs, VanRoekel said. Contract language pertains to establishing communications between end points."
Posted Friday, March 21, 2003 5:17:52 PM

Web Services for SMEs. A year ago I speculated on the motivation for Microsoft's acquisition of Great Plains and their opportunity to leverage the accounting software to enter vertical markets. Now, in this article by Barbara Darrow of CRN, it does indeed look like Microsoft is moving in that direction.
Posted Friday, March 21, 2003 9:46:11 AM