WEB SERVICES MANAGEMENT

by Tom Welsh, Editor, Web Services Strategies

When XML and Web services are discussed, the arguments often focus on superficial details, without acknowledging the underlying trends that make Web services feasible. Among these is the explosive rate of growth in computer price/performance, which allows software companies to embark on projects that would have been ridiculously overambitious only a few years ago.

Industry watchers reacted to the first news of Web services by doubting whether network bandwidth would permit the anticipated volume of traffic. But thanks to Moore's Law and the even greater advances in storage and network capacity, today's IT systems are capable of digesting the huge workload imposed by Web services. Furthermore, they can even indulge in such extravagant luxuries as opening every message in transit to check security entitlements, measure trends and volumes, and -- in the case of products like Swingtide Monitor and Scorecard -- draw high-level business conclusions in real time.

There is plenty of scope for improvement, though: the market reflects the confused and immature state of standards for Web services management. Much the same could be said, to a lesser extent, of Web services security. The need to find solutions rapidly, combined with the potentially huge payoff for success, has spawned scores of ambitious startups.

Nevertheless, the state of the art has advanced rapidly in the last two years, with feature-laden new releases coming thick and fast. Just as important, two of the "big three" system management players -- Computer Associates (CA), HP, and IBM/Tivoli -- have announced general availability Web services management products. So far, though, there are too many claims and not enough objective ways of evaluating them. That may change soon, thanks to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

As the standards -- led by the OASIS technical committee for Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) -- take shape and begin to be implemented, there will be a shakeout in which pure-play startups will be severely culled. Many will go out of business, while some of the most successful will be snapped up by mainstream vendors, including industry giants like CA, HP, and IBM. This trend has already been foreshadowed by CA's acquisition of Adjoin and HP's purchase of Talking Blocks.

Fortuitous as these events may have been, Talking Blocks could just have played a catalytic role in getting the big three to pool their ideas through the OASIS WSDM technical committee. The San Francisco startup, which had not been making much progress recently, originally aligned itself more with CA and IBM. When it was taken over by HP, Mark Potts -- ex-CTO of Talking Blocks -- became an even more influential figure, with intimate knowledge of everyone's plans. From then on, there was little point in any of the heavy hitters trying to "go it alone."

There is a major obstacle looming, however. The whole raison d'etre of Web services was originally to cut users free from the stifling bonds of proprietary systems and vendor lock-in. Whatever platforms and products you used, so the pitch went, you could always link them together with Web services. What was more, Web services themselves were industry standard software -- the same everywhere.

That has been getting less and less true, as vendors add Web services capabilities to their existing product portfolios and get down to competing seriously in this new arena. But with the advent of production-strength security and management tools, Web services users will start to incur the risk of being well and truly locked in. What's more, most of the tools described in this report are quite expensive, with typical entry-level cost being about $50,000, while full instrumentation of a large battery of Web services could easily cost $1 million or more.

-- Tom Welsh, Editor, Web Services Strategies