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The
Enterprise IT Perspective
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IT managers have not yet been tasked with managing applications
and business services based on Web Services -- but the story might
be different 18-24 months from now. IT management is about ensuring
the reliable delivery of highly available, high-performance business
services to employees, customers, partners, and suppliers. Therefore,
there are a few basic considerations that will affect decisions
made by IT management in terms of Web Services.
If the task of the IT department is to supply of applications based
on Web Services, then it needs to understand how these services
will perform in it's software environment. It needs to cost-effectively
manage availability and performance. If applications are going to
dynamically search and select the Web Services they need in real-time,
IT managers must ensure repeatable performance for users. If applications
are going to advertise Web Services for external use, they will
need to understand and oversee the security implications of doing
that. In general, Web Services are just another infrastructure device
that needs management. Integrated fault management, performance
monitoring, and capacity planning are needed to ensure consumer
satisfaction with the associated applications. And since these applications
are generally mission critical, this is not a step to be taken lightly.
The bottom line is, Web Services will probably make the IT manager's
job more complicated in the short-to-intermediate run. The complexity
is a function of the time it takes to:
- Investigate new technologies
- Separate vendor hype from reality
- Determine which products fit the overall IT strategy
- Investigate Web Services avoidance strategies
- Characterize and test new applications
- Identify and integrate new tools to monitor and manage Web Services
environments
- Train personnel
- Coordinate deployment across applications
This work needs to be done to gain the benefits of Web Services.
Concurrently, standards are still being developed, underlying mechanisms
like XML are maturing, platform wars are raging, and hundreds of
vendors are making thousands of announcements and claims clamoring
for attention. Almost every established software vendor has made
some announcement about its Web Services strategy. They usually
promote future functionality and offer a glimpse of the product
roadmap; what it really means is that the company's current offering
will soon comply with current SOAP and UDDI standards. It will be
important for IT to understand the goal of the project, the nature
of the service that needs to be deployed, and the long-term goal
of the organization when choosing solutions.
Ultimately, Web Services may make IT life easier by bridging the
gap between business decision makers (and the applications they
require) and the IT department. Some vendors promise that the creation
of Web Services applets will become so easy that business analysts
can actually create them with drag and drop graphical tools, taking
some of the burden off of IT and allowing for more rapid deployment
of these services as discrete applications. This kind of vision
requires an IT infrastructure that is highly flexible and extensible,
as well as a business culture that is confident that it can rely
on software to empower decision-making. This has been a lofty goal
for years, but the technology continues to become more complicated
and the learning curve is high.
It is important to reiterate, very few real Web Services deployments
have been implemented on a large scale to date - this industry is
being built on technology vision and market hype today with some
early pilots in process. We expect that IT departments will beta
test the technology with small non-disruptive projects in order
to evaluate its greater potential. This is a smart thing to do before
any organization re-architects any major applications or departments.
Most of the early work in testing Web Services has been to evaluate
how it performs in the context of application development and integration.
We expect early deployments to be in this arena given how hard it
is and how incomplete today's current solutions are in solving the
whole problem.
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Barbara Angius Saxby (barbara@accelentmarketing.com)
founded Accelent (www.accelentmarketing.com)
to help software startups accelerate marketing strategies, planning,
and execution. She specializes in positioning and launching enterprise
infrastructure and application companies. Barbara is a senior marketing
executive with over 20 years experience in strategic marketing management
and has done extensive work internationally.
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