The Essential Guide to Web Services

Be realistic about how quickly your company needs to implement Webservices. Web services won't be something that's hyped and thendisappears, Hein says, but the technology hasn't achieved industrialstrength yet, either. His advice? Don't rush out tomorrow and insistthat the entire company and all its partners change over to a Webservices approach. Instead, keep an eye on the Web services market,which he expects will grow in the next year to year and a half, andstart experimenting internally.

Lend a skeptical ear to vendors' marketing claims. Vendors will go onand on about how they've had umpteen people involved in thedevelopment of XML since 1997, or they were the first to roll out betacode that supports such and such standard. And they'll claim that thishas put them way ahead of their competitors when it comes to Webservices support. Take those claims with a grain of salt. "It's tooearly in the development of Web services to make a strategic call onwhich vendor is the best to wed yourself to," Schatsky says. The beststrategy is to work with a vendor that you already have a relationshipwith until the market matures.

Make sure that your company's up-coming business applications supportWeb services standards. "Business managers may not make decisionsabout platform choice, but they do often get heavily involved in theselection of business applications," Schatsky says, such as enterpriseresource planning or customer relationship management systems. Headvises executives to add Web services support to the checklist ofthings they'll need from business application vendors - most will offersuch support by late this year.

Recognize that deploying Web services is as much of a business problemas it is a technology problem. Yes, vendors will roll out more Webservices-enabled software and (one hopes) agree on more sophisticatedstandards. But companies won't be able to point and click away thehard work of deciding which computing resources should be integratedinternally, which ones should be shared with partners and which shouldbe opened up to consumers. "Just because you have an easier-to-usetechnology doesn't mean you change the world's business modelsovernight," Quinn says. So while the IS department is experimentingwith internal uses of Web services, business executives should bethinking about future business opportunities afforded by thetechnology.

Web services are undoubtedly a work in progress, and thegrand Web services scenarios envisioned for the future won'thappen without a serious bit of work on the technology sideand the business side. But if you start experimenting withsimpler Web services now, you'll be in good company - andyou'll also be ready when Web services really start to takeoff.