COMMENTARY--Can anyone honestly say that in 1990 they had any inkling of how business would be conducted a decade later? Ten years from now, how will things have changed? Web services will certainly play a role, but not for the reasons you might think.
In the mid-90s Web browsers revolutionized the presentation layer of applications and overtook the conventional Windows and OSF/Motif user environments virtually overnight, in an explosion of new application value. Many of those browser-based solutions remain healthy and are still in use, despite the dotcom downturn. In similar fashion Web services are now standardizing some of the technology between the n-tiers of distributed application architectures with SOAP, XML and WSDL.
Web services certainly won’t replace many of the current technologies used between computing tiers, but they will become a common denominator in many environments, a new platform for innovation through which companies will realize value that they may not even anticipate today.
Innovation typically takes place in the largest or most rapidly expanding technologically bounded market segment within which barriers can be overcome. Innovation is what the MS Windows platform has spurred for nearly two decades, and what the Java and Open Source communities have fostered more recently. That the technologies around which these communities gathered are strong platforms for innovation may be the single biggest reason those communities have delivered so much collective value to the world. And so it will be with Web services.
Where is the value in Web services?
Ignore for the time being the possibility of long running business transactions between loosely coupled trading partners (the whole Web services enchilada). The real beauty of Web services is that they allow a company’s previous software investments to be combined and exploited more easily in unanticipated value-added ways. This is true regardless of how independently the services were developed--whether by different business units, central IT, subsidiaries that were added through acquisition or offshore development teams that may have been managed on contract. It’s also true regardless of the purposes for which the services were originally developed.
Web services are software reuse dressed up for the 21st century. By virtue of one simple fact--that through them, value producers can more easily serve multiple consumers--Web services are an automatic boon to business agility, the ability of a company to turn its resources on a dime to serve more customers in a superior way. Of course, business agility is a benefit of any service-oriented architecture (SOA), whether or not it is based on Web services. But the standards underlying Web services allow the value of the services to be exploited more easily by a prospectively larger pool of service consumers in less predictable ways.
Betting on the unforseen value
Indeed, the unforeseen value of any given Web service may be more substantial than the intentional, architected value. If you build a Web service interface between two internal systems now, you can defend the cost/benefit for that particular project in stride, just as you would any other integration project. But the future value may be much greater.
Since Web services are based on standards, it’s likely you can reuse that same interface, or a lightly modified version of it, for different purposes that may emerge later. This versatility is key to a business’s ability to deliver different combinations of products or services to new markets, win market share from competitors and create new shareholder value.
In addition to gaining popularity in the application integration space, Web services will be conveniently consumed through portals and business process management tools, incorporated into workflows and dynamically invoked according to business rules. If what industry luminaries like John Chambers say is true--that the greatest contributions to corporate productivity are likely to come out of dynamic changes to business processes--then Web services may win a global award someday. But it won’t be for all of the inter-enterprise, eBusiness reasons the vendors had been heralding. It will be for business agility and the productivity that stems from it.
Forward march
Web services are not for the faint hearted, but those who avoid them stand to lose momentum. As the rate of innovation increases around us the harder it will be to predict how to position your products, or where you will need to modify your business processes. Increasing value will be placed on business agility, because a greater return on IT investment will be achievable--thanks to Web services.
The adoption of Web services will become a business imperative, especially for larger enterprises, or those with very close relationships with trading partners. The more lines of business an enterprise has a meaningful reach into, the more potential consumers there may be for its Web services. And the more consumers that are found for a service, who in turn deliver more value, the greater the return on software will be for the overall enterprise.
The greatest contribution Web services ends up making to your organization could well be the prospective longevity of your service-oriented architecture and the skills and culture that support it. Shifts in architecture represent a costly part of software development, integration and maintenance. The incremental effort of giving a SOAP and XML facelift to your systems is a small price to pay for the value derived from tying these systems together in a way that in all likelihood will remain useful, reusable and maintainable for a long time to come.
It’s not just the present economy and the incremental approach you can take to Web services that make them so attractive. In the shifting sands of Information Technology, Web services remain an oasis--one that will become more refreshing over time through continued innovation. And as businesses become more agile, Web services may be the only meaningful hedge against the continued, disruptive change that normally keeps IT marching in place, instead of moving forward.
Cathy Lippert has over 20 years of experience in product management and marketing in the software industry. As vice president of product management at Flashline, the software asset reuse company, she focuses on product strategy and direction, introduction of new products, and competitive positioning. Prior to Flashline, Lippert was director of product management at Compuware Corporation, a $2 billion software & services company, where she managed a $200 million portfolio of Web and client-server based software products and services.
