Web services expert predictions 2004 -- Eric Marks, author, Executive's Guide to Web Services

Eric's 2004 predictions

• 2004 will be the breakout year for Web services. I'm actively engaged with multiple clients, F1000 firms, (3 of which are F500), and even the "early adopters" are not that far along in actual implementations of Web services or their SOAs. That said, these firms are all beginning their planning to more formally organize to attack the Web services opportunity - do formal strategies, project roadmaps, build out their Services-Oriented Architectures, etc. While 2004 will be the breakout year, many firms will not be conducting enterprise scale Web services for another year to two years, primarily due to their commitments to supporting legacy enterprise apps such as SAP, Oracle, etc.

• Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) lingers, but it shouldn't. Many of the analysts and even big vendors (Microsoft and IBM) are signaling that some aspects of Web services are not ready for prime time, such as security, management, and others. The fact is that these suggestions are merely FUD because they (Microsoft, IBM, perhaps others) probably don't have their product solutions ready yet. (My analysis is based on opinion, not comprehensive interviews and product assessments.)

  In reality, there are commercial solutions available from new companies that address the gaps in security and WS management, and other gaps as well. Web services adoption should NOT be delayed because of the naysayers out there. This is too important of a technology paradigm to ignore, and there are too many financial and business benefits to be gained by moving ahead now.