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Thursday 21st October 2004
COMMENTARY - WSM STUCK IN THE CHASM?
| REQUEST FOR FEEDBACK
CBDI is currently researching the WSM market to update our reports in this area. We would like to hear from enterprise customers on their requirements and their response to the issues posed above. Questions we would like to discuss are:
- Do they have the critical number of Web Services and volume of transactions to warrant investment in WSM? If not, when do they think this threshold will be crossed?
- How they are implementing WSM today? Are they buying new WSM products, working with their incumbent Systems Management vendor, or building their own simple capabilities by leveraging the application platform?
- What areas of WSM functionality are most important today? Such as security, performance and availability monitoring, problem resolution, managing SLA, routing and broking, etc.
- What areas do they think will be most important tomorrow?
- Are their requirements sophisticated enough, and their Web Services sufficiently aligned, to implement the concept of monitoring business performance via monitoring Web Services, or is the use of WSM purely for traditional IT operational concerns.
If you would like to share your experience and views with us please comment below or contact feedback@cbdiforum.com. Please respond by October 29th.
| ABSTRACT: This week we see two Web Services specialist companies Actional and Westbridge merging. This is the latest in quite a long line of acquisitions and mergers in this area, and conventional wisdom tells us that this is completely predictable. The pressures on these companies are well known. The Web Services market remains an early market. It has taken far longer to mature than anyone predicted, it is reasonable to say that it is a long term middleware transition which will take many more years to come to maturity. Further pressure on WSM vendors also comes this week with the announcement by IBM of Tivoli support for WSM.
The original simplicity of the Web Service technology has been superceded by significant transactional control and management complexity, together with widespread agreement on SOA as the architectural backplane, all of which in the long run will deliver massive benefit. So companies and investors dependent upon Web Services are in a bit of a bind. They are finding the mainstream market has not yet taken off, and current customers are generally early adopters. We turn to Geoffrey Moore and his thinking on adoption and do some analysis.
The other day a strategist from one of the major platform vendors commented on his difficulty in promoting SOA. He explained that their customers are still driven primarily by short term issues and the need to deliver immediate solutions and ROI. While there is evident interest in architecture within the technology community, in his opinion the business community is not yet interested in longer term investment.
This particular vendor is making major investments in SOA and Web Services, and is completely committed to an SOA enabled product portfolio, but they no longer differentiate themselves on their SOA capability, rather they are prioritizing business solutions. It would be fair to say that this is a widely held view.
This week we see two Web Services specialist companies Actional and Westbridge merging. This is the latest in quite a long line of acquisitions and mergers in this area, and conventional wisdom tells us that this is completely predictable. In the first stages of the Web Services market there were a large number of start-ups that formed to deliver Web Service specific functionality. At one stage we recall counting 27 companies in this category.
The pressures on companies like Actional and Westbridge are well known. The Web Services market remains an early market. It has taken far longer to mature than anyone predicted, it is reasonable to say that it is a long term middleware transition which will take many more years to come to maturity. The original simplicity of the Web Service technology has been superceded by significant transactional control and management complexity, together with widespread agreement on SOA as the architectural backplane, all of which in the long run will deliver massive benefit.
So companies and investors dependent upon Web Services are in a bit of a bind. They are finding the mainstream market has not yet taken off, and current customers are generally early adopters.
WHY VENDORS GET STUCK IN THE CHASM
The concept of a chasm was first articulated by Geoffrey Moore in his various books including Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. He showed by example that there is a huge gap between visionaries and pragmatists in terms of their product needs.
The visionary enterprise is risk taking and opportunity seeking, whereas the pragmatist is evolutionary, conformist and motivated to solve problems. Moore described the situation - whenever innovative high-tech products are brought to market they will initially enjoy a warm welcome in an early market made up of technology enthusiasts and visionaries, but then they fall into the chasm when they run out of visionary customers. Then main difference between visionaries and pragmatists is that the pragmatist requires a 100 percent solution. Moore refers to this as the whole product.
Moore defines the whole product as the minimum set of products and services necessary to ensure the customer will achieve his/her reasons to buy; you might also look at the whole product as the set of capabilities that solve the business problem.
WHAT BUSINESS PROBLEM
And here is the primary issue - at least for the Actionals and Westbridges of the Web Service world, the business problem is actually very poorly defined.
- Most enterprises are adopting SOA as a core architectural strategy, but this will be a long term program. SOA is justified by improved agility. But agility is not a compelling case for specific action, it needs to be built into all projects when the infrastructural backplane is ready.
- Web Services are in use in many enterprises, but primarily as specific project support, not as an enterprise wide strategy. The dedicated WSM product providers such as Actional and Westbridge will spend a lot of time assisting a customer to get up to speed on one project, and then often find the customer has no plans to migrate the technology and experience throughout the rest of the enterprise.
- Many customers are looking at what the large vendors like Microsoft, IBM, CA and HP are doing and thinking that much of the required functionality will be realized eventually in the platform, and service management products that provide coverage for both Web Services and conventional resources. For example, IBM Tivoli has this week outlined their Web Service strategy covering management, security, collaboration with the development lifecycle and a commitment to emerging standards. This is matched by early releases of products available from IBM alphaworks. Link below, and also link to CBDI report on recent HP announcements.
- Web Services are now fully usable in simple situations, but support of secure business transactions is very much the preserve of early adopters. The standards and critically the profiles for what you might regard as "normal business" - secure internal and B2B processes will only be stabilized sometime during 2005.
- There's a compelling case for Web Services management both in more agile systems and lower management costs, particularly as dynamic resource allocation (on-demand) becomes viable. However Management standards remain work in process and the platform vendors efforts might be categorized as Version One.
- One of the most critical needs for WSM is where Services are used in a federated environment between business partners, or using hosted service providers, and SLAs must be ensured. Yet most current WSM products provide little support for distributed management involving external resources, and WSDM standards that could enable this are some way from adoption.
All of which points to early adopting situations.
IS EVERYONE STUCK IN THE CHASM?
Moore suggests the way to cross the chasm is to specialize on particular market segments. By putting all the eggs in one basket the vendor focuses on a specific problem space, and develop a whole product that goes much further than a generalist vendor can achieve. Moore calls this a beachhead.
Web Services Management is currently a niche in most organizations.
Interestingly we noted a couple of weeks ago Cape Clear Software announced a comprehensive telecommunications industry sector solution designed to simplify integration and enable the rapid delivery of new services. In their announcement Cape Clear mentioned new functionality which provides adapters for the most popular OSS and BSS applications, and integrations with leading ISVs.
Moore stresses the "all the eggs in one basket". Pragmatists insist on 100 percent of their requirements. If one focuses on a generalized market approach you end up offering 80 percent, which is fine for early adopters, but simply insufficient for pragmatists.
DEFINING THE WHOLE PRODUCT
A further problem the Web Services vendors have of course is that their ability to deliver a whole product is constrained by standards activity. Of course they will say they will take care of that issue through automation as and when the standards mature, but for the pragmatist SO architect they are looking for stability in order to develop their patterns and policies. So they will move more slowly.
LINKS
IBM Tivoli Web Service Management
CBDi Report - HP's Strategy for Managing the Adaptive Enterprise |
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