Economy Slows Web Services DevelopmentEconomy Slows Web Services Development

Nearly half of companies building Web services applications have reduced spending on the projects because of the slow economy, a market research firm said Wednesday But none of the companies had abandoned their work, and nearly a third of the organizations surveyed by Gartner said the economy had no impact on spending.

The online survey of 111 North American companies showed a strong commitment to the set of emerging technologies for tying disparate IT systems over the Internet. As noteworthy, however, was the way companies were using, or planned to use, Web services over the next 12 to 24 months.

The majority of companies would not be using Web services at all if Gartner had defined development as using all the core technologies associated with the new architecture, namely Soap, UDDI, WSDL, and XML. Gartner defined Web services development as the use of any of those technologies to tie systems together to perform useful business functions.

Three-quarters of the respondents said they were using or planning to use XML during the next 24 months, while 62% said they would also use Java Server Pages or Java servlets. Only 35% of the companies said they would use Soap, Simple Object Access Protocol.

Soap is the transport mechanism for moving XML messages over the Internet. XML, a core technology to all the Web services specifications, is an open standard for describing data. It's used for defining data elements on electronic business documents, making it possible for an application to parse the document and process only the data it needs for a specific business activity.

More than half of the respondents said they were using, or planned to use, Web services over the next 12 months for tying systems both within the organization and with partners and customers. Thirty-nine percent of respondents limited their work to internal systems.

However, over the next 24 months, 65% of the organizations planned to use Web services for intra- and inter-enterprise integration, while 23% said they would use the technologies for internal use only. Those numbers indicate a planned shift toward more business-to-business usage.

Gartner found that about 18% of the organizations had formed committees of IT and business managers to oversee the Web services projects. The vast majority of the projects were in the control of IT managers or management information system heads.

Respondents were using or planning to use more than 90% of the time a database or application server to build or integrate in the web services project. Management tools for ongoing monitoring of deployed code, and testing and configuration tools for developed code were in use or planned for use more than 40% of the time.

Twenty-three percent of the time, respondents were planning to use an integration broker, with webMethods the most common brand today, followed by IBM and SeeBeyond. In future projects, however, IBM and Microsoft became the favored vendors.