Blogarithms

Doug Kaye's thoughts on web services, web hosting and managed services.

Conventional Wisdom. At odds with the post below, Brent Sleeper of the Stencil Group linked to this News.com story that highlights the integration benefits of web services, not those that enable business agility. So the greatest benefit is in one camp, while the greatest current utilization is in another. There are two reasons: First, it's true that the web-services technologies for long-lived loosely coupled asynchronous transactions aren't as mature as those required for simpler integration tasks. But the other reason is that developers and their managers aren't yet thinking in terms of the loosely coupled systems that will ultimately deliver the greatest benefits of web services. (Yes, this has been said before, but it bears frequent repeating.) Posted Tuesday, February 25, 2003 7:17:01 PM

CIO Priorities: Reducing Costs Isn't #1. CIO Insight magazine recently surveyed nearly 400 CIOs, and while many questions are only of interest to the respondent group, others are of more general significance. With all the talk about tight budgets and pressure to reduce costs, I was intrigued to find that cost reduction was only the top priority for 6.0% of CIOs. Here's the complete list: Aligning IT with the business: 31.7% Making the enterprise more adaptive, flexible, and faster: 18.4% Developing strategies that leverage new technology: 13.6% Ensuring security and business continuity: 11.9% Ensuring projects are completed on time and on budget: 10.1% Reducing costs: 6.0% Helping to launch new products or lines of business: 5.2% Ensuring systems uptime: 1.8% Recruiting, retaining, developing staff: 0.3% By a 3:1 ratio, CIOs consider "making the enterprise more adaptive, flexible, and faster" to be more important than cost savings. All the more reason to think of the business-agility benefits of web services as the primary objective, and that leads to loosely coupled services as the place to focus your attention. Posted Tuesday, February 25, 2003 6:51:11 PM

When 100% Uptime Isn't. In this story reported on WebHost Directory, EDS claims to be the first hosting vendor to offer 100% uptime. I'm fairly certain that's not true, as I've worked with other vendors (including at least one major one) who have previously made such guarantees. But the real irony of the 100%-uptime claim is that it comes with a time-to-repair commitment. Wait a minute--If a system never goes down, why should there be a time-to-repair? No, it just appears that EDS is just offering a good, aggressive SLA, including penalties that kick in after as little as one minute of downtime. Don't take the 100% uptime SLA to imply that your systems will always be up. That's just hype. I could offer you a 100% uptime SLA, even though my box seems to go down at least once a week. The real substance is the aggressiveness of the penalties and the vendor's ability to meet the agreed-to service levels. Oh, and the price you pay to achieve those levels of service. Posted Tuesday, February 25, 2003 2:56:33 PM

Making Web Services More Flexible. David Chappell and Tony Hong are trying to get programmers thinking about creating loosely coupled systems in this article in XML & Web Services Magazine. The pitch: SOAP over JMS. Posted Tuesday, February 25, 2003 5:35:22 AM

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