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Pieces of the Puzzle. Let's be honest. It's going to be many years (if ever) before all the layers in the web-services pyramid are codified in standards. Even then, there will always be a need for one-off customizations. Standards will never cover everything. In the meantime, where do companies turn, today, for the missing pieces? And where will they turn tomorrow?
The top of they pyramid is the world of business semantics: industry-specific protocols, formats and documents. This will be the final frontier for standardization, and even then it will be dominated by specialty vendors and not-for-profits that operate vertical hubs providing centralized workflow automation and directory services.
Below the business-semantic peak of the pyramid lie the technologies that are horizontal (i.e., not unique to specific verticals) but that have not yet been standardized or widely adopted. Technologies in this layer pass through a technology pipeline through which they evolve from ad-hoc service offerings to shrink-wrapped software products, and eventually are bundled with operating systems or application servers.
The pipeline has three stages. (1) In much the same way as vertical hubs solve the most difficult industry-specific problems, web-services networks (WSNs) do the same horizontally. Today, for example, WSNs support encryption, authentication, message queuing and other critical functions for which no standards yet exist. (2) At the next stage in the pipeline, as solutions become less ad-hoc but are not yet fully standardized, specialty ISVs step up to deliver solutions in the form of software products rather than as services. (3) When standards are finally adopted (or as an attempt to create de facto standards) the major ISVs like Microsoft and IBM deliver their own solutions in the form of commodity software.
The history of TCP/IP and the Internet are perfect examples of this pipeline. In the early days--before there was an Internet--companies like UUNET offered message routing as a service via dial-up UUCP. When the Internet became available, specialty ISVs offered TCP/IP protocol stacks as shrink-wrapped software packages. In the final stage of the pipeline, Microsoft bundled the TCP/IP stack with its Windows operating systems. What entered the pipeline as a service, came out the other end as a standardized commodity with essentially no value based on differentiation. (Imagine trying to make a living selling TCP/IP implementations today.)
All of the yet-to-be standardized horizontal components of web services will likely follow the same pipeline. What we can only get from WSNs today, will next be available in the form of software packages and eventually bundled with platforms. What does this mean for the WSNs and the specialty ISVs? Will they forever be able to identify and deliver new and valuable ad-hoc functionality, or will they eventually go the way of UUCP networks and the TCP/IP protocol vendors? My instincts tell me the latter.
[Source: Thanks to Dave Wright, Microsoft .NET Architecture Evangelist, who inspired these thoughts over lunch yesterday.]
Posted Wednesday, July 03, 2002 2:10:01 AM 
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