Excerpting from the book, "Securing Web Services with WS-Security" by Jothy Rosenberg and David Remy, who have a chapter called "The Gestalt of Web Services" here are the points that build the case for paying attention to Web Services:
You could say that the Internet is the most pervasive distributed computing infrastructure ever envisioned. Based on surveys done in 2003 and 2004, from a variety of sources, here are some of the statistics:
- There are approximately 46 million registered Internet domain names.
- There are 172 million Internet hosts.
- More than 500,000 servers on the Internet have Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates in use.
- There are in excess of over 3 billion accessible web page documents.
- For every computer supporting a company's presence on the Internet, there are some number of internal servers that run the same web technologies.
The web has become the global network for information exchange. If you do the math, as Web Services become pervasive, web services could affect almost 2 billion servers.
They go on to say, "Virtually every organization has invested in computing infrastructure (or pays fees to someone who has on its behalf) to support its participation in the Web. Middleware that leverages this enormous investment and enormous commitment to a set of ubiquitous international standards will have an immediate acceptance unlike anything in computing history. This is the main reason for Web Services' rapid adoption."
In his recent blog post, The Next Big Thing: Web services/SOA, Mitch Betts points to a Goldman Sachs Group report that is very bullish on web services, and cites results from a survey of 100 IT managers at Fortune 100 companies.
Optimize Magazine features a case study article about a Web Services/SOA implementation,
"Building An SOA Pipeline" -- that provides one view into this journey.
Web Services integration takes thought, but is a very effective way to bring otherwise disparate systems together meaningfully. It's something that anyone implementing or evaluating technology should be aware of as an option -- and require of their vendors -- or their IT groups who are writing and maintaining custom applications.
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