 Web Services. There is a lot of confusion about Web Services mostly due to the chest thumping and white noise of the enterprise software vendors. If I was still at Forrester or Gomez, here is how make sense of it for my clients.
Web services are composed of 3 different segments. Each solve a particular business or consumer problem. These segments are:
1) Enterprise Web Services. These services are focused on application communication and the development of new applications that integrate services from many different systems. Major players include IBM, Ariba, BEA, Sun, and Microsoft. Major problem solved: how do I get my sales system to talk to my financial system?
2) Consumer cloud services. These services focus on the individual. Consumer information (profiles, calendars, etc.) is stored in a confederation of databases in the cloud. The stored data can then be viewed and accessed by a variety of different applications running on numerous devices. Vendors: Microsoft and AOL. Major problem solved: how can I share my calendar with my friends and relatives?
3) Person to person Web Services. These services allow individuals to directly connect to each other in order to share contextual content (as opposed to file based P2P apps). Vendors: UserLand and Groove. Major problem solved: how can I publish content that my friends and coworkers can interact with?
The most interesting to me is the person to person segment. That segment is riding two trends: Web Services and P2P technology. It offers major cost advantages over traditional publishing in that it elminates infrastructure and leverages the power of distributed PCs. It can also grow faster than the other segments due to the ease with which people can download an application and join a network. What's driving the trend towards P2P Web services?
1)Low cost bandwidth and storage. PCs with high bandwidth connections and multi-GB hard drives are now commonplace.
2)High cost Website infrastucture that can be replaced by leveraging the power of PCs.
3)Latency. Full productivity occurs at 1 second or less latency. Even if I had a Gb of bandwidth that latency would still be there unless the content I am accessing was stored locally.
What does person to person Web services mean for the industry? Three things:
Lots of infrasture goes away. In this new model companies can publish Websites by simply introducing the structured content into the network at little to no cost.
Content distribution networks like Akamai go away.
Personal Web services become the Internet platform of choice.
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