META Group Touts Web Services in Year-End Report

Web services predicted to dominate in 2002

• By Matt Migliore
• 01/03/2002

Information technology analyst firm the META Group has released its year-end prediction recap for 2001. According to META, Web services dominated headlines in 2001 and will continue to do so in the coming year.

META believes the application server market will grow with increased support for Web services standards and protocols as vendors look to provide customers with solutions that can connect complex heterogeneous environments. By 2004, META sees the application server market consolidating down to just a handful of vendors, including BEA, IBM and Sun. Furthermore, META sees application server-based infrastructure models becoming more of a focus for enterprise customers, while demand falls for traditional client/server and Web-specific development tools.

The Web services concept, says META, will move from the experimentation phase to a low level implementation phase in 2002, with enterprises actually using standards and protocols such as SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL to simplify the creation of business components and integration of systems.

In 2001, META touted Web services and the next evolution of Web architecture. Now, it says, "Web services IS the next evolution in Web architecture."

For e-business, META says integration vendors are now a major force, and describes the centralization and standardization of systems as essential. META believes the importance of these three ingridients is in the process of extending beyond e-business to touch on all areas of an enterprises technology infrastructure.