A balanced growth

Bangalore: The adoption of Web services by industry can best be described as steady, with an optimistic outlook. There is an initial excitement that surrounds any promising technology when it breaks free from the research labs into the business world.

The media loves the new buzzwords, lofty figures are thrown around in boardrooms, and everyone has this feel-good factor about the techies having made something that can actually be used to make (or save) money. That is the way it was with Web services in the early adoption era, from around early 1999 to end-2001.

There was more talk than action — as most businesses waited for the dust to settle. But the experiences of early adopters showed the promise of shifting towards service-oriented computing — reducing maintenance impact, leveraging existing investments, improving operational visibility, and creating new business value.

Sparing bodies like OASIS and W3C, which come out with the standards for technologies like Web services, the parties working the hardest during this era were probably the market research firms, with complicated analyses of market potential, identification of key implementation areas, and projection of integration issues were carried out.

An early picture painted for Web services. Source: The Stencil group