Saturday, September 04, 2004

Things are busy...

Well, I've been busy.

We've seen our consulting business pick up considerably and the sales pipeline remains very strong. Momentum has been adding a new employee about every 5 days and I believe this will continue through the end of the year.

Most of our projects now have some component of web services. Here is a sampling:
- SOAP gateways to access legacy systems
- business objects being converted to business services; data layers being turned into data services
- laying down foundational ws-infrastructure (policy, monitoring, balancing, etc.)

Some other trends:
- desire to have pure SOAP as well as a slimmed down XML services (no RM, Sec or TR)
- "ESB" has made its way into RFP's
- brand awareness of ws-pure plays is much higher (Systinet, Blue Titan, AmberPoint, etc.)

Still, the world remains divided on how they view web services. As I recently told one of our customers:
"The web service protocols are at an adoption level equivalent to where you may have found TCP/IP in 1993 or 1994. Mass adoption has not yet occurred, but the writing is on the wall and no one is buying proprietary standards (Novell IPX/SPX). As we begin 2005, web services will enter into their 5th year in existence and remain the cornerstone strategy for vendors like IBM, SAP and Microsoft. This must be part of any go forward integration strategy for a Fortune 2000 company."

Come to think of it... some of those customers are still running IPX/SPX :-)

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