Words can often deceive, and the three words "Web services management" are a case in point.
At first glance, you'd think those three words describe a topic of interest only to those who have Web services worth managing. That would indeed be a small community, for it consists of only those enterprises that not only have already deployed Web services, but have also deployed so many of them that they need a sophisticated, automated management system to keep track of them.
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In fact, the application of Web services management goes much further, penetrating virtually every sector of information and communications technology. Anybody who wants to link multiple resources within a network or Web environment is going to need some form of Web services management, even if their actual use of Web services makes up only a very small proportion of the end-to-end system.
That's why there's been such an uproar in the past week over who gets to participate in and supervise the standards efforts surrounding Web services management (see OASIS Aims to Conquer Web Services Issue), and why so many vendors are competing to offer Web services management tools (see Actional Jumpstarts Web Services Management).
What Puts the 'Web' in Web Services?
The smallest word of the three is the most misleading. "Web" is there because the technologies in question all run over HTTP, the fundamental transfer protocol of the WorldWide Web. The core specifications for linking computer systems and software on top of that foundation have therefore come to be known as Web services standards. But their far-reaching impact is due to their capability to link together all types of computer systems and software, not merely those that are built from scratch with Web services.
Web services management applies to a much broader range of services than its name suggests — application services, utility services, on-demand services, connection services and grid services, as well as Web services. Any automated resource or function can be made available as a service simply by wrapping it with a Web services interface — resources as diverse as mainframe applications, databases, communications links or mobile appliances. All of them become services in the sense of being provided as an automated capability.
Web services provides the glue that enables us to put all of them into the common framework of what is known as a service-oriented architecture. The glue of course is important, but it is the resources themselves that make up the bulk of the system.
If each resource on its own is significant, the interactions between them are even more important. It is the quality and performance of those links that is the primary concern of Web services management, and that is why it is such a vital activity.
Now It Gets Complicated
It's also a complex activity. As ASPs know, there are many aspects that need to be carefully scrutinized when providing automated services over a network — resource allocation and availability, response times, usage metrics, consistency of service, speed of fault resolution and so on. Web services management is concerned with monitoring, reporting on, analyzing, responding to and adjusting all of these parameters. This is in addition to traditional systems management to monitor and maintain the underlying resource infrastructure.
Frank Moss, who led systems management startup Tivoli in the 1990s before selling the company to IBM in billion-dollar acquisition, is on record as saying that Web services management will be many times more complex than systems management. That's because, rather than dealing with individual enterprise infrastructures, it deals with all the myriad links that Web services allows us to forge between all the systems and applications within and between each of those enterprise infrastructures.
No single vendor owns that capability today, none of the specifications have been standardized, and very few of the required skills and expertise have so far been discovered or learnt. But all of the industry's early players are well aware that, once the pool of knowledge expands and leaders begin to emerge, the value they will be able to command will be at least on a par with that achieved by Moss's former company, perhaps even greater.
Web Services Management for All
Web services management may appear to serve a very restricted market today, but don't be misled by the name. Within two or three years, no self-respecting enterprise will attempt to run its IT infrastructure without investing in Web services management platforms and tools.
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