Oct. 29, 2002: In this week's commentary: The Web services pilgrimage will be a hard one, but weary travelers from the ASP world can take heart in the fact that they are on the right track.
Travelers on long and perilous journeys into unknown territory often go through moments of self-doubt and despair. The 17-century writer John Bunyan, in his allegory of the Pilgrim's Progress, called this phase the slough of despondency. In Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy, it is a place in the land of Mordor. In the technology business, analyst group Gartner has named it the trough of disillusionment.
Read and React
"Probably the biggest challenge that Web services will have to overcome is to persuade developers, providers and users to adopt a service-oriented mindset. As an industry, ASPs have learned the hard way that you don't create a service just by putting software online."
The pattern is now so well-established — both in literature and in high-tech folklore — that it seems incredible anyone is still surprised to encounter it. Nevertheless, Gartner's hype cycle plays out time after time. Expectations for some new technology build to an unsustainable peak of hype, then just as surely a backlash develops when the inevitable disappointment sets in.
The backlash against Web services is now firmly established, judging by reactions to last week's announcement from another analyst group, IDC (see IDC Issues Web Services Reality Check). The group's findings — in brief, that it is too early to say whether Web services will deliver on its promises — are hardly astounding. The story made headlines not because it was news (the report in question was first published in August), but because it is what a growing number of people want to hear. The novelty value of Web services has palled, and despondency looms.
Beauty Behind Gloomy Headlines
An unwelcome side-effect of tbe negative headlines is that most readers will overlook something that I felt was one of the most intriguing aspects of this report — even though it's staring them in the face. Called Software as Services? What Your Mother Didn't Tell You About This Aspect of Web Services, the title itself makes a loud and explicit assertion that delivering software as services is the future of Web services.
That should be music to the ears of anyone reading this column, since ASPs have been the standard bearers for software as services for many years (and, in their time, certainly experienced their own fair share of the Gartner hype-cycle effect). Many of the technical, commercial and cultural obstacles cited in the IDC report are already familiar ground to ASPs, and so the good news for those who can look beyond the gloomy headlines is that there's going to be strong demand for that kind of expertise over the coming years. ASP veterans will be able to play a big part in lifting Web services out of the "trough of disillusionment" and up the slope of enlightenment towards mainstream acceptance.
Probably the biggest challenge that Web services will have to overcome is to persuade developers, providers and users to adopt a service-oriented mindset. As an industry, ASPs have learned the hard way that you don't create a service just by putting software online. In a continuous, real-time relationship, customers expect a level of responsiveness and attention to service quality that is rarely found when selling traditional software products. They are also much more insistent on automating complete business processes, rather than accepting the boundaries and limitations of individual application packages.
Software the Engine That Drives
So although it puts us on the right track, the phrase software-as-services is also something of a misnomer. We are not really talking about a delivery mechanism for software. The real objective of Web services is to enable software to become the engine of service automation — to create real-time, software-enabled business services.
That never has been an easy objective, and anyone who ever thought it could take any less than a decade or more to begin to reach maturity has been living in a dreamworld. This is a long hard pilgrimage, and there will be plenty more setbacks and disappointments along the way. But although IDC's report has set a gloomy headline tone, its core assumption at least provides some reassurance to weary travelers from the ASP world that they're still on the right track.
Do you have a comment or question about this article or the ASP industry in general? Speak out in the ASP Discussion Forum.
Phil Wainewright founded ASPnews.com in 1998 and is the publisher of Loosely Coupled. He can be contacted at
IE 7
Firefox 2.0