Interesting look ahead. This is a key trend in regards to how and where corporations are spending their Information Systems money. The Internet is the great “integrator”, making cohesiveness in business processes possible.

“Web services are expected to become even more pervasively used throughout the entire computing stack,” said Sandra Rogers, program director for SOA, Web Services, and Integration research at IDC. “Web services have been and will continue to be primarily adopted by technology vendors that then proliferate the use and consumption of Web services via integrated solutions more so than enterprises addressing all the development and processing complexity directly.”

Several trends influencing the level of spending for Web services software include:

• Continued vendor and product consolidation

• Price pressures and shifting license models

• Evolving maturity and skill sets in developing Web services and Services oriented architecture (SOA) solutions

• Major product version releases by key vendors influencing the landscape

• Complexity of and rate of adoption for various Web services standards

• Organizations balancing existing base of technologies until volume and levels of complexity force review and investment