Service technology -- from SOA to cloud to IT service management -- promises many "-ilities": greater agility, flexibility, and reusability. Joe McKendrick explores the challenges and opportunities with service orientation, and how to capitalize on these emerging computing philosophies.
Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant and speaker specializing in trends and developments shaping the technology industry.
Some more food for thought about the economics of business process outsourcing: A report just out of Datamonitor argues that speech-enabled self-service technology may be a better value proposition than using offshore call center agents for low-level transactions. The report estimates that a company can save 25% to 35% per transaction using speech-enabled self-service solutions versus using a call center in an offshore location.
Speaking of the critical role of the registry in SOA (see my previous post on UDDI, below), Infavio's Jeff Tonkel also beats the drum for registry in his latest blogs. Tonkel observes that there is no single corporate registry tostore information on SOA end points and govern theirrelationships and runtime interactions.
Can Big Blue succeed in BPO? The latest edition of KnowledgeWharton, published by the University of Penn's Wharton School, reports that IBM continues to shift away from platforms to services, with nearly half of its $89 billion revenue from last year coming from services.
UDDI, or the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration protocol, got a bad rap a couple of years back when the dot-coms dot-bombed. UDDI is considered one of the four basic Web services standards (along with XML, SOAP, and WSDL), but was closely associated with e-commerce, intended to serve as the "yellow pages" for linking providers and consumers of Web services.
Hmm. The reason we have standards is so everyone has a common format towork with.
While Web services and open source software are poised to transform the software level of the IT stack, companies such as IBM and Hewlett Packard are hoping to also transform the hardware level through utility computing. They intend to sell computing cycles as a service.
The Web services concept is all about simplicity.Some industry luminaries, however, believe thatthe standards process has become unnecessarily complex.
Gartner vice president and analyst Roy Schulte, who has been tracking service-oriented IT since before the days of CORBA, feels a new headache coming on. This pain comes in the form of enterprise service buses, or ESBs -- the logical layers where application components from different systems can meet and mingle, as reported by TechTarget's Jon Panker.
There's plenty of Web services and SOA action taking place in Orlando this week, thanks to Gartner's Application Integration and Web Services Summit, with attendance topping more than 1,000.
Famed venture capitalist John Doerr, who was once elevated tothe "Reckless Optimist's Hall of Fame" by the Silicon Valley based Churchill Club, has some new predictions to make. He believes that the potential of the Internet has been "underhyped.