Have Web Services Companies Self-Willed a Market into Existence?

Philip Windley has a piece on "Do-It-Yourself Web Services Management". It's a interesting collection of companies and offerings. Also interesting is the fact that the text is presented as image. Well here's the image:

Two observations though. The first, even though SOAP-based standards add no real value above REST. The mere fact that there are so many vendors supporting the protocol immediately makes it the logical choice over REST. It seems that vendors through sheer act of will have created for themselves a market!

Let me digress to examine this phenomena a bit. The big vendors, IBM and Microsoft, hype up a half baked formula for interoperability. The media catches on about the "revolutionary" consequences of this technolgoy. Industry pundits and consultants start pitching the benefits. This then influences the investment banks, that leads to even more companies supporting the half baked formula. Over time, the half-baked formula matures to something half way decent. Now there are tons of companies offering all sorts of solutions and proclaiming "compatiblity" with the standard. Bingo, you now have a new market!

Also, a necessary ingredient must be added with any technology so that you can sell it. Complexity, the problem with REST is that its just too simple, you can't make a dime on it. SOAP despite its name has unnecessary complexity, furthermore, its got all sorts of deprecated baggage. A rule of thumb, just like most people ignore the inherent complexities of XML's (i.e. processing instructions, entities, etc), with Web Services you do the same thing. The little secret that what works is REST, all the extra complexity is all for show! Have you not noticed that almost every strategic IT based consultant worth his salt is pitching Service Oriented Architectures?

Anyway, back to the topic. The other interesting observation is that a lot of these tools are built with the latest and greatest programming ideas and environments. This leads to technologies that are simply vastly superior to that of yesteryear. It doesn't matter if yesteryear's standards are equivalent to Web Services. The sheer superiority of the tools simply overwelm the fundamental value of the original systems.

In short, vendor persistence has self-willed the market into existence. It's time to prepare for this new reality!

Before I end, let me just summarize from the list some of the cool new manageability capabilities that these vendors have added:

• Support for analysis, planning, and simulation.
• Web Service proxies for monitoring, auditing, logging, routing and transformation.
• Security proxies for signing, encryption, signature validation.
• Policy enforcement and SLA enforcement.
• Single point of configuraion.
• QOS support priortize traffic, provide failover etc.
• Mediation sevices. Connection, transport and authorization
• Hardware based solutions