What's in store for Web services in 2005?

Web services have become hot favorite of all developers over the past few years. New tools for development of services have come up, each one with better features, newer standards are being introduced and industry bigwigs like Microsoft, Sun, IBM, BEA, Borland etc. are working to deliver in this area. What's in store for Web services in 2005? Here is a compiled list of predictions from Web services analysts.

Web services shall be outsourced, India being a favorite destination

According to Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink, since Indian enterprises are adopting and implementing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in a very big way, they will be the next things to be outsourced from the Indian sub-continent.

Business services will be made available for enterprises irrespective of its location of actual existence and companies will be able to 'mix and match' services from different places and plug them into their existing architectures. As Indian companies are already far ahead in adoption of Web services as compared to the West, Bloomberg suggests an advantage for them, as they will be the 'natural beneficiaries of the coming outsourcing boom in Web services,' he says.

Web services consulting practices to grow

With SOA entering the mainstream and more and more enterprises wanting to implement a service oriented architecture, Web services consulting practices are ready to pick up.

Organizations like Accenture, EDS and Booze Allen Hamilton that specialize in both IT and business consulting will start or grow their SOA practices.

Simplified Web services

Web services, which were meant to be simple have evolved over the years and in the process have moved from being simple to rather complex solutions. With a variety of sometime conflicting standards and technologies they have lost the initial idea of being simple.

However, 2005 brings hope with it, and promises 'simple' Web services, says Stephen O'Grady, senior analyst with RedMonk. Web services will be built using simple protocols like HTTP making it easier for developers.

"The overhead in getting involved with Web services this way is much less," he informed.

More trends

Analysts feel that release of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 will help developers create professional Web services with .NET. This will further boost up their adoption amongst enterprises. Better tools for building Web services will also spur the adoption of Web services.

Also forecasted is an increase in internal adoption of Web services, internal applications will be linked with each other through Web services.

The world of Web services will also see 'consolidation,' which is a pertinent need currently as the number of operators is on a rapid rise.