Web services bring a significant opportunity for innovation and leadership The two disruptive technologies that currently fascinate me and so consume endless hours of company debate and “bar napkin” designs are Web services and instant messaging. Both of these technologies will no doubt fit my definition of a good technology, delivering on their respective visions, but they will do it for different reasons. Instant messaging will change the way the next generation of knowledge workers interacts with one another, with customers, and with applications. This disruption will be one of social and organizational impact; it will not be a technology revolution. Web services, on the other hand, will rock the technology industry like the Netscape browser did in the 1990s. Web services will redefine many of the rules in the software industry and will bring many early challenges, including issues relating to software distribution and licensing, trust relationships, Web services’ role in mission-critical computing, SLAs (service-level agreements) for end-to-end business processes, and performance and transaction processing, especially roll back. I also believe that we will discover some issues as we all race to implement Web services in the real-world enterprise. The upside to this kind of challenge is that it almost always brings a significant opportunity for innovation and leadership. The promise to those of us trying to develop and deploy industrywide portals or applications that span multiple enterprises is clearly around the notion of true integration. Both Web services and XML provide the perfect engine for integration in the real world of the heterogeneous enterprise that provides for one of everything. When you extend this model to enterprise-to-enterprise computing, it is potentially even more powerful in any large industry attempting to wire together multiple tiers of a supply chain. Envision an industry portal, or even an enterprise portal, with common services such as security, registration, and directory; a robust deterministic communication between the trading partners; and certified Web services all built on published industry standards. This vision will create the ability for the enterprise to extend and enhance the legacy application base (legacy defined as anything running today) beyond the four walls of the enterprise. Or in the inverse scenario, combine Web services with your EAI (enterprise application integration) strategy and use the trusted Web services found in your company directory to expose enterprise applications. Either scenario arms the technology organization with the tools needed to keep pace with the business. The additional advantage to the Web services model is that it also protects the existing technology investments, giving the enterprise the capability of enabling new business processes for a fraction of the replacement or renewal cost. Some existing technology players will thrive in the world of Web services and others simply just won’t get it. In the end, several new technology companies should emerge and the entire industry should see what we have come to expect from technology: the step function in productivity, which is a significant increase in productivity that then levels off and allows for the next innovation that raises productivity again. Are you listening, Mr. Greenspan? Software Development