Independent research has found that while Microsoft's .net
development tools are increasingly popular among IT companies
developing web services, a significant number of user companies are
building applications with rival technologies.
Jyoti Banerjee, chief executive at MyBusiness.net, which conducted
the research, said end-user businesses are backing both .net and
the rival Java 2 Enterprise Edition specification. In a survey of
114 heads of IT, MyBusiness.net found that 49% of user companies
are running .net technologies and 30% run IBM Websphere, BEA
Weblogic or J2EE.
Within the IT community, Banerjee said .net is proving a popular
choice due to the wide availability of development tools and
Microsoft skills. In particular, the software giant positions
Visual Studio .net, its development tool for building web services,
as the most appropriate platform for building Windows applications.
The popularity of .net is set to increase this year following the
launch of Windows 2003, which includes a copy of the .net framework
- a Microsoft architecture for building .net web services.
The common perception of web services is that they work well for
linking internal IT systems together in a consistent way. But
Banerjee's survey found the majority of user companies are building
a mixture of internal and external web services applications. "Web
services are being driven by the business and are being used to
connect to outside companies," he said.
According to Banerjee, businesses are looking to use web services
as another way to communicate and share information among suppliers
and customers. Forty three per cent of IT chiefs in user companies
said web services would be used to form the basis for e-enabled
business processes.
Today, applications such as supply chain integration usually
require suppliers to access internal systems through proprietary
interfaces. Banerjee said web services create a cost-effective way
to connect IT systems together.
"It is impossible to expect all businesses to run the same
applications - web services provide a set of standards to allow one
system to talk to another," he said.