Consumption of Web Services Will Greatly Increase Through 2009, IDC Finds

According to a recently released IDC study, the vendor community has shifted its primary attention from Web services creation to that of more robust consumption, with security, management, messaging and event processing, and the assembly of services into composite solutions as key focal points. Leading adopters are evolving proof-of-concept implementations into more robust deployments.

IDC estimates that $2.3 billion was spent worldwide on total Web services software in 2004, more than double the amount from the previous year. IDC expects spending to continue to increase dramatically over the next 5 years, reaching approximately $14.9 billion by 2009.

"Web services are expected to become even more pervasively used throughout the entire computing stack," said Sandra Rogers, program director for SOA, Web Services, and Integration research at IDC. "Web services have been and will continue to be primarily adopted by technology vendors that then proliferate the use and consumption of Web services via integrated solutions more so than enterprises addressing all the development and processing complexity directly."

Several trends influencing the level of spending for Web services software include:

• Continued vendor and product consolidation
  
  
• Price pressures and shifting license models
  
  
• Evolving maturity and skill sets in developing Web services and Services oriented architecture (SOA) solutions
  
  
• Major product version releases by key vendors influencing the landscape
  
  
• Complexity of and rate of adoption for various Web services standards
  
  
• Organizations balancing existing base of technologies until volume and levels of complexity force review and investment

The Web services development, deployment, and information access marketplace is currently the largest primary Web services software category, although Web services applications software will ultimately experience the highest growth through 2009. From a regional perspective, nearly two-thirds of the Web services software market is currently concentrated in North America, primarily in the United States, and the region will continue to host the majority of the market through 2009, according to IDC.

The IDC study: Worldwide Web Services Software 2005-2009.