April 10, 2003 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web services, the somewhat enigmatic computing concept that always appears on the brink of widespread adoption, now appears ready for serious uptake in Europe.
Popularly defined as a standardized way to integrate applications over the Internet in order to better facilitate things like B2B transactions, Web services have garnered headlines for some time now. However, it has been only recently that their practical use has become feasible, leading to serious consideration of adopting them by larger companies. A recent study from research firm IDC confirmed this sentiment, and indicated European organizations were beginning to realize the benefits that Web services technology can provide.
"IDC's latest survey data suggest that European organizations have started to recognize the potential benefits of Web services technology," a March 2003 brief from the firm states. What's more, in the firm's survey of businesses, the majority of European respondents identified Web services as a "must have" technology in 2003.
The Yankee Group, another research firm, released a report last summer that elicited similar sentiments, predicting that Web services would remain inside high-end firms for the time being but that they were gradually "creeping" into the mainstream both in Europe and worldwide. Financial services and telecom operators, the Group said, were expected to be Europe's early adopters of most e-business technologies, and expected these firms to fully leverage Web services by the end of 2004 as a result. Other sectors, such as retail and manufacturing were expected to follow by the end of 2005, the firm said.
One company preparing to try and take advantage of this emerging market in Europe is Systinet Corporation, a U.S.-based supplier of Web services infrastructure software. Earlier this month, the company announced it would expand into the UK and Germany to "meet increasing European demand for its Web services," according to the firm.
The company says several UK customers already use Systinet's WASP (Web Applications and Services Platform) product range, including JP Morgan, T-Mobile and Retail Decisions. The company's WASP product range includes a development environment, a server for Java and C/C++ and WASP UDDI, a secure registry implementation geared toward private applications that and features up-to-date standards support.
"Over the last year we've seen accelerating interest in our Web services solutions in Europe," CEO Roman Stanek said in a recent release. Stanek founded well-known software development firm NetBeans, a Java enterprise company, before selling it to Sun in 1999. "We have plans for aggressive expansion in Europe and we are actively looking to develop our channel in the UK to raise our profile in this rapidly growing market."
One potential problem facing companies like Systinet will likely be Europe's privacy regulations, which tend to be more stringent. While the European Union has taken steps to establish privacy regulations that deal with the concept of Web services, the United States has done little to stay up-to-date with the EU's requirements. In his bookLoosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services, IT consultant Doug Kaye outlines the issue: "The European Union has adopted generally stricter privacy laws than exist in other regions," he writes. "Even if your company is located outside of the EU, you may be obligated to comply with its regulations if you obtain Web services from EU countries (or vice versa)."
Though Web services is a technical computing concept that is global in nature, another potential issue may be language, both in the spoken sense, as Europe is multi-lingual, and from a technical perspective, as a set of well-defined semantics that provide standardized procedures and data storage methods has yet to be fully implemented. To help further promote the need to bring semantics to Web services and to ensure businesses are aware that Web services have moved beyond hype and are now an important technological reality, the World Wide Web Consortium, which is responsible for developing Web standards, is holding various seminars throughout Europe. These seminars will promote improving the organization of data globally for Web-based communication as a whole and for Web services. "We haven't done a good enough job as we would like explaining what we're trying to do with the semantic Web," Eric Miller, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead, recently told CNET. "It's not rocket science, but a set of simple enabling technologies for data integration on the Web."
With the advent of Web services worldwide, many Web hosts are already asking: how will this affect the Web hosting industry? The answer is that regardless of geographic location, Web services will have an overall, long-lasting effect on hosts. In a column late last year, Kaye detailed several ways in which hosts were planning to leverage Web services when they finally arrived, including via delivery networks and shifts in how various pieces of equipment, i.e. servces, communicate with each other. When Web services do arrive in popular form, Web hosting firms will likely be among the first to take advantage of it, and Europe will likely serve as an important staging ground.
