Will Web Services Change Web Hosting

By Doug Kaye

October 25, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The high-end web-hosting business is cooling off, but web services are on fire. What’s going to happen when they meet? I recently spoke to some of the movers and shakers of the web-hosting world, and asked them how they were anticipating the arrival of web services.

Most web-hosting vendors agree that web services will bring them more business. After all, they say, anything that generates more Internet traffic requires more servers; and more servers require more data-center space and management. But the impact of web services will likely vary by industry segment.

The most consistently enthusiastic proponents of web services are the content-delivery networks (CDNs), perhaps because they’ve also been the hardest-hit sector since the burst of the dot-com bubble. For instance, Bob Hammond, CTO of Mirror Image Internet, says his company is preparing for web services by developing an Application Delivery Network (AND), which will support the deployment of web services at the edge of the Internet along with a number of value-added services.

Akamai, a Mirror Image competitor, has announced a beta-version edge-application service based on the Tomcat open-source Java application server, according to Richard Bell, Akamai’s Director of Product Development. Bell said this would be followed by deployment of IBM’s webSphere application server by the end of the fourth quarter, and by Microsoft’s .NET server early in 2003.

Traditional web-hosting vendors are also looking to web services to help expand their businesses. Dave Asprey, Director of Strategy at Exodus, expects a huge impact from web services, partly through leveraging of what he calls Exodus’ “community of companies.” With major customers such as Covisint and Nordstrom, and web services working their way into the supply chain, Asprey believes there will be an increase of inter-customer traffic within or between his company’s data centers. He also believes that as web services bring a shift to server-to-server communications, more companies will need Exodus’ value-added services such as security and management.

David Greene, Exodus’ VP of Market Solutions, sees, “a fundamental trend of enterprise applications towards web-based Internet infrastructure. And as that happens, all the values of web hosting become applicable to a whole new set of applications.” He says customers have already learned that Internet data centers are more secure than customers’ own facilities, and as web services increase the volume of commerce over the Internet, customers will once again turn to outsourcing. On the other hand, Greene says, “The next wave, web-services business, hasn’t taken off yet.” Most web-hosting companies are moving into web services far more slowly than the CDNs.

With involvement in virtually every aspect of web hosting and web services, IBM Global Services has big visions for integrating the two. Dev Mukherjee, VP of Strategy for E-Business Hosting and E-Business On Demand, thinks web services will alter the definition of hosting. Instead of just power-pipe-and-ping, web services will allow service providers to enter the world of utility computing by becoming aggregators of business functions. For example, he suggested a customer could begin with an intranet starter kit, based on web-service components. At some future time, “they’ll call up the service provider and say, ‘Can you switch on the e-procurement function for me?’” Mukherjee believes a service provider’s ability to integrate multiple web services and its support for management, security, billing and instant scalability will drive customers to the outsourced utility model.

At the other end of the spectrum, managed-service providers (MSPs) are moving more slowly. In Sil Rhee, Chief Tactician and Co-Founder of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), says he doesn’t see much web-services deployment yet, and points out that Microsoft’s .NET server hasn’t even shipped. “We’re still in the infancy stage of adoption,” he says. MSPs are typically followers rather than leaders of technology. “We take on solutions and embrace them when they become best practices or best-of-breed. I still need to wait and see who will come out with the best UDDI implementation before we can say Opsware has full support capabilities around UDDI. We’re still two iterations away from that given that most products are still in beta.”

One area in which even conservative shops are looking at web services, however, is for internal use. Exodus’ Asprey says his company is already using web services to manage its customers’ web sites and to support service-level management (SLM).

Todd Johnson, President of ASP Jamcracker, says, “We’ll deliver a significant number of technology components that will be built as web services this year.” Johnson used provisioning APIs as an example of early use of web services.

While the vendors at different ends of the web-hosting spectrum are moving to adopt web services at different rates, there’s one thing they all agree on: web services are for real, and they’re coming.