In reading a recent blog by Phil Wainewright highlighting the shift from enterprise applications to a service marketplace, I'm thinking that the writing is on the wall as to the inevitable shift.

Clearly, we are building service marketplaces now, and eventually these electronic marketplaces will provide most of our enterprise application functionality, delivered as remote Web services directly into enterprise and composite applications. Thus, we'll become more integrators than developers, mixing and matching remote application components to create enterprise applications custom fit for our needs, and no longer buying them from the usual suspects as multi million dollar and multi year projects.

What is telling about this trend is the types of players that are in this marketplace area now. While guys like StrikeIron have always been innovators in that space, selling/renting Web services over the Internet, we now have huge interest from guys like Amazon.com, eBay, and even Google. Furthermore, we’re seeing the larger service providers such as NetSuite and RightNow move quickly towards a Web services delivery infrastructure, and will eventually feed into the marketplaces.

This is nothing we have not talked about before with component programming and network computing, but now there seems to be some real money and interest beyond this notion…a better and less expensive way to deliver software functionality, basically through a SOA.

So, what does this all mean? We are moving, albeit slowly, to a time when key enterprise applications will be available at the click of a mouse, and they can be further tied together to form solutions, without much or any coding. Admittedly, we’re a ways away from that right now, but as we begin to solve the issues of security, performance governance, and accessibility, the market will begin the fall in place. In essence we're the Internet back in 1990…we know something is there; we just need to mature both the technology and ourselves to embrace it.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on September 27, 2005 02:03 PM