Web Services Is Lessening The Need For EAI

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November 02, 2004 (5:08 PM EST)

By TechWeb Technology News

Web services, a standards-based technology used to tie applications, is diminishing the need for older proprietary technologies, a developers survey released Tuesday showed.

In an October survey of more than 400 developers, Evans Data Corp. found that 4 in 10 believed web services is either "absolutely" or "probably" diminishing the need for enterprise application integration technologies.

Only 10 percent of the respondents believed web services "absolutely" does not diminish the need for EAI, which often requires the building of an entire middleware layer to move data between applications running on different platforms.

In addition, 6 in 10 web services developers said they believe the technology can be implemented at significantly or somewhat lower costs.

"With the standardization that web services brings, applications can be linked with fewer lines of code, and often within a much shorter timeframe," Evans analyst Joe McKendrick, said in a statement. "The savings potential of web services is enormous."

In other findings, Evans found that the top three services being developed with web services technologies were business process management; data management, cleansing and synchronization tools; and e-commerce applications.

Seventeen percent of the respondents said they were using third-party consultants to help with web services projects, and another 14 percent said they planned to use them in the next year. The areas that required outside help included security, design and development, and interfacing to legacy systems. The latter was rated as the biggest obstacle to web services by 20 percent of the respondents, compared with 8 percent a year ago.

Budgets for web services development were growing, the survey found. By next year, 1 in 5 developers expected to be devoting most of their IT budgets to the emerging technology.