Sun Web Services Strategy

1. What type of growth do you project for web services? What are the main barriers to adoption?

Given the total estimate market size of Web services, which is approximately $34 billion, including software, services, and hardware, high growth opportunity is underway to deploy this technology. However, the growth may not be achieved unless the following challenges are resolved:

- Standardization: competition to establish standards between Microsoft and IBM against Sun delayed the development of Web services and interoperability. As a developer of Java, Sun plays a critical role in establishing Web services, however, the company failed to exert stronger leadership to collaborate with MS and IBM in creating a single reliable standard.

- Security: lack of security, transaction reliability, and the consistency of business profess flows resulted in enterprises to withdraw from adopting Web services technology.

Consequently, proliferation of Web services was limited in year 2002. However, today, the technology is widely accepted by many enterprises. Moreover, the need for adopting Service Oriented Architecture has enhanced to deploy Web services further.

2. Relative to .NET, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the shared platform from Java camp?

Advantages:

- Open source: Any members can improve the platform while nobody could gain a competitive edge by keeping proprietary technology within them. By contract, only MS can improve its Windows operating system.

- Java’s openness gained market’s favor among enterprises because it provided corporations with switching options by spurring venders’ innovation

- The Java camp uses open, standard languages such as Java, XML and SOAP

Disadvantages:

- Time to market: it takes 12 to 18 months agree on a Java standard. Venders can’t that long to release new products

- Difficult to tightly integrate the architecture due to lack of degree of close collaboration among engineers from divers organizations

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