Web services are '10 years away'

It will take 10 years for web services to become as reliable and commonplace as other services such as the telephone or power supply.

According to Martin Butler, managing director of the Butler Group, web services, built intelligently and in real-time based on WSDL (web services description language) and SOAP (simple object access protocol), will not be a reality before 2012.

Butler said: "The idea that an application will look for a published service, based on UDDI (universal description, discovery, and integration), that performs a particular function on-the-fly, that it will determine the call interface and the exact nature of the services offered, bind, execute and then detach when finished is at least 10 years in the future."

There is even worse news for corporates looking to integrate these web services into their business processes. Butler predicts it will be 20 years before this happens.

"The dream being sold by the vendors today is not a reality. It will not happen for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fragmentation of standards and the difficulty in constructing systems that do that sort of thing," he explained.

Marty Robins, senior director of Sun Microsystem's Sun One web services strategy, agreed but claimed many companies are using some of the web services standards to boost existing B2B offerings.

"It is safe to say that we as vendors probably need a finer definition of web services. We need to clarify between the simple and the complex. There are lots of companies around already using XML to extend access to their data and this is really the first step on the path to more complex web services," he said.

However, Mark Greatorex, director of .Net at Microsoft, claimed many companies are still trialling web services within the IT department.

"Over the next 12 months you'll hear a lot about companies trying it internally and learning about how to extend this to the rest of the organisations," he said.

The technology being proposed today is just the foundation, explained Butler.

"It's the initial architecture on which to add security, performance and some form of service agreement and liability clause - the mundane things that don't grab headlines but make web services work. That's why we've given it a timescale of 10 to 20 years before large corporates use it in an every day manner."