The Distributor vs. the Innovator

The confrontation between Hewlett-Packard and Dell is more than a particularly lively bout of competition in the $106 billion-a-year printing industry. It is a clash - and an intriguing test case - of two different models of innovation and corporate strategy.

ZapThink: Web Services Management Market Set To Expand Dramatically; Growth Tempered by Fragmentation of Market Leading to Dominance by Incumbent Vendors

XMLMania's commentary on a new report titled "Web Services Management: The Maturation of a Transitional Market" by ZapThink:

Web Services Management, an emerging set of capabilities for handling the runtime requirements of emerging Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), is set for rapid growth, concludes ZapThink's latest report, "Web Services Management: The Maturation of a Transitional Market," released today. The short-term trend in the Web Services management market is primarily one of fragmentation, as the vendors in the space focus on solving various customer problems. However, in the long-term, the market will consolidate as customers look to their current vendors to provide coordinated frameworks that offer not just management capabilities, but all the components needed to build, run, and manage SOAs.
"Companies are coming to understand that Web Services Management is critical for both the operation of Web Services as well as SOAs," said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. "As a result, vendors in this space are finding customer traction by offering a range of different capabilities, from monitoring, to SOA enablement, to metadata management."

ZapThink's report discusses the strategies of all the vendors in the space, and lays out a detailed map of how the Web Services management market will continue to transform as it matures. The report also provides clear advice and direction to companies looking to understand and take advantage of the Web Services management products that are currently available.

Other key findings of the report include:

• The total Web Services Management market will reach $30.4 billion by 2010, where 85% of that market will be represented by incumbent System Management vendors who have Service-enabled their products.
  
• The opportunities for new entrants in the Web Services Management (WSM) market will peak in 2004-2005, and drop off rapidly thereafter as incumbents move to consolidate the market.
  There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity of at most two years for new entrants in the WSM space to achieve sufficient customer traction to establish themselves as successful WSM vendors.
  
• The WSM market is especially cutthroat, as vendors seek to achieve sufficient traction in advance of the dominance of the incumbent players. This market for new entrant WSM vendors will peak at $350 million in 2006, and then gradually be subsumed into the incumbent System Management and SOA markets.

The reality behind the politics

Out of all the vitriol surrounding the offshore-labor question, remarkably few concrete suggestions have emerged to address this controversial trend.

In stripping away the hype, this CNET News.com special series examines the social, economic and political dimensions of offshoring and offers tangible steps that can be taken for the U.S. industry to maintain its historical lead in high technology. The report includes a poll of nearly 500 key industry decision makers, conducted jointly with Harris Interactive, the research firm that created The Harris Poll. Continue Reading...