[provision] Gartner's note on "Web Services Provisioning"

["Ranthidevan, Anand" <aranthidevan@jamcracker.com>]

Gartner has a recent cluster on "Charting Web Services Opportunities"
and notes Web Services Provisioning as a distinct area:

See
http://www3.gartner.com/1_researchanalysis/focus_areas/ipws/ipws022202/i
pws022202.jsp

The note is on the article titled "Key Entry Points into Web Services
Markets".

Excerpt:

Web Services Provisioning

Web services provide a new opportunity for companies, and even
individuals, to become suppliers of business services internally and
over the Web. Recognizing this, Gartner has developed an implementation
model called the "service station," which leverages some of the best
features of Web services and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, with the
goal of opening up the path to tighter collaboration and more
cost-effective document sharing. The advent of Web services and the
interest in P2P models make the service station concept particularly
timely for strategic and opportunistic applications (see "The Service
Station: A P2P Web Services Usage Model," COM-15-0042).

Former application service providers (ASPs) will seek out this market to
build a new business model. Other players will include traditional
service providers, such as Internet service providers (ISPs) and
telecoms. New players in this market will come from commodity service
Web services (e.g., those handling hotel reservations, package shipping
and banking services), which will trigger new classes of business
opportunity.

In addition, former applications vendors (e.g., SAP and PeopleSoft) will
provide an increasing amount of their applications functionality in a
service-based model. Finally, structuring Web services so that they can
be located with relative ease or for aggregators to gather them, based
on quality and category, will create business opportunities for
enterprises to redefine and sell themselves as Web services.

Market Opportunity: Enterprises should explore the possibility that Web
services will catalyze a lucrative business opportunity where service
provision expertise and quality of service, rather than technology
expertise, will define winners and losers.

Representative Vendors: ISPs, application vendors and ASPs