Security Concerns Top List of Potential Obstacles to Enterprise Web Services Adoption

SANTA CRUZ, CA, June 18, 2002 - Web services, the IT application development model championed aggressively by the technology industry’s global giants, has been taken to heart at large customer organizations, a new Evans Data Corp. survey finds.

The Summer 2002 Enterprise Development Management Issues Survey, released this week, reports strong endorsement among IT development managers of modular applications designed to interoperate across the Web with other Internet applications.

According to the new study, based on in-depth interviews with more than 400 IT executives, Web services are being adopted almost universally within the enterprise.

The survey, conducted among development managers at organizations with more than 1,000 employees, explores Web services, security, mobile & wireless development, Linux & open source software, platform & operating system migrations, planned projects & developer programs, technology adoption, developer tools, remote development & outsourcing and more.

The survey found that 98% of IT managers will be developing Web services-enabled applications within two years and 75% are incorporating some level of Web services functionality into applications today. Almost a third of respondents said Web services will impact between a quarter and half of all enterprise applications.

While Web services have been heavily promoted as a means to develop business-to-business interoperability, the survey found support for internal enterprise applications is the most prevalent area of deployment. At this time, just over 15% of respondents indicate that a majority of their Web services deployments will support business-to-business applications. More than one out of five enterprise developers say that a majority of their Web services deployments will support internal enterprise applications.

Since Web services relies heavily on the Internet and dealing with companies or partners outside the protection of the firewall, enterprise development managers are greatly concerned with security and authentication issues. Close to half identified security as the top potential obstacle to the Web services model – about the same as in the last development manager survey six months ago.

The new report also found:

• Big Iron is back. The percentage of mainframe sites expecting to increase their usage now surpasses those expecting to scale back. About 29% of companies with mainframes expect to increase their usage over the next two years – up from 22% of mainframe sites in the last survey.
• Development managers are focusing on a variety of strategies to guard applications and data against unauthorized access or data theft. Digital signature technologies have considerable support as the best method of authenticating end-users on a network. Biometrics – primarily the use of fingerprint readers, but also other technologies such as facial recognition systems – have support among almost a third of enterprise developers as a means to authenticate end-users.

The Enterprise Development Management Issues Survey is published every six months and focused on development management at large organizations. The survey provides numerous cross tabs of data against developer segment and industry to enable an up close understanding of specific development areas. Evans Data clients are also given the opportunity to provide input to future surveys and to have additional cross tabs created to respond to specific inquiries.

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans' syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.

Copyright 2007 Evans Data Corporation. All other company names, products and services mentioned in this document are the trademarks and property of their respective owners.

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