News
Plenty of Room for IT in Web Services
Special Report from TechMentor: Web services and .NET has many IT managers and systems administrators wondering how Web services will affect their jobs and responsibilities.
- By Scott Bekker
- 04/04/2002
(Orlando, Florida) A lot of the early attention on Web services
and Microsoft's .NET initiative has necessarily focused on developers.
But many IT managers and systems administrators are curious about how
Web services will affect their jobs and responsibilities.
Ace Swerling, a consultant with the Microsoft-Accenture joint services
venture Avanade, predicted how things will play out for IT during a keynote
at a conference for Microsoft Certified Professionals in Orlando, Fla.
The upshot: People who can keep servers and networks running will be
just as necessary in a distributed Web services future, and a lot of the
Web services-related projects will help reduce enterprise application
integration headaches.
Swerling, who worked for three years as a senior consultant with Microsoft
Consulting Services, works on large-scale implementations of Microsoft
technologies at Avanade.
 |
| Avanade consultant Ace Swerling explains the impact
of Web services and .NET to attendees at MCP TechMentor. |
Swerling believes Web services represent a fundamental change that will
transform business, but he says some of the early buzz is overblown. One
misconception: That infrastructure will disappear as software turns into
services hosted out in the ether.
"The application development guys are saying the infrastructure is going
to go away. And I'm saying, no, I'm going to have a job for a really long
time," Swerling says.
That assessment applies to IT managers and system administrators as well
as systems integrators like Swerling, he says.
 |
| Swerling: "Not only are most of developers unqualified
to [build those from scratch into their applications], but they don't
want to do it." |
"I think there's always going to be a need for people to run data systems.
We're always going to need to make sure that they're available, that they're
clustered, all of that stuff," says Swerling, adding "whether that happens
in the future within companies or in an outsourced hosting environment."
IT professionals will be needed to create security and authentication
infrastructures that support the Web services-based applications that
developers build.
"In terms of account and authentication, we have to be able to deal with
these kinds of things. Not only are most of those [developers] unqualified
to [build those from scratch into their applications], but they don't
want to do it," Swerling says.
In the near term, the biggest cost savings from Web services will come
as a replacement for Enterprise Data Integration (EDI) projects. "The
big benefit here is to reduce the enterprise application integration cost
compared to EDI," Swerling says. That will happen as applications swap
data and call functions through Web services industry standards such as
XML and SOAP.
Companies that deploy well-designed Windows 2000 Active Directory networks
should be able to redeploy administrators and staff to work on Web services-related
infrastructure issues without hiring new staff, Swerling said.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.