Summit Strategies Says IBM Rules Web Services

In a recent report on Web services, Summit Strategies concludes that IBM is the leading Java-based vendor of Web services-enabled tools and infrastructure.

“IBM is second to none in its enthusiasm for XML-based Web services,” said the Boston-based Summit Strategies.
Web services refers to an open standards-based approach to building and integrating applications, regardless of the computing platforms and programming languages in which the software was developed.

The report, titled IBM Takes an End-to-End Approach to Web Services, points to IBM’s strength in Web services-enabled middleware and development tools and its pioneering role in developing Web services standards.

The report notes IBM’s significant role in developing core Web services standards and the company’s ability to transfer its knowledge to products, stating, “IBM is not only shaping the direction of Web services evolution, but is also gaining deep technical understanding that it can transfer to its own products and services… These efforts are likely to pay big dividends to IBM when it comes to building products that offer the best compliance with evolving Web services standards.”

The Summit Strategies report also states that IBM’s WebSphere Studio development tools holds a major advantage over Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET: “The IBM tools, like IBM’s full range of middleware, is firmly ensconced in the Java world.” IBM’s WebSphere Studio is a set of development tools that can be used to create Web services. IBM shipped the Web services version of WebSphere Application Server in mid-2001. Summit Strategies calls WebSphere Studio the industry’s first production-ready infrastructure software to deliver Web services functionality.

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