According to Infravio, the leading provider of Web Services software and solutions, 2005 will witness the evolution of Web Services and service oriented architecture (SOA) into three distinct areas, operations management, runtime management, and asset management. However, the company says only WS/SOA asset management is worth perusing. "It's the only niche with long term viability and the only niche that represents a brand new IT opportunity," a release from the company noted.

Infravio has little faith in operations and runtime management because these areas already have established competitors in the rest of the IT world. It is believed that WS/SOA operations management and runtime management will soon be dominated by veteran ISVs that have proven enterprise credentials. It is anticipated that users looking for WS/SOA operations management are going to turn to the established ESM vendors such as BMC and NetIQ. Similarly, Cisco, BEA, Microsoft, and the other big infrastructure players are going to own the broker space because that?s who users trust with their runtime environment, Infravio foresees.

What makes asset management such fertile ground, is the lack of established counterparts.

According to Infravio, "asset management is a wide open field, with no established counterpart in the rest of the IT world. It's a new enterprise challenge. And the business services registries that perform WS/SOA asset management are a new management category."

Infravio has already taken heed of some its predictions. By the end of the first quarter, the company will ship products based on a 2partnership with NetIQ. With Infravio's operations management technology embedded within NetIQ's AppManager Suite, IT administrators will be able to manage Web Services through the same AppManager console they already use for end-to-end management of mission critical Windows, Linux and UNIX environments.

As a result, NetIQ emerges as the vendor of choice for Web Service performance and availability management and becomes a major competitor to independent vendors like Actional and AmberPoint.