Although all the initiatives are still relatively young, IBM and Microsoft are eager to be the top Web services heavyweights. Each is heavily touting its offerings to companies interested in moving further toward e-commerce integration.

In this knock-down skirmish, is either company emerging as the clear leader? The answer appears to be that IBM is winning, but some believe there is room for both companies.

Bigger Big Blue

Not surprisingly, IBM is certain that WebSphere ranks above Microsoft's .NET in the contest between them. And IBM has some independent confirmation to back its claim.

For example, a Giga Information Group survey noted that over the past year there has been a dramatic increase in the perception of IBM WebSphere as a Web services platform, primarily at the expense of Microsoft, with 33 percent of respondents choosing IBM and 22 percent picking Microsoft.

The report also noted that the IBM percentage, when combined with other vendors, means that 78 percent of the audience places some other solution ahead of Microsoft. "This audience must certainly have heard Microsoft's pitch for .NET at some stage, so the result is still very significant," the report stated.

One possible reason for companies choosing tools other than Microsoft's, said the report, is that while most vendors shipped some form of Web services support in 2001, Microsoft's enterprise-level Web services offerings did not actually arrive in the market until early 2002, except for last year's early release of Visual Studio.NET.

Playing Nice

IBM feels that it can continue to outpace .NET, in part, because WebSphere offers wide interoperability with other software and systems, while Microsoft's framework has developed a reputation for being hard to integrate with other companies' software.

"With WebSphere, we're focused on a multiplatform strategy," Stefan Van Overtveldt, WebSphere's director of technical marketing, told NewsFactor. "We have it running on Windows servers, on different flavors of Unix, and on different operating systems," he said.

"We're really looking at the ability to deploy Web services applications with a common infrastructure ."

Van Overtvelt said that IBM has had Web services products for over a year, which he called a "stark contrast" to Microsoft's offerings.

The amount of time that WebSphere has been in the market has allowed IBM to gain a foothold in the market and spin out a multitude of Web service products. (continued...)

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