CRN: What needs to happen next to take Web services to a higher level of usage?
MOORE: The technology that is really needed is model-driven development, which would allow all this to be much more practical and economical. To a certain degree, we're getting closer to the world where programmers build services and business experts build business processing. The kinds of tools that are used to build services are complicated, sophisticated, modeling tools. The kind of tools that a business process expert could use to model a business process is not one of those. The tool that those people need is very different from the tool that a programmer would use.
CRN: How will these change the way people interact with applications?
XMOORE: I think one of the insights that drives the computer industry today, whether we realize it or not, is that biology has tried a lot of different things and come up with certain things that work. The second half of this decade will be driven by anthropology-sociology technology. It is not a technical question anymore about computers. Technically they work, more or less. The question is how do you use them to make people happier, more effective and more productive. That's really an issue of how do you socialize people on computers.
For example, a travel agent might not know how the banking system works but he can ask for payment. That is how software is evolving. With Web services we finally have an architecture to make software systems work like biological or ecological systems. That is more realistic and we already know it works.
CRN: What should solution providers take away from all this?
MOORE: If you're a partner and you want your customers to really continue to see value in staying with you, then you have to provide a value application. Partners need to provide real domain expertise and real innovation. And more and more customers will look for partners to bring in innovation and teach them how to adopt new practices. One of the benefits of using a partner, for systems integration, for example, is there are things that you have to learn once and then you know them forever. If a partner can amortize those costs across multiple customers, all of those customers benefit.
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