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By Tony Hallett, 19 January 2004 12:10

NEWS Over half of large UK companies have adopted web services, with the technology increasingly being used for mission-critical projects, says new research.

Web services refers to software building blocks that can work together across the internet by using common standards, most notably XML. The idea is to make integration and end-to-end processes easier - but the web services market hasn't taken off overnight.

In a survey of 113 senior IT decision-makers commissioned by webMethods, 54 per cent said they are using web services. Of those, 6 per cent said they are being used for mission-critical projects, 24 per cent for those categorised as 'major', 10 per cent for 'minor' and 14 per cent for 'pilot' projects.

The survey highlights the growth of web services. The approach has long been on CIO and IT manager radar screens but live rollouts - beyond the intranet and into internet and extranet environments - have been less apparent.

The research found encouraging partner or customer self-service as the main reason for using web services, cited by 28 per cent of users. Other answers included: use of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to allow different systems to interoperate (13 per cent), to use reusable integration technology (7 per cent) and the ability to perform integration tasks quickly (6 per cent).

The main barrier to adoption among the 46 per cent making up the laggards was an inability to quantify return on investment (ROI), cited by 42 per cent of them.