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.