Web services are no silver bullet

John Stahl recently gave me some heat for my assertion that Elgg should be built on top of Drupal.

I think that the next few years are going to bring tremendous challenges for applications that do not easily communicate with other applications that are “outside their platform” i.e are written using a different language/framework, run on a different server, etc....The days of monolithic application stacks that try to do everything are fading fast. A new “network-centric” software ecosystem is starting to bloom.

This is wishful thinking. I've spent much of the past few years puzzling over this exact question. While I am personally very much a proponent of web standards and web services I am pessimistic as to how much immediate impact they will have in the evolving marketplace of non-profit/ngo & advocay web technology services.

Backstory

I didn't always think this way. If you told me a year and a half ago that I would be hawking CivicSpace/Drupal as the über-platform that could meet virtually every need of any size organization I would have told you you were nuts....

After the Dean campaign ended and we started work on CivicSpace our assumptions were:

• Drupal wouldn't be able to "scale" to meet the needs of large organizations
• We would not be able to develop the platform quick enough to meet all the core needs of organizations any time soon
• We would integrate third party service providers to fill the functionality gap organizations required

Then some interesting and unexpected things happened:

• It turned out Drupal could scale
• CiviCRM showed up and filled the functionality gap
• Lots of vendors established quickly growing businesses servicing the technology. The top half dozen firms now employ ~ 50 people between them and each are looking to hire.

This reshaped my thinking on the future of the web-technology marketplace quite a bit. We have an immediate opportunity to commodify the core web-technology organizations need to a single integrated and scalable open-source application stack and this is a very good thing for the marketplace. Over the next few years I believe the advantages afforded by this stack of technology (CS/Drupal/CiviCRM) will far outweigh the benifits realized by the integration of applications accross web-services in terms of costs saved and passed on to technology owners and innovations in technology and services.

Integration accross web-services and web-standards is relatively costly

• Web applications that are not built from the ground up to be integrated will never play nicely with one another. Let me repeat: if an open-source application is not built to be integrated with your web-application it probably isn't worth the effort to try to integrate it. This renders 95%+ of open-source web applications useless for those looking to leverage the work of other communities.
• If an application has a strong API it is still tricky to integrate. Even integrating with CiviCRM, an application that was built from the ground up to interface with CMS's and shares the same web-app environment as Drupal, it costs us 2-10X more to integrate with it than it does to integrate with a standard Drupal module.
• The most cutting edge private sector web-service and web-standards are not that advanced. We still don't have workable single sign-on solution, the cutting edge of semantic information interchange across the web is to embed it in XHTML, the hottest API's from SalesForce and Flickr haven't made much of a dent in the marketplace, and please don't get me started on the semantic web.

The market currently prefers a single integrated stack

• The majority of the market for web-technology services is owned by companies like Kintera, GetActive, and Convio that serve as one-stop shops for virtualy all an organizations web-technology needs. They have trained technology owners to make purchasing decisions under the assumption that they can cut a check to a single entity that will provide and support a complete "solution". I.E. there is not much point to shopping around for "best of breed" services to integrate, "just give us your business and all your technology problems will go away". This creates an uphill battle in the marketplace for vendors selling what will be seen as "piecemail" solutions created by amassing various web-technology providers products across web-services.
• There are huge unanswered usability concerns created by integrating together two different applications. This is espcially felt in functionality that is presented to an organization's contituents. Technology owners demand a seamless user-experience across their user facing application space (CMS, event tools, community tools, etc). In the future as more and more functionality moves out of the back-office and onto the web these concerns will only increase.
• Open-Source vendors eat costs when integrating third party services, mantaining integration, and licensing software, so they have economic incentives to service a complete pre-integrated stack of technology instead of servicing a suite of other providers products integrated over web-services.

The future of the application stack and the role I think webservices will play

I hope and expect that in the next year the CS/CiviCRM/Drupal stack will evolve to a point where it can compete head on with the likes of Kintera, GetActive, and Convio. When this happens open-source vendors will grow into full blown ASP's that will be able to sell services that undercut the current market of proprietary service providers and will be able to grow downmarket to smaller organizations and horizontally to for-profits with overlapping technology needs. With so many organizations and vendors based on the same codebase it will create a very efficient marketplace that supports application development and services. It will also open up the marketplace to anyone wishing to specialize their services towards a vertical, sell data services, or offer 'best of breed' applications. Since the majority of the vendors business will be based entirely around customization and hosting / support and not licensing fees to support product development and sales, they will be much more likely to partner with 3rd party providers or create specialized services themselves. Over time as web-standards evolve the third party services and specialization will grow increasingly important in the marketplace. And then we can all live happily ever after....