Innovation continues to take place in small companies. In today's over exposed world of instant information, web services and IT in general, it becomes difficult to sort through the background noise of what is published today to find new products and services. Especially from new or small startup companies. They just do not get the press.
I just read a really interesting article about a small company that has been able to monetize web services and do quite well at it. Google, Yahoo!, EBay, Amazon all have web services in place however are still trying to make it a profitable business. The article was published in the March 13, 2006 issue of Information Week entitled "Web Services By the Dozen".
The small company is called StrikeIron and it provides an online marketplace for web services for general use. StrikeIron acts as sort of a broker for organizations to search for web services and establish deals to consume them using StrikeIron in similar business model that makes Amazon and EBay successful. They are like this "80-pound gorilla" that dominates a field with few competitors.
In my local area, I had the opportunity recently to talk with a few small startup companies (micro companies) that are just as innovative. They are touting that web services and their agility (as in nimble) are the technologies that will allow them to distinguish their product and services to be ultra competetive and grow in the future. After reading about StrikeIron I think the creativity and innovation that will be driving the future of IT are the small companies. Google recently purchased Writely which was yet another small company providing their AJAX based web services that allows you use your browser for editing word processing documents in MS-Word, RTF, OpenOffice formats.
The only threat these micro companies have is their managing their own growth and being acquired too soon (i.e. by Google or others) while they are still half baked. We live in yet another exciting period where innovation is driving new ideas and most of these innovations are coming from the small companies.
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Speaking of SOA and modeling, in the most recent InfoWorld 3/13/2006 they have a good set of articles about SOA Lessons Learned. Modeling is mentioned quite often... "SOA planning: Sizing up business processes".
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