NEWS BROWSER
Since the Spring of 1995, when IBM bought Lotus Development Corp., Big Blue has been on something of a software buying spree. In the past two years, IBM has added Transarc, Tivoli, and NetObjects to a multibillion-dollar cache that already includes the homegrown DB2, IMS, CICS, and other products. The bottom-line growth is impressive, but does all this software really add up to anything?
IBM hopes the end result is the next killer app. On April 15, IBM introduced
the "Network Computing Framework (NCF) for e-business." The new
architecture knits together Big Blue's software offerings to support an
emerging world of multitier, Internet-based electronic commerce. The splashy
announcement took place at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum and was broadcast
to other locations worldwide. In recent television advertisements, IBM has
even brought its message to the consumer with spots designed to reassure
the public about e-commerce security and performance.
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Beyond IBM's spellbinding visions of riches awaiting companies that follow its electric rainbow, the strongest impression left by the April 15 event was that IBM's disparate software groups are starting to pull together. The NCF brings DB2 Universal Server into a closer relationship with Lotus's groupware offerings (Notes and Domino), Transarc's Encina, and Tivoli's Tivoli Management Environment. In attendance along with John Thompson, head of IBM's Software Solutions Division, were several of his key lieutenants: Janet Perna, data management; Alfred Spector, Transarc transaction systems; and Mike Zisman, executive vice president of Lotus.
Perna and Spector were there to talk about two of the five Web servers IBM announced as part of the NCF: DB2 Universal Database and IBM Transaction Series. The DB2 emphasis was on its scalable Universal extender capabilities. In the customer pavilion, Yamaha Corp. and Vision Associates showed the Disklavier digital/acoustic player piano (see Yamaha's Web site at yamaha.com:8000:pianos.htm), which via the Internet can play music as recorded by famous artists. Vision Associates built this rather ghostly exhibition with DB2 as the data store and Lotus Notes as the Web server.
Another customer, Fidelity Investments, displayed its Personal Investing section (on the Web at personal.fidelity.com), an online service built with IBM subsidiary Transarc Corp.'s Encina and CICS (connected to a System/390 server). Along with scalability and availability, Fidelity's demonstration also showed the potential of a seamless multitier connection from Web to mainframe via IBM's two transaction services.
IBM left it to Lotus's Zisman to articulate the company's hard-boiled vision of a just-in-time world that will require the Internet industry to move from its current publish-and-subscribe model to a distributed application model. Zisman is hoping that this next generation will favor Lotus as the platform where commerce, collaboration, and content merge into the next killer app.
It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out what EMC and BMC have in common. But beyond their mutual fondness for the third and thirteenth letters of the alphabet, what could possibly compel a Massachusetts-based storage vendor to link up with a Texas-based software tools maker? Surf and turf? Baked beans and chili beans? Kennedy and Johnson?
The magnetic force turns out to be the data warehouse market, which almost by definition makes for strange bedfellows. On April 28, EMC introduced its new DataReach information sharing software and announced a significant alliance with BMC Software to develop more tools for "platform-independent information sharing." Held at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, the announcement also featured pleasantries from Jerry Held, Oracle Corp.'s Server Technologies senior vice president, and Art Lane, Hewlett-Packard's Enterprise Storage Solutions Division general manager. Oracle and HP are part of EMC's open systems triumvirate, which with BMC becomes a quartet.
According to Michael Ruettgers, EMC's president and CEO, EMC would like to build its software revenue from its current $76 million level to $200 million within the next year. DataReach addresses the time-consuming extract, load, and transfer process that as data volumes grow can grind a warehouse operation to a standstill. EMC says that DataReach performs these duties directly through EMC's Symmetrix storage devices, without involving the mainframe CPU or network. DataReach licenses cost $100,000 per server; BMC will provide support.
Given its prominence in the tools market, BMC has kept a surprisingly low profile in the data warehouse arena, instead concentrating attention on its Patrol client/server management suite. But with EMC as its ally, BMC's president and CEO Max Watson said the company is "aggressively poised to attack this extremely large opportunity."
"Objects on the Net," a new report issued by Forrester Research Inc. (Cambridge, Massachusetts), suggests that Fortune 1000 companies are abandoning the Object Management Group's (OMG's) Common Object Request Broker (CORBA) component architecture in favor of Sun's JavaBeans and Microsoft's ActiveX. According to a Forrester survey of such companies cited in the report, after six years (CORBA was specified by OMG in 1991), only 14 percent of respondents are using CORBA-based applications. The report suggests that a large majority of the survey respondents prefer applications based on JavaBeans or ActiveX because of their comparatively low cost of deployment. (Usage rates of these models among respondents were not given.)
If CORBA truly belongs on the "endangered standards" list,
a shift may be occurring away from proprietary, industrial-strength applications
typical of the CORBA model. If so, perhaps the increasing complexity of
enterprise architectures is fueling a need for simple, manageable components
that can be reused among applications and deployed on multiple tiers (see
"Post-Client/Server: An Interview with Robert Epstein," page 50).
In any event, the continuing emergence of middleware that supports all three
models should make the differences among them largely academic for the purposes
of the enterprise.
Some Impressive FiguresEstimated percentage of Year 2000 conversion capacity that offshore resources can provide: 5 percent (Source: Software Engineering Productivity Strategies) Percentage of wholesale distributors that will make the majority of their profits from information services and other post-sale support, by 2002: 60 percent (Source: Gartner Group) Profits earned by Microsoft in the third quarter of fiscal 1997, per day: Over $11 million |
Eager for products that will stem the tide of "IntranetWare killer" Windows NT, Novell is working hard to ensure that its Wolf Mountain clustering technology stays in friendly hands.
In April, engineers from Novell's Wolf Mountain project team bolted the company to launch a startup called the Wolf Mountain Group (WMG). Among the engineers, Jeff Merkey was chief architect of Wolf Mountain technology, spearheading the operating system. Darren Major made major contributions to its Unified File Object Directory. And Larry Angus, WMG's senior vice president of operations, served as operations manager for the project team.
Novell executives seem unflustered by the exodus. According to Michael Bryant, director of product marketing, "The departure was a little untimely, but we don't expect to see any significant effects on our clustering technology." He added that the company is "taking action to ensure that Novell technology stays at Novell." (No release date for the first product utilizing the clustering technology is planned.)
The "action" to which Bryant referred includes a Novell lawsuit against WMG and the erstwhile Novellites that alleges the theft of trade secrets and trademark infringement. According to The Wall Street Journal (May 5, 1997), hard disks and floppies were seized from the engineers' homes. The paper also reports that WMG has agreed to change its name but denies any culpability, claiming that much of the technology is already public knowledge.
WMG had planned to develop clustering-related products that run on Windows NT and IntranetWare. The effect (if any) of the Novell lawsuit on release dates is as yet unknown.
Did you ever wonder where those stunning images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope go after they've been in the newspapers?
Since 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Science Data Archive-which contains the exquisite observation data captured by Hubble-has been maintained in a Sybase SQL Server database. The archive, administered by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (the "hub" of all Hubble scientific analysis), is replicated in SQL server databases at the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) in Munich and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre in Victoria, B.C. Each of these sites provides various Hubble data services for the astronomical community. Other services such as data directories and retrievals are also managed through a Sybase RDBMS. (You can visit the ST-ECF Web site at ecf.hq.eso.org.)
The Archive comprises two parts: a bulk data store containing images, spectra, and engineering data, and a log that describes all Hubble observations. Archive programmers have developed proprietary tools that let users browse this data using query-by-example paradigms; the data can then be interpreted and analyzed with the help of a downloadable "HST data analysis cookbook." The observation data itself-multiterabytes in size-is stored in optical and CD/ROM jukeboxes.
This might be a microniche for Sybase. According to Benoit Pirenne, archive scientist at ST-ECF, SQL Server is used at several other astronomical sites. "Many space missions and ground-based observatories have chosen Sybase as their observation log repository in the past few years," says Pirenne.
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