So what’s behind Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of application server company NetDynamics Inc.?
The acquisition, announced on June 30, follows relatively closely on the heels of Netscape’s acquisition of Kiva. NetDynamics will join Sun’s product division as a separate business unit focused on enterprise software products, and its management team will move over to Sun.
Sun appears not only to be moving on a commitment to compete with Microsoft in the middleware market, but also evidencing a belief—now widely shared—that infrastructure is the key to adoption of Java technologies in the enterprise. The deal now puts Sun head to head against other companies with the same idea, including Netscape, IBM, and Inprise.
The deal does raise some eyebrows, however. First of all, one wonders if Sun’s development partners may be getting a bit nervous. Second, although NetDynamics was an early supporter of Java technologies, it only recently announced its support for Sun’s Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) specification. Its platform does not yet support JDBC or Sun’s Java Servlet APIs. Sun intends to integrate these technologies into NetDynamics, but it admits that this goal will take some time to achieve.
In an interesting break from Sun orthodoxy, NetDynamics supports (and will continue to support) Microsoft’s COM/ DCOM model; in fact, approximately 70 percent of NetDynamics servers are deployed on Windows NT platforms and thus implement Microsoft’s JView Java virtual machine (JVM). However, given Sun’s legal battle with Microsoft over Java licensing, it’s likely that Sun will replace JView with its own JVM.
Sun expects this deal to accelerate the adoption of Java technology in the enterprise, both for application vendors and tool vendors meeting the EJB specification. Because NetDynamics can’t fulfill all of Sun’s needs, it remains unclear whether Sun will spend its efforts rallying for support or simply pondering further mergers down the line.
Microsoft has billed its TerraServer site (www. terraserver.com), launched June 30 as a showcase for its prerelease version of SQL Server 7.0, as the “world’s largest online database” and “most detailed atlas.” Containing more than 178 million photographs and satellite images culled from the U.S. Geological Survey, the pure-relational TerraServer holds 1.01TB of compressed image data (3.5TB uncompressed). The database runs on a Compaq 64-bit AlphaServer 8400 and stores its BLOBs on StorageTek disk.
Microsoft hasn’t received the type of attention it was hoping for. The company is now suffering the wrath of users who have experienced frequent crashes while working with the server. Smelling blood, IBM has been quick to challenge Microsoft’s claims that it has the largest online database. According to IBM, its own online database of U.S. patents—which includes drawings and descriptions of all U.S. patents issued since 1971—is an impressive 1.5TB (compressed) and 15TB (uncompressed) in size. The company also claims that at 4.2TB, the DB2-powered database that supported the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan dwarfs that of TerraServer.
So what’s the big deal? Sure, size matters, but so does performance. Microsoft still has a long way to go before it wins the hearts and minds it needs to demonstrate SQL Server’s scalability.
If you’ve heeded the Y2K doomsayers and plan to close your bank and brokerage accounts on New Year’s Eve 1999, think twice. A new 450-page global survey report issued by Merrill Lynch Global Securities Research and Economics explains that most corporations should be fully Y2K ready by the end of 1999. In fact, according to “Y2K: Implications for Investors,” most U.S. companies believe they will be fully compliant by the end of 1998. The report identifies only a small percentage of survey respondents as “unlikely” to be ready for date-field Armageddon. Few U.S. companies are listed as “less likely” to be ready, and the numbers for companies around the world are almost as strong. Unfortunately, several major companies did not participate in the survey, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard. These companies fall into the “don’t know” category.
Most companies are confident in their ability to make applications compliant by the year 2000 but express reservations in the readiness of their customers and suppliers. Furthermore, most companies already have or intend to make an end run around the tedious and expensive chore of remediating legacy applications by implementing packaged applications. The packaged applications vendors of the world—PeopleSoft, Oracle, and especially SAP—would surely tell you that the turning of the century will be the best thing that ever happened to their business.