Posted on 4-2-2003
Sharing
Gaining Strength Online
by Steve Lohr, NYT, 3 Feb03
The software competition in Web services will be fierce, but
it promises to
be a different kind of rivalry than in the past. For decades,
technology
companies have competed by persuading customers to buy their
homegrown
products. The goal was to "lock in" customers of a company's
proprietary
software and hardware so that switching to another supplier
and starting
over would be extremely costly and arduous.
Web services should make the lock-in strategy harder to pursue
because the
standards allow data to be easily shared rather than locked
inside
proprietary software. One sign of the changed terms of trade
was the
creation last year of the Web Services Interoperability Organization
to
ensure industry cooperation in smooth data sharing. The group
was founded
by the two companies that most analysts say will be the leading
competitors
in the Web services field: Microsoft and I.B.M. They were joined
by BEA
Systems, among others, and later Sun. "Web services is a heterogeneous
technology that connects your new stuff and your old stuff together,"
observed John Swainson, general manager for I.B.M.'s Web services
software.
"So our cooperation with Microsoft is in some sense a deal with
the devil
for both of us. We're letting them into our world and they're
letting us
into theirs."
The Web services project at Allstate Insurance is an example.
At its big
data center outside Chicago, Allstate has I.B.M. mainframes,
Sun machines,
PC servers running Windows and other systems. Its databases
include
I.B.M.'s DB2, Oracle and Microsoft's SQL. To allow information
to flow
smoothly among its computer systems, Allstate is using Microsoft
.Net
software tools and its Windows server software. But to share
data with its
big systems, it is using WebSphere, I.B.M.'s Web services middleware
software. The Microsoft and I.B.M. software have to talk to
each other.
"Web services gets you out of the world of proprietary messaging
software,"
said Kevin Rice, a technology manager at Allstate.
The software companies competing against Microsoft are offering
middleware
software, based on Web services standards like XML and Java,
a programming
language created by Sun. They are betting that this will move
industry
competition away from the operating system and especially away
from Windows.
To be sure, I.B.M., BEA, Sun and others in the non-Microsoft
camp all
compete against each other as well. It is still early, and sorting
the
winners from the losers will likely take years. Yet most analysts
and
industry executives say they believe that over time I.B.M. will
emerge as
the leading rival to Microsoft. "The gorillas in this are I.B.M.
and
Microsoft," said Thomas M. Siebel, the chief executive of Siebel
Systems,
whose customer relationship management software is being fine-tuned
to run
on both I.B.M.'s WebSphere and Microsoft's .Net technology.
Microsoft's Web services technology is tailored for Windows.
But the .Net
technology is trying to appeal to a wide range of programmers
by letting
them write in many different computer languages, including Cobol,
C++,
Perl, Smalltalk, Java and C#, which is Microsoft's answer to
Java. By
contrast, the middleware of the non-Microsoft camp runs on any
operating
system, but it is geared toward Java programmers. "Our goal
is to make Web
services easy for software developers, businesses and end users,"
said Neil
Charney, a director in Microsoft's platform strategy group.
A poll of corporate technology executives by CIO Magazine, released
today,
suggests that Microsoft has at least attracted the most attention
in the
early going for Web services. When the executives were asked
what they
expect to be the leading "Web services platform," 47 percent
chose
Microsoft's .Net, while I.B.M.'s WebSphere came in second with
19 percent.
The survey gave no hint of whether the Microsoft vote reflected
enthusiasm
for the .Net technology or fatalism that Microsoft, the world's
largest
software company, would prevail in this market as well.
Its competitors contend that, in the end, most large corporations
will
limit their commitments to .Net, fearful of having their businesses
too
beholden to Microsoft. "People are still very leery of Microsoft
lock-in,"
said Tod Nielsen, BEA's chief marketing officer, who is a former
Microsoft
executive.
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