The "legacy" internet may be dominated by serving up static pages, but this is certainly not the really difficult problem going forward. The hairy problem is dealing with transactions. In a B&M business, one has only so many terminals connected to the system through which to place orders. Even if one gets a phenomenal response to a catalog, the number of entry devices is a gating factor to the rate that transactions impact the system and additional entry devices can only be added so fast. EDI can ramp up more quickly, but again, unless the orders are coming from existing trading partners, there is an implementation cycle for each new partner. On the web, though, hang out your shingle and the next day there can be 10,000 or 100,000 orders if you have done you job in marketing. That kind of scalability tests a lot more than just delivering static web pages.
NTAP may be a play for handling the physical job of getting stuff off the disk and onto the wire, but the really tough job here is the software to support the transactions and the best in the biz at this point in doing this kind of stuff is Forte, now a division of Sun. Forte may not be contributing gorilla-size revenue to Sun this year, but don't be surprised to see this sector grow dramatically over the next two years and for the total solution aspect to do a lot for selling Sun iron as well. Forte is also the techical leader in EAI, showing dramatic growth, and a large number of EAI projects are also internet driven, i.e., strength upon strength. |
