Ahhaha, do you believe eXcelon can keep its lead over its competitors?
Yes.
Which competitor(s) do you fear the most?
There are no specifically identifiable direct competitors. WEBM is the only one close. I wouldn't be surprised to see the two merge. The market has to develop a little more before that could happen. I think both companies would look for that opportunity and EXLN would weaken their poison pill in order for it to go through.
Recently Bill Gates himself has expressed a determination to further the advance of XML. Is it possible for a larger capitalized company to develop a XML storage strategy that can compete with EXLN?
You have to understand the nature of the DB software market. You shouldn't say "storage". That term is reserved for other technologies. Since computing is processor, connection, and DB, it isn't hard to imagine that the field of DB is vast. There are many players with many niches, styles, techniques which address substantially different market, application, individual, and company needs. MSFT is one of the players within their niches. For example, Access is their vanilla flavored public elementary DB. IBM has DBase. There's Oracle, Informix, Sybase, Sun, CA, and many others with products which compete directly and indirectly with one another. There are different kinds of DB like RDB and ODB, and subtypes like hybrids.
All of these kinds of DB have one critical item in common: they must execute rapidly. In order to do that they have to be written in high order languages like C or C++. Java won't do. Neither will XML. These two latter languages are for interface purposes. They facilitate the way humans interface with computers and databases.
The new computer paradigm is the Internet. The Internet employs all kinds of complicated, complex data types where in the past computers fed off flat data files usually text files. There are many kinds of computers and formats and protocols and data types and they are all independent and don't like to cooperate with the others. This has been a major problem for the last 20 years. It's called the failure of interoperability.
XML provides a way to glue all these disparate uncooperating systems together. It's adhesion. XML needs more than it's language environment to succeed at addressing the interoperability problem. What helps is a fluid way to pass different data types, objects, around among different application platforms. Passing needs a place to hold objects. The most efficient engine yet created for doing this is EXLN's Objectstore. It is sine qua non of an efficient object manager and this propels EXLN's DAP into a status difficult to beat.
Can MSFT write code that is comparable? It's possible, but that isn't their market. MSFT can't do everything and trying to do so would be an expensive nightmare. That isn't their style. They go where they can leverage their expertise. Indeed, MSFT has various agreements with EXLN so that MSFT can use Objectstore as a component. There hasn't been the demand for OODBMS until recently and so MSFT, for example, hasn't invoked this relation much. They will point one of their customers to EXLN if the customer can be best served with EXLN's product. This could significantly change and it would be in their interest and part of their previous agreements to utilize not only Objectstore, but also EXLN's DAP. They wouldn't do the latter because MSFT primarily addresses the consumer market. EXLN is big company oriented and sets up major corporations with a flexible scalable comprehensive Web site management and development environment. MSFT doesn't do that. They provide "shrink wrap" style solutions.
Is IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, or CA?s Jasmine (with some tweaking) a possible future competitor?
I don't believe so. They all ran from the failure of OODBMS to revolutionize DBMS and did so with such haste that they caused a vacuum which only EXLN could fill. EXLN was left holding the bag and suffered greatly. Oracle has kept their foot in the XML door just like everyone else, but the problem is that unless you made a major commitment years ago to OODBMS, you are seriously behind. Oracle's 8i emulates the function of OO, but that isn't good enough. Oracle has locked themselves into an adequate solution, not a premier solution and they still have all that legacy RDBMS ware which gave them the DB monopoly in the first place. They are going to have major problems transforming the "big" ware to the new svelte environment. Their size advantage of the past now is their Achilles' heel. No doubt Oracle will grab the majority of this niche of the B2B market, but any company going with them will be embedding intrinsic incompatibilities and inefficiencies. It has finally become critical to have pure OO in your interoperability development suite. Hybrids found in Products from IFMX and ORCL won't do, but many corporations will try to make them work. This will enable EXLN to grow at a manageable rate without being demand swamped.
Also, do to the lead EXLN has over its competitors, who do you think would be most likely to acquire EXLN.
I don't believe anyone would buy them. The have a unique business. Of course, GE can buy NBC. Everyone just wants to use what EXLN produces. They don't want to get involved with the complexities of wrestling with solving these very difficult software problems of business Net integration and they don't want to engage the risk that would come through purchase.
The issues discussed above are much more involved, but you would need to have personal experience with it over the last 5 years to get a good understanding. One way to do this would be to read the entire thread of the predecessor company. You'll see many appearing here going through all kinds of agony, but it is the best single condensed source of information of the history and circumstances which have led to the current situation. |
