"And favorites in Intel-based servers, for the most part, follow market share rankings from International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass.-based market research organization: Compaq Computer Corp. first and Dell Computer Corp. second. That many solution providers favor Dell's PowerEdge server line shows that they don't share traditional solution providers' loathing for direct sales
vendors."
SATURDAY, JULY 22, 2000 12:21 AM - CMP MediaJul. 21, 2000 (VARBusiness - CMP via COMTEX) -- Remember the old rule, "Don't mention politics and religion when conversing in polite company?" Here's a new rule: In E100+25 society, don't mention vendor preferences. It's the rare Internet service provider who does not profess to be technology-agnostic these days. "We don't favor one technology or one vendor over the other," says Thomas Barton, CTO of $63.5 million, New York-based Xceed Inc., E100 echoing the sentiments of most solution providers today.A broader scan of the E100+25's vendor mindshare, however, does reveal some favoritism: Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp., for example, are the E100+25's preferred platform providers. Sun's Java development technologies are often edging out Microsoft's Visual Basic. And Oracle Corp.'s Internet-focused 8i is the database favored for e-solutions. As for the future, wireless technologies are at the top of almost every Internet professional service organization's research and development to-do list.As they admit their preferences, however, the E100+25 service providers constantly return to the fact that their technology choices are customer-driven."Customers are very interested in best-of-breed, and their view of best-of-breed may not be the same as ours, so all of our frameworks are designed to be agnostic to accommodate what they are asking for," says Marc Hebert, president of Sierra Atlantic Inc., E100 an e-consultant in Fremont, Calif.Back To BasicsAmong technology agnostics and their customers, two flavors of operating system and hardware platform are favored. "Windows NT on Intel-based servers and Sun Solaris [on Sun hardware] are the preferred platforms for e-business today," says Chris Clark, chief business strategy officer for Vienna, Va.-based Iconixx Corp., E100 which tallied 1999 revenue of $80 million.Rules of thumb about when Unix or NT should be used are eschewed by most. So Clark is going out on a limb of sorts when he says that Sun's Unix OS is the top choice "when scalability, robust transaction throughputs and intensive, enterprise-level database management is needed, particularly for large implementations."Sun won mindshare in the e-business space by being an early TCP/IP and Internet player, Clark adds. Also, he notes, the success and rapid maturation of Java has caused "a lot of infrastructure to be built on that platform."Sun's closest contender is IBM AIX, E100+25 solution providers say. Web-enabling features in AIX and IBM Corp.'s RS/6000's server lines have boosted their viability in e-business.Windows NT running on Intel Corp.-based servers is seen as the affordable e-business alternative. "NT has all the flexibility and scalability we need," says John Bamburger, president of $57.7 million SequoiaNET.com, E100 an Internet professional services company in Auburn Hills, Mich. "A lot of dot coms like NT because it's easy to add to existing environments, and a lot of people and developers are familiar with it."Some solution providers believe that Windows NT, Linux and Solaris are interchangeable in terms of Web-server scalability. And favorites in Intel-based servers, for the most part, follow market share rankings from International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass.-based market research organization: Compaq Computer Corp. first and Dell Computer Corp. second. That many solution providers favor Dell's PowerEdge server line shows that they don't share traditional solution providers' loathing for direct sales vendors.Java JoltIn the development platform arena, Java is thriving. "Two years ago, it was a dead heat between VB [Microsoft's Visual Basic] and Java," says Larry Gordon, vice president of marketing for $88.9 million Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., E100 an e-business solution provider in Teaneck, N.J. "Now there are many more customer requests for Java development than for VB."Today, Java is the de facto standard for building complex, integrated, enterprisewide applications and for building the pieces of software that sit between point apps, according to Iconixx's Clark. "It's the right tool for building a backbone that allows the data to flow from one end to another," he says.About 90 percent of the code written by developers at Organic Inc., an e-solutions provider in San Francisco, is in Java."If you just look at application code, we're probably all Java," says Matthew Bernardini, CTO of $77.8 million Organic. "Java has great portability, and its quality of code encourages correct application design and architecture. Things that are written well in Java tend to migrate well from platform to platform and software to software in terms of the business logic.""The holy grail in software development is reusable code and case tools," says Paul Wanuga, CTO of $104 million TIS Worldwide, E100 an e-business solution integrator in New York. "Java seems to be very much approaching the true idea of reusable componentry in the EJB [Enterprise Java Beans] model."Sun has driven Java to maturity rapidly while Microsoft is about a year behind on some of its development technologies, says Eric Brittigas, manager of the Microsoft practice at Reston, Va.-based Proxicom Inc., E100 an Internet consulting and development company. "Microsoft is going to leap forward this year, however," he says. "Our teams are getting ready for the implementations coming down the pike."Not that Proxicom has any preference for Java or VB. "That doesn't matter to us because we're focused on the business scenarios," Brittigas says. This year, Proxicom's development has been split evenly between VB and Java. "Now, our typical hire works in both VB and Java," he says.The dual Java-VB focus is probably a good idea for solution providers that serve businesses of all sizes. "On enterprise, large-scale solutions, Java probably has the edge," Barton says. "[But], if you're building an app for a company that only has $100,000 to spend, you're not going to build it on a Java engine."Whatever the development or operating system platform, the Internet database of choice for the E100+25 is Oracle 8i. "Oracle 8i is in a dominant position," Cognizant's Gordon says. "It's a proven technology with the robustness needed for e-business. It's not overpriced and, to cap it off, there's a lot of legacy Oracle around."In addition, Xceed relies a lot on Oracle 8i's scalability and reliability: "Time and again, it withstands the test of thousands of transactions per minute," Barton says.Serving Up SoftwareFrom these clear choices, we move into the gray areas of e-business infrastructure and application software solutions. In this nascent product area, solution providers don't have one or two clear favorites. They label a number of products as best-of-breed, selecting each for its strengths in particular arenas. This diversity offers solution providers the advantage of many options for custom-fitting solutions and the disadvantage of requiring an investment in training on those products."There is such a wide array of choices and technologies, so that, for us, one of the most critical pieces of technology integration is brain power," Xceed's Barton says. "We have to use our brains to make sure we're using the best components."In the application server area, for instance, BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and Sun-Netscape Alliance iPlanet are most often cited as solution providers' choice of best-of-breed generic application servers-tools for developing an application, such as an auctioning engine, and managing it. All of those vendors' solutions are scalable, easy-to-integrate and flexible, solution providers say.TIS Worldwide uses generic application servers when "we need a scalable, fast-process, migratable, 24/7, up-and-running, platform-independent solution," Wanuga says. "They make it easy to hook up your Web front end with, say, a back-end Baan trading system, regardless of what the Baan trading system was written in."E100+25 solution providers have several favorites in the area of application servers tailored for e-business. Those include application servers from Art Technology Group Inc., Ariba Inc., Asera Inc. and webMethods Inc. These bring labor-saving, Web-focused features to application serving. "You could write an exchange, for example, using the more generic app servers," Wanuga says. But e-tailored products offer a layer on top of the core application servers, such as integration points to back-end ERP systems, that are helpful in creating e-systems such as exchanges. Sometimes with generic app servers, "you have to find workarounds to integrate with in-house systems," Wanuga notes. "These tailored products make the development process easier, faster and cheaper."The Web-focused application server vendors will have to move quickly, solution providers say, because the generic product vendors-particularly IBM-are adding more e-business functionality to their solutions and building components designed for particular vertical industries. Organic, for one, has found IBM WebSphere's new e-commerce components "versatile, scalable and very suitable for Web-based apps and extranets, with great tools for retail e-commerce," Bernardini says.Suitability Determines SegmentationAs more vendors add functionality to their e-business software lines, product segmentation is going to get harder and harder. Xceed, for example, uses ATG Dynamo and BEA WebLogic most often as application servers, but it sometimes uses BroadVision's One-to-One. "We're looking for maturity and suitability to a situation," Barton says. All three products have the maturity, he adds. As for suitability: ATG Dynamo's base services enable Xceed to step up quickly with a solution; BEA WebLogic offers adaptability in integrating third-party pieces into a solution; and BroadVision's One-to-One works well as an app server when content management is a big part of the solution.Given that segmentation is difficult and the number of e-business point solutions on the market immense, drawing up lists of favorites becomes very challenging. What is clear is that e-applications from BroadVision and Vignette are widely used and well-respected by the E100+25."For retail-based e-commerce, BroadVision has a huge speed-to-market advantage because of the number of powerful built-in features you can implement quickly rather than starting from scratch," Organic's Bernardini says. "Vignette is best-of-breed in workflow and content management and is e-businesses' top choice for information-based sites."The Wireless WaveWhile various point solutions are being put through their paces by E100+25 companies, it's a sure bet that wireless solutions are being tested in almost every lab. "It's essential to be moving forward in learning how to build infrastructures for wireless Internet services," TIS Worldwide's Wanuga says.There are many unanswered questions in the U.S. wireless arena, and solution providers agree that they must be answered quickly. Lack of bandwidth has been holding up the show in the United States, but carriers like Sprint and AT&T promise to solve that problem within the next 18 to 24 months. During that time, a war for dominance will be waged among competing protocols, operating systems and devices."Wherever the market goes from a device perspective will be where the application developers go," Iconixx's Clark says. "Right now, people walk around with a notebook PC, a Palm for mobile data and an Internet-enabled mobile phone. In 24 months, they'll carry just one or two devices; then, just one."This waiting game plays havoc with planning. "It's hard to get experience with technologies that aren't ready for prime time," Brittigas says. Proxicom keeps up with the latest developments via close bonds with technology companies. "The trouble is that predicting market adoption rates is very challenging, even for technology gurus," Brittigas says.To be prepared both for the future and the here and now, a technology agnostic has a lot of homework to do. It's a different world from the days when office-automation solution providers sold an end-to-end solution from one vendor only, Brittigas says. Proxicom handles the preparation problem by setting aside 15 percent to 20 percent of its technology workers' time for research. These IT experts form technology/product research teams that become the company's point of contact for their specialty."We have to hedge our bets, making sure our competency is spread over a few vendors' technologies," Xceed's Barton says. "Then we have to make sure we have a general knowledge of many technologies."http://www.varbusiness.com/By: Jan Stafford Copyright 2000 CMP Media Inc.
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