yes I know the issue well. My last startup company kindof choked on the problem. You can think of appl software people as being in 2 camps- one is the traditional model that emerged from Client/server- this is when the big apps were born siebel, peoplesoft etc. Later came middleware and a set of middleware-like apps such as ariba. The middleware apps play in the "collaboration space"- they function as a collaborator sitting outside multiple enterprise apps. Marketplaces are like that, they (theoretically) don't store data themselves instead they catch transactions and push them through to multiple external enterprises.
The conventional wisdom in 1999 was that as the collaborative tier gained ground, more and more business logic would reside in the aribas of the world, sucking that same functionality out of Sap, peoplesoft. Pricing for example, ariba would do it since pricing should be a function of not just the seller, but also the competition. I2 was really rocking with this concept then since tradematrix has analytics. The SAP order management people that did ATP were redeployed since ATP was moving to the collaboration tier we thought.
Anyway, fast forward to 2002. News flash- it is ENTERPRISES that pay the bills. Enterprises don't really want to collaborate, it drives their pricing down. There are some collaborative areas still around, single-vendor marketplaces for example and a few others. But, it is the traditional vendors who are augmenting their products with a middleware layer, they are not losing to some 3rd party middleware player, imo. Oracle 11i has a middle tier for example with a few collaborative things, even some APIs to Sap their arch enemy. (probably not hooks to Siebel though!).
So I see the demise of the unique collaboration tier as a win for the conventional players now. Well jmo. The gorilla game people have much more hard details on the issue I'm sure, I'm just talking gut feel.
BTW back on my startup company. It was a bunch of middleware guys from Sun. Pretty well known people but one thing I determined- they were completely confused about data. How to structure data in an enterprise app for optimum efficiency stuff like that- they were even storing data in Oracle in objects (a HUGE no no for analytics of any kind)... I'm placing my bets on the ex-Oracle crowd for application software dominance.
L |
