"Re: what makes TPRO an exciting long term investment''
Karl,
Right! I slapped my head that I did not read the white papers in detail some months before. In my mind, Wonderware was just one of the product vendors sitting on top of MS NT and BackOffice.
Reading those White papers was a real eye-opener to me; and it changed my mind completely!
I know the MS strategy for dominating new markets again and again very well.
One of the strategies is to define and dominate and own the specification of 'middleware' interfaces. These interfaces are between 'service providing software objects' (from other software vendors or MS) and 'service using' software objects (from other SW vendors or MS).
OPC is just one of such interfaces.
Think of MAPI (sitting between mail clients such as Lotus CC:Mail, MS mail, etc etc and Mail server software such as MS Exchange, ...)
Think of TAPI (telephone interface)
Think of the OLE interface definition for financial services
Think of OLE for Health Care
Think of ODBC (between database using programs and specific DBMSes such as Oracle, MS SQL server, Sybase, Informix).
etc, etc.
Just look at microsoft.com, to see the list of all the industries that MS is targetting.
The only other competing standards are the Corba standards, IMO (pushed by SUN,IBM, Oracle, etc). |
