Hi Alan:
My mistake; left out a key part. I meant to say 'Oracle and Sybase on UNIX', but I now see that would have been equally wrong. I see that they apparently do support those configurations. Guess I have heard too much rhetoric from Tom "I let MSFT do the heavy lifting" Seibel.
Well, now I'm really confused. SEBL says that they leverage MSFT technologies to improve their development efficiency, implying this as a competitive advantage. That's fine on the client, which apparently is only Windows 95/NT (no UNIX). But everyone in this space is using MFC and OLE/ActiveX, so that advantage is lost.
Which leaves the server side. In any N-tier architecture, you need an infrastructure that supports scalability, failover, distributed transactions, named services, queues, etc. On NT, those infrastructure pieces include Microsoft's MTS, DCOM, MSMQ, etc. On UNIX, it is TP monitors (e.g. BEA's Tuxedo) and CORBA in the future.
Traditionally, Oracle is much more likely to be found on the UNIX side (although Oracle is working hard to penetrate NT). Generally, the alignments that customers are looking at are MSSQL/NT or Oracle/UNIX. Wherein lies the rub. How can SEBL adequately support both MSSQL/NT and Oracle/UNIX by letting MSFT do the heavy lifting? That is where I got confused; they can't.
If they support Oracle/UNIX, but heavily rely on MSFT technologies, then those UNIX customers 1) need to invest heavily in NT servers (at least one $15-30K NT box per 100 users) in addition to their UNIX investment, or 2) need to handle the aforementioned reliability/scalability/et al issues themselves. Conversely, if SEBL in fact does PROPERLY support UNIX servers, they would need to invest resources, which breaks down their 'MSFT heavy lifting' argument.
Sorry to mislead anyone. Guess I got caught up in the Siebel hype. They certainly are clever, I'll give them that. I've said before, though, 'clever' doesn't sell in IT organizations (they will see through the above rather easily).
DISCLAIMER: I work for CLFY, as indicated on my profile. I try to be very upfront with this, lest someone thinks I'm impartial. Heck, never been called THAT in my life...
Good luck. |
