Interesting: someone I don't know must of just read my post and sent me this email. Can anyone make any "tech" sense of it??
Now that I think about it SYSB & CAYN shared the same office building in Burlington before cayn moved to Bedford.
news.com
Sybase fights to stay
in tool game
By Mike Ricciuti
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM
July 8, 1998, 12:00 p.m. PT
Sybase is fighting to keep its place in
the development tool game.
The company will lay out a plan at its
Powersoft
Conference next
month in Los
Angeles for
bringing its
flagship
PowerBuilder
development tool
more fully into the
era of distributed application building.
In the process, company executives
hope to convince their huge user base
that Sybase is in the tools business for
the long haul, despite recent financial
troubles at the company.
At the conference, Sybase will
announce PowerBuilder 7.0, a new
version of its client-server
development tool, along with a new
release of PowerJ, its Java-based
toolset, sources close to the company
said.
The company will also announce
Jaguar CTS 2.0, a new release of
Sybase's application server intended to
mesh more fully with PowerBuilder
and simplify the company's somewhat
confusing application server lineup.
The new application server enters beta
testing this summer and is expected to
ship by year's end.
While PowerBuilder remains a
favorite among business software
developers at big companies, the
tool--one of the first serious
Windows-based business development
tools--isn't winning any new converts,
analysts said.
"PowerBuilder is solid with its
installed base," said Michael Barnes,
an analyst with the Hurwitz Group.
"But Sybase's focus has been on
solidifying its installed base, as
opposed to getting new customers."
At the same time, competition has
become fierce. New kids on the block,
including Allaire, NetObjects,
NetDynamics (bought by Sun
Microsystems last week), and Haht
Software, have cropped up in the past
few years, all aiming at the
PowerBuilder-style developer.
And old nemeses, like Microsoft and
Oracle are making a renewed effort to
capture development tool business.
PowerBuilder's popularity--the
company claims more than 100,000
users--as a traditional "fat client"
development tool has limited its
appeal to corporate developers
looking to build newer thin-client and
multitier Web applications. "Sybase
has done an excellent job of making
midlevel developers heroes. But they
really have not given those developers
a transition path to n-tier computing,"
Barnes said.
Newer e-commerce and other Web
applications have driven the need for
application server software, which
provides the so-called middleware
connections between Web-based
clients and back-end databases and
enterprise resource planning
applications.
Also, application servers theoretically
let systems become more flexible and
easier to build. For instance, the rules
defining how a bank's customers can
obtain their account information might
be hardcoded into a mainframe
application. To write a new system
that uses those same rules, you need to
recreate them.
But by separating the rules in a middle
layer of code, residing on an
application server, they become
accessible to multiple applications and
can be reused.
That's the current state of the art in
business application development,
analysts said. But before Sybase can
play in the larger market for multitier
development tools, the company must
rework PowerBuilder, trim its
overgrown set of application server
tools, and retrofit them to work with
newer technology, analysts said.
"Sybase recognizes the importance of
application servers in terms of
enterprise application development,"
said David Kelly, also with the
Hurwitz Group. "So I would expect
them to place renewed focus on an
application server product. And I think
it would make sense to see a
consolidation of multitier models
within the Sybase product family."
The company's current application
server lineup includes three dissimilar
products: PowerBuilder Distributed
Application Server, Sybase's first
attempt at building an application
server to work with fat client
PowerBuilder applications;
PowerDynamo, a thin-client
application server intended to extend
PowerBuilder for HTML applications;
and Jaguar CTS, a component server
introduced last year for handling
ActiveX and Java components on the
middle tier.
Sybase is adding support for both
PowerBuilder and its PowerJ Java
development tool to Jaguar CTS 2.0,
along with new CORBA (Common
Object Request Broker Architecture)
support. That will let developers using
PowerBuilder's outmoded application
server make the switch to
standards-based component
development.
And, PowerBuilder 7.0 will be
specially tuned for building Jaguar
components.
Also new in the tool will be a
reworked look and feel, productivity
enhancements that give developers
multiple, simultaneous views of
objects, new wizards for automatically
building and deploying distributed
objects, and new Java-to-database
connectivity tools, according to the
company.
The new features might help the
company to grow its installed base,
analysts said. But more importantly,
the revamped tools could help Sybase
retain its existing customers, many of
which have been stuck in a holding
pattern, afraid to architect new
distributed applications with
PowerBuilder.
"Many [Sybase customers] have been
waiting nine months to a year to start
new projects, because it was clear that
Distributed PowerBuilder wasn't the
right architecture for the industry," said
one source, who requested anonymity.
"That's really held back their
penetration." |
