Flick,
If the growth of the middleware market from $1.7 billion 1997 to $7.0 billion in 2002 is sexy, what would you call the highly specialized (read: barrier to entry) subset of that market -- the web-to-mainframe tools market which is expected to go from $24 million in 1997 to $50 million in 1998 to $1 billion in 2002?!?<g> Per IDC, CNT had 9% of that market in 1997 with OpenConnect as the market leader with about 38%.
It quickly became apparent to me, as I did my due diligence on CMNT over the weekend, that CMNT's focus is driven by one simple fact: anywhere from 65% to 80% of ALL business data still resides on mainframes which occupy the datacenters aka the glass house.
Here's a July 1998 TechWeb article that crystalized this idea quite nicely for me.
Shattering The Glass House
John Fontana
techweb.com
The brawn of a new applications era may be the Web, but the brains still reside in the mainframe.
Make no mistake, legacy applications-the critical data and business logic that run nearly every Fortune 1000 company-are still locked in the glass house.
And every Web application developer is staring in like a child with his nose pressed up against a candy store window. The developers can't wait to get the data and business logic out to users as distributed Web apps.
Staring back are IT managers guarding what's been built over the past 20 to 30 years, often unwilling to unlock any of the applications or data without good reason. These managers recognize the efficiencies and cost savings the Web promises, but many won't shatter the glass house until they're sure all their nagging questions about security, bandwidth and processing power are answered........
........How will companies get there? Three options for integrating TCP/IP with traditional legacy applications have surfaced: Run fat-client terminal emulation; deploy a Java-based emulator out to a browser; or deploy middleware that helps convert legacy apps into single Web-based apps. Many IT managers will be picking one of these methods after they connect their host environments to TCP/IP-but they will proceed with caution............
CMNT is clearly planning to participate vigorously in a hot market. A fast-growing market like that can usually accomodate several players prospering at the same time. Ultimately, CMNT's ability to grow faster than the market (read: grab market share) will depend on its ability to rollout and sell products to, unarguably, the most conservative (hence, most lucrative) market in IT.
That's going to take time. CMNT,for example, expects to rollout products incorporating Intelliframe technology in mid-1999. Meanwhile, CMNT's SAN products - Ultranet and Filenet -- have been driving the growth of sales and earnings since the December 1997 quarter. This buttresses my working view that EMC and IBM -- which both use Filespeed -- will be very influential in shaping the evolution of the SANs which, like it or not, will have to deal with the practical reality that most of the data is still stored in storage subsystems that connect to mainframes.
Regards,
Gus
P.S. IBM is fast becoming the Muhammed Ali of the drive drive biz in terms of bombast. Nice cutting-edge technology, though. You would expect nothing less from an outfit with an annual R&D budget of about $5-6 billion. |
