Look 4 Profit - It may be sooner than '98, look at this bombshell!
Securities company makes wholesale investment in network
computers
By Ron Condon
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 3:30 PM PT, Feb 6, 1997
Japanese-owned Nomura International PLC, one of the world's largest financial securities companies, is
planning to install about 1,100 network computers (NCs) from Sun Microsystems in its offices across
Europe over the next two years.
The Java Stations, slimmed down devices that run the Java Virtual Machine to call down applications
components as needed from a network server, will slowly replace PCs installed in Nomura's European
offices.
The main hurdle at the moment, according to Geoff Doubleday, Nomura's managing director for information
systems, is the lack of Java-based office applications, such as word processor, spreadsheet, and e-mail.
He is watching moves by Corel and Applix, both of which have plans for Java-based alternatives to the
market-leading Microsoft Office suite of products.
Despite the seemingly threatening nature of Nomura's plans to the PC hegemony, Microsoft Chairman and
CEO Bill Gates on Thursday dismissed NCs as inconsequential. In Madrid, Spain, Gates said NCs will be
too slow and inflexible to threaten PCs.
"We see the PC going forward," Gates said at a conference for Internet users. "If you look at the market
share the network computer has today, that's what we predict for the future."
The move away from PCs for Nomura is part of a two-year-old major restructuring of the global
corporation's systems. The project is called Houdini (Highly Object-oriented development in Nomura
International), which involves installing three-tier client/server architecture using object technology.
According to Doubleday, this approach makes it easy to move to the NC. "All of our desktop architecture
has been based on a thin client, so Java is an absolute godsend to us," he said.
Nomura has a strategic business partnership with Sun and has been looking at Java for the last 18
months, Doubleday said. NC competitor Oracle has announced plans to ship its NCs in April. See Oracle
touts NC sales, cozies up to Borland's Java technology.
Nomura already has a number of Java applications working. The most important is a three-tier application
handling order routing in a workflow system. Another two-tier application handles access security for both
Unix- and Windows NT-based systems. And at the lowest level are what Doubleday refers to as
"crapplets" -- the tiny applications that put animation on to Web pages.
"We evaluated Java even before the alpha stage," he said, "The last piece of the jigsaw was to move from
Windows 3.11 to NT on the PCs, so we could run the Java Virtual Machine on it." The company will install
NT in March, but Doubleday sees this being a two-year stopgap measure to allow existing PCs to
support Java.
As soon as Java-based office software components are available, Nomura's PCs will be stripped down to
the equivalent of what Microsoft calls a NetPC and they will run just the Java Virtual Machine.
All of the company's new hardware acquisitions will be Java Stations. Some users, such as traders who
require high-power systems, will retain their Sun Unix workstations (the company has about 400 of them),
but for other staff, the slimmer NC or NetPC will have to suffice.
But that kind of move away from the PC of today would be risky, according to Microsoft's Gates.
"[NC] software is under control of hardware companies and you're going to get problems of
incompatibility," Gates said at a question-and-answer session Thursday. "The only time you have
compatibility is when the software is run by a neutral company, which is the role Microsoft does for the
PC," he said.
Nonetheless, Doubleday is also examining whether Java could be used to write software to run on
servers as well as clients.
"We are working with JavaSoft to replace our C++ with Java. We are interested to see if we can make it
robust enough to run on a server. And that means any server," he said. "Once it is robust enough to run
on a server, why would you worry whether you are running Wintel or any other platform?"
Gates believes that heavy reliance on servers may hamper the effectiveness of thin clients. "Unlike the
direction in PC technology, where the trend is for faster and faster access, the network computer actually
makes it slower for them on the server," said Gates in Madrid. "Network computer is throwing away all
software. Clearly Microsoft doesn't think people want to do that."
Nomura, however, is banking that platform independence will make it easier to make its systems available
to its professional investment clients. Nomura will be able to supply software to clients for them to run
locally or will allow them to dial in and download components, regardless of the systems they have in their
offices.
Although the initial plan for installing Java Stations covers Europe, Doubleday said that groups at Nomura
offices in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia are already trying out the concept.
At Sun Microsystems U.K., Dermot Duggan, a marketing manager responsible for financial markets, said
the Nomura deal could be the first of several similar contracts for Java Stations. "We have around a
dozen financial companies in London looking at it right now," he said.
Sun Microsystems Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., is at sun.com. Microsoft Corp., in Redmond,
Wash., is at microsoft.com.
Ron Condon is a London-based correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.
Please direct your comments to InfoWorld Electric News Editor Dana Gardner.
Copyright c 1997 InfoWorld Publishing Company |
