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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brennan Wilkie who wrote (65331)	7/20/1999 8:59:00 AM
From: Captain Jack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Brennan--- there are various levels of IT people. Everything from "help desk" employees and LAN Supervisors to Mgrs for huge companies. Some travel between facilities doing installations and upgrades. It is not ONLY boxes but tracking usage of co equipment on co time, purchasing & specing equipment needs and the list goes on.. it is a huge field that is getting bigger... A degree in computer science or related helps tremendously and keeping updated is a must,, being certified by MSFT in various areas is usually required for those with and without a degree... Middleware mania By Maryfran Johnson 05/31/99 I have middleware on my mind this week, and I'm here to tell you that's one painful state of affairs for a nontechie. Having immersed myself in a day's worth of high-level, heavy-duty middleware talk at a Gartner Group conference in the California desert (palm trees and golf courses having a 0.9 probability of easing the mental agonies of middleware), I thought I'd come away with a clue or two about this stuff (alas, a 0.2 probability). What I did figure out is that middleware has become the minivan of software technology: It's boring, expensive and, depending on your circumstances, probably just what you need. It's even a bit passé to call it plain old middleware — originally defined by Gartner wonks as the system software "glue" that helps programs and databases work together on diverse systems. The latest rebirth of the term is EAI, for Enterprise Application Integration. Indeed, middleware in the age of the Internet and e-commerce has morphed and mutated into a staggering array of products and vendors. Gartner analysts are officially tracking 10 messaging middleware products, 30 platform middleware products, 34 integration brokers and 16 "extraction, transport and transformation tools." There's communication middleware and platform middleware and data management middleware and integration middleware. There's portal middleware and Web middleware, too. By 2001, the conference attendees were told, nearly 80% of application development organizations will have several mission-critical applications extended to the Web, enabled by (you guessed it) middleware. Clearly, this dire situation calls for IT leadership. You must act immediately to hide the mind-numbing complexity of middleware — perhaps even the very existence of it — from your business users and nontechnical project managers. It will only upset and confuse them. One IT director told me about a call he recently received from a business executive at his company. "He asked me what middleware was, and I was totally at a loss about how to explain it to him," the IT guy acknowledged. "I said, 'Let me get back to you on that.' " He was last seen hightailing it out of the parking lot. I'd give it a 0.8 probability that he was driving a minivan....