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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: If only I'd held who wrote (31081)	11/22/1999 9:21:00 AM
From: Tassi	Respond to of 108040

CNTR........Some more info... ============================================================== To: +Ellen (560 ) From: +Cathy Nong Sunday, Nov 21 1999 8:32PM ET Reply # of 563 Martin Knopp is a Senior Consultant at Pict & Byte GmbH, Vienna / Austria who has been at Centura's Customer Conference in Europe. He posted a link to his summary of this conference on Centura's user group- marketing feedback forum: For the benefit of non-technical investors, I will only post the part that might interest you., to view the whole article, please go to : byte.at ------------------------ CNTR's European Conference - latest news: Centura Customer Conference, 17-19 November 1999, Berlin Written by Martin Knopp, Senior Consultant at Pict & Byte GmbH, Vienna / Austria, 20th November 1999. Introduction It was quite a busy week for Centura; Two conferences, Comdex and a nice increase in stockprice caused by some very interesting announcements (eSnapp launch, SAP deal in Japan and a WAP cooperation with Nocom). What you will find here is a summary and comments about the Customer Conference held in Berlin. …… Summary and Comments The first day consisted of some general sessions and keynotes starting with Heinz Höreth, Directing Manager Centura Germany. He did a short introduction and all the boring organizational stuff thats needed to run a conference with about 350 attandees. And thats the first great thing because the last big conference in Europe two years ago in Munich which was attended by some 100+ people. Seeing now 350 people is the first sign that Centura is back on track and growing again. The next session called "2 Years with Centura - Successful Turnaround" was held by Scott Broomfield, CEO of Centura. To underline the touch of this conference to be a "German Conference" Scott did his first few sentences in German. After that he gave an update on the strategy and vision of Centura and it was great to see that there are no strange things coming up. Centura is simply continuing what was started two years ago. Right now Centura is completely focused on Microsoft DNA architecture, component based development, web enabling applications, embeddable databases and solutions for appliance computing. All of this topics were further discussed in the sessions during the next two days. What was great to see in Scotts session is that during the past two years every single word was about getting back credibility. Right now that is no longer an issue, so everything is focused on the future and on the vision of the company. That was not only my feeling about the presentation but also what I felt from the audience and all the people I talked to. No single word about the credibility of Centura but a lot of ideas for the future. Next in line was a keynote speech held by Chris Atkinson, Director Business Solutions Group Microsoft EMEA. He talked about "Microsoft's WinDNA 2000 Architecture". Seeing this presentation in the agenda already shows that Centura and also Microsoft is commited to really live the partnership that they announced some months ago. We learned about Microsoft's vision for the DNA architecture. …… Last but not least for this day was a session of Charity Silkebakken, Manager Tools Development of Centura. She did introduce the new Centura Complementary Software Partners Program (CSPP). This program is meant for companies who develop third party products adding value to the Centura product line - specially the tool. There is a new, old person in charge of this program - the well known David Burke. He does all the communication with the CSPP members. Centura will provide co-marketing and technical assistance (up to getting into their sourcecode if need). Starting with the "Matterhorn" release of CTD we will see demoversions of the CSPP member products directly shipped with CTD on the same CD. See the section about CSPP below for further details. …… About the Internet Strategy its obvious for me that Centura is going the "ASP + COM" way. What means for me that they position "Matterhorn" as the tool of choice to develop business logic COM components to be used by any internet development tool/solution thats COM compliant. Thats what the Microsoft DNA suggests anyway - so its obvious for Centura to follow. Whats currently known as Centura Web Developer (CWD) will stay there and being improved (both from the point of scalability and from the point of adding better layouting capabilites) but in "Matterhorn" it will no longer be called CWD, neither will it be available as a standalone product - it will be called "Centura Web Extensions" and being shipped only as part of "Matterhorn". Last but not least there was one statement in Joe Falcones session on the first day that I did not mention there because I think it better fits here. In presenting his visions he talked about a CTD runtime for running non-visual CTD applications on Linux. To make it clear they are not going to port CTD to Linux, they are not going to port the whole runtime to Linux. Right now they are not even working or planning on anything for Linux but they are recognizing that Linux might become a plattform of choice at least for running business logic components on a server based on Linux. Please do not get wrong what I write here - you will not see this happen during the next months, but take it as an indicator that Centura is very closely monitoring the market. There is one thing which makes this move more complicated that it might sound - "Matterhorn" will be able to create COM components. Unfortunately there is no COM on Linux so Centura either has to wait until there will be a COM implementation on Linux which might either never happen or never get credibility in the Linux world as it comes from Microsoft. So going this step would mean for Centura also going the step to implement either CORBA or EJB as the component model. Maybe we should start a thread on forum.wishlist to discuss our needs and pros/cons of possible solutions. Whats going on with net.db? net.db will be continued and the new release commonly known as net.db 2.0 but internaly known as "Unity" is in Beta already. It gives you much better layouting capabilites as well as the most important new feature - business logic integration. Sorry but I did not figure out for sure how this will be established - we heared a lot about "Unity" being able to access COM components for this job but saw a presentation from Gerd Marinitsch, Consultant of Centura Germany who demoed a direct link to CTD only. So we all stayed confused about that and to be honest net.db is not that interesting for me so I did not try to dig deeper to figure out the truth. Anyone interested in net.db should also read the following CSPP sections. Another great session talking about the "Interface for R/3" was held by Uli Klemm, Data Design. You might wonder why it is not held by someone from Centura but that is simple. Centura Interface for SAP R/3 (CIR/3) was developed by a third party vendor and only purchased by Centura and it is now maintained by Data Desing who will also do the further product development. As far as he talked about the future version its focused on providing better classes on the CTD side to make parameter handling easier and add support for accessing BAPI components. Right now its only based on Remote Function Calls (RFC) to SAP. Personally I think its a great solution and there were some people around in the audience who already developed successful soultions. Just to mention the interface is BAPI Validated by SAP! BTW, for me it sounds perfectly suited to become another product moved to the CSPP. …… There was one important deal during the least year regarding the database sector of Centura. In July 1999 Centura did aquire Raima Corporation. Raima is a vendor of two database products one called Raima Database Manager (RDM) which is a very small, very fast, very robust database engine well positined in the market of embedded databases. It is currently used by a lot of big companies (such as Hewlett Packard, Hughes/AOL, ...). RDM is available on WindowsCE, Linux, various RTOS and right now it is ported to PalmOS. See the section below about Appliances for reading more about RDM. The second product is Velocis which is a client/server database. It is available on different OS like Windows NT but also on Linux. Because there is an ODBC driver for Velocis and CTD can be used with ODBC databases you can develop applications with CTD running against a Velocis database on Linux. Congruity Corporation did show this configuration together with Centura at the COMDEX. …… What can we expect for the future? The feature that Centura was most specific about is that they will add the patent pending SafeGarde technology that is currently only available in SQLBase to both RDM and Velocis. SafeGarde is an end-to-end security technology which encrypts both the network traffic and the database file itself using algorithms up to 128bit Triple-DES without too much loss of performance (in the range from 0.1% up to about 8% based on the platform and algorithm that is used). …… What was most interesting for me was that there were people around in the audience that came to Ralf directly after his presentantion, telling him that they have current projects where eSnapp perfectly fits their needs. As Ralf outlined in his presentiation the appliance computing sector is very important for Centura because of the tremendious increase in such devices proposed for the next few years. What features can we expect for the future? Right now eSnapp provides connectivity to database applications. As everything is moving into component based development the logical step forward is to provide connectivity to business components and thats what is planned for future versions. We will see functionality which provides connectivity from appliances to COM components. Additionally we will see a notification functionality (from the eSnapp Application Server to the small device) and some features to better support offline operations (some kind of replication technology). At the moment eSnapp is available on a limited basis for some kind of pilot projects. General availability will be in Q1/2000. …… If you have any further questions or comments feel free to drop me a mail at mknopp@byte.at or use the online contact form.