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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: garyx who wrote (19577)	3/9/2000 5:02:00 AM
From: garyx	Respond to of 54805

OPTICAL NETWORK STANDARDIZATION/VALUE CHAIN BREAKING NEWS JDSU/VRTL/ALA Nascent "Standardization/Value Chain" in Optical Network Revolution Emerging? Still Way Early, But look at the Big Movers. King JDSU Gathers His Princes? Or is JDSU a maybe-Gorilla? March 8, 2000 WDM Technology Leaders Alcatel and JDS Uniphase Define New Standards for WDM Laser Modules Integrating Wavelength Monitoring money.go.com and March 7, 2000 Vertel e*ORB Technology to be Deployed as Part of the Alcatel Next Generation Server Platform Family biz.yahoo.com Watch That Value Chain!

To: garyx who wrote (19577)	3/9/2000 2:05:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

I'm not sure that middleware works that well however. I'm sure there are little tweaks that go on, and that once in the system I'm confident that customers won't want to go through the hassle of switching. Not addressing the question of VRTL specifically, but "middleware" is a rather slippery category. A lot of middleware is like CORBA, i.e., one company's implementation/tools of a public standard. There isn't any way to make that a gorilla game, no matter how much better one is than the other guy. Inter-Application middleware (EAI), however, is a very different beastie. There, the interface to the other applications is public, often provided by the application vendor, in fact, but the way that the applications are connected is proprietary (although some like Forte Fusion use standard components like XML and XSLT). So, there is the chance there of proprietary technology and a compelling competitive advantage, but at the current state of the art even the best packages involve huge amounts of custom work unless you are selecting from among a small pool of previously interfaced applications. This can be a real zoo. Packages like SAP have rather cleanly defined APIs which allow one to exchange reasonable business "objects" like customer and order, but other packages like Vantive have a complex micro-API which can take a dozen or more calls just to retrieve a customer record. Moreover, most EAI projects involve other legacy applications and a large percentage these days involve an internet interface, so the budget for most projects is 95+% labor.