To: JC Jaros who wrote (40399 ) 1/13/2001 12:35:19 AM From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh Read Replies (2) | Respond to Lot of questions there... The influence of the merger is not all simple good, by any means, and I can't claim to have foreseen all of it, but there is a great deal that is very good and looks like it is getting better. McNealy said yesterday that Forte was the most successful acquisition they had ever made in terms of the continuity of people not turning over as a result. I think that alone says a lot. All of the original Forte products except SynerJ have been recently moved to iPlanet, where they appear to have a more natural home. Fusion, the EAI product, now re-branded iPlanet Integration Server, has become a real flagship product. It seems clear that while there is still some sorting underway, that the iPlanet product line will be stronger not only because of the additions, but because of the synergy of having brought in a group of people who really understand very big and serious applications. There is still a bit of jockeying because of the odd mixture of Java and TOOL, but frankly there is just a class of problem which Java isn't up to yet and even the iPlanet folks who are responsible for producing Java products seem to recognize the need for something else for a while at least, even if the end-user piece will be Java. All of the Java products are still within Sun, but I expect them to move to iPlanet when they are a bit more mature. A combination of having to incorporate the Netbeans stuff and having the J2EE standard not quite being *there* yet doesn't help, but I think that by mid-year or so you will see the full range of product out top to bottom and it will just blow away anything available elsewhere. Meanwhile, the TOOL folks have been making a lot of strides in interoperability of Java and TOOL components so we are getting a lot closer to being able to assemble pieces without worrying what the original authoring language was ... which is not the same as a unified development environment. With that, there is some great potential synergy between the iPlanet product lines and the Forte tools for web-oriented applications ... sure got me excited. iPlanet may not have dominant marketshare yet, but they sure have some significant accomplishments under their belt when you focus on the enterprise end of the market. E.g., CNN staying up under 100M+ hits a day and then peaking 62% higher in one day and still staying alive (November 8). Or LDAP servers that benchmark at 700+ transactions a second compared to 33 for number 2. Or E*trade with 500,000 simultaneous transactions in flight. Serious stuff; and thus a good fit.
