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

To: Judith Williams who wrote (44781)	7/22/2001 3:30:43 PM
From: Judith Williams	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Big link added to BEA's value chain. Intel/BEA alliance to make WebLogic operate at peak efficiency on a new microprocessor for high end server market. biz.yahoo.com --Judith

To: Judith Williams who wrote (44781)	7/23/2001 9:47:27 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

Judith and Don, Great Hunt report! Thanks much! I'm confused about your conclusion that the tornado has not yet begun. I see the following: 1) total growth rates, 2) all the contenders appear to be shipping a whole product, 3) the platform vendors appear to be focusing on internal issues that enable the notion of "just ship it!" rather than focusing on customization that addresses needs of individual customers, 4) the value chains are sufficiently strong to support a tornado, and 5) demand appears to be outstripping supply. What is the missing element that tells you the tornado has not yet formed? Is it because the licensing growth is not strong enough to call it a tornado? I've never wrapped my hands around the issue that the company has to "set up" a platform or that someone has to set it up. Is this any different or more complicated than a third-party integrator setting up an enterprise-wide software application? Is this a constraint to product adoption any more so than in the case of an enterprise-wide app? --Mike Buckley

To: Judith Williams who wrote (44781)	7/23/2001 2:22:09 PM
From: EnricoPalazzo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Wonderful report, J&D, wonderful. I think the question of .NET vis a vis BEAS is an interesting one, but not, at the end of the day, one which should affect our investment decisions. It's obvious that should BEAS become as vast as many are expecting, Microsoft would fight back--and hard. And it's also obvious that the weapon would involve .NET in some way. Importantly, however, were this to happen, BEAS would have already proven a very lucrative investment. Moreover, Microsoft's likely response is still very hypothetical now. The reality today appears to be that BEAS has one legitimate competitor, IBM, and if they beat WebSphere, they basically have a green field for a while. BEAS impresses me more than many more vaunted competitors to MSFT--e.g. RNWK, NSCP. Solid management, business model and technology. They could do very, very well. I would not be shocked to see them as public enemy #1 in Redmond within the decade. I'm curious, BTW, what you mean by your repeated assertions that BEAS architecture is more "open" than .NET would be. It seems to me that both companies would try to as open as possible in order to win the game, and then gradually milk the product ("close" it) once the battle is won. In the short run, MSFT obviously has a greater opportunity to integrate with other MSFT products. It does strike me, someone naively maybe, that the whole wave 5 architecture will have to be pretty open no matter who wins. B2B demands openness. Not for nothing, but Microsoft's "wave 4" architecture is generally thought to be the most open consumer PC architecture out there. cf, e.g. Apple.

To: Judith Williams who wrote (44781)	7/23/2001 3:09:56 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

A major competitive advantage is created by the “enhancements” integrated into WebLogic that customize the platform according to a customer’s specific e-commerce needs. One needs to be careful here. There seems to be a strong trend away from proprietary extensions to servers and toward servers which comply fully with J2EE standards. This may mean some loss in functionality, but does mean that the applications are not dependent on a specific vendor, which is not only good protection against future changes, but addresses the apparently frequent problem of having to deploy against multiple vendors servers. The flexibility BEA offers its customers and ISVs—the number of components and open architecture—makes it easy to adopt and less expensive to write software off the BEA platform. Result: Huge network effects are tripped and switching costs created. For this reason alone, IBM and Oracle are not likely to overcome BEA’s lead. I would like to see this more quantified or dealt with in a more detailed fashion. My impression is that IBM has a richer offering than BEA and that iPlanet has a much richer offering. My sense of this market is that it is strongly moving toward adherence to J2EE, an open standard, but not a proprietary one and that there is a very strong interest in vendor independence. Business applications written for the proprietary features of specific appservers are becoming unacceptable because businesses may already have a different appserver in place for another application. I can't agree that BEA deserves discontinuous innovation credit for taking middleware to a new level since many companies have participated in this and Forte in particular has a C++ based environment which is far ahead of any J2EE environment, including their own. The whole Java market is very much oriented toward buy your favorite component and assemble it with components from other sources. Much is also made of being able to take Java code developed in one system and bring it in to a new system, e.g., to start simple and move to more complex or to take advantage of efforts authored under different environments.