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

To: darryl25 who wrote (51450)	5/17/2002 4:17:34 PM
From: paul_philp	Respond to of 54805

Darryl, A big part of the overall picture is the emergence of a new layer of software I call the virtual server operating system. This layer self-manages and self-administers the server farm. Buzzwords are self-healing, virtualization, transparent. There are a lot of companies working on this problem. Sun has their N1 project. IBM has the eLiza project. There are also some interesting things happening in private companies. Vmware is delivering a software layer that allows the creation of multiple, dynamic vitual machines out of many different types of server configurations. As usual, this type of technology will only be used at the low end of the market to start but it will grow in capability and move upstream over the next 2 - 3 years. I find this area to be one of the most exciting and least covered developments in enterprise technology. It will be a couple of years but I forsee a Gorilla Game here as well. Veritas and BEA merge? Remember you heard it here first. ;-) Paul

To: darryl25 who wrote (51450)	5/17/2002 5:10:31 PM
From: tinkershaw	Respond to of 54805

Can you tell me what you've seen differently that points to the move to commodity based servers? My analysis is based upon strategic opportunity as the technology develops overtime and not over a static analysis of present best practices. The history of computer technology is the eventual commoditization and decentralization of the product resulting in enormous efficiencies. This is exactly, and unambiguously the whole product that BEAS and INTC are endeavoring to craft together. I am confident they will get there in the next few years so as to change the economic model in the data center. But this is certainly not the case today. Which is why execution risks still exist for BEAS and INTC in this marketplace. They have to produce the product and then convince the buyer of its efficacy. WebSphere is certainly a less risky play as IBM is not going to be crushed in this marketplace. There will always be a need, at least at the highest end, for what IBM does. And this is why they are doing so well presently. The commoditized product simply does not exist as-of-yet. Nevertheless, IBM is not going to crush BEAS either. But just how successful BEAS can become will largely depend on how commoditized they can eventually make the whole product. And this is an unknown element that we can only speculate about. The only sure thing we can agree on is how valuable it would be if they succeed. Also, does BEAS clustering technology allow for the addition of hardware without a linear addition of necessary management? This is a very good question. It does enable the addition of servers without having to re-program the entire system in an almost plug 'n play fashion. However, I am without information regarding whether or not each additional server would require a new human being to mind it. In some respects this might be necessary, particularly if you want disparate data centers geographically. But I'll see if I can dig deeper and find some more insight on this question. The analogy with the PC is a very good and close analogy on the ebusiness end of things. But there are differences. The largest difference is that ebusiness computing is more complicated than PC computing, and provides greater challenges to commoditization than was the case with the PC. But the basic economic advantages and technologies are analogous. In my mind today's army of JAVA programmers might become yesterday's army of COBOL programmers down the road. They won't disappear, but they will become less essential and less numerous as the product becomes more plug 'n play and customized programming becomes less and less necessary. Tinker