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

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (52300)	7/23/2002 10:50:15 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

What phrase do you believe properly characterizes Siebel's offerings? As I said in 52291, "It is more properly an N-tier, highly distributable application with a flyweight client ... i.e., essentially two generations beyond Client/Server in the classic sense." And yes, I do realize that this is rather a mouthful as a "phrase", but I think the distinction is quite important. "Classic" Client/Server had significant problems in scalability, both due to heavy network usage and the centralized server. It was also quite a headache in updating the clients to consistent revisions. This was improved upon by N-tier which broke the Server component into multiple "Services" that could be distributed across multiple platforms, promoting scalability. This left us with the heavy client and versioning issues. The current trend is toward lighter and lighter clients. Siebel has done more than just about anyone in this regard as they have reduced the client to a browser and some support utilities which are downloaded for the session. This means zero footprint on the client and no versioning issues. The utilities provide extensions to the browser to create a more full-featured, Windows-like interface than one usually gets in a browser and also provide screen management such that network traffic is about 10% what it would be with conventional browser technology. I guess I am getting farther from a "phrase", not closer.