To: Eugene Kislenko who wrote (7552 ) 11/19/1997 4:29:00 PM From: fyi Respond to
Thats not the way its happened.
True, Visigenics went after the CORBA business because it decided it wanted to attach its future to
the CIRBA standard.
At the same time, the Visigenic clearly lost out in the data access middleware business, and that
fact certainly was instrumental in their eventual withdrawl from the data access market.
If you doubt the above fact, then how do you explain that Visigenic data access middleware was
replaced at both Informix and Platinum, two of the few OEM partners that Visigenic was abler
to sign on while it tried to compete in data access. Add to that the fact that Microsoft had
to eventually abandon Visigenic as its partner for porting ODBC technology (driver managers) to
non-Windows platforms. Of course as indicated by the second pressd release, Microsoft
chose Intersolv to replace Visigenic for that need.
If you understand where the future of data access is going, it will be universal data access.
This paradigm means that customer needs for data access will be server by common server techn ology
for heterogeneous clients (that is both object and relational). Intersolv is the vendor thart is best
positioned to deliver on this customer need, not Visigenic.
Interestingly enough also are the dynamics of the middleware markets. That is, the data access
middleware market from which Visigenic has withdrawn is currentl 10 times larger than the
object middleware market, which Visigenic tried to go it alone before the Borland overture to
acquire Visigenic. For the forseeable future, the data access middleware market is forcast to remain
mant times the size of the object middleware market. The reasons are easy to see.
Just about any applicatiuon needs access to data. On the other hand, object middleware must
compete head on with similar forms of middleware such as messaging, distributed transaction
processing etc. And today with the immature state of object middleware, quite often
these other forms of middleware just plain do the job better.
So, there you have the opinions/explanation of one very humble industry observer.
