|
January 1, 2000, Volume 3 - Number 1 The Internet Changes Product ReviewsReflecting on the year's most influential productsBy Michael Carnell, Peter Fischer, Nelson Kingand, Robin Schumacher and Kevin Reichard If there’s one thing Intelligent Enterprise’s product reviewers agree on this year, it’s that the basis on which to measure the influence of the past year’s products is scalable e-business. Does the product support 24x7x365 operation, fast deployment, flexibility, dynamic load failover, multitier distributed applications, and low-nonsense integration? In short, does it keep you from falling on your face in the viciously competitive and highly visible realm of e-business? Our blue-ribbon panel of reviewers discusses here whether this year’s product offerings delivered what enterprises are demanding. Behold – The Datamaster!The last year of this century has witnessed an unprecedented explosion in the business model of the future: e-commerce. The e-business has invaded and stormed the gates of nearly every traditional brick-and-mortar company’s customer base. The result of all this is that every traditionally managed company finds itself playing catch-up to the electronic new kids on the block. This Internet thrust-and-parry has mandated large, new systems-development efforts and introduced new IT methodologies and work practices not seen since the massive client/server revolution. It has created new classes of IT workers and developers, most notably the webmaster. But it has also extended and changed the role of the traditional database administrator. Today’s corporate DBA must manage Web sites and e-databases that have the potential to support unlimited client connections on a 2437 basis. When you are on the Web, the business never shuts its doors, which means that DBAs must manage data availability and performance like never before.
In addition, year 2000 DBAs will find themselves helping developers debug Active Server Pages (ASPs) and Java code (as it relates to database access), tune Internet database network configurations, distribute and move data to various locations to improve Web performance, and manage extended data types (video, for example) that dynamic Web sites house. And this is often in addition to managing traditional client/server and mainframe systems. With all this, is there any doubt as to why DBAs are so hard to find? One thing is certain; all these Web-related responsibilities have elevated the DBA into something more: A datamaster. And more than ever, the datamaster needs the right equipment to perform the critical jobs of schema and change management, backup and recovery, and performance monitoring. Just what equipment do datamasters need to shine in their roles? Although there isn’t enough space here to list everything, I can briefly cover some of the software packages that 1999 and beyond offer the datamaster.
Oracle8iNo, the Internet File System extensions aren’t there yet (as of this writing). However, there is enough meat in Oracle8i to give it solid credibility for e-commerce and also do something that previous editions of version 8 couldn’t do: move the masses of 7.x users to 8.x. Where object/ relational technology and initial partitioning failed to prod the 7.x users out of their comfort zone, 8i has the right stuff to make it happen. Numerous performance and space-management enhancements, extended monitoring capabilities, and a boatload of schema and object productivity newbies make 8i a must-have for all current Oracle shops, as well as for those undecided on which database to use for their e-businesses. Without question, there are other database vendors that can support the Internet, but presently, nobody does it better or gives the datamaster more to work with than Oracle.
Embarcadero Technologies’ DBArtisan and Rapid SQLDatamasters need an all-purpose Swiss Army knife to perform the work on all the databases in their enterprises, be they e-databases or client/server-based databases. And because no administrator is single-platform anymore, DBAs need their toolsets to work on heterogeneous data sources as well. To this end, nothing on the market comes close to DBArtisan 5.0 from Embarcadero Technologies Inc. DBAs who start using this tool never look back. Datamasters who aren’t using this tool are working too hard. And although Embarcadero’s Rapid SQL development tool has competition from others, no one else lets datamasters and Web developers manage their SQL, Java, HTML, ASP, Perl, and other Internet-related software code from one tool. The combination of DBArtisan and Rapid SQL is like Batman’s utility belt for the datamaster.
BMC PatrolJust ask the recent e-commerce companies that have experienced a prolonged outage about the importance of availability and performance inside their organizations, and you’ll understand why having an industrial-strength performance management tool is critical. And not just any performance monitor will do for today’s datamasters. They must have a proactive product that alerts them to trouble far in advance of a potential disaster. They also need something that assists with the specialized database and server tuning as it relates to e-commerce. At present, no one tops BMC Software Inc.’s Patrol 3.0 in this area. The product still gets low marks for its complex installation and configuration, but no one can touch the breadth and depth of features and benefits that Patrol offers. With special, plug-in “Knowledge Modules” for nearly every database in existence along with new Internet modules to help an e-business stay up and running, Patrol is the act to beat. There are other products and tool suites that 1999 (and beyond) offers today’s database guru, but these are the ones that stand out of the crowd as the strongest options. Once armed with the right database engine, productivity suite, and performance management system, the datamaster will definitely have a leg up on those making do with less.
Web’s Strange BedfellowsAs an industry, we are still grappling with how best to present data to users via the Internet. This is no small problem, and it’s made even more complicated by the rapid evolution of the Web, both in terms of underlying technologies and user expectations. For this reason, my choices for the biggest events of 1999 are contradictory: the amazing continued popularity of Yahoo’s search engine and the emergence of Bluestone Software Inc. as a major player in the application server and e-business worlds. Bluestone helped pioneer the application-server field, but in 1999 the company outpaced the rest of the pack by setting Sapphire/Web and XML Suite as its foundation for its new Total-e-Business solution. At the moment, the application server world is extremely fragmented, with some application servers excelling in some areas, but Bluestone seems to have the best grasp on what’s truly needed in an enterprise-level application server: powerful load management, granular failover capabilities, a great development framework, commitment to truly usable standards — extensible markup language (XML) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) — and a conceptualization of exactly how an e-commerce application server can best serve the needs of both users and the enterprise. On the flip side, however, Yahoo remains a paradigm for presenting information to users efficiently. The main Yahoo front page is usually delivered in three seconds, and secondary and international pages are also quick to load. Yahoo doesn’t do anything fancy with its Web pages — no Java, no ASPs, no XML, no EJBs — and it delivers impressive performance on a network of 70 or so Intel-based servers. The thing we all can learn from Yahoo is that sometimes we worry more about the glitzy presentation of data rather than the efficient presentation of data. Yet Web users certainly know the difference, keeping Yahoo one of the most visited sites on the Web. It seems fitting to near the end of the millennium with a conundrum, as the future of the Internet is still evolving. As it stands right now, the Internet will go down as a major innovation of the 20th century, but certainly not the most important development of the millennium; the technological change of today is nothing like what we experienced at the beginning of the century, what with the development of mass-produced automobiles, the widespread introduction of electrical devices, and the real wiring of the nation with telegraph service and telephones. The best bet is that the Internet will accelerate its rate of development, and someday an Intelligent Enterprise columnist will hail the Internet as the great story of the 21st century, after it rapidly evolved from its primitive roots.
What’s Old Is New AgainPerhaps it’s fate — or irony — that we end the decade and the millennium with IBM as the story in enterprise computing. Lest we forget in this Internet and personal-computing besotted era, IBM is the company that, far more than any other, is responsible for the spread of computing throughout business. To a large extent, IBM is also responsible for the commercial development of computing to the point that enterprise-level business can’t exist without computers. Then there was the personal computer, which IBM did not invent — or even like. But it was a slightly renegade IBM division down in Boca Raton, Fla., that cobbled together a bunch of parts and created the first IBM PC. Millions of IBM PC sales later, with the term “PC compatible” synonymous with business computing, it looked like IBM was in the catbird’s seat to lead computing into the next century. That this great legacy almost became an epitaph is itself a story of legend. In fact the “fall” of IBM may itself be more myth than reality, although even IBM will admit to a stumble around the turn into the 1990s. Although the mainframe and service aspect of IBM continued its reliable success, the PC hardware and software components of IBM’s business did relatively poorly on the bottom line. What’s perhaps more important, IBM lost much of its invincible aura. It was no longer the leader in some important aspects of computing. As the wags of the time remarked, “The elephant can dance, but it’s Microsoft’s tune.” IBM still hasn’t recovered its leadership position in personal computers and software, but since the 1980s, computing has moved on. Now it’s the Internet that has become the most important arena for computing. It’s not possible for any computer company to miss the Internet, but it’s not that easy to take advantage of it. In 1999, IBM demonstrated that, not only does it “get” the Internet, no company does enterprise Internet better. There were many good enterprise products in 1999, some of them important within their own software category; but this wasn’t a year when any one product jumps out of the crowd as important on a broad scale. What does stand out is IBM’s suite of products for developing Internet applications: WebSphere Studio 3.0 and Visual Age for Java 3.0. IBM wasn’t alone in 1999 (or 1998) with an all-inclusive Internet suite, but it was the most successful. In particular, IBM grabbed a good share of the leadership for Java from the fumbling hands of Sun and has created the best integrated, all-Java approach to enterprise Internet application development. WebSphere Studio 3.0, which features and supports the WebSphere application server, is probably the most completely integrated server package available — and arguably the most important component of a multi-tier distributed application architecture. The improved Visual Age for Java provides programmers with an excellent GUI development environment. Together with IBM’s unusually complete support and partnership programs, this package is the kind that will not only enable, but stimulate enterprise Internet applications. Leadership with this kind of product gives IBM the platform to beat for e-commerce — even into the next millennium.
EAI Was the Big StoryAs the 20th century draws to a close, we are witnessing major changes in the way companies are using IT to “enable” business process reengineering and consolidation. In the past year, two trends emerged that reshaped the IT industry: enterprise application integration (EAI) and application servers. They are influencing the way we will build and deploy applications for the next three to five years. EAI rose to the top of CIOs’ and CTOs’ agendas as the preferred vehicle for creating and reengineering business processes that focus on customers’ needs instead of product features. EAI creates an environment that integrates business processes from existing computing assets running on heterogeneous platforms and across organizational boundaries. The meteoric rise of the Net technologies — the Internet, intranets, and especially extranets — has caused a dramatic shift in how to accomplish EAI. E-business integration (EBI), the intersection of EAI with Net technologies, has emerged as one of the most efficacious ways to achieve EAI. The EBI environment combines the features and functions of message brokers, such as message routing and message transformation, with enterprise-class features including thin-client computing load balancing, fault tolerance and administration, and management. As a systems integrator in the EAI space, I have worked with many of the products in this area. One of my favorites is Active Software Inc.’s ActiveWorks. The ActiveWorks architecture provides an integration framework and environment that supports both horizontal and vertical scalability. ActiveWorks is a distributed, hub-based environment that provides the main features required of a message broker product. Some of the essential features and functions such as message transformation are not centralized but are placed in agents, allowing for extensibility without the expense of centralization. Its native support for publish/subscribe communication lets components exchange information in the form of messages in event-driven as well as request/reply communication models. The ActiveWorks environment provides solid adapter support for packaged applications such as Siebel, SAP, and PeopleSoft, letting you integrate ERP systems with business processing systems. Besides native support for Java, language access via an ActiveX adapter makes it easy to build integration code and agents using Visual Basic. Its full-featured administration facility allows you to control and monitor all aspects of the environment. Java’s emergence as a viable server-side computing platform has created a new genre of middleware, the application server. These application servers let you package and deploy Java code in the form of servlets (the server-side equivalent of Java applets) and, more important, as enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). In 1999, a plethora of application server products were announced and released. My company reviewed and evaluated products for Intelligent Enterprise as well as a number of Fortune 100 companies looking to leverage Enterprise Java and component technology as the basis of new middle-tier computing environments. Two products that stand out from the pack are BEA Systems Inc.’s WebLogic Application Server and IBM’s WebSphere Application Server. WebLogic provides leading-edge Java development and deployment tools and is a full-featured environment that supports servlets and EJBs. In addition, it has built-in support for JDBC, JNDI, and other essential Enterprise Java elements. If you are looking for one-stop shopping to start on the path to Enterprise Java computing, WebLogic is a solid product; all the components required to build Enterprise Java applications are provided “in the box.” For example, there is no need to go out and find a JDBC driver; this product comes with drivers for all the major databases. WebSphere focuses on the ability to deploy a distributed application using a combination of servlets, Java Server Pages (JSPs), and EJBs. WebSphere is a complete deployment and administration environment and provides the best overall monitoring and management facility, bringing all the pieces required to deploy, configure, and administer distributed Java and Web-based systems into a single, integrated package. You have to use an external development tool and environment, such as Symantec’s Visual Café or IBM’s VisualAge Java to actually develop your JavaBeans and servlets and to pack beans into jars. VisualAge Java’s Builder tools let you create Java code that natively supports CICS and IBM MQSeries. Using VisualAge Java with WebSphere gives you a solid environment that meshes well with IBM-based platforms.
Y2K Held ProminenceThe past year has been significant, not so much for the new software or technology that came out, but for what it taught us about our tools and practices. With the odd exception of product version releases such as Microsoft Office 2000 and Seagate Crystal Reports version 7 and enhancements to existing products such as Oracle 8i and Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition, this has been an exceptionally quiet year for product announcements. When I look back over the year, I cannot think of anything that came out that made my work easier or my users’ time more productive. When looking back at 1999, one thing stands out: 1999 has been the year of the Y2K assessment. Although I am not one of those alarmists who believe that Y2K means the end of the world or at least horrendous problems for all computers, I do believe it is significant. It is significant because it has taught us that we cannot take our tools and development assumptions for granted. It has taught us that software and equipment must be designed with the future in mind and that we must review what is in place as well as the new products coming in. Additionally, the year 2000 has presented IT with one of the first deadlines that we could not move, fudge, or compromise. No one, that I know of anyway, has found a way to alter when the year 2000 will arrive. Also, because after this date programs either work or not, this is a pass-fail test. Research shows that the majority of software products come out over budget, late, or poorly implemented. This goes back to the standard triangle of development: time, cost, and quality. Well, for the first time, coming in late is not an option. And failure is not an option. Therefore, the third side of the triangle, the budget, has skyrocketed for many institutions. Moreover, I believe that those costs will be the other lasting legacy of Y2K. Businesses will remember what it cost them to cope with this problem. They will not want to see the same situation arise again, and they will also remember who was fair and equitable in the bills presented for Y2K service. I expect to see a good number of people unemployed when this is all done, people who, with any luck, made their money when the game was afoot, because in a short time, that river of cash will run dry.
|
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
