Chewing the FatImpatient with bugs and insecurity, customers will look for resilient email managementThe fast food joint was nearly empty. Headphones on, a teenager slumped into a corner booth with his knees drawn up, munching on french fries. Scattered around the restaurant, a handful of other customers bent over their newspapers as they slurped soft drinks and bit into their cheeseburgers. There was no line. It's a confusing time. Assessments about whether the economy is fair, foul, or fitfully recovering change almost as fast as the roller-coaster performance of the stock markets, which seem to rise and fall on the slightest news. On TV, we see corporate executives escorted away like criminals; their conspicuous wealth, once admired and envied, has become the most flagrant evidence of wrongdoing. Stock options, so recently tickets to wealth and buying power and the most tangible aspect of employees' belief in the future of their companies — well, even the likes of balanced scorecard guru Robert Kaplan now opine that on the balance sheet, options should be treated as expenses incurred in the here and now. More to the point, we no longer know what to make of the cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke. Is this meal a guilty pleasure or a healthy repast? Gary Taubes, in an article for the New York Times Magazine (July 7, 2002) reports that after 30 years, nutritional scientists are coming around to the belief that Dr. Robert Atkins is not a quack. His "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution," a best-seller since it was first published in 1972, advises that high-fat meat, eggs, and dairy products are actually good for you, while starches and carbohydrates cause the most weight gain. Taubes quotes Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and head of a long-running and massive study of diet and health: "the idea that all fat is bad for you [and dieticians'] exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic." Eat the cheeseburger, hold the bun: but what about the fries? "Potentially cancer-causing acrylamides — compounds produced in the cooking of starchy foods like potato chips and french fries — pose a significant but still undetermined risk to consumers, a committee of public health experts quickly convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded," said a recent article in the Washington Post (June 27, 2002). The sudden meeting was called after scary findings in April by Swedish researchers, who found high levels of acrylamides, "which are used to produce plastics and dyes and to purify drinking water." The WHO considers acrylamides a probable human carcinogen: "But some scientists contest that conclusion," reports the Post, "and say that animal studies reveal little about whether the substance will cause cancer in humans." Shifting PrioritiesIt remains to be seen whether fast-food restaurants will quarantine the fries and become temples of healthy, beef-bound nourishment. Or whether corporate executives, clothed in hair shirts, will eschew the trappings of luxury and instead be lured from one post to another by the promise of higher ascetic glory: but it's clear that the greater economy is in the midst of a transition in priorities. The information revolution is a primary catalyst; to protect and enrich their own vested interests, more and more people follow the business news and will react. Ever-eager politicians will also react, hopefully with some degree of wisdom. And with their heads filled with the prevailing nutritional information, many people just might hesitate before ingesting those hot, salty, golden-brown strings of deep-fried spuds. The software industry, as it orients itself toward service, is trying to find its bearings amid the shifting priorities of its customers. With stock prices largely deflated and the very model of how the industry motivates and rewards itself — stock options — under attack, you can't help but feel the makings of a tectonic shift in progress. The pace of consolidation is quickening. In late July 2002, IBM, already a strong consulting services provider, agreed to acquire PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) for $3.5 billion. Saddled with shrinking margins and high expenses amidst a flat economy, it was only a matter of time before somebody swallowed one of the big systems integrators. Less than two years ago, PwC had been in negotiations to sell out to Hewlett-Packard for $18 billion. IBM will surely cut as much fat as it can in order to reap the payoff of an even more dominant position in the systems integration and services business. Technology providers are still feeling their way through the continuing, epic transition from stand-alone computer platforms to networked systems and services, which they must now do within the constraints of a continuing slowdown in IT spending. The hope is that the transition will yield a new fleet of products and services that build on current investments, tap the competitive requirements of strategic business objectives, and become the impetus for spending increases. In Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (Springer-Verlag, 1997), a thoughtful collection of essays commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Bob Frankston writes: "The next stage shifts the focus from what we can do in the computer to what we can accomplish with it as part of the larger infrastructure. The computer itself will 'disappear into the woodwork.' Our challenge is to learn how to master this new arena — one in which we are not writing programs but adding intelligence to everything around us." A software developer best known for implementing VisiCalc with Dan Bricklin, Frankston continues: "The limit is our ability to manage complexity. It is a world in which resiliency is more important than perfection. A resilient system is one that can continue to function in the midst of the chaos and failure that are the norm." The Collaborative OracleOn July 11, during an Analysts Day briefing, Oracle executives identified three areas as significant growth opportunities for the company: outsourcing, Oracle's new Collaborative Suite, and the E-Business Suite's chances in the midmarket sector. With IBM and Microsoft pulling every lever available to pry market share away from Oracle, and with open-source database products becoming a serious alternative, CEO Larry Ellison and his cohorts are sorting priorities as well. Few have been taking seriously the company's recent interest in challenging Microsoft's Exchange for groupware and email management systems, but perhaps journalists and analysts are underestimating both the company's seriousness and potential for success. Email is maturing into a data management problem, with increasingly tough requirements for security, resiliency, scalability. Noting that both Microsoft and IBM/Lotus have expressed their intent to involve SQL Server and DB2 UDB in their respective infrastructures for email management, Ellison challenged those who believe Oracle is crazy to join the market at this late stage: "We're not behind, we're ahead." But can a database system weaned on passive, structured data and application programs make the transition to the "active" world of user communication, interaction, and collaboration? Success could be essential if Oracle is to capture the lead for the next generation of networked software and services. The market will also look closely at new systems from companies such as Stratify Inc., which specialize in unstructured data management. It will surely cast a cold eye on current systems that might be programmed for perfection and elegance, but lack resiliency. Ellison predicted a dramatic contraction of the enterprise software business around the top two or three full-suite providers, his company included, which will compete fiercely for midmarket business. However, the suites have holes — collaborative capabilities being one of them. Best-of-breed competitors who can meet new strategic priorities still have a great opportunity to fly right through them. David Stodder [dstodder@cmp.com] is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise.
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