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January 1, 2004

Only the Best Survive

The Combination Of Integration And BI Were The Standouts Of The 2003 IT Landscape

In this Issue:

Data Mining Evolutions

Analytics Everywhere

In Pursuit Of Customer Data Integration

The Borland Alternative

The Coming Of The Grid

Resources

Continued from Page 1

The Borland Alternative

From the perspective of application development, 2003 is when a lot of things seemed to be spinning apart — most notably Web services standards, but also Java solidarity and even monolithic Microsoft, where security is an issue eating away at the foundations. This turmoil has affected developers, sometimes deeply.

That's why I'm pointing to Borland Software and some of its products — JBuilder, C#Builder, and C++Builder — as a refreshing approach not only to provide alternatives to Microsoft, IBM, and Sun products, but also as a way for harried enterprises to address software development in a multiplatform environment.

Borland is making a valiant, albeit imperfect, attempt to provide integrated development environments (IDEs) that are similar yet cross the boundaries among the worlds of Java, Microsoft .Net, and C++. In theory at least, developers familiar with any one of the Borland IDEs can switch to another one without learning a new user interface. Of course, they still must learn another language.

The Borland IDEs help with these hurdles, but the developer needs to be alert to problems in shifting from one language to another. Still, given the reality that many if not most enterprise shops have developers in at least two of these programming "worlds," the highly regarded Borland IDEs may provide a welcome crosswalk. They also demonstrate that some bridge-building companies can do very well by resisting the centrifugal forces at work in contemporary software development.

Nelson King [nelsonking@earthlink.net] has written multiple books on database application programming and is a long-time contributor to Intelligent Enterprise. He spends much of his time in the trenches of enterprise software development.

The Coming Of The Grid

In today's economic climate, IT departments are being forced to do more with less. On the other hand, computers and servers across the enterprise function at well below their peak capacities most of the time. Grid computing is the technology that promises to bridge this gap. It enables multiple computers, servers, and storage units to be virtualized as one large computer system. It optimizes the utilization of resources within the grid, providing just the right amount of resources that you need.

Over the last several years, major vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, NEC, and Oracle have been trying to position their products to support grid tech nology. Moreover, smaller companies such as Avaki, Entropia, DataSynapse, Platform Computing, and United Devices are specializing in building custom grids for vertical industries such as financial services and life sciences. In Sept. 2003, Oracle unveiled the next release of its database: Oracle Database 10g (g for grid).

The Globus Alliance conducts research and development related to grid technologies. The Global Grid Forum (GGF) is a significant force for setting standards and community development. The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is an initiative to marry grid technology with the emerging industry trend of providing Web services. All these organizations are well supported by almost all the players in the grid technology market.

In the past year, grid computing has slowly emerged from the realm of scientific applications and moved into the mainstream IT thought. It will be another two to four years before we see widespread usage of the grid. However, as with any emerging technology, the early bird catches the worm. The time is right to start planning on how grid computing will fit into your enterprise architecture.

Ganesh Variar [ganesh_variar@yahoo.com] is a lead analyst at Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon. He has nine years' experience in managing and designing business intelligence solutions.