"IBM dismisses 9i as 'publicity stunt'" - the451.com, Oct 11, 2000 by Ray Hegarty

London - So Oracle wants to be taken seriously as an application server? According to Paraic Sweeney, IBM's vice president of business transformation in the application and integration middleware division, Oracle's 9i database and application server software announcement in San Francisco last week was a "pure-play publicity stunt."

Oracle's message is 'blurred', says Sweeney. It is unrealistic to think companies will want to buy into the idea of being a complete Oracle shop with both application server and database. "For companies that have been in business for longer than six months, there will be a degree of heterogeneity, with several different systems running in an organization either through merger, acquisition or the passage of time," he says. Oracle just doesn't have the skills to compete in the business: An application server connects to business logic that is stored in several different kinds of databases.

Application servers are designed using technology based on open standards. They employ different methods of forwarding requests from users to applications and databases. These methods include Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), common object request broker architecture (CORBA), Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Microsoft Active Server Page, Java Servlets and the Java Server Pages.

Oracle's application server, says Sweeney, might be used for serving Web pages--what he refers to as static elements--rather than for conducting Web-based transactions. "But how will it deal with dynamic pages, how will it drive a transaction workload? IBM has been doing this for 25 years," says Sweeney, referring to IBM's MQSeries messaging platform and CICS transaction software.

Nowadays, of course, IBM also has WebSphere, its messaging and application server: The middleware hosts execution of business logic and has services for transaction and state management, high performance, high availability, resource pooling, transaction integrity, data integrity, workload management and access to data and legacy program resources. Sweeney claims IBM has 40 products that can be delivered alongside its WebSphere platform.

Will Oracle buy its way into this business? It's a possibility. Those companies might be prepared to wait that can afford to pay more attention to their long-term e-commerce strategies.

Meanwhile, IBM is planning to release an updated, Java-compliant version of WebSphere, version 4.0, by the end of this year, with support for EJB and J2EE. Its marketing and R&D spending on WebSphere is projected to total more than $1bn over the next two years; the company has 4,000 people working in its middleware engineering labs, claims Sweeney.

And, while we didn't speak to the reporter directly, the CNBC.com article includes several of the topics we've issued InfoBytes on over the past couple of weeks.