IBM’s senior vice president and group executive Steve Mills recently told press the deal enabled IBM to realize a 20-year-old industry dream of building optimized code output while staying in the highly optimized abstract layer.
Newly appointed WebSphere director Bob Sutor is more direct. With the acquisition IBM is absolutely committed to becoming the largest tools company in the world. It’s not tools for tools sake, it’s a category of the software industry, he said at IBM’s annual developer conference.
Sutor is not given to hyperbole. A mathematics PhD, Sutor, prior to becoming director of WebSphere infrastructure software, was in the frontline of IBM’s work on web services standards.
Curiously, mathematics expert Sutor did not define his terms. Largest in what respect? Numbers of users, product revenue, ISV support or by combining product revenue with support revenue, derived from its massive Global Services business.
The general manager for developer relations Buell Duncan leant a hand. Duncan suggested IBM’s sights are set on growing the number of programmers who use its services and technologies. Programmers skilled in C/C++ are natural targets for Java and Linux, which Buell claimed are two of the most heavily trafficked parts of IBM’s developerWorks online community, while IBM is also interested in Microsoft Corp’s Visual Basic developers.
We are going after people who have interests in these [Java and Linux] technologies. Of the Visual Basic programmers, more than half have skills in Java and we are going after those, Buell told ComputerWire.
Duncan believes IBM’s portfolio, featuring DB2, data integration, Notes and Tivoli, will distinguish it against Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) rivals like BEA Systems Inc and Oracle Corp. The breath of the portfolio gives us momentum in different markets, he said.
Sutor said IBM’s use of the Eclipse framework in WebSphere studio will help to grow IBM’s presence among ISVs. Eclipse enables ISVs to build tools that easily snap into each other, without custom programming on a partner-by-partner basis. WebSphere Studio is based on Eclipse since IBM donated $40m of its code to the project.
If I’m a tools vendor and I have to choose the top three companies to support, which am I going to choose? Eclipse and Microsoft are in the top three, then possibly Borland. That puts someone like BEA at a disadvantage, Sutor claimed.
IBM’s ability to integrate the Rational product set into its own appears to go without question, from both analysts and competitors. Rikki Kirzner, IDC research director, predicts IBM will become the second largest vendor offering combined platforms and tools behind Microsoft.
Currently, Borland is number two in tools behind Microsoft on the Windows platform and number one on Java, thanks to JBuilder, with 40% market share. That 40% figure puts Borland ahead of IBM.
Kirzner, though, believes Borland will retain its number-one slot in terms of an independent tools provider. The company, she believes, will win the loyalty of customers who do not want to become locked into IBM’s platform and tools. Such companies may operate both Java and .NET or Java platforms from more than one J2EE supplier.
There will always be demand from developers for non-proprietary lock-in, she said.
One senior Silicon Valley executive backed Kerzner’s assessment that IBM’s tools would ultimately lead to lock-in. He predicted IBM could integrate the all-important Rational tools for application life-cycle management in two years, but did so with a warning.
If IBM can execute they will have a complete end-to-end development environment for WebSphere. But it will only be for WebSphere and for those customers who say I only want to run IBM, the executive said. Largest, it seems, could have its limitations.
Source: Computerwire
