When Progress Software Corp bought Java Tools specialists Apptivity in 1997, customers of the company’s fourth generation language 4GL tools puzzled as to where it was leading them. A more pertinent question now is where Apptivity is leading Progress. According to Purna Pareek, vice president of Progress Software’s Apptivity product unit, the application server market in which they are competing, is set to grow from under $200m currently to $1.5bn by 2001. And it is opening a new market for Progress. Progress customers are not necessarily what we’re going after. We are going after a new breed of application developers that are building a totally new kind of application. These are not the replacement applications of Progress 4GL. That would very limiting for us. The reason why Progress spent $11m on a company with little revenue to speak of was to grow beyond its own installed base. It will take time for Apptivity’s progress to be reflected in Progress’s profits. The results of this kind of acquisition really show after three or four years, said Pareek. While a consensus has built up that Java is not quite ready for enterprise applications, he takes a more pragmatic line. Java is ready for lots of things and it’s not ready for lots of other things. It depends on what kind of application you want to build. If you’re building a very sophisticated Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Java may not be quite ready for that. And the reason is that you need a lot of supporting infrastructure. It’s coming, it on the way but it will take another year or two before it’s ready. The company wrote its own IDE in C++. But while the Java environment may be full of holes, Pareek sees a huge immediate potential in Java applications. Java is ready for building the classical transaction-orientated, form-centric database orientated application. It’s biggest advantage is deployment. If you have to deploy an application over 100,000 PCs it will take one of two years before you can complete the deployment. By the time you’ve deployed the application, it will be out of date anyway. What Java does is give you the browser metaphor. You don’t need any other client. That is the largest MIS problem so far. Java solves that. Maintenance also become easy for organization with fast changing structures and its final bonus is accessibility where an application can be run from anywhere in the world provided you have internet access and a browser. Pareek sees Apptivity’s main competitors as application server vendors like Netdynamics Inc and Netscape Communications Corp’s Kiva Software Corp subsidiary. Market shares are difficult to determine in such an infant market, though Netdynamics probably has the edge currently. Who emerges with the biggest share of the vast emerging application server market depends on how rapidly they can add new tools. Apptivity has just released version 2.1 addressing the problem of secure client server communication across a firewall but the bug step forward will come with the release of version three in September/October. This is a major re-write using CORBA as the infrastructure. It will include a ‘smart adapter’, a way to get to the vast amount of data many organizations hold which is not on a relational database. This will cater for BOPS – an acronym for BAAN, Oracle, Peoplesoft and SAP. But Pareek is uncomfortably aware that with such a valuable market beckoning, Apptivity’s competitors are working on their own bright ideas to increase market share.
