Nielsen’s comments came as he sought to explain why infrastructure software vendor BEA only recently announced its Liquid Computing vision, coming as it does several years behind competitive grand visions, such as IBM’s On Demand, HP’s Adaptive Enterprise, or Sun’s N1.
According to Nielsen, the reason for announcing a more forward-looking vision at its eWorld conference in San Francisco on May 25 was because our customers were asking us where we are going. There are certain times when you need to give a longer view. With IBM’s On Demand and the like, there is a high-level marketing war being waged and we don’t want to fly behind IBM and HP in this.
If the company does make an acquisition, it seems one area where it could choose to buy rather than build is for an enterprise service bus product. Nielsen said the company is working on an ESB, codenamed QuickSilver that should be ready sometime next year.
But with all of the hype around ESBs, and several companies already having ESBs of their own, Nielsen conceded that an acquisition in this space might make sense to get to market faster. In any one area, we have not ruled out an acquisition, he said. More and more customers are saying that our [existing] products are good, but they want an ESB. We may decide an acquisition makes sense, or we may still build our own.
Sonic Software is credited with inventing the term enterprise service bus, to describe a standards-based integration platform, which combines messaging, web services, data transformation and intelligent routing in an event-driven Service Oriented Architecture.
As well as companies like Sonic Software, ESB competition comes also from the likes of SeeBeyond Technology, Cape Clear, PolarLake and Fiorano Software. Blue Titan is another potential prospect, as it already has a Control for WebLogic Workshop that adds some useful features such as discovery, registration, SLA enforcement and monitoring.
