Last week’s announcement that IBM will co-develop and co-market software based on Silverstream’s Application Server has gratified customers, Silverstream says. Cobbled together from ex-Sybase executives, the company was a pioneer in building web application servers in Java (CI No 3,317). Converting IBM takes Silverstream one step up towards the enterprise. Bill Critch, director of alliance marketing and the person in charge of the relationship with IBM, describes the new deal as a combination technology, sales and marketing relationship. Silverstream has joined IBM’s formal ISV program with the purpose of adding DB2, CICS and MQ support to existing support for products from Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Lotus, Peoplesoft and SAP. However Critch says the IBM relationship exceeds in scope the relationships Silverstream has with the other vendors. For example, a strong technology link binds the company to Microsoft, but the Redmond giant is nothing like as active in marketing and selling Silverstream as Big Blue plans to be. Our customers’ short term reaction to the deal is lots of questions, says Critch, we’re getting a bit overwhelmed! He stresses that the questions are mostly technical and involve details of DB2 configurations rather than any alarm over Silverstream’s direction. Our customers have a lot of faith in us, says Critch, and anything that can give us more recognizable credibility, they’re happy with. Silverstream now has access to IBM’s distribution channels and vice versa. For a 110-person company, the application server startup claims an enviable distribution model, estimating that 500 to 1000 people are involved in selling its software. Silverstream’s eponymous product is now in release 2.0, and Critch says the latest version has addressed certain issues outstanding from 1.0. In particular, the server now has the power to create Java on the server and use that code to generate HTML on the client, getting around long- standing issues to do with lack of mainstream support for Java 1.1.
