DEVWORKS - Integration is watchword at IBM show
SAN FRANCISCO - Integration is the watchword at IBM Corp.'s developer conference here this week, where the company is pushing new software that it says can help companies link business applications in ways that make them more efficient.
Steve Mills, general manager of IBM's software group, told developers in his opening speech Wednesday that businesses spend as much as 40 percent of their annual IT budgets on IT integration, including money spent on products and developer salaries. IBM can help reduce those costs with a slew of new products that will be rolled out this week and in the coming year, he said.
The overall message was that developers are required to link all kinds of applications from multiple vendors and running on multiple platforms. Big Blue is refreshing its family of WebSphere products to help developers achieve that, and is also improving its Tivoli management software and Lotus workgroup products to allow for tighter integration.
"The pieces have to come together and dovetail to deliver the complete computing model, because it's about more than automating transactions, it's about horizontal business process integration," Mills said.
New products announced Wednesday include a new release of IBM's flagship WebSphere Application Server, version 5.0, which will be available in the third quarter and adds new functions in areas like transaction management, security and Web services development, IBM said. New support for Business Rule Beans let business analysts update business rules without needing to alter applications, according to IBM.
Version 5.0 also adds support for JMX (Java Management Extensions), which should help boost performance of busy Web sites, according to IBM. JMX provides a standard way of managing a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) environments, using IBM's Tivoli products or software from third-party vendors, the company said.
Mills described WebSphere as the cornerstone of IBM's middleware strategy, which is built around open standards like XML (Extensible Markup Language), WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), he said. WebSphere competes with J2EE server products from BEA Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp. and others.
Big Blue also announced WebSphere Business Integration version 4.1, a new tool that should help to simplify IBM's lineup of integration products, which some analysts have called confusing. The product combines the functions of three separate products -- CrossWorlds Interchange Server, WebSphere MQ Integrator Broker and MQ Workflow -- and will be sold at the same price as the Interchange Server, starting at $150,000, IBM said.
The product can be installed on AIX, Windows NT/2000 and Sun Solaris and will be available this quarter. Starting in the third quarter, IBM also will release new WebSphere products designed to address business process integration in specific industries starting with retail distribution, telecommunications, automotive, electronics and insurance, according to a statement.
The efforts to simplify its vast product line by consolidating and repackaging products were welcomed by some developers here.
"Too many of IBM's products are everything to everybody," said Brian Grant, a technical systems analyst with Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto. WebSphere in its current form gets
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