Guild Companies

Over the next five years, as companies decide how best to evolve their enterprise software systems, Microsoft .NET and Sun Microsystems Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) will emerge as the clear leaders for new development of enterprise applications, an analyst with Gartner said at its recent IT expo in San Diego. However, J2EE will continue to have a leg up on .NET in market share, owing in large part to Microsoft's premature announcement of the .NET Framework a year ago.

Jeffrey Comport, a vice president and research fellow with Gartner, presented these findings in a session entitled "A Five-Year Vision for Enterprise Application Architectures and Technologies." Comport sees several forces working to shape the market for prepackaged ERP, CRM, and supply chain software--often collectively referred to as ERP II. In a very broad sense, we are all still working to cope with the rapid explosion of information that ensued after the popularization of the Internet in the late 1990s. Because the majority of legacy systems were developed before the rapid rise of the Internet, they are not entirely well-suited to cope with the wide variety in content as well as the format of this information. Specifically, Comport says there is no good way to blend purely transaction-oriented systems that use rigid data structures with knowledge-management-oriented systems designed for unstructured data. The solution to this problem is not an easy one to achieve, and will require ERP vendors to loosen their grip on their applications and take a more holistic approach toward the enterprise.

"Packages must be a piece of a larger puzzle," Comport says. "Package vendors that embrace and support that role will succeed. Those that don't will be become legacies, feeding off of the maintenance of their bases."

To become a piece of that larger puzzle, vendors will need to realize and accept another shift occurring in the marketplace, in which one stops thinking of prepackaged products and starts thinking in terms of access to specific business processes delivered as a service. The upheaval is already under way, Comport says. "Application vendors no longer have the luxury of thinking a business process begins or ends solely within their application," he says. It's important for customers to have the "capability to alter processes and use applications as participants, not sole owners of business processes. So we no longer think of business processes as something that lives within an application."

There is such a tremendous range of business processes that need to occur within a typical enterprise that there is no way a single application--not even the "super suites" being offered today--can cover all of them. This leads us to another shift currently underway: componentization. Customers need to have the power to access certain business processes control points provided by the vendor, but not be tied down into purchasing the entire suite. "This can only work if the vendors begin to open up their applications. We've seen this begin to happen," Comport says.

Tying together these pre-existing business processes and delivering them through a services-oriented architecture is, of course, the job of Web services. This seemingly simple--but extremely complex--view on the future of enterprise computing is not one put forth originally by Comport. It's the dominant paradigm, held by nearly all of the systems vendors, although each has different software and services they would like to sell to take you there. The route to Web services has divided itself into two dominant camps--J2EE and .NET--which have different underlying architectures but rely on some of the same technologies, predominantly XML and its numerous offspring.

The component-based architectures of J2EE and .NET are rapidly replacing the "precomponent" architectures that were used to develop transactional systems, both old-fashioned host-based and more modern client/server architectures. According to Comport's graph, precomponent architectures--including OS/400 5250 protocols, CICS and mainframe 3270 protocols, Tuxedo, PL/SQL, CGI, Scripts, and 4GL--began 2002 with well over 50 percent of the market for enterprise projects. However, he predicts, through the graph, that the market share of precomponent architectures will have declined to less than 25 percent by the start of 2005. Earlier component-based architectures--COM, COM+, and CORBA--will also slowly dwindle away as the years progress, with their spaces being taken over by the .NET and J2EE architectures.

Gartner says, with 80 percent certainty, that J2EE will continue as the most popular enterprise application architecture through 2006. Comport stated in the written portion of his presentation that .NET might have faired better if Microsoft had not prematurely announced it. That premature announcement "has slowed down the adoption of COM+ and has led to an overall decline of new Microsoft starts at the enterprise level," Comport writes. The Microsoft hype on the Next Generation Windows Services initiative started well before Microsoft launched the initiative in June 2000, and the company has backed off putting .NET in the name of its server products because .NET isn't really there yet.

Tell us what you think about a world where J2EE and .NET are the dominant development environments by sending us an e-mail at editors@itjungle.com. We'd love to hear what you have to say.