The Four Hundred

Taking the reins of business development at LANSA is a new role for Al Grega. But it is far from uncharted territory. LANSA, the Oak Brook, Illinois, developer of OS/400 tools and Web solutions, chose Grega to fill this critical position because he brings more than 23 years of IT experience--in business development, sales, marketing, and project management--from IBM. He'll be counted on to increase e-business sales and market share, a tough job in a highly competitive market.

I asked Grega about his take on the iSeries Web solutions field, and how things are shaking out for companies facing the modernization of legacy applications.

Along the Java path, the two big players are IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic. Each controls about 34 percent of the market, according to the most recent statistics I was told during training just about a month ago.

The rest of the market is pretty much aligned with Microsoft. That breakout includes Visual Basic and C++ languages and environments. There are a lot of tools ganged up around those two technologies.

Given those environments and your experience in WebSphere customer service, what do iSeries customers want today?

The bottom line is that customers want to be cross-platform, and ultimately it has been a matter of price. The question most are asking is, "What tools can get us cross-platform capability at a price point that is not going to bankrupt the company?"

To clarify the question about what customers want, we need to recognize that there are two distinct marketplaces out there: small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and large, enterprise-type organizations.

Before I joined LANSA, I spent three months at IBM working on the global systems integrator team. There is a much different set of priorities in enterprise than there is in SMBs.

In the enterprise environments, there is an incredible amount of focus on open technology. The distinctions are a little bit more defined. It's clearly a Java versus Microsoft approach. In SMBs, the line is not as distinct. There are more players at the lower end that offer options.

In enterprise situations, there are often a lot of satellite offices that need to be connected to the main solution. You don't want to be rolling out million-dollar projects in each location; you want to simplify that information, get the data, and aggregate it into a central location. You don't want to be spending it all on the connectivity to remote sites.

In the enterprise there is a great amount of focus on WebSphere and Java versus Microsoft's .NET strategies. These customers are spending millions of dollars on solutions. I have worked on $5-million-plus deals with some of these huge companies. These companies have different dynamics--international issues, cross-platform applications, and the need to distribute applications. Some of these Java-based solutions could exceed a small or midsize company's annual IT budget.

For the most part, they are more open to looking at alternative solutions to Java or .NET. They are looking to other traditional iSeries vendors, like LANSA, that have an established track record on the platform. In the last few years, the market has established who the technology leaders are.

The first option for many shops is WebFacing, taking existing RPG applications and using any of the WebFacing tools. But that is really a short-term fix. I call those "breathing room" solutions. This works as a short-term way to the Web. It is geared more to extranet, a set number of folks that you want to provide some extensions to access applications over the Web. It doesn't scale really well, because of the conversions that have to take place from HTML to 5250. It's good for smaller projects, good for breathing room, but really not good for robust e-business solutions.

To clarify what I mean by not scaling very well, it's that most WebFacing tools introduce an interactive workload on the machine. For instance, if 1,000 people want to access the application I've put out on the Web, each one establishes a new 5250 session on the back end. That can easily drive you over your CPU utilization. That could cost a fortune. A better idea is to create a batch workload, a key business application workload that lets you take advantage of the hardware.

Some companies are natively creating applications using CGI. Others are with the tools method. CGI pretty much locks you into a platform. It doesn't give you that flexibility. It is good for rendering information to the Web, but it falls short in the area of really complex business logic. For instance, you may want to write an application and deploy it on other servers. If you are an ISV [independent software vendor], you might want the flexibility to run on Intel, Unix, and iSeries.

From an iSeries customer mindset, I think the largest percentage of customers right now is looking at WebFacing. They are looking at short-term relief. However, the reality is that some companies are going to be forced to accelerate the movement to newer technology.

If you view WebFacing as a breathing-room solution for companies that will ultimately need more cross-platform capability, what are some examples that come to mind?

The health industry is an example, with its need for HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996] compliance. Health care companies have a new standard to adhere to by October of next year, and it requires an understanding of EDI [electronic data interchange] to be able to communicate with different vendors in the networks. That could be a daunting task to take your legacy information and convert it into formats that are cross-platform compatible.

Other organizations such as UCCnet are also pushing customers to move. UCCnet is the holder of uniform codes that go on all product packaging. UCCnet is an attempt to join suppliers and retailers in the exchange of product information. There are already some large vendors notifying their suppliers, saying "we strongly recommend" that you provide your product information on UCCnet.

If you are a small customer that is looking at just doing a WebFacing project and you get a call like that, what do you do? WebFacing or using CGI would not help you out in cases like that. You have to be talking Java technology or talking tools like LANSA that provide the back-end integration to the legacy systems. But more important, you need tools that provide middleware that allow connectivity and also the capability to move the information out into any format that you need.

These companies will need connectivity from iSeries to Intel, Unix, and Linux. They need flexibility on the back end that allows existing RPG applications, ERP solutions, to talk to all the latest standards that are being used.

Other products such as IBM's Connect for iSeries provide the base technology to tie back-end programs to XML solutions, but there are different formats being used by various companies, including variations of XML and EDI. And some companies are using spreadsheets and flat files. You have to predict whether your company will need to communicate with other companies using any of these options. There are many ERP solutions, including custom ERP versions, with unique back-end data structures and product master files that need to be integrated when companies take applications to the Web.

I would expect to see these Web-enablement solutions driving some iSeries hardware sales. Would you agree?

A lot of people don't want to expose their production servers to the Web. New servers will be used to do the Web serving that ties in on the back end. As the build up of new applications on the Web drives new business, those uses will generate more CPU cycles on the production machines as more orders come in. It's the equivalent of more people being attached to the machine. Upgrade sales of iSeries machines will result from that in order to handle additional workload.

In an LPAR [logical partitioning] environment, you can easily have one partition acting as a Web server while another acts as a firewall, and you can have the production in another partition. You need a new iSeries to do that.

The basic recommendation is that you don't put your production machine out on the Web, even though, with iSeries security, you could probably do that safely.

My experience is that a majority of iSeries installations that are going on the Web are using the iSeries for Web serving. There are cases where people use Intel, but there is a certain comfort level with the iSeries, knowing that the machine will stay up without crashing.