Late last month IBM quietly acquired what has been described as a new wonder drug for distributed applications. The product known as Interspace from privately held PlanetWorks, a small five-year- old one product New York based software house, promises to put some backbone into all those feeble client/server systems built using the likes of Microsoft’s Visual Basic or Sybase PowerBuilder tools.
Using what’s become the re-branded VisualAge Interspace, IBM says product developers can stick with their preferred desktop development tool and start building client-server, Java or App Server applications that hook with ease into IBM enterprise server back ends. That will suit the many thousands of companies that have investments in CICS, IMS and other run-the-business back-end IBM programs and now want to start building new applications on top of these assets without having to retrain masses of developers. VisualAge Interspace allows for re-use of existing CICS transactions on the web, it can help leverage distributed middleware, and it will extend an organization’s existing MQSeries infrastructure to new users. And it can be done in a more or less seamless fashion, the company claims.
But there is more to this than a pure out-and-out product purchase. The few analysts that have looked closely enough see the deal as a strategic step by IBM. The move is a noticeable sideswipe at Microsoft, which has always sought to leverage its infrastructure off its tools, comments Bruno Beloff, a ComputerWire analyst and development tools specialist. It’s a point that is echoed by others within the analyst community. Planetworks Interspace was a leading niche tool for providing seamless mainframe connectivity through object wrapping technology. IBM’s closest competitor, Microsoft, does not currently have a comparable offering to help [Visual Basic] developers get to the mainframe, nor does MTS or MSMQ offer the same level of services or scalability as WebSphere [IBM’s Application Server] or IBM MQSeries, concludes a report by Hurwitz Group.
The thinking behind the purchase seems to be an acceptance by IBM that it is way too late for it to win over to its VisualAge product all those Visual Basic and PowerBuilder developers which have built nice and easy eye candy client/server systems. Most of these systems don’t scale too well, however. Nor do they have much to offer in the way of data security. So a better ploy is to complement them, providing a VisualAge Interspace bridge to reinforce the flimsy world of PowerBuilder or Visual Basic developments with the steel plated back end infrastructure of IBM. IBM can then use infrastructure access from the desktop as yet another means of selling its own platform strategies.
Against Microsoft, IBM is out to do everything it can to ease the problems of access into its enterprise server environments. We want to compete more aggressively with Microsoft, Rob Lamb of IBM’s Hursely Laboratories confirmed to us, adding that in using a product like Interspace it can drive the utilization of more mainframe MIPS in the process. And at the same time it helps build on the use of IBM systems like CICS. There’s a really massive investment in CICS and customers desperately want to leverage that. We estimate that globally there are around 30 billion CICS transactions every single day. That’s more than all the daily hits that are made on the web, he adds.
While all this sounds eminently sensible, the acquisition is one that IBM needed to make for other reasons. As Beloff points out, the PlanetWorks acquisition should help IBM address two noticeable weaknesses in its applications server strategy. One is fairly specific to IBM in that there are several very different data integration products being marketed under the WebSphere brand (web server, Component Broker, CICS). Although these are shipped together, they are really very separate products and require specific skills from developers. Arguably, the situation for a unified view of MQSeries is even worse. There is also a common applications server problem. Where vendors offer both server and tools, there is always some vendor-specific tool advantage. Opening up other tools to IBM run-time servers obviously lessens the first problem and hopefully eliminates the other, he says.
Rob Lamb of IBM confirms that the product means the choice of application server is no longer dictated by choice of desktop tools or development environment. It means the VB/PB folks can tap into the world of industrial strength middleware, the scalability of Transaction Server for OS/390 or the in-built security of a product like WebSphere, without having to worry at all about the plumbing. Visual Age Interspace handles all that. The product provides an intuitive interface so that a VB developer can call a routine (usually a COM component) in the very same way they’re used to and drive a CICS application that might be written in Cobol that’s running on a S/390 server, he told us.
IBM announced VisualAge Interspace at the IBM CICS/MQSeries Technical Conference in Dallas but won’t say much more about the detail of the PlanetWorks deal other than to report the $2,495 Visual Interspace product will now sold through all the usual IBM channels. What becomes of PlanetWorks’ partner program remains to be seen. The company has worked closely in the past with Candle and Computer Associates, NetDynamics, SilverStream and NCR.
