With plenty of fanfare and Net-age rhetoric, IBM attached an electronic "e" to its business solutions on Tuesday, presenting its new formula for "e-business" based on a family of Web servers and a Java-based programming model. Like a revelation, Big Blue proclaimed its newfound equation: "The connectivity of the Web + the substance of IT = e-business."
Forecasting that 35 percent of the IT industry, some US$450 billion, will be driven by network computing by 2000, John M. Thompson, head of IBM's software group, announced a new family of servers to run "killer apps." The five new machines, developed by IBM and marketed under both the IBM and Lotus names, range from a simple mail server to a secure transaction server for high-volume Web commerce, all based on a common technology to make for easy upgrades and scalability.
A common set of tools will be used across all the servers and a common programming methodology based on Java, linking Web-based applications with transaction systems and back-end databases. This "network computing framework" will allow applications designers "to compose rather than build applications," Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager of IBM's Internet division, told Wired News. In the future, programmers will code the components so that designers can click them off a palette to create applications.
At the heart of the IBM-Lotus presentation, which began with a video clip of Nicholas Negroponte poking fun at those unaware of the trillions of dollars moving around the Net today, was IBM's decision to move its tried and true business applications to the Web. The company is attempting to bring together its experience with databases and other business apps and the connectivity of programs like Lotus Notes so that customers can access data in existing applications from the Net.
"This is not just about browsers or browser wars; this is about business," Thompson told the journalists and industry consultants gathered at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Mike Zisman, executive vice president of strategy at Lotus, hyped the Web as the new front door to the 20 years of enterprise data some old-time IBM customers have in their applications. But he clearly saw that IBM and Lotus have not broken new ground so much as tied together the existing parts and pieces of their business into a cohesive whole. "Our announcement today is not so much a new vision as a refinement of a vision, making the possible into the practical," Zisman said.
