IBM to inject consistency into middleware

IBM on Monday will outline an ambitious plan to establish greater technical consistency within its line of middleware products. The end goal is to increase the portability of both data and applications across many different environments, including proprietary IBM operating systems, Linux, and Windows and, ultimately, to make that data easier to manage.

“The underlying theme of this is greater consistency of middleware across different server and client environments, to get all the typical benefits that can bring. They want the middleware to act as this insulating layer smoothing over all the disparities that exist in operating systems and hardware,” said one source familiar with the company’s plans.

The initiative will span IBM’s core middleware products: the WebSphere application server, the DB2 database, Lotus Notes collaboration products, and Tivoli systems management software.

Some sources see the move as a pre-emptive strategy against Microsoft’s client and server versions of Longhorn, not expected to arrive for at least another two years. Like IBM’s upcoming strategy, Longhorn is trying to achieve a much more consistent development framework across servers and clients as well as a more consistent document management strategy across clients and servers via its upcoming SQL Server database, code-named Yukon.

“Longhorn’s arrival in 2006 will create an inflection point in the market in that users will have to make a big decision. Do they continue with all Microsoft all the time and/or buy more Microsoft than they have been buying? Or do they say, ‘hey, maybe going with so much Microsoft [software] isn’t right for me any more?’ IBM is trying to encourage users right now to take that second option,” said another source familiar with the company’s upcoming announcement.

By establishing greater consistency among IBM’s middleware lineup, IT administrators can more easily manage the flow of data across environments and from servers to clients, which figures to save corporate users from further investing in technology and IT staff.

“If you have greater consistency of environments across all platforms, the management portion of that task is a lot easier,” one source said.

Just this past week Microsoft at its annual Windows Hardware Engineering conference (WinHEC) in Seattle announced it was more closely aligning the development efforts of the server and client versions of Longhorn. Company officials previously had indicated there could be a period of months between the arrival of each version. But with the closer alignment of the previously separate development efforts, that delta could be shorter than initially anticipated.

“By having a much more common architecture across content and application development, Microsoft is creating a synchronization and replication bus — an ESB really — able to synch up clients and servers too,” said one source.

Also part of next week’s announcement is the Micro Edition of the Lotus Workplace Client. The new product reportedly offers users a “richer” client that makes it easier for desktop users to pull together data and integrate it into a range of different business processes and workflows.

An IBM spokesperson declined to comment on the IBM event planned for Monday.