rganizations are creating intranets and other Web-based projects at a furious pace-and with good reason. If they don't, chances are good that competitors will beat them to the punch, getting information to employees, suppliers, and customers faster and at lower cost.
"The Web goes everywhere and erases time and geography," says Winn Stephenson, VP of network computing at Federal Express Corp. in Memphis, Tenn.
Web technology may be the ideal distributed architecture. That's because it's largely independent
of platforms and operating systems. It's also because the Web offers the benefits of centralized control, something companies with client-server envi-ronments have learned is essential. Putting mainframes on the Web lets companies get around most of the complexities of client-server and reduce costs by leveraging existing assets. "As long as it's already on the mainframe, you give it a Web front and you're fine," says Michael Barnes, an analyst with the application strategies service of Hurwitz Group Inc., a Boston consulting firm. "The user doesn't care."
Web-based computing is the latest link in the evolutionary chain that began with mainframes, then led to networked computing and client-server. Many thought client-server would be cheaper to implement and maintain than large-scale systems and would empower the knowledge-based worker to maximize productivity. But they couldn't foresee how expensive client-server systems themselves would be to maintain and service.
Where the mainframe comes with tried
-and-tested communications, security services, and business rules coded into applications gleaned from decades of experience, communications in client-server environments only now are becoming adequate. More programmers must be hired to write applications that let organizations offload mainframe-based applications to midrange servers. Meanwhile, systems administrators grapple with software and configuration management.
Order From Chaos
"One of the problems with client-server and the whole idea of a physical architecture and rigid structure like tiers is that you're trying to impose order on something that's inherently chaotic," says Barnes.
The
migration to Web-based computing won't be without its difficulties (
see related story
), but Web applications already are changing the face of distributed computing by helping speed up or ease access to databases and application development, improving business-to-business communications, and revamping netw
ork management.
Organizations are simplifying information access for users by giving them browser access to data warehouses on Unix or Windows NT servers that extract data from mainframes. "It's a hundredfold better than what people have now in terms of getting out data and making business decisions," says Jim Ingle, senior VP of custom business solutions at the Revere Group, a Chicago systems integrator. "It makes data available to more people regardless of time zones or geography."
That's evident at United Parcel Service in Atlanta, now in a three-way race with competitors Federal Express and DHL to bring applications to the Web to provide better service and let customers track shipments easily.
UPS has close to 340,000 employees and 160,000 vehicles world- wide, and it ships nearly 3 billion packages a year. To track all this, field staffers need reports covering subjects ranging from th
e number of hours drivers have worked to performance statistics. In the past, getting those reports required sending requests to corporate IS, which would "pull a group together to consider what they wanted, determine who had to deal with it, assign a priority order, and then generate the report," says Marc Dodge, telecommunications systems manager at UPS.
This was necessary because UPS has 200 different systems and applications at its IS shop in Mahwah, N.J. Over the years, UPS created Unix-based data warehouses and is now giving staffers access to them through browsers. This lets the field staff "manipulate, use, and present data in half the time it used to take," Dodge says.
Competitor FedEx is benefiting from new models of distributed computing in other ways, including faster application development. "You tend to develop and deploy things faster using Java and HTML. You can make a change, put it on the Web, and see how it works much easier than in client-server," says FedEx's Stephenson. One Web a
pplication the shipper has de- veloped is Internet Ship, which lets clients around the world track their packages using the Web.
Direct Connections
Web technology will also speed up business-to-business computing and enable direct connections between business applications because the open standards of the Web mean business partners don't first have to spend months negotiating protocols and data formats, says Clive Moss, senior VP of technologies at Fidelity Investments Systems Co. in Boston. Moss says Fidel-
ity is looking into doing business-to-business transactions over the Web once it resolves some interoperability issues.
Others already run business-to-business communications over the Web. The Federal Reserve Board in Washington can gather data from banks and financial institutions faster and more easily now that the Fed lets those organizations send files by E-mail over the Internet.
Every March 1, the Fed receives mortgage data from about 9,000 lending institutions and 2,300 bank
s nationwide in compliance with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Community Reinvestment Act.
The Fed's IS department had to send out software to extract relevant data, clean it up, and put it into a format that its computers could use. Moreover, the data came on diskettes and mainframe tapes. The Fed needed two to three weeks to load the data from the diskettes and tapes into the mainframes even though the process was automated, says Geary Cunningham, a manager in the Fed's information resource management division.
Last November, Cunningham's team used Web.PB, a Web application development tool from Sybase's Powersoft division, to write an application that lets the banks and financial institutions send the data over the Internet. They get an E-mail acknowledgment as soon as the Fed gets their messages.
The Web is also changing the nature of network management. Instead of fixed LA
Ns connecting a certain number of clients to a server or servers, many companies will set up virtual LANs to connect different clients to different servers, says Tom Bishop, director of platform development at Tivoli Systems Inc.
"You won't even know you're getting information from Server Y today as opposed to Server X yesterday," Bishop says. Network-management systems will have to evolve similarly: The different network-management protocols and interfaces now in use will be replaced by a single Java-based protocol, Bishop says. Java technology "comes closer to the ultimate solution than anything else."
Outside The Network
One of the most important aspects of Web technology is that it extends the client-server paradigm outside the corporate network. IBM sees the Internet as the global LAN, giving businesses unparalleled reach and users unparalleled choice, says John Patrick, VP of Internet technology at IBM.
The Net's bandwidth could be increased through the application of Digital Su
bscriber Line (DSL) technologies-new wiring technologies that will increase bandwidths to trillions of bits per second-and Internet 2, a joint effort among the academic, private, and non-profit sectors that will use a GigaPOP backbone, Patrick says.
GigaPOP is a gigabit-speed point of presence, a local number users can dial to connect to the Internet. This will let companies locate their computing resources where it's most economical for them to do so. Patrick believes GigaPOP ultimately will subsume the existing Internet architecture. Work on the GigaPOPs project will begin this year, he says.
Where does the emergence of the Web leave client-server? Ready for a mutation. Network computing, where there's network awareness on the client-server system and in the application environment, will replace the traditional client-server architecture by 2001, predicts Tom Austin, VP of electronic workplace technologies at Gartner Group Inc., an IT advisory firm in Stamford, Conn.
In Austin's view, user profiles-consisting of information about applications the user is cleared to access-will be stored on servers and downloaded only when required, and by devices from smart phones to super workstations. "If I drop my laptop on the tarmac while running for a plane, I'll be able to go to a WebTV in my hotel room and access my files," says Austin. "The next day, I can buy a new notebook and go on as if nothing happened."
But he predicts that it will take about five years before the industry reaches that point. Between global LANs, the spread of Java technology, and network awareness, client-server architectures will remain, even if in a mutated form.
Says FedEx's Stephenson, "At some point, client-server and Web technologies will blend so much that it'll be difficult to distinguish one from the other, and Java will be the piece that cements them together."
Client-server isn't going away, but like nearly everything els
e in computing, it's being transformed by the Internet.
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rganizations are creating intranets and other Web-based projects at a furious pace-and with good reason. If they don't, chances are good that competitors will beat them to the punch, getting information to employees, suppliers, and customers faster and at lower cost.
