InformationWeek

December 14, 1998

Most Important Products Of 98

Most Important Products Of 98:

Enterprise Application Integration Software

Teamware

Enterprise JavaBeans

SQL Server 7.0

Network-Attached Storage

Application Servers

NetWare 5

Customer-Management Applications

Midmarket ERP

Transaction Management

Runners-Up

Transaction Management
Part of the explosion of application server software is due to the development of transaction-management technology. Software for building and managing transaction-oriented applications grew in popularity this year, as technology managers looked for better ways to build electronic-commerce and distributed applications.

Transaction managers or "monitors," which for years have handled heavy workloads in high-end systems, have been repackaged with easy-to-use tools for use in midtier application servers and Web servers.

And transaction managers are so integral to many new application server-based solutions that they are rapidly being integrated into application servers--or, in the case of Windows NT, into the operating system itself. Sybase packages its Java-based Jaguar Component Transaction Server with its Enterprise Application Server. Microsoft includes Microsoft Transaction Manager with Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition and as part of the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack.

During the year, BEA Systems Inc., which sells a leading transaction manager called Tuxedo, improved its standing in this part of the middleware market with its acquisition of NCR's Top End transaction-management software and the acquisition of WebLogic Inc., a developer of application servers.

--John Foley

Read about the: Runners-Up