InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
December 14, 1998
Most Important Products Of 98
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Application servers were hot in 1998, as IT managers used them to build bridges between their enterprise systems and the Internet. Products in this category were also called on to buttress popular Web sites that quickly found themselves accommodating thousands of simultaneous users, which is beyond the capacity of most Web servers.
The deployment of application servers typically results in a division of the middle tier into two parts. Business logic such as internal business calculations are placed on a separate application server, while Web servers remain dedicated to publishing content in HTML format to the Internet. The result is improved speed and ability to scale. Online stock traders E-Trade Securities Inc., for example, relied partly on Netscape Application Server to build a system that can respond to spikes in trading volumes.
Vendors met demand with a barrage of new products. Netscape led off by releasing Netscape Application Server 2.0, based on technology the company acquired when it bought Kiva Software Corp. in 1997. Sun Microsystems also bought its way into the app server market when it purchased NetDynamics Inc. in July. Sun plans to bundle the NetDynamics application server with its Solaris servers.
Other top-tier vendors are making similar moves. Microsoft intends to bundle its Microsoft Transaction Server and Microsoft Message Queue Server with Windows 2000. For its part, IBM added its own version of the Apache Web server to its WebSphere application server.
With vendors churning out products and users rushing to application servers, markets don't come any hotter than this.
--Gregory Dalton
next product: NetWare 5
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