"The end product was not as feature-rich as we would have liked, and the user interface was not appealing," Kerin says. "Rather than go into production with this application, we started looking at application servers."

A lot of businesses are now looking at application servers, and a wide range of vendors are offering products to satisfy what appears to be a fast- growing market. In less than two years, the application server market has grown to include more than 40 vendors. By 2002, Internet application server sales are expected to reach $2.2 billion, analysts predict.

Internet application servers are designed to let users build high-performance, highly scalable business systems for the Internet, intranets, or extranets. Without an app server, companies would have to build from scratch the functionality and framework needed to create a multitier architecture to augment the two-tier client-server and mainframe architectures that are most widely used today.

After working with Gartner Group, the Chicago Stock Exchange deployed an application built on SilverStream Software Inc.'s application server. The application is being used by 400 trading specialists, who work at a handful of specialist firms, to manage information about the 40 to 50 stocks each trader covers. The server had to connect to an Oracle database, a Versant object database, and Iona Technologies' Orbix deployment environment. Both SilverStream and NetDynamics (recently acquired by Sun Microsystems) built two prototypes, one in Java and another with an HTML interface.

"Both companies' solutions hooked up to Oracle, Versant, and Iona, but SilverStream's went together much quicker. The environment was easier to work in and the end product was more appealing aesthetically," Kerin says.

Interoperability and standards are two of the key issues IT managers must consider when looking at Internet-based application servers, analysts say.

In the app server arena, there are three fundamental architectures being marketed today: COM+ (Component Object Model), which is Microsoft's proprietary specification for server-side components and an execution environment; Enterprise JavaBeans and the work-in-progress Java 2 Enterprise Edition, developed and supported by Sun and the large Java community; and, finally, the language-independent Common Object Request Broker Architecture (Corba) and its companion, Common Object Services (COS), which includes specifications for transactions, security, and other key attributes of enterprise-class distributed applications. While some of the earliest app servers were based on proprietary foundations, these didn't last long.

"Any vendor that wants to compete in the application server space and doesn't provide Corba or Enterprise JavaBeans implementations, or a solution based on COM+, has an excellent going-out-of-business strategy," says Kenneth Rubin, chief operating officer of Secant Technologies Inc., an application server vendor.

Consolidation is already reshaping this market. Over the past two years, significant mergers and acquisitions repositioned several of the market leaders, including Netscape, NetDynamics, and Forté. Other companies dropped out of sight. And the market continues to be volatile, making it difficult for IT managers to select an application server vendor (see story, "App Server Products Flood The Marketplace").

continued...page 2, 3