InformationWeek

November 15, 1999

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A Server Whose Time Has Come
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"We have AS/400 systems that handle our order processing, order entry, and inventory, as well as product movement, for the orders we take by phone, mail, or fax," he says. "Interfacing to our back-end systems was easier since we decided to go with AS400 as our Web presence, too." Not including application developers' salaries, Cargill says the entire hardware and software system cost almost $200,000.

Picking an app server vendor can be tricky in an industry that's undergoing consolidation, as smaller suppliers are gobbled up by larger companies. But Forté customer Chris Nabinger, executive VP of Prio Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., is not concerned about Sun's acquisition of Forté. "We use Sun equipment today and we use Forté, so any marriage will probably result in something positive for us," says Nabinger.

Prio is a 6-month-old company that provides commerce systems, such as special promotions, that link Internet and brick-and-mortar merchants. Prio's applications, which sort and respond to shoppers' promotions through a portal Web site, were developed and are managed using Forté's development tools. They are hosted on commercial servers from Sun. "With thousands of merchants and potentially millions of consumers, we needed a technology infrastructure that can handle a high volume of transactions over the Internet architecture while providing round-the-clock security and a high level of scalability," Nabinger says.

These needs are common among buyers of application servers, which cause some to question Microsoft's ability to deliver an enterprise-class app server that is scalable and robust. Some observers consider Microsoft's software to be a platform-specific system because its app server qualities are embedded in its operating system.

"The upcoming version of Windows NT has most of the pieces that would qualify it to be an application server, but one of the benefits of an application server is the ability to run on multiple platforms," says Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline.com Inc., a company that provides a market for customers to buy and sell reusable software components. "You have greater scalability when you can move from a PC to a mainframe using the same code, and you don't get that with NT."

But others say Microsoft's application server capabilities make the company a solid contender as it bundles its application-development environment with system tools and its operating system platforms.

Jeff Block, a VP of Internet startup SelectTeeTimes.com, says Microsoft's app-server platform, Windows Distributed interNet Architecture (DNA), which uses COM+, is performing very well for the San Diego company, which uses NT. SelectTeeTimes.com is an application service provider for golf courses. The company has created an application it distributes to golf courses via the Internet that lets course managers aggregate their unreserved tee times and post them on a Web site, where golfers can "find a tee time in a given area in 60 seconds," Block says.

SelectTeeTimes.com provides hardware, Web software, and support to 150 golf courses nationwide. The two main reasons for choosing Microsoft were speed of deployment and affordability. "Cash is always a consideration for startups," Block says.

But the company is also concerned about robustness and scalability. Block says developers constantly evaluate the performance of the site as it grows. SelectTeeTimes.com hosts information about 150 golf courses and delivers "tens of thousands of Web pages a day to thousands of unique users," Block says. He expects that Microsoft's software will be even more effective in Windows 2000, which the company plans to release in February, because the application server environment, DNA 2000, "will be completely integrated, not a bolt-on to the operating system like it is with NT."

SelectTeeTimes.com considered more-expensive alternatives such as Corba, but "we keep coming back to Microsoft and COM+." Block says Microsoft's plans to support the Extensible Markup Language with its upcoming BizTalk Server will be an added benefit, facilitating business-to-business communication by making data independent of applications. In DNA 2000, XML will be the primary method for enabling communication between applications.

IT managers who don't want to standardize on Microsoft software for an Internet application server still have a wide range of vendors and products to choose from. The challenge is picking a server that best fits into an enterprise's business plan, can quickly serve up the applications and features needed by users, and that can easily connect to a company's back-end systems.

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