July 3, 2000
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Vendors Beef Up App Servers
Products from Oracle and IBM are aimed at E-businesses
By Rick Whiting with Matthew G. Nelson and Elisabeth Goodridge
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racle and IBM last week unveiled new releases of their application server products, which the companies say will serve as the cornerstones of their respective E-commerce offerings.Application servers provide large numbers of concurrent users with browser access to applications. The technology is expected to take on more important roles, serving as application integration hubs and platforms for E-business services, Gartner Group analyst Yefim Natis says.
Giga Information Group predicts application server sales will reach $9 billion by 2003. Along with Oracle and IBM, competitors in the crowded market include BEA Systems, Iona Technologies, iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, and Microsoft.
The Oracle Internet Application Server 8i replaces the Oracle Application Server 4.0.8, which Natis says suffered from technical problems. The old product's proprietary Web server technology has been replaced with the Apache Web server. Internet Application Server 8i also includes application-integration services, "which is exactly what users need," Natis says. A major component is Oracle's new iCache data-caching technology, designed to let the app server handle greater volumes of transactions and numbers of users by improving data throughput by a factor of three.
WebWare Corp., which manages media assets such as advertising graphics and video for clients, has been testing iCache running with the Oracle database and Apache Web server. "Anything you can do to reduce the number of round trips to access the database and improve its performance is good," says CEO Lauren Flanagan.
Oracle also introduced the Internet Developer Suite, which combines many of the vendor's existing development tools into one package, and a new version of the Oracle8i database with improved Java, Extensible Markup Language, and security features. The app server and tools package are available now, while the database release will ship in several weeks; all are priced according to configuration.
IBM introduced version 3.5 of its WebSphere software. It includes new Java development capabilities, improved security, expanded support for the HP-UX and Windows 2000 operating systems, and better integration with other IBM products.
IBM's announcement focused more on marketing than technology, Natis says, as the company seeks to extend its successful WebSphere brand to include such infrastructure products as its MQSeries messaging middleware. WebSphere Standard Edition will be priced at $795, while the Advanced Edition will be priced at $7,500 per processor. Both will ship July 31. Enterprise Edition will ship Aug. 31, priced at $35,000 per processor.
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