InformationWeek

But IT managers should exercise caution in selecting their app server vendor, since they're likely to become extremely dependent on that vendor's technology. That potential dependency is a result of several factors: proprietary application components, sizable investments in software and product-specific training, and extensive use of the app server vendor's development and consulting services.

The bottom line? A successful relationship with an app server vendor is likely to become highly strategic and intimate, which means both sides must make a serious commitment. Companies are finding that they don't need to go to top vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, to get this level of service. Many second-tier app server vendors, such as Allaire, Bluestone Software, Compuware, and Metaserver, are ready and willing to go the distance.

Planalytics Inc. in Wayne, Pa., is a case in point. The company has been helping its customers in industries such as agriculture and energy anticipate the potential impact of weather patterns on their businesses for 50 years. To accelerate development of its new Weatherplanner.com subsidiary, Planalytics selected Bluestone Software's Sapphire app server. That purchase quickly evolved into a closer relationship that included extensive contract development services.

"I went there to buy a piece of software," recalls Stephen Worden, chief technology officer at Planalytics. "But I came away realizing that Bluestone had a lot of experience and expertise that could be really valuable to us."

Worden started with a Bluestone consultant on-site full-time to help jump-start his team's development effort, and then scaled back the consultant to just one or two days a week. The consultant's job turned out to be more than merely writing code or teaching Planalytics' IT staff how to use Sapphire. "He was much more of a coach, showing us how we could tackle various development challenges and showing us examples of code that had worked in other places," Worden says.

Like Planalytics, Indiana University makes extensive use of services from its app server vendor, Compuware Corp. "We don't need them to write code for us," says Barry Walsh, director of IS. "What we lean on them for are architecture decisions, because that's where they excel."

At E-mail marketing specialist FaveMail, the use of rented staff from Bluestone has been even more extensive. Fred Kauber, FaveMail's VP of technology and operations, says two Bluestone employees were brought in full-time during the first month and a half of FaveMail's development. That relationship has since been extended, with the same two developers remaining on board since last October.

"It's not that we need their knowledge of the Bluestone product specifically," Kauber says. "They're just productive, cost-effective resources for the kind of work we need to do here." And, he adds, there's a good reason why companies like FaveMail tend to develop the same type of close working relationships with their app server vendors that many organizations develop with their enterprise resource planning or database suppliers. "Your app server is where you're putting all your business logic, and you spend a lot of time learning about its integration features and performance characteristics," he says. "That's going to end up drawing you into much more of a partnership than you typically have with a vendor of commodity technologies like Web server hardware or desktop software."

Why have app servers become such critical repositories of business logic? The primary reason is they provide a ready-made software infrastructure that incorporates much of the functionality needed to build scalable, reliable E-business sites: database pooling, transaction monitoring, and failover mechanisms. By relieving IT departments of the need to engineer these capabilities into their own code from scratch, Web app servers cut development costs and speed time-to-market.

At WealthEngine.com, for example, company president Tony Glowacki's mission is to give his customers--primarily nonprofit organizations--Web access to the data they need about potential benefactors. To accomplish this, WealthEngine.com needs to present data from a variety of sources, including internal Oracle databases and external Extensible Markup Language links. Although the company still required an in-house Oracle database administrator and XML programmer to build its online application, Glowacki says he significantly reduced his development work by leveraging the connectivity functions already built into his Metaserver app server.

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