December 8, 2003
(Computerworld)
... says marketing VP Douglas Brockett, who acknowledged that his experiences might be contrary to those of other companies reported in this paper and elsewhere. Even given his satisfaction, he's not sure whether the venerable trade show, or any general technology trade show for that matter, will make it into his marketing budget in 2004 and beyond. "IT experts will get their less-technical information on the Web," Brockett argues. But you won't just travel in the virtual world; he thinks you'll be heading to smaller, targeted conferences, "where like-minded people will discuss matters of common interest in detail." Brockett claims the small but steady stream of Comdexers who visited SonicWall Inc.'s booth were attracted by the low-cost TZW line of secure wireless network units that fits well into remote-office operations and will be upgraded to 802.11g next year. The fact that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company resells its SSL-R and SSL-RX security appliances to Cisco Systems Inc. probably gave corporate IT booth visitors warm fuzzies as well. They also undoubtedly liked hearing about the 2004 firmware upgrades to the Pro line that will let them handle a mix of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and IPsec traffic, cutting down on the number of systems to manage while giving users the levels of secure access they need for the applications they want to use.
If you really want secure communications, go fax. "Faxes are traceable, hackproof and virusproof," claims Mark Malone, senior product manager for Captaris Inc.'s RightFax family. The company's products link into application workflows, from supply chains to law-office operations. In the RightFax world, pages are sent electronically to PC desktops or fax printers, Malone says, so there's more flexibility and control about who sees what and when. He boasts that RightFax has a good chunk of market share already, yet the client/server product will be overhauled by the third quarter of next year. The software is being redesigned using .Net and will swap out its proprietary Raima database for either Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL. But users won't have to wait that long to see other changes. In February, Release 8.7 will have improved support for Notes and Exchange, and a couple of months later, Version 9.0 will include antispam features. If you're in the health care market, you have to wait only until next month to get HIPAA privacy features. That means lab techs can see only the patient data that's relevant to them and administrators can access even less.
Less is more for the developers at Scapa Technologies Ltd. in Edinburgh. Scapa is a major contributor to Hyades, the monitoring and testing project for the open-source Eclipse framework. CEO Michael Norman says that by leveraging Hyades inside Eclipse, his team will have to crank out only 20% of the code needed to deliver plug-in tools for software writers. Granted, the 80% delivered by the open-source community is the relatively easy infrastructure part. Still, it means Scapa's plug-ins will get to market faster, like the Jan. 1 release of Scapa StressTest-Express. Designed for e-commerce applications, the testing tool can simulate an unlimited number of users running an application through its paces, banging on everything from SSL to database access. Norman expects Scapa to eventually deliver testing tools for Web-based applications using SAP and, he hopes, Oracle.
Eclipse is being spearheaded by IBM, which sees the development framework as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s .Net. But Eclipse's rising popularity means IBM will need to relinquish control of the project. Already at 60 IT vendor members and growing monthly, "it needs to break away from the mother ship," Norman says. He predicts the next executive director of Eclipse won't be from IBM. Once that happens, expect to see the likes of Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. jump on board. Microsoft, too? Not in your wildest dreams.
A Path to Better Apps
Candle Corp. in El Segundo, Calif., tomorrow will release six packages for J2EE or WebSphere-based application integration projects. As part of the PathWAI line of services and tools, Candle will offer four new consulting services for developers -- two for J2EE and two for application integration work. Not to mention a Workbench tool set designed to improve application scalability and performance.