Mainframes lead resurgence in software tools
1999-09-08
It is old news that mainframe companies are experiencing an uplift in their fortunes. As the mainframe re-invents itself as the workhorse of the Web, the drive to competitive advantage is causing vendors to light the fires under the slumbering development tools market.
Let’s take an example. Amdahl’s hardware revenue figures for last year beat expectations by 202%. Quite a turn-around. Now the company says that interest is increasing in its ObjectStar development environment. ObjectStar is an integrated collection of tools to enable mainframe applications to be developed – tools include screen and GUI builders, a rule-based engine for business logic and wizard-like facilities to support the generation of common functionality. Whilst the product has a reasonable existing customer base, whose licensing revenues have supported the product’s continued viability, efforts to promote ObjectStar were largely killed off eighteen months ago when they failed to generate sufficient new customers. Things have remained flat until now, with both existing customers, and new prospects enquiring about the product.
Why should this be? The answer, says Chris James, Marketing Manager for Software and Services at Amdahl, is the drive towards competitive advantage on the Net. This makes sense: it is one thing to use an off the shelf package for internet site development, or to select a mainframe over a smaller server to ensure that the volume of transactions can be handled. However, it is the additional services which can set one Web site above the rest. These services need to be defined and implemented at a rate which the packaged tools could not possibly keep up with: in other words, they require bespoke development. At the same time, eCommerce is driving the requirement for an unprecedented level of integration with external information feeds and back end systems, new and legacy. To deal with this level of complexity, whilst developing added value functionality in an ever-decreasing timeframe, companies are turning to development tools with renewed vigour. Particular interest will inevitably be garnered by enterprise RAD tools such as ObjectStar.
A few words of reality. There does not exist, anywhere on the market today, a fully integrated development environment which takes into account the full spectrum of needs for Web Site development. Areas such as site editorial, management of external components, monitoring of statistics and configuration management are still the domain of a disparate set of tools which remain disconnected from the “core functionality” of application serving and transaction management. This situation will change: the renewed interest in development tools will, in the short term, lead to promotional campaigns for existing products. In the medium term it will also spawn advances in functionality as the suppliers attempt to leap-frog each other to corner the burgeoning market.
In a way, history is repeating itself. There is nothing happening here that did not happen during the CASE “revolution” of the late seventies and early eighties. We will see the market consolidating, silver bullets flying and the inevitable disappointments when they do not solve all ills. We will also see a new generation of software tools which, used correctly, can enable businesses to reap the rewards of the Web.
(First published 8 September 1999)