Microsoft's recent overtures to SAP should come as no surprise to anyone who's followed either vendor. Each company covets the other's market. Microsoft is evolving into a more complete vendor of ERP and other business applications. SAP has become a full-fledged Web application and integration platform vendor, in addition to strengthening its core ERP, CRM and supply-chain management application suites.
The most interesting story from Microsoft's recent Professional Developers Conference wasn't the vendor's future Longhorn operating system, but rather, Microsoft's shift away from two preoccupations of its recent past: .Net and Web services.
Web services management (WSM) is one of the most innovative sectors in today's IT industry. Despite the general economic slump, dozens of start-ups have ventured into the WSM market over the past few years. Consequently, enterprise customers can choose from many sophisticated tools for managing their complex Web services middleware environments.
E-mail is rarely secure, but users rarely care. E-mail is secure enough for most users under most circumstances, even those involving transmission of sensitive content. People leave most messages unencrypted and unsigned because they believe the risks of eavesdropping and tampering are minimal - until someone proves otherwise. Customers have voted with their dollars in favor of e-mail products and hosted services that skimp on end-to-end security.
Microsoft Corp. has taken a small step in the right direction by agreeing to implement Security Assertion Markup Language 1.0 in its upcoming .Net operating environment. Although Microsoft's announcement was short on specifics, such as the future availability of SAML-enabled .Net security features, the company deserves commendation for this important move toward support for a standard that most of the Web services security industry has long since embraced.
In this mean season, it's sad to see our fondest e-business visions become stale jokes. Take public-key infrastructure (PKI) technologies. More specifically, let's take another look at yesteryear's promise of interoperable, multivendor PKIs as a universal trust and security environment for e-business. Sure, we have PKI standards galore, and many innovative PKI products and services. So why has the mass market for PKI-enabled products never taken off?
OK, so we can access the Web over wireless connections from PDAs and data-capable cell phones. We can also send and receive e-mail with these same devices.
Continual exposure to threatening and irritating content is the price we pay for e-mail interoperability. Mobile messaging users have begun to realize they aren't immune to viruses, worms, spam and other mail-borne content threats. Wireless mail clients may be the prime targets for the next generation of hackers and online troublemakers.
The Internet won't mature as an e-business environment until the industry converges on middleware infrastructures that bind billions of heterogeneous components into a unified computing web.
The Internet won't mature as an e-business environment until the industry converges on middleware infrastructures that bind billions of heterogeneous components into a unified computing web. Everyone agrees that new standards for e-business middleware must address several key business-to-business requirements that traditional approaches don't support. Business-to-business middleware must use HTTP as the principal transport protocol. It must specify XML as the primary content-encoding syntax. It must work across diverse operating environments, object models and programming interfaces. It must rely on asynchronous message-passing communications. And it must be able to traverse enterprise firewalls without compromising end-to-end network security.
E-commerce will not mature until it becomes truly mobile - available anywhere, amenable to our every whim and so easy to access that we barely think twice about it. And in fact, e-commerce is becoming increasingly portable, as convenient as the wireless terminals we stash in our briefcases, install in our automobile dashboards and embed in all manner of everyday appliances.
Every network software vendor worth its stock options is repositioning its offerings for the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce, or e-business, market. For some vendors, the move is just a superficial marketing campaign, a matter of applying new labels to old shrink-wrap. However, much of it reflects profound re-examination of vendor product directions and architectures.
The three kings of enterprise messaging - Lotus, Microsoft and Novell - are looking more and more like clueless bystanders in this new age of carrier-grade messaging services.