WishX Posted July 31, 2002 Share Posted July 31, 2002 IBM's WebSphere vs. Microsoft's .NET - Who's Winning? By Elizabeth Millard NewsFactor Network July 30, 2002 http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18818.html In the fight for Web services dominance, the scuffle has barely begun and vendors are still scrambling for places in the ring. Although all the initiatives are still relatively young, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are eager to be the top Web services heavyweights. Each is heavily touting its offerings to companies interested in moving further toward e-commerce integration. In this knock-down skirmish, is either company emerging as the clear leader? The answer appears to be that IBM is winning, but some believe there is room for both companies. Bigger Big Blue Not surprisingly, IBM is certain that WebSphere ranks above Microsoft's .NET in the contest between them. And IBM has some independent confirmation to back its claim. For example, a Giga Information Group survey noted that over the past year there has been a dramatic increase in the perception of IBM WebSphere as a Web services platform, primarily at the expense of Microsoft, with 33 percent of respondents choosing IBM and 22 percent picking Microsoft. The report also noted that the IBM percentage, when combined with other vendors, means that 78 percent of the audience places some other solution ahead of Microsoft. "This audience must certainly have heard Microsoft's pitch for .NET at some stage, so the result is still very significant," the report stated. One possible reason for companies choosing tools other than Microsoft's, said the report, is that while most vendors shipped some form of Web services support in 2001, Microsoft's enterprise-level Web services offerings did not actually arrive in the market until early 2002, except for last year's early release of Visual Studio.NET. Playing Nice IBM feels that it can continue to outpace .NET, in part, because WebSphere offers wide interoperability with other software and systems, while Microsoft's framework has developed a reputation for being hard to integrate with other companies' software. "With WebSphere, we're focused on a multiplatform strategy," Stefan Van Overtveldt, WebSphere's director of technical marketing, told NewsFactor. "We have it running on Windows servers, on different flavors of Unix, and on different operating systems," he said. "We're really looking at the ability to deploy Web services applications with a common infrastructure." Van Overtvelt said that IBM has had Web services products for over a year, which he called a "stark contrast" to Microsoft's offerings. The amount of time that WebSphere has been in the market has allowed IBM to gain a foothold in the market and spin out a multitude of Web service products. "Customers exist in a multivendor world," he said. "We recognize that companies will be using .NET, so our strategy takes that into consideration. Microsoft doesn't do it that way, though. With them, it's a one-way street. With us it's a two-way street, and that makes a very big difference." Redmond Reverb At a recent briefing for industry analysts and reporters, Bill Gates tried to clarify the company's .NET strategy by talking about the future Windows .NET Server -- a new system that is approaching release. Gates complained, "We still get people saying to us 'What is .NET?'" The Microsoft cofounder stressed that it will take five to six years before the .NET concept reaches some of the goals announced at its launch two years ago. Having to explain a product two years after the company heralded it as the next big thing is a necessity that does not inspire confidence. But Gates insisted that .NET has had many achievements since its announcement, including the release of a set of programming tools designed to work with the .NET framework. No Battle at All? There is also the possibility that although WebSphere and .NET seem to be in competition, the two products will end up being equally embraced for different needs. "In terms of adoption at the desktop level, Jupiter analyst Matthew Berk told NewsFactor, "Microsoft is everywhere, whereas IBM is at the enterprise level." Thus, WebSphere and .NET could, feasibly, play well together within the same company walls. "Ideally, these products should be communicating," Berk said. "There are so many mixed environments today that it would be ideal to have components of .NET interacting with WebSphere, since interoperability is at the core of what these products should do." Microsoft was unable or unwilling to comment for this story prior to publication. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neo1980 Posted July 31, 2002 Share Posted July 31, 2002 Apple's .MAC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonatj Posted July 31, 2002 Share Posted July 31, 2002 I work with WebSphere daily, and I don't even care. If .NET is ever going to materialize its got some big hurdles to overcome. Its more proprietary than ever requiring C# code. WebSphere can host industry standard web apps written in Java and XML. Not that Microsoft can't overcome an established product if it offers a good feature set, but what about .NET is there to like? Its unlikely that there can be any comparision between the 2 products in the near future. IBM WebSphere = well established Microsoft .NET = vaporware Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KayMan2K Posted July 31, 2002 Share Posted July 31, 2002 Originally posted by jonatj Its more proprietary than ever requiring C# code. No.... that's incorrect. .Net works with ANY programming language so long as it there is a compiler for .Net. Already you can use Visual Basic, JAVA, C++, C, C# with PERL, PASCAL and FORTRAN compilers on the way. Also .Net is made so that it can run on any platform using minimal space and garbage collection. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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