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Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs
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InfoWorld: Why is integration so critical, and what's happened that's made it maybe a bigger problem now than it was before? I guess heterogeneity would have something to do with that.
Patrick: Part of it's the heterogeneity problem that if we roll back to the '90s and such, we really talked about what operating system we were focused on because we were HP shops or Sun shops or Microsoft shops or whatever, because we were coding at that very low level. The problem was we were all reinventing things again and again. Well, the application infrastructure wave came through and really changed that. It gave us the ability to do things in standard-based ways that made development easier. So the developers spent more time focusing on solving the business problem and less time focusing on writing [code]. And so in that wave came the CORBAs and the J2EEs and such. The problem that started happening is the realization that money was suddenly tight, the bubble had burst. People couldn't continue to throw money at the problem, they had to start thinking, "How can I leverage the investments that I've made in the past and reutilize them in new and different ways?" Because they couldn't afford to go back and rewrite their backend systems, which is really where they kept the company jewels and the information that was necessary. They couldn't just go back and rewrite it, so they had to figure out how to reach back into those systems and unlock that information. Because those systems weren't J2EE or CORBA or COM or anything like that, you immediately got into this heterogeneity type of problem of legacy systems, new systems, a mix of vendors, and a mix of technology.
InfoWorld: What do you see as Microsoft's role in SOA? It doesn't talk about it much. Where do you see it fitting in as maybe part of Free Flow or from a competitive viewpoint?
Patrick: Microsoft has a very strong Web presence via .Net. As such, what we keep seeing is that people on their desktop are already running Web services clients, [service] consumers, if you will. And a lot of them run and write those clients in .Net. But they've also got Unix boxes and mainframes and all other kinds of things. So Microsoft is another piece of that overall service ecosystem that is occurring. I think sometimes a lot of the industry thinks about them as being the desktop only, but they've also made some inroads using .Net in a service-based approach in the back room. So I think this is a realization when we think about Free Flow that .Net is there, it's something that as an industry we can't ignore. [It is] Web service-based so it can interoperate, because [Microsoft] too realized that it had to play with other people. And to play with other people on different platforms, interoperability was really the foundation that needed [to occur].
InfoWorld: BEA, IBM, and Microsoft have been working on a bunch of different Web services standards. Are there any more standards coming out? What about criticism that there are so many of these so-called standards and specifications that nobody can keep track of them all, and IT shops are only going to implement a couple of them anyway instead of the seemingly dozens out there?
Archived Discussions (Read only)