VARs Aren’t Hip to the Java Jive

Even though VARBusiness' State of the VAR Market 2000 results show that 22 percent of VARs are using Java technology, only 4 percent report that it is a significant contributor to revenue. Why the discrepancy? Perhaps it lies in the fact that VARs are using Java in tandem with many other tools in preparing e-business solutions and don't break out the development revenue to attribute it to Java. Some in the industry attribute it to lack of resourse for training initiatives.

Glynis Gore, a New York-based Java trainer thinks many VARs were initially put off by the high cost of Java training. "My feeling is that most VARs missed the boat," says Glynis Gore, sales and marketing executive director for LearningPatterns.com, a New York-based training firm.

And according to research on Java, it's some boat. Sales in the Java tool market are set to skyrocket in the next few years. For the integrated development environment, Java tools' sales will leap from $164 million in 1999 to $718 million by 2003, according to International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass.

Still, some VARs think that the opportunity is not completely lost. The early development environment for Java was immature says Ben Tandowski, president of Aztec Technology Partners of Braintree, Mass. And he should know. This $350 million offshoot of U.S. Office Products invested early in Java expertise. But he says tools have improved since then. Java technology has matured dramatically in the last four years, the most significant milestone being Sun's shipment of the Java 2 Platform one year. The Java 2 Platform is stable, secure, and feature-complete and

represents the most enterprise-ready release of Java technology to date says Tandowski.

Major corporations and some vertical market VARs,particularly those in the financial, telecommunications, and airline markets,got over the sticker shock when they saw Java's strong security, flexibility, and cross-platform capabilities. Java development is a "great market opportunity," says Ben Tandowski, Aztec's president. It offers "great value for our customers for rapid application development and hardware independent development."

ISVs are definitely buzzing on Java. Roughly 30 percent of software developers used Java in 1998. In 2000, 58 percent will, according to a survey by Evans Marketing Services of Santa Cruz, Calif.

The cost of training has dropped significantly, according to Gore. Where it once cost thousands of dollars, it now costs roughly $1,000 a week for personal training and much less than that for online training.

Now that the training cost barrier has dropped, should VARs go with Java? "VARs who do software development should be heavily invested in Java," says Gore.

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