IBM's WebSphere 5 Set For Release

WebSphere 5 includes enhanced Web services, deployment and self-calibration features in line with IBM's new strategy to create e-business on demand, said Scott Hebner, director of marketing for WebSphere.

The product includes a gateway for securely accessing Web services through the firewall, as well as a Web services invocation framework for building services that can be accessed independent of network protocols, Hebner said.

WebSphere 5 also features enhanced clustering, self-troubleshooting and the ability to prioritize traffic based on a client's service needs in an e-business transaction.

IBM first targeted WebSphere 5 for release in the summer. In August, however, executives revised that date to late in the fourth quarter, opting to make the new development tools available first. IBM released Version 5 of its WebSphere Studio tools in September.

The delay of WebSphere 5 did not go unnoticed by IBM's chief Java software rival, BEA Systems, which mounted an aggressive marketing campaign in recent weeks charging IBM with, among other things, lagging behind on Java standards.

Indeed, WebSphere 5 is IBM's first app server compliant with J2EE 1.3, while BEA released its J2EE 1.3 product in the summer.

Shahzad Ahmed, vice president of enterprise systems and integration at Toronto-based solution provider Montage.DMC, said he is not concerned with IBM's late release of WebSphere 5, since the new product is significantly more robust than the last version.

Now that app servers have become somewhat commoditized, the strength of an app server and its ability to scale horizontally across systems are key differentiators, Ahmed said.

"To be able to plug [an app server in and scale so you don't have to change your entire infrastructure is key," Ahmed said.

To that end, the new self-healing and self-configuration features of Version 5 "will be helpful," Ahmed said. WebSphere 5 "has much better support for debugging and exception handling," he added.