Why The Midmarket Is So Hot

Page 1 of 4

The midmarket is often the neglected middle child. Vendors roll out new products and offer attractive programs to entice small business buyers. Or the eldest—the enterprise—gets all the attention and specialized products and incentives. A midmarket organization, on the other hand, has to look for products that fit its needs. Enterprise products are often too big, expensive, and complicated; SMB solutions can be too small and simply not up to the task.

But midsize companies represent a hot market, one in which solution providers are finding more and more opportunities. So, the Channel Group Test Center embarked on a special quest. Over the space of several weeks, we sifted through products in a variety of categories in search of solutions VARs can help use to drive their midmarket business. The categories included Software Development Platforms, Business Software, Data and Network Security, Data Center Products, Storage and Disaster Recovery, Network Management and Networking. At the end of our search, we created a list of 20 products that would benefit solution providers serving the midmarket. More importantly, engineers decided these were the products the midmarket should already be thinking about.

Software Development Platforms

Adobe LiveCycle ES 8.0
adobe.com, Price: Starts at $40,000 per CPU
LiveCycle ES blends Flash and PDF technologies, including the forthcoming Adobe Integrated Runtime, which combines Ajax, Flash and various client-side technologies to run RIAs on the desktop, outside of a browser. Form-driven wizards make it easier for business analysts to present information in dynamic dashboards. LiveCycle takes advantage of Flash's ability to present information in realtime, just like in a desktop application. While most Ajax-based code can perform auto-refreshes, Flash applications simply blow them away in performance and graphics quality. Adobe is targeting LiveCycle at the financial services, government, manufacturing and life sciences markets and is especially interested in companies that do a lot of paper business internally and with outside partners and suppliers. Solution partners can work with companies to transform these paper processes into PDF forms that can run as LiveCycle business processes.

Altova XMLSpy Suite 2008
altova.com, Price: MapForce Enterprise is $999, Professional is $499
Accessing multiple databases from XMLSpy 2008 is now easier than ever with this software suite. It arrives with a new database query Window that has drag and drop SQL statement capabilities. The SQL creation features help developers work with SQL-specific syntax for different databases. The query tool supports SQL syntax correction and XQuery. It also integrates with IBM DB2 pureXML version 9. The database query Windows arrives with features that work with DB2 pureXML. By querying XML data in DB2 9.0, developers can open up XML documents in XMLSpy. All of the tools available in XMLSpy can work with DB2. XMLSpy can also register schemas inside a DB2 database. The 2008 suite can build complete XML solutions. For instance, with the help of XMLSpy, StyleVision and MapForce, developers can link to a relational database and store records in external XML files while transforming the output into different Web file formats.

ComponentOne, ComponentOne Suite (code name Sapphire)
componentone.com, Price: Not available
With Sapphire, solution providers can build data-aware UIs by dragging and dropping controls and manipulating properties, all without coding. ComponentOne is on track to release new Silverlight 1.1-based components in its suite early next year. The company is closely following Microsoft's Silverlight 1.1 development scheduled for the second quarter of 2008. Silverlight is Microsoft's silver bullet for running rich Internet applications on heterogeneous environments. Like Adobe Flash, the Silverlight plug-in runs on Linux, Mac and Windows, including on multiple browsers. ComponentOne chose to build new components with Silverlight 1.1 rather than the older 1.0 due to the limitations on interactivity in the current version. The new ComponentOne Studio will fill in the gaps that Microsoft will not be supporting in its 1.1 release. ComponentOne will support Microsoft's Designer Studio paradigm, whereby developers will be able to use XAML-based animated components based on graphics created by designers. As part of its toolset, ComponentOne plans to include wizards to generate controls.

Digipede Technologies Digipede Network 2.0
digipede.net, Price: Professional Edition starts at $4,000 per year
Need grid computing on .Net? You don't have to look any further than Digipede. Just a few weeks ago, Digipede made its second major release of its Network grid server. The grid server complements Microsoft's Compute Cluster Server, so developers can ramp up computing power by combining the two. In this release, Digipede is listening to developers in a big way by providing an SDK that works with Visual Studio 2005. The SDK comes with a debugging package for distributed applications and provides tighter control over code, threads and processes, and application configuration. Digipede uses a highly optimized and scalable computing paradigm, so it can boost the performance of transaction-based applications that use asynchronous SOA components and even message-based architectures. Neither clustering nor virtualization is nearly as efficient. Network 2.0 supports Active Directory and Windows Authentication.

OpenSpan, OpenSpan suite
openspan.com, Price: Not available
The OpenSpan suite is the only enterprise middleware on the market that addresses software integration of desktop applications. Essentially, the OpenSpan suite can generate integration code that connects desktop applications. Sadly, the No. 1 integration technique on the desktop today is still copy and paste. OpenSpan is taking advantage of the lack of interest by enterprise vendors in solving this problem. Portal technologies are also quite inadequate for solving integration of desktop applications. The company views desktop applications as end points that can be integrated. OpenSpan can insert itself inside an application running on a desktop and detect all of its objects. Once detected, OpenSpan can manage of all the objects as if it were the original author of that application. The software has full control of buttons, text inputs and menu items. OpenSpan can interact with the objects and can even change interaction properties such as hide them or block its usage. With OpenSpan Studio, developers can combine Java, Windows, green screen, mainframe, DHTML and many more executable formats into a single desktop application. No other product on the market can do this.

Next: Business Software

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More Channel Programs