Plain English, Please

But behind all the noise is a real paradigm shift that IBM is doing a poor job of explaining.

What IBM is trying to market is known as a service-oriented architecture among the people that create application development tools. At the heart of this concept is the idea that applications should be deployed in discrete modules that leverage the same enterprise middleware infrastructure.

In IBM's case, that infrastructure is a collection of products and technologies marketed under the WebSphere brand. IBM is encouraging customers to require software vendors to standardize on that infrastructure, promising significantly lower application deployment and maintenance costs in exchange. IBM says customers will be able to roll out an e-business application in a matter of weeks, or in IBM's parlance, on demand.

Once you have that capability, it becomes feasible for an outsourcer to create a pay-as-you-go pricing model on top of a service-oriented architecture. The number of people that will opt for that, however, is likely to be small because over the long term, that pricing model is usually more expensive than outsourcing the application based on a flat fee or running the application in-house. Microsoft, BEA, Sun, Novell and others are also branding their own service-oriented architectures and leveraging Web services and application server platforms as their core enabling technologies.

So the good news for partners is that no matter where you turn, the cost associated with building and maintaining applications is about to come down. The bad news is that rather than explaining what is happening in plain language, IBM and the rest of the vendors are opting for empty slogans that confuse more than they enlighten. That means it will take twice as long as it should to get these new application development architectures in place. And given the high cost of building and maintaining software, that's nothing but a shame.

Are you listening? Do you agree? I can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at [email protected].