Infrastructure and Integration Software Category Profile

Whether you're a traditional solution provider, a systems integrator or an ISV, the way your company underpins a particular software solution is critical to the success of any project you do. This has never been truer than today, with the proliferation of services-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web-based applications that pretty much rewrite the rules for selling and implementing software. Web and integration- infrastructure software--everything from application servers to portal servers to development tools --provides the basic framework for solution providers to connect the dots between disparate systems without having to reinvent the wheel and write code from scratch.

In the 2006 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) survey, partners called a close race among the major software-infrastructure players of the day in the Infrastructure and Integration Software category. There's no real winner in the J2EE vs. .Net development paradigm debate, as Microsoft and its .Net platform ranked high against the major J2EE companies such as BEA Systems and Oracle.

But IBM has garnered the most partner satisfaction, particularly in Loyalty, where it scored an 84, and Product Innovation, where it earned a 72. Big Blue has staked its software business on being the infrastructure or middleware expert, not vying to compete in the business-applications space. IBM looks to partner with third-party ISVs and other software VARs that would build and run their solutions on top of IBM's stack and go to market jointly with the vendor.

One such ISV is ILOG, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company whose software focuses on centralizing the reams of business rules that comprise any business process; for example, a business process might be those steps taken to map out a mortgage loan (that's something IBM's WebSphere Modeler will handle), while the business rules for that process involve checking loan eligibility (which ILOG's software does). Andrew Redmond is IBM alliance director at ILOG, where he has worked closely with IBM on the development of SOA environments.

"We have lots of other partners at ILOG, but no one is doing what IBM is doing," Redmond says. "We're getting more support than anywhere else, and we've dedicated lots of resources to IBM because they're willing to do the same for us."

One initiative garnering kudos at IBM is the SOA Specialty Program it launched some 15 months ago. IBM seeks to educate and train partners on building SOAs, a paradigm that some solution providers have had difficulty with from a business perspective. The program already boasts 2,500 partner participants, according to Sandy Carter, vice president of WebSphere and SOA at IBM.

"We want to provide partners with support to get their customers started with SOAs," Carter says. "We focus on enablement; the No. 1 thing customers worry about is skills." IBM is putting its money where its mouth is, too, having upped investment in the program by 40 percent year-over-year, Carter says.

Software infrastructure encompasses much more than SOAs, although that paradigm, along with a strong push around Web services-based integration and the enterprise services bus, is the wave of the future. BEA's partners, for example, gave it very high marks in Product Innovation--and an overall score of 73--for its WebLogic and AquaLogic brands, although the company fell short in a number of partner-program criteria.

As for Microsoft, the company isn't winning over partners with technical prowess, but it has managed to build a solid partner program that VARs ranked tops among the survey participants.