Cool reception for IBM Java initiative
Software Uptake of third release of San Francisco remains slow.
Analysts have expressed concerns that IBM's third release of its San Francisco Java-based application templates will never take off.
San Francisco, which was launched with great fanfare last year, is targeted at the SME business market and is sold via Vars. The software gives resellers templates that they can customise for their customers.
But according to analysts, uptake has remained low. Bobby Cameron, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said: 'The feedback that we are hearing from applications vendors is that San Francisco is interesting, but there's not a lot of commitment to it - and you need a lot of commitment to make it work. There's not much aggressive adoption right now. IBM is taking the classical big systems approach to design and while this is conceptually on target, it's too difficult to implement.'
He added: 'It's not that IBM's heart is not in the right place. It's just not offering people what they can use. I don't think San Francisco will be a big success.'
Microsoft, on the other hand, according to Cameron, was taking a more practical approach to the same problem. The software giant has set up industry-specific groups to identify and define crucial problems. It has then written templates with production-ready code to address these problems and make development as easy as possible.
However, because Microsoft does not want to be seen as an applications supplier, it has packaged up the code as development toolkits and given them to the Vars for free, making them widespread, Cameron argued. Examples of such templates include the Active Store architecture for linking up point-of-sale machines and the Value Chain initiative.
John Swainson, general manager of application and integration middleware at IBM, refused to comment on Microsoft's reseller strategy but claimed the company was seeing 'mounting enthusiasm from large sites' for San Francisco.
'IBM's San Francisco is unique in the industry,' he said. 'No other company today offers software developers and enterprise customers pre-tested, reusable Java components that provide the basis for rapidly building e-business applications.'
San Francisco Version 1.3 includes accounts receivable and payable templates that can track transactions in multiple currencies to support the move to European monetary union. The frameworks can also run on Sun's Solaris, HP/UX and Siemens Reliant Unix, as well as IBM AIX, Windows NT and OS/400, which were already supported.
They are scheduled to ship in the fourth quarter, but IBM will start rewriting them as Enterprise Java Beans during the first half of next year, starting with common business objects.