AS THE CTO of Silverstream -- a company that provides application server software -- Arnold "Arny" Epstein is in the thick of a major shift in how enterprise software will be built and deployed. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Epstein talks about how Silverstream is reinventing itself to take on that challenge by helping customers manage and integrate Web services.

InfoWorld: What is the core competency of Silverstream?

Epstein: We started [by] understanding that it was complex to build and deploy Web-based applications that used rich content as well as structured data from legacy systems or databases. We were one of the early pioneers of the application server phenomenon, in 1996. This class of software has evolved quite a bit over the years, obviously, from separate independent architectures to now a very strong and well-supported standard called J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition].

InfoWorld: The J2EE standard has done a lot to commoditize this segment of the industry. How does Silverstream differentiate itself today?

Epstein: We saw that trend probably close to two years ago. We started moving up the application stack -- above the application server -- at that time. From day one, we were focused on building the whole application. The server is the infrastructure. On top of that, we built application services such as content management, workflow, personalization, legacy integration, and enabling XML. We're now focusing on the above-the-app-server complexity of building applications. So we're turning around and partnering with our former competitors, building value on top of the infrastructure that they and we build.

InfoWorld: Who are some of those companies?

Epstein: BEA, for example, is one company. And we've recast our pricing so that our sales force has no particular incentive to sell our app server if another one's in there already.

InfoWorld: So what is the difference between the services that you would build on top of the stack and what a BEA would deliver?

Epstein: That relates to a core competency issue as much as anything. The core competency of the infrastructure providers, like BEA and to a large extent IBM, is that they see it as technology and not a solution. What we have is a bunch of services that are designed to work together and a bunch of tools that help you hook them together and plug them together on top of the standards.

InfoWorld: A lot of companies in this space are embracing Web services as a new development model. Is that a direction that Silverstream is heading in?

Epstein: It's very clear to us that this is an application metaphor that makes a lot of sense. Our x-commerce product is a core piece of what has to happen. It can take any non-XML-based service and XML-enable it, effectively turning it into a Web service. From there, you can plug those together by passing the XML documents across and enabling it to come into your service. The Web services phenomenon that is getting so much hype now adds the notion of public directories and descriptors to these services, which are, of course, XML-based and straightforward for us to process. Where I see us going is providing our customers with something that really enables that application construction metaphor by taking the workflow that's already part of our services and making it the Web service sequencer or, if you will, the business proccess part that you can plug the service into.

InfoWorld: What's your take on the battle between the Java camp and Microsoft in this space?

Epstein: I think the interoperability is really important. The fact that they're both supporting SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol], they're also supporting UDDI [Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration], and, importantly, they recognize that it shouldn't matter how you build things. That's an important concession from Microsoft, given that what they want to do is to capture the minds of developers and then make sure that once they've written the program, it can't run anywhere but [on] Microsoft [applications]. That'll still be true, but I think they've pretty much come to the realization that they're not going to own the back office. They'll have to play nice and interoperate. The rest of it is an attempt to capture developers, and that may or may not work. I suspect that if you're a Microsoft shop, that's the way you'll build services and expose them. But if those exposed services don't talk with the rest of the world, that effort will fail.

» posted by ITworld staff

InfoWorld

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine