WebSphere Revolution

e-business On Demand strategy in October 2002 in front of the press and analysts at the New York Museum of Natural History. The term e-business was eventually dropped and the initiative continued under the name On Demand Business. The WebSphere project was beginning to hit its stride when IBM announced its On Demand Business initiative and WebSphere was to play an important role. To understand how WebSphere was a natural fit for On Demand Business, we must step back and trace another technology thread that had been on a convergent path with WebSphere for quite some time—a thread that started with the trend toward client/server computing that emerged years earlier in the late 1980s. In contrast to a centralized computing environment where users interacted with mainframe computers located in a central data center, client/server computing enabled departments or individual users to select, install, and use their own computer systems to do their jobs. Departments and individual users welcomed the idea because they could now address their own needs with local computing solutions without having to wait for an overworked IT department to solve their problems. But this departmental autonomy came at a cost. Soon a diverse set of platforms, applications, and skills started to proliferate. Information became spread across disparate servers, application programs, and data formats. That is, “islands of information” began to form. If a business was involved with mergers and acquisitions, still more islands of information would appear. This unstructured fragmentation eventually led to problems in customer service, data integrity, business process efficiency, and information consolidation, thus hampering operations and effective decision making at all levels of the business. Businesses soon found themselves struggling to integrate the many “islands of automation” to regain control and streamline business processes but it wasn’t easy and many such efforts failed. During this time, IBM had recognized a need for what we now call message-oriented middleware (MOM)—especially from its customers in the finance industry. Message-oriented middleware had real potential to empower almost every application, new or legacy, to share information with any other application based on an asynchronous messaging paradigm. This was exactly what was needed to integrate the disparate applications to reintegrate the islands of automation. The IBM Hursley lab, working with a partner named System Strategies Inc., had developed and launched some messageoriented middleware called MQSeries® in 1993. MQSeries was an elegant solution. It created a “virtual hub” that helped businesses integrate those islands of information and streamline internal and customer-facing business processes. Its broad platform coupled with programming language support helped WebSphere MQ make a big splash in the industry; in fact, it became a de facto standard. As Steve Mills explains, “Prior to this idea of messageoriented middleware everybody was just moving things on “A strategic decision early on was the diversification of our portfolio of WebSphere products. We built a suite of products that started with the WebSphere Application Server, but we continued to move up the value through acquisitions and investments in the WebSphere Portfolio.” —Tom Rosamilia, General Manager, IBM Application & Integration Middleware 36

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of WebSphere Revolution

WebSphere Revolution Table of Contents The Rise of Internet Business WebSphere Takes the Stage WebSphere Application Server Evolves Beyond the Application Server WebSphere and On Demand Business New Flexibility through SOA An Eye Toward the Future

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