WebSphere Revolution

that are integrated from end to end. WebSphere MQ and Message Broker provided a way to integrate the islands of automation, achieve this horizontal integration, and thereby accrue the benefits of the On Demand Business model. All along, the IBM marketing machine was working hard to roll out the WebSphere integration message in each of the geographies around the world. Since many of the concepts forwarded by WebSphere were new, IBM spent as much time educating the marketplace as to what could be achieved as it did competing in the marketplace. Open standards were more important than ever during this time frame because they could be leveraged to create a middle ground through which disparate systems could exchange information. It was a reversal of the islands of automation scenario. Through open standards every system could communicate with every other system. The open standards that facilitated the Internet were now migrating down into the IT infrastructures of businesses. Both IBM and its competitors understood the value that adoption of open standards represented for their customers which made for interesting times from a marketing standpoint. On one hand, IBM and its competitors would work publicly together to promote the adoption of open standards such as J2EE and Eclipse. On the other hand, each company had its own software products built according to those standards and in that context they were in fierce competition with one another. This cycle of joining together one day and competing the next made for quite a marketing roller coaster ride. Along the way, one thing that became clear was that customers were in need of more skilled workers to accomplish the integration goals that they had set for themselves. IBM saw this as another marketing opportunity. So IBM started working to grow the pool of workers skilled in working with WebSphere by providing colleges and universities worldwide with curriculum centered on WebSphere and the open standard technologies that were underlying WebSphere, including J2EE and Eclipse. IBM also continued to nurture the WebSphere skills of IBM Business Partners. Not only did this help customers get the WebSphere skills they needed, but it created a growing number of students familiar with the technological underpinnings of WebSphere. When these students entered the workforce, they would have a natural affinity for WebSphere and the Eclipse-based development tools used to develop WebSphere applications. They would therefore be more likely to favor WebSphere in their workplaces a strategy that has been paying dividends for years. Ever since the launch of WebSphere in 1998, the IBM marketing team had been working hard to gain the attention of the industry and customers in the Web arena not an easy thing to do. Then as Robert LeBlanc recalls, “I finally figured out that we had really made it when I was at a Gartner confer- “Coming from a few key clients that we worked with in the early days to now WebSphere having over 100,000 clients you know what we really nailed it.” —Robert LeBlanc, then Director of Object Oriented/Application Development Technology 38

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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