Monopoly claims on Microsoft Corp. might go out the window in the wireless space as major vendors, developers and operators expect to leverage both the software giant’s .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition platforms for third-generation Web services, according to industry watchers.
“The evolution to embrace Web services, both Microsoft.NET and in the strategies of several J2EE vendors, like IBM, BEA, Hewlett-Packard and Sun/iPlanet, presents both new opportunities and new challenges for achieving interoperable implementations across Windows and J2EE environments,” said Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Giga Information Group, who just sampled the market in a study on integrating Microsoft and Java platforms.
Major vendors like Motorola Inc., Siemens AG, Samsung, LG Electronics, Panasonic Corp., Fijitsu, NEC Corp., Sony Corp., Mitsubishi Electric, Sharp, Psion, Research in Motion Ltd. and Inventec either are shipping or planning to ship devices with Java technologies.
Operators like NTT DoCoMo, Cingular Interactive, Far EasTone, J-Phone, KDDI, Omnitel, One2One, SmarTone, Sprint PCS, Telefonica and Vodafone Group plc plan to either deploy or trial Java.
“There may be some specific instances where an alliance causes a vendor to align more tightly with specifically one or the other,” Gilpin said.
But at the JavaOne Developer Conference last week, Sun MicroSystems President Ed Zander urged programmers to be alert to Microsoft’s efforts to control how the Internet is woven into business transactions.
“You tend to hear that kind of statement from Sun more than IBM and BEA,” remarked Gilpin.
In separate polling of vendors and operators who attended the GigaWorld IT conferences in February in London and May in the United States, he discovered that J2EE improved on its support, with Microsoft still in the lead.
“Eighty-five percent of enterprise application platform commitments are either J2EE or Microsoft and that enterprise development can be successful with either platform,” he noted.
Compared to the London polling, he explained, “J2EE makes a stronger showing (2 to 1 in London vs. 3 to 1 in the United States), but the difference could be simple variance of the informal audience polling method.”
He said those polled preferred J2EE to .NET because of platform flexibility, greater maturity of clustering and load balancing in J2EE products and portability of its servers.
Low platform costs and large existing base of skills were the reasons cited by Microsoft supporters.
Gilpin said he expects Sun and IBM to dominate the server market, while Microsoft may hold sway in client and devices choice.
Nicolas Lorain, product manager for Sun, said that 70 percent of all smart phones and palmtop computers will be installed with Java platforms. According to the Nikkei Market Access research, 40 percent of the 20 million mobile phones sold in Japan this year will be Java-enabled.
He dismissed .NET’s capacity to outpace Java, adding that it is no more than a vision.
At the Java conference last week in San Francisco, there was some fight in the family.
Bill Coleman, BEA Systems Inc.’s chief executive, claimed that software giant Oracle Corp. hypes the superiority of its products, saying talk and press releases are cheap. He dismissed the assertion that Oracle “leapfrogged” BEA in the core application server area.
But Oracle was not going to wilt under the blows. Its chief executive, Larry Ellison, unleashed his counter-punch with a slew of statistics and slides.
Rhapsodizing the virtues of its Oracle9i application server as superior in speed and cost to BEA and IBM offerings, he said he had been asked not to make any presentations.
“Other people could be hurt,” he said, inspiring applause at the expense of his opponents.
Coleman, however, told reporters at the end of the session that Ellison’s statistics and claims were suspect.
“Larry made them up on stage,” he said. “We have real stuff that real people use.”
Major announcements last week lend credence to Java’s rising profile. Nokia Corp. announced it was committed to deliver 100 million Java-enabled phones by the end of 2003.
“By bringing Java technology to the mobile phones and providing tools for application development, Nokia has created an unprecedented opportunity for developers,” said Pekka Ala-Pietila, president of Nokia. “I am fully confident that by working with the developer community and with wireless carriers, we are taking an important step toward the mobile world.”
Nokia is dedicated to the Symbian operating system, which works with its Java-architecture.
Motorola Inc. agreed with HillCast to provide a suite of mobile applications to users of Java2Platform technology-enabled handsets.
“This relationship offers powerful Java technology applications that provide wireless subscribers on-the-tick financial data and news essential to making informed decisions,” said Trey Ikard, president of HillCast.
Other companies with Java-based products include Trium, Sagem, Compaq and Palm.
