Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? by Gerstner Louis V

Author:Gerstner, Louis V. [Gerstner, Louis V.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

At the base, there are the operating systems that tell the hardware what to do.

At the top, there is all the application software, like a spreadsheet, a program for calculating your income tax, or a graphic design program. This is what an end user sees on the screen.

In between, there is a collection of software products that connect the two.

At the base: Microsoft owned the dominant operating system, which, regardless of the fate of OS/2, we believed would become increasingly commoditized in a world of open standards.

At the top: Companies like SAP, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards dominated the applications software market, while we were an unimportant player.

In the space between: products like databases, systems management software, and transaction management programs. It was the complex, largely invisible layer (aptly named “middleware”) about which only the most hardcore techies could get excited.

Yet the more we considered what was going to matter if client/server computing gave way to networked computing, middleware started to look less like a backwater and more like the key strategic battleground. We couldn’t see the entire picture at the time, but we could see enough. More users. More devices. More transactions. And more demand for ways to integrate applications, processes, systems, users, and institutions. No operating system was going to be able to tie it all together. But middleware existed to do exactly that.

To provide this kind of integration, however, middleware was going to have to work on all of the major vendors’ computer systems that would be linked together over vast new networks. In the industry’s jargon, the new middleware would have to work “cross platform,” and this represented a major obstacle that we would have to overcome. Up until this point in 1995, all of IBM’s software was proprietary and worked only with IBM hardware and other IBM software.

Thus, we launched a massive, multi-year effort to rewrite all of our critical software, not only to be network-enabled, but to run on Sun, HP, Microsoft, and other platforms. It was a hugely expensive and complicated project and it created many of the same internal tensions that our services strategy had evoked. Once again we were collaborating with the enemy!

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