Apparently someone over at the competition took issue with my previous posting. He called my posting a "rant," apparently so he could justify writing an actual rant of his own in response. The unfortunate part for him is that, like most rants, it contains nothing at all technical or worthwhile. Rather, it makes unsubstantiated market-related claims, attempts to insult my company, and then attempts to compare two products that simply can't be compared. After all, if the product he mentions could really already do what Artix can do, then his company wouldn't need a gateway, would they?
No, instead his rant just (poorly) attempts to insult IONA without basis, saying we're "late to the WS game" and "fighting with (our) own legacy stuff." Now those are laughable statements. We've been working on WS for many years now. For example, my friend Don Box called me years ago to run SOAP by me while it was still a work in progress. Our XMLBus product started shipping years ago and has been a successful precursor to Artix, and is still used in production. As for our "legacy" stuff, it brings in millions in revenue each year, allowing us to be a public company with $54 million in the bank and no debt. The person who was apparently unable to respond to my post technically certainly can't say anything even remotely close about the financial strength of his company. "Fighting with legacy stuff" is a problem they'd like to have.
I, however, prefer to keep it technical. I would have much rather have seen a technical response explaining why they think gateways are effective, or an explanation of his inaccurate product claims, by showing how their non-gateway product that he compares to Artix can make, say, seamless non-SOAP transparent invocations of WSDL-defined services over native bindings from a Tuxedo client into an MQ service, for example, without ever having to translate into SOAP, cross over into HTTP, or traverse a slow gateway. But I'll save him the trouble: it can't. Artix can do all that and much more, including the simple pure Web Services stuff that his product and others do.
Comments (2)
Steve,
I'm not up to speed on either of Iona's or Systinet's product lines, but I can say with certainty that the "legacy" business my firm needs to deal with is huge (just like yours).
Are we fighting with it? If you want to call it that, sure.
We fight our legacy in that some decisions we made 5-10 years ago in COM we now regret and we have to either support things that now seem shortsighted or take the pain of telling our customers their code will break. I'm sure any team fortunate enough to have a five+ year legacy has similar issues.
Of course, an even bigger "fight" we have is the inertia of the installed base. Do we worry about J2EE or Linux wrt market share? Sure. But NT4 is a serious competitor as well (and calling the company that sold you NT4 a bunch of idiots presents an obvious credibility problem for us).
I'm sure that selling Artix to happy Orbix 2000 customers is a bit of a challenge to your sales force.
My 2c,
DB
Posted by Don Box | May 20, 2004 11:50 PM
Posted on May 20, 2004 23:50
Steve:
I am not trying to take side as I respect both companies and all the individual involved but you could also point out that IONA one of the main contributors to what I consider the most important spec for SOA: WS-CAF. Not many company can brag about such outstanding contribution to the standards work.
back to work,
JJ-
Posted by Jean-Jacques Dubray | May 25, 2004 10:41 AM
Posted on May 25, 2004 10:41