IBM is incorporating open standards throughout its middleware products and its services, and that's a key differentiator, Mills said in an interview here with eWEEK following this morning's announcement.
IBM's approach "is inherently designed for cross-platform, heterogeneous process flow," he said. "Microsoft is neither cross-platform nor heterogeneous... They're a single-platform provider. So as soon as the interaction goes off platform, Microsoft simply views it as a point of connection, not a point of management."
IBM executives this morning unveiled a Web services plan that includes new and upgraded products (many of which will be released next month) and a services strategy designed to support the initiative.
IBM estimates this market will be worth as much as US$50 billion by 2005.
Among the releases will be a new version of IBM's Websphere Application Server. Version 4.0, scheduled for release June 30, expands support for open standards such as UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and WDSL (Web Services Description Language).
Enhancements include better management of high-volume transactions and better management of multiple connections.
On the database front, DB2 Version 7.2, scheduled for release June 8, includes greater support for open standards as well as the DB2/XML Extender, which will enable businesses to access data stored in databases and make it accessible to Web applications.
IBM executives also highlighted greater integration and tighter links both within the IBM middleware family and with technology from other vendors, saying the company will leverage technology from its Tivoli Systems and Lotus Development subsidiaries to improve management and collaboration features of the strategy.
Another management tool, also scheduled for release in late June, will be the Websphere Business Integrator, executives said. The software is designed to help businesses manage the flow of Web services applications within the enterprise and between trading partners. A key to the technology will be the use of IBM's messaging queuing product, MQSeries, to deliver SOAP messages between Web services applications.
The key to the entire strategy, said Mills and John Swainson, general manager of the application and integration middleware division, is the use of open standards. Businesses are using a wide variety of platforms and technologies and want to incorporate what they've already invested in into their e-business strategies rather than scrap everything and start from scratch, they said.
Vendors must address this, and the only way is through open standards and working together.
"I think there's plenty of room there to cooperate and room to compete," Mills said.
Microsoft's 'closed' .Net
That cooperation is a key difference between what IBM and what Microsoft are doing, he added. Though he applauded Microsoft's recent work on standards, including SOAP and UDDI, Mills said .Net still is a fairly closed strategy and nothing more than a rebranding of Microsoft technology.
"Microsoft had DNA, and now they have another brand, .Net," he said. "They keep coming out with these umbrella brands.
".Net is everything they sell," Mills continued. "I'm not trying to create an architectural brand. I'm trying to develop a technology that meets a set of customer needs.
"There's something fundamentally wrong with the whole approach to architecture branding. The marketplace keeps moving, and an architecture brand tends to cement you into a set of points you're making at that particular point in time... And that architecture brand may not apply to where the market is going."
Swainson said another key difference is that the bulk of .Net has yet to be released.
"People have talked about these (Web services) for a while," he said during the one-hour presentation. "They've talked about them in an experimental phase. We're here to tell you that we're ready for prime time."
