Legacy Links

Luis Colon is a microsystems specialist at Communications Data Services (CDS), a company in Des Moines, Iowa, that analyzes people's buying habits in order to build marketing models and targeted mailing lists. Because CDS was previously a NetWare shop, Colon says he has evaluated both Microsoft's BackOffice and IBM's Software Servers. In his company's transaction-heavy environment, he says that performance and integration with a legacy database were his key evaluation criteria.

"We run DB2 under MVS, AS/400, and AIX," says Colon. "Although you can get [BackOffice] SQL Server connected to it, the cost of integrating and main taining an NT server was high enough to eliminate it from consideration."

Colon also says that some of the IBM products were more mature and scaled better than their Microsoft equivalents. He selected IBM's Communications Server for a Systems Network Architecture (SNA) application based on its performance. Colon says his testing showed that improving NT's performance was more dependent on all the pieces being Microsoft products. Communications Server, being somewhat stand-alone, was a better solution.

Colon views suites as a nice concept, but he's not completely sold. "Having it all in one box is great, but once you get past the installation, the benefits of bundling start to dwindle," he explains. He admits that suites have an advantage as far as licensing, price, and bug fixes are concerned. But he wouldn't use a mediocre application just because it was part of a suite.

Colon believes that neither IBM nor Microsoft has got applications-server suites right yet. If Microsoft is going to make headway in the medium-to-large enterprise, BackOffice has to be available on some thing besides NT Server, he says. As for IBM, Colon has some advice: "If you're going to do integration, you should work on integrating the user interface to cut training costs." Each, it seems, could learn something from the other.