As BackOffice expands, it will grab an even larger share of the market from OS/2, NetWare, and Unix," predicts James Venturi, president of Creative Technologies, a New York City reseller. "The market is ripe for NT because of its price and performance. SQL Server, for example, is a great value."
The surprising news is that resellers who report surges in NT say in the same breath that the BackOffice family, for all its advantages, remains glaringly immature in some areas. The platform's securi
ty measures are still "hokey," according to
Mohnish Pabrai
, director of BackOffice implementation practice for Transtech in Naperville, Illinois. In particular, he dislikes the need to install third-party firewalls onto a platform that's touted for its tight integration. And resellers still question the platform's large-enterprise capabilities, despite Microsoft's lavishly staged Scalability Days conferences. Some resellers shy away from BackOffice and NT for critical applications, such as real-time reservation systems and terabyte-size data-warehousing projects.
But Microsoft sees these limitations and is promising changes. Even skeptical resellers believe Microsoft will correct shortcomings in BackOffice, though it may take a couple of development cycles. "We've seen [nondisclosure] specs for BackOffice, and we're confident that in 18 months, problems like scalability will be moot," says Pabrai.
So how well does the current release of BackOffice serve the needs of resellers
and systems integrators? BYTE spoke with resellers across the country and found them upbeat about BackOffice's business potential, if not completely enamored with the product line from a technological standpoint.
What's in It for You
For anything but the largest client/server projects, resellers see the Windows NT/BackOffice package as an
attractive one-stop
shopping alternative to buying different applications from different vendors and coping with integration hassles.
The complete BackOffice bundle consists of NT Server, which includes Internet Information Server (IIS); Exchange Server, for e-mail and groupware applications; SQL Server; Systems Management Server (SMS), for network administration and troubleshooting; Systems Network Architecture (SNA) Server, for IBM host connectivity; and Proxy Server, for secure Internet access for desktops. New additions are Merchant Server, for Internet/intranet electronic commerce, and Transaction Server, for managing distrib
uted transactions. Resellers can license the full bundle or choose individual components, depending on the project.
Resellers like the tight integration among NT and the BackOffice applications, as well as with mainframe hosts. Integration makes BackOffice more than a bundle of separate applications, says Pabrai. "Because the development staffs of NT and SQL Server are in bed with each other, the SQL Server people are privy to the inner workings of NT, which isn't the case for developers for Oracle and the other databases," he notes.
This integration pays off, especially in economics. Clueit says that a full-blown client/server implementation on Unix typically costs two to three times more than on BackOffice, primarily because RISC-based workstations and servers are so much more expensive than PCs.
He also adds that while RISC-based Unix systems offer superior performance on paper, x86 power is adequate for many real-world needs. "Intel hardware is growing at a faster rate than [our customer
s] need," he says.
This price difference sometimes makes up for Unix's power and scalability advantages. Clueit says his company inherited a large client/server project that was begun by another reseller, whose specification called for several hundred RISC workstations running Unix. The cost was $60,000 to $70,000 for each workstation, Clueit recalls. "We switched to NT, and now we estimate that the hardware costs will be between $15,000 and $20,000 [for each Pentium machine]. When we got down to the numbers, the customer said [the Unix proposal] was a hell of a premium to pay for features they weren't sure they needed."
He adds that many of his customers are familiar enough with the Windows environment that training or additional staff for systems administration usually isn't necessary with BackOffice, which isn't always the case with Unix.
Clueit cautions that he's seen prices rising as the BackOffice platform matures, and while there are still significant price advantages, the gap between
BackOffice and Unix is narrowing. Also, experienced resellers know when to look beyond BackOffice to give customers the right match of power and integration. For example, Clueit says SCO/Open Server and UnixWare support thousands of third-party applications, including turnkey financial and accounting programs, which are as tightly integrated as the BackOffice family and provide essentially plug-and-play convenience.
Tackling Scalability
A catalyst for the growing popularity of BackOffice applications is the growing need for scalability and NT's answer to it. "We're looking at Mips, Hewlett-Packard, Sequent systems, and they all have hardware designed for scalability," says Pabrai. "Clustered [NT] servers address the scalability issue. Several people outside of Microsoft are working on this. NT today can't run airline reservation systems, but it will in three years," Pabrai believes. Wolfpack uses a distributed lock manager and a shared-nothing approach to clustering -- a somewhat basic implem
entation that keeps servers from sharing resources unless a failover occurs.
He adds that in the projects his company has worked on, the limits of NT scalability haven't been a negative factor. "Most of our work centers around departmental servers, Web servers, print servers. The fun starts when you go beyond departmental servers. Scalability is more of a SQL Server issue than a BackOffice issue. You need to get to terabyte- size databases before you have problems." SQL Server may have some problems there.
Many resellers credit SQL Server developers with improving the relational DBMS (RDBMS) since its early days as a direct descendant of Sybase SQL Server. Because the BackOffice bundle gives end users run-time licenses for SQL Server, it becomes convenient for resellers to use that RDBMS in custom applications. But the price/performance advantage of SQL Server is, as Pabrai quips, "where Billy wins hands down, thanks to volume."
Pabrai estimates that a 10-client Sun/Oracle implementation wit
h one server costs about $250,000. An NT/SQL Server project with the same number of clients comes in at only $35,000. "That's why in three years, the database wars will be over. The winners will be SQL Server [for small to midrange projects] with Oracle keeping its lock on enterprises."
Nevertheless, resellers say that Microsoft must look to what Oracle and other DBMS vendors are doing to find ways of changing SQL Server into a more powerful product. Clueit reports that the developers in his company "are less than enthralled" with SQL Server, compared to competing products from Oracle and Sybase. "Microsoft put a lot of effort into the user interface and the administrative capabilities, but some of the functional aspects of the server are not up to snuff," Clueit says.
SQL Server was slow to move beyond accommodating only page-level locking. It wasn't until its current incarnation that SQL Server supported row-level locking. As interest in data warehousing and data marts heats up, more SQL Server
shortcomings become obvious. Tools for creating and managing metadata have yet to blossom, and there are no native on-line analytical processing (OLAP) programs.
Exchanging Notes
Thanks to recent upgrades that have boosted the reliability of e-mail services, Microsoft Exchange is a "powerhouse," according to Venturi. He gives Exchange high marks for its electronic messaging, discussion, scheduling, and group-calendaring capabilities.
True, hardware requirements can be daunting in the BackOffice environment. "Exchange clients are fairly weighty," Venturi observes. "But with the Citrix technology [which Microsoft acquired last spring], we'll be able to deploy clients across an enterprise without upgrading to Pentiums. It will also be excellent for remote access."
But its integration with other systems is superb. For example, according to Venturi, Novell's GroupWise and Lotus's cc:Mail require resellers to manually import and export directories. Exchange, on the other hand, handles thi
s task automatically. Venturi says he's currently working on a project that melds Exchange with Quickmail and is finding that he can easily import directories into Exchange. "There are a lot of legacy mail systems out there, and a lot of our work centers around integrating Exchange with the old systems," Venturi says.
Management and Middleware
Integration is also the key when it comes to management and connections to other types of systems.
Venturi gives BackOffice solid marks for its administration capabilities, saying it's "simply more logical" than working with, say, Novell products. With support for SNMP, BackOffice provides a central display for setting up the network, adding servers and workstations, and configuring equipment. However, the platform's capabilities won't cause large-scale network administrators to turn in their HP OpenView or CA Unicenter licenses just yet. Clueit says SMS "could do with a lot of improvement. It's a pig in terms of resources."
The BackOffice pla
tform is getting two new pieces of middleware to boost the environment's stature for large enterprises. Transaction Server essentially marries the capabilities of a transaction-processing monitor and an object request broker (ORB). Message Queue Server (MQS), code-named Falcon, is Microsoft's reworking of IBM's MQSeries, a store-and-forward message-queuing technology for getting BackOffice to operate with other platforms, such as IBM's Customer Information Control System (CICS).
The design objective of Falcon is to link network applications through a queuing system. According to Microsoft, applications send and receive information as messages that are stored and routed through a series of queues that are designed to survive system and network failure.
However, some resellers aren't convinced the technology is ready for prime time. One reseller that has beta-tested Falcon has came to the conclusion that the product "will be behind the eight ball," because it doesn't offer as many features as MQSeri
es.
Development Advantages
So how do you string all these pieces together? For development, especially when mixed clients are present, "only two environments are worth anything: Microsoft's and Metrowerks'," says Clueit, adding one caveat: "Microsoft started to get its tools act together only recently.... We do a lot of multiplatform development. We write MFC [Microsoft Foundation Classes] applications and run them on the Mac, and have had some problems. That was on [Visual C++] 4.0. When 5.0 came out, Microsoft decommitted [Mac support]. That was a real disappointment, because we're actually doing more Mac development than ever before."
Although he says Visual C++ is solid, Clueit notes that developers at his company are using Metrowerks increasingly often, primarily because of its capabilities for both NT and the Mac.
Ronnie McNeill Consulting Service's namesake president says Visual Basic "is progressing along quite well" as a development environment. "But it wasn't until the thi
rd version that you could take it seriously." The company develops client/server systems for such companies as HP and Coldwell Banker using Visual Basic for client applications and BackOffice applications on the server.
He adds that the BackOffice platform hints at object orientation, but "it's not fully there." For example, McNeill says an application can inherit the interface of an object but not the object itself. NT isn't truly multithreaded in McNeill's view.
Seller's Market
Does tight integration of applications mean end users pay less for reseller and systems-integration services? No, say resellers who are working overtime to install BackOffice systems. Some savings are derived if fewer hours are needed to launch the project, but the cost of integration services is at a premium because the market is now so bullish. "We see a strong need on the services end for BackOffice, particularly for SQL Server," Pabrai says. Because of demand, resellers are finding a profitable supply-and- de
mand situation. "There's a shortage of people to handle demand. It's fundamental capitalism."
Where to Find
Microsoft
Redmond, WA
Phone: 800-426-9400
Phone: 206-882-8080
Internet:
http://www.microsoft.com
BackOffice at the Forefront
