Midmarket companies can't afford to ignore middleware.The sad truth about middleware in the midmarket is that there isn't much of
it. Despite everybody talking about the value of middleware for two decades or
more, the simple fact is that most midmarket companies don't have the IT
expertise or budget dollars to acquire, deploy and manage middleware projects.
The closest thing most midmarket companies have to middleware is the
spreadsheets they use to copy data out of various applications to create reports
that the business can reasonably rely on as being accurate, as a human being
has gone to great lengths to correlate data residing in different applications.
Given the current state of the economy, it may not be reasonable to expect
that midmarket companies are going to suddenly embrace middleware. But as
application software continues to evolve, there is more support for XML Web
services inside these applications. As a self-describing, data-neutral file
format, XML provides IT organizations with a basic standard for sharing data
across applications.
Unfortunately, most midmarket companies have not taken the
time to master the nuances of support for XML Web services within their
existing applications, so all too often the lingua franca for middleware in the
midmarket remains the spreadsheet.
The question this all brings
up is whether midmarket companies can afford to ignore XML Web services much
longer. Now that Oracle has acquired BEA and Microsoft seems to have gotten
over its yen to acquire Yahoo, the odds are good that both Oracle and Microsoft
will look to bolster their positions in the midmarket as they vie with SAP and IBM. In fact, IDC
reports that in 2007 there were 230 announced and completed deals in the
enterprise applications market valued at over $59.4 billion. That activity is
expected to continue unabated through 2008 because valuations of software
companies are dropping and the easiest way for the big vendors to gain share in
the midmarket space is via acquisitions.
That means that just about every day IT departments are living in terror of
the acquisition du jour, which usually requires the IT staff to eventually
migrate to the application platform of the latest victor in the vendor wars.
That migration brings a whole host of issues associated with support,
maintenance and upgrades that usually translate into higher costs for the
customer and less flexibility for the business as a whole.
What all this means is that midmarket companies can no longer afford to
ignore the value of XML Web services. With their underlying XML format, these services provide a data-neutral format and a safe haven
from the turmoil of vendor acquisitions. This makes it easier to migrate from
one application to another should a company not want to do business with a
vendor trying to buy its way into the business by acquiring a rival company.
Chances are pretty good that the company doing the
acquiring was passed over in the first place for good reason. By acquiring a
company, any vendor can force the issue again through dint of financial muscle.
But the real question is, what can IT organizations do to protect themselves
from all this predatory behavior? Arguably, the first line of defense should be
XML, as whatever group controls the data ultimately remains the master of its
own destiny.
