IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems, Second Edition

Preface

All large organizations have complex, heterogeneous IT systems. All of them need to integrate their applications to support faster, more accurate business processes and to provide meaningful, consistent management information. All organizations are struggling to achieve this.

One reason for their struggle is that they are caught in the crossfire of an IT vendor war. In one corner is Microsoft Corporation, whose strength is its consistent technical strategy based on the .NET set of software technologies and the Windows operating system. In the other corner, ranged against Microsoft, is a group that includes IBM Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and BEA Systems. This group is focusing its resources on the Java environment. ...