With Microsoft bogged down in legal disputes on two continents and Netscape's fourth-quarter losses driving investors to distraction, the AS/400's sudden rise in stature as a server platform has never been more confusing for corporate management to understand. After all, just last year many pundits were viewing the AS/400 as a legacy system that was overdue for replacement. Now, there is a general consensus that the AS/400 may be the most secure computing platform in the organization, with its greatest growth potential still ahead. How did this sudden change take place? The events leading up to the February announcement of OS/400 Version 4 Release 2 paint an interesting picture of an industry in tumultuous transition. Rising out of the swirl of confusing press releases, IBM's Lotus Development Corporation is now causing many analysts to wonder "Is Lotus destined to dominate the client/server marketplace?" If so, the AS/400 may be the best place to be after all.

IBM's February announcement of OS/400 Version 4 Release 2 was destined to start rumors long before its details were fully disclosed. (See "In Platform Politics, IBM's AS/400e Model 170 Is a Winner" and "OS/400 V4R2: The Real Version 4 Rears Its Head" elsewhere in this issue). It was no secret that IBM was planning to roll out a native version of the groupware messaging and Web serving product called Lotus Domino. In fact, instead of laying out the usual smokescreen of hyperbole prior to the announcement, IBM was careful to invite many press analysts up to Rochester, Minnesota, for a prerelease briefing. You may recall that last month we talked about IBM pulling out of Comdex and dragging Lotus Development with it. Now, at these briefings in Rochester, IBM gave details of the announcement and told the press to be sure to attend the Lotusphere show in Orlando in February. Why? To see the preview of Lotus Domino for the AS/400. For the AS/400 press, we could smell something big coming. Now, suddenly it seemed IBM had a venue where its products and its research could be really showcased. That showcase was Lotusphere, a forum devoted to advanced Web-serving technology and the collaborative workgroup model.

What surprised many of these new non-AS/400 press members at Lotusphere was the power and scalability of the native Domino server. It had never occurred to some of these analysts that the

AS/400's 64-bit RISC architecture would catapult the AS/400 into a groupware server that far- outstripped every other platform in the market. According to IBM's specifications, Domino for the AS/400 handles as many as 10,000 users on a single AS/400. And performance? Running on the 64-bit RISC boxes, Domino for the AS/400 is the first 64-bit Domino server code in the world. This makes the AS/400-Domino combination a real competitive threat to Microsoft's 32- bit Exchange Server code that runs only on Microsoft NT.

So isn't Domino merely an application? Like email and calendaring? If this is the traditional AS/400 view of the groupware server, then it's time to rethink the IT strategy. By bringing the Domino server to the AS/400, IBM has opened the door to legions of Domino developers who have packaged applications that use the Domino server technology.

For instance, SkillSet Software has announced plans to port the Desktop Recruiter application to the AS/400 Domino server. Desktop Recruiter is an integrated applicant-tracking software package that uses Domino workflow computing tools to provide companies with a competitive advantage in a tight hiring market by automating the entire job requisition and tracking process. Desktop Recruiter should be available before the end of the first quarter.

Another application is Infinium Software's new Infinium e-business Extensions. Extensions is a powerful set of enhancements to Infinium's financial, human resources, materials management, and process manufacturing applications. Extensions expands the collaboration and communication capabilities of a business enterprise so it may work more closely with customers, suppliers, and the workforce. It provides integrated Web and workflow application functionality that goes beyond basic Web-enablement. The product automates the paper-flow processes and extends electronic connections to customers and suppliers in a collaborative groupware environment. The product's modules include Performance Review Management, Invoice-Order Resolution, Purchasing Approval Processing, and Credit Limit Resolution.

And on the connectivity side of things are new Domino-enabled products that make the AS/400 easier to access. One interesting hardware/software expansion of the AS/400's capabilities is Digi International's PortServerII communications server. The PortServerII is a Remote Access Server (RAS) that allows dial-up modems to connect to the AS/400's Domino server. It supports a variety of TCP/IP-based protocols and slips into the card cage of the AS/400. It's another way to bring the AS/400 to your mobile users, and this may be an important tool for you to investigate. But more importantly, it shows that the AS/400 is no longer an island requiring special connectivity tools: Both software and hardware vendors are planning to use the Domino Server as an application platform to leverage their products to the traditional corporate AS/400 customer base.

Furthermore, it's become clear that Domino for the AS/400 is not an aberrant version of the Lotus product line, but a key platform that enables Lotus and its legions of third-party software developers to provide highly functional collaborative and workflow applications to a new corporate market. Domino for the AS/400 is a fully functional version of Domino Release 4.6, making it a natural for developers to start porting their groupware applications to our home platform. How easy will that be? Well, sources at IBM indicated that the port of Domino to the AS/400 went so smoothly that Lotus developers left Rochester weeks ahead of schedule. This is good news for us, for if the port had been filled with problems, the long-term viability of the product might have given us pause. Now, rumors are circulating that Rochester is turning over

OS/400 Domino's future enhancements directly to Lotus, who is already working steadily on Release 5 of the product. This should mean that new releases will start appearing on the same time schedule as Lotus' other implementations. It also means that Microsoft will have an even harder road ahead with Exchange Server. After all, if a company has the capabilities of Domino on the AS/400, why would it pony up for a different collaborative groupware environment?

One of the more exciting V4R2 announcements was the availability of Microsoft NT on the AS/400's Integrated PC Server (IPCS). This feature fulfills IBM's commitment to make the AS/400 compatible with the latest NT technology. Since Microsoft products represent the most popular clients attached to the AS/400-and because NT is becoming the single most-desired PC network server in the industry-many people view the takeover of the midrange marketplace by Windows NT Server as inevitable. However, over the past several months, Microsoft itself has had a few legal and public relations problems keeping it busy. Actions by the Department of Justice continue to dominate the news about Microsoft, and this public relations debacle is causing many IT professionals to take stock of their long-term networking strategies. Why?

For a while, it appeared as though Microsoft was deliberately using stalling tactics to obstruct the implementation of a 1995 consent decree. You may recall that late last year U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft to un-bundle the Internet Explorer 4.0 from Windows 95. Unfortunately, Microsoft interpreted this order to mean that it must remove every program module from the Windows 95 operating system that was used by IE 4.0. Of course, by following these orders, the resulting version of Windows 95 was severely crippled, and it seemed to observers that Microsoft was employing this tactic to make an important point: Windows 95 and IE 4.0 are joined at the hip and cannot be separated.

In other words, according to Microsoft, if you disable one element, you will cripple the other. How can this be? A good analogy might be OS/400: How can you remove the DB2/400 database from OS/400 without destroying the functionality of the entire computing platform? Of course, the answer is, you can't. But the press publicized this engineering feature of Windows 95 as a legal tactic. According to the popular coverage of the events, Microsoft seemed to be saying that the DOJ and the U.S. District Court were unable and unqualified to judge Microsoft's engineering. This tactic evidentially infuriated Judge Jackson who threatened to hold Microsoft in contempt if it did not stop obfuscating the demands of the court. So, the media began treating the dispute as a new cybernetic soap opera, detailing each new development as yet another episode portraying Microsoft as a rogue player with a monopoly interest in the industry. The result? First Chairman Bill Gates was forced to stand before Windows software developers to calm their worries about the viability of Microsoft's long-term strategies. Finally, in mid-January, Microsoft relented and merely disabled Window 95's automatic installation of the IE 4.0's program icon. The message finally got to Gates: You can bully the OEMs, but you can't bully the
U.S. Courts. Public credibility in the court of public opinion is more important than technical correctness in a court of law.

Perhaps the events investigated by Japan's Fair Trade Commission also swayed Microsoft's decision. Microsoft's Tokyo unit was ransacked by Japanese officials who were looking for new evidence to prove allegations that the Redmond, Washington, software giant was also bullying Japanese computer manufacturers. At the heart of this dispute was Microsoft's marketing practices with IE 4.0, but it also included the company's market bundling of Excel with Microsoft Word. This was a new wrinkle in the Microsoft soap opera. In Japan, Excel is the most

popular spreadsheet program on the market, and Microsoft bundles it with the Microsoft Word word processing application. However, Word is considerably less popular than a more powerful product called Ichitaro-a product developed and marketed locally by Justsystem Corp. According to some computer manufacturers, Microsoft refuses to allow computer makers to preload Excel onto the desktop if Ichitaro is also loaded. In other words, it refuses to un-bundle Excel and Word to allow the consumer to choose. Microsoft claims that Word and Excel were designed to work together and can't be run separately (does this strike a familiar note?).

The result? If a customer wants to buy a computer with both a word processor and a spreadsheet program installed, he must choose between Ichitaro with Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Word with Excel. The FTC has declined to comment publicly on the case, but local media reported that Microsoft is under suspicion of violating Japan's anti-monopoly law. This case, which is expected to drag on much longer than the U.S. DOJ action, may have been sparked by Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein, who recently visited Japan prior to the FTC's actions. Klein's concern is this practice of bundling. "Companies can use powers, like bundling, to protect their dominance," said Klein in January to the Software Publisher Association's Advanced Corporate Counsel Institute. "The result is a stifling of innovation." The primary point of his address was that traditional measurements of monopolist power are not always valid. "The laws [of the past] have been focused on price competition-now we are focused on innovation competition. Free is not usually a price you see in the [traditional] markets."

For companies using IBM's AS/400, the impact of these disputes questions the viability of our long-term IT strategies. Since the majority of the PC clients connected to the AS/400 are dependant upon Microsoft Windows, what will be the impact of the Justice Department's foray into design of the desktop operating system? Could the government's demand that Microsoft un- bundle its products open the door to new realms of automation with greater choice? Or is it merely legal interference? Klein denies that the government is stepping out of home territory. "This is not-and I repeat-not about the U.S. deciding what will go into an operating system." But for the antitrust regulators, the market concepts of bundling have meant a rethinking of how to gauge unfair competitive practices. For instance, no longer are price gouging and restrictive customer policy the only weapons in a monopolist's arsenal. Now, patent issues, licensing schemes, bundling agreements, and other competitive edges all act as barriers to competition. This means less choice for AS/400 shops trying to set up productive client/server networks at a reasonable price.

Who'd have thunk that you'd be worrying about Netscape in an AS/400 shop? But with IBM focusing on Domino server and Sun Microsystems' Java Technology, it's become clear that IBM intends to use Web browsers as the natural clients for the user's desktop. One would assume then that companies building sophisticated Web-browsing clients would stand in the best market position to capitalize upon the technology. Yet Netscape Corporation-still the dominant player in the browser market-announced a fourth-quarter loss of $85 million and announced plans for a layoff of up to 20 percent of its workforce. The cause? Lower than expected earnings in the server market and lessening demand for its Internet browser. Netscape's market strategy was to use the popularity of its Web browser to pull customers to its advanced Internet and intranet server technology. However, it appears that the Microsoft NT juggernaut, combined with the free availability of the IE 4.0 browser-preinstalled on Windows 95-has broken Netscape's momentum.

The importance of Netscape's economic problems to AS/400 users is derivative. Netscape was instrumental in pushing Sun Microsystems' Java technology onto the scene-a technology that IBM Rochester is now banking on to provide cross-platform compatibility for the AS/400. Microsoft, on the other hand, is currently being sued by Sun Microsystems for a breach of contract in the use and development of Java and has removed pure Java compatibility from its Internet products, including IE 4.0. If Netscape fails to provide enough market penetration for its Java-compliant browser, all the work to make the AS/400 Java compliant could be for naught. If the Web browser market share goes to Microsoft, applets written for the AS/400 using Sun Microsystems' Java might not be usable for future Windows desktops running IE 4.0.

Meanwhile, Microsoft took a shot at Novell's NDS for NT product. Novell's NDS is still the most popular directory service product in mid-to-large-sized organizations, tying the various network resources of security, directories, and files into a single enterprisewide facility. NDS for NT was designed to compete with and complement Microsoft's own product called NT Directory Service (NTDS). However, Bill Gates evidently decided that allowing Novell into the NT directory services niche was too close for comfort. He announced that Microsoft would not support the new Novell product on its NT server platform. For its part, Microsoft claimed that NDS for NT has too many bugs in its first release, and consequently customers who implement the product would have to look elsewhere for support. At first glance, one might have assumed that it was merely a compatibility issue and that Microsoft didn't want to take the blame if the product malfunctioned on the NT server platform. However, industry analysts and Novell spokespeople pointed once again to Microsoft's closed dominion and wondered how the Microsoft NT operating system-once viewed as the Swiss army knife of operating systems-ever became so closed to competing complementary products. One week after Microsoft said it wouldn't support ND5, loaded NT systems, it backed off and said it would support such systems.

What's interesting for AS/400 users is that NT is currently making its debut on the AS/400 with Version 4 Release 2 of OS/400. Running on the AS/400's IPCS, NT follows a long history of PC networking operating systems that have been adapted to the AS/400's architecture. This history has included IBM LAN Server, OS/2 Warp Server, and Novell NetWare Server. Using the IPCS, companies can install NT to tie the PC network directly to the AS/400 and maintain a single computing footprint for both OS/400 applications and PC network applications. This has been an extremely popular concept for AS/400 shops. In fact, the interest in NT for the AS/400 has been so hot that IBM cannot keep up with demand for its IPCS card, and a waiting list has formed for shipments. But what will happen, some wonder, if Microsoft suddenly decides that NT on the IPCS has "too many bugs" or that it doesn't like the competitive edge that the configuration provides? Will Microsoft drop technical support for NT on the IPCS? Only time will tell.

Perhaps a similar concern is driving IBM and others to focus more resources on the growing Network Computer (NC) market. IBM introduced the Network Station last summer and subsequently released a Java-enabled model called the Network Station 1000. The idea behind the NC is simple: Why not create a client platform that requires no underlying operating system? Instead of spending thousands of man-hours maintaining the operating systems of hundreds of PCs on a network, why not let the network itself deliver the software? IBM has had great success in the first months of selling the Network Station, but problems still persist with industry standards for supporting the devices.

For example, an IBM Network Station Series 1000 cannot boot from a non-IBM server, and

IBM's NC management software cannot run on servers other than those from IBM. The same is true of Sun's JavaStation: It can boot only from a Sun Netra J server. In order to make the NC model successfully compete against Windows desktops in the client/server environment, it's imperative that NCs have the same cross-compatible hardware configurations as the Java code running on them.

With this in mind, IBM and others met in Cupertino, California, last January to map out compatibility strategies for the network computer architecture. Included at the summit were IBM, Sun, Compaq Computer Corp., Boundless Technologies Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., and Corel Corp. Also in attendance was an NC adversary, Microsoft Corp., which attended as an observer. The lack of interoperability and standards are only two of the problems facing the NC. The clients also suffer from a lack of heavyweight industrywide support. Currently, IBM is the only major vendor selling a Java-based network computer, which it released in December. IBM has since updated it with a Token-Ring model and-for the AS/400-a model that supports twinaxial cable. Meanwhile, Sun, the only other large manufacturer committed to NCs, is far behind schedule in delivery of its JavaStation. It has begun shipping the box in limited quantities, but volume shipments won't begin until the second half of the year.

More important, however, is the availability of off-the-shelf Java business applications. So far, Star Division Corp., in Hamburg, Germany, has shipped StarOffice for Java, and Lotus Development Corp., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has begun shipping eSuite, which will run on NCs. This places Lotus in the middle of the new market arena, offering the first of a line of applications specifically designed for the Java environment. These applications will run off the Domino server, transforming the AS/400 from a host-based computing system with 5250 green- screen terminals to a leading-edge server platform, delivering state-of-the-art technology to new leading-edge hardware. Again, it looks as though IBM has given ample thought and preparation for the AS/400's emerging role. It has leveraged its unique operating system and combined the strengths of Lotus Development Corporation's most promising products to the benefit of its users. It has brought the first working models of NCs to the industry. No wonder many IS and IT professionals are taking a new look at the AS/400 as both the safest and most robust server for the long term.

With these thoughts in mind, I encourage you to examine the articles reviewing Version 4 Release 2 of OS/400, as well as the pertinent hardware announcements. (See "OS/400 V4R2: The Real Version 4 Rears Its Head" and "In Platform Politics, IBM's AS/400e Model 170 Is a Winner" in this issue of MC.) There's ample opportunity to read between the lines, to see the direction IBM is mapping for the AS/400, and to understand how this unique architecture will impact the productivity of the industry for some time to come.

Thomas M. Stockwell is a technical editor for Midrange Computing. Email him comments and questions at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Thomas M. Stockwell is an independent IT analyst and writer. He is the former Editor in Chief of MC Press Online and Midrange Computing magazine and has over 20 years of experience as a programmer, systems engineer, IT director, industry analyst, author, speaker, consultant, and editor.  

 

Tom works from his home in the Napa Valley in California. He can be reached at ITincendiary.com.

 

 

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