TrendsLetter Logo

IBM Workgroup

November 1994

IBM used COMDEX as the launchpad for its packaging of a number of existing client/server products into a Workgroup strategy. IBM Workgroup will be seen in the marketplace as a competitor for Microsoft's BackOffice offering -- and it is -- but it’s also more. What we are really seeing here is IBM taking a group of its existing, mature and robust products from the client/server market and integrating them together. This integration is designed both to provide a higher level of functionality and, at the same time, to offer greater ease of use, simplifying access to workgroup tools for both users and their administrators as well as for workgroup application developers.

The messages are straightforward:

• Integration

• Of services

• Of various platforms in a heterogeneous computing environment

• Between client and server

• The importance of IBM's Messaging and Queuing technology to support interprocess communication at the code level. IBM will try to get customers to evaluate every client/server strategy on the basis of how robust their communications services are -- and on the difference between mail/messaging and interprocess messaging.

• There is real, robust, scalable workflow (IBM's FlowMark product) here. This is workflow well above the level of mail-enabled routing in other products.

• IBM can provide all of these advantages against a background of enterprise solutions experience which other vendors are just beginning to understand the need for.

Because we are already accustomed to the Microsoft BackOffice metaphor, we'll present IBM Workgroup's stack compared to it first. There are many comparisons you'll want to make:

• Microsoft is about providing functionality for the Microsoft family of operating systems. It is focused on Windows and NT and requires the use of NT servers. IBM Workgroup is for a more heterogeneous environment. It can support OS/2, AIX, and OS/400 servers and will support NT and other UNIX servers in the future. It supports Windows and OS/2 clients and will support Windows 95 clients in the future.

• Product Maturity: All of the IBM products, except the Ultimail-based Group Communications option, are existing shipping products. Only the integration is itself a new product. The Microsoft BackOffice product is based on a mixture of products, some shipping (like SNA Server and SQL Server), some yet to be shipped (like SMS Server and Microsoft Exchange).

• IBM's product includes a substantial workflow product, FlowMark, scalable to large scale applications. Microsoft's current offerings do include some workflow (in Microsoft Exchange), but they are more in the nature of forms-enabled routing.

We expect to add additional vendors to the chart below, starting with Novell, until we can give you all the relevant vendors. This will be a challenging exercise. Just deciding who to list is a challenge. We think that the list should include (besides IBM and Microsoft):

Of course, there are rhetorical questions to ask, with no answers yet to be found:

Have we left someone significant out?

Is there anyone else who truly stretches across all (or most) of this space?

Will customers choose to align themselves with a single vendor or will they demand the right to pick and choose, selecting the best tool from each vendor, so that open standards, rather than tight integration, will be the highest value?

Comments or Questions: Send Email to opinions@wohl.com

Home/ Search / 2005 Articles / Issue Archive / Free Newsletter

Entire contents © 1994 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.