Market Opportunities

Robust growth is forecasted for the data access middleware market for each year through the year 2006. The following are several economical factors that will drive interest in middleware during the forecast period:

• As multinational businesses expand in both number and size, distributed computing solutions will be essential.
  
  
• Customer recognition of middleware advantages, and the subsequent increase in demand for these technologies as client/server application deployment continues, will push vendors to distinguish themselves by expanding middleware capabilities.
  
  
• Middleware with expanded capabilities will streamline distributed computing by handling more functions from distributed applications. This will foster a cycle of better product and stimulate further demand.

One can argue that advances in connectivity technology have fertilized the growing worldwide client/server application market place because of its implicit mission to distribute business processes unbound by geography. But what acts as the connectivity moderator among the distributed information resources of a multinational (or even only multi-building) enterprise? Increasingly, middleware does.

Middleware is an independent software and service system that distributed business applications use to share computing resources across heterogeneous technology. It is layered on top of the client and server operating systems that host the computing resource as well as the communications networks connecting them together.

As an essential enabler of distributed computing (two and three-tier), middleware delivers increased customer benefits such as freedom of choice and technology independence, uniformity and transparency, adaptability and flexibility, simplicity over complexity, lower-cost application development, reduced application maintenance, and the enablement of new technology such as the Internet.

To address many of these needs, Microsoft has committed to it's Universal Data Access strategy and the components associated with it: OLE DB, ActiveX Data Object, ODBC, and Remote Data Services. OLE DB is an object-based specification for standardized data access to any type of data. It leverages COM to define an object model for accessing databases. Again, as many desktop applications begin to support this specification there is a need for data source providers to make their data OLE DB compliant. OLE DB adds an entire different level of complexity.

The following are several factors – both economic and technological – that will drive interest in middleware during the forecast period:

• As multinational businesses expand in both number and size, distributed computing solutions will be essential.
  
  
• Customer recognition of middleware advantages, and the subsequent increase in demand for these technologies, will push vendors to distinguish themselves by expanding middleware capabilities.
  
  
• Middleware with expanded capabilities will streamline distributed computing by handling more functions from distributed applications. This will foster a cycle of better product and stimulate further demand.

• Customer movement away from proprietary database API connectivity. As customers scale up their use of data access middleware, they will increasingly use three-tier server-based products. Customers can then evolve their distributed architectures so that classes of applications are able to talk to data resources through the services of data access layers such as COM/DCOM.
  
  
• Movement of customers away from server-based solutions built in-house. To access back-end data from client/server applications, many customers have done it the hard way and built their own in-house data access manager layers. Over time customers will grow tired of the burden of maintaining in-house data access components and revert to the use of commercial software products and standards.
  
  
• Universal data access versus the universal database.Over the next five years one will expect competition between the data access manager layer and the emerging concept of universal databases. There is no reason why both categories of products could be designed to deliver data resources to application programs in a similar fashion. However, the independence that is a fundamental characteristic of middleware products would give customers the ability to openly pick and choose which component data store were combined together for universal data access
  
  
• Expanding user base resulting from the Internet enablement. As far as the need for data access is concerned, the Internet will significantly grow the population of clients that demand access to back-end data resources. The potential volume of access here will grow the number of circumstances whereby data access must be scaled up through the use of a three-tier product.

As part of the constant growth, the shape and constitution of the middleware markets are sure to continuously change. A wide variety of IT industry players will drive the explosion in the middleware markets and it is OpenAccess Software's strategy to be working with them.

Customers

The primary interest group driving growth in the middleware markets will be customers. In essence, customers will increasingly buy middleware products because of the greater benefits they receive when building and operating distributed applications in a heterogeneous data source environment. When not using independent middleware products, the odds are that at some point the deployed applications will fall short of their potential and the customer is at the risk of the following barriers:

• Vendor and product lock-in
• Technology lock-in
• Inability to support change transparently
• Failure to deliver optimal customer benefits

Web-Based Portal Vendors

The world is caught up in the Internet/intranet craze as the latest phase in the industry’s continued evolution to increasingly distributed operating environments. If this craze continues on its course, it could be the biggest boom for middleware products that these markets have yet seen. Customers will build large-scale applications on top of Internet technologies; they will need to use middleware.

With the glut of information available, commerce opportunity will be created for the delivery of information for a fee. Information sources exist in various formats, ranging from text engines, relational and non-relational databases, and real-time information feeds. Providing standard data access to these information sources allows users to pay for information as delivered in existing applications.

System Management Vendors

As customers increasingly build large-scale applications using middleware, they will find that the run-time middleware environments must be configured, tracked and managed.

Application Package Vendors

Many of the early client/server application packages originally were designed around embedded specialized database systems and connectivity technology. In the last years, several application vendors have announced plans to redesign future releases of their client/server application packages around OpenAccess Software middleware products.

Database Management System Vendors

Database vendors have most vigorously pursued a product strategy built around embedded connectivity technology. In the competitive database market, the deliberate strategy founded on the important role of middleware is a potentially valuable difference that a DBMS product vendor can use to differentiate its entire product line and strategy.

Application Development Tool Vendors

Application development tool vendors have long recognized the benefits of enabling their tool sets for building distributed applications to middleware. Because of the diversity of services that different middleware products provide, application development tool vendors will increasingly enable their tools to build applications that are able to leverage services provided by any database through middleware.

System Integrators

Middleware products promise a significant opportunity for system integrators to sell services. For example, there is the opportunity to consult with customers, helping them deploy middleware products and distribution application architectures to most appropriately meet the requirements of a growing distributed applications portfolio. A second opportunity for services involved providing custom development and code to tie together diverse legacy applications to interoperate.