Last month, Jack Martin, editor-in-chief of WebSphere Journal, and Tom Inman, vice president of product management and marketing, IBM WebSphere Software, talked about the differences between WebSphere and WebLogic. This month, they look at what's happening in WebSphere now, and plans for the future.
Jack Martin: What was your background? What did you do before you did this?
Tom Inman: I joined sales and marketing right out of college and have been here ever since.
JM: What school did you go to?
TI: I went to Michigan State University, where I earned a Bachelor of Science in engineering and an MBA in marketing and finance. I needed money to pay for school and I landed an internship with IBM just outside of Michigan State in Lansing, Michigan. I hit it off with the branch manager and the sales manager very well. They tried to hire me before I finished school and they were going to pay for the rest of it. I thought the opportunity to work for IBM made sense, but I wanted to get out of Michigan, having grown up there. It is a great place to call home, but I was young and needed to explore more of the world. I coerced them into helping me find a job in San Francisco because I wanted to move to the West Coast. This was back in the mid-'80s.
I spent a number of years in San Francisco, but I have been here in the New York area for 8 years.
I have spent my career mostly between sales and marketing. I had a short stint as the executive assistant to Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's head of technology and chief visionary.
Tom Inman - Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, IBM WebSphere Software
JM: I've met him twice. They were both enlightening conversations.
TI: He is a visionary who actually is quite grounded in reality. In my experience working for Irving, there was some technology developed by IBM for the 1996 Olympics and the Web site. Irving asked me to take a look at this technology to see if we could actually make a business out of it. To make a long story short, the ideas and technology used for the Olympics became the seeds for what became WebSphere. We set up a small group of people with business and technology backgrounds and built the initial business plan.
JM: Were you involved when Don Ferguson first got involved?
TI: Yes. Don was working on an initiative, which I'm sure he talked to you about, called IBM Component Broker. Don's ideas, which went into Component Broker, in many ways became the reference architecture and design that shaped most of the major technology specifications that went into the creation and development of J2EE.
There were some great ideas behind Component Broker and some challenges. One of the challenges, quite frankly, was that it was too complex for what the general market was seeking. I pushed very hard for a more basic, simpler technology and product to introduce into the marketplace.
At that point, the predominant customer need was for a simple, standards-based Web interaction server. This would enable self-service applications to be built and deployed on the Web and would enable connectivity to some back-end systems and applications such as CICS, DB2 databases, Tuxedo, Oracle databases, or whatever back end the customer might have. In that, we needed a product that was properly suited for the market and so I helped push the design for what became the first WebSphere products. Those were WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Studio, which we introduced in May of '98.
