More Than Marketing
by Steven Berkowitz
On November 7, 2002, Chutney Technologies sponsored a small get-togetherat New York City's Marriott Financial Center. When Alan forwarded theinvite to me, my first thought was, "Goodie. Nothing about Web services."
As it turns out, that wasn't entirely true, but Web services was not thefocus. They just came up as incidental to everything else.
The day started with a presentation by Charles Francois, Sun's chiefarchitect for Sun ONE. Francois talked about the Sun ONE set of products andwas followed by Chris Riley, senior technology evangelist from Cape Clear,who spoke about their own CapeConnect software. These were straightmarketing presentations. You may well have uses for these products, in whichcase you should visit their respective Web sites to learn more since suchpresentations don't leave me with much of my own to say.
The third presentation was given by Dr. Anindya Datta, cofounder and CEOof Chutney Technologies. I was a little concerned that this was going to beanother hour of mere marketing. Had that been the case, you wouldn't bereading this now. Yes, Chutney had a product to sell (an out-of-processobject storage solution called Apptimizer) and, of course, they would lovefor us all to buy it. But rather than simply tell us about the product, Dr.Datta presented an in-depth explanation of the problem Apptimizer solves.The slides were largely about the vicissitudes of object creation, objectdestruction, and garbage collection. Maybe it was his command of the subjectmatter, maybe his quiet passion for the topic, but Dr. Datta presented acompelling case for external object storage.
There is a lesson here for marketers. Don't just tell me about yourproduct. Don't just tell me about people who have used it successfully. Showme a problem and then show me how to solve it with your product. Dr. Dattadidn't mention his product by name until slide 42 of a 54-slidepresentation. Yet, as a marketing tool, his was the most effective of thethree presentations.
After lunch, Bijesh Jacob, senior architect at Marsh, Inc., told thetale of how they implemented the portal at Marsh.com. Something fascinatingcame out during his talk: when trying to scale the portal, Marsh's J2EEserver crumbled under the heavy load. Jacob couldn't tell us which serversince Marsh had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the vendor. Hey,vendor, whoever you are, shame on you.
After Jacob's presentation there was a panel discussion consisting ofJacob, Riley, Dr. Datta, and Edgar Holcomb from JP Morgan. The real meat ofthis discussion revolved around Morgan's experiences with implementing theirown portal.
A servlet-based application running on WebLogic, Morgan's portal is anexample of how Web services are being used right now. This project isserving as Morgan's Web services proof of concept. The business units usingthe portal are free to write their portlets in whatever language(s) theywish as long as they provide clear SOAP interfaces. However, Holcomb saidthe portal developers worked very closely with the business units on thisproject to make sure everything worked the way it had to.
