Why Middleware Matters

Lots of organisations have organised their information resources into searchable, retrievable and programmable databases. Still more reach out to customers and suppliers through their Web sites.

The irony is that this level of information technology implementation only helps IT vendors; the payoff for the implementor rarely matches up. There will be a nice-looking Web site that is little more than an interactive advertisement for the company, and data storage in a form that makes for passable MIS and offers creative ways for junior managers to make pointless Power Point presentations.

A firm needs something more to really profit from technology. A potent genre of software packages and solutions, known as application servers, provides a solution. They sit between a company's back-end database and its front-end browser interface, and integrate what is often a disparate mess of IT components of widely varying vintages and compatibilities. This integration allows an organisation to harness the power of IT and the Internet by adding real-time speed, information backup and functional flexibility, both to its internal operations as well as to the services it offers customers.

Which is why the app server market is estimated to grow at a blinding 130 per cent each year until 2004. That's in stark contrast to dipping growth rates everywhere else. Find out more about app servers and the organisations that have implemented them in our cover feature. Our bottom line: resist the temptation to build your own and buy them.

This issue also features an important subject in these downsizing days. Too many top managements still regard IT either as a set of glorified system administrators or as an avoidable cost head, or both. "So, What is a CIO Worth?" tells you how to maximise your value to your firm-and how to communicate it. Guess what? Selling the idea of IT is way more important than blowing people's minds with jargon.

One problem even a CIO can't fix is the information overload on the Internet. You can waste so much time seeking information on the Net that at most managerial salaries it may be more cost-effective to seek it on the telephone. Still, understanding how search engines work and fine-tuning your search techniques can crunch that time dramatically. How? Look at our guide to search engines.

The Net's pervasiveness makes it necessary to search intelligently. It also suggests a future direction for IT, especially through small mobile computing devices that bring IT's benefits to the masses. That's why our February 2002 Chief Guest, Wendy Hall, professor of electronics and computer science at the UK's University of Southampton, and hypermedia expert, argues that, "the Web will disappear. And with it will go the buttons".

The CD you get with this issue is an interactive guide to Internet security, an area of particular importance to any implementor of enterprise IT solutions, like app servers. It has been specially prepared for Computers Today by SSI group company Inndsoft Systekh. We hope you'll find it useful.

Hari Menon
<editor@computers-today.com>