David Caddis
Vice president, Application Infrastructure Management Group
Candle Corporation
Many organizations have not realized the value of their IBM WebSphere investments because they have not developed the right blueprints for success. Architecting J2EE to support industrial-strength business requirements is a complex undertaking. An effective runtime environment must optimize each system within an infrastructure and address how the interrelated technologies impact one another. When architecting e-business environments, the performance of the entire infrastructure is greater than the sum of its parts. Many J2EE blueprints have addressed only front-end application considerations, which is like designing a car without including a radiator to prevent the engine from overheating.

Failure to design for performance, scalability, and flexibility across the entire enterprise has caused many applications to either perform poorly or remain stalled in pre-production. To mitigate these problems, 2004 will mark a refocus on architecting enterprise Java applications and the underlying transaction processes that serve as the highways for business operations. A comprehensive J2EE blueprint will enable organizations to sidestep performance hurdles and quickly deploy new business applications.

Sunny Gupta
Senior director, J2EE Products
Mercury Interactive
Many IT organizations have made significant investments in building new applications, integrating existing applications, and customizing package applications leveraging the WebSphere platform. However, less than 20 percent of these organizations are getting what they need from these applications - 99 percent availability - to provide value to the business. Almost half the time, availability and performance issues get noticed only when customers call to complain that they cannot complete a business process. In other words, once revenue and productivity have already been lost.

In the year ahead, we believe that more IT organizations will adopt a business technology optimization (BTO) approach to maximize the business value of their WebSphere applications. With BTO, companies can focus resources on application delivery and application management to optimize the quality, performance, and availability of their WebSphere applications, get more out of their existing investments, and control IT costs.

Nicolas Jabbour
CTO
Prolifics
WebSphere is becoming a commodity, as are most of the J2EE application servers. Their value is no longer based upon what they do but instead upon how they do things. I suggest that support for the latest and greatest J2EE standard will be taken for granted. Instead, the enhancements that complement the J2EE standards, and the overall enrichment of the application server with value-add offerings (e.g., Rational Suite, WSAD, Portal, Pervasive, etc.) will make the significant difference. In fact, we have seen this played out in history before, and it was successful for both IBM and Microsoft. When you own the infrastructure you can sell more value-add software. Once that value-add software becomes recognized for its own merits the process reverses and the value-add software drives more infrastructure software sales. IBM's model with the legacy operating systems (VM, MVS, etc.) and Microsoft's model with MS Office are brilliant examples of this.

Some other predictions:

• The application server space will evolve into an integration server space. JMS, JCA, and the inclusion of the Web services standard into the J2EE spec are a few examples of this evolution.
• Coming soon are the days when application servers will be distributed with the operating systems; just follow the history.

But this year, WebSphere professionals need to find more effective ways to deal with the faster rate of change, in addition to establishing and maintaining application- and transaction-specific service levels. This will help them identify and monitor the transaction-specific paths, enabling them to detect and proactively eliminate availability exposures and friction, as well as provide sufficient application and environmental forensics to ensure rapid problem resolution or circumvention. More important, these new approaches will enable IT management to set business-oriented priorities for service levels and the use of resources.

Adam Kolawa
CEO/Chairman
Parasoft
Within the next year, I expect that many companies using outsourcing will start to abandon their outsourcing efforts because they are not providing the anticipated level of cost reduction. This change will come as companies realize that the quality of code developed offshore is not improving and they begin to understand that it will cost them just as much to fix the outsourced code as it would cost them to have their own developers produce it from scratch. However, outsourcing will prove effective for some companies, and those companies will continue to outsource.