Life-sciences standards are just emerging. At standards meetings, competitors, partners, and customers come together to create interoperability interfaces in areas important to customers. IBM is active in life sciences-related standards focused on informatics and data management, many of which use XML and a Web services approach.

Pharmaceutical companies are facing the challenge of improving the productivity of the drug discovery and clinical trials process, creating and sharing knowledge across the silos of that process, and integrating applications and data in enterprise-wide development efforts. Biotech, research, and medical organizations face similar challenges of collaboration and sharing of applications and data.

In the past few years we've seen a revolution taking place in the life sciences, a revolution driven by information technology, which has become the engine of experimental biology. As a result, we are seeing the convergence of information technology and the biological sciences, a convergence that will affect the way we live and that holds the potential to greatly improve the quality and effectiveness of medical care.

In the past, I've written about operational readiness and operational excellence as performance models for data center environments. I'm an ops guy; a gear-head; the imperious overlord of all things within my domain. I'm the person you typically hand your space, equipment, applications, and business models to, and say, 'Make it all work, then manage it.'

While most companies today are under tremendous pressure to anticipate and respond to customer demands in order to stay ahead of the competition, many are meeting this challenge over the Web with enterprise applications deployed on application servers.

Pervasive computing. Sounds awesome, doesn't it? But, what is pervasive computing, exactly? Well, IBM defines it as the ability to manage information easily. More specifically, it will enable people to accomplish an increasing number of personal and professional transactions using a new class of intelligent and portable devices giving them convenient access to relevant information anywhere, anytime. Wow. What a mouthful!

In past columns we looked at several ways that sales teams can work together and the considerations involved in a successful sales process. This month let's get a little further inside of a big customer's thought process, a customer who out of the gate requires high scalability. These are customers with multi-tier architectures, terabytes of data storage, sophisticated business logic, distributed applications, and a very real need for maximum uptime. These are the customers who bring the greatest challenges - and the greatest rewards.

This month we're going to examine why customers make technology-buying decisions based on both the target technology and on their or someone else's ability to implement it. Bad software implemented by anyone is still bad software. Good software deployed by a knowledgeable team is what creates winning solutions. Good software implemented by less than the best is what can create dark scenarios that range from limited functionality to deep black holes that absorb revenue and resources into an unknown vortex.

With the release of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 2.0 specification a new category of enterprise beans was introduced - message-driven beans (MDBs). Message-driven beans have been specifically designed to process incoming JMS messages within an EJB container.

Enterprises rely on IBM's WebSphere Application Server to quickly build complex applications and highly scalable transaction services. As such, the business criticality of these J2EE applications has grown. WebSphere's importance will continue to expand as businesses look to Web services as the next evolution of application architectures.

Welcome to the inaugural column of 'Why They Buy.' In this space we'll explore the reasons behind why customers choose WebSphere and why WebSphere sales are made. Making sure that the customer is part of the solution team ensures effective team selling and WebSphere sales. It's not as hard to achieve as it sounds. Hopefully, this column will help you do that.

What's the best way to develop and fine-tune your WebSphere applications to run faster, jump higher…and make fewer trips to the database? When creating optimized WebSphere applications that access data on your DB2 database, what kinds of challenges do you face? Creating DB2-enabled WebSphere apps involves the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API, which can be a challenge in itself.

Business continuity. A new and exciting catchphrase? For some, perhaps. Traditional business continuity planning involves many aspects of corporate activities, from call center rerouting and alternative raw material suppliers to policies requiring executives to fly on separate planes.

Most of the time spent in an application development project is in developing and testing the application. Less time is actually spent designing and creating a repeatable and reproducible packaging and deployment model. A well-designed 'build, package, and deploy' model has numerous benefits, including improved developer productivity, reduced turnaround time for builds and code fixes, better consistency in application code, and reinforcement of development policies.

The fastest-growing and most exciting part of Lilian Vernon's multi-channel business is the company's new Web site, www.lillianvernon.com. We've shown our confidence in both the future of the Web and our overall e-business strategy by making a major investment in this new Web site. Lillian Vernon receives 4.4 million orders a year; during our peak holiday week last year, we processed more than 289,000 orders. Our challenge had been keeping the information on our Web site current and in line with promotions, pricing, and a constantly evolving product line.