Dietzen Charts Course for BEA Innovation
When you’re one of the fastest growing companies in software, what do you do to keep up the pace?
by Dan Ruby and Jim Fawcette

A lot has happened in the Java world since our last interview with Scott Dietzen, chief technical officer for BEA Systems, a little more than a year ago. XML Web services have moved to center stage while app server competition has intensified and dot-bombs have detonated. To assess the reconfigured landscape, Dan Ruby, Java Pro editorial director, and Jim Fawcette, president of Fawcette Technical Publications, sat down with Dietzen at BEA's San Francisco office shortly before Christmas. His left ankle was wrapped in a seasonal green-and-red cast, the result of a pick-up basketball game injury. But that didn't slow Dietzen's enthusiasm for Java and BEA's technology plans.

ADVERTISEMENT

Part 1: Web Services: Hype and Reality
Q: BEA Chairman Bill Coleman recently declared that the battle between Java and .NET is over. By the time .NET is here, he argued, the enterprise market will be entirely owned by Java-based application servers. Yet when Java Pro held a roundtable discussion for application server vendors last May, the consensus was that Web services and Microsoft .NET were good for Java, because as one put it, "Web services will open up Java application servers to all those VB programmers." Is the battle really over or are you guys getting a little cocky?

Dietzen: [laughter] Well, I certainly believe there is going to be a long-running competition between .NET and the J2EE alternative. It is true that there are only two horses left in the race. There were other innovations around Web e-business platforms, but the market has come down to the big players either being in the Java J2EE camp or in the .NET camp. Competition is a good and healthy thing. There's nothing that is going to better motivate the Java community or the Microsoft community than trying to stay ahead of the alternative.

Having said that, I do believe that the Java community has a built-in lock on a significant share of the enterprise application market. For example, enterprise ISVs such as SAP or PeopleSoft will find it challenging to build enterprise applications on a .NET architecture because many customers are going to deploy them on Unix. And while I expect that C# will be ported to Unix and other platforms, .NET is going to be a Microsoft-centric technology. If Microsoft really wanted full application portability from Windows to other platforms, it could have stuck with Java and competed for that market. But Microsoft has a different business interest. From Microsoft's perspective, you build on Windows and you deploy on Windows.

Q: How does the emergence of Web services affect the horse race?

Dietzen: Web services offer good news for both sides. It's no longer the case that the Java community has to kick and claw to get a client-side footprint. And Microsoft now has a seamless way to plug in its front- and back-end technologies to existing Java-deployed services. Nobody—not Microsoft, not IBM, not BEA—-gets to dictate protocols on the Web. Everyone has a vested interest in XML Web services, because without them we have no Web effect and no dramatic growth. Both .NET and J2EE stand to both win big by converging on a single Web-services stack that each environment supports.

For BEA, we see opportunity in the competition between .NET and J2EE. We've done a great deal to make our platform very Windows-friendly. We've integrated with Windows-based services through native bindings to SQL Server and transaction sharing and native integration with COM and the NT registry. We see Windows as a key platform along with our other key platforms, and we will aggressively work to carve out the value proposition for WebLogic on top of Windows.

Mostly the deployment platform dictates people's choices right out of the gate. We're going to win some deals on enterprise scalability because we can demonstrate large-scale, business-critical sites running today with large workloads. (See sidebar, "Big Apps Turn to BEA.") But .NET also has a built-in constituency in smaller enterprises, especially those growing up from the client server and workgroup communities into heavier lifting. Also, Microsoft's ISV channels are likely to jump on the .NET bandwagon. Of those customers, we'll convert some of them and many will go .NET. It will be only with the most sophisticated where it will come down to a technology sell between the two.

Q: Where does Java have advantages over .NET, in your view?

Dietzen: Java technologies offer several advantages right now. For instance, our component model today supports automated persistence and stateful conversations. It's better at treating asynchronous messaging as a first-class citizen directly in the component model. I think we've got an edge in transparency. With J2EE, we can turn on existing beans and existing messages for Web services. Contrast that with a Visual Basic developer, who is facing a substantial transition to Visual Basic .NET.

We also have the edge in the support we have for caching and replication inside the fabric. As a developer, you have a service-provider interface for JDBC or for connectors or for messaging that lets you do a lot more plug-and-play in the Java world than [is supported] in .NET.

Beyond technology, the Java community guarantees innovation across a lot of companies and investment protection around API standards. With tens if not hundreds of companies contributing API technologies to the Java Community Process, we are able to pick the best and go forward. Microsoft's model doesn't involve as many companies, but it's the most powerful company in information technology. No doubt it looks at the Java standards when it's specifying its own APIs.

Q: Hasn't Microsoft assumed the initiative in XML Web services?

Dietzen: The fight is not Web services vs. Java. Like the rest of the Web stack, Web services plays across both product lines. In reality, the fight is Java and J2EE versus C# and .NET. But because C# isn't sexy and Web services are, all the .NET marketing is around Web services.