Roundtable Transcript, Part 2 (Continued)

Integration Tools for Customers
[09:05] Elloy: One thing, just to add, looking back at the previous hour we're talking a lot about technology and this standard and that standard, but no one's said squat about what's important for the customer, what's going to help them use the Java technology to build software better and faster to out-compete. I think that's the single most important thing we should be talking about, and so far we haven't said squat about it, a lot, well, we have a couple of times, but not much.

[09:25] Renaud: Well, I think actually we did. We talked about how to give them tools that would allow them to be productive. And we talked about standards, which is something customers care deeply about to protect their investments.

[09:34] Elloy: Yeah, but I'm talking about specifically how do we help a customer who is offshore, who wants to go offshore to mitigate the risk of failed delivery through the fact that they've got teams that aren't talking to each other, teams that don't have code and sequence testing and sequence requirements and stuff like that.That's the reality of what enterprise software companies have to deal with today. You have also another reality of companies going through massive M&A activities; they're acquiring a lot of other technologies and then must understand them in a hurry to integrate them and then ultimately to unify them. How well technologies help them do that today. So that's the reality of what's going on in the enterprise.

[10:09] Chappell: I can help answer that. I think you're absolutely right in saying what's important to the customer is what we should all be thinking about, but every customer, the ones that I know of, that are all faced with M&A and integrating things across the enterprise, and they're also faced with things that have been brought up like integration between Java and .NET, and this notion of a thing, I haven't brought it up till now, but an architectural concept known as an enterprise service bus, which is actually an implementation of an SOA that is all about being able to—and it's something that customers are using today—achieve these things, to achieve loosely coupled integrations using SOA and dealing with things like interoperability between J2EE and .NET. And it's not necessarily the task of the implementations of all the end points, to have to worry about what their interoperability is between everything else. I think that's something that's better off delegated to a middleware infrastructure such as that.