.NET Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Derek Ferguson recently had the opportunity to chat with a few of the major players - Microsoft aside - in the .NET space. In this exclusive interview, high-profile executives from Computer Associates, Borland, Infragistics, and Unisys discuss what their companies are doing to support the .NET initiative, the future of Web services, J2EE versus .NET issues, success stories, and their relationships with Microsoft.

.NETDJ: Can you introduce yourselves, please?
Dillman: I'm Fred Dillman, CIO and VP of technology and architecture for Unisys Global Industries Enterprise Transformation Services Unit - the unit that handles all of Unisys's services and application-level software.

Thornhill: My name is Simon Thornhill. I'm vice president and general manager of Borland's Rapid Application Development Business Unit.

Guida: I'm Dean Guida, president and CEO of Infragistics. I was a cofounder of Protoview, which was one of the companies (Sheridan Software being the other) that merged to form Infragistics.

LeClair: I'm Don LeClair, vice president and technology strategist in the office of the CTO at Computer Associates. I have been focusing on Web services and utility computing initiatives at CA.

.NETDJ: What are you doing to support Microsoft's .NET initiative?
LeClair: .NET is a pretty big initiative for Microsoft, as it incorporates their Smart Client, servers, development tools, and XML Web services. Computer Associates is delivering support across our product lines to ensure that Microsoft .NET can provide the maximum advantage in the context of a heterogeneous IT environment. We have a three-part focus on .NET. First, deliver intelligent information and applications to users. Second, provide enterprise and storage management, and third, secure the .NET environment.

Guida: The business value that we provide to the marketplace is that...in building applications, developers spend 30-40% of their time building the presentation layer. We provide the NetAdvantage toolset, a framework of reusable components that emulate the Microsoft style - grids, menus, toolbars, charts, etc. We support all Microsoft environments - everything from VS 6 to .NET and ASP.NET.

Thornhill: Borland has been expanding its solutions to support the complete application development life cycle. You can see from the recent acquisitions we've made - including TogetherSoft - that we are focused on providing our customers with the solutions they need to accelerate the application life cycle and are aligning our product offerings accordingly.

Project Sidewinder is the way that we will do this for the .NET platform. There are three key things that we are going to do with Sidewinder. First, we are going to make sure that it tightly integrates with all the other pieces of life cycle support infrastructure that we are making available for .NET. Second, we are going to offer outstanding support for mixed enterprise application environments - such as J2EE, CORBA, and .NET - and enterprise databases, such as Oracle, IBM DB2, and SQL Server. The third and final thing is that we are very keen on design-driven development - where UML models drive the application instead of being converted to the code of a program.

Dillman: Let me start off by giving you a little bit of background. We deliver solutions on two platforms: J2EE and .NET. We're very focused on the idea of model-driven development. This is the idea that you can create models of your software and then use tools to drill them down into code. It is very much component-oriented and business-driven. That's why we're attracted to both of these platforms - their focus on components really helps to make our Business Blueprints technology "go."

We're really focused on Tier 1 and Tier 2 (really large applications). We've been working with MS to create application models for .NET in key vertical industries. To give you an example, we have a major .NET initiative in the health information management space to produce Medicaid payment processing software that will run on .NET. MS is interested because this is proving that .NET can run with really large applications.

.NETDJ: When do you believe that Web services will finally take off?
Dillman: Well, one of the reasons Web services haven't taken off yet is that they haven't been driven from the business side. We, however, see them as a great way to allow business processes to be more agile. Now that we are bringing in this perspective with our Blueprints initiative, for example, we are getting much more traction.

The difference is that we aren't just building Web services on the side. Our Blueprints are using them as fundamental parts of the solutions we are delivering. You can keep any part of your software in-house or outsourced or whatever. This allows you to match the best business model to each component.

LeClair: I don't think the business people care about the details of the technology that IT is using. They do care a lot about flexibility, cost, and providing customers with an integrated view of the enterprise. We see the financial services sector as one of the early leaders in applying Web services. Informal surveys indicate that over half of our customers have Web services in production or are in the process of building them. The tools are available now to make it easy to create Web services, and we see a very strong focus on use behind the firewall. So we see that Web services are taking off, and we are now moving into a phase where security and management are becoming the key needs - especially as people look at using Web services with other companies.

.NETDJ: Which developers do you see as being most interested in .NET nowadays?
Dillman: At Unisys - having done previous generations of MS technologies - we have a number of people who were familiar with the COM and DCOM world, so they have a lot less of a trip in terms of retraining. But we also take people from the J2EE space and bring them over. The longest trip that most developers make is into the object-oriented mindset. What we are finding at the end of the day is that the concepts between J2EE and .NET are similar, and so people who are already in that mindset can make that trip fairly quickly. Most of our .NET people are existing DCOM folks or J2EE people.

LeClair: Microsoft has a gigantic base of developers and applications built with Microsoft technology. The need to Web- and Web service-enable many of these applications is very strong, so .NET is typically the clear choice. CA has solutions that have historically integrated with Visual Studio, ranging from business rules engines to code-generation tools and change management. We see strong customer interest in the new versions of these products that support .NET development, which indicates customers are staying with the tools they know best.

.NETDJ: Do you see any methodologies lending themselves more to .NET than others?
Thornhill: In our complete ALM solution, when you combine Borland Together with Sidewinder, you have a complete refactoring solution. In the initial release of Sidewinder, we're not going to have this in the IDE, though. This refactoring stuff would really be most compatible with agile development methodologies such as XP, for instance.

LeClair: Today there is a strong emphasis on best practices and development methodologies to help improve quality and control costs. We don't lock in on any single methodology, but we do deliver the tools that deliver customizable best practices for development with the AllFusion Process Management Suite. CA adds value by integrating the management of the development process with project management that can help anyone respond quickly to integrating new technology like .NET into their development processes.

.NETDJ: Are any of you planning on doing anything with .NET on devices?
Thornhill: In future releases we will support the Compact Framework.

LeClair: We are already supporting software delivery and management of the Pocket PC platform. We also have support in the CleverPath Portal for dynamically rendering content to wireless devices, and client access to the Unicenter Service Desk. The opportunity for wireless devices is just getting started.

.NETDJ: How do you deal with J2EE versus .NET issues?
LeClair: Virtually all CA customers run both J2EE and .NET. We provide consistent capabilities for management, security, and development for both environments. Since we also deliver key capabilities of many of our products as Web services, we do extensive interoperability testing to ensure both .NET and J2EE developers can leverage their CA solutions.

Guida: Due to the fact that we have complete toolsets for all Microsoft environments and Java in the marketplace, we maintain separate development and support staffs for each line of products.

We have rather an interesting technology story here. This month we shipped the latest version of JSuite, our toolkit for J2EE. In this version, we updated and enhanced both our client-and server-side charting engine. The way this came about was that we had first coded our charting engine in C# for Windows Forms and ASP.NET, then we took that engine and within 3-4 weeks we actually managed to port that to J2EE. We were able to leverage our API and learning from .NET to J2EE in the same way that our customers can benefit from having our same API on both platforms.

Nowadays we can add a different chart type on one platform, then we can move it to another platform in literally 1-2 days!

Thornhill: For application integration, we are absolutely going to support .NET Remoting, XML Web services, DCOM, etc. But, we are also going to be providing interoperability between .NET applications and CORBA and J2EE. So this way developers will be able to seamlessly build native .NET applications that directly connect to other environments within their organization.

In the area of database connectivity, this is very important because the vast majority of our customers are building data-connected applications. We are focused on providing a solution that has very rich database capabilities equally for all the major database vendors. Out of the box we will be supporting Oracle9i, SQL Server, Borland InterBase, IBM DB2, MSDE, and Access - and all of the tools in the environment will support those environments equally.

We are implementing this with the Borland Data Provider, which is an ADO.NET data provider, but it is unique in that it uses client drivers plugged into the provider to connect to any database. The advantage to our provider is that it provides a rich set of features that any tool can connect to. One nice thing about this is that, unlike the Microsoft data provider, you have the same objects in every data source. This allows developers to prototype on small local databases and then move up to real databases. Our driver will implement native CLI data types, so database data types don't need to be learned.

.NETDJ: Who are your success stories?
LeClair: We have done extensive work with a variety of products in the .NET area. One of the interesting areas has been enabling our business intelligence solutions that turn knowledge into action with Web services. For example, CleverPath Aion Business Rules Expert provides Web services and managed code interfaces to business rules components. We have been working closely with companies like American Medical Response as they move forward with Visual Studio .NET implementations of their business rules systems.

Guida: Best Software - makers of the ACT contact management software - are currently retooling the next version of their software with our components. Fidelity went to market in Q4 2002 with their ActiveTrader system, intended to help them compete with E*TRADE. They built this using our tools - and we even added some custom methods just for them!

We also have a number of enterprise applications in both J2EE and .NET - Schwab built a trading application with our Java components, and Merrill Lynch built a trading application with our COM components. In addition to this, we have names like Bond, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft (in Great Plains)...we are proud to say the list is pretty extensive.

Dillman: We're working with our first state client on our health information management (HIM) system right now. One of the most exciting things about this is the way we are leveraging .NET Web services to allow fine-grained "build or buy" decisions.

For example, you've got a number of standard payer processes that are a part of the HIM process - whether they are public or private health care payments. Since these are broken down into Web services, our customers will potentially be able to factor any of these off and use them cross-organizationally once these services become available and economically viable without breaking their existing architecture.

HIPAA-compliance functions are really high-cost in terms of implementation. So customers could either outsource or implement, and then resell.

.NETDJ: How do you manage your relationship with Redmond?
LeClair: CA has a long history of working closely with Microsoft in general, and we have been very engaged with the Visual Studio .NET team. CA provides enterprise-wide solutions, and Microsoft solutions are important platforms at many companies. Both of us have strategic relationship managers, and one of the functions of the office of the CTO is defining CA's product strategy for major platforms - including .NET - across each of our brands.

Guida: We maintain a great relationship with Redmond on many levels. Having been in this industry for so long, we know that whenever you build development tools, you have to know what your value-add is over the platform owners. You have to have relationships and maintain them at the right levels. Over time, anyone's solution can be encroached on by a large software vendor, so you always have to be aware of that possibility.

Where we've maintained our advantage is really in the depth and breadth of our offering. While Microsoft has added features and complete components offering the functionality of our previous versions to current "in-box" components, because of our close relationship we've been able to add new features and components they have not included. Infragistics' value offering today stems from the fact that what we offer in NetAdvantage is 20-30 times the breadth and depth of the components compared to what is "in the box."

Other technical wins that have helped Infragistics build its relationship with Redmond over the years include: in the early '90s we wrote one of the first C++ developer tools, which we licensed to Borland. Then a lot of the folks we worked with at Borland moved over to Microsoft. Since that time, Microsoft has asked us to work with them on many occasions. For example, we wrote some of the data binding technologies for Internet Explorer. Microsoft, probably better than any company I have worked with over the years, understands the value of maintaining and growing long-term partnerships with both quality companies and the individuals who work for them at the highest levels.

Dillman: In our case, MS is interested in selling more licenses and we are interested in selling more consulting services. However, this is not an exclusive relationship.

.NETDJ: What is your take on Mono, Portable.NET, and other non-CLR implementations of the CLI?
Guida: We have not looked at those. All of our components are Managed C# components. So if these are implementations that could handle that, then great. We are not actively testing on any of them. However, if we get customer demand for that, we certainly will.

Thornhill: We are monitoring what some of the other CLI projects are doing, but we're really focused on what Microsoft is doing. If people get this working on other platforms, great - but we're not targeting it.

LeClair: This is something we are watching closely. The market dynamics would be very interesting if Microsoft's .NET initiative becomes a portable multiplatform solution.

.NETDJ: Final question: what is your outlook for i-technology in 2003 and beyond?
LeClair: We certainly have seen tough markets recently. We see a lot of interest in leveraging new technologies like Web services and wireless in businesses. However, customers remained very focused on achieving a quick ROI. We see an ongoing interest in solutions that provide value out of the box and in flexible licensing so they can prove the value without making a long-term up-front commitment.

Technology that drives better efficiency and cost savings is likely to stay strong for some time to come. This is behind much of the recent move toward an on-demand computing, or utility computing model reflected in initiatives including Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative. As the leader in enterprise management, CA is delivering on the promise of self-managing systems that help IT organizations deliver services to the business in a cost-effective way.

Guida: I think way too many companies stopped building in 2002 just in the name of reducing expenditures and capital expenses. In the first quarter of this year, we're seeing developers and corporations alike moving out of an evaluation mode and into a mode of building software - which has to happen in order to achieve success in the marketplace. Business plans change and business leaders must implement altered development plans that require them to build software in order to meet the evolving needs of their organizations. So we're really starting to see positive growth. Like everyone else, I'm tired of this down economy, but I remain cautiously optimistic.