A Conversation with Mike Gilpin

The government's antitrust case labeled Microsoft a monopolist that has unfairly used its dominance of the Windows desktop operating system to crush competitors such as Netscape in the consumer browser market. But the trial did not factor in the release of Windows 2000 and Microsoft's aggressive plans to run corporate Web sites and influence business-to-business e-commerce through application integration, middleware and standards. Wall Street & Technology's editor-in-chief Ivy Schmerken spoke with Mike Gilpin, vice president and research leader at Giga Group, about Microsoft's current initiatives, including DNA 2000, Biztalk and XML.

wall street & technology: Do you expect the court ruling that Microsoft is a monopoly to have any repercussions in the business software space regarding financial services institutions rearchitecting their software to communicate with the Internet?

mike gilpin: I think it won't have very much impact and that's based on a couple of things. First of all, Giga has done some primary research surveying companies on what they plan to do and a surprising 80% said it had no effect on their plans whatsoever. I was talking with a number of companies over the past few weeks more generally about Microsoft in the business space. I was speaking with them because Microsoft is doing some interesting things with Standard Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which is an XML-based, remote object access mechanism that Microsoft is putting forward as a good way for objects to talk to one another over the Internet, regardless of whether they are Microsoft objects, Sun objects or IBM objects. I talked with the folks at Iona and Object Space who have already endorsed those technologies and they are implementing support between Microsoft, CORBA, EJB components and Microsoft DNA objects to talk to each other. There are other people that I talked to who are also collaborating with Microsoft. What emerged from this will be a sort of Internet business-to-business truce that will enable XML to be interchanged between applications running on a Microsoft architecture and, say, between an IBM WebSphere architecture. Customers will benefit. I think this will take time to come to fruition-at least a year.

wall street & technology: How are customers reacting to these initiatives?

mike gilpin: In talking to customers about their strategy, you tend to see two types of organizations: Those that have a mainly Microsoft architecture, and those that have a more heterogeneous approach. The ones that have a heterogeneous approach rarely embrace the Microsoft-component architecture like DNA, but they frequently embrace Windows, so they will have mixed architectures of Windows, and mainframe and Unix boxes. The cost per transaction tends to be lower with Windows. So when it's a good fit to the needs of the application, then you have to question, "Why should I pay more?"

wall street & technology: What is DNA 2000 and how is Microsoft positioning this to solve application integration problems? mike gilpin: Remember this several years ago-IBM had a similar concept called SNA system network architecture. DNA is a similar kind of thing. It's an architecture, meaning it's a bag full of stuff. You may not use all that's in the bag. DNA stands for distributed Internet application architecture. The N is from the Net. It makes for a rather peculiar acronym.

wall street & technology: Where is DNA 2000? Is anyone using it?

mike gilpin: It's available now. Recently, I was in Fort Lauderdale and had a conversation with Auto Nation, one of those online automobile retail sites. They do a lot of stuff on the Web. They've built their whole architecture in the Windows environment, and have been very happy with its robustness and scalability. They are an example of the typical company. They didn't have a lot of legacy systems. They approached it as a greenfield kind of problem. They saw what could be done in the Microsoft architecture. An older company ... will usually be a heterogeneous mix of technologies. Sometimes even in those companies, you'll see someone embracing DNA because they've decided all new business logic is going to go onto the Window platforms. And what isn't on the Windows platform, they'll integrate with some sort of application integration. That's a minority. The majority of those heterogeneous shops don't say they're going to new development on Windows in the future. Given that they want to do development on Unix and maybe the mainframe and these new, more open technologies like J2EE. J2EE is an umbrella that includes EJB and a bag of other things as well. And I don't see any of these behaviors being altered by the DOJ action.

wall street & technology: Do you think that customers don't expect the remedy to impact Microsoft or its products that much if the company is broken up?

mike gilpin: What's happened is sort of "stare the monster in the eye." What would happen? Probably the pieces would get bigger and just grow faster, like AT&T, and from a customer's point of view, once you stare the monster in the face, it's not all that scary.

wall street & technology: Microsoft has publicly embraced XML as a standard for moving data on the Internet. But Microsoft has a history of modifying standards, such as Java, so that it runs better on Windows. Is Microsoft working with XML, the industry standard, or has it changed XML by adding proprietary extensions so that it works better on computers with Windows installed?

mike gilpin: What they have done with XML is more like what they did with HTML than what they did with Java. They tend to push the envelope with the standard. Historically, the way they have defined an XML document is with a DTD-a document table definition. The problem is that a DTD does not give rigorous information about a document in order to make sure it's machine readable and machine processable. You could use a DTD and then when a program sucks it in, it would die. So Microsoft invented the idea of the XML schema. However, they submitted it to W3C, the Worldwide Web Consortium, and the W3C is now near to standardizing a version of schemas that will be embraced by everyone. Because Microsoft was the first mover with XML schemas, they can have a time to market advantage. But it's not a sustainable technology advantage that Windows has. Ultimately, you end up with IBM, Sun, Microsoft and the other players all ending up having competitive implementations of XML support. I do occasionally encounter people who are so suspicious of Microsoft that they do think there is some danger in using these Microsoft standards extensions. I think you can read too much into it. They looked at the DTD, they saw that it wasn't strong, and they wanted to make it better. If as a side of that, they get to have first-to-market competitive advantage, so be it. I don't think that's a motivator. They really appear to just want to make the technology work better. They appear to be playing with other vendors in a way that will enable interoperable solutions around XML.

wall street & technology: Can the securities industry look to Microsoft as a neutral solution for software integration?

mike gilpin: I would say that Biztalk could be part of the solution and the area where it can have the greatest impact might include online trading and Web interfaces. t Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio