Monthly Market Research Overview - December 2002

Weekly Digests

Overview

Competitive

• Sonic Software successfully closed its acquisition of eXcelon, and launched its SonicSynergy partnership program; it met FY2002 targets by reaching $15M in sales - an 87% growth on last year's $8M. Sonic now represents over 5% of Progress Corporation's annual revenue, and it looks like all of Progress' growth is now coming from Sonic sales.

• Yet more competitive products were launched or updated - further fragmenting and commoditizing the market in JMS (UberMQ, SwiftMQ, JORAM), integration (Charteris XML integration toolkit, Iona, Systinet WASP 4.5, DataPower), BPM/Workflow (Collaxa 2.0, iWay, Cape Clear) and caching (Tangosol Coherence 2.0).

• Fiorano nets Toshiba-IT as its Japanese distributor

Industry

• Researchers disagree on the details, but agree that 2003 should see at least some modest growth in IT spending. Web services are finally agreed to be here, and more or less useful, especially for integration (inter and intra company).

• Various vendors (eg Tibco, Versata) reported Q4 up on Q3; though some are still suffering year on year falls, perhaps the turn finally has come.

• More consolidation - IBM picks up Rational; a counterbid by Microsoft for Borland (and maybe Rational too) is rumoured.