* The Market Research digests started during March 2002, so there is only one weeks worth of news, and no overview:

• Highlights
• Quote of the week:
• Monday 18 March
  • • New ILOG JRules 4.0 Brings Industry-First Business Rule Management Features
    • SilverStream Unveils the Next Generation of its Powerful SilverStream eXtend Product Suite
    • U.S. Justice Dept seeks more info on TIBCO buy
    • General Motors to use Web Services for Internal Integration
• Tuesday 19th March
  • • Bio-IT bubbles out of the lab
    • Which Technology for Tomorrow's EAI?
    • IBM and Sungard Ally on STP solutions
    • Versata Q1 results (Nov 2001 -Jan 2002)
    • Gartner on What Web services Will and Won't do
    • Sonic (and Progress) results
    • TIBCO ActiveEnterprise Enables NASA's Ground Control System to Provide Command And Telemetry Interfaces for X-38 Project
    • Sun acquires Clustra Systems
    • Microsoft Loses First Round Of Lindows.com Battle - Windows trademark at risk?
• Wednesday 20th March
  • • SpiritSoft and HNC Software Team to Enhance Business Process Integration
• Thursday 21st March
  • • STP triggers big boost in XML spending
    • Tibco software announces first quarter 2002 financial results
    • Metrowerks and Softwired Empower Wireless Developers to Create Enterprise Applications
    • SpiritWave passes J2EE compliance test suite
• Friday 22nd March
  • • iWay Adds 200 Adapters for BizTalk Server
    • GemStone Systems announces GemFire, an in-memory object caching system

Highlights

• Sonic results - revenue standstill

• SpiritSoft alliance with Blaze

• Tibco Q1 results - 19% fall in revenue

• SpiritWave passes J2EE compliance test suite

• GemStone releases GemFire in-memory object caching

Quote of the week:

"The semantic web is on the same level as flying cars and elevator rides to the moon; a nice but impractical and infeasible dream."

Dare Obasanjo on the xml-dev mailing list, Tue, 19 Mar 2002

Monday 18 March

New ILOG JRules 4.0 Brings Industry-First Business Rule Management Features

First with Comprehensive Business Rule Management, New Release Targets Dynamic Industries With Fast-Changing Business Processes. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020318/sfm078_1.html

Being designed as a plug-in, and with new features like a standardised business rules repository (MOF, XMI, JMI - no sign of RuleML I see) and "new event management features ... [to] monitor a continuous flow of data and events " ILOG JRules looks like the one to beat or partner with.

SilverStream Unveils the Next Generation of its Powerful SilverStream eXtend Product Suite

Simplifies Complex Web Services Integrations and Accelerates the Delivery of Sophisticated Business Applications

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020318/182347_1.html

Note: announcement not release. Delivery expected Q2/02. Adds a Web services-based Business Process Manager (to Composer) and J2EE 1.3 integration

U.S. Justice Dept seeks more info on TIBCO buy

Tibco has a request from the U.S. Department of Justice for additional information related to its pending acquisition of software provider Talarian Corp

http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/020318/n18118033_1.html

Let's hope red tape slows them down for a lot longer

General Motors to use Web Services for Internal Integration

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/cmp/20020315/tc_cmp/iwk20020315s0027

See the discussion of what this means (apart from being a real use of web services we can talk about):

http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=12514

Tuesday 19th March

Bio-IT bubbles out of the lab

(eADT for Monday, March 18, 2002) IDC predicts that the IT sectors benefiting from bio-sciences will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 24%, reaching nearly $38 billion globally by 2006. The research firm says that software, which in 2001 accounted for $2.5 billion of that market, will account for $7.5 billion in 2006. The categories of software that will benefit most include databases, analytic software and tools, middleware software and tools, data management and data integration tools, application servers and knowledge management software and tools.

Which Technology for Tomorrow's EAI?

(ebizQ) http://e-serv.ebizq.net/aps/techmetrix_2.html

Sun's J2EE Connector Architecture will have a significant impact on the integration broker market, which has historically been dominated by proprietary tools. In this article, TechMetrix Research explores how the new JCA standard will affect EAI technologies.

Read this to understand our positioning with J2EE-based integration partners like Attunity and Insevo.

IBM and Sungard Ally on STP solutions

http://www.messageq.com/news/news038402.html

Sungard is listed as a SpiritSoft partner, but in reality they will continue to depend on MQSeries, and IBM will use Sungard components in its financial solutions

Versata Q1 results (Nov 2001 -Jan 2002)

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/020318/vata.html

Versata, a "leading" BPM vendor sees quarterly revenues decline by 57% year on year, from $15M to $6.4M. They have lost an accumulated $186.5M since they launched in 1995. They are trying to dig their way out of the hole with the help of partners like ILOG, WRQ, IBM, BEA, and Mercator.

Gartner on What Web services Will and Won't do

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2854299,00.html

Gartner offers six things that Web services will fail to deliver, and six corresponding areas where Web services will succeed

Sonic (and Progress) results

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020319/192180_1.html

Sonic business ... "grew over 150 percent compared to Q1 last year"

_That makes Q1/2002 something in the range $2.7 - $3M taking into account rounding errors - which says their growth rate has declined dramatically.

Absolute deltas ($k) were 700, 500, 500, and now in the range (minus 100k to plus 300k).

That means serial (Q on Q) growth rate has slowed even more - 63%, 27%, 21%, and now somewhere between -3% to +11%_

TIBCO ActiveEnterprise Enables NASA's Ground Control System to Provide Command And Telemetry Interfaces for X-38 Project

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020319/sftu033_1.html

Well, it's hardly rocket science....

Sun acquires Clustra Systems

Having contributed $3M out of $22M to funding last year, Sun has now acquired Clustra Systems, a software firm that develops clustering technology that enables continuous (99.999% or better) real-time computing - to tie into SunONE and iPlanet App Server.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2002-03/sunflash.20020319.2.html

Read more about Clustra here: http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid13_gci71799,00.html?Exclusive=True

Microsoft Loses First Round Of Lindows.com Battle - Windows trademark at risk?

http://www.informationweek.com/news/IWK20020318S0011 http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173690.html

A federal judge denies Microsoft's request for an injunction preventing Lindows.com from keeping its name, calling into question the validity of Microsoft's Windows trademark.

Wednesday 20th March

SpiritSoft and HNC Software Team to Enhance Business Process Integration

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020320/202049_1.html http://www.spiritsoft.com/news/pressreleases.asp?id=19

SpiritSoft gets the Blaze name onto our website - primarily to promote us to Blaze rather than Advisor to us

Thursday 21st March

STP triggers big boost in XML spending

http://www.zapthink.com/reports/finsvcs.html

Expenditures for XML implementation in financial services will reach $8.5 billion by 2005, driven by the need for so-called Straight Through Processing (STP), according to a new study by ZapThink

Figure includes consulting, internal/B2B integration, content management, and all kinds of other things - stretching "XML integration" definition to the limit

Tibco software announces first quarter 2002 financial results

http://www.tibco.com/about/press/releases/press478.html

Tibco posted a small fiscal first-quarter net profit versus a year-ago loss, but lower-than-expected sales pushed its shares down in after hours trading.

_Revenue down 19% from 2001 to $74M, Licence $46.8M (2001: Total $82M license $58M) of which "related parties" incl Reuters $3.8M down from $4.3M

As of close Thursday, TIBX down to $11.75 from peak $13.50 earlier this week and $16.90 this January._

Metrowerks and Softwired Empower Wireless Developers to Create Enterprise Applications

http://www.softwired-inc.com/pdf/news/metrowerks200302.pdf

Metrowerks' New CodeWarrior Wireless Studio Includes Softwired iBus Technology for Scalable, Secure, Asynchronous Communications Between Wireless Java Devices and Enterprise Systems

SpiritWave passes J2EE compliance test suite

It's true, by the way - every single test passed at last.

Friday 22nd March

iWay Adds 200 Adapters for BizTalk Server

http://eai.ebizq.net/news/news0310702.html

iWay and Information Builders have more adapters and connectors than you can shake a stick at - see also http://www.iwaysoftware.com/products/iWay_Adapter_List.html

GemStone Systems announces GemFire, an in-memory object caching system

Pluggable into any JVM, GemFire is intended to provide a zero-latency object cache for applications running on multiple JVMs on the same machine. GemFire uses Operating System style shared-memory techniques, which offers realtime performance by eliminating disk and network bottlenecks.

http://www.gemstone.com/products/gemfire/index.html

Full release and some comments at http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=12572 note that this could be complementary as well as competitive to SpiritCache