Allaire speaks; Jeremy Allaire, CTO at Allaire, discusses the company's foray into providing a full Internet-business platform
llaire made its name on the Internet in the tools business with Cold Fusion, one of the first development environments that incorporated the Web tagging method for development. Through acquisitions and internal growth, the company branched into the application server market to meet customers' n...
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| Published in: | Java world p. 1 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Magazine Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
San Francisco
Foundry
25.05.2000
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| Subjects: | |
| ISSN: | 1091-8906, 1091-8906 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | llaire made its name on the Internet in the tools business with Cold Fusion, one of the first development environments that incorporated the Web tagging method for development. Through acquisitions and internal growth, the company branched into the application server market to meet customers' needs for more robust deployment servers. With the company's recent announcements, the Cambridge, Mass.-based vendor is signaling its play to provide a full Internet-business platform, incorporating development, middleware, and application frameworks. Cofounder and CTO [Jeremy Allaire] recently spoke with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Martin LaMonica about Allaire's long-term plan. Jeremy Allaire: Yes, I think so. Twenty four months ago, we looked at our business and saw that we needed to do a couple things. And when we looked at the opportunity for Allaire, we believed that by 2000, or around the year 2000, that the market would mature into a few -- what we call -- platform vendors, as opposed to tools and server vendors or as opposed to standalone application vendors. So there are going to be people focused in on becoming Internet- business platforms or Internet-software platforms. And we looked historically at how different areas of the computing industry evolved and we saw that the major winners tended to be those that could supply volume -- broadly adopted, general-purpose operating platforms of some sort. Some kind of server platform. And solutions tied on top of that. So the best analogies we can think of are: the Microsoft to the desktop operating system; leverage that into the office suite -- which was, again, applications. And those really fed each other. You really couldn't sell Office without having that dominant Windows business. The dominant Windows business also in turn was necessary to have those applications to make that really credible to companies. In the client-server space, Oracle [is] becoming the dominant leader, if you will, in that category because they departed from just being tools and servers. They went into the back-office application space and, in three years, knocked down a lot of major competitors and became one of the top two or three vendors in that space. Jeremy Allaire: There's a couple of key pieces. Allaire moved into it as early as last June when we acquired Live Software. And we continued shipping that product all the way until now. So we've been in this space, but we will move aggressively into it in the coming months. What we saw were a couple things. One was that there was increasingly a shift toward standardization in the application server market. Enterprise customers wanted to know that whichever vendor that they were choosing for their core platform, there was going to be some form of portability. And that didn't mean necessarily strict one-time portability, like I can drag and drop my code and it will run. But it meant that the basic architecture, skill sets, and knowledge required to use the Internet as an application platform was coming from major platform vendors. So we believed that there was going to be a shift that was going to take place and that we needed to get out in front of that. |
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| ISSN: | 1091-8906 1091-8906 |