Ovum accuses Big Blue of confusing customers
Analysts at the IT consultancy Ovum have taken a controversial stand against IBM by accusing it of confusing customers and “muddying the waters” by trying to position its CICS transaction processing (TP) monitor as a distributed application tool in the middleware market.
A report called Ovum Evaluates: Distributed TP Monitors, rated a number of TPs and concluded that IBM’s transaction processing models, and CICS in particular, could not compete in the middleware market to support enterprise-wide applications because its true architecture was oriented to mainframe-based transaction processing.
Rosemary Rock-Evans, the Ovum associate who wrote the report, said that although she did not question the superior quality of the CICS product there was “a big difference between a TP monitor and distributed TP middleware”, and that CICS in fact worked best as non-distributed server-support software.
The middleware market offers connectivity solutions to businesses that want to link their different systems together, and is a fast growing area of the IT industry, already worth billions of pounds to firms like IBM.
The firm has five main products in its middleware portfolio, and Rock-Evans claimed the firm was “muddying the middleware market waters” and should immediately clarify its position on middleware to its customers and the market.
She added that it “may make IBM more sales in the short term, but in the longer term it will disillusion users with IBM, its products and its regard for its customers”. IBM declined to comment.
