The research company further notes that, although the concept of application integration has become mainstream, the market has not become easier for software providers. It says that competition has intensified, software megavendors have strengthened their offerings, and new players focused on Web services whilst enterprise service bus (ESB) technology has entered the market.
Despite incessant merger and acquisition activity and ongoing consolidation in some sub-segments -- for example, application servers and message-oriented middleware (MOM) -- the market remains fragmented across myriad vendors, who are struggling to diversify and defend their margins.
New opportunities
Vendors are also, says Gartner, increasingly looking at new opportunities, for example, the development of service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- in unexplored territories, such as niche vertical industries and the mid-market, and, therefore, are facing marketing and product development difficulties that they hardly experienced before.
Furthermore, the research company says, increasing attention is being paid toward application integration technology coming from business application vendors, which push their technology to their established customer base, thus reducing the opportunities available for the traditional market players.
IBM Business development manager for SAO and open standards, Joe Ruthven, says users should first look at what middleware is, before tackling the debate on the technology's extinction.
Ruthven says: 'Looking at the application environment dealing with databases, user log-on, security and messaging middleware vendors ended up with various scenarios and a big mess.' Each developer has its own way of doing things, and this has made the integration of middleware much more complicated.
Jan Dijkstra, principal consultant at Oracle SA, says: 'The intelligent network will most definitely impact on some of the messaging aspects of middleware, but the middleware space is much broader than just messaging.'
Dijkstra says that performance of middleware is based on standardization and key to its performance is that standards not change too often. He believes that the intelligent networks of tomorrow will assist in the standardization process, and adds that XML and Web services are becoming the de facto standards in protocols.
'With intelligence built into the hardware it will force middleware vendors to focus their attention on increasing the functionality of their software solutions rather than having to incorporate various messaging standards that enable integration with systems. Middleware will always be there, but might move away from application design,' Dijkstra says.
Ruthven believes that the move to build more intelligence into the network in the router and server space is a good thing. 'This will take away from some of the components of messaging within the middleware space, but it will mean easier middleware integration into SAO systems. The intelligent network only impacts on a very small portion of what middleware is and does,' he adds.
'The portal is middleware'
Ruthven says there is still a significant amount of middleware which companies can develop and refine to suit customers' individual needs. For example, he says: 'A portal is not an application, it is actually middleware through which an end-user's applications are displayed through. This is where IBM is focusing its attention. We are not planning to move anywhere into the network level or application space.'
He does, however, add that because of the intelligent network making integration so much easier for middleware, IBM is happy to work with the likes of Cisco and 3Com to work this level of messaging into switches.
IBM software architect, Juan van der Breggen, says: 'Switches will take over only the basic layer of middleware messaging. The network vendors are not taking away any of our lunch money.'
Willie Oosthuysen, systems engineer director at Cisco EMEA, says: 'With the Intelligent Information Network (IIN) and Application Orientated Network (AON) we have made the interface shared and re-usable.' Oosthuysen notes that compliance issues and the need for shorter middleware integration cycles drove the development of building intelligence into the physical network and hardware. 'Now abstract applications can seemingly talk to each other without having to worry about the messages.'
Cisco's standardizing of transfer messages in a network based on SOA also impacts on security, as all messages have to go through the network, and can now be captured and secured.
'A lot of middleware vendors focus on messaging, and it will be those vendors who might not survive, and will have to change their focus,' he adds.
'We do not want to tell customers what applications to use. We will only ensure that any application a company wants to deploy will be able to interact with its operating system,' says Ruthven.
Manoj Bhoola, server & tools business group manager at Microsoft SA, believes that Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) will not be around as it currently is in the future, and notes that integration will become more of a network and hardware layer instance.
'Through BizTalk Server we are looking at the connectors and are bundling a whole lot of them, like SAP, Oracle and many other connectors in there. We are focusing on Business Process Management (BPM), which goes a step further than simple EAI. BPM allows for more processing and provides more workflow into the integration layer over many systems,' Bhoola says.
Bhoola believes also believes that there is still a space for middleware, apart from simple messaging, and notes that development of middleware should be focused on functionality.
Middleware vendors have to up their game in the functionality of their products to add value to customers, as the competition will warm up, following the fact that integration languages will be standardized and not a differential anymore.
Open standards will not 'kill' middleware, many believe, but will ensure a focused approach to the development and increased functionality thereof, as most companies are gearing up for a multivendor approach in order to minimize risks.