"Like most organizations in the utility industry, our systems are critical and in larger scale," he said. Any flaws or errors can be easily detected because of the scale and number of users involved."

Sideways or upwards?

While J2EE and .Net remain two major development platforms, they are often seen as competing programming languages rather than complimentary ones.

"Frankly I see it [the shift from Java to .Net] as a move sideways," said Shreves.

Nonetheless for Cascade, the shift of programming language is considered as an upgrade.