Views on the Industry

diamelle

In a former glimpse of myself, and in my former job, I advocated within Sun for a small software company based in Cortland Manor, New York, about an hour north of the City if I recall. The only time I spent much time there was during a terrible snowstorm in 2001 or '02. But I was in close contact with the Architect of the company's software, SS for the better part of three and a half years. It is amazing that it was that much time, but we accomplished quite a bit for running a guerrila campaign within Sun and throughout the J2EE community. One might conclude that we should be reaping the rewards of this effort, but that has not come to be, and that is the topic of this post. Where did the Diamelle-iPlanet/Sun ONE alliance build value within the developer community, and what more can be done? These are difficult questions, but important ones, especially considering that it will not be done with the support of Sun for the foreseeable future, if ever. As I have wrote about in previous posts, it could be done with support from JBoss, but I am going to assume for the time being that it will be a future in which Diamelle will have to survive and thrive on its own, that its best days of partnering are behind it, and yet its better days of execution are ahead of it. Let me begin...

The dream or the vision came to me via Dan Graves, the product manager on NetDynamics, who in the fall of 1998, drew the constructs of an app server on a whiteboard. I was in my final year of graduate school, and had been closely tracking Java (at least as close as possible from VA), and was looking to build contacts to get an interview with Sun upon graduation (it worked!). In addition to the app server, DG demonstrated the goal of portability in the form of components, and in this case, it was EJBs, the new standard building within the Java community. I, seeking a component model to distribute via Castanet, immediately caught the bug, and began to develop a plan for an independent software company, focused on portable components. What I would only realize in December of 1999, after signing on @ Sun 9/9/99 (Sun employee ID 96969), was that my role would be to build the app server, while partnering with vendors to create a component marketplace. Diamelle was the first, and would be the one to stay with me the longest, through it all (someday, we'll be able to tell that story).

But to describe what it takes to start an apps company, it should be noted that Diamelle has a development center in India with talent that could not be bought in the U.S. without VC funding. Now that is the "World is Flat" side of things, but Diamelle is still working on their go-to-market strategy. I think their new approach with identity management is solid, and could be the entry point in to the marketplace for SOA-enabled component services. I'll have to evaluate after taking a product tour sometime, hopefully sometime soon. I admire what they are doing from a technology standpoint, and look forward to them being an apps contributor to the Java Enterprise community, a need that is certainly there, from a business standpoint, as well. It will take some time, but as MF has pointed out, the acceleration of the pace of adoption is making the market form more rapidly than previously imagined. Within a year, there will be posers and composers, and I would bet Diamelle is going to be right there with JBoss in the latter category...

posted by douglas dooley @ 10:30 AM