It's a new year, a new millennium (give or take a year), and we've just released version 3.5 of the Sybase Enterprise Application Server. There's no better time to contemplate where we've been and where we're going.

Since the first release of PowerBuilder, our mission has been to make it as easy as possible to develop and deploy business applications. In 1991 that meant building client/server applications using Windows for the client and any one of a dozen database systems for the back end. Then as now, businesses needed to take advantage of a computing revolution to ensure they would stay in business. Then as now, the major challenge facing IT was to meet a nearly unlimited demand for application development with very limited resources.

As complex as client/server development seemed to many of us in the early '90s, that architecture looks relatively simple from today's perspective. But the arrival of the Internet and distributed computing hasn't changed our mission one bit. We're still focused on making it easy to build and deploy business applications. That typically means Internet applications in which the client is a browser, the application runs on an application server and the back end is a heterogeneous mix of relational and nonrelational databases and applications.

A consequence of this architecture change is that the focus has moved from the client to the middle tier. The application server has emerged as the critical platform choice rather than the client operating system. After all, we're talking about moving to an architecture in which a single application server replaces hundreds or thousands of high-powered workstations. Clearly the application server becomes a critical success factor.

Fortunately, we anticipated this shift and started development of the Sybase application server in 1996. In designing our application server, we drew from our experience in database connectivity, PowerBuilder development and especially from our experience using Sybase OpenServer to build mission-critical distributed systems for the financial services industry. From this experience we developed four key technology goals for our application server:

1. Maximum RAS (reliability, availability, scalability) on minimum hardware to enable nonstop e-business on cost-effective platforms
   
2. Security inside and out to provide ensured integrity in a wired world
   
3. Open support for a broad range of industry standards to provide maximum flexibility for integration in a heterogeneous environment
   
4. Productive development with integrated and third-party tools to enable rapid development of custom solutions

However, it wasn't until the release of Enterprise Application Server 3.0 and PowerBuilder 7.0 in April 1999 that we really brought together all elements of our strategy. With this release we made it possible for the PowerBuilder developer to quickly and directly build high-performance Internet and distributed applications. At the same time we provided the integrated ability to quickly build 100% Pure Java solutions. And best of all, we provided complete, high-performance interoperability between the Java and PowerBuilder components. Once you move to the middle tier, you have complete freedom to continue your development in PowerBuilder, Java or both.

In response, our application server business has gained by leaps and bounds, achieving record levels in Q3 and Q4 of 1999. Companies of all sizes, from Fortune 100 to dot.com start-ups, have adopted EAServer. (See www.sybase.com/success for some of their stories.) More than 15,000 developers attended full-day training sessions on developing Internet applications with PowerBuilder and EAServer. More than 60,000 developers have joined the Sybase Developers Network at http://sdn.sybase.com and more than 10,000 customers have selected EAServer in their support profile on http://mysupport.sybase.com. Perhaps most telling, our EAServer newsgroup is now the busiest Sybase newsgroup, with over 2,000 posts from developers deeply involved in EAServer development.

Another major accomplishment of 1999 was the creation of Sybase Financial Server and the formation of a new Sybase company focused on Internet banking. This was a direct outgrowth of our mission to simplify the development and deployment of business applications. We looked at the requirements in a specific vertical industry and created a product that directly met those requirements. Sybase Financial Server dramatically reduces the cost of implementing Internet banking and online trading applications as this functionality is already built into the server.

Looking Ahead
In 2000 we'll be increasing our focus on our pure Java capabilities. The hot news in Java is the creation of the J2EE platform - Java 2 Enterprise Edition. This standard brings together a set of individual standards to create a complete platform for enterprise computing. Sybase was one of the earliest adopters of Java technology, working closely with Sun Microsystems since 1996. We've become one of a few select vendors to join the J2EE early-access program and will be one of the first vendors to ship a robust, scalable implementation of the J2EE standards.

We'll be the only vendor to combine J2EE support with access from multiple client types (HTML, XML, Java, CORBA, COM) and interoperability with other server component types including PowerBuilder, C++ and COM, thus providing a lot of flexibility in development and deployment. We'll be launching a new seminar series to promote our unique support for the J2EE platform. Watch for it at www.sybase.com/events.

We also plan on creating some excitement around support for Linux, enterprise portals and the further development of technology for specific vertical industries. All in all, it should be a great start to the new millennium (or a great end to the last millennium if you're one of "those"!).

If you have any questions or topics you'd like to see addressed in these articles, please send me an e-mail at veitch@sybase.com. I look forward to hearing from you.