Who's Who in Transaction-Processing Monitors, 4Q05
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Research Publication Date: 2 February 2006 ID Number: G00137650 Who's Who in Transaction-Processing Monitors, 4Q05 Massimo Pezzini, Yefim V. Natis This report gives details of five vendors of transaction-processing monitor products. It also offers advice on when to consider buying each vendor's product. © 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although Gartner's research may discuss legal issues related to the information technology business, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 Overview...................................................................................................................................... 3 2.0 Vendors ....................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1 BEA Systems.................................................................................................................. 3 2.2 IBM ................................................................................................................................. 4 2.2.1 CICS TS ......................................................................................................... 4 2.2.2 IMS TM ........................................................................................................... 5 2.2.3 TXSeries......................................................................................................... 5 2.2.4 z/TPF .............................................................................................................. 5 2.3 Micro Focus International ............................................................................................... 6 2.4 Sun Microsystems .......................................................................................................... 7 2.5 Tmax Soft ....................................................................................................................... 7 3.0 Bottom Line.................................................................................................................................. 8 Publication Date: 2 February 2006/ID Number: G00137650 Page 2 of 10 © 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. ANALYSIS 1.0 Overview For more than 30 years, transaction-processing monitor (TPM) products have been the platforms of choice for supporting online transaction-processing applications. Born on proprietary mainframe platforms, TPM technology was later made available on Unix and then Windows and Linux platforms in the form of mainframe TPM-compatible products (such as IBM’s TXSeries) and products specifically designed to run on distributed, nonmainframe boxes (such as BEA Systems’ BEA Tuxedo). Although TPMs are declining in popularity, they still run the business of thousands of companies worldwide. Increasingly, enterprises designing new high-end, business-critical, transactional applications look at popular enterprise application servers based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) set of standards and the Microsoft application server platform, commonly referred to as .NET, because these platforms have significantly closed the quality-of- service (QOS) gap with TPMs. Leading-edge organizations with extreme requirements are also looking at innovative grid-based or event-driven application servers that aim at providing ultrahigh-end performance, scalability, reliability and availability on commodity Linux or Windows boxes. TPMs still have a vast installed base, proven enterprise-class QOS and rock-solid reliability. The most popular TPMs are still viable platforms that continue to evolve in terms of manageability, QOS and support for technologies such as Java, XML, Web services and event processing. Many TPM users will continue to use these platforms during the next five years to run their business- critical applications, although they will increasingly look at more-recent platforms for new developments. In some cases, they will try to reduce the cost of running TPM applications on mainframes by migrating them to mainframe-TPM-compatible products running on Linux, Unix or Windows boxes. Examples of these are Fujitsu's NeoKicks, High Technology World Company's XFrame, IBM's TXSeries, Micro Focus' Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition, Rosebud Management Systems' Eden Server, Sun Microsystems' Mainframe Transaction Processing and Mainframe Batch Manager, and Tmax Soft's OpenFrame. 2.0 Vendors 2.1 BEA Systems San Jose, California www.bea.com Analysis by Yefim Natis (December 2005) BEA Tuxedo is the dominant online transaction processing (OLTP) monitor for distributed systems. AT&T Labs originally designed the product in the late 1980s. Tuxedo was a visionary product for its time, offering, in the 1990's, support for service-oriented architecture, a precursor of a messaging-based enterprise service bus transport, and a precursor of XML. Its scalability and availability still remain the highest available for Unix and Windows platforms. Approximately 2,000 enterprises depend on Tuxedo for their mission-critical applications. Tuxedo supports C, C++ and COBOL programming (not Java); it uses X/Open XATMI or a less-used implementation of a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) programming model. BEA Systems has not invested strategically in modernizing Tuxedo in recent years; still, it was Publication Date: 2 February 2006/ID Number: G00137650 Page 3 of 10 © 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. upgraded to support XML and Web services access. Further modernizations and use of Tuxedo technology are expected in the future as BEA Systems is experiencing some renewed interest in Tuxedo in Asia/Pacific markets. Consider BEA Tuxedo when developing high-end distributed business applications using C or COBOL programming. 2.2 IBM Armonk, New York www.ibm.com Analysis by Massimo Pezzini (December 2005) IBM is the dominant vendor of traditional TPMs. Although the installed base of these products is not growing, and possibly eroding at the low end, TPMs are a healthy (about $1 billion in new license revenue in 2004), profitable and growing business for IBM. The daily workload supported by these products is constantly growing, although the number of new applications is relatively small. Among TPM vendors, IBM is the most dedicated to "breathing new life" into its glorious, although aged, TPM platforms, investing more in the products than what is needed to slow down installed- base erosion. IBM's TPMs have gradually absorbed new "Internet-oriented" technologies, such as XML, HTML/HTTP, Java and Web services. Users are still actively extending their IBM TPM- based applications, frequently taking advantage of hybrid architectures that combine J2EE or .NET as front ends and TPMs as back ends to support modern transaction-processing requirements. Although J2EE or .NET has yet to prove to be as dependable as IBM's TPMs, these newer platforms are gradually invading IBM TPMs' vital space and confining them to mainly supporting the most demanding, ultrahigh-end transactional applications. Despite IBM's rejuvenation efforts, its TPMs will continue to be unattractive in comparison with less-proven but more-popular alternatives. This is because of the TPMs' extremely high cost of entry in terms of hardware, software and skills building — a major concern for IBM TPM users, because skills are forecast to become increasingly rare (and, therefore, expensive) during the next five to 10 years. As a result, IBM's TPMs will be confined to their current installed base and will not gain a significant number of new clients, despite their superior maturity and enterprise readiness. 2.2.1 CICS TS Customer Information Control System (CICS) Transaction Server (TS) is IBM's flagship OLTP application platform and the market-dominating enterprise-class application environment since the 1970s. Because of its deep integration with the underlying z/OS (and DOS/VSE) operating system and zSeries mainframe hardware architecture, CICS TS remains one of the most scalable, secure and highly available application environments on the market. CICS TS has a large — albeit slowly shrinking — installed base of about 6,000 enterprises and supports mission- critical business applications with tens of thousands of concurrent users and tens of millions of transactions per day. Since the late 1990s, IBM has been constantly modernizing CICS programming through the addition of support for Java, Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1 Session Beans, Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Remote Method Invocation (RMI)/Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), and Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI). IBM also introduced an XML parsing capability, a wide range of connectivity options, including HTTP, the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA)- compliant CICS Transaction Gateway and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) support. IBM Publication Date: 2 February 2006/ID Number: G00137650 Page 4 of 10 © 2006