Development community warned over middleware threats

From its viewpoint in the SOA infrastructure and services space, Active Endpoints has mailed 30,000 US developers this week (did they forget the UK?) with a WARNING to the development community that change is risky, but stasis is fatal.

The company claims to be well versed in the development of the Business Process Execution Language and as such feels it warrants a position to comment on current failings within implementations of middleware.

Fair enough you might say, but the company’s message is fairly Gung-Ho, “We are emailing you because we are concerned about you. We’ve learned something about the state of middleware technology, its impact on outsourcing and business competitiveness that we felt strongly we should share with you.”

This company is apparently at pains to tell us that they are experiencing a huge surge in downloads for its products from India and China. If you believe the hype then you may want to entertain the theory that US companies have become too caught up in the complexity of their current systems, too content to be dictated to by proprietary middleware vendors and too comfortable with their status quo.

Meanwhile, companies without legacy issues – and without the temptation to use those issues as inertia – adopt the most effective and modern middleware technologies rapidly.

The propaganda doesn’t stop there, so they round out with this comment, “No matter how daunting change may seem, it’s better than the alternative: a world in which your company and you personally have been eclipsed by external competitors.”

We don’t, I believe, digest this kind of over-played press comment well here in the UK. Hopefully that’s why many US companies still employ European PR agencies, but even they can’t stop the rot sometimes. I’d like to argue that middleware is too embedded a technology layer to warrant this kind of hard sell. It certainly doesn’t do the vendor in question any favours.