A note re: the IBM-Lawson Software tie-up: just remember San Francisco
A cautionary note to anyone getting carried away thinking about the potential ramifications of the tie-up between IBM and Lawson Software (mid-market vendor of packaged application software) - Lawson was one of the high-profile vendors which signed up to support IBM's
San Francisco project, which started with great fanfare in 1994. San Francisco was an attempt by IBM to create a Java framework for enterprise applications which would be OEMed by ISVs, and which could also be procured and built on by in-house IT departments.
Nothing wrong with that, in principle - of course, what is Microsoft's
MBF if not something extraordinarily similar? ...except that IBM was stunningly ahead of its time. Anecdotal evidence at the time indicated that the whole thing ran like a three-legged dog. The project and slid quietly into obscurity at the end of the '90s.
The head of the San Francisco project within IBM? One Danny Sabbah...now
extolling the virtues of SOA, which
Lawson is touting as the architectural foundation of its re-engineering exercise...
