In 1999, I examined a plethora of enterprise products and technologies, and many were very impressive. Here is the Enterprise Developments award, which I present to organizations or individuals who implement strategies that uniquely support the enterprise.
I'm pleased to announce that Metrowerks (http://www.metrowerks.com) and IBM Corp. (http://www.ibm.com) jointly win the 1999 InfoWorld Enterprise Developments award.
Metrowerks earns the award for its stellar achievements in supporting C++ and Java developers with a broad platform approach. The company's CodeWarrior development environment supports developers on Macintosh, Windows, Solaris and Linux platforms.
Few competing products come close to providing development tools across the same number of operating systems that Metrowerks does. In June 1999, I evaluated CodeWarrior for Red Hat Linux, GNU Edition. I was impressed with, among other things, CodeWarrior's flexible development interface, multithreading development support, and good interoperability with third-party tools.
In August 1999, Motorola (http://www.motorola.com) acquired Metrowerks, whose president, David Perkins, recently told me that developers using CodeWarrior should expect "business as usual" in 2000. Perkins believes the link with Motorola will help provide the necessary development tools and hardware support for the growing intelligent-device market.
My second Enterprise Developments award goes to IBM's AS/400 development team in Rochester, Minnesota. It released a rock-solid OS/400 Version 4, Release 4, this last year. This server operating system stands apart from rival platforms, including Solaris, Linux and Windows.
The chief reason is the OS/400's capability to neatly fit into mixed-platform settings and the impressive capability of concurrently running Windows NT and OS/400 on the AS/400. Support for logical partitioning allows customers to consolidate server requirements by dedicating processors, disk, and memory on a single AS/400 to represent equivalent multiserver configurations. Built-in clustering offers superior support compared with other solutions. Now the AS/400 and its OS/400 are well-prepared for Web and electronic-business applications.
The OS/400, Version 4, Release 4, that I examined in spring 1999 offered good enhancements to the AS/400's built-in Web-server support and added application-server functionality, as well as an updated DB2 database with support for managing multiple types of external content. Moreover, extensive Java development support has been added to the platform.
The combination of AS/400 server, the OS update, the database and Web-related tools are a cost-effective and highly reliable solution for enterprise customers.
Metrowerks and IBM took a step ahead of others with their unique approaches to supporting enterprise customers. The outstanding efforts of both entities have earned each an Enterprise Developments award for 1999.
(Maggie Biggs is InfoWorld Test Center's technical director. Send her e-mail at maggie_biggs@infoworld.com.)