.NET-based stops and starts
Lack of knowledge—and lingering fear about technology spending—are stalling the migration to Microsoft .NET, but those who have made the move say it pays
By Tony Baer, senior contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
Like most logistics service providers, American Port Services tailors its business processes—which entail receiving goods at seaports in the Southeastern U.S. and transporting them to their final destinations—to suit individual customers. And that fact figures prominently in the Savannah, Ga.-based freight forwarder's information technology choices.
For instance, American Port Services uses a warehouse and yard management application from HighJump Software because the system was written in a unique 4GL language that makes it easier to customize business processes. Now American Port Services is exploring possibilities for further enhancing its ability to create custom processes by exploiting another feature of the HighJump architecture: its use of Microsoft .NET technology.
When it introduced the Microsoft .NET framework in 2001, Microsoft billed it as a platform for creating and deploying Web services, which seem to be living up to their promise as the standard building blocks for Internet-based business applications. Web services are bits of application logic wrapped in standard formats that allow them to be snapped together almost at will to create new business processes.
"We are looking at Microsoft .NET because we already have some services that we Web-enable for our customers," says Jeff Meraz, IT lead at American Port Services. "The .NET framework could let us group business processes and package them in a service layer that is separate from the data stream."
Having that separate layer of business services would allow American Port Services to create new business processes on the fly, with little or no programming involved. That was the vision Microsoft painted when it released .NET. But while IT professionals see this vision as valid, they are not necessarily rushing to adopt the .NET framework.
In fact, manufacturers' seeming reluctance to migrate to .NET caused Made2Manage Systems to halt plans for rewriting its entire ERP package in .NET.
The company, which targets small and medium-size manufacturers, did complete a .NET-based e-commerce module, but Frank Onell, product development manager, says additional work in .NET was stopped because, "We were putting a technology in place that a majority of our customers simply were not asking for."
A deliberate approach
As a means of giving its customers the flexibility that .NET promised, Onell says Made2Manage is converting existing functionality in its ERP suite into Web services, which can easily be linked with other applications to create new business processes.
Ironically, even Microsoft Business Solutions, a unit of Microsoft Corp., is taking a deliberate approach when it comes to moving its own applications to the .NET framework. So far, Microsoft Business Solutions has its new CRM product on .NET, but is holding off on its remaining stable of ERP and accounting solutions, which includes Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, and Axapta.
"We don't believe there is value in rewriting existing code," says Dave Coulombe, general manager of Microsoft's ERP product group. Instead, Microsoft is focusing on Project Green, an effort to build a next-generation ERP system that is supposed to place all Microsoft enterprise applications on a pure services-oriented architecture. However, Microsoft does not yet have a product road map, nor has it announced a delivery time line for Project Green.
At this point, Microsoft is using .NET technology indirectly. "Our goal is to expose current applications through XML [eXtensible markup language] and Web services to allow customers and independent software vendors to integrate current applications to .NET," Coulombe says. Such a strategy would leverage middleware and integration tools, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and BizTalk Integration Server, which are built on .NET technology.
Industry experts say there are several reasons why manufacturers are not yet clamoring for .NET, starting with the fact users don't have to know anything about .NET to benefit from its features. John Kervin, cofounder and VP of R&D at CMS Software, contends some users of his company's new .NET-based ERP package "couldn't spell .NET if they tried" but they like the flexibility it has added to the new CMS product.
Kervin also says CMS developed the .NET-based package, called CMS M5, to give customers choices beyond its CMS i5 solution, which runs exclusively on the IBM iSeries platform. Says one early adopter of the new package, ".NET did not drive our decision" to migrate from the iSeries system. Mike Gondosch, CFO of EM Plastics and Electrical Products, Toronto, was attracted by the system's enhanced distribution functionality. He also believes a system running on Microsoft technology offers a lower total cost of ownership.
Cleaner, more reliable software
Another ERP vendor, MAPICS, is adding a .NET-based product to its lineup as well. The next version of SyteLine, a Windows-based package that MAPICS acquired a couple of years ago, will be built on .NET. But Chief Technology Officer Alan MacLamroc says development of the .NET package will coincide with an upgrade to the MAPICS iSeries product, which is based on Java technology. The result, he says, will be a set of common business objects that will be able to spawn either .NET or Java application components. "This will result in cleaner, more reliable software for all of our customers," MacLamroc says, "while it gives us greater ability to reuse software."
Microsoft unveiled .NET three years ago as an answer to Java 2, the Sun Microsystemsplatform that had become the dominant environment for developing Internet-based applications. In many ways, .NET and Java are like twins separated at birth. Both offer object-oriented component models that require developers to separate business logic from data and the user interface, potentially simplifying the maintenance of software programs and improving the odds that business logic can be reused.
Additionally, .NET and Java provide services covering the "plumbing," or inner workings of software, such as mapping objects to relational data, managing transaction state, managing memory, providing a security model, dynamically generating Web pages, and automatically exposing application components as Web services.
The payoff, according to Tim O'Brien, senior product manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, is code that is far more stable, reliable, and extensible. "Building applications in managed code [code that complies with the .NET framework] is highly secure and component-based. That means a lot when it comes to lowering the total cost of both developing and owning applications."
Despite their parallels, .NET and Java are polar opposites in one important respect. While Java provides a single language that can run on multiple platforms, .NET can run multiple languages—as long as they comply with the .NET framework. There's one catch, however. Excluding open-source initiatives—such as the Mono Project that will port the .NET framework to Linux and UNIX—the .NET languages can only run on Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Vendors see clear benefits
For obvious reasons, the .NET framework appeals to companies whose software portfolios already are Microsoft-based. According to Stamford, Conn.,-based Gartner, for organizations with Microsoft-based platforms, migration to .NET is not a question of "if," but of "when."
Nonetheless, because of its object orientation, upgrading to .NET won't be a trivial task. Gartner likens it to the process of moving from16-bit to 32-bit Windows almost a decade ago.
Microsoft contends that 20 percent of its top manufacturing industry software partners have committed to putting their applications on .NET.
Most application vendors that have embraced .NET see it as way of giving their customers additional benefits through faster development of new, bug-free functionality.
Significantly, .NET's 2001 emergence coincided with a downturn in overall IT spending. And even though analysts say the market is showing signs of recovery, lingering fear of spending too much on technology without reaping real business value is likely to keep users cautious about moving to the new platform.
Salco Products, a manufacturer of railcar components based in Lemont, Ill., is a case-in-point. Terry Weaver, IT manager, says Salco bought the .NET-based e-commerce module from Made2Manage because it needed the functionality for processing sales over the Internet. But any connections between that e-commerce module and other Salco systems are built with Visual Basic 6, a language that preceded .NET.
Microwave Data Systems—a 250-person, Rochester, N.Y.-based manufacturer of equipment for wireless networks—runs four plants on the original, Microsoft-based SyteLine ERP package from MAPICS, but it won't upgrade to the .NET version immediately.
Duane Niewiemski, program manager at Microwave Data Systems, says his company purchased SyteLine because of its compatibility with Microsoft's SQL Server database—which he finds easy to manage—and that is still a more important feature than anything .NET offers.
.NET versus Java
Compared to J2EE, the .NET framework's later start has proven both a blessing and a curse. As the newer kid on the block, .NET was designed to parse and generate Web services messages from the start; similar capabilities had to be retrofit to Java, which emerged before Web services existed. On the other hand, Java's earlier start and its multiplatform support has given it a greater foothold as a tool for developing Web applications, as well as a greater presence with both developers and users of high-end systems. For high-end enterprise software providers—such as SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle—J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is the development platform of choice.
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