Avaya stands alone, OpenVMS boosted, and Oracle takes its own medicine.

Lucent spin-off Avaya started trading independently last week and hasn't done too well so far. It started out at around $22 and is trading just over $15 at the time of writing with no sign of a slow down in the fall. It wasn't a good week for technology stocks but, clearly, Avaya has not captured the imagination of investors.

Avaya was formerly the Enterprise Networks Group of Lucent Technologies and was spun-off six months ago as Lucent restructured. Avaya concentrates on the provision of large-scale communications solutions for enterprises and service providers. It specialised in voice and data channels for CRM and messaging environments.

In addition to this, it has just announced the introduction of hosted solutions for service providers that will enable them to offer an outsourced communications infrastructure with associated applications to small businesses.

With more than a million customers across the world, it would be expected that Avaya should be showing a healthy financial status. However, the business has shown recent negative growth although it has received investment of $400 million from Warburg Pincus. The slow business activity has unsettled investors who were hoping that the spin-off would create a smaller, more dynamic business.

It seems this is not the case and that Avaya might have benefited from a short delay before breaking away from Lucent. That delay would have given it the time it needs to fully develop its range of voice telecommunications and other products.

Instead it has come to the market with its portfolio incomplete and a partial message for potential customers and is suffering as a result. Analyst expectations are that the real growth and profitability will start to be realised in 2001 and 2002.

An old-timer of an OS chugging away

Compaq has just announced that the next release of OpenVMS will be made available in the first part of 2001. This is the first major release since 1998 and is an event that will leave many organisations and individuals with big smiles on their faces. Like RSX and RSTS/E on the PDP before them, OpenVMS and the VAX culture simply refuses to die.

The arrival of Alpha-based servers with 64-bit Unix and Windows NT implementations was always going to be a problem for advocates of the OpenVMS platform. The steady decline of Digital and eventual sale to Compaq didn't do too much to help either. But Compaq has always claimed that it plans to support OpenVMS for the foreseeable future and, now, it has backed up that promise with positive action.

OpenVMS 7.3 belatedly attempts to set up the operating system as a platform for ebusiness. It will incorporate a web server and Java development kit and will also provide an enterprise directory structure. The TCP/IP Services, DECforms and Transaction Router products have been enhanced to provide the support required to build ebusiness applications.

Add to this the improvements to the 'Galaxy' clustering technology, new ramdisk capabilities and print and file server compatibility with Windows 2000, and OpenVMS seems to be taking a significant step into the modern world.

But is it all enough? Many of the changes are simply allowing the OpenVMS operating system to catch up with developments that have been mainstream elsewhere for some time. A great deal of impetus has been lost as OpenVMS has been left out in the cold by Compaq, unlike IBM's AS/400 that has long been promoted as an ebusiness platform.

We can only hope that Compaq treats this release of OpenVMS as a springboard for further, more frequent, upgrades in the future.

Oracle on ebusiness

Oracle claims to have saved a billion dollars. It wants to share the secret of this financial bonanza with the rest of the world. The way to do it is to convert to an ebusiness, running on a single integrated platform. What is the favoured platform? Actually, it is Oracle.

The occasion for this outburst of enthusiasm was the Oracle OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco. Gary Bloom was the enthusiast, as he aimed to establish his credentials as the new second in command at Oracle, following the departure of Ray Lane.

Bloom's argument raises a couple of points of general interest. First, we can think about trends in the development of technology for the web. Second, we can review the ongoing argument about technology choices and their interaction with business requirements.

The early excitement is dying down and there is less enthusiasm for rushing to the web. Those trends are offset, though, by the strength of the movement to embrace the internet as an integral part of modern business. While business-to-consumer activity is the most visible, the internet is driving massive changes in the business-to-business sector. Web sites are increasingly sophisticated with three crucial capabilities most widely demanded. They are content management, transactions and personalisation.

The longer running argument is about how technology choices are made. An important view of a company starts with its business processes. There is innovation at this level, sometimes spurred by technology changes such as the internet, but more importantly by business concepts. A simple example is customer relationship management, where the business processes are redefined to focus on the customer instead of the product.

Business processes define the need for IT applications, and applications in turn define the platforms that are required. Bottom of the heap is the hardware on which it all runs. One approach is to select applications purely in relation to business requirements and let everything follow from that.

The trouble with that approach is exemplified by Oracle's claim to have saved a billion dollars by exploiting the internet and using a standard platform. Technology standardisation reduces costs in many ways and increases the effectiveness of IT people. But it does constrain application choices and for this reason is often seen in a negative light by general management.

Development of middleware standards such as the Java Enterprise Architecture aim to cut the links between the lower levels of technology and the applications. But vendors such as Oracle will inevitably seek to break through those layers to link solutions with their technology. In this situation, there are neither easy nor right answers.

The best approach is to aim for open debate of the issues as they affect a particular organisation, hoping to achieve a consensus on an agreed level of compromise. And following Oracle's lead might be the chosen compromise.

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