So give an example of how SOA is being used.
Enterprises need to have a view into all the information they need from top to bottom. Let's look at a company that's going to contract with another company to handle credit card transactions and fulfil online orders from their catalogue. The first company decides that it wants a 98 percent success rate for transactions, which seems reasonable. But does it make a difference to them if it were to discover that the 2 percent failures were the largest orders attempted?
If it's only failing 2 percent of the time, but it is your biggest customers, that is important information to you, as a manager. So there is a new relationship between information you might have from these services and what it actually implies for your business. There's the information gap that we are now able to bridge.
Let me ask you about what's going on in Web services consolidation. There has been a lot of talk that if Oracle can't get PeopleSoft, which now appears likely, then BEA Systems is the next target. So what would that mean for IBM?
It doesn't change anything that we do fundamentally. We have been competing against both of them very successfully. If you look at the breadth of our product portfolio, we do not just do application servers. We do not just do what is frankly the relatively simple integration, and we also simply do not just do databases. So we already have what is essentially a far broader portfolio, excluding the Oracle enterprise applications.
You mentioned the ubiquity of Java. Now, obviously, IBM would like to see Java made open source, as you indicated in a letter to Sun. But what's in it for Sun -- why should they do it?
What it boils down to is: what is Java? What is actually Java has been built by hundreds of people and hundreds of companies. I think sometimes when people read press releases, when Sun announces a new Java version, "well, Sun did not write all of it. This was done by many, many people."
JSR-109, a Java specification for enterprise Web services -- IBM started it, IBM led it. BEA had a big role in many of these things, too. So, fundamentally, it is a mistake thinking that Sun equals Java, Java equals Sun. It is already a community effort. It has evolved, and there are bits and pieces here and there, but there is no one complete Java solution available from anybody that is open source that you can count on.
We donated $40m worth of code to Eclipse, the open-source Java effort IBM founded, and then Eclipse became completely independent. So we have this model in which the value is to create the ecosystem and let lots of software developers do lots of good things. Let us just try to produce a situation in which we can work together to get the best possible common distribution so that we can put our resources to work individually.
It is not that we are looking to make more money off the platform. It is just that we are looking to accelerate the adoption of Java and the building up of it for all of us. Sun can reapply the resources to other places. Sun can create great products. We can create great products with open-source Java.
