IBM sharpens leading edge in middleware

As many companies remain wary of new technology investments, IBM this week told developers how they could improve their businesses by keeping their existing applications.

At IBM's new Developerworks conference in San Francisco, Steven Mills, head of its Software Group, announced the company's enhanced focus on middleware, the software that connects enterprise data and applications.

'We're the largest builder of middleware technologies in the IT [information technology] industry by far. In excess of US$11 billion of our revenues is specifically associated with middleware,' he said.

Central to this is a new range of tools for the Websphere software platform.

Websphere, which began life as a lowly server application, has been broadened over the years to the point at which it is now arguably IBM's most important software brand.

Many people understand middleware to be the Web browser that sits on every Windows desktop, hiding the complexity of the operating system beneath. But for a large enterprise, middleware is becoming a crucial way to integrate new and old data and applications, which are frequently stored on different hardware systems.

Websphere is made up of a number of software modules, based around standards including XML, Soap, Java 2 Enterprise Edition and Web Services.