RE: Lansa vs. Plex

> From: trevor perry
>
> so having a wide set of products available means an
> individual company
> can find what fits their current requirements, product biases,
> skill sets
> and of course, quality.

And while that may be true from an end user standpoint (in general more
choice is better), that may not be true from a vendor standpoint.  A vendor
with multiple approaches to the same business problem may be one that has a
flexible architecture, or by the same token might be a company that has no
true focus, and is simply trying to cover all its bases.  You can usually
recognize the latter by the fact that they purchase other technology in
order to bolster their in-house product's lacks, rather than extending their
own in-house technology.

In the former case, a company with a truly comprehensive offering, the
chances are that you'll find a good solution and that solution will grow not
only as you change but as technology changes, allowing your technology
investment to grow with you.

In the latter case, as a given technology falls out of favor within a
corporation, the poor end users of that technology find themselves
struggling against the tide.  This is in a way what's happened with the
Net.Data folks - and certainly what happened to those of us who targeted
WebSphere Standard Edition.

Of course, there's another model - the small, single-focus shop like mine.
We believe we have the right technology and we think other solutions are
band-aids that in the end will make your company less competitive (as you
have to deal with what will become "legacy GUI code").  Because of that we
will continue to improve our base architecture.  Those improvements will
always help our end users, because we don't have different product lines
with different architectures.  Any additional products are simply extensions
of the base  architecture.

For example, when we add XML support, all of customers will get XML support.
When we add web services, all clients will get it.  The same thing for
non-intrusive API support, and additional keywords, and extended templates.

But you know, it's all hype.  Nobody has a silver bullet.  No company is the
great liberator.  There are no magic beans.  There are just products.

PSC/400 is an intrusive API
newlook is a screen scraper
XCaliber is an XML interface

You pick what's best for your company.

Joe Pluta
http://www.plutabrothers.com