Use of Technology in Business WebSphere Tutorial Competitive Business Analysis: In today’s highly competitive business environment, the intelligent use of technology can determine whether a company becomes an industry leader or just one of the pack. It is crucial to select a technology platform that gives your organization a competitive edge by delivering the right services to the right customers at the right price.

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by Allan McNaughton, president, Technical Insight LLC. Intel Corp.

In today's highly competitive business environment, the intelligent use of technology can determine whether a company becomes an industry leader or just another one of the pack. To become an industry leader, it is crucial to select a technology platform that gives your organization a competitive edge by delivering the right services to the right customers at the right price.

In the past it was standard practice to use a diverse array of proprietary products, however recently many companies have realized the price of doing so. Cost control efforts have led to the widespread adoption of standards-based technologies, with server-side Java and Intel architecture-based processors leading the way. The demand for Java development and deployment solutions has heralded the arrival of many competing products.

Against this confusing backdrop, the standards-based IBM WebSphere Application Server running on open architecture Intel® Xeon™ processor-based servers offers customers a competitive advantage.

The right solutions
No matter what demands your organization places on server-side Java technology, there is a member of the WebSphere Application Server product family to fit your needs. Small projects can benefit from using WebSphere Application Server Express. The Express product is intended for departmental type applications that employ popular technologies such as Servlets, Java Server Pages (JSPs), and Web services.

Projects that need the full capabilities of Java 2 Enterprise Edition should consider WebSphere Application Server. As the foundation of the WebSphere platform and the core J2EE and Web services configuration, IBM WebSphere Application Server is optimized for ease of administration in a scalable, single-server deployment environment. This configuration is recommended for organizations that need to build and deploy message-oriented, standalone, departmental applications and Web services, but don't require failure bypass or workload distribution.

WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment is the next level in application serving with automatic distribution of workload across multiple servers through sophisticated load balancing and clustering capabilities, including failover capability, content-based routing to deliver more effective session management and enhanced, edge-based caching capabilities. This edition includes the Tivoli Performance Viewer which streamlines the optimization of complex environments.

Faster developers
Due to WebSphere's consistent programming model, developers will find familiarity as any one edition of WebSphere Application Server translates into working knowledge of the other editions. They will also appreciate WebSphere's focus on maximizing a developer's effectiveness with the WebSphere Studio family of integrated development environments.