Interview: IBM's software chief speaks out

AS THE OVERSEER of IBM's $12 billion software business, a business that spans every major software market from mainframes to PCs, Senior Vice President and Group Executive Steve Mills must feel a little like that guy on the Ed Sullivan show trying to keep about 20 plates spinning at once. With one hand the 28-year IBM veteran must make sure the strategies against long-time rivals such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun are spinning in the right direction. And with the other he must direct a raft of emerging and very different Web-based technologies and all of their associated strategies and political wranglings that go on in any number of standards bodies and other institutions where political in-fighting rages.

Sometimes sounding much like the hard core technologist he is, and sometimes more like a politician carefully clarifying his position on the issues of the day, Mills recently sat down with InfoWorld's Editor In Chief Michael Vizard, Steve Gillmor, director of InfoWorld's Test Center, and Ed Scannell, editor at large, for a wide-ranging interview. Mills gave his thoughts on where he and IBM stand on such things as the technical and political ins and outs of Java, XML, Web services, peer-to-peer computing, Microsoft's .Net strategies, IBM's open-source Eclipse initiative, as well as on Web services standards organizations such as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the recently formed WSIO (Web Services Interoperability Organization).

InfoWorld: A couple of years ago it seemed like the evolution toward distributed computing would be driven primarily out of the Java space. But now it seems to be driven more by alliances and deals between companies like IBM, Microsoft, and BEA and then brought to some other standards body. What has changed about the process here and what's good about that?

Mills: Well we never thought it was going to be driven by Java. And when we jumped on the Java bandwagon in 1995, we saw Java as something very valuable for server-side development, programming, and interoperability. That was not the message Sun was delivering, but that was the interest that we had. We saw Java as a logical mechanism to replace the more complex C++ and CORBA-based implementations for system interoperability that preceded what's now emerged as J2EE. That's the way we saw Java. We've always seen CAD mark-up languages as being useful for high-level data descriptions and normalizing information. And we've been working on XML and its predecessor technologies for decades. We delivered WebSphere in 1998 before anyone was talking much about XML with native XML parsing capability because we knew this was going to be the technology that would become preferred for doing these high level descriptions.

InfoWorld: People talk to us about J2EE {Jave 2 Enterprise Edition] and its support for Web services. But it is unclear to us what really belongs in J2EE and what doesn't. Not just that, but what's the line between where J2EE is supposed to begin and end and where some of these other initiatives begin?