Title: The Impact of Research on the Development of Middleware Technology
Abstract:
The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of
8.5 billion US Dollars. In this talk we address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of the technology that is being sold in this market? We attempt a scholarly discourse. We present the research method that we have applied to answer this question. We then present a brief introduction into the key middleware concepts that provide the foundation for this market. It would not be feasible to investigate any possible impact that research might have had. Instead we select a few very successful technologies that are representative for the middleware market as a whole and show the existence of impact of research results in the creation of these technologies. We investigate the origins of web services middleware, distributed transaction processing middleware, message oriented middleware, distributed object middleware and remote procedure call systems. For each of these technologies we are able to show ample influence of research and conclude that without the research conducted by PhD students and researchers in university computer science labs at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, and University of Washington as well as research in industrial labs at APM, AT&T Bell Labs, DEC Systems Research, HP Labs, IBM Research and Xerox PARC we would not have middleware technology in its current form. We summarise by distilling lessons that can be learnt from this evidenced impact for future technology transfer undertakings.
Biography:
Wolfgang Emmerich holds the Chair in Distributed Computing in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. He is Director of Research in the Dept. of Computer Science. He received his undergraduate degree in Informatics from the University of Dortmund in 1990 and went on to conduct research into process-centred software engineering environments. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University of Paderborn in 1995. After a brief post-doctoral appointment at the Software Verification Research Centre of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, he joined The City University as a Lecturer in 1996. He was appointed as a Lecturer at UCL in the Department of Computer Science in 1997 and co-founded the Software Systems Engineering Research Group, which he currently heads. He is a member of the ACM SIGSOFT Impact project (see http://www.acm.org/sigsoft/impact) where the work described here was conducted. In parallel to his academic career, he worked for the Central European OMG representation on the CORBA middleware specification and co-founded three start-up companies. He is a co-founder, partner and non-executive director of the Zuhlke Technology Group.
