Internet Connection Secure Server for AS/400 is a separate product that provides secure Web connections. It allows Web browsers and servers to authenticate each other, permits Web site owners to control access to the server, and allows sensitive information (such as credit card numbers) to be shared between browser and server, yet remain inaccessible to third parties. This product uses Netscape’s Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to assure secure communications. SSL provides a private channel between client and server that ensures privacy of data, authentication of the session partners, and message integrity. Note that only Internet Connection Secure Server uses the SSL shown in Figure 11.2; the standard Internet Connection Server does not.

We discussed other AS/400 security products for Web serving in Chapter 7, including hardware-supported encryption and firewalls. You also can use a proxy server to provide a higher level of security. A proxy server acts as an intermediary between a client and the Web server. A request from a Web client to the Web server is directed to the proxy server, which makes the request to the Web server and then returns the response to the client.

A new IBM offering for the AS/400, called Net.Commerce (not shown in Figure 11.2), enables customers to develop their own online shopping systems. This product provides tools to create and manage an interactive online store. Using the catalog-building function, you can define the categories or departments through which shoppers navigate to reach products. Net.Commerce uses both DB2/400, which contains all the catalog information, and Internet Connection Secure Server. For secure payments over the Internet, the Net.Commerce product uses Secure Electronics Transaction (SET), which I described in Chapter 7.

The Battle for the Desktop

The first shots in the battle for the desktop were fired on September 4, 1995. The location was a technology forum in Paris, France, where Larry Ellison, chairman and CEO of Oracle, was one of the main speakers. In his speech to the attendees, Ellison said, “We believe the world is moving from a desktop point of view to a network-centric point of view, and when you have a network-centric point of view, you don’t need a device as complicated as a PC. You can get a terminal for as little as US $400 to $500.”

“A PC is a ridiculous device; the idea is so complicated and expensive,” Ellison continued. “What the world really wants is to plug into a wall to get electronic power and plug in to get data.” With these words, Ellison introduced the concept of a network computer (NC). The battle had begun.

Another participant at the Paris forum was Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, the company at the heart of what Ellison called the “ridiculous” PC. Bill Gates, not one to take a bullet from Larry Ellison, fired back by saying that the dominant desktop device would never be Ellison’s “dumb terminal.” Commenting on Ellison’s statement that a future desktop device would be less expensive because it would have no disk storage, Gates said, “You’ll still need a way of storing the applications that you download from the network, and your personal data.”

From this beginning, companies from all over the world began to take sides in the battle for the desktop. On one side were companies such as Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Apple, and IBM. On the other side were Microsoft, Intel, and various PC manufacturers who had the most to lose if NCs caught on in businesses.

The PC proponents argued that the PC was already so dominant on the desktop that no business would ever switch, even as the world moved to network computing. The NC proponents, on the other hand, claimed they had cost on their side, and that would drive businesses to the new NC. According to the NC proponents, the cost of a PC used in a business, referred to as the total cost of ownership (TCO), has skyrocketed over the past 10 years.

Numbers released in 1996 by the Gartner Group, Inc., of Stamford, Connecticut, showed that the TCO of a PC over a typical amortization period of three to five years is more than $40,000, or between $8,000 and $13,000 per year. The Gartner Group also estimated that the equivalent cost of a PC back in 1987 was less than $20,000, meaning that TCO had doubled in the past 10 years.

According to the Gartner Group, TCO has four major components. The actual cost of the PC makes up about 21 percent of the total. About 9 percent represents administration costs, and another 27 percent is what the business spends on technical support. A whopping 43 percent of the cost is attributed to “end-user operations,” which means the user is tinkering with the PC, wasting time adding special software or hardware, and using it for tasks that are not business related. Sun’s CEO, Scott McNealy, has stated, “The thing that is going to drive this business is TCO… We plan to bring that number down to $2,500 a year.”

On May 20, 1996, Oracle, Apple, Netscape, Sun, and IBM released the first guidelines for building an NC. The document they produced, called the Network Computer Reference Profile, stated that its intention was “to provide a common denominator of popular and widely used features and functions across a broad range of scalable network computing devices, including personal computers.” The group was saying that PCs could join and have all the attributes of an NC. There was, however, a question of whether a PC with its large hard disks and large memories could compete with the leaner, built-to-the-guidelines boxes.

The Network Computer Reference Profile identified user-interface resources, such as a video graphics array (VGA) terminal, a pointing device, and text-input capability. The profile also specified which communications protocols must be supported to make the NC a network-centric device. Examples of these protocols include TCP/IP, Telnet, and the simple network management protocol (SNMP) used in 3270 and 5250 terminals. In addition, the NC must support the fundamental Web standards, such as HTTP, HTML, and the Java virtual machine, which I describe in the next section.