BEIJING, China, Nov. 8 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- Middleware, as the shining
point of the whole software industry, has attracted a keen interest of
international magnates including IBM, ORACLE and SAP. Yet when opening and
expanding the middleware market in China, they were confronted with strong
resistance from native software enterprises, not like the all-round triumph
in the database and operating system market. With their advantages in price
and services, native middleware enterprises headed by TongTech, CVIC SE and
Primeton, held around a 50% market share all along.
As the adoption and application of information technology proceeds and
prevails in China, a large group of high-end application projects began to
well up, providing a new opportunity for native Chinese software
manufacturers. These projects focussed on the industry and its integration,
with which native enterprises were quite familiar, considering their
experience in the industry. Taking advantage of this opportunity, native
middleware enterprises conceived a counterattack, and launched a
“substitution strategy”, participating into the face-to-face competition
with international manufacturers such as BEA. They were then rewarded with
achievements in many upgrading projects in the finance and telecom industry.
The intensification of competition has approved the value of talents.
Since the very beginning of 2006, the Chinese middleware industry launched a
new round of war for talents. On one hand, talents of marketing were badly
needed as the competition pressure weighed upon enterprises such as IBM and
BEA; on the other hand, an increased demand for talents in consultation and
management areas had to be granted with the development of native middleware
enterprises. At the same time, the whole middleware industry, with the birth
of such frameworks of new technique systems like SOA, called for more high-
end technical talents. The Chinese middleware industry was thus involved in
a war for talents of various majors: marketing, consultation, management and
technique.
In this war, international enterprises preferred ready “old hands”
while native enterprises such as TongTech paid more attention to the
cultivation of quasi-talents, meaning undergraduates in software colleges.
With this in mind, TongTech organized a speech tour of middleware and SOA
front technique to undergraduates from software schools in Tongji University,
Fudan University, Sichuan University, University of Electronic Science and
Technology, South China University of Technology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Xi’
an Jiaotong University, Xidian University, Beihang University and Peking
University. The purpose was quite obvious, to hunt talents.
The activity ended as a success, thanks to TongTech’s leading reputation
in the industry. And a national complex was found among Chinese students
from software schools. From their point of view, middleware is the only
pride in the Chinese software industry and should thus be supported. Under
the influence of this complex, such medium-sized enterprises as TongTech were
well received among them, only inferior to IBM, the world software magnate.
In this round of war for middleware talents, national software enterprises
such as TongTech defeated international enterprises. And this advantage is
quite crucial to the high-technology-intensive middleware industry. It is
possible to rewrite the future of the whole industry.
Survey: Which middleware enterprise are you interested in?
In order to hunt talents, TongTech has also established China SOA Club,
the first special community for SOA research and communication in China. It
aims at attracting and cultivating more interests in middleware all over
China and accelerating the process of application and world integration of
Chinese middleware and SOA technique through the organization of a series of
on-line and off-line activities.
“Middleware, as the only field in Chinese software industry that keeps
pace with the world front technique, is a field of great prospect and
promising achievements. At present it has come to a historical turning
point. We know the importance of talents to the development of software
enterprises, and the importance of talent cultivation to the development of
the whole national software industry. Therefore, we will make more efforts
in the cultivation of middleware and SOA talents to support and promote the
development of self-made software industry, taking advantage of talents as
the decisive force for success and the core drive of Chinese middleware
industry,” said Mr. Xu Zhidong, vice president of TongTech.