omniture

Native Chinese Middleware Enterprises Get the Upper Hand in Talent War

TongTech
2006-11-07 15:02 1926

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.

Source: TongTech
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