.NET Winning at places

[Extract] 

Two years ago, Jesse Shiah lived happily in the land of J2EE programming, working as part of a crack development team at Tragos, where he wrote custom Java applications for Global 2000 companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. He was quite literally a man in step with the times.

But times have changed. Today, Shiah's career path finds him at the helm of his own software firm, Ascentn, a business-process management (BPM) vendor in Mountain View, Calif. Despite an abiding love for the Java programming language, Shiah pulled a developer's 180 at Ascentn's inception, abandoning J2EE in favor of Microsoft's .Net framework and Visual Studio .Net tools. That's what he's using to build his AgilePoint BPMS product line. In some developers' circles, where commitment to a platform is akin to faith in a religion, the switch was tantamount to heresy. But for Shiah, who still lauds J2EE's technical might, moving to .Net. had nothing to do with techno-religion or vendor loyalty. It was simply smart business.

"I set two goals for this company: usability and value," Shiah says. "With .Net, we have been able to bring the cost of a BPM solution like ours down by five to 10 times that of J2EE. Everyone is looking for productivity and efficiency these days. And Microsoft helps you get it."