James and Nancy,

We've just noticed that the HPTS abstracts are due - and we'd very much like to come along 
again this year. The 1999 HPTS was really good, and much more interesting (and useful!) 
than most academic conferences, in fact I'm still using some of the case studies and 
discussions in my work and teaching. 

Last time we came along to talk about the benchmarking work we were starting, an objective 
study of the performance of all the major OTM products (basically CORBA, Forte and MTS). 
This time we would like to come along and discuss our results and the lessons we learnt 
along the way.

I'll propose 4 possible topics:

	1. 	comparative performance results for the major OTM products
		(Sun Microsystems Forte 4GL, Fujitsu INTERSTAGE v3.0, 
		IONA Technologies Orbix v3.3, IONA Technologies Orbix 2000, 
		Borland Visibroker ITS v1.2, BEA WebLogic Enterprise v5.1, 
		Microsoft COM+)

	2. 	comparative performance results for the major EJB products
		(BEA WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere, SilverStream Application
		Server, Borland Application Server, Fujitsu INTERSTAGE Application
		Server, and possibly some others if they are working well enough 
		to be	benchmarked in time)

	3. 	comparative performance results for the major MOM products 
		(MQ Series, MSMQ, Tibco)

	4. 	a discussion of some of the lessons we learnt along the way,
		including some of the more subtle artefacts introduced (and
		fixed) in our test drivers, and the difficulties of determining 
		good performance metrics for asynchronous messaging products. 

We have finished the OTM evaluations and the final results have been written up for 
publication. The EJB tests are under way and will be finalised by mid-year. The MOM 
benchmarking (for asynchronous only at this stage) will be complete by the end of May 
as well. We would be bringing all of these benchmark results for presentation at HPTS 
in October - and they might result in some vigourous discussion! 

I'm proposing 4 topics and, given the amount of material we would be presenting, we'd 
like to have 3 people attending (Ian Gorton, Anna Liu and myself). Ian could lead the 
OTM presentation, Anna the EJB session and I would do the MOM and lessons learnt. We 
can give you more details and formal abstracts on the Tuesday after Easter. 

Hope to see you all again in Asilomar in October,

regards,
Paul