05.15.08
Posted in Technology Market Trends at 5:46 pm by Tony Baer
In the wake of Microsoft’s failed Yahoo bid, we recently sat in on a BriefingsDirect podcast to give our prognostication on the future beyond keywords. Will software vendors find an alternative to subscription sales with ads, or is the future more driven, not by advertising as we know it, but product placement in the context of an activity, such as gaming, or a process, such as bookkeeping? As for Microsoft, what’s its next act after Yahoo? Could Facebook provide the opening, not necessarily through ad placement, but as a way to infuse social computing into enterprise collaboration?
Convened by ZDNet blogger & analyst Dana Gardner, we joined fellow independent analysts Joe McKendrick and Phil Wainewright in the roundtable; to hear the podcast or read excerpts, click here.
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Posted in Systems Management, Application Development, IT Infrastructure, SOA & Web Services, Data Management, Enterprise Integration at 1:22 pm by Tony Baer
Just mention the word “governance,” and most people will equate it with auditors or attorneys who scold on all the wrong things you’re doing, or that a gap in the access control system could put your CEO in jail. No wonder governance is such a hard sell, and why Forrester Research analyst Mike Gilpin and Software AG chief marketing officer Ivo Totev concurred that when it comes to SOA governance, maybe we need another name.
Nonetheless, on a beautiful day in May, roughly 150 customers and prospects showed up for a SOA governance summit presented by Software AG at a hotel in the heart of Times Square. Maybe the turnout wasn’t so surprising given the locale. With the financial sector having seen Enron and corporate options scandals, not to mention the subprime meltdown, if there was ever a sector that begs governance, this one’s the baby.
It was also a pretty sophisticated audience when it came to SOA background; virtually everybody in the room had already gotten their feet wet with SOA projects, and roughly 60% were already involved in some form of SOA governance effort. We had the chance to moderate a panel with Gilpin, Software AG’s Miko Matsumura and Jim Bole, plus HCL Technologies consultant (and pragmatist) Rama Kanneganti, most of whom had spoke earlier in the morning.
Gilpin and Kanneganti gave the audience healthy doses of realism.
Gilpin maintained that, at least for larger enterprises, the deeper they get into SOA, the more likely they’ll wind up with four, five, or more enterprise service busses. In other words, don’t fool yourself with the myth that you’ll have a single monolithic grand unification architecture, despite the best efforts of your enterprise architects. Just as most organizations never succeeded with the galactic enterprise data warehouse or that top-down enterprise data model, life in a modern post M&A world is just too complex and heterogeneous. He noted that no vendors have yet picked up the mantle on how to integrate all those integration stacks, but in the next year or two you’ll start seeing commercial product rolling out. Nonetheless, he conceded that selling an integration stack of integration stacks may not be the easiest pitch that you’ve ever made to a CFO. For starters, if you end up using the same rationale that was purposed towards justifying those initial SOA investments (e.g., more reuse, agility, better IT/business alignment), the response is likely to be jaded. Gilpin’s dose of reality was not without its ironies: as you implement SOA to unify your app and data silos, you could wind up with creating yet another über silo.
When it was Kanneganti’s turn, his talk was a welcome departure from the usual SOA-and-see-the-light presentations in its acknowledgment that in the trenches, SOA may seem so abstract that it may difficult at first to gain support through acclimation. He presented several lessons, such as:
1. “Dumbing down the technology” by eliminating the aura of mystery and the abstractness of service abstraction. Take advantage of social computing tools to tell stakeholders what’s really happening on the project and what it means (a challenge because architecture is not as easy to explain as, say, implementing a functional module of a business application), develop common plumbing services to get some quick wins (things like error handlers seemed a bit low level to us, and he later admitted to us that, no, those are not the first services you should develop, but they’re useful when you want to scale out the project) and then show how an approach that stays close to the basics can result in predictable production of services.
2. To reduce risk, organize something like an informal Center of Excellence, but pitch it more as “a center of getting things done” that contends with issues such as ownership of data or processes.
3. When it comes to the usual role of EAs, which is to promote better, consistent architecture, use a carrot rather than stick approach.
In between, Miko (we’re violating our usual editorial convention of last names because, well, his first name is so heavily branded) provided a talk that was, literally, a stretch. Relating some metaphors of evolution (reptilian functions are still present in human brainstems, and we’re genetically 95% equivalent to chimpanzees), he explained how SOA projects must navigate entrenched tribal turf rivalries, such as when services transition from design (software development) to run time (operations). And from that, he launched into a discussion of his latest initiative, looking at the synergies of service provisioning and virtualization – which we feel is the tip of the iceberg of a larger issue. Namely, how can you manage compliance with service level agreements or contracts as part of run time governance without some logical ties with IT operations and IT service management/ITIL worlds. It’s an area for which vendors on both sides of the aisle – the Software AGs, the HPs, and the IBMs, have yet to provide adequate answers. But, bringing the point back home, it’s a question of dealing with potentially warring tribes, as a debate rekindled by Todd Biske on the future of ESBs brought out a few weeks back.
As if we can’t get rid of this tribal mania yet, well, maybe they’re not a tribe, but a group of (choose one) soothsayers, high priests, or medicine men within the tribe. We’re talking about EAs here. When we posed the question of what SOA governance is, the panel concurred that it is a combination of people and processes, with technology as tool to apply the processes that people (in or out of their tribes have worked out). Bole volunteered that business processes might be a better way to sell SOA, and ultimately, SOA governance to the enterprise. We pressed again, asking, at the end of the day, who’s accountable for SOA governance? One of the answers was, maybe, yet maybe, SOA governance could make EAs relevant, finally.
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05.13.08
Posted in Technology Market Trends, IT Services & Systems Integration, Outsourcing at 10:44 am by Tony Baer
Only leaked yesterday, this morning HP confirmed it would acquire EDS for north of $12 billion. The obvious driver, as colleague Dana Gardner noted, is that with the IBM and its global services colossus and the growth of outsourced, cloud, or on demand computing, that enterprise customers were going to demand a viable alternative – an Avis to IBM’s Hertz so to speak.
Of course the deal brings back memories of when Mark Hurd’s predecessor left off, which was the attempted purchase of PwC consulting for $18 billion back in 2000. Barely a couple years later, IBM swooped up PwC up for roughly a fifth of the cost. Besides the ridiculous price tag (these were pre-inflated dollars) was the question of culture clash. HP’s techie culture seemed a poor fit for PwC’s suit-and-tie atmosphere; as we maintained, IBM and PwC were a much better fit.
And while $12 billion still sounds like a lot of money, that’s probably about half of what HP would have paid back in 2000 with pre-deflated dollars.
But what a difference a few years and a more-focused senior management team make. Not only has Hurd rationalized the Compaq acquisition, but for the first time his team actually cultivated HP Software as more than an oxymoron, and has bulked it up with some shrewd acquisitions. Admittedly, success at HP Software doesn’t automatically portend similar results with EDS, which has been through the acquisition game before. More importantly, comparing Hurd to Fiorina, he exercises the far more hands-on management style that will be necessary to pulling such a transformative deal off.
Among the challenges are reorienting EDS away from IBM to promote HP infrastructure. Given that EDS is stronger in infrastructure outsourcing rather than mainstream systems integration, that might be a smoother shift, but it will require an internal migration of expertise. EDS is already part way down the transformation road, having been slimmed down by CEO Ronald Rittenmeyer (he stays on as business unit head), and before that, Michael Jordon (no, not the Air Jordans guy).
Significantly, HP will preserve EDS’s identity and autonomy, handing over some of Ann Livermore’s services operations. With more engaged management, HP stands a better chance this time of making such an acquisition work.
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05.12.08
Posted in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Application Development, SOA & Web Services, BPM at 7:01 pm by Tony Baer
SOA Software, a company that makes secrecy a virtue, has surfaced just long enough to tell us that they’ve finally plugged a gap in their SOA offerings. The privately held firm, which until now has concentrated on run time SOA management and integration, is acquiring LogicLibrary, which has the upstream SOA repository component.
SOA Software has historically competed with AmberPoint, which has concentrated on SOA management, otherwise known as run-time governance. By contrast, SOA Software has also focused on run-time integration, offering products providing service gateways for B2B transactions, mainframe CICS transactions, along with its existing service mediation and routing (SOA Software isn’t so buzzword-crazy as to call their mediation offering an ESB).
But as customers get past piloting their SOA environments, they need to adopt more of a lifecycle approach to managing the service, from concept to run time, and whatever you do at the end of a service’s live. More importantly, they also want to leverage reuse, which without a place to manage the service lifecycle (and track what kind of service it is), is practically impossible. For SOA customers, adding that level of lifecycle governance required them to go best of breed.
That’s where LogicLibrary comes in. With IBM, Software AG, Tibco, and Oracle/BEA promoting end-to-end approaches (with HP nudging in), the question with SOA Software was when they would finally add the missing link.
Significantly, LogicLibrary’s lineage is more akin to Flashline, later acquired by BEA, as opposed to something like WebSphere Registry/Repository. Specifically, LogicLibrary began life as a component, rather than specifically an SOA repository. As such it emphasized links with source code management systems (SCM), with APIs to all the major names: Rational ClearCase; Serena PVCS and Dimensions; Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and Team Foundation Server; and open source offerings like CVS and Subversion.
Consequently, LogicLibary brings an SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) focus to the SOA lifecycle, providing the ability to establish dependencies for components that are exposed as services back to the assets released by software development organizations. That’s counter to the louder noises or recent that SOA should be business process-, rather than software artifact-driven. That is, your services should be driven by the business stakeholder’s view of what services should be offered, as opposed to the software developer’s integration focus based on lower-level perceptions of what software components or artifacts should be exposed. Call it the BPM or top-down, vs the Component-Based Development, or bottom-up view.
We doubt that SOA Software wants to get in the middle of that shouting match, but they will get dragged in.
What’s more interesting is that SOA Software and LogicLibrary have rarely crossed paths in the field. It sounds like both started to work on a partnership, with one thing leading to another., The upside is lots of cross-selling opportunities, the challenge is educating each other’s customer base that they are missing something essential.
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05.09.08
Posted in Java, Application Development, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 9:21 am by Tony Baer
While our overriding impression was that the Rich Internet Application was the predominant theme of this year’s JavaOne, we did stumble across one potentially interesting server development. Caucho, a 10-year old firm that we’ve never heard of, has recently reached a major milestone in its 3-year effort porting PHP over to Java. That is, it’s taken the underlying constructs of PHP, which are written in C and C++, and reimplemented them in Java. The result is kind of you-can-have-it-both-ways deployment platform for PHP.
The result is Resin, an open source appserver that lets you write your web app in PHP, but run it on a server that takes advantages of most (not all) of the Java EE services of brand name appserver platforms. In other words, you get the reliability, load balancing, and other bulletproofing features of Java EE, but you don’t have to write Java. It’s drawn several major PHP sites, which the company cannot disclose, but does brag how Japan’s largest online gaming portal migrated from Tomcat to Resin.
Caucho doesn’t claim to have the job finished; in fact, given the impedance mismatches between PHP and Java, it never will be a 100% artifact-for-artifact translation. For starters, there’s the immaturity and rough edges of PHP, which still isn’t fully documented and has its share of bugs. But the company has attained compatibility with PHP 6 and now supports some of its most popular apps like the Drupal social networking-oriented content management system, Wordpress blogging platform, and MediaWiki engine that powers Wikipedia.
We never heard about Caucho before, but given PHP’s popularity and the current tooling vacuum surrounding it, we couldn’t ignore these obscure folks. PHP and other dynamic scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby have emerged as responses to Java’s complexity. In essence, Caucho Resin is yet one of a number of responses (like “rebel” frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate) to the complexity of Java EE – and the idea of writing PHP appservers seems to be catching. Reportedly, IBM is also pursuing the idea.
Watch this space.
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Posted in Java, Application Development, Mobile, SOA & Web Services, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 1:02 am by Tony Baer
JavaOne provides a good barometer of the current fads hitting IT. Three years ago, Java discovered open source; two years ago, it was Ajax; while last year was a non-event. But this year, the rich client’s back, baby.
In fact, this being our tenth JavaOne (which we covered remotely this year – too much darn travel), the spotlight on the client was déjà vu all over again. Covering our first JavaOne back in 1998, most of the booth traffic was around demos showing Java applets adding animation to word, numbers, and pictures on the browser. Ironically, we could have cared less about the animated browsers; instead what piqued our attention was this startup company called WebLogic, which made a bet on Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) before the standard was approved. More importantly, their message was, forget the animations, the true value of Java was back on the server.
You know the rest of the story. Java’s early stab at rich client fell prey to bandwidth hurdles (those were the days of dial-up) and the nagging issue of browser compatibility. The Flash runtime stole eventually the thunder, literally.
But we digress.
This year’s appearance by Neil Young set the tone: it’s all about really rich multimedia, the type of stuff where Plain Old Ajax (POA?) runs out of gas. Yes, Sun made some announcements about its open source Glassfish appserver (a new telco edition was coming out), but this year’s big announcement was the roadmap for JavaFX, the rich Java client framework that Sun first announced last year.
Thanks to Neil Young, JavaOne made the news, but the news was hardly about Java. The headlines read, Neil Young is beginning release of his entire music and video archives on Blu-Ray, making it the first serious music collection to hit the new high-def DVD format. But it was funny seeing pictures showing Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz barely squeezed into the frame as a rock fan. The Java connection? Java lets you have a real interactive experience with Blu-Ray, rather than the rudimentary front, back, right, left navigation you get with run of the mill DVDs.
Back to JavaFX, it’s Sun’s all-Java answer to Adobe Flex/AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. To recap, JavaFX is a programming framework for accessing the rich media capabilities that to some extent were already part of the Java SE desktop spec, plus new ones such as the streaming audio and video codecs from On2 that Sun just announced it was licensing. And with the whole deal is yet another new scripting language, JavaFX Script, which would make all the rich media capabilities of Java accessible to web designers. Just like Microsoft Silverlight, and its associated scripting languages, this is yet another play for the Adobe Dreamweaver crowd.
During the keynote, Sun splashed demos showing screen renderings of the kinds of spinning, 3D spheres that for us rekindled memories of demos of the first multimedia PCs of the early 90s, and the finite element model renderings of CADCAM systems using souped-up graphics cards a few years before that. Some demos never change. We also saw a demo of Java applets (remember them?) being dragged and dropped off the browser to the desktop, where you could persist them as a regular local app –- which in its own weird way could be construed as Sun buying into Microsoft’s Software + Services vision blending the cloud with local client.
Ever since Sun hatched JavaFX a year ago, we wondered about why the world needed yet another multi-platform rich client framework, as Adobe would have proven a convenient multi-platform partner. But that was based on the dated perception of Sun viewing Microsoft as its primary rival. In fact, it’s much more nuanced picture, given (1) Sun’s and Microsoft’s interoperability détente; (2) the increasingly intense rivalry between NetBeans and Eclipse for Java development platforms; and (3) competition for the hearts and minds of Rich Internet Application (RIA) developers and designers, where for now it’s advantage Adobe.
And that’s where you get into a battle of lies, damn lies, and statistics. Sun and Adobe are battling over whose runtime is more ubiquitous in the connected world. Adobe claims that the Flash Player reaches over 98% of Internet-enabled desktops in “mature” economies (the number drops to 97% when rest of world is factored in), compared to 84% for Java. Sun counters that the JVM is on 90.7% of all Internet-connected desktops, plus virtually all smart phones produced within the last three years. Well not quite. The iPhone is expressly omits Java support, and of course, there are Windows Smart Phones. Adobe has Flash Lite for mobile devices, but it hasn’t published studies showing killer penetration.
Nonetheless, when you parse the numbers and statements, it’s clear that Sun views Adobe as it main rival for the Rich Internet client. JavaFX is Sun’s stake in the ground for its argument that the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is the place to do your multimedia, rather than the Flash plug-in. And that’s why Sun is trying to reopen the barn door, even after some of the horses have galloped out.
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05.08.08
Posted in Application Development, Middleware, IT Infrastructure, SOA & Web Services, Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Integration, ITIL at 11:11 am by Tony Baer
All too often, when I come across one of Todd Biske’s writings, my conclusion is, “Why didn’t I ever think of that?” As a former colleague on the weekly BriefingsDirect podcasts, you could always count on Biske to come up with common sense insights that were so basic that they never occurred to you. In his latest post, The Future of ESBs, he reiterates a conclusion he came to some time ago, that “the capabilities associated with the [ESB] space really belong in the hands of operations rather than the hands of developers.” That’s because when you eliminate all the extraneous embellishments of the definition of what ESBs are, at the end of the day, they are all about connecting services. Nothing more, nothing less. He adds that when you really compare costs (and we presume, benefits) of ESBs, it should be with that of other network intermediaries, such as switches, load balancers, and proxying appliances – rather than the software-based offerings of middleware providers who dominate the ESB market.
The dilemma of course is that the network folks have had difficulty navigating up the stack. Recall Cisco’s Application-Oriented Networking (AON), where routers were supposed to get a lot smarter about prioritizing SAP traffic? The notion of attaining telco-like Five 9’s availability and service levels out of the basic plumbing of service, process, or (forbid the thought) application-level integration has long been a holy grail. Haven’t heard much from Cisco about AON lately.
The problem is mindset, not technology. Network admins are used to thinking at packet level; the software folks are used to thinking in terms of components, services, or application modules; while the business folks wonder why they can’t get their reports on time or why there’s so much latency when they attempt a supply chain optimization. The dilemma gets compounded when we start talking run time governance of SOA, a situation we were reminded of last week when Tibco announced addition of Service Level Performance Manager to their ActiveMatrix SOA management stack. Obviously, when gauging whether service contracts are fulfilled, you need the ability at the level of named service to see if it is available and whether latency is within what’s called for in the service contract. The problem is that, while software development factors like how a service is designed and whether the SOAP headers and XML schemas are properly formed will impact performance, at some point, when demand for a service spikes, you’ve got to start provisioning underlying infrastructure.
As we’ve written previously, there’s still a disconnect between SOA run time governance and underlying infrastructure management that for now is handled through email or SneakerNet. At the technology level, nobody is yet talking about how service level management issues identified by tools from folks like Tibco or AmberPoint are going to automatically generate trouble tickets in Remedy or Peregrine. At the mindset level, nobody is yet talking about mapping SOA run time governance to ITIL processes.
Until we do, the goal of conceiving service connectivity, performance, and SLA management will remain a tale of two IT silos.
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05.04.08
Posted in e-Commerce, Technology Market Trends at 10:18 pm by Tony Baer
For now Microhoo is history. With Steve Ballmer walking away this weekend from Yahoo’s $37/share demands, inboxes are bound to be overflowing Monday morning with al the postmortems.
We’ll keep ours short and sweet. It’s obvious why Microsoft ditched its otherwise successful M&A model to snag Yahoo: it’s in the unusual position of playing underdog, in this case, to Google’s online ad machine. It’s obvious why Yahoo turned down what is probably going to be the best offer it’s going to get: if it must surrender independence, it’d rather do so with Google in a way that keeps the rank and file, not to mention the antitrust folks happy.
One of the obvious arguments against the Microhoo deal is that Yahoo’s software platform is largely open source, while Microsoft’s obviously isn’t. But the open/closed source dichotomy shouldn’t be such a deal killer because Microsoft of late has shown welcome pragmatism toward open source, as evidenced by Sam Ramji’s keynote to EclipseCon a couple months back.
As we noted when the deal first surfaced, Microsoft faced a similar situation back roughly 15 years ago when the company was blindsided by rise of the Internet. At the time, Bill Gates called a management retreat and effectively steered a U-turn. This time around, Microsoft is punting rather than reaching back into its bench. Admittedly, life’s more complex today; when the modern web emerged, you had Netscape, which had market penetration but no business, whereas today with Google, Microsoft has met its match. Also, there’s the question of whether Ray Ozzie really has the moxie to fill Gates’ shoes.
There’s obviously no shortage of debate going round.
Veteran Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley couldn’t like the deal less. “Microsoft’s decision to walk restores my faith in the future of the company,” she wrote, adding that her view is evidently shared by at least some within Microsoft as well. The Gillmor Gang convened on Kentucky Derby Day and concluded that “Google is a big winner, Microsoft is not dead, and lives to bid another day.” Larry Dignan speculates that, besides Google, Facebook and MySpace (weren’t they the ones eclipsed by Facebook?) are also winners as, guess what, they’ve got the only other beachfront property left. Ovum’s David Mitchell counters that the deal would have helped Microsoft in Asia where it could have leveraged Yahoo’s penetration in China. My colleague Andrew Brust, who’s finally returned to blogging, offers a more idealistic view of why the deal should happen: it not only fills the online ad gap, but provides a great platform for monetizing its AQuantive ad server acquisition. “AQuantive’s ad serving platform and Razor Fish’s agency savvy could combine really well with the reach that Yahoo’s network of sites would provide. Add Silverlight to the equation, with its rich media capabilities, and things get really exciting…”
Our take? Yahoo will try sidling up to Google, but (1) if YaGoogle (or GoogleHoo?) can’t get past antitrust (remember, this is about ads) and (2) Microsoft still hasn’t spent its $44 billion, Ballmer will return with an offer that will sound a lot like $33, or even less.
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04.30.08
Posted in Java, Application Development, IT Infrastructure, .NET, SOA & Web Services, Data Management, Enterprise Integration, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 9:08 pm by Tony Baer
You can tell you’re at a techie conference when the CEO’s opening address steps you through the generations of IT history. Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé, who roughly a decade ago wrote a book on the power of real-time information, is now telling us that real-time isn’t fast enough; you need to be able to predict the foreseeable future based on patterns that are emerging today. What was kind of amusing was that as he was drawing Tibco’s vision of event-driven architecture (EDA), events took their own turn as his slide presentation anticipated what Ranadive was going to talk about next, and advanced from the EDA architectural diagram to the next shot before he was through. Check out Dana’s Gardner’s ZDNet blog for another account of Ranadive’s keynote.
TUCON 2008 provided some interesting tidbits of a company in transition. Like most major software players, it came off a good 2007 and, Q1 2008 wasn’t too shabby either (like the rest of the software industry, we’re waiting for Q3 and 4 to see if Tibco and its peers can handle the truth). Like most active mid-tier players, the company is embarking on a SOA transition that hasn’t always been well explained to its customers. In part it’s due to the fact that Tibco has had to layer over a legacy, the penalty paid for being the first on the block, but mostly it’s due to the fact that the company has not adequately communicated its message as to how all the pieces are fitting together. With Tibco ONE, which seeks to unify the design experience across all its tools, busses, and process engines, it’s made an auspicious start. But to date, the company lacks a web page to explain what the ActveMatrix brand is, and the vision and message behind it. Enter “Tibco ActiveMatrix” in Google today, and aside from point product listings, you’ll get a SOA landing page with a list of ActiveMatrix products underneath it.
The highlights of Tibco’s announcements include a welcome addition to run time SOA governance, Service Performance Manager, which cleverly bundles some of its Business Events complex event processing technology to tell you whether you’re meeting the Service Level Agreements, at least from a performance standpoint. It takes the assumption that service levels are a classic complex event processing problem, especially given the kinds of highly scaled and highly distributed networks that Tibco customers tend to have. We attended a live podcast recording session led by Dana Gardner that featured independent analyst Joe McKendrick, IDC analyst Sandy Rogers, Tibco SOA marketing manager Rourke McNamara, and Allstate technology solutions VP Anthony Abbatista that plumbed the topic to more detail, which should be published soon by Gardner and Tibco.
What’s missing (and Tibco is hardly alone here) is the link with the actual systems performance side of the house. Ironically, an announcement made at the show that BMC will OEM ActiveMatrix as the SOA platform to integrate its Business Service Management (BSM) products was a bit anticlimactic, as it was not about adding any tie-ins between SOA service performance management and IT service management. The challenge is that, if service levels on a service are tanking, it would be nice to either automatically trigger a trouble ticket and/or initiate an action to trigger something like a hypervisor manager to automatically spawn some new VMware or similar containers.
The problem is that the issue has yet to be adequately defined, there are no standards for specifying how such an interprocess communication might be initiated, and finally, there’s the age-old problem of organizational silos: service level management of SOA is part of run time governance, which tends to be the domain of the software development organization. Meanwhile, IT service levels in the data center are the domains of service operators. Even were technologies and standards adopted, you’d have the challenge of marketing a joint solution to two different entry points in the IT organization, something that will only happen when a CIO bangs heads together.
A couple other interesting developments coming up in the pipe today included some early fruits of a budding technology partnership between Tibco and Microsoft that, actually, have little to do with each other. The first is the ability for Microsoft .NET development shops that have Tibco licenses to invoke Tibco’s EMS messaging technology from Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) in place of something like Microsoft’s own MSMQ – this was the result of joint customers like Allstate that said, we’ve got sizable .NET installed base, and we want our .NET apps to talk to Tibco’s busses without having to do lots of translation. From a more strategic point, the relationship makes sense because, aside from Eclipse-based tooling, Tibco is not your typical Java EE provider because it relies on busses, rather than servers. So there’s no reason why Tibco shouldn’t have closer ties to Microsoft.
The other Microsoft related development was a statement of direction that going forward, Tibco richer clients would use Microsoft Silverlight, rather than Adobe Flex. Now of course, the natural question to ask is, didn’t Tibco already have a rich web client strategy already with General Interface, and does this mean that GI will fall by the wayside (it’s based on Ajax)? The answer is yes and no – GI still lives, but according to technology VP Matt Quinn, when it comes to charting the extremely complex network topologies that ActiveMatrix must manage, JavaScript simply runs out of gas. Quinn added that in this case, the decision was strictly the result of a technology shootout, as opposed to something more strategic. In essence, Silverlight can talk back to any server, while Flex has more dependence on its own servers. Admittedly with Microsoft there’s always questions of cross platform support, but for now it promises support of all the usual browser suspects.
The final piece for today was Tibco doing something really weird – a software company going into the custom appliance business. It’s for a special use case: high-end financial services houses (maybe later telcos) who are so neck deep in algorithmic trading that they need to process such huge throughputs with practically no latency. They are packaging Rendezvous (the message bus on which the company was founded) in a box, with the idea being to provide supercharged throughput to financial service clients who are demanding it.
Although folks like Oracle gave the practice a bad name in the past (recall the “Raw Iron” 8i database appliance?), recently it’s not been so unusual for ISVs to embed their stuff in silicon. But typically it’s commodity silicon using commodity pieces of the Linux kernel. What makes this different is that Tibco is doing custom silicon -– think of their boxes as ASICS on steroids. In the short run, Tibco can count on an addressable market numbering in the hundreds. When it comes to silicon, that’s probably a few seconds of production, which means huge expense and high risk as the market is so modest. We understand the need from Tibco’s customer base, and of course the unusual nature of the problem, but we wonder in an age of commodity hardware, how a company not experienced with this side of the market is successfully going to navigate upwind.
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Posted in Technology Market Trends at 1:28 am by Tony Baer
Maybe we should have entitled this entry, “How to Kill a Conference.”
Let’s explain. For the past several years, one of the events that we’ve most looked forward to was Sand Hill Group’s annual Software conferences. Brought together by industry veteran M.R. Rangaswami, the conference was an intimate gathering of software industry business executives and financiers, providing place where one could truly put one’s ear to the ground and get a sense of where the money was flowing. In fact, even more valuable than the agenda (which boasted an A-list of speakers, ranging from Steve Ballmer to Mark Benioff and Hasso Plattner) were the networking opportunities.
We had the misfortune of attending this year’s gathering, which was hardly anything like its predecessors. Previously an intimate gathering of C level software executives, venture capitalists, and angel investors in Santa Clara, this year it was airlifted wholesale to Vegas and merged in with InterOp, a gathering of network gearheads. In place of an intimate event with maybe a couple thousand attendees, you had probably about 10x the crowds, most of whom were looking at converged routers.
Now of course, there’s obviously a case to be made from letting a tiny event take advantage of discounted room deals when piggybacked with a larger event. The problem is that, in their infinite wisdom, the InterOp folks ran both events as one conference –- which wouldn’t have been a bad idea if there was some commonality or intersecting of the audiences. But software executives and network geeks?
Of course, Sand Hill Group is a small, specialized group that helps emerging software vendors formulate go-to-market and business planning, it’s not a media, analyst, or conferences organization. So we fully understood their decision to sell the conference to Tech Web Networks. But as for Tech Web, just what were these people thinking? We presume they paid good money to take on the event, so we’re wondering if anybody there ever passed Demographics 101. They could have easily paired it with another of their events, Enterprise 2.0, where there might have been far more synergy. Unfortunately for us, the result was largely a wasted day getting lost in Vegas, not to mention all the needless pestering over routers and switches that clogged our voice and emails ahead of time.
They made their mistake, hopefully we won’t repeat ours.
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