02.08.10
Posted in .NET, Application Development, IT Infrastructure, Java, Middleware, SOA & Web Services at 12:55 pm by Tony Baer
Thanks go out to Oracle this morning for finally putting us out of our suspense. AmberPoint was one of a dwindling group of still-standing independents delivering run time governance of the for SOA environments.
It’s a smart move for Oracle as it patches some gaps in its Enterprise Manager offering, not only in SOA runtime governance, but also with business transaction management – and potentially – better visibility to non-Oracle systems. Of course, that visibility will in part depend on the kindness of strangers as AmberPoint partners like Microsoft and Software AG might not be feeling the same degree of love going forward.
We’re surprised that AmberPoint was able to stay independent for as long as it had, because the task that it performs is simply one piece of managing the run time. When you manage whether services are connecting, delivering the right service levels to the right consumers, ultimately you are looking at a larger problem because services do not exist on their own desert island. Neither should runtime SOA governance. As we’ve stated again and again, it makes little sense to isolate runtime governance from IT Service Management. The good news is that with the Oracle acquisition, there are potential opportunities, not only for converging runtime SOA governance with application management, but as Oracle digests the Sun acquisition, providing full visibility down to infrastructure level.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here as the emergence of a unified, Oracle on Sun turnkey stack won’t happen overnight. And the challenge of delivering an integrated solution will be as much cultural as technical, as the jurisdictional boundary between software development and IT operations blurs. But we digress.
Nonetheless, over the past couple years, AmberPoint itself has begun reaching out from its island of SOA runtime, as it extended its visibility to business transaction management. AmberPoint is hardly alone here as we’ve seen a number of upstarts like AppDynamics or Bluestripe (typically formed by veterans of Wiley and HP/Mercury), burrowing down into the space of instrumenting transactions from hop to hop. Transaction monitoring and optimization will become the next battleground of application performance management, and it is one that IBM, BMC, CA, HP, and Compuware are hardly likely to passively watch from the sidelines.
As for whether runtime SOA governance demands a Switzerland-style independent vendor approach, that leaves it up to the last one standing, SOA Software, to fight the good fight. Until now, AmberPoint and SOA Software have competed for the affections of Microsoft; AmberPoint has offered an Express web services monitoring product that is a free plug-in for Visual Studio (a version is also available for Java); SOA Software offers extensive .NET versions of its service policy, portfolio, repository, and service manager offerings.
Nonetheless, although AmberPoint isn’t saying anything outright about the WebLogic share of its 300-customer installed base, that platform was first among equals when it came to R&D investment and presence. BEA previously OEM’ed the AmberPoint management platform, an arrangement that Oracle ironically discontinued; well in this case, the story ends happily ever after. As for SOA Software, we would be surprised if this deal didn’t push it into closer embrace with Microsoft.
Postscript: Thanks to Ann Thomas Manes for updating me on AmberPoint’s alliances. They are/were with SAP, Tibco, and HP, in addition to Microsoft. Their Software AG relationship has faded in recent years.
Of course all this M&A rearranges the dance floor in interesting ways. Oracle currently OEMs HP’s Systinet as its SOA registry, an arrangement that might get awkward now that Oracle’s getting into the hardware business. That will place into question virtually all of AmberPoint’s relationships.
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02.04.10
Posted in Business Intelligence, Data Management, Database, SOA & Web Services at 7:48 pm by Tony Baer
OK, we’ve gotten off the horn with Sybase. It’s obvious that for now, the deal simply formalizes the partnership that both companies (actually all three if you also count Coral8) already had in place around Sybase’s RAP platform. On one hand, Sybase has little work to do because the products in question already integrate with its offerings, but still has lots of work cut out in rationalizing the Aleri stack. At this point, Sybase has not yet thought about the broader synergies with its BI offerings, but as we state below, it is not simply about integrating products. It is about positioning BI as a broader portfolio that ranges from static, historical trend analysis to operational intelligence and feed-forward predictive analytics. You may not use the same tools or techniques, but in each case you are looking to synthesize insight based on transforming data (as opposed to querying databases).
But it also brings back the debate over whether CEP and BI are converging or different creatures. A few months ago, Streambase CTO Richard Tibbets responded to a Twitter discussion that involved us, stating that CEP and BI are different paradigms: BI infers the need for a human to make decisions, whereas CEP is about real-time data transformation. Our contention is that it’s about ends, not the means. So, true, CEP is not simply fast BI. It’s a different form, which we’d characterize as adaptive closed-loop intelligence that is event-driven. Your systems analyze torrents of data to make discoveries, and based on those discoveries, identify a set of events and apply policies to act on them. In turn you can apply good old-fashioned BI to determine if your system is looking for the right events or applying the right policies. Or you can use parsing of those streams to predict what will happen. That’s still BI because the action comes on analyzing and transforming data, but it’s not your father’s BI.
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Posted in BPM, Business Intelligence, Data Management, Database, Enterprise Applications, Middleware, SOA & Web Services at 5:21 pm by Tony Baer
Consolidation in the software business is like the force of gravity. Although there will always be best of breed solutions, ultimately as a particular solution space matures, it doesn’t do so in isolation. No technology is an island.
But of course, there’s always been the question, what to do about Complex Event processing (CEP)? Obviously, only a dropout from marketing could have ever dreamt up a product name whose emphatic message is, “this product is too difficult for you.” (Actually the name just evolved out of academic research.)
Research from our day job at Ovum revealed that there is no single set of use cases, but instead that there are uses for event processing that differ based on complexity of the event or the latency at which events must be processed.
The technology itself is not new – financial services firms have used their own routines to drive algorithmic trading or couch risk for years. What’s new – as in new during the past 10 years – is that a commercial software market has evolved out of it. But the market has struggled because of a number of factors that start with the question, “What is CEP or whatever you call it?
For now we won’t get hung up on names. Let’s stick with Whatever Event Processing, and invent a new TLA: WEP II, so as to distinguish it from Wireless Encryption Protocol. OK, we’re just joking. Suffice it to say that we are talking about a technology that parses out events that would not otherwise be human perceptible that can be translate into actionable intelligence.
Nonetheless, whatever you call it – complex event processing, business event processing, or just plain event processing – is a technology that was never meant to stand alone. There is logical synergy with business process management, as processes can trigger a chain of events or vice versa. There is a similar symbiosis with rules processing – you can use rules to parse and identify unique chains of events, or unique chains of events that are identified can trigger response through rules or policy management. And of course there is a synergy with SOA, as event processing can be exposed as a service that may be consumed by other applications.
But what became clear to us was that the very act of parsing and analyzing event streams, whether through time-based SQL approaches or through rules processing for identifying specific occurrences that must be dealt with, is a prime example of business intelligence. This form of BI does not replace other established uses, ranging from look-back historical analysis to quasi-real time BI where data warehouses or data marts are trickle fed data to keep them almost current. Instead, parsing events as they occur can provide a snapshot of what is occurring now, and form the basis for feed-forward predictive analytics.
Streambase will vehemently disagree with us, but the days of the standalone CEP vendor are over. More specifically, there is room for maybe one or two strong independents – just as players like Informatica and Teradata have survived as independent players. (But as Seth Grimes has pointed out, that also leaves Teradata currently standing by the wall at a party without a CEP date.)
So our first take on Sybase’s acquisition of Aleri is just that – an inevitable act of industry consolidation. Just as Informatica recently swept up Agent Logic, initially to boost its U.S. federal business. Both Sybase and Aleri have already been on first dates, with a 2-year old where Sybase integrated Aleri’s event processing engine as an input to its RAP trading platform. But secondly, the potential BI connection hasn’t escaped us. Sybase could add the Aleri technology – actually there are three of them, which translates to a lot of migration and consolidation. More to the point, when “Sybaleri” grows up, it could offer event processing to its BI portfolio as a piece of look-forward technology.
As (almost) the last man standing, Streambase is having its fun, offering an “amnesty” to Sybaleri customers. When we inquired whether Sybaleri customers were criminals, Streambase CEO Mark Palmer jokingly reassured us that they were just “misguided souls.”
We’ll be speaking with Sybase and Streambase later this afternoon and may update this post later.
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01.27.10
Posted in Application Development, Cloud, Data Management, Database, Enterprise Applications, Java, Linux, Middleware, OS/Platforms, Rich Internet Apps., SOA & Web Services, Web 2.0 Apps at 5:58 pm by Tony Baer
In an otherwise pretty packed news day, we’d like to echo @mdl4’s sentiments about the respective importance of Apple’s and Oracle’s announcements: “Oracle finalized its purchase of Sun. Best thing to happen to Sun since Java. Also: I don’t give a sh#t about the iPad. I said it.”
There’s little new in observing that on the platform side, that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun is a means for turning the clock back to the days of turnkey systems in a post-appliance era. History truly has come full circle as Oracle in its original database incarnation was one of the prime forces that helped decouple software from hardware. Fast forward to the present, and customers are tired of complexity and just want things that work. Actually, that idea was responsible for the emergence of specialized appliances over the past decade for performing tasks ranging from SSL encryption/decryption to XML processing, firewalls, email, or specialized web databases.
The implication here is that the concept is elevated to enterprise level; instead of a specialized appliance, it’s your core instance of Oracle databases, middleware, or applications. And even there, it’s but a logical step forward from Oracle’s past practice of certifying specific configurations of its database on Sun (Sun was, and now has become again, Oracle’s reference development platform). That’s in essence the argument for Oracle to latch onto a processor architecture that is overmatched in investment by Intel for the x86 line. The argument could be raised than in an era of growing interest in cloud, as to whether Oracle is fighting the last war. That would be the case – except for the certainty that your data center has just as much chance of dying as your mainframe.
At the end of the day, it’s inevitably a question of second source. Dana Gardner opines that Oracle will replace Microsoft as the hedge to IBM. Gordon Haff contends that alternate platform sources are balkanizing as Cisco/EMC/VMware butts their virtualized x86 head into the picture and customers look to private clouds the way they once idealized grids.
The highlight for us was what happens to Sun’s Java portfolio, and as it turns out, the results are not far from what we anticipated last spring: Oracle’s products remain the flagship offerings. From looking at respective market shares, it would be pretty crazy for Oracle to have done otherwise
The general theme was that – yes – Sun’s portfolio will remain the “reference” technologies for the JCP standards, but that these are really only toys that developers should play with. When they get serious, they’re going to keep using WebLogic, not Glassfish. Ditto for:
• Java software development. You can play around with NetBeans, which Oracle’s middleware chief Thomas Kurian characterized as a “lightweight development environment,” but again, if you really want to develop enterprise-ready apps for the Oracle platform, you will still use JDeveloper, which of course is written for Oracle’s umbrella ADF framework that underlies its database, middleware, and applications offerings. That’s identical to Oracle’s existing posture with the old (mostly) BEA portfolio of Eclipse developer tools. Actually, the only thing that surprised us was that Oracle didn’t simply take NetBeans and set it free – as in donating it to Apache or some more obscure open source body.
• SOA, where Oracle’s SOA Suite remains front and center while Sun’s offerings go on maintenance.
We’re also not surprised as to the prominent role of JavaFX in Oracle’s RIA plans; it fills a vacuum created when Oracle terminated BEA’s former arrangement to bundle Adobe Flash/Flex development tooling. In actuality, Oracle has become RIA agnostic, as ADF could support any of the frameworks for client display, but JavaFX provides a technology that Oracle can call its own.
There were some interesting distinctions with identity management and access, where Sun inherited some formidable technologies that, believe it or not, originated with Netscape. Oracle Identity management will grab some provisioning technology from the Sun stack, but otherwise Oracle’s suite will remain the core attraction. But Sun’s identity and access management won’t be put out to pasture, as it will be promoted for midsized web installations.
There are much bigger pieces to Oracle’s announcements, but we’ll finish with what becomes of MySQL. In short there’s nothing surprising to the announcement that MySQL will be maintained in a separate open source business unit – the EU would not have allowed otherwise. But we’ve never bought into the story that Oracle would kill MySQL. Both databases aim at different markets. Just about the only difference that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL makes – besides reuniting it under the same corporate umbrella as the InnoDB data store – is that, well, like yeah, MySQL won’t morph into an enterprise database. Then again, even if MySQL had remained independent, that arguably it was never going to evolve to the same class of Oracle as the product would lose its beloved simplicity.
The more relevant question for MySQL is whether Oracle will fork development to favor Solaris on SPARC. This being open source, there would be nothing stopping the community from taking the law into its own hands.
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01.11.10
Posted in BPM, Enterprise Integration, Java, Middleware, SOA & Web Services at 12:36 pm by Tony Baer
Is it more than coincidence that acquisitions tend to come in waves? Just weeks after IBM’s announcement to snap up Lombardi just before Christmas, Progress responds with agreement to put Savvion out of its misery? In such a small space that is undergoing active consolidation, it is hard not to know who’s in play.
Nonetheless, Progress’s acquisition confirms that BPM’s pure play days are numbered, if you expect executable BPM.
The traditional appeal of BPM was that it was a business stakeholder-friendly approach to developing solutions that didn’t rely on IT programmatic logic. The mythology around BPM pure-plays was that these were business user, not IT-driven software buys. In actuality, they simply used a different language or notation: process models with organizational and workflow-oriented semantics as opposed to programmatic execution language. That stood up only as long as you used BPM to model your processes, not automate them.
Consequently, it is not simply the usual issues of vendor size and viability that are driving IT stack vendors to buy up BPM pure plays. It is that, but more importantly, if you want your BPM tool to become more than documentware or shelfware, you need a solution with a real runtime. And that means you need IT front and center, and the stack people right behind it. Even with emergence of BPMN 2.0, which adds support for executables, the cold hard facts are that anytime, anything executes in software, IT must be front and center. So much for bypassing IT.
Progress’s $49 million offer for is a great exit strategy for Savvion. The company, although profitable, has grown very slowly over its 15 years. Even assuming the offer was at a 1.5x multiple, Savvion’s extremely low 7-figure business is not exactly something that a large global enterprise could gain confidence in. Savvion was in a challenging segment: a tiny player contending for enterprise, not departmental BPM engagements. If you are a large enterprise, would you stake your enterprise BPM strategy on a slow-growing players whose revenues are barely north of $10 million? It wasn’t a question of whether, but when Savvion would be acquired.
Of course that leads us to the question as to why Progress couldn’t get its hands on Savvion in time to profit from Savvion’s year-end deals. It certainly would have been more accretive to Progress’ bottom line had they completed this deal three months ago (long enough not to disrupt the end of year sales pipeline).
Nonetheless, Savvion adds a key missing piece for Progress’s Apama events processing strategy (you can read Progress/ApamaCTO John Bates’ rationale here). There is a symbiotic relationship between event processing and business process execution; you can have events trigger business processes or vice versa. There is some alignment with the vertical industry templates that both have been developing, especially for financial services and telcos, which are the core bastions (along with logistics) for EP. And with the Sonic ESB, Progress has a pipeline for ferrying events.
In the long run, there could also be a legacy renewal play by using the Savvion technology to expose functionality for Progress OpenEdge or DataDirect customers, but wisely, that is now a back burner item for Progress which is not the size of IBM or Oracle, and therefore needs to focus its resources.
Although Progress does not call itself a stack player, it is evolving de facto stacks in capital markets, telcos, and logistics.
Event processing, a.k.a., Complex Events Processing (CEP, a forbidding label) or Business Events Processing (a friendlier label that actually doesn’t mean much) is still an early adopter market. In essence, this market fulfills a niche were events are not human detectable and require some form of logic to identify and then act upon. The market itself is not new; capital markets have developed homegrown event processing algorithms for years. What’s new (as in, what’s new in the last decade) is that this market has started to become productized. More recently, SQL-based approaches have emerged to spread high-end event processing to a larger audience.
Acquiring Savvion ups the stakes with Tibco, which also has a similar pairing of technologies in its portfolio. Given ongoing consolidation, that leaves Pegasystems, Appian, Active Endpoints, plus several open source niche pure plays still standing. Like Savvion, Pega is also an enterprise company, but it is a public company with roughly 10x revenues which as still managed to grow in the 25% range in spite of the recession. While in one way, it might make a good fit with SAP (both have their own, entrenched, proprietary languages), Pega is stubbornly independent and SAP acquisition-averse. Pega might be a fit with one of the emerging platform stack players like EMC or Cisco. On second thought, the latter would be a much more logical target for web-based Appian or even Active Endpoints, both still venture-funded, but also promising growth players that at some point will get swept up.
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12.16.09
Posted in Application Development, BPM, Cloud, Enterprise Integration, Middleware, SOA & Web Services at 12:14 pm by Tony Baer
This has been quite a busy day, having seen IBM’s announcement come over the wire barely after the alarm went off. Lombardi has always been the little BPM company that could. In contrast to rivals like Pegasystems, which has a very complex, rule-driven approach, Lombardi’s approach has always been characterized by simplicity. In that sense, its approach mimicked that of Fuego before it was acquired by BEA, which of course was eventually swallowed up by Oracle.
We’d echo Sandy Kemsley’s thoughts of letdown about hopes for Lombardi IPO. But even had the IPO been done, that would have postponed the inevitable. We agree with her that if IBM is doing this acquisition anyway, it makes sense to make Lombardi a first class citizen within the WebSphere unit.
Not surprisingly, IBM is viewing Lombardi for its simplicity. At first glance, it appears that Lombardi Teamworks, their flagship product, overlaps WebSphere BPM. Look under the hood, and WebSphere BPM is not a single engine, but the product of several acquisitions and internal development, including the document-oriented processes of FileNet and the application integration processes from Crossworlds. So in fact Lombardi is another leg of the stool, and one that is considerably simpler than what IBM already has. In fact, this is vey similar to how Oracle has positioned the old Fuego product alongside its enterprise BPM offering which is build around IDS Scheer’s ARIS modeling language and tooling.
IBM’s strategy is that Lombardi provides a good way to open the BPM discussion at department level. But significantly on the call, IBM stated that once the customer wants to scale up, that it would move the discussion to its existing enterprise-scale BPM technology. It provided an example of a joint engagement at Ford -– where Lombardi works with the engineering department while IBM works at the B2B trading partner integration level, as an example of how the two pieces would be positioned going forward.
James Governor of RedMonk had a very interesting suggestion that IBM could leverage the Lombardi technologies atop some of its Lotus collaboration tools. We also see good potential synergies with the vertical industry frameworks as well.
The challenge for IBM is preserving the simplicity of Lombardi products, which tend to be more department oriented bottom-up, vs. the IBM offerings that are enterprise-scale and top-down. Craig Hayman, general manager of the application and integration middleware (WebSphere) division, admitted on the announcement call that IBM has “struggled” in departmental, human-centric applications. In part that is due to IBM’s top-down enterprise focus, and also the fact that all too often, IBM’s software is known more for richness than ease of use.
A good barometer of how IBM handles the Lombardi integration will be reflected on how it handles Lombardi Blueprint and IBM WebSphere BlueWorks BPM. Blueprint is a wonderfully simple process definition hosted service while BlueWorks is also hosted, but is far more complex with heavy strains of social computing. We have tried Blueprint and found it to be a very straightforward offering that simply codifies your processes, generating Word or PowerPoint documentation, and BPMN models. The cool thing is that if you use it only for documentation, you have gotten good value out of it – and in fact roughly 80% of Blueprint customers simply use it for that. On the call, Hayman said that IBM plans to converge both products. Thats a logical move. But please, please, please, don’t screw up the simplicity of Blueprint. If necessary, make it a stripped down face of BlueWorks.
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11.09.09
Posted in .NET, Application Development, Java, SOA & Web Services at 9:53 pm by Tony Baer
Application platforms are often like chunks of private real estate. If you have some sort of relationship, you are invited in. If you want to go next door, you will probably have to go back onto the street before ringing the neighbor’s doorbell because, unless you are very familiar with the people you are visiting, they will probably not let you cut directly through the back yard to the neighbors place. Chances are there will be some sort of fence, natural barrier, or No Trespassing sign in the way.
It’s the same with application platforms. If you are a Java developer and are working with a Java-based web application, you might be treated as part of the family. Of course it depends on whether you are writing against a compatible back end that uses the same transaction and persistence models. If that’s the case, you could figuratively cut through the backyard and not have to go back out to the street. If not, you might as well be writing against .NET or other platform, meaning you could not write to it directly.
If you are writing a complex, highly distributed, transactional web application, you will probably have to treat each Java or .NET instance as independent transaction systems that will each require their own housekeeping when it comes to running an application. That is, if System A works fine but System B crashes, you will have to treat each as self-contained systems; you would not be able to roll System A back if B crashed.
In highly complex transactional environments, there are good reasons to different zones autonomous to avoid single points of failure. But depending on the application, there are equally if not more compelling reasons to treat them as a virtual single entity. Until now, the most effective way of doing so was through dropping to neutral, loosely coupled architectures such as SOA, which are theoretically supposed to enable the dynamic chaining of independent entities through elf contained services transactions that manage themselves. Or you could have taken your chance writing your own transactional logic, but that’s a pretty klugey approach that gets awfully brittle each time some piece of code or underlying platform changes.
JNBridge has just introduced a more traditionally tightly coupled option, which lets you write a Java application against a .NET source so that if one goes down, it roll back the other so the systems are not out of sync. An evolutionary development in the progression of Java-.NET interoperability, JNBridge’s feature will be useful for exceptional situations where you have heterogeneous systems that must be tightly coupled.
In the end, the decision to use SOA or a directly bridge using the JNBridge approach boils down to the architectural argument of whether it makes more sense to write tightly or loosely coupled systems. JNBridge CTO Wayne Citrin makes an interesting argument over the topic. Tightly coupled have their benefits, especially if the logic is relatively static, and performance requirements are strict. Otherwise a loosely coupled approach becomes the better option if either of the moving parts are likely to evolve independently and/or have the potential for reuse. At least JNBridge now gives you the choice in a scenario where No Trespassing signs were traditionally the rule.
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10.15.09
Posted in BPM, Business Intelligence, Database, Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Integration, Java, Middleware, Rich Internet Apps., SOA & Web Services, Supply Chain Management at 1:22 am by Tony Baer
Sorry for the pathetic rhyme, but we waited bloody long enough for the privilege of writing it. Like almost every attendee at just-concluded Oracle OpenWorld, the suspense on when Oracle would finally lift the wraps on Fusion Apps was palpable. Staying cool with minimizing our carbon footprint, we weren’t physically at Moscone, but instead watching the webcasts and monitoring the Twitter stream from our home office.
The level of anticipation over Fusion apps was palpable. But it was hardly suspense as it seemed that a good cross-section of Twitterati were either analysts, reference customers, consultants or other business partners who have had their NDA sneak peaks (we had ours back in June), but had to keep our lips sealed until last night.
There was also plenty of impatience for Oracle to finally get on with a message that was being drowned out by its sudden obsession with hardware. Ellison spent most of his keynote time pumping up its Exadata cache memory database storage appliance and issuing a $10 million challenge to IBM that it can’t match Oracle’s database benchmarks on Sun. Yup, if the Sun acquisition goes trough, Oracle’s no longer strictly a software company, and although the Twiterati counted its share of big iron groupies, the predominant mood was that hardware was a distraction. “This conference has been hardware heavy from the start. Odd for a software conference,” tweeted Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman. “90 minutes into the keynote, nothing yet on Fusion apps,” “Larry clearly stalling with all this compression mumbo jumbo,” “Larry please hurry up and tell the world about Fusion Apps, fed up of saying YES it does exist to your skeptics,” and so on read the Twitter stream. There was fear that Oracle would simply tease us in a manner akin to Jon Stewart’s we’ll have to leave it there dig at CNN: “I am afraid that Larry soon will tell that as time has run out he will tell about Fusion applications in next OOW.” A 20-minute rousing speech from governor Arnold Schwarzenegger served as a welcome relief from Ellison’s newly found affection for big iron toys.
Ellison came back after the guvernator pleaded with the audience to stick around awhile and drop some change around California as the state is broke. The break gave him the chance to drift over to Oracle Enterprise Manager, which at least got the conversation off hardware. Ellison described some evolutionary enhancements where Oracle can track your configurations trough Enterprise Manager and automatically manage patching. As we’ve noted previously, Oracle has compelling solutions for all-Oracle environments, among them being a declarative framework for developing apps and specifying what to monitor and auto-patch.
But the spiel on Enterprise Manager provided a useful back door to the main topic, as Ellison showed how it could automate management of the next generation of Oracle apps. Ellison got the audience’s attention with the words, “We are code complete for all of this.”
Well almost everything. Oracle has completed work on all modules except manufacturing.
Ellison then gave a demo that was quite similar to one that we saw under NDA back in the summer. While ERP emerged with and was designed for client/server architectures, Fusion has emerged with a full Java EE and SOA architecture; it is built around Oracle Fusion middleware 11g and uses Oracle BPEL Process Manager to run processes as orchestrations of processes exposed from the Fusion apps or other legacy applications. That makes the architecture of Fusion Apps clean and flexible.
It uses SOA to loosely couple, rather than tightly integrate with other Fusion processes or processes exposed by existing back end applications, which should make Fusion apps more pliant and less prone to outage. That allows workflows in Fusion to be dynamic and flexible. If an order in the supply chain is held up, the process can be dynamically changed without bringing down order fulfillment processes for orders that are working correctly. It also allows Oracle to embed business intelligence throughout the suite, so that you don’t have to leave the application to perform analytics. For instance, in an HR process used for locating the right person for a job, you can dig up an employee’s salary history, and instead switching to a separate dashboard, you can instead retrieve and display relevant pieces of information necessary to see comparisons and make a decision.
Fusion’s SOA architecture also allows Oracle to abstract security and access control by relying on its separate, Fusion middleware-based Identity Manager product. The same goes with communications, where instant messaging systems can be pulled in (we didn’t see any integration with Wikis or other Web 2.0 social computing mechanisms, but we assume that they can be integrated as services.). It also applies to user interfaces, where you can use different rich internet clients by taking advantage of Oracle’s ADF framework in JDeveloper.
Oracle concedes the obvious: outside of the midmarket, there is no Greenfield market for ERP, and therefore, Fusion Apps are intended to supplement what you already have, not necessarily replace it. That includes Oracle’s existing applications, for which it currently promises at least a decade of more support. But at this point, Oracle is not being any more specific about rollout other than to say it would happen sometime next year.
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10.08.09
Posted in .NET, Application Development, Cloud, Data Management, Database, Java, SaaS (Software as a Service) at 5:44 pm by Tony Baer
Developers are a mighty stubborn bunch. Unlike the rest of the enterprise IT market, where a convergence of forces have favored a nobody gets fired for buying IBM, Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft, developers have no such herding instincts. Developers do not always get with the [enterprise] program.
For evidence, recall what happened the last time that the development market faced such consolidation. In the wake of web 1.0, the formerly fragmented development market – which used to revolve around dozens of languages and frameworks – congealed down to Java vs .NET camps. That was so 2002, however, as in the interim, developers have gravitated towards choosing their own alternatives.
The result was an explosion of what former Burton Group analyst Richard Monson Haefel termed the Rebel Frameworks (that was back in 2004), and more recently in the resurgence of scripting languages. In essence, developers didn’t take the future as inevitable, and for good reason: the so-called future of development circa 2002 was built on the assumption that everyone would gravitate to enterprise-class frameworks. Java and .NET were engineered on the assumption that the future of enterprise and Internet computing would be based on complex, multitier distributed transactional systems. It was accompanied by a growing risk-averseness: buy only from vendors that you expect will remain viable. Not surprisingly, enterprise computing procurements narrowed to IOSM (IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft).
But the developer community lives to a different dynamic. In an age of open source, expertise for development frameworks and languages get dispersed; vendor viability becomes less of a concern. More importantly, developers only want to get the job done, and anyway, the tasks that they perform typically fall under the enterprise radar. Whereas a CFO may be concerned over the approach an ERP system may employ to managing financial system or supply chain processes, they are not going to care about development languages or frameworks.
The result is that developers remain independent minded, and that independence accounts for the popularity of alternatives to enterprise development platforms, with Ruby on Rails being the latest to enter the spotlight.
In one sense, Ruby’s path to prominence parallels Java in that the language was originally invented for another purpose. But there the similarity ends as, in Ruby’s case, no corporate entity really owned it. Ruby is a simple scripting language that became a viable alternative for web developers once David Heinemeier Hansson invented the Rails framework. The good news, Rails makes it easy to use Ruby to write relatively simple web database applications. Examples of Rails’ simplicity include:
• Eliminating the need to write configuration files for mapping requests to actions
• Avoiding multi-threading issues because Rails will not pool controller (logic) instances
• Dispensing with object-relational mapping files; instead, Rails automates much of this and tends to use very simplified naming conventions.
The bad news is that there are performance limitations and difficulties in handling more complex distributed transaction applications. But the good news is that when it comes to web apps, the vast majority are quite rudimentary, thank you.
The result has propelled a wave of alternative stacks, such as LAMP (Linux-Apache web server-MySQL-and either PHP, Python, or Perl) or, more recently, Ruby on Rails. At the other end of the spectrum, the Spring framework takes the same principle – simplification – to ease the pain of writing complex Java EE applications – but that’s not the segment addressed by PHP, MySQL, or Ruby on Rails. It reinforces the fact that, unlike the rest of the enterprise software market, developers don’t necessarily take orders from up top. Nobody told them to implement these alternative frameworks and languages.
The latest reminder of the strength of grassroots markets in the developer sector is Engine Yard’s securing of $19 million in C funding. The backing comes from some of the same players that also funded SpringSource (which was recently acquired by VMware). Some of the backing also comes from Amazon, whose Jeff Bezos owns outright 37Signals, the Chicago-based provider of project management software that employs Heinemeier Hansson. For the record, there is plenty of RoR presence in Amazon Web Services.
Engine Yard is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider that has optimized the RoR stack for runtime. Although hardly the only cloud provider out there that supports RoR development, Engine Yard’s business is currently on a 2x growth streak. Funding stages the company either for IPO or buy out.
At this point the script sounds similar to SpringSource which, of course, just got acquired by VMware, and is launching a development and runtime cloud that will eventually become VMware’s Java counterpart to Microsoft Azure. It’s tempting to wonder whether a similar path will become reality for Engine Yard. The answer is that the question itself is too narrow. It is inevitable that a development and runtime cloud paired with enterprise plumbing (e.g., OS, hypervisor) will materialize for Ruby on Rails. With its $19 million funding, Engine Yard has the chance to gain critical mass mindshare in the RoR community – but don’t rule out rivals like Joyent yet.
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10.05.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:59 am by Tony Baer
OK, for a change we’re not going to talk about IT.
It was quite a month, three trips mashed into one. A family trip out to the west coast to celebrate mother’s 94th birthday morphs into a business trip, visiting clients and prospects throughout Asia/Pacific. Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Australia. Economies in various states of maturity. Asian sense of organization – there are lots of people, for which infrastructure and systems were well designed to handle. You get food And drinks, even on 1-hour commuter flights. No delays – well, except for the Hong Kong – Singapore leg which was on United (the power went out just before we were supposed to push back from the gate).
As for the third trip, when this whole thing was booked last spring, the recession was in its nadir and Quantas direct flights between New York & Sydney were dirt cheap. With the logic of when the heck else would we ever find ourselves out there, we tacked on about 10 -1 12 days and made the last part a family trip.
A few highlights. Arriving in Australia after a red eye from “Asia” was a bit anticlimactic; you go most of the way around the world, traversing exotic cultures and cities, only to find out that you’re practically back “home” in a western nation. Call it Canada with a better climate and a sense of humor. Nothing exotic except for the flora and fauna. A prosperous country that doesn’t realize how good it has. A country with the land mass and natural resources (except water) on par with the states, but with only about 5 – 10% of the population. No wonder they’ve already figured out how to do national health care; Oz (Australia) can easily afford it.
Australia is a prosperous country with the optimism that there are better days ahead, mate. When things are going well and you don’t have to worry about freezing your as off, it’s easy to laugh about life’s absurdities. Australians are happy to be in Australia.
Cut to the chase. The most surprising place was our first stop in Asia. We spent nearly 4 days in Seoul. Until now, the closest we got was Little Korea, the block of West 32nd Street between 5th and 6th (just below the Empire State Bldg.).
Of all the places we visited in Asia, Korea was the one where the least English is spoken. That’s in spite of the US historical presence (which made South Korea, and its economic miracle, possible), and the fact that most of the signs are in English as well as the local language. Korea is off the beaten track for westerners, and as a tourist destination, draws Asians to its flea markets. On its present course, however, Korea isn’t going to be such a shopper’s bargain forever.
Korea is A Tale of Two Cities, err… countries. It’s the golden age for the South, while it continues to be the Dark Ages up north; a glance at a nighttime map of the world clearly demarcates the boundaries of North Korea. Seoul (which is promoted as The Soul of Asia, as if anybody could understand what that really means) is barely 30 miles from the DMZ, but you’d never know it. In fact the 8-lane airport freeway ends abruptly in the northern suburbs; where the airport bus got off was barely even half the distance from the frontier. The freeway’s abrupt end also signifies that the country seems like it’s still under construction – sort of the throwback to the US in the 60s. Save that thought.
Back to the golden age, South Korea is booming – they’ve hardly been touched by the global recession. If you’re looking for a better indicator close to home, forget the ma and pa shops of Little Korea, head to the Samsung showroom at Time Warner Center in New York. Inside Manhatttan’s premier upscale shopping mall, Samsung has a store that sells nothing but image. You can’t buy anything at The Samsung Experience, but you can gape at all the cool 100-inch flat screens and multi-function mobile devices. A few years back, Samsung was a second tier consumer electronics supplier whose products were primarily found in off price stores. They made their strategic thrust in LCD, while Sony, the previous high end TV brand, was caught napping. Today, Samsung, not Sony, supplies the panels for Sony’s Bravia flat panels in addition to their own brand. Along with Sharp (Aquos), Samsung has cornered the high end of the flat panel market.
Samsung is a parable of the Korean economy. They are positioning themselves as the higher quality alternative to China in manufacturing. That has fueled a boom that is now manifested in the Seoul metro area, which has become one of the world’s largest construction sites.
Back to the US in the 60s thought; we were building the modern infrastructure that is now, after years of disinvestment, falling apart. Case in point: the DC Metro. When it was built in the 70s, it was considered a state of the art transit system. Decades of disinvestment later, the Metro was the site of the nation’s worst transit accident since the Malbone Street wreck in Brooklyn, dating back to World War I.
Back to Korea, the question is what happens when the construction is finally completed? Korea has a bumper crop of university graduates who are aspiring for more in life beyond an office salary. Like Japan, or India’s offshore developers, their expectations are being inflated as they join the global economy. Salary levels are going to rise. The manufacturing base will get challenged by the next country that introduces new crops of engineers to the global market at an earlier point in their development. Korean needs to learn from its age-old nemesis Japan, which has never fully recovered from the inflation born of rising income from exports, that in turn fueled a real estate spiral that careened out of control. If Korea is to claim its position at the higher end of the value chain, it will have to evolve beyond manufacturing (where there will be new competition) and construction (which will flatten out once the country or metro areas have built themselves out).
Hopefully Korea can also learn from its own history. Go to Changdeokgung Palace, the palace of palaces among Korea’s royalty. The place, designed in harmony with its natural surroundings, was built in the 15th century, was regularly burnt down by invaders and rebuilt roughly every 150 – 200 years, through the present.
The common thread is resiliency; through most of its history, Korea has either been fighting or been conquered by bigger guys in the neighborhood, principally Japan, China, and after the Second World War, the Soviet Union.
So today is truly a golden age in Korean history. They have never been so prosperous or seemingly secure. North Korea could be an exurb of Seoul, but South Koreans don’t take North Korea seriously – a lot of that is denial. With the wealth so conspicuous, it’s hard to think about the what-ifs. But today the world is buying Korean (Koreans are furiously buying American at Costco but that’s another story). Tomorrow South Korea will have to reinvent itself to go higher in the food chain if it is to preserve its newly won wealth. Just like the Japanese could not play the global economy on their own terms forever.
The day of reckoning will come when North Korea implodes. It’s not a question if, but when. And that’s where you’ll see movement in the world’s political geotectonic plates.
At some point it will be in China’s interest to seek a Grand Bargain. China doesn’t care who runs the north, and in fact, the nuclear nonsense is probably not in China’s best interest. China doesn’t want North Korea to disintegrate because of the huge refugee problem and unrest that it might cause in China’s northern provinces, not to mention causing a drain on its economic development. Consequently, North Korea is not the pawn of Russia and China that Iran is. North Korea lacks useful resources (oil) and a unique strategic position that could knock the west off balance.
There a solution to the North Korea problem, but unfortunately it is one that reflects American weakness. U.S. power and influence are waning; China holds most of our debt, and for China, the U.S. is too big to fail. As an export-oriented economy, South Korea is going to get to a crossroads where it must decide where its political and economic security best lie. Given current trends, we wouldn’t be surprised if at some point China offers South Korea a Grand Bargain – acknowledge China’s sphere of influence, and get the North back.
That of course would be a continuation of old history. Korea has never been big enough to survive on its own; it has either been conquered or operated as a protectorate. It’s too small and in too rough a neighborhood to stand alone. South Korea has operated under the U.S. protection umbrella since the Second World War; it’s not inconceivable if at some point its allegiance would shift to China, especially if that would get the Northern regime out of the way.
We’ll make one more prediction. Should the Koreas reunify, it would make the German counterpart look like child’s play. West Germany inherited a nation that had the highest standard of living in the former eastern block. Yet the cost of integrating the former eastern zone into the western economic and political system has drained the country. On the other hand, South Korea would be inheriting a region that ranks with Africa as one of the worlds basket cases. No matter how rich the south is, it will be up to its eyeballs civilizing the north.
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