10.15.03
Posted in Data Management, IT Infrastructure, Storage at 12:33 am by Tony Baer
Just like Moore’s law in processors, storage continues to get denser and cheaper. While a gigabyte-size storage appliance would have cost about $50,000 in 1980, today a handheld 60-Gbyte drive can be ordered for $200 or less.
Not surprisingly, companies are buying more storage and spending less. According to IDC, in Q2 2003, worldwide shipments totaled 180 petabytes, a 36% increase in raw capacity, but a 4% revenue decrease over the same period last year. Businesses are piling up more transaction, business intelligence, and unstructured (e.g., documents) data, at a faster rate, than ever before.
But as companies accumulate data, they are spending even more on managing it. Gartner predicts that the storage resource management market will grow at a 24% annual clip through 2007.
And that’s why EMC has pushed the Information Life Cycle, a strategy to migrate the company from hardware to solutions provider. Over the past 90 days or so, it has bought two software companies to do just that: Legato, a Veritas wannabee in storage management, and just yesterday, Documentum, one of the largest players in document management.
The Documentum deal grabs our attention because this gets EMC beyond its pure infrastructure niche. Aside from hierarchical storage management (HSM) tools, the relationship between data value and storage management has been ephemeral at best. While business units have typically bought document management solutions, storage management has been the domain of the data center. Consequently, business folks keep buying enterprise applications with little if any idea on what it will cost to store all that data, while the IT folks end up buying solutions reacting to the data access bottlenecks that result.
As with any IT initiative these days, the ideal is getting the business and technology sides of the house on the same page, so both understand the true cost of ownership. Conceivably, with Documentum part of EMC, quantifying the total costs of managing more content should become more straightforward. At least, that’s the goal.
Nonetheless, EMC will face a missionary sell because of the different target buyer demographics. Not surprisingly, EMC plans to continue operating its two software acquisitions as separate business units — and if it continues to do so, both will simply amount to what the consumer goods industry characterizes as “brand line extensions.” EMC’s real challenge, however, is to forge a new target market that finally breaks the blood-brain barrier separating the data center from the rest of the enterprise.
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10.14.03
Posted in Enterprise Integration, SOA & Web Services at 12:32 am by Tony Baer
Cutting against conventional wisdom, in the technology field, it often pays to reinvent yourself when your technology base grows moldy. It’s a principle that Digital never learned, IBM learned the hard way, and Sun is still trying to learn.
And so it is with enterprise application integration (EAI), a sector that has strived to productize systems integration through middleware. Although offering vendor support has been a notable improvement for an activity that has long been the black hole of IT, integration (even with EAI tools) remains costly and time-consuming.
Just over a month back, we threw around the premise that SOAs (Services-Oriented Architectures) could simplify systems integration. To recap: Unlike conventional approaches, which involve hard-coding point-to-point links, SOAs eliminate the need to specify exactly which system must perform the requested business function. That means (1) making integration requests is much simpler, and (2) integration links don’t break every time some underlying system changes.
So, we took note of webMethods’ announcement yesterday that it was acquiring three software companies for the grand sum of $32 million (how times have changed). More importantly, webMethods will use the acquisitions to migrate its proprietary integration platform to an architecture based on web services standards. In case we didn’t get the message, Graham Glass, head of one of the acquired companies (which created a web services development and deployment environment), will now be CTO of webMethods.
This is a preemptory strike against major rivals Tibco and IBM, and a warning shot to challengers like BEA, whose integration offering relies on constructs that the company is still trying to push through the Java mainstream. The downside? By embracing web services, webMethods might find itself in a more commoditized market with lower budget rivals offering lighter weight solutions.
WebMethods’ move is a message for the future. With EAI largely confined to large organizations that can afford 6-7 figure projects, we don’t expect anybody to yank out competing EAI brokers because the technology might not be the most current.
And of course, new technology isn’t always better. Indeed, there are questions whether SOAs, plus web services that are based on bulky, chatty XML messages, are the most efficient way to go for EAI. To some extent, that’s always the case when proprietary technology competes against “open” alternatives, a lesson that Digital never learned when UNIX began undercutting the proprietary but well-designed VMS platform.
But we believe web services represents the future for EAI, if only because the baseline standards are gaining critical mass acceptance. Although webMethods claims its existing architecture can readily accommodate web services, no migration is painless. Nonetheless, at least webMethods is swallowing the necessary medicine now.
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10.06.03
Posted in Supply Chain Management, Technology Market Trends at 12:31 am by Tony Baer
With dot com era long over, it’s hard to imagine anybody getting exercised over technology anymore. Yet, in recent weeks, the national media — from Time and Newsweek to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fortune — have all run headline stories on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
Of course, it would be very understandable if you were to ask, “Radio frequency what?”
Wal-Mart’s recent announcement requiring suppliers to affix RFID tags to every case and pallet by 2005-2006 has put the story in the headlines. When Wal-Mart announced similar dictates over bar codes a decade ago, the consequences almost pushed rivals like K-Mart out of business.
Yet, virtually all of the stories focus on the RFID feature least likely to be adopted, for now: Having RF tags ID each box of product. Sounds like we’ve got another case of technohype on our hands.
Theoretically, affixing RF tags to every package of razor blades or cornflakes could reduce pilferage, eliminate checkout lines, and for durable goods, provide ways for appliances to “talk back” when they need repair. Yet, the articles in the press focus around inflated fears that those innocent little tags could tell retailers something about what you do when you wake up in the morning.
Nothing could be further from reality. Let’s assume that retailers and manufacturers really wanted to know how you consume products. Do you really think they could afford to occasionally drive trucks around your neighborhood scanning every box of cornflakes in the area? Could they even manage all that data? As one RF equipment supplier told us, if Wal-Mart tagged every item in every store and tracked every movement, that would generate 7.5 million terabytes daily. And that’s just inside the store. Using Gartner storage cost estimates, we figured that level of tracking would easily cost Wal-Mart millions of millions of dollars.
OK, item-level RF tags might eventually be economical for some aspect of inventory tracking, but regardless of how cheap the tags get, the challenges of mining unheard quantities of data are likely to doom any kind of Big Brother scheme. Furthermore, it’s a safe bet that retailers will finesse the issue by embedding kill features that disable RF tags after checkout.
The real problem is that we still get overexcited by technology. Remember when the Internet was going to change everything? That’s exactly why Gartner Group publishes a “hype” cycle that includes a “trough of disillusionment” that eventual flattens out to a “Plateau of Productivity.” Obviously, the hoopla with RFID and privacy issues reflects the same sense of misdirected hype, making yet another “trough of disillusionment” likely once more.
At case and pallet level, RFID will make supply chain management more productive. But you can bet that story won’t sell as many newspapers as the one about privacy advocates worrying what could happen once an RFID tag detects that you have opened yet another box of birth control products.
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