04.28.04
Posted in Business Intelligence at 7:45 pm by Tony Baer
Maybe the popping of the IT bubble has made us jaded to catch phrases like “the real time enterprise,” but that hasn’t stopped pundits from preaching that real time is the wave of the future. Nonetheless, beyond the issue of what processes or information assets must be real-time is the question of whether there are such systems that actually deliver in real time.
One of the biggest disappointments has been in the area of business intelligence and analytics. Most BI systems that call themselves real-time are little more conventional data warehouses that are updated faster or more frequently.
Ironically, the emergence of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) has further inflated the real-time hype. That’s because BAM systems provide dashboards, which for anyone who has ever gotten behind the wheel, implies real-time. In actuality, BAM dashboards are only as real-time as the data warehouses that typically feed them.
When we spoke last summer with database veteran Jnan Dash, we realized that real-time BI wouldn’t come from a data warehouse, but from a smart network that sniffs for exceptional events. And at the time, just about the only products that could perform this were repurposed systems that were originally designed for unrelated tasks, like telecom network provisioning.
But when we recently came across a new product billed as an “operational dashboard,” we took note. Offered by Celequest, a new firm founded by the same folks who started Informatica, the company takes the event-driven network approach that we were looking for. Monitoring data streams before they get to any data warehouse or database, Celequest’s technology uses real-time cache to sniff and transform the data for dashboard display. Their approach is so unique that they currently have four patents pending.
Of course, just because now you can have real-time BAM, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. For most organizations, dashboards showing data that is a few hours old may be perfectly adequate if they operate in daily cycles. But for organizations requiring real-time engines for tracking call center activity, rogue stock trades, or other rapid-fire events, Celequest is finally giving them a choice.
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04.02.04
Posted in .NET, Java, Technology Market Trends at 12:56 am by Tony Baer
If not for the collateral damage, few comedians could dream up anything more ridiculous than the ongoing personality wars between Scott McNeally and Bill Gates. Unfortunately, their bad behavior cost corporate customers dearly, depriving them of the opportunity of leveraging the platform independence of Java with the ubiquitous presence of Microsoft Windows. Regardless of what you felt about Java applets (yes, they were performance hogs), Sun’s litigation against Microsoft’s JVM effectively killed client side Java.
Would you believe that’s all a thing of the past? In a move reminiscent of Nixon’s visit to China, Sun and Microsoft are burying the hatchet. Not just a cease-fire but a full-blown peace treaty. This is no April Fools!
Going forward, Sun and Microsoft are planning to collaborate, with almost nothing at this point considered off the table. Native compatibility between Java and the Microsoft .NET framework and a cessation of hostilities between the Microsoft/IBM/BEA vs. Sun/Oracle cabals in web services standards are just a few of the tantalizing possibilities.
There’s little question that money has a wonderful power to concentrate minds. In an era where IT investments are likely to grow, but only cautiously, the industry can no longer afford distracting political rivalries. Of course that shouldn’t preclude competition (the .NET framework being one of the few positive results of the Sun/Microsoft rivalry). But at this point, IT customers have no time or budget to subsidize vendor grudge matches.
Back to the Nixon in China strategy, for Microsoft, aligning with a weakened Sun is a way to counter balance its informal alliance with IBM in web services standards. For Sun, we believe that the .NET framework could enable Sun to eclipse Eclipse, the IBM-funded open source Java framework that until now has crowded Sun out of the developer market for the technology that it invented. Kind of like the enemy of thy enemy strategy, ain’t it?
The turnaround clearly has the stamp of Jonathan Schwartz, until now the person responsible for Sun’s recent pragmatic software strategy. Maybe it’s coincidental, but concurrent with the Microsoft détente, Schwartz was promoted to president and COO. Coming off quarterly losses of roughly $800 million, Sun will be laying off 9 percent of its workforce. Nonetheless, with a real adult now in control and petty battles behind it, we see today’s announcements as the best news for Sun in years.
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04.01.04
Posted in IT Infrastructure, Systems Management at 12:54 am by Tony Baer
If you buy technology or track the market, by now you’re probably hearing catch phrases like real-time, adaptive, or on-demand enterprises in your sleep. Theoretically, if you subscribe to the logic, your company can respond at the drop of a coin, updating all respective systems — giving your employees, customers, and business partners the same snapshot of the way things really are right now. As a competitive strategy, that’s supposed to blow your rivals away.
The dark side, however, is the resulting stress that all this places on data centers, storage devices, and networks. Like the Amazon butterfly, whose wing flapping is eventually connected to some gale that pounds the coast of Maine, the impact of a major customer changing an order at the end of the quarter could wreak havoc if your infrastructure is not properly sized and your applications not adequately integrated.
Traditionally, getting all this under control has required a disparate array of best of breed tools that monitor network devices, server utilization, database I/O, storage, applications, and other peripherals — not to mention the systems used for providing technical support and problem resolution. Compounding the situation, IT infrastructure is the domain of different organizations covering the data center, network infrastructure, and security. As we noted a few months back, look at identity management. The matter often degrades to such a tug of war between systems admins and developers that one of the few companies that markets products to both [Novell] has yet to integrate them.
So, we look on IBM’s acquisition of Candle as a good step. It’s a logical move for IBM, whose Tivoli framework lacks the end-to-end server performance management functions of Candle’s flagship Omegamon products, not to mention the fact that Candle’s customer base is almost 100% IBM. And it’s an exit strategy for privately held Candle, whose revenues have been stagnating for years.
But it’s not the end of the conversation for BMC or CA, because nobody — not even IBM — has been able to integrate all the tools you need to monitor, manage, and repair IT infrastructures. Look at web services. When you submit a service request, you’re asking for authorization to access and claim processing, storage, and network resources. Yet, for the most part, web services resource management functions are still largely viewed as the domain of application developers. And, HP excluded, none of the major systems management folks have come up with strategies for integrating that.
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