01.31.08
Posted in IT Professional Development, Uncategorized at 2:36 am by Tony Baer
With the Open Group testing the waters to extend its reach beyond enterprise architects, we were part of an inaugural offshoot from their EA conference that discussed the role of what the group terms IT Specialists. It’s part of a kickoff to a new certification program for the people who are considered the unsung heroes of IT: those who work at ground level to get projects done.
Ironically, the name “IT Specialist” is something of a misnomer as the goal of the Open Group’s certification efforts is to create specialists who become, in effect, more like generalists. That is, you retain your technical specialty, but develop an awareness of technology disciplines that you routinely intersect with. For instance, an application developer who regularly deals with architects, DBAs, and QA. And the certifications are also supposed to emphasize cultivation of so-called soft skills through an evaluation process that accounts for actual experience in delivering project or non-project work to fruition.
We had the chance to address the session with a presentation describing why, at the end of the day, soft skills are becoming more critical to IT professionals because of the necessity to position themselves higher in the value chain in a globalizing market where traditional heads-down programming skills are increasingly available offshore at a fraction of the cost. (We’ll post our presentation online in a few days.)
We also had the chance to moderate a spirited discussion involving Phil Stauskas, who runs IBM’s IT Specialist program (which, along with Cap Gemini’s, is what the pen Group’s program is largely shaped after); Ron Tolido, Capgemini’s Northern Europe CTO (and a former UNIX geek who obviously broadened his horizons); Scott Radeztsky, one of Sun’s principal engineers; and ebizQ contributor Beth Gold-Bernstein.
A recurring theme was the inadequacy, if not obsolescence, of university computer science programs that tend to emphasize language and engineering skills at the cost of learning how to work within a business setting. Tolido suggested the notion that Java developers who were once the toast of the dot com world could become obsolete as more powerful, easy to use tools backed by frameworks like Spring that hide complexity transform development into a higher-level, less programmatic task.
Nonetheless, few on the panel bought into the notion that tooling would become so easy to use as to eliminate the need for developers – in spite of the hype surrounding new mashup offerings. Gold-Bernstein maintained that for every simplified front end, you would still need adults to build and maintain the robust, governable back ends that could support all the easy stuff up front.
Later in the afternoon, IBM’s Sheila Thorne delivered a highly personal presentation with the provocative title, “Dealing with People You Can’t Stand,” which provided useful pointers on how IT professionals – who are not exactly known for their people skills – could more successfully win friends and influence people. Almost acting like a plant in the audience, an obnoxious developer peppered her with instant trash psychoanalysis during the Q&A, providing ready proof of the challenge that remains in getting geeks to simply grow up.
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01.29.08
Posted in Enterprise Integration, SOA & Web Services at 1:54 am by Tony Baer
Maybe it’s time to go back to basics, advised ZapThink’s David Linthicum during his keynote before the Open Group’s Enterprise Architects Practitioners Conference, being held this week in San Francisco. With undercurrents as to whether threats of an oncoming recession are taking its toll on SOA budgets, or whether there is what Gartner terms a “trough of disillusionment” afflicting SOA adoption, Linthicum stated to a room of enterprise architects that you have to start with an ROI case.
“Most of the people in this room could use a good lesson in that,” he noted.
Of course, given that SOA is an architecture, not a technology or product, the notion that you can attach a quantifiable dollar benefit at first sounds like a bit of an oxymoron.
So how do you do it? Not surprisingly, none of Linthicum’s answers were terribly new or startling as he trotted out familiar benefits of reuse, flexibility, and agility. He acknowledged that selling reuse is a pretty tough one, considering the fact that reuse has been promised ever since the days of CASE or Cobol Copy Books before that. The difference this time is that SOA is not about reusing code, because code is supposed to be abstracted from the service. Nonetheless, Linthicum concedes that’s a tough sell.
But he raised an interesting point on how to quantify ROI from flexibility or agility, which is to compare a scenario of how the business acted previously vs. a predicted scenario after implementation, such as ability to swap out a business service rapidly. A “hard’ ROI would come from savings of time – how much would it take to make the change with and without SOA. We don’t blame him for not touching the ”soft” benefits, such as ability to respond or change course sooner.
He added that’s also important to frame the issue properly. You should not spend time figuring how to solve a business problem, but rather, selling an idea to the business. So at first blush, that sounds like swinging for the stands, with some grand vision statement rather than saying you’ll address a tactical problem.
Yet in the next breath, Linthicum stated that it’s advisable to take an iterative approach that blends principles of Agile Development in something he terms “Agile SOA.” Namely, you develop the vision, but not all the details in advance, and then you advance into it, one modest piece at a time so you don’t end up with, what Joe McKendrick termed a couple years ago, “Just a Bunch Of Web Services” or JBOWS.
As noted, none of what Linthicum stated was new, but it was significant that, five years or so after modern concepts of SOA have emerged, that he felt the need to remind us why and how we should pursue SOA.
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01.28.08
Posted in Business Intelligence, Desktop Apps, Technology Market Trends at 6:00 am by Tony Baer
Project managers are all too aware of Murphy’s Law – just about the only certainty when you plan out a succession of events or critical paths is that you can usually never be 100% certain that a task will get finished by the promised date. You can often be pretty sure, but reality is never 100%.
Yet, most project management tools take delivery dates as givens, and when it comes to fudge factors, they are typically only applied at the aggregate level, such as that the overall certainty that a specific project will get done by a certain date is 80%. But when you get closer to the task level and speak with the people who are intimately involved, they can often give you a pretty accurate picture as to their chances of meeting specific deadlines.
Of curse, the only problem with all that is that corporate culture tends to discourage such bouts of realism. It is difficult for line employees to stand up and state for the record that management’s deadline is not realistic.
Over 20 years ago, Eliyahu Goldratt codified the idea of factoring in constraints when it came to complex scheduling problems in a manufacturing plan. He had the originality to write up his idea, not in a doctoral thesis, but in the form of a bad dime store novel that was so bad, that it got attention. His ideas were later incorporated into advanced scheduling products from i2 and a host of other software providers, and by Realization Technologies for management of multiple projects. And he has formed an institute to promote his work.
Today at the Demo 2008 conference, LiquidPlanner is going to take the wraps off a product that applies a similar idea, not at factory managers, but at the poor guy who has to schedule projects. It does so with a SaaS-based offering (what new offering isn’t based on Software as a Service these days?). It enables individuals to enter the degree of probability that shows how confident they are that they can finish a project with a given period of time. OK, it doesn’t ask you to commit as to whether you are 65% or 75% certain that you’ll make a certain date, but instead asks you to enter date ranges. Given the ranges that different people assign to different tasks. LiquidPlanner then assigns probabilities based on all the ranges that people enter.
CEO Charles Seybold uses the fashionable term “social computing” to show how his company’s tool munges up everybody’s estimates to come out with an aggregate estimate of when a project will get done, based on ranges for the consistent tasks.
What’s potentially even more interesting is that LiquidPlanner also comes with a data warehouse, so you can start comparing results over time to see what types of tasks with similar levels fo resources get completed how fast, and how close to estimate. We’re sure that there are potentially a million and one ways to slice and dice the data to get a realistic idea of how your organization actually executes.
We’ve seen an early version of the tool that’s being unveiled at Demo today – it’s pretty cool although it’s still a bit too text heavy to make it the easy to use tool that shows you in glance just how you’re doing. But that’s just a tweak (adding a few basic dials or colored bar charts would certainly do the trick).
What’s kind of funny is that by itself, LiquidPlanner’s innovation doesn’t sound that dramatic – generating a probability based on date ranges that people enter. You’d think that somebody would have thought of this before, but in tools like Microsoft Project, they haven’t.
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01.24.08
Posted in Business Intelligence, SOA & Web Services at 7:31 pm by Tony Baer
IBM’s announcement yesterday that it is buying Aptsoft reflects IBM’s contention that complex event processing is the next frontier of SOA. Complex Event Processing (CEP), which is sometimes confused with event processing, is the scenario where lots of things happen, and after a while, you detect that there is a pattern, and that pattern is something that you must respond to.
The problem, of course, is by the time that a human puts all the pieces together, it’s probably too late to react.
And that’s why there has been a rash of offerings that have entered the market over the past five years. There are obvious uses in areas ranging from national security to securities trading, supply chain management, public health, and retail.
Although IBM paints it as part of its SOA initiative, SOA is simply a means to an end – in this case, an architecture that makes complex event stream analyses accessible across application silos, or as a means for triggering defined business processes. In fact, a strong connection can also be made with business intelligence because of the possibilities of being able to analyze and make sense of otherwise subtle or invisible turns of events.
IBM is hardly new to this space, already having the ability to process complex streams of events through some of its WebSphere and Tivoli products. But the kicker here is that IBM gets a tool that has the kind of high level visual interface, and business process-like terminology, that can enable business people to define complex event patterns, rather than having to rely on developers.
The company they have acquired is hardly a spring chicken. We spoke to AptSoft almost exactly four years ago when they relaunched themselves as a high level integration engine. We say re-launch because the actual software came out of a defunct systems integrator, Wheelhouse, which found itself over its head when it tried to make the transition to product company.
In the past four years, AptSoft has built up a customer base of less than 20 customers, which is hardly stellar performance. The company has hardly been a pioneer either, as providers like Streambase and Coral8 claim to also have very business-user intuitive friendly approaches. Players like Tibco, Progress and even BEA (remember them?) are also contending for share. But what does distinguish the company is that unlike most of its rivals, much of its client base is outside financial services.
But its lack of market success does not necessarily tarnish the technology, and fitting into IBM’s portfolio, provides icing on the cake.
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01.16.08
Posted in Database, Java, Middleware, OS/Platforms, Open Source, Technology Market Trends at 8:00 pm by Tony Baer
Now that we’ve had a working day to digest the news from Sun (surprise) and Oracle (OK, the cat was out of the bag on that one long ago), we’ve had more of a chance to reflect.
Listening to Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz, it was obvious that the real driver of the deal was that Sun badly wants to penetrate new customer bases. MySQL is one of the few trophies left (aside from Red Hat/JBoss) that has a growing customer community in the enterprise Internet computing space. And given Schwartz’s directive for the company to literally open source everything under the (S)un, on paper, the MySQL acquisition jibes well with Sun’s strategy. Furthermore, as database, along with storage, is at the fault lines of Internet apps, buying the right database could be a hot ticket for growth. Sun absolutely needs a move that could energizes and excites its business, and MySQL could be it.
So now the LAMP stack becomes the LASP stack…
For Sun, of course, the challenge is in execution. For instance, name a software acquisition that has been successful. Although Sun has been trying to switch its course from systems to software, the dollars are still coming from systems. On the open source side, it’s managed to paint itself into a corner with NetBeans. So the company that invented Java finds itself on the outside looking in when it comes to the mainstream of Java development.
We always thought that Red Hat would have been the more logical suitor, if only because MySQL’s business model is more at Red Hat’s, not Sun’s level. But obviously, Sun was in much better position to fork out a billion dollars. Of course, that leaves open the question, for Sun to fully seal the deal, wouldn’t it make sense to go the next step and fork out $4 – 5 billion for Red Hat?
Dana Gardner had an interesting take on the acquisition, saying that, “Yes, it makes a lot of sense, which makes the timing so frustrating. I for one — and I was surely not alone — told very high-up folks at Sun to buy and seduce MySQL three years ago.” He makes a persuasive case that this could be the deal that saves Sun because it could take a lot of air out of Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM in the hottest part of the $15 billion database market – Internet applications. Put another way, a good case could be made that Internet apps are more data-driven than ever, and so, if Sun succeeds in removing oxygen from Oracle et al, dare we say it could once more become the dot in dot com?
Maybe, but at what price? Our concern is that MySQL’s sweet spot has been the low cost/no cost part of the database market. And compared to its grown up cousins, MySQL is simpler and more approachable. But does this business scale? Let’s assume that Sun successfully pulls off this deal, MySQL survives intact, and with more feet on the street and enterprise-class support, its business organically grows. Will MySQL generate the kinds of margins that Sun needs to run a $10+ billion business? Will it be the engine that pulls through the higher value iron?
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Posted in Database, Java, Middleware, Open Source, Technology Market Trends at 10:51 am by Tony Baer
Gulp!
To nobody’s surprise it finally happened. With no other white knights in the offing, as we expected, Oracle sweetened its $17/share offer for BEA to $19.75. It came after 3 months of initially vocal, then quiet wrangling. Oracle made its $17 offer back in October; BEA’s top management held out for $21; minority investor Carl Icahn told BEA, “Get real!”; BEA chimes in with better than expected results a month later (seems like a lot of the Q4s have come in ahead of the street; more about that in a moment); both parties go quiet; then today news breaks in the wee hours that Oracle has upped its bid to $19.375.
So both parties save face – BEA gets more, Oracle gets it below the magical $20 level.
So let’s get onto the next item on the list: Sun buying MySQL, followed by early disclosure of Q4 results later in the day. Does anybody see a pattern here? IBM also charmed the street the day before yesterday. But of course the Q4 numbers come after a year where IT spending was unusually bullish — reflecting long-delayed recovery from 9/11 and the fact that the rest of the world is at a different point in its economic cycle than the U.S. is. The conventional wisdom is that the Q4 numbers are the calm before the storm, as the impact of the US downturn will show up in Q1.
Our early take is that Sun has also done a bit better than expected in Q4; it is obviously a bigger company than the other logical suitor Red Hat and could afford a fatter payout; in the end the deal will have more headline than economic value as the point about MySQL is that it is a low cost/no cost alternative to Oracle. Like Java, it will give Sun possession of a de facto standard; like Java, the margins for MySQL will be a drop in the bucket on Sun’s bottom line; unlike Java, there is a business model for MySQL, but it’s more in sync with a company that’s a fraction of Sun’s size.
Film at 11.
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01.15.08
Posted in SOA & Web Services, Technology Market Trends at 11:47 am by Tony Baer
It’s probably not surprising that we’ve drawn a fair amount of comment from our last post on prospects for SOA investment in 2008. With the ‘R’ word on everybody’s minds (at least on this side of the pond), we’re all obviously sensitive about anything that could affect our livelihoods. And so we speculated that, in a down cycle, investments in strategic initiatives like SOA are likely to get pushed back as dwindling budgets are directed towards keeping the lights on.
Discussion was especially timely given preliminary announcement from IBM of unexpectedly bullish results of respective 10% increases in revenue and 24% increases in earnings per share over a year ago. Not surprisingly, growth came from outside the U.S., showing that fears of recession are not shared in the rest of the world.
The most vocal response came from colleague and partner-in-crime Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, who wrote us from Germany. While meeting with Software AG at their Darmstadt headquarters, he learned that the brunt of the company’s SOA business is now coming from Europe, not the states. “Flatly put, the US is under-investing in architecture and over-invested in infrastructural glue. The wheels are coming off the car, and we think we’re moving in the right direction?” Schmelzer wrote. Reflecting this, Schmelzer notes that attendance at ZapThink’s Practical SOA architect training sessions is definitely running stronger in Europe.
Obviously, Schmelzer has some mercenary concerns – he’d like to see US attendance at Zap’s seminars as healthy as Europe. But he points to a deeper concern that weak enterprise architecture skills could in the long run jeopardize competitiveness, as Europeans use SOA to support increased enterprise agility.
Of course, not everybody subscribes to the notion of the grass being greener elsewhere. For instance, a colleague (and architect) from a New York-based consulting firm responded, “The Euro-compete doesn’t bother me (and I don’t really buy it anyway). What concerns me is how deep this recession will be.”
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01.14.08
Posted in SOA & Web Services at 12:03 am by Tony Baer
Over the past week, my colleagues Joe McKendrick and David Linthicum have wondered aloud about prospects for SOA projects as the economy hits a possible recession and IT budgets head for certain cuts. In fact, all this kicked off with a post from SOA Consortium director Brenda Michelson that consortium members remained optimistic that their SOA projects would survive the cut this year.
Unless you’re living under a rock or a trust fund, it’s hard not to ignore the warning signs of doom and gloom. Ironically, forecasts for IT budget cuts come after a year when the IT sector finally got its budgetary head firmly above the waterline since 2001.
We had a chance to catch up with Linthicum and McKendrick and discuss this very point during a prep call for an upcoming panel session at the next Open Group Enterprise Architects Practitioners Conference. We concurred that “special” (read: strategic or architectural) projects are likely to take a back seat to projects that are tactical or aimed at simply keeping the lights on. That’s exactly what transpired during previous recessions of the early 1990s and 2000s.
Our take on the SOA Consortium’s grass roots optimism is that the sample is a bit self-selected: these are companies that are likely further along in SOA adoption, and therefore more likely to budget staff time to participating in such a group. And once a set of practice or architecture gets rooted, it no longer fits the definition of “special project,” which is Linthicum’s contention.
Nonetheless, if there is a 2008 recession, for IT organizations it will likely not be as severe as that of 2001 because there is a heckuva lot less bloat to cut. A more apt comparison might be the early 1990s when the term “downsizing” and “outsourcing” first entered the vocabulary. Yeah, that’s still happening today.
But more to the point, the recession of 1990s occurred just as IT was on the verge of another great architectural migration, in that case to client/server. While investments in client/server were obviously slow back at that time (we had a hard time coming up with real-life installations while writing for Computerworld back then), when dollars flowed back several years later, they did so with a vengeance. And that was before IT organizations got caught up in the Y2K and Internet booms. OK, we don’t expect SOA to explode in the same way as its predecessors, but that’s because it’s not 1995 anymore. SOA projects for non-early adopters will likely slow this year, but they won’t get permanently derailed.
We’ll be plumbing this and related topics further as we join Linthicum and McKendrick on a SOA Reality Check panel moderated by InfoWorld editor-in-chief Eric Knorr at the Open Group’s 18th EA Practitioner’s later this month in San Francisco.
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01.08.08
Posted in Cloud, Mobile at 3:58 pm by Tony Baer
The IT and consumer electronics worlds have had a kind of chicken and egg relationship dating back to invention of the transistor. Following the Internet bubble, the flow of innovation has shifting from computers to gadgets. And in some ways, so have the excesses of hype, as we’ve read reports of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) undergoing the same kind of bloat that previously afflicted Comdex.
If there’s a single platform that’s considered a barometer for the pace of innovation, it’s the mobile hand device. From the plain vanilla voice (and more recently, text) phone, it’s now taken for granted that, depending on target demographic, your device should be able to take pictures, play music, provide web access, deliver email, enabler location-based services, or make electronic purchases.
This being the week of CES (and the week before MacWorld), we had an interesting conversation this morning with Sony Ericsson CTO Mats Lindoff, who gave us a midterm assessment on trends with mobile platforms. Maybe there was something gamey with our connection (we think not!), but what we thought we heard was more evolutionary than revolutionary.
“Your phone will tend to know more about you than you know about yourself,” Lindoff told us. Of course, that might sound startling until you consider the fact that the Japanese are already beginning to use cell phones as payment devices with mobile-enabled vending machines. From that standpoint, there’s relatively little concept leap that your Bluetooth-enabled phone could similarly exchange credit card or debit account data with any similarly-enabled point-of-sale terminal or RFID device. Within the European Union, there’s even research on whether phones could serve as electronic passports, a prospect that biometric advancements could make thinkable.
Part of Lindoff’s prediction is that your phone will get smarter in parallel with the network or cloud. And that’s not exactly earth-shattering either, given trends in on demand computing, social computing, and, if you’re an adolescent or Second Life vicarious personality at heart, serial social gaming.
When you slice and dice the global market for handsets, you wind up with a matrix delineated by demographics and region. In developing nations, the trend is strongly toward basic voice and text handsets that, with modest additions, add FM radios followed subsequently with entry-level web access, as (1) people don’t yet have cars or home computers, and (2) the market is not yet mature enough to calve off into lifestyle segments. In developed markets of course, you wind up with more familiar segmentation comprising young gamers and music fans; mainstream voice, text and camera phone users; and corporate PDA users. From speaking with Lindoff, it sounds like demographic markets themselves might not necessarily change (although some may co-opt features from others), but that the global distribution of those segments will.
There’s another fact of life that’s not likely to change either. No matter how smart the device and the cloud get, unless you change the laws of physics or double the size of human anatomy, there’s only so much you can do with a device whose screen maxes out at 3 inches. Additionally, much has been speculated about the imminent opening up of the North American device market. That will certainly spur new content, applications, and make life simpler for handset manufacturers. But of course, such a market is already in place in Europe and parts of Asia, so again, change here would be evolutionary.
Both trends point to a single given: Your phone might become an even more intrinsic extension of who you are or what you do. You might thumb-key emails, watch video podcasts on the plane, and enjoy or consume more applications on your handheld device. Yes, you’re phone’s becoming more important. But you’re not going to toss out your laptop anytime soon.
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