03.31.08
Posted in Application Development, Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Integration, SOA & Web Services at 4:53 pm by Tony Baer
Dana Gardner today gave what seemed to us as a SOA valedictory, in a post with the rambling but apt title, “We know SOA depends on cultural shifts, but — like the weather — we still don’t do much about it.” He provided an interesting coda to an online dialog that involved a bunch of us over why SOA adoption at an enterprise architectural level has either grown, sputtered, or has taken a detour for recession. Gardner summarizes the litany that has to some, sounded more like a broken record. “The acknowledgment that SOA requires top-down, bottom-up, organizational and behavioral, ie “cultural,” change to proceed to its potential is well documented and debated. We have come back to this topic again and again,” he wrote.
Here’s the factoid: a Forrester Research study as reported by TechTarget’s Rich Seeley showed that SOA as an enterprise-level architectural initiative grew to 26% in 2007, up 4% from a year earlier. You can interpret that in one of two ways:
1. Enterprise SOA adoption continues making impressive gains.
2. After 5 or 6 years, enterprise SOA adoption is still an exception to the rule.
Here’s a related tidbit of trivia: our first mention of SOA goes back five years, while our first mention of web services dates way back to 2001. So it would be understandable to ask, what’s taken SOA so long?
Gardner put the answer in perspective: “Let’s recognize that a higher purpose is at work here, and that SOA is a subset — not even a leading driver, perhaps — of the end-game,” taking its place in line with other megatrends of the moment like SaaS, cloud computing, BPO, ITIL and so on. As he stated, a means, not the end. He jumps to the root cause for what really drives adoption: culture and politics, which in large organizations, “remains a mystical, quizzical patchwork of leaps, lunges and stumbles…Looking to SOA to change cultures seems to be a moot expectation.”
Whether you take a fill-in-the-boxes approach to enterprise architecture like the Zachman Framework, or you tout visions of a service-oriented enterprise, at the end of the day, you must have the right mix of players in place who can either leverage an organizational culture that already accepts change, or who are able to effectively sell the concept in spite of an entrenched culture of inertia.
It takes more than pure architectural or technical skills to pull it off. For instance, the Open Group’s emerging IT Specialist program -– which mirrors the internal certification programs that already exist in consulting firms like IBM Global Services, EDS, and Cap Gemini -– is predicated on the fact that being a successful technologist also requires distinctly non-technical skills. In his book Dealing with Darwin, Geoffrey Moore referred to the cast of characters necessary to shepherd innovation through its lifecycle: often, informal alliances of inventors and optimizers can overcome the natural gatekeeping tendencies of managers and deployers.
We don’t only say “amen” to what Gardner’s said, we should also say “mea culpa.”
All too often we fall in love with the perfection, simplicity, or elegance of an architectural solution while forgetting how it would work on the ground, or what it would take to sell the vision. In other words, we forget the people side of the story, or the reality that in most organizations, it’s easier to sell something akin to the old Holiday Inn slogan, that “the best surprise is no surprise,” as opposed to, “Change will increase your competitive edge.” All too often, change is bought only when survival is at stake, which sometimes is too late to make a difference.
Fear of change pervades any major IT initiative, just think of all those ERP projects that encountered unexpected complications. Specific to SOA, there’s the need to think about the ramifications of baseline concepts like loose coupling as far down as the job description level. And, borrowing some ideas from Moore, it wouldn’t hurt to find out from the folks who tweak or expedite things as to how to make service implementations more than one-shot deals.
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Posted in .NET, Application Development, Desktop Apps, Linux, OS/Platforms, Open Source, Technology Market Trends at 3:43 pm by Tony Baer
ZDNet’s Jason Perlow had some interesting observation upon returning from Microsoft’s Technology Summit last week. For starters, Perlow noted Microsoft’s acknowledgement and implied support for the work that Novell’s Miguel de Icaza and colleagues on the Mono project are directing at porting key Microsoft desktop technologies to Linux. He speculated that Microsoft’s Open Source Lab’s work to achieve interoperability with key open source projects like Samba and Apache is being driven is not only the result of EU directives to open up its interfaces, but also to increase visibility and utilization of Microsoft platforms on open source systems.
But Perlow felt uncomfortable equating these olive branches with Glasnost. “It would be difficult to say that Steve Ballmer is Microsoft’s Mikhail Gorbachev – his patent and intellectual property saber rattling in the past year would seem to put him more firmly in the Nikita Khrushchev shoe-banging ‘We will bury you’ on the podium camp rather than be characterized like the reformative and cuddly Gorby.” Per our observations a couple weeks back at EclipseCon, it looks more like ping pong diplomacy, where Microsoft is testing the waters for a market where open source has gone mainstream.
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03.26.08
Posted in Business Intelligence, Database, Enterprise Applications, Java, Middleware, Technology Market Trends at 4:48 pm by Tony Baer
In another sign of the times, Oracle’s just reported 30% growth in Q3 FY 08 earnings per share wasn’t enough to mollify investors, with share prices plummeting after hours. The company boasted higher margins than Microsoft, and growing software market share against second-ranked IBM. To clarify, these numbers pertained to the quarter that ended February 29, 2008. Over the past year, Oracle made nearly a dozen acquisitions, although the most recent, BEA, has yet to be consummated. Consequently, the 20% overall growth in revenues is in large part from acquisitions, not product sales.
But beyond all this is that the 2007 numbers were stellar for much of the software industry, and obviously don’t reflect what are likely to be sharp contractions this year.
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03.25.08
Posted in SOA & Web Services at 6:19 pm by Tony Baer
Responding to our January blog on prospects for SOA in a recession, Progress Actional VP Dan Foody posited that SOA should be positioned as a cost savings measure. “Consistency, avoiding duplication (notice I didn’t say “reuse” even if that’s what I was referring to), and consolidation are all instrumental to managing costs. And SOA gives you these,” he wrote a couple weeks back.
We had a chance to speak with him today and trade thoughts. He avoids the term “reuse” by stating that SOA can provide the same kind of virtualization strategy to applications that hypervisors provide to OS platforms. In that sense, he views SOA as a way to reduce redundancy, which could be a polite term for reusing rather than reinventing application logic.
Foody concurred that promoting SOA as a long journey might not be the best strategy, given the short half-life of CIO tenures. “The people who first listened were enterprise architects, and that was the message that best appealed to them,” he stated.
“Maybe it’s heretical, but maybe we should bring web services concepts back into SOA,” he said, stating that at least you could build web services without having to get hung up in top-down architectural exercises. “We started off right with web services, because it was a reflection of the value that you could deliver to an individual project.” By web services, Foody isn’t limiting matters to SOAP and the WS-* stack, suggesting the simpler, more accessible RESTful-style services might be
Of course, that riles up prognosticators like Microsoft’s Nick Malik, who rail that building “JaBOWS” (actually, it’s JBOWS), a term Joe McKendrick coined several years ago, means you wind up with the web services equivalent of the spaghetti code you were trying to get rid of in the first place.
Nonetheless, Foody continued by taking fault with the notion that SOA had to be done exactly right, the first time. “The trap we got caught in was that you have to be perfect from day one,” providing as an example, trying to arrive at an enterprise definition of what constitutes a customer. Of course, data warehousing guru Ralph Kimball told us the same thing roughly a decade ago, meaning this has proven a perennial enterprise challenge.
Instead, Foody recommends an iterative approach, which is to model only as much as you need to build services now while still providing freedom to act when circumstances change. That’s where he pitches the argument of having the kind of instant feedback loop that run time SOA governance tools, like Actional’s, provide, in order to enable the agility that SOA can deliver.
Recessions tend to discourage the kind of long-term thinking that grand enterprise architectural exercises are supposed to support. In that sense, SOA has been caught up in the middle – roughly six years after the current incarnation of the concept emerged with web services, there remains considerable debate as to whether it makes sense to take a project or architectural approach.
Of course, the happy medium is the “architected project” approach, where you try applying more iterative approaches to refining services, rather than defining them as part of some grand scheme. If that sounds familiar, it should, because those were the lessons supposedly learned after the CASE debacle, which gave rise to rapid application development (whose roots also began in a recession).
Towards that end, we’ll be interested in what ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg has to say when he addresses that topic head on at IBM’s upcoming Impact conference.
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Posted in Data Management, Database, Enterprise Applications, OS/Platforms, Technology Market Trends at 2:23 pm by Tony Baer
Ever since Sun anteed up a billion in cold cash for MySQL a couple months back, we wondered when the next show would drop. Today, EnterpriseDB announced that IBM was one of several venture backers to fund its third $10 million round of financing.
At first glance, this appears to be IBM’s response to Sun. But it isn’t.
Lets drill down a bit. With the enterprise database market pretty mature, new opportunities have emerged with new workloads associated with web applications. MySQL has drawn the attention because most websites start pretty modestly and needed a low cost/no cost engine to get going. As we’ve stated, both our blog and main websites are powered by free open source versions of MySQL under the covers. We don’t pay for support because our application –- essentially an embedded database inside a blog and content management system for a relatively low-traffic website (OK, we’re not that tiny, but we’re not Amazon or Yahoo either) -– is rather pint sized and rudimentary.
Now the big guys also offer free databases. IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle offer freebie “Express” editions, but these really don’t compete with the open source folks for one reason: the commercial Express offerings are targeted solely at development or piloting, as they are typically limited to a single CPU and maybe 2 – 4 GB cache. Whereas with open source database, you’ll get the whole enchilada regardless of whether you subscribe to support or get it free. The open source folks claim their subscriptions are cheaper than the incumbents.
That fact is important because, while there are lots of modest websites (like ours), there is also an explosion of data among popular consumer websites. That explains growing demand for server, storage, and it also explains the explosive growth of VMware. You need serious databases for these apps. Increasingly, MySQL, joined by EnterpriseDB and a revived Ingres are muscling their way in. They’re not displacing the Oracle or DB2 systems running back end OLTP systems, but they are clawing their way to these new workloads.
But EnterpriseDB and Ingres claim to be different creatures from MySQL in that they contend they’re more scalable. Specifically, EnterpriseDB has pursued the Oracle market, adding Oracle compatibility (e.g., PL/SQL, stored procedures, etc.) to its Postgres engine (a 20-year old spinoff from the original Ingres) to sell to Oracle DBAs running new workloads. In its third year of business, it has tripled its customer base.
Ergo, this deal is IBM dipping its feet gingerly into a back door challenge to Oracle, not MySQL. Ever since IBM held back on its own SQL database invention, allowing Oracle to grab leadership of the market, it has always responded by making DB2 cheaper. But it still plays second banana. Investing a modest chunk in EnterpriseDB is a way of having somebody else test-drive a new strategy for carving a wedge inside the Oracle market, something that IBM has hungered for going back at least 20 years.
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03.24.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:35 pm by Tony Baer
Evidently social computing is becoming so last year. A couple pieces in today’s eWeek are providing indicators that virtualization at all levels, from desktop to storage and cloud computing, are drawing critical mass VC interest. Chris Preimesberger reports from an annual VC forum at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, while Rene Boucher Ferguson writes of a startup’s idea about freeing those unused cycles across supercomputing grids that are becoming more ubiquitous. Think of it as the SETI@home screensaver on steroids. And we’ve also looked with interest on another startup’s elastic computing idea to take on demand computing beyond monthly subscription fees to something that more closely replicates paying by the drink.
It reflects the fact that, while we’re not necessarily in a Malthusian world yet (there was an interesting piece in the Journal this morning), we are in an age where rising resource costs, not to mention the green ethic, is changing perceptions fueled by explosion of the Internet that computing is essentially free.
And one last endnote before we put EclipseCon 2008 to rest. Mike Milinkovich provided an excellent response and clarified some of our questions about interoperability. As you’d expect, he also gave a spirited rebuttal on how Eclipse is not losing its focus — it’s a challenge that faces any organization as it grows its mission, and we credit them for keeping the issue on their radar.
And as for all those strange bedfellows that we spoke about, Daryl Taft raised an interesting point today about another consequence about diversity: what would life be at Eclipse beyond IBM?
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Posted in Application Development, Java, OS/Platforms, Rich Internet Apps., SOA & Web Services, Standards Development, Technology Market Trends at 12:15 am by Tony Baer
While designing an earlier version of our website, one of my webmaster’s perennial complaints centered around the difficulty of designing web pages because of Microsoft’s poor support for web standards, such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). OK, maybe the fact that my webmaster has always been a vociferous Mac enthusiast might have colored his perceptions, but the fact is that Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) has traditionally not been a very good web citizen. Dig down a bit deeper, and it becomes apparent that so-called standards-compliant browsers like Firefox haven’t always been as well-behaved either.
The conventional wisdom is that, if only everybody was standards-compliant, interoperability problems would evaporate. So what happens if we get what we asked for? With IE8, Microsoft has promised that it would clean up its act, making web standards the default mode. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley wondered whether this would break the web. The fact is, you have a lot of non-standards compliant legacy out there that could get messed up.
A few days later, ex-Microsofter Joel Spolsky let loose a 4500-word thesis that concluded that the real problem is that standards are a moving target. And, as someone who was present during the original sin – in this case, development of early versions of Microsoft Office, Spolsky added another point: the need to continually worry about backwards compatibility. Rounding out his argument, Spolsky explained that standards often become victims of good intentions.
He framed the problem by spinning a great tale around the fictionalized creation of a “Martian Headset.” The problem, he explains, is that as you invent the de facto standards, chances are, you’ll probably neglect to document some odds and ends that later come to bite you. “And you forgot, when you wrote the spec, to document that the voltage should be around 1.4 volts. You just forgot. So the first aspiring manufacturer of 100% compatible headphones comes along, his speaker is only expecting 0.014 volts, and when he tests his prototype, it either blows out the headphones, or the eardrums of the listener, whichever comes first.” You can imagine how the story goes from there.
Another example of unintended circumstances is when the technology evolves and supports use cases that you might not have initially imagined. You might recall that Java was initially intended as language for set top boxes before it morphed into a web application deployment platform; JavaScript had similar humble roots as a dynamic client side scripting language before it was paired with Dynamic HTML to make Rich Internet Applications come alive; while OSGi was meant as a home entertainment gateway (kind of like Java’s origins) before the Eclipse Foundation co-opted it as its new component deployment model.
Even when standards are well documented and accepted by a critical mass (admittedly a pretty rare event), either the standard is so rigid that the technology becomes obsolete (especially true in processor design, which in turn impacts how software is architected). Or more likely, the standard is written loosely with the goal of getting broader support and more headroom for growth. Spolsky refers to Postel’s Law (a.k.a., the “Robustness Principle”) that guided development of TCP, and later the Internet: “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” Spolsky contends that this permissive approach has spawned what he’d consider sloppiness in web development: developers aren’t being careful to use HTML consistently because variations will still display similarly enough.
The result is that interoperability goes out the window unless you take heroic measures. Looking at the 30 – 40 years of history with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the existence of hundreds of well-documented standards didn’t do away with costly, time-consuming tests to ensure that two trading partners could establish electronic “handshakes.” A more recent example is WS-I, an organization expressly created so vendors could test the interoperability of their implementations of commonly accepted web services standards, including SOAP, WSDL, and WS-Security.
Don’t get us wrong, standards have their uses. De facto standards (Windows, Mac) gave birth to the desktop computing market. Formal standards (W3C) paved the way for the web. But enforcing standards among vendors and developers invariably becomes an exercise in herding cats: they will all eventually want to eat their kibble, but at their own speed, and will get to their dinner bowls via their own paths. And even if you start with unitary creation, at some point new use cases will make exceptions the rule.
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03.22.08
Posted in .NET, Application Development, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Data Management, Java, OS/Platforms, Rich Internet Apps., Technology Market Trends at 7:46 pm by Tony Baer
Maybe it wasn’t a Kumbaya moment, but EclipseCon 2008 brought together some pretty strange bedfellows to the party. Namely that Microsoft showed up this year and promised support of a couple Eclipse projects, while Sun agreed to make one of Eclipse’s projects the reference implementation for one of the Java EE standards.
Of the two sightings, Microsoft’s was more dramatic, with Open Source lab director Sam Ramji delivering a keynote that was covered well by eWeek’s Daryl Taft, with interesting perspectives from Iona’s Eric Newcomer plus a blow-by-blow session description from Intalio’s Jonathan Crow. The headlines were that Microsoft promised to support the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) visual controls on Vista’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), meaning Eclipse developers could develop GUIs natively on Vista. The other announcement was that Microsoft would support interoperability between Cardspace and Eclipse’s Project Higgins covering identity management on the web. What was interesting was what Ramji didn’t say or left open, such as the possibility of Microsoft joining Eclipse (no answer), and interoperability with Silverlight, which would be natural because it’s Microsoft’s emerging cross-platform rich Internet client (or Adobe AIR killer).
We’d share Newcomer’s conclusion, “The recent steps toward improved interoperability support and improved relationship with open source communities may strike some as insufficient or incomplete, but to me they represent a significant change in tone and strategy for Microsoft.” Newcomer and others, as cited in Galen Gruman’s recent Infoworld article, consider a sign of pragmatism that is likely attributable to Ray Ozzie’s influence. In fact, we first saw evidence of this back in late 2005 when Microsoft and JBoss jointly announced work to improve performance on Windows and interacting with SQL Server – which happened to be roughly six month’s into Ozzie’s reign. And more recently, Microsoft has been working jointly with Zend to improve performance of PHP on Windows.
The bottom line of course is that supporting Eclipse on Windows means more Windows. And the same goes with JBoss and Zend. At the end of the day, Microsoft is still protecting its core franchise, just being a bit smarter about it.
The other end of the coin was Sun’s endorsement of the EclipseLink project as the reference implementation of the Java Persistence Architecture (JPA), one of the pillars of Java EE. (The technology competes directly with JBoss’s Hibernate.) The die was cast a year ago when (1) Eclipse joined the Java Community Process (JCP); (2) Oracle ramped up its Eclipse membership, joining the executive board; and (3) Oracle got Eclipse backing to turn its TopLink Java persistence technology into top-level Eclipse project. So while there was little surprising about the development, it marked a minor milestone.
As we noted last week, Eclipse is entering a far more complex phase of its existence. For instance, projects like Swordfish, the new SOA runtime (which is part of Equinox), could intrude onto turf already occupied by Apache ServiceMix, or other open source ESBs.
No longer defined by the IDE, the spreading of Eclipse’s mission means that members and neighbors aren’t necessarily drinking all the Kool Aid. For instance:
1. IBM was heavily identified with Eclipse’s origins, but today it is far more selective as to which projects it supports, and for instance, it has not associated itself with the Serena-led Application Lifecycle Framework project.
2. While JBoss is making its tooling Eclipse-compliant, its tools are not hosted on Eclipse.org, and it’s not supporting Eclipse’s venture into run time.
3. Oracle has made loud noises about EclipseLink, but it’s having nothing to do with the IDE around which the organization was founded.
4. Sun and Microsoft are now mentioning Eclipse in normal speech, with Microsoft going as far as ping pong diplomacy.
In other words, as Eclipse gets broader, its mission is in the eyes of the beholder.
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03.19.08
Posted in Data Management, Database, IT Infrastructure, OS/Platforms, Technology Market Trends at 11:30 am by Tony Baer
Although on record we have been more critical of Sun in the recent past, we’re encouraged by recent moves to leverage its MySQL acquisition to gain a stake in the rapidly growing web database segment. Its taken a logical step, building on that acquisition with recent moves to bundle a companion open source backup and file management system from Zmanda, and as reported yesterday in eWeek, with a push for rack-mounted x86 boxes, along with SMB-friendly free trials.
The question of course is whether Sun, as a high end systems player, can make money with volume-driven, low margin deals. In today’s market, it’s a question Sun can’t avoid.
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03.17.08
Posted in Business Intelligence, Data Management, Technology Market Trends at 5:25 pm by Tony Baer
A few years ago, we had the chance to see SAS CEO and founder Jim Goodnight address an industry of software industry executives at Sand Hill Group’s Software 2005 conference. What was interesting was the audience reaction: they saw a business model to which they could not relate. A company known as a pillar of stability in a sector where the half-life of most ventures probably averages 3 years.
If you’re not familiar with SAS they’re quite an anomaly in the software, if not an anomaly in American industry in general. Just over 30 years old, the company is now a $2.15 billion operation that claims to have been consistently profitable since its founding, and over the past year grew 15%. More to the point, the company has remained privately held, carries no debt, and has a strong identity with its Cary, NC headquarters community, where it has even built its own model schools. SAS is the hometown company that keeps going about its business, thank you. And as Goodnight says, as long as your expenses are less than your revenues, that’s OK.
We had a chance to sit down with Goodnight today at SAS’s Executive conference down in San Antonio. The guy is actually very plain spoken and blunt enough to scare off any handlers. He responded to us that during the dot com boom, the company actually considered going public, but to do so, would have to implement a standard financials package in place of their homegrown system (they chose Oracle) so that they would be more readily accountable. You know the rest of the story: 3 years later, no more boom. But as he admitted, the idea never sat right with him anyway, so even the migration would have taken only 3 months, the story probably wouldn’t have changed.
SAS is that rarity in the software industry of being a company with exceedingly low turnover. But we wondered whether having too much staff stability could engender inertia. Goodnight responded by citing a polar opposite: Jack Welch’s strategy of dismissing the lowest 10% of achievers each year. “You can’t have that kind of churn in the business and still expect business continuity,” he said. We continued to press, if you have the same people year in, year out, where do the new ideas come from? “Customers give us direction,” citing examples like HSBC where SAS collaborated on developing a credit fraud detection program, and Kohl’s, where SAS jointly developed a new application for marking down slow sellers.
For better or worse, SAS is very much a technology company that often takes hunches on solving technical problems, rather than a place where you conduct extensive marketing focus groups to determine future direction. At this point, the company is heavily embarking on a vertical applications strategy, which is not all that unusual, as enterprise players like IBM, SAP, and Oracle are doing same. It’s a strategy where you get led by your best customers -– a model that works for SAS because of the high end nature of its product. Its best customers have tens of millions or more invested, and like any enterprise backbone system, they are not about to pull the plug. Furthermore, today it’s not difficult to think of a global business problem for which statistical analysis might provide some insight.
Our overriding impression is that SAS is very much like a German company, in that it expects that its technology should speak for itself. In that sense, companies like SAS, IDS Scheer, and Software AG appear to be companies divided at birth.
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