02.22.10
Posted in Agile Development, Application Development at 9:05 am by Tony Baer
Today’s announcement of CollabNet’s acquisition of Danube is yet another indicator of the mainstreaming of agile development processes. Managing agile development was formerly the domain of purpose-built tools from providers like Rally Software and VersionOne; today, virtually every ALM tools provider claims to support agile in some way shape or form.
Even CollabNet did, although it was through a fairly klugey template atop their TeamForge core planning platform, which was not originally designed for agile processes.
Until now, CollabNet was best known for helping reinvent the ALM market by being one of the first tools vendors to actually profit from open source. One of its co-founders, Brian Behlendorf, was also a cofounder of the Apache Software Foundation, a group that took a commercial-friendly approach to open source licensing. One of the earliest projects of that foundation was Subversion, a source code change and configuration management (SCCM) tool around which CollabNet was founded.
Open source found its calling during the deflationary period of the early 00s, after he combined impacts of the end of Y2K, the popping of the dot com bubble, and the post-9/11 recession imploded IT budgets and with it, software vendor sales. In the ALM space, CollabNet got its mojo as the usual suspects – Borland, Compuware, Rational, and Serena – found their pipelines eroding. In tough times, developers were no longer going to pay a lot for this muffler – if it was commodity technology, they would not pay for it. CollabNet saw open source wave coming and figured out that if you layered value-add atop it, IT organizations would be glad to put their money where their mouths were.
Having caught the open source wave, CollabNet missed the agile one. On one hand that was kind of surprising, but on another it wasn’t. CollabNet represented one form of grassroots movement that paradoxically came to fruition from the top down: exploit commodity technology to simplify management of global software development. Global IT organizations thirsted for cheaper, simpler alternatives to proprietary household names like ClearCase, PVCS, or ChangeMan, and Subversion provided it. Building atop Subversion, CollabNet developed a planning system that coordinated source code check in, testing, builds and releases. CollabNet Enterprise and its current incarnation TeamForge capitalized on such demand from large global IT organizations, while overlooking what was happening at ground level, within isolated enclaves across its client base. Instead, Rally, joined by niche players like VersionOne and Danube, focused on the planning needs of development teams that embraced agile development methodologies. More recently, household names like IBM Rational, HP, Serena – and yes, CollabNet – hopped that bandwagon, exclaiming, “We’re agile!”
But Danube provides the lighter weight planning capability that CollabNet was missing. The acquisition that is being announced today plugs a gaping hole in CollabNet’s catalog. In the short term, CollabNet will link Danube’s (which will lose the company name) ScrumWorks product (whose brand name will survive) by enabling defect reports and commits tracked in TeamForge to update ScrumWorks. But both products will still be driven by separate back end repositories.
CollabNet can be excused for not having a full product integration roadmap, but at some point it is going to have to bite the bullet with ScrumWorks. While offerings from powers-that-be like IBM or Micro Focus (which inherited the Borland catalog and what was left of Compuware developer products) are not driven by a single engine, the CollabNet portfolio is not so diverse and complex to make that argument. Furthermore, acquisition of Danube has placed CollabNet up against Rally and Serena, which provide unified, broader suites (for Rally, minus source code control) that includes a key piece that is underrepresented in the combined TeamForge/ScrumWorks portfolio: requirements management. Scrumworks has some limited uer story management capabilities. Now that it has bitten off on agile, CollabNet needs to also make a serious stab for upgrading requirements capabilities.
It’s not like product convergence is foreign to CollabNet; last year it completed a more ambitious migration following the 2007 acquisition of SourceForge. It was hardly a straightforward process: product convergence meant migrating to the more modern, scalable architecture of the acquired product. It took 18 months, and after that point, the products were only about 75% integrated. But it did migrate the core base. The transition should not be so painful with ScrumWorks – you can use a common data engine but just selectively expose it through a lighter weight process skin.
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02.18.10
Posted in .NET, Application Development, Java, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 5:26 pm by Tony Baer
In spite of a belated challenge from Microsoft, Adobe’s Flash framework has arguably remained the de facto standard for formal Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). But that existence has been called into question with its latest cold war with Apple.
Steve Jobs has slammed Adobe for being lazy; his motives of course are debatable, as we’ll get into below. Yes, Flash is buggy and there are lots of security holes. That’s because as a full RIA client framework,, the technology is being called upon to exert a much wider role from which it was originally designed; to bring multimedia to static web pages.
We were reminded of this while being contacted by an Asian reporter who was asking about whether Flash’s very market survival was now in question. But let’s get real; the only reason we’re having this discussion is Apple’s rejection of Flash for the new and overly hyped iPad.
The conflict between Apple and Adobe is nothing new, and in a way is rather ironic. Adobe Postscript was the technology that helped make the Mac what it is for creative professionals, as Postscript technology made the Mac the de facto standard for desktop publishing. Fast forward to the present, and Apple views Adobe technology as a threat to its revenue stream.
Apple has honed to a very clever business model for its mobile products that is actually a throwback to the golden days of turnkey systems, circa 1979. This model, where the hardware supplier controls what software goes on the machine and gives the client a box with functionality that is ready to go gives the hardware provider control over the revenue stream. The only difference between 1979 and now is that, while the hardware provider used to supply the software, today that comes through third parties who pay for the privilege of selling content to the iPod audience, and a mix of content or software to the iPhone, and now the iPad market.
The problem for Apple however is that the Flash framework could provide third-party software and content providers a bypass around Apple’s Berlin Wall and fees. Adobe is therefore an existential threat to Apple’s annuity stream.
Consequently, while Steve Jobs isn’t off base in criticizing Flash’s technical vulnerabilities, the real driver is cold hard cash.
The argument over whether denial of access to he iPad is a threat to Adobe is because there are questions as to whether the iPad will have the same transformational impact on the mobile Internet space that the iPod and iPhone have had over music and cell phone. Based on what’s out now, we think that the iPad is more hype and actually represents a step back for Internet users to the Web 0.9 experience as the iPad lacks multi-tasking, not to mention the Flash content that is ubiquitous across the web. Others are obviously rushing to come out with their iPad wannabees, most of them likely with Flash support. A new tablet market category will emerge and steal thunder from the netbook.
Admittedly, multi-tasking could be fixed in forthcoming rev, but we think that Apple has made a line in the sand regarding Flash. Maybe Apple has something up its sleeve, like its own answer to Flash, Silverlight, or JavaFX. Or maybe Apple eventually promotes HTML 5 as its RIA strategy. That’s the draft W3C standard that would bring RIA support right back into the mother ship, eliminating the need for those pesky add-ons or reliance on loosey-goosey Ajax. But HTML 5 is way off in the future. Currently in working draft and deficient in areas such as security and codec support, the W3C won’t likely approve it until 2011 at the earliest, an dafter that, it will be years before it reaches critical mass adoption if ever.
But let’s just pretend that maybe the iPad has the same transformative impact on the market as the iPod or iPhone. By 2011, there’s a definite trend away from netbooks to tablets, Apple’s rivals roll out their wannabees, but web developers find that much of their audience is drifting off Flash. (Fat chance.) That’s where things could get really weird. Microsoft, which has been watching from the sidelines, wants a game changer. It must decide which is its worst enemy: Apple or Adobe. If the former, it scraps Silverlight for Flash, because what use is there in being #3? If the latter, it embraces HTML 5 under the guise of industry standards support. Sound unlikely? Actually there’s a precedent. Years ago, Bill Gates promoted Dynamic HTML as Microsoft’s industry-standard alternative to Java clients (we saw him at a Gartner event back in 1999 making the pitch). Who’da thunk that DHTML would eventually becoming one of the pillars that made Ajax possible?
Back to our original point: the iPad is overhyped, it will gain some market share, but it won’t kill off Flash.
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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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