Open-source development tool momentum swings towards Eclipse
First, what has a post concerning
Eclipse and
NetBeans got to do with IT-business alignment?
Well, it’s all to do with the cost of training and of acquiring skills. Development tool environments have ceased to be a key battleground between IT vendors, by and large; and these days, most IDEs do pretty much the same things. Projects like Eclipse and NetBeans are potentially important contributors to enterprise IT department initiatives which are seeking to reduce spending on stuff that ain’t important, and allocate money to stuff that is, because the more commonality there is in the world of software development, the more transferable skills are – and the more productive people can be.
In the run-up to this week's EclipseCon event, the open-source IDE framework project (see
http://www.eclipse.org/) has finally started to become something significantly more than an open-source hernia from IBM's software technology labs. Heavy-hitters Borland, BEA and Sybase have all joined the Eclipse Foundation as Board members, shifting the balance of power further away from IBM. With Borland and BEA now playing major roles in Eclipse along with IBM, it is clear that the key Java tools players are now marshalling their forces around Eclipse, in order to ensure that they deliver functionality equivalent to that planned by Microsoft with it’s Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) and the upcoming enhancements to Visual Studio.
CA, which had just announced its enrolment in Eclipse, is likely to recommend a project to link to systems management environments: and HP is working on similar things. This doesn't signify that Eclipse is trying to create a globe-consuming monster: however it is an important sign that Eclipse is increasingly seen as a force to be reckoned with and therefore an operation to partner with.
The significant increase in momentum behind Eclipse over the past few months means that once more, we have to ask the question: "what now for Sun's competing NetBeans (see
http://www.netbeans.org/) project?" At least publicly, Sun explains that its antipathy towards Eclipse stems from the use of technologies within Eclipse that are considered by Sun to be "non standard" - specifically, Eclipse's use of SWT, a GUI library which is optimised for use on Windows - rather than the Sun-endorsed cross-platform alternative, "Swing". Although Eclipse deliverables are tested against a wide variety of platforms - not just Windows, but also Mac OS X, Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX - SWT does have to be integrated into the "host" operating environment, whereas Swing only requires a Java Virtual Machine. (See
David Berlind of ZDNet's coverage of this and other "issues" between Sun and other big Java contributors).
Sun does have a point, strictly speaking; it would be better if things like developer tools were truly portable. But the world is a simple place, sometimes: the truth is that individual developers and developer teams don't work on a Windows machine one day, and the next day need to install the software again, box-fresh, on a Solaris box. Most corporate software developers work on Windows. A small minority work on other platforms, yes; but even they don't typically move from platform to platform.
As support for Eclipse continues to build and large software vendors commit more and more money and time to the project, Sun's stance is starting to look more and more quixotic. The danger is that Sun will start to be seen as actively fragmenting the Java community that it worked so hard to create.
Aligning IT with the business
When Nicholas Carr published his May 2003 Harvard Business Review article questioning the value of IT (
http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.html), it was greeted with much hand-wringing and voluble protest from the IT vendor community. Whilst questions can be raised about the validity of some of his arguments – not least the fact that it's how the I(nformation) and the T(echnology) of IT are combined that DOES matter – there can be little doubt that the hypothesis at the heart of his article resonated in countless boardrooms. Survey after survey of business leaders sees them questioning the value of their IT investments. Equally, business leaders want to see more of their IT investments targeted at business innovation and less at maintaining the IT status quo.
This business-IT disconnect is nothing new. In the halcyon days of the mainframe era when IT was firmly in control, the business suffered with an inflexible IT resource - and an expensive one at that. The advent of client/server and distributed systems allowed the business to wrench back control but at the cost of a proliferation of poorly integrated, heterogeneous technology which is fragile and increasingly costly to maintain.
The consequences of this flip-flopping of control are all too apparent: the business demands innovation, whilst IT struggles to simply maintain what it’s already got; IT resource utilisation is sub-optimal and there’s significant redundant capacity; investment in ‘quick fix’ solutions exacerbates inflexibility; and outsourcing is seen as a route to cost saving.
The post-dot.com hangover has all but abated and IT budgets are growing (albeit at - most would say more realistic - low single digit rates). However, unlike the teenage binge drinker, lessons have been learned. IT investments are now subject to far greater scrutiny. It is now incumbent upon the IT organisation to demonstrate that IT investment will impact the bottom line – and then to show how it has.
This has not been lost on the vendor community. Business-IT alignment is becoming an increasingly common mantra which permeates their strategies – whether those strategies are dressed up in words like “On Demand”, “Adaptive Enterprise”, “Business Technology Optimization”, “Dynamic Systems Initiative”, or something else similar. If you scrape away the marketing veneer, the common technology picture which emerges, combines the benefits of the two phases of control which got us to this point in the first place: the scalability, reliability, security and manageability of the mainframe era; with the openness and flexibility of a highly distributed environment. This is what we refer to as the “next-generation data centre”.
The “next-generation data centre” technology concept demands the convergence of enabling application lifecycle, integration and management technologies; and shifts the value of technology tools increasingly away from features and functions, towards simplification and integration – which, interestingly, offers both opportunities and challenges for the largest IT suppliers. They have the potential to exert an ever-stronger grip over IT procurement choice – if they can get their own product lines in order.
As an IT user,exploiting this concept requires a new approach to IT investment and deployment, which targets technology complexity and promotes common understanding of the key issues and priorities at the interface between business and IT. The hyperbole which surrounds service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services could imply that we already have the makings of this new approach. The truth, though, is that while they are certainly important components, by no means do they provide the complete picture.
Business-IT alignment, enabled by the “next-generation data centre” and a way of thinking “end to end” about IT issues which we refer to as “enterprise architecture”, demands a new way of thinking from IT suppliers and their customers. That new thinking must be informed by a new type of advice: one which focuses on the convergence of enabling technologies, rather than the technologies themselves, and is delivered in the context of an architecture framework which unites the worlds of business and IT. That’s why we formed Macehiter Ward-Dutton.
