More Redmond watching from Oracle
In an
article today, Computer Business Review, comments on Oracle president Charles Phillips’ recent announcement of what he claims to be "a major revamp of our product line coming out over the summer both for BI tools and our OLAP engine." I commented
recently that Oracle is readying itself for Microsoft’s November launch of SQL Server 2005. This announcement only serves to reinforce my view. Microsoft has already shaken up the reporting/business intelligence/analytics market by bundling capabilities for which its competitors have traditionally charged. SQL Server 2005 promises to increase the competitive pressure and Oracle is clearly attempting to pre-empt this with this promise of summer enhancements. If the substance of what Phillips announced have been correctly reported, I think he is over-egging the summer pudding (forgive my
culinary license for want of a metaphor) somewhat in an effort to thwart his Redmond foe. I hardly think that the centralised administration of OLAP engine deployment and a new user interface and wizards for the business intelligence tool constitute “a major revamp”. We’re already well into the summer and this smacks of a hastily put together announcement designed to steal some of Microsoft’s November thunder.
What's REALLY new about SOA?
Britton Manasco over
at ZDNet provides an insightful analysis of some recent commentary by Michael Liebow, VP of Web Services and SOA at IBM Global Services. Liebow's comments address the issue of what is new about SOA and, unsurprisingly, emphasises broad support (RESTafarians excepted, of course) for web services standards as the distinguishing factor. Whilst I don’t disagree with the importance of implementation-independent, interoperable, open standards, I do have a problem with the assumption which appears to underpin Liebow’s perspective – “"Now we have a set of basic standards that allow for the discovery, description, communication, cataloging and securing of messages that allow applications to talk to one another …” and “it's something I would call SOI, or service-oriented integration. It's exposing some applications to being connected …” – that SOA is primarily concerned with exposing application functionality and information as services and, more specifically, an open standards-based approach to EAI. This is certainly an important aspect of a service-oriented approach to IT but it is not sufficient.
Whilst it is true to say that ‘old’ SOA was primarily concerned with application development and integration, things have moved on. IT organisations are now under significantly greater pressure to justify business investment in IT (and even the existence of the IT organisation itself). To do so, they must explain the business value of the capabilities they offer in a consistent way. Presenting those capabilities as services within a structured management framework is a well-proven approach. But those capabilities are about much more than application functionality and information – there’s the infrastructure services they depend on and the lifecycle services that are responsible for the design, development, operation and change of the both the application and infrastructure services. And there are the contracts which govern the interactions between providers and consumers. Not just the functional aspects of the interaction but also the quality-of-service and commercial aspects.
So Liebow’s comments, whilst valid, only address a subset of what’s new about SOA. SOA today is an approach which demands a more holistic consideration of the different types of IT service and their associated contracts.
IT's all about business outcomes
In his latest
blog post over at Loosely Coupled, Phil Waineright discusses the challenges to traditional software-based pricing models. He refers to an
Economist article which highlights some of the factors which are driving a reappraisal of processor-based pricing models, such as the advent of multi-core processors and virtualisation. Whilst these factors have certainly served to catalyse what has been an ongoing industry debate, his later reference
to an article by former McKinsey & Co partner Mike Nevens gets to the heart of the matter. Here at MWD we firmly believe – in fact, it’s why we created our own company – that business investment in IT is directed to deliver business outcomes and that IT organisations should be measured on that basis – and by implication their IT suppliers. However, this is not limited to pricing models. Our discussions with enterprises make it quite clear that they are far less concerned with the features and functions of stovepipe technology solutions and far more with how they can work together to support the desired business outcomes. Which brings me on to SOA.
Much of the industry discussion around SOA is focussed on the design, development and integration of business software applications as groups of software-based web services. Whilst this certainly goes some way to addressing the need to break open technology stovepipes, it doesn’t go far enough. A service-oriented approach to IT must consider more than these "business function" services. It must also take account of the infrastructure services that provide the underlying platform and the lifecycle services that are responsible for the design, implementation, operation and alteration of infrastructure and business function services. It is the combination of these distinct but interdependent IT services that IT organisations must deliver to enable investment in and delivery of IT capabilities in line with business objectives. But how can the business assess those capabilities in terms of the business outcomes they deliver? The key here is to ensure that the mutual obligations of service providers and consumers are agreed and then enforced. Once again, current SOA thinking is lacking here, with much of the emphasis on ‘what’ the service provides – the functional aspects. Service contracts must also consider ‘how well’ the ‘what’ is delivered and ‘how much’ it costs – the quality-of-service and commercial aspects. This demands that infrastructure to support SOA initiatives has sophisticated capabilities in areas such as policy-based prioritisation and optimisation, identity management etc which are essential if IT organisations are to support business outcomes – and be seen by the business to do so. As SOA initiatives mature it will only serve to increase the pressure on IT suppliers to shift to a model, in terms of packaging and pricing, which reflects the way it is being used to support business outcomes.
Longhorn becomes Windows Vista
Well, after much speculation, Microsoft has announced the
formal name for Longhorn: Windows Vista. Whilst Microsoft clearly hopes the name will invoke the key messages of ‘Clear’, ‘Confident’ and ‘Connected’, I always think of ‘vista’ as a vision off in the distance! Given the history of delays with the next version of Windows, perhaps they’ve got it right!
SAP NetWeaver: still plenty to do before world dominance
Ask IBM, BEA and others about where they're most concerned about competition coming from in the application platform / service infrastructure space, and they'll say "SAP".
I came across
this article the other day (it was a link inside the regular SAP Developer Network e-newsletter - you may need to accept a certificate to view the page).
It's interesting because it reveals (to those who might not know already) that underneath the snazzy "one integrated technology stack for all your application platform needs" branding, the reality of the NetWeaver "platform" is quite different...
Of course, SAP isn't the only company with a "reality gap" between its platform branding and the true status of its platform products. But SAP's position is particularly interesting because it primarily sells to business audiences, not technical audiences - so the incentive for SAP to improve its technology may well be less than that for its competitors...
IBM nabs PureEdge to weaken Adobe and Microsoft
IBM today announced its intention to acquire 70-person PureEdge, a 12 year old privately-held company based in Canada. This is yet another small technology-focussed acquisition, along the lines of
AlphaBlox, SRD and Venetica. PureEdge’s eponymous
8X solution supports the development, delivery and utilisation of electronic forms, based on the W3C’s
XForms standard developed by the likes of Adobe, IBM, Novell, Oracle, SAP, Sun as well as both IBM and PureEdge. IBM has already been working with PureEdge in 10 of its 37 target industry solutions segments, with a particular emphasis on public sector, financial services and insurance, and believes that electronic forms are relevant to at least a further 19. As well as these go-to-market synergies, PureEdge has already been integrated with IBM’s WebSphere Portal and some work has been done around Workplace, based on the Eclipse Rich Client platform. It is no surprise that the initial focus of the integration with the IBM software group portfolio will be around Workplace.
This is a smart move by IBM. There can be little doubt that electronic forms play an important role at the front-end of many vertical industry-specific and horizontal business processes, in areas such as claims processing and human resources. Although IBM has tapped into these opportunities with Notes/Domino in the past, there is the obvious downside that this requires that the customer has bought into Notes/Domino in the first place which is clearly not always the case. IBM is focussing significant R&D and marketing dollars on Workplace and electronic forms processing is an important capability if IBM is to realise its Workplace vision. IBM plans to have an integrated solution available in the first half of 2006 and plans to extend the integration to Content Manager and the WebSphere Portal after that. During the conference call announcing the acquisition, Dr. Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of Workplace, Portal & Collaboration Software was keen to point out that the PureEdge technology has broad applicability to other IBM software assets. He’s not wrong. The WebSphere portfolio, and more specifically, WebSphere Business Integration, provides business process management capabilities and electronic forms as a front-end are equally applicable there. The challenge of course – not uncommon across the IBM software portfolio – will be to deliver those capabilities equally across the different brands. Whilst Dr. Goyal was very clear in emphasising synergies across the software group, he was less clear when it came to the timescales, particularly for WebSphere.
The electronic forms opportunity is one which has not been lost on other significant players. Adobe, with its
Intelligent Document Platform and Microsoft with the Office System,
InfoPath and
Information Bridge, are attempting to exploit the ubiquity of their document-centric platforms to deliver similar capabilities. During the conference call, Dr. Goyal mentioned “forms as the currency of exchange” on numerous occasions and the role of XForms as a means of breaking the control delivered through proprietary formats. IBM’s vision is to “drive ubiquity in (the) market place around IBM’s XForms industry direction and integrated products” by the end of 2006. Whilst this serves to promote IBM’s open standards message, this is as much about driving the rest of industry in a direction designed to weaken the position of Adobe and, particularly, Microsoft (the most noticeable absentee in the list of XForms supporters)
Oracle gets ready for Yukon
Yesterday
Oracle announced general availability of its Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003. These tools have been developed through Oracle’s participation in Microsoft’s VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partner) program and enable the development and deployment of Oracle Database 10g applications using the dominant development environment for the Windows platform. This is hot on the heels of the company’s announcement of the
second release of its Database 10g, which also offers Microsoft-centric capabilities in the form of support for the development of database stored procedures based on the .NET Framework’s CLR (Common Language Runtime). There are a couple of aspects to these announcements.
First, these announcements provide tangible evidence, as if it were needed, that Oracle has its mind focussed on Redmond (as well as
Walldorf) and more specifically the week of November 7th, when Microsoft
plans to launch the long-awaited Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey) and SQL Server 2005 (aka Yukon). There is a 3-way battle going on for database market share, with Oracle facing IBM in the UNIX/Linux corner and Microsoft on Windows. Oracle clearly recognises that it needs to get developers, particularly from the ISV community, on side if it is going to take on Microsoft. These announcements will help in that regard, particularly in reducing objections where Oracle has won the database battle. The challenge of course is that Microsoft is able to offer levels of integration which Oracle simply can not hope to emulate – VSIP membership or not. Added to which there will always be a time lag before Oracle is able to support the current version of Microsoft’s tooling.
Second, I think they provide further proof (if proof were needed) that Oracle is still a database company first and an application platform provider second. Oracle’s Fusion middleware stack is exclusively Java-based. Now, if Oracle were an application platform vendor first and foremost then stored procedure support would be based on PL/SQL and Java only, to maximise integration and skills reuse across the platform. But, because the database comes first, Oracle needs to ensure that it continues to have a market-leading standalone proposition – and that means supporting the CLR on Windows, even if it will raise questions in the minds of those considering Oracle’s application platform proposition. Oracle could (and probably does) claim that CLR support means it can play better in .NET environments to provide a foundation for customers to migrate to its broader platform proposition – but then, of course, its application platform is Java-centric.
More Sun 'participation' - this time with web single sign-on
According to
news reports, Sun will later today announce a further foray into open source, with the creation of the Open Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project. According to the report, OpenSSO will see Sun releasing source code from its Java System Access Manager (under the same CDDL license used for the OpenSolaris project) for web single sign-on and authentication, with the necessary integration hooks to tie it into its Java System Web Server and Java System Application Server. It will be interesting to see whether OpenSSO includes working examples of the identity management interoperability specifications
co-developed with Microsoft.
This is a smart move by Sun. First, it continues the ‘participation age’ theme promoted by COO
Jonathan Schwartz and manifested in its recent
rebranding. Second, whilst web single sign-on is valuable both in terms of simplifying the user experience and easing user administration, the real opportunity lies in user provisioning, federated identity management, auditing for compliance etc. Eric Leach, a Sun product manager is quoted as saying “"The idea is that we're going to give developers the tools they need to build basic security into their internal Web infrastructures without additional cost,". In other words, OpenSSO provides customers with a free platform for Intranet-based single sign-on from which Sun can then build with its suite of
identity management products offering higher value identity management capabilities.
Sun clearly hopes that the inclusion of off-the-shelf integration with its web and application servers will help to drive adoption. Whilst some developers may choose to experiment with these products, the majority of customers will already have made their choice (and it’s likely to be Apache, BEA, IBM, JBoss rather than Sun) and will want OpenSSO to work with that, so I think Sun is likely to be disappointed.
Microsoft’s channel boost: vital for building real enterprise relationships
For some years now, Microsoft has been working hard to improve perceptions of it within “enterprises” – large commercial and public-sector organisations. These days, it’s doing more than ever.
One particular set of initiatives which the company is pursuing, concerns dialog with customers about the business value of Microsoft technology. The company is doing a whole host of things to try and maximise the likelihood of customers not only buying licenses for Microsoft software – but actually using those licenses in a way which helps them do quantifiably valuable things.
Bob McDowell’s “information worker business value” mission is one such effort: others include the architecture work being done by people like
Arvindra Sehmi and his team – which aims to help customers understand how they can architect systems using Microsoft technology so that they align to business goals.
But Microsoft’s business model gives it a severe challenge, even though it’s trying hard. Why? Because (here I think I once more have to name-check an ex-colleague,
Gary Barnett – I think I heard him use this phrase first) the business-focused audiences in enterprises which Microsoft covets so much, don’t buy products – they buy outcomes. But Microsoft is a product company – its partners fill the gap between the products that Microsoft offers, and the outcome that an enterprise wants. Microsoft can try as hard as it likes, but while it stays out of the professional services game, it can’t by itself “close the loop” on business value delivery – i.e. understanding what value is actually delivered (and how), as well as teeing things up before implementation commences. Microsoft architects can help enterprises understand how they can utilise Microsoft technology brilliantly: but a third party can come into the relationship subsequently, and make a complete mess of things. Microsoft may not know about such failures until a discussion about Enterprise software licensing months or years later.
The boost which Microsoft is
giving to its partners in terms of opening up more internal information, training and tools to the community, is the starting point of what needs to be an ongoing program of improvement if Microsoft is to reach its goal of being a “true enterprise grade supplier”. Redmond has an opportunity to build programs which encourage its myriad partners to not only take forward Microsoft’s own architecture proof-of-concept work with customers, for example; but to also feed back real information about what happened during implementation – and how Microsoft could help improve the success of future engagements. Without insight from the partners which really help enterprises create business value, Microsoft is operating with one hand tied behind its back.
Calling time on ESB
For some time now, I’ve been holding back from letting a growing frustration boil over. Specifically, my frustration is with the creation of new terminology to represent concepts which are already well-understood, with the purpose of creating new product opportunities; and with the twisting of existing terminology to represent concepts other than those which were originally framed. But with the growing interest in the “Enterprise Service Bus” (ESB), I’m afraid I just can’t control myself any longer.
First, let me say that I’m convinced that the concept of an ESB is absolutely valid in the context of implementing a service-oriented approach to application delivery. Indeed Sonic Software (often credited with the creation of the term, supported by
Roy Schulte) provides a sensible definition: “An ESB is software infrastructure that simplifies the integration and flexible reuse of business components using a service-oriented architecture. An ESB makes it easy to dynamically connect, mediate and control services and their interactions.” The
Wikipedia entry for ESB is good, too.
What’s getting me really uppity is the way that some vendors (you know who you are) are attempting to make it very clear that “old-school” technology vendors offering this technology are not really worth consideration, because either (a) their technology isn’t built from the ground up based on Web Services; or (b) they don’t have a product called an ESB.
Let’s be honest – this is a cynical marketing move. The ESB product category is a complete fiction, invented by software companies (abetted by some of my fellow analysts) intent on convincing the world that their technology is materially different from that which has been delivered by the “old-school” players for 10+ years. What’s really incredible, is that these old-school vendors are now coming under pressure from their salespeople because prospects are saying “you don’t have an ESB product, so I can’t work with you”. Somewhere along the line these prospects become convinced that only a product with ESB on the box, is going to do the job. This interview with IBM’s
Steve Mills is just a symptom of what’s going on.
But the truth is that if you’re an IBM customer with a significant investment in WebSphere’s integration technology, there's a good chance you already have an ESB. Same goes for SeeBeyond (now
part of Sun). And TIBCO. And webMethods.
The “ESB product vendors” try to convince prospects that because products from the old-school vendors don’t always provide the same features as they do out of the box, they’re not doing the job. But customers of the old-school vendors already know that implementing enterprise-wide application infrastructure isn’t something you can do by just installing software from a DVD.
So, come on – let’s hear it. Am I
tilting at windmills, or
naming the elephant?
