A great identity management resource
For those of you grappling with the the fast moving world of identity management, you could do a lot worse than cast your eyes over
Doc Searls article
over at the Linux Journal. It provides a great summary of the work of
Kim Cameron (glowing praise - completely justified - for Microsoft in Linux Journal!), the
Identity Commons team, Dick Hardt at
Sxip (whose
presentation from the 2005 OSCON is also highly recommended) and numerous others on the
identity metasystem, the
7 laws of identity and the role of a variety of WS-* standards. It also provides insight into the relationship with a number of the grass roots, open source identity initiatives. Thanks Doc.
Microsoft and JBoss co-operate: commercial realities abound
Yesterday, Microsoft and JBoss
announced plans to enhance the integration between Windows Server and the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System. The two companies plan to focus on four key areas: Interoperability - web services; Security - Active Directory; Manageability - management of JEMS using Microsoft Operations Manager; Data - optimisation of SQL Server for use with Hibernate and EJB 3.0.
Much of the press commentary, quite rightly in my opinion, avoids the temptation to pepper their commentary with references to "open source foes", "adversaries", "thawing of relationships" and so forth. Instead they focus on the commercial realities of the announcement. A significant proportion (as much as 50%
according to Microsoft's Shared Source lead Jason Matusow) of JBoss customers run the software on Windows. However, I think there is an additional commercial slant to this: IBM. In May, the company announced the
acquisition of Gluecode with a clear objective to target the enterprise developer and SMB communities - both key markets for JBoss - and whilst Microsoft and IBM have agreed a truce when it comes to web services they remain fierce adversaries. Far better for both Microsoft and JBoss that companies choose to run JEMS on Windows than Gluecode on Linux.
Office productivity suites finally got interesting again
The past few weeks have seen a major flurry of industry activity, comment and posturing in the office productivity software arena. For five years or so - ever since the end of the small blip that was
Corel's vain attempt to build a viable
office productivity suite in Java - this part of the world of business software has been a sleepy backwater, where Microsoft has continued to dominate despite significant reported customer dissatisfaction, and potential competitors have failed to capitalise on opportunities.
With the debut of "Office 12" at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference earlier this month, however, the company has started to reveal the plan which it hopes will rejuvenate its profit powerhouse - at the same time as key customers (led by the Commonwealth of Mass.) start to bare their teeth, and as competitors (led by
IBM and
Sun) start to launch new offensives.
Microsoft is starting - through serious engagement with software developers, closer links with Sharepoint, addition of server-based functionality (in
InfoPath,
Excel etc) and integration with the new
Windows Worflow Framework - to shift the point of control that it exerts with Office away from ownership of file formats - and towards something which (thankfully) is much more interesting, at the end of the day, to its customers. That something is the management of business processes which involve "knowledge working". The issue of document formats is at the heart of the State of Massachusetts' blow to Redmond, and the fact that it lights the way for other big government clients around the world to follow, is only highlighting the timeliness of Microsoft's rethink. (Whether Microsoft will eventually support ODF is another question entirely).
What's interesting when you scratch away all the rhetoric - from Microsoft as well as from IBM (which is evolving its
Workplace offering to weave workflow, content management, application integration, portal and document collaboration functions together) is that there's a realisation occurring, finally, that office productivity software isn't about personal productivity - it's about organisational productivity. The people who use these suites are participants in business processes, just as the people who use Siebel or SAP apps are (and of course they're very often the same people - ref.
Mendocino, which IBM has yet to respond to, btw). Finally, it seems that the big IT vendors are realising that there is value to be driven from using business process automation and workflow technologies more holistically, to bring the office productivity and collaboration automation domains much closer to the domain of structured information processing.
SAP venture funding bears fruit
Back in
June I commented on the investment of $7.5 million in Ping Identity by SAP's VC arm. Well, that investment appears to be bearing fruit. At SAP TechEd '05 in Boston yesterday, Ping
announced the availability (as a free download) of kits to integrate Ping's federated identity solution with SAP's NetWeaver. I am sure this is only the start.
Microsoft's WWF Smackdown
I was told by
Scott Woodgate at this week’s Microsoft PDC that WWF is not an officially-sanctioned term for referring to the newly-announced Windows Workflow Foundation (formally announced at PDC). Which is a shame, because I suspect that the arrival of WWF will – if Microsoft executes well – usher in a bit of a
smackdown in the world of workflow. (For reference, WWF was previously known as Windows Workflow Services - and before that, WinOE).
After 10+ years as an industry analyst I have a strongly cynical streak, and so it’s a rare thing these days when I get excited about a new technology. Plus, my focus is on the business value of technology – and often, sexy technology is sexy for all the wrong reasons. But WWF is, I think, a game-changer in the world of workflow. Why? Briefly:
- A semantic model for workflow which is rich enough to encompass the complexities and nuances of real human-centred processes, and also provide easy ways to implement straightforward structured workflows – in one engine
- A model which can be programmed visually in Visual Studio tools; directly by editing XML workflow representations; or even in C# or VB.NET (think about what that last bit means for ISVs and Microsoft itself, when embedding WWF). What's more there's three-way synchronisation between changes made through the tools, editing the XML, and editing the code
- programmatic model extensibility, with the ability to render flows using existing modelling languages (BPEL rendering is supported out-of-the-box and you or Microsoft can create other renderings)
- The ability for actors to change workflow instances in which they are participating, on the fly, and extend them to encompass new activities and actors
- The fact that it will be embedded in BizTalk and Office “12” / Sharepoint, and the new versions of the “Dynamics” (formerly MS Business Solutions) applications – as well as addressable by ASP.NET applications, driving web application page flow.
So – that’s one advanced engine, capable of handling a wide variety of workflow scenarios, which is extremely programmable using common skills, and which will become almost ubiquitous in the Microsoft operating platform over the next two years. Plus, of course, WWF does all the things you'd expect from a workflow product - like providing a rules engine (though in truth, this is more of a framework for a rules engine, aimed at ISVs to build on).
In contrast: today’s workflow technologies are stove-piped, specialised for particular scenarios, often constrained semantically, and implemented as stand-alone systems which are frequently poorly-integrated with other applications and everyday usage contexts.
There’s still a lot that Microsoft could do to squander the opportunity, however. Among other things, it needs to make sure it engages with its current partner community in the right way – to encourage workflow specialists to evolve, while encouraging those which have built their own embedded workflow capabilities to implement on WWF instead.
It needs to make sure that it manages expectations around Office “12”: WWF is part of WinFX, which is part of the Vista client and the Longhorn server, but which will not be shipped with Office “12” running on XP. CORRECTION: Belatedly, I realised that WWF will actually be back-ported to XP and Windows Server 2003. Apologies. It needs to make sure that using WWF in applications doesn’t make performance suck. And last but not least, it needs to make the benefits of WWF clear to customers, as part of the drive to convince them of upgrading to future versions of BizTalk, Sharepoint, etc.
I encourage anyone whose interest is piqued by this to
go here.
(For transparency purposes: Microsoft is a client. But we haven’t done any work with the WWF team.)
Ebay plus Skype equals bubble 2.0?
Our blog is meant to provide “our latest thoughts and ideas on IT-business alignment, together with comments on relevant industry events” and I am not sure I can stretch the use of the term relevant to encompass Ebay’s $2.6 billion (and potentially $4.1 billion) acquisition of Skype – but I couldn’t resist. The fact that it occurred on the same day as Oracle’s proposed $5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel only increased the temptation. With Oracle offering a 17% premium (and beginning to look like the CA of business applications – at least the CA of old) and Ebay acquiring at a 40-plus (and possibly close to 70-plus!) multiple of projected 2006 revenues, was yesterday’s $10 billion shopping spree the start of another bubble inflating: a Web 2.0 bubble? Whilst the numbers are certainly big, I am not so sure. I am not a financial analyst and so I am not going to comment on the merits of a 40-plus revenue multiple. However, similar questions were raised when Ebay acquired PayPal and that seems to have worked out, with PayPal streamlining the transaction process and providing an additional source of revenue. I can certainly see similar synergies with Skype. Buyers and sellers will be able to have a real time discussion – IM or voice - about a proposed transaction, rather than an asynchronous email dialogue. And, with Skype’s video conferencing service, even view the subject of the transaction. They could also see additional revenues through some sort of “pay-per-call” from advertisers and merchants. But I think there’s also a broader dimension to this. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Ebay are all converging on the consumer – albeit from different directions - but, in contrast to Web 1.0, are putting them at the centre, rather than as another eyeball at the edge. With the consumer at the centre of a web of loosely connected, federated services, a similarly loosely coupled, federated identity management system – an identity metasystem – becomes critical. Such a system, as Yahoo recently discovered with Flickr, must put the user in control. Combine Ebay’s massive user community, built-in reputation system to facilitate trust, PayPal payment infrastructure and now Skype, and it has, to my mind at least, the start of such an identity management system. Google is rumoured to be working on a payment system and is beginning, if Google Talk is anything to go by, to use Gmail usernames as a common identifier. Microsoft has Passport, which although an abject failure (rightly so in my opinion) with potential business partners, is not short of a consumer or two and now has VoIP with Teleo. The creation of an identity management system for Web 2.0 is becoming an important (and seemingly expensive!) battleground.
