BEA ups the service infrastructure stakes... or will, soon
Yesterday the infrastructure software vendor BEA announced its acquisition of software asset repository vendor Flashline. Flashline's flagship product becomes a part of BEA's AquaLogic service infrastructure product line - the AquaLogic Enterprise Repository (ALER for short). It will sit in the AquaLogic Portfolio alongside the Service Registry, which is OEMed from
Systinet Mercury HP.
On the face of it this is not a surprising acquisition, given the high level of agreement in the analyst and vendor community about the importance of SOA repository technology to the value of SOA initiatives. But when I look a bit deeper, I do wonder why BEA didn't end up chomping
Infravio instead. (They might well have tried and failed for some reason, of course - if anyone knows anything about that, let me know!)
Why? Well, Flashline sells a really comprehensive, smart set of tools for storing and managing pretty much any kind of software-related asset you might think of, which is highly regarded. But given BEA's positioning of the repository squarely within its SOA offering, it's fair to assume that BEA was looking for a SOA-focused repository. And here, from a technology standpoint at least, Infravio appears to be a much better fit than Flashline.
Although Flashline does sell a "SOA version" of the Flashline repository which is tuned to the storage and management of some SOA-related assets (XSD documents, WSDL specs, etc), the product doesn't offer functionality geared to the specific challenges of service lifecycles. Given the nature of "services" - that they are more than software assets, they're at least as much about
operational experiences of capabilities - a really SOA-specific repository should offer facilities that link together design- and development-time processes with the middleware and management tools that shape the operational service landscape.
There's nothing to say that BEA couldn't build these facilities on top of a combination of the new AquaLogic Enterprise Repository and its OEMed Service Registry - but at the moment, what BEA has added to its service infrastructure suite is a general-purpose software asset management product. A very sophisticated one, but not one that really dovetails with the nuanced requirements of managing service network lifecycles.
Arithmetic 2.0
OK,
this has *nothing* do with the stated aim of this blog.
But it is f-u-n-n-y.
And you know how I feel about things labelled "2.0".
Is
Peter Rip too humorous to be a venture capitalist...? Someone remove his chequebook, quick.
"Uncompany" research reports now published
I've never used this blog before to advertise our research reports - we've been trying to keep the focus on "content" rather than "company stuff" - but seeing as I already
trailed the research in this blog, I thought it would be worthwhile letting any readers who aren't MWD research subscribers know that a few weeks back we published a pair of research reports on the topic of the "uncompany".
The research project we embarked on aimed to look at how the Worldwide Web and "the business of business" are evolving, influenced by one another, and analyse how new features of web-based resources and technologies enable organisations to do things in different ways - turning themselves inside out, and taking on features of what we call the "uncompany" (think
unconferences to get an idea of this kind of change).
The
first report concentrates primarily on how the Web is changing; the
second report looks at how this relates to business change and business imperatives, and makes some recommendations for anyone looking at adopting the new technologies and techniques out there in their organisations.
Readers of this blog may also not know that subscription to our entire catalogue of research reports - including this pair of reports - is completely free of charge. You can
sign up here.
Sun's open-sourcing of Java: avoid the red herring
So this morning I attended a briefing with Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer(*). The briefing was kind of a rerun of a soiree in San Francisco yesterday evening, where the assembled were updated on Sun's progress in its open-sourcing of Java.
The "big news": Sun now plans to bring its reference implementations of the mobile "editions" of Java (JME CDC and CLDC) to market under open-source licenses. It also has a bit more clarity on the timescale for its open-sourcing of Java Standard Edition: code will start being released under the new license regime before the end of the calendar year. And in addition, it's created a
portal to serve the interests of potential Java committers. Sun hasn't yet settled on the type of license that it will release its JSE and JME implementations under (although JEE is already "done", using Sun's own CDDL license): the situation here is a bit more tricky, because one of the things Sun wants to do is to make it easy for desktop Linux distributions to ship with Sun's Java implementation - something that's been very tricky so far because of licensing incompatibilities and ambiguities.
Having said all that - for me, the importance of these details in the broad scheme of things is a bit questionable. What's much more interesting is what effects these moves might have on the ultimate beneficiaries of Java technologies. I have my own position on this, and Simon agreed with it when he responded to my question. To paraphrase him a little:
most people don't know or care about how Java is made...so for most people it [Sun's involvement in open-sourcing Java] will have a negligible effect.
Exactly. Sun's active involvement in bringing Java and the open source community-of-communities closer together might matter a great deal to a small but highly influential group of industry insiders and black-belt developers, but to mainstream enterprise audiences Sun's involvement is a red herring. At least, in the way that most people seem to be reporting it.
Why? Because the truth is that (1) most enterprises already use Java from an established vendor which has licensed the technology from Sun, or which has already managed to work around licensing issues quite nicely; (2) there are already a number of free and open-source alternatives to Sun's JDK out there (see Apache's
Harmony,
Kaffe and the
Classpath effort for three examples), for those who want them - and with the caveat that these alternatives aren't all completely 100% compatible implementations, they are already shipped with desktop Linux distributions today; (3) the Java Community Process (JCP) now allows for open-source implementations of any JSR (as long as it was created under version 2.5 of the process or higher).
There are only two things that Sun's active involvement *does* do, as far as I can tell: (1) allow Sun to say "look, other people have been asking us to open-source Java for ages, and we're listening, honest"; and (2) enable small vendors to attempt to build interesting businesses on top of the pukka Sun-originated Java reference implementation - something that many find prohibitive today due to licensing fees.
In theory re: (2), over time this will enable small vendors to push more innovation into the mainstream Java codebase. Note, however, that this does not mean that said small vendors will be able to build viable commercial businesses. Why? Because most enterprises, whether we like it or not, prefer to buy services and support from large, established vendors. Hmm.
To me as someone who thinks about the business value of IT, what's *really* at the heart of all this, came almost as a side comment from Simon (although he's also said it before). And that's that to Sun, the open-source model is a means to an end: and in large part the "end" is about aligning Sun's remuneration with the business value that customers get from using its software - rather than making them pay for software up front, before they've had a chance to get the value from it. In other words, for Sun, open-source software distribution is to a great extent interesting because it's an established vehicle for offering software for free and then charging for support and services around the software. For a company like Sun, which has always struggled to make lots of money from software, there's an obvious appeal here which also nets it a lot of "industry shaper" kudos and brownie points.
I'm in violent agreement with the view that the enterprise value of open source software is mostly about only having to pay for something if and when you use it in anger, and I think this model will grow and grow - for infrastructure software categories primarily, in the short term. The challenge with this view is that it's politically incorrect, and companies like Sun that see open-source as a tool to turn over their business models end up spending inordinate amounts of time trying to justify their intentions in the name of "building communities" or similar.
(*)That's a cute marketing move if ever I saw one. What next - Microsoft appointing a Chief We're Not Monopolists, Honest Officer? IBM appointing a Chief No, Really, We Don't Do Applications Officer? Mercury/HP, CA and
others appointing Chief Don't Worry About All That SEC Stuff Officers?)
IBM acquires FileNET - who really stands to gain?
So - IBM has just announced the
impending acquisition of content management/business process management vendor
FileNET. There was an analyst call about it yesterday, and from the nature of the questions being asked by other analysts, I got the impression it was generally seen as a positive step. Given that I feel wholly nonplussed by the whole thing, I'm forced to ask myself why this may be. Perhaps it’s because I’m not exactly sure who is gaining what.
Let’s have a think, firstly, about the clients of both companies. As FileNET was already an IBM partner, and what with the interoperability standards that have been emerging for information sharing, it is difficult to see how clients can gain technologically. There are things in FileNET’s portfolio that are stronger than the IBM equivalents, notably (we are told) on the content and records management side, and in imaging and workflow – which just happens to be where
EMC has been making some recent investments (such as Captiva and ProActivity). Given IBM’s investments in Lotus and WebSphere however, and its strong integration capabilities aided by its
Venetica acquisition, I do wonder whether any gaps were particularly significant from the customer perspective, or whether they merited buying what just happened to be one of IBM’s biggest rivals in this space.
What about for business partners? Again based on the existing, though co-opetive relationship between IBM and FileNET, any opportunities for “synergies” would have existed for FileNET partners already. The sales opportunity is unlikely to be any different, nor are new customers suddenly going to buy into these areas. Enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) are notoriously hard to articulate and sell, and rightly so as they are enabling technologies which offer little value out of the box, without services. Automate a poor process, or manage duff information and you succeed only in speeding up failure.
Concerning the pitch we were given about the merger, I just didn’t buy the idea that there were two kinds of business process – process oriented and content-oriented. The idea of a process that isn’t process-oriented is, frankly, laughable; a process operating without content is only slightly less of an oxymoron. Meanwhile, the idea of offering a stronger, more tightly integrated portfolio just left me thinking I’d heard it all before – around the time of the Venetica acquisition, for example (it is perhaps no coincidence that Venetica’s integration capabilities were OEM’ed by FileNET). Assuming the goal is to end up with a single product set for ECM and BPM, lets not underestimate the integration challenges – it's taken EMC several years to align its software products following the acquisitions of Documentum and Legato, for example. Once IBM achieves that what choices do its customers have other than an expensive migration, if they are to be expected to make use of the integrated platform? At this stage this is a
rhetorical question, but valid nonetheless.
On the upside, I hope, is that the business pressures around compliance, better reporting, integrated views on information and so on are actually leading to a growing market for ECM and BPM. Here, IBM has plenty to gain, in terms of expanding its services offering (consultancy is a must). plugging a few technological gaps as highlighted above, and also (like last week's
Webify acquisition) giving the company more of a business-led sales strategy, particularly for BPM as FileNet has tended to have a stronger vertical proposition in this space. But all of this brings things back to the financial benefits to IBM, which may or may not be simultaneous with an increase of value to IBM and FileNET’s customers.
If the main beneficiary of this acquisition is IBM, and it is my belief that it is, this has to be seen as a consolidation move. If IBM believes that the ECM/BPM market is set for a period of significant ongoing growth, it is highly plausible that buying FileNET is the most cost-effective way of making sure it takes a leading share in that market. Good luck to IBM and its shareholders, we only hope they don’t make their customers pay more than they have to.
Novell starts down the road of Sentinel integration
Novell
today announced the first update to the Sentinel the security and event monitoring and reporting solution it obtained with
the $72M acquisition of e-Security in April. The company did what it had to by adding support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and bolstered support for non-US markets, where SUSE is strongest, with with addition of German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese languages. Hardly sufficient, you would say, to justify the "
major milestone" headline on the press release. And you would be right. What turns this announcement into something more significant is the fact that Sentinel is now able to collect events from Novell's suite of identity management offerings.
Whilst hardly earth shattering, this is important since it enables identity data to be correlated with other runtime events including, importantly, application logs. Too much of the discussion relating to the role of identity management in compliance focusses on ensuring that identity data and associated entitlements are managed and provisioned in accordance with policy within identity management solutions and far less on then determining whether those policies are subsequently enforced by the systems which use that data. This announcement goes some way to address that.
This announcement is important for Novell in two regards. Firstly, Sentinel includes more sophisticated event correlation and reporting capabilities than Novell Audit, the company's pre- e-Security compliance audit and reporting offering, which was largely a simple data dump for event data with customers reliant on their resident Crystal Reports wizards in order to make sense of that data. Of course this is somewhat of a double-edged sword for Novell, since existing customers will be wondering what this means for their existing investment in Novell Audit. No doubt Novell will respond with some attractive upgrade packages. Secondly, it bulks up Novell's offerings as it faces up to IBM in identity management - IBM's December
acquisiton of Micromuse brought with it one of the leaders in security and event management in GuardedNet.
Novell has done a good job in the first 4 months since the acquisition and the integration adds to already comprehensive identity management portfolio. There is still some way to go though if it is to maximise the return on its $72M and integrate it with the rest of the Novell portfolio. I still have my doubts, however, whether that portfolio has the breadth and credibility for the company to position itself against the likes of IBM to address organisations' broader security and event monitoring requirements.
Bastard apps
Nick Carr is really getting the hang of this blogging thing... he serves as an example to me at least.
See his latest on
Bastard apps. A thing of beauty (and not least, because on this, the subject of "enterprise mashups", our prejudices are aligned...)
IDS-Scheer: everyone's best friend
Yesterday Oracle
announced that it's partnered with IDS-Scheer to resell the elements of the ARIS business process modelling and simluation platform as part of its Fusion Middleware suite. Moreover there will be a significant degree of integration of the modelling tools and Oracle's middleware - including with its identity management capability, service registry and so on. Initially the focus will be on design-time integration, but the plan is to move beyond this within a few months to add integration across the whole "process lifecycle".
IDS-Scheer is everyone's best friend these days, it seems. Oracle's nemesis SAP has had a "strategic relationship" with the modelling tools specialist for a while - IDS-Scheer jointly developed the SAP APO module and is a long-standing SAP implementation partner.
This partnership appears to have a lot of technical depth to it, too - it's not just a sales deal. Importantly, the ARIS integration will be available to customers of Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel customers as those application suites start to be migrated onto the Fusion Middleware platform. The ability to use ARIS to do end-to-end process analysis, modelling, implementation, operation and improvement - integrated into the core application and middleware functionality of their existing investments - should be a tasty carrot for customers to move to Fusion-powered versions.
Of course Oracle's known for the prowess of its announcements. However IDS-Scheer is known for its seriousness and practicality. Hopefully the combination of the two will be a positive one - as there's potential for everyone to win here.
If it looks like an application, walks like an application ... IBM acquires Webify
Earlier this week IBM
announced the acquisition of Webify Solutions, a 120-person privately-held company based in Austin and Mumbai, India. Webify will become part of IBM's Software Group as part of the WebSphere brand but there is also a strong IBM Global Services element, which WebSphere GM Robert LeBlanc characterised as "unique" in acquisition terms.
Webify provides an infrastructure, the Webify Fabric, for the creation, deployment (subscription and personalisation) and management/monitoring of composite applications. The company also provides pre-built services, business process models, message formats and other assets which form the basis of industry-specific applications that organisations and systems integrators can compose using the Fabric. Webify currently provides these "accelerators" for the insurance and healthcare markets, with plans already in place to extend into banking and telecommunications - plans which IBM will extend into other target verticals, such as public sector and retail.
On paper this acquisition makes a lot of sense. The Webify Fabric, coupled with the accelerators, adds a layer of industry-specific capabilities on top of IBM's SOA Foundation, which should allow the IBM Software Group to engage in more business-meaningful discussions with customers and prospects. From the services side of the IBM house, Webify provides Global Business Services with a toolkit to speed the delivery of solutions in consulting engagements. IBM also sees opportunities, through Global Technology Services (GTS), to offer hosted application solutions based on the Webify Fabric and accelerators.
It's not just on paper though. 80% of the Webify customer base is deployed on IBM technology and the Fabric has been optimised for WebSphere so that should speed the integration (a roadmap will be published in the next 30-60 days). Plus, the two companies have been working together for more than 3 years, wih joint sales and marketing, and two thirds of those customers are the result of introductions by IBM.
In the Q&A session of the analyst briefing a fellow analyst asked the same question that sprang to my mind 5 minutes into the presentation: does this represent a move into the application space and thus a potential conflict with ISVs? Robert LeBlanc did an admirable job of attempting to explain why it isn't: it's not about pre-built applications rather it's about enabling customers to create applications from a combination of pre-built assets and existing applications; it's process-centric rather than starting from monolithic applications with embedded processes; it provides a platform which ISVs and SIs can build on to add value.
I agree with him to some extent. However, the notion of pre-built frameworks, process models, semantics, business services has echoes of the San Francisco project. It's also the direction that the dominant players in the application market - SAP with Enterprise Services Architecture and Oracle with Fusion - are taking things, albeit building out from their application monoliths. Then there are the plans to offer hosted composite applications through GTS, which sounds a lot like software-as-a-service to me (just think Salesforce.com's AppExchange). Oh ... then there's Workplace for Business Controls and Reporting and Business Strategy Execution plus some of the assets it
acquired with Bowstreet (note to IBM: you need to explain how Bowstreet composite application development fits with Webify!) which seem like applications to me. And I nearly forgot the
SOA Business Catalogue: I wonder when the Webify assets will end up in there.
So, as I said, an acquisition which makes a lot of sense, with tangible evidence to boot. As IBM strives to move up the value chain and deal with the threat of NetWeaver and Fusion Middleware, I know it is going to have to tread carefully: Global Services makes a very nice living from application-based services especially SAP, and ISVs (as its success with Webify demonstrates) are an important route to market for the Software Group. BUT, it's really time for IBM to desist with this "we don't do applications" positioning. For one thing, in today's SOA world - one which IBM has played no small part in creating - the distinction really doesn't make sense. And on the other, moves such as this make that position increasingly untenable.
Debunking the myth of ROI from IT
Andrew McAfee, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School (whose
blog is recommended reading for anyone interested in the impact of web 2.0 behind the firewall), recently
posted what I found was a thought-provoking piece on building a business case for IT.
He refers to the work of Bob Kaplan and David Norton and their book
Strategy Maps, in which they discuss how organisations can turn intangible assets - including IT - into tangible business outcomes. The essence of their argument is that you can't measure the value of such assets separately and that they don't directly impact on financial outcomes: their impact is indirect as a result of
"cause-and-effect relationships". It's worth reading the article in full but here are a few of the highlights that got me thinking:
I’ve probably seen hundreds of business cases that identify the benefits of adopting one piece of IT or another, assign a dollar value to those benefits, then ascribe that entire amount to the technology alone when calculating its ROI. The first two steps of this process are at best estimates, and at worst pure speculation.
and
A company invests in a new assembly line because it needs more widget capacity. If it had that capacity, it could make and sell more widgets. The relationship between costs and financial benefits in this case is complicated in some ways (it depends on many factors, some of which must be estimated) but the cause-and-effect chain is a short one, and one that doesn’t depend on lots of contemporaneous changes.
With IT, cause-and-effect chains are often quite long, e.g. successful CRM adoption integrates the information about customer purchases across multiple channels - phone, web, store, etc. This information allows stores to accept returns of good purchased online and lets customer service reps see each customer’s entire order history. Both of these can increase customer loyalty, which in turn increases sales. Sales can also be increased if recommendations presented to the customer on the website take into account purchases made at the store.
Andrew is not suggesting organisations should cease building business cases. The costs can be calculated but instead of relying on ROI to compare those costs with the capabilities acquired, simply ask the business sponsors:
Most of the executive teams I’ve worked with would have little trouble answering questions like "Is it worth spending $1 million and tying up the following resources for the next sixth months so that we can capture all customer contacts in a consistent digital format?" or "Is it worth spending $3 million so that over the next two years we can give all of our field sales people automated heads-up alerts whenever the business intelligence system predicts one of their customers is likely to defect?"
I don’t mean to imply that the answers to such questions are always "yes." I simply mean that most business leaders can quickly answer them because they’re posed in familiar terms— as cost vs. capability tradeoffs.
Makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, this depends absolutely on a common language between business and IT, so that those capabilities are "
posed in familar terms". In the example, there's absolutely no point talking about OLAP, MDM and BAM. It's about capturing customer contacts and alerting sales people as part of the real business processes.
Podcast: On Web 2.0 from first principles, enterprise mashups, HP/Mercury and SML
Where did July go? It's been over 3 weeks since we last 'casted (can you say that?). I'd like to say it's because we've all enjoyed holidays - but the truth is we've been busy busy busy.
Anyway, here it is: a juicy summer cup of discussion on Web 2.0, enterprise mashups, Jon's nuts (ahem), HP's acquisition of Mercury, and the new SML initiative. Warning: this episode is long (47'32"). But if you go to the
podcast page on libsyn, there's a list of some audio markers, so you can dip in and out - particularly if you're already familiar with Web 2.0 concepts and don't need to hear us trying to explain it all...
Drink deep from the cup of podcast summer love! You can
subscribe to the feed, or just
download the audio.
