HP turns adaptive on itself
I've previously
gone on record saying that HP should drop the "
adaptive infrastructure" tag, but I'm changing my mind. I'm at an analyst event today, where HP have been explaining how they are approaching customer engagements with a consolidated solutions portfolio, plus a services-based approach that leads with finding out the maturity of the customer, which therefore enables HP to put technologies in place that fit the customer needs and capabilities.
Essentially (and I've tested this out on a number of HP execs), "adaptive infrastructure" becomes a reflection of how HP adapts its own offerings to its customers, rather than any pie in the sky ideal about applications and infrastructure dynamically reconfiguring themselves to fit with demand. This is adaptive, but not in the way that HP initially meant. Frankly however, I don't care - as it is the approach that matters the most. If HP wants to adapt the message to fit with a mechanism that adds real value, I'm all for it.
HP decided a while back, following its
ill-fated foray into acquiring a business consulting practice and the subsequent arrival of Mark Hurd, that it would stick to its knitting - namely, to be a one-stop infrastructure platform provider for companies large and small. The strategy would appear to be
paying off - while the company still has some progress to make, notably in services, it should be applauded for finally starting to turn its own tanker around.
Identity meets SOA
I just came across (well, Neil pointed me to it)
this post from
Todd Biske, an SOA Enterprise Architect at MomentumSI in which he discusses the implications of a service-oriented approach for identity. Todd raises an important question:
what “identity” is in the context of service securityThis is something I discuss in
our identity management reportHowever, identities are not just important to humans’
interactions with IT systems. The advent of technologies such as RFID tagging,
the deployment of software services acting as proxies for real people, the
proliferation of digital media assets and so forth are leading to the
realisation that identity applies equally to the management of access to digital
resources.Coming at this from the perspective of an SOA architect, Todd highlights a number of other important issues:
The problem gets even more complicated when dealing with composite services. If policies are based on system identity, what system identity do you use on service requests?
and
If this wasn’t enough, you also have to consider how to represent identity on processes that are kicked off by system events...Events are purely information. Service requests represent an explicit requests to have action taken. Events do not. Events can trigger action, and often do, but in and of themselves, they’re just information. This now poses a problem for identity.He's absolutely right to highlight these issues. The question is how do you deal with them. The first step is to rethink identity management architecture and shift away from a focus on identity management as a set of applications for user management, provisioning, authentication etc. Such a rethink will also address a variety of other challenges and should adhere to a number of core tenets:
- Identity management needs to transition from an architectural approach which is user-centric to one which is identity-centric
- The authentication mechanisms must reflect the levels of risk and the granularity of the resources associated with that risk, without over-burdening the individual
- Hybrid identity data integration approaches are required to combine the benefits of metadirectory and virtual directory technologies, allied with tooling to assist with data reconciliation
- There is a need to authorise access to business functions and information at the level of each service using policy-based approaches to the definition and enforcement of access control requirements
- A federated approach is required for the mediation of the relationships at the heart of identity management, which in turn depends on managing and brokering the trust that underpins those relationships
- Identity management capabilities must be delivered as distributed infrastructure services, which exploit existing serives and are defined according to clear contracts which are enforced through policies
- Roles must be modelled at the intersection of identities, entitlements and organisational structures and managed as part of the broader identity management lifecycle.
Labels: identity, SOA
IT service management - road maps, not short cuts
When I first kicked off our reports covering IT service management some 6 months ago, I can remember what I said at the time with alarming clarity. "That should be quite straightforward," I said, "It's just a case of writing it all down." Such remarks can come back to bite you. As it turns out I was right on one count, that it was just a case of writing it all down; straightforward, however, it most certainly was not, when I started to think about the real world service management issues of the organisations we advise.
Just as writing the reports was less evident in practice, I believe this is also the case for organisations that are actually trying to implement IT service management. Scratch the surface and the full complexity of IT reveals itself only too clearly; trying to deal with the issues at the same time as keeping on top of the ever-growing pile of service calls and change requests, can mean any efforts to move in the right direction are too quickly overtaken by events.
Nobody sets out deliberately to fire fight or create chaos, but such things can thrust themselves unannounced upon the IT organisation. Similarly, I don't believe the tools vendors deliberately set out to sell management software that ultimately turned out to be inadequate. Enterprise frameworks were supposed to be the answer, but like the people implementing them, in reality they just couldn't keep up with the pace of change or the growing complexity. It's the same today - there are no magic bullets, however there are approaches to selecting and deploying tools that help organisations maximise the chances of success.
In the three reports, we present how organisations can think about IT service management, and we offer a
maturity-based approach to meeting these challenges. We also consider the
requirements for technologies and tools, underpinned by an architectural approach, best practice advice and guidance which reflects the complex realities of the
context in which IT service management is to be implemented. While we try to address the challenges, we recognise that there are no quick fixes: we can only offer a route map to IT service management, not a short cut.
The more I think about IT, the more it appears like an eternal change programme, staffed by practitioners and overseers who trade experiences with each other and pass on what they learn. Like IT itself, these reports can only ever be a work in progress, a perspective on how things are today. Please do let us know what you think, we would welcome any feedback based on your own experiences. Onward and upward.
Ballmer and infringing Linux
I just came across
this post from David Berlind over at ZDNet which discusses Steve Ballmer's claims that Linux uses Microsoft intellectual property. I have to say the fact that this is recent news came as a bit of a surprise to me. Not because I know there's Microsoft IP in Linux (I am far from qualified to say) but because this is something Microsoft made pretty clear to me in my discussions with them about the Novell agreement, as I pointed out
here:
Microsoft said to me that Novell is the only company which can truly claim to be able to indemnify Linux customers which is a clear indication that they believe there is Microsoft IP in Linux and must raise concerns about other distributions, such as Red Hat and Ubuntu. The deal with Novell is not exclusive so it will be interesting to see if Red Hat comes knocking on the Redmond door: I am sure Microsoft would welcome them.
Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance
I was in transit to Germany when
the news of Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance winged its way into my inbox and prohibitive WLAN pricing at the conference hotel meant I haven't been able to comment until now.
This is just the latest in a series of interoperability-related announcements from Microsoft, including the formation of its
Interoperability Customer Executive Council back in June and the
more recent agreement with Novell. These announcements all reflect a growing pragmatism in Microsoft's approach to addressing the concerns of technology adopters, particularly larger organisations awash with a broad range of heterogeneous hardware and software assets: "Integrated Innovation" may be in Microsoft's DNA but reality demands interoperability around the integrated stack.
25 or so hardware and software vendors are currently participating the in Interop Vendor Alliance (why Interop Vendor, which suggests they are vendors of interoperability?) and to be honest the majority of the names are unsurprising - although some of the ommissions are - since they are already close of partners of Microsoft, including:
- AMD (but no Intel!)
- Centeris (Linux/Windows management)
- Novell (they had to be for obvious reasons)
- Quest (management, including Linux/Unix integration)
- SugarCRM (open source on Windows - no JBoss though)
- Sun Microsystems (a continuation of the 2004 agreement)
- XenSource (virtualisation)
BEA is also there, which is perhaps surprising - until you cast your mind back to last August when BEA
acquired Plumtree, whose portal technology (now BEA AquaLogic User Interaction) is equally at home on .NET and Java.
So what's so interesting about a bunch of partners coming together to focus on interoperability? To my mind it's the approach. This is not about the slow, vendor-dominated establishment of interoperability standards for the future. Instead, and no doubt informed by the feedback from the Interoperability Customer Executive Council, the alliance will focus on real-world interoperability scenarios based on deployed technologies, testing of those scenarios and the publication of best-practice advice and guidance.
Good intentions are one thing. Results are another. The alliance is going to have to deliver if the very people it is trying to address don't quickly perceive it as another vendor marketing wheeze paying lip service to their very real requirements. The other key challenge, and perhaps a more significant one, is for Microsoft and mutual customers (the more effective route) to corral the likes of EMC, IBM, Oracle, SAP and many others into the alliance.
Organisations with any reasonable investment in Microsoft technology should at least monitor progress and prefereably exert pressure for results and participation from their other strategic suppliers.
Another SOA podcast - with a dose of open source
My latest podcast appearance, together with
Dana Gardner,
Steve Garone and
Joe McKendrick is now
available (or you can read the transcript
here). This episode focusses on SOA-related news from Oracle's OpenWorld conference, including some of Oracle's Web 2.0 aspirations, and concludes with a discussion of the company's Unbreakable Linux announcement.
Gardens and IT-business alignment
Those of you who subscribe to our
monthly newsletter will be aware that Neil, Jon and I together with Dale Vile from our partner
Freeform Dynamics are in the process of writing a book on IT-business alignment for
John Wiley & Sons:
The Technology Garden: Cultivating Sustainable IT-Business Alignment.
Rather than pontificate from our respective ivory towers, we have gone out into the real world and conducted numerous interviews with senior IT and business executives to draw out best practice and use that to produce what we hope will be a practical guide for organisations that want to maximise the business value of their IT investments. We will be backing that up with some scorecards designed to help organisations use the guide by assessing where they currently are and how they can move forward.
We will be documenting our progress over
here. We want the site to be about more than the book so as well as posting our thoughts as the writing progresses, we will be providing links to and commentary on relevant IT-business alignment resources. This is not just about what we think though: we hope that those of you out there with something to say about IT-business alignment (and I am sure there are plenty of you) will contribute to the discussion. Ultimately, we hope the site will become an IT-business alignment resource in its own right, long after the book has finished whizzing (we can dream!) off the shelves.
Take a message, Mr Thompson
Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me an email from his Flickr account, asking me to hook up with him. The surprise to me was that I even had a Flickr account - I created it back in May 2005, probably in a frenzy of pre-2.0 excitement, and hadn't touched it since; indeed, I hadn't even clicked on the "confirm" link in the registration email. But there it is: perhaps I'll get round to using it some time. I sent him a message back, and now we're connected.
But did I send him a message? I know that a communication passed between us, that I would term a "message". It left my outbox and went into his inbox, looking to all intents and purposes like an email. But was it? I have no idea what the underlying technology looks like - whether I created a text stream, an entry in a database, or whether a race of highly intelligent mice tapped the thing out in morse code.
To the point. A couple of weeks ago, Symantec was explaining at its European analyst event, that it was merging its understanding of "secure messaging" to cover both email and instant messaging. This is laudable perhaps - it is absolutely true that more and more business conversations take place via IM, and it is good that the associated risks are being appreciated.
However rapidly email and IM are growing, a cursory glance around the Web is that they are only the tip of the messaging iceberg. I have a "messaging" account with Groove; others with WebEx, with LiveMeeting; I can send a message in eBay, in Amazon and others sites used in companies large and small for procurement and sales; I can converse with colleagues, customers and business partners in Internet Relay Chat, any number of Jabber or Java-based chat facilities, or even Second Life and other immersive enviroments.
If there is a messaging market, it is fragmenting at a tremendous degree. The fact that I have such a wealth of options means I am more likely to choose the most appropriate mechanism to enable a conversation. And I haven't even mentioned blogs , wikis, discussion boards or other social spaces yet - what are these other than collaborative messaging tools?
The rationale behind integrating the security of email and messaging may be valid, but it forgets that information security is more about porosity than it is about closing stable doors - from a risk management perspective it can pointless to close one, if others are left open. Perhaps John Thompson has created a petard for Symantec by agreeing to coin the phrase "
Security 2.0" to define the company's strategy. Symantec has no tools or capabilities to secure online communications outside its quite limited remit: when asked, for example, the company said that it would not have a blogging solution in place any time soon.
This is no idle point. The reasons behind some of the delays in Windows Vista were reported, direct from inside Microsoft, on a blog; as were the details of some up-and-coming products from
Apple, who would be delighted to locate the sources of the information. Whether it's a gimmick or a leadership position, companies are setting up shop in Second Life - if nothing else it may become, for some, a virtual golf course, where business conversations can take place away from prying eyes. The blogging world is under constant, unremitting attack from comment spam; meanwhile, blogs themselves are being used ('splogs') to raise the profile of blogs and other sites on search engines. In other words, there are plenty of threats in the 2.0 world, that are currently under-addressed.
If Symantec wants to secure messaging effectively, it needs to start by radically changing what it means by messaging, to cover the exploding variety of communications that are very quickly becoming part of the mainstream. Then, maybe, it needs to plan how it addresses the issues and challenges that these raise, and soon. Otherwise, it may find itself forever fashioning locks too late, for doors that perhaps should never have been left open.
With standards, do we get what we deserve?
I've been meaning to blog on
this story from the Register for ages, but it got lost somewhere deep in my pile of "blog on these things" messages to myself...
It's no secret that IT industry standards bodies are hotbeds of jockeying and jostling - especially as vendors get ever smarter about ways to use standardisation processes to both make themselves more "open", and keep ahead of the competition at the same time (for an example, see JEE - many of the "enhancements" suggested over the years by the big middleware platform vendors have been engineered to make the resulting standards pretty difficult for small vendors to get certified against. Also, it's no secret that many a proposing vendor will seek to push a standard based on something they've already developed, so giving them a head-start in having a "compliant implementation").
So anything that organisations which buy IT can do to get involved with standardisation processes has to be a Good Thing - helps to keep the vendors honest, and with any luck helps to make sure that new standards actually standardise things that are actually useful. Traditionally some of the big telcos and financial institutions - the companies with the longest and most complicated histories in terms of IT use, in other words - have put time and budget aside to participate. But overall, standardisation efforts are 99% driven by vendors.
Why? Are standards somehow operating outside other market dynamics, which should be driven by what people actually want and need?
Perhaps now, in this time of open source communities, commons and participation, it's time for "users" (what a horrible word) to think about moving beyond contributing code to open implementations, to contributing ideas to open standards?
The Liberty Alliance appears to a case in point: it has involved big IT users since the outset who've kept the vendors honest - and it is one of the few standards bodies that is driven by use cases.
What do you think?
Oracle buys Stellent. Can we close the gap now?
In the film 'The Blues Brothers', Jake and Elwood go into a bar. "What kind of music do you play?" one of them asks. "We got both kinds," says the lady behind the bar, "Country and Western."
While this might be quite a limited perspective on music, information technologists have often been even more myopic. There are two kinds of information, apparently - structured and unstructured - and each requires very different handling. The structured world has its own terminologies and constructs, as does the unstructured world, and never have the twain met - or if they have, its been an uncomfortable liaison, like divorcees forced together at a family gathering. Its not just the technology vendors - DBAs care little for taxonomies, and content management types think "normalised database" is a contradiction in terms.
OK, I generalise - DBAs and others do actually look over the tops of their cubes from time to time - but the fact remains that there are two sides, from the IT perspective. Business people, those trying to actually use the information, would be right in wondering what all the fuss is about: each technology has evolved over the years, with little attention to the other, and the result is a divergent set of tools requiring complex interfaces or third party products to bridge betwen them.
Today, Oracle
announced it was buying Stellent. The fact it has taken until 2006 for this to happen (and the same can be said for IBM, with
Filenet), is indication enough that even the largest companies have only just "got" that organisations need a single source of information, whatever its structure. While this may not be Oracle's first foray into unstructured data management, however it is the company's first recognition that a content management system may offer additional facilities other than what can be supported from within the RDBMS. The issue has been brought into stark relief with the rapidly growing importance of email: today a purchase order may exist as a Word attachment to an email, or it may be a set of fields filled on a database form, but this is a purely technological distinction. To the sales operative, there should not be a distinguishable difference.
That's not to say that there aren't strengths to be had from both sides. The structured world has brought lots of good things such as highly scalable transaction management and analytics, just as the unstructured world has brought us workflow and search capabilities. But the bottom line is, it's about time that the gap was closed and we started to consider information management in the round, rather than from the too-limited perspective of provenance.
Third SOA Insights podcast
It was my turn to guest on Dana Gardner's
BriefingsDirect SOA podcast the other week, which focused on two interesting issues: open source software and its contribution to SOA initiatives, and how to sell the business value of SOA outside IT shops. Both bits of the discussion with Steve Garone (ex IDC) and Jeff Pendleton (ex BEA) yielded some nice insights I think.
You can get to the audio from Dana's
summary blog post, which also provides some transcript excerpts to whet your appetite, or you can
go straight to the transcript if you'd rather read than listen.
More on Microsoft and Novell
Jon pointed out in his
"crystal ball" post that we would have more to say about the Microsoft-Novell alliance. I had the chance to talk to Microsoft yesterday and was just about to put fingers to keyboard when a journalist came emailing with a request for my thoughts, which I thought I would share (it's Saturday after all):
From Microsoft's perspective, I see this deal as a continuation of the pragmatic approach that Microsoft has been taking with the open source community - JBoss, SugarCRM, Zend etc - with a little extra intellectual property (IP) spice. Microsoft has gradually evolved from a stance that
open source is a cancer created by
communists to something which they must embrace (but not extend!), culminating in this strategic alliance. Microsoft recognises that open source software is part of the landscape for its customers and it is better to work with it and, for example, have JBoss running on Windows rather than Linux and Zend working with SQL Server rather than with DB2 or Oracle.
In the case of the Novell deal, Microsoft's customers have undoubtedly been raising concerns about the potential threats of litigation as a result of deploying Linux and Microsoft has responded. One of the challenges for Microsoft in this regard is the implications around the GPL (as
discussed by Eben Moglen, attorney of the Free Software Foundation) and so it has chosen not to cross license the IP but rather to indemnify customers using SUSE Linux. Microsoft said to me that Novell is the only company which can truly claim to be able to indemnify Linux customers which is a clear indication that they believe there is Microsoft IP in Linux and must raise concerns about other distributions, such as Red Hat and Ubuntu. The deal with Novell is not exclusive so it will be interesting to see if Red Hat comes knocking on the Redmond door: I am sure Microsoft would welcome them.
Contrary to
some commentary, Microsoft's commitment to offer customers SUSE Linux support coupons does not amount to a blanket reseller relationship: the coupons apply specifically to SUSE Linux running as a virtual guest in a Microsoft operating system host or vice versa. This goes back to my point about Microsoft wanting to maximise the Windows opportunity.
From Novell's perspective this is also a pragmatic move, given their poor showing in the enterprise compared to Red Hat. Whilst there has been a lot of concern raised in the open source community (
here for example) because Novell is effectively paying royalties to Microsoft for its IP and has been characterising Novell as a 'selling out', I think this has to be viewed from the perspective of Novell as a commercial entity. Novell did win some concenssions with respect to open source community in terms of the indemnification of individual, non-commercial developers. Not that I think it would ever have made sense for Microsoft to sue them: it's more of a symbolic gesture.
Ultimately, I think the key beneficiaries here are organisations grappling with the reality of their heterogeneous IT environments. They now have greater choice with reduced risk and the potential for increased interoperability (and prospects of cross platform .NET development based on Mono).
The technical aspects of the announcement around virtualisation, management and document formats are really a continuation of existing work, with the additional commitment of resources from both companies. The Open XML-ODF interoperability between Office and OpenOffice is significant (but something that Novell had been working on anyway as part of its involvement in the Open XML
standardisation process at ECMA). This leaves the likes of Sun and IBM in an interesting position given that they have been promoting ODF as an alternative to Open XML/Office: Novell is now embracing both with OpenOffice.
The announcement in some ways parallels
that betwen Microsoft and Sun in 2004. The difference here, I think, is the motivation. In the case of Microsoft-Sun, the primary motivation was to deal with the litigation issues hanging over Microsoft and as a result there has been comparatively little of substance for technology adopters, as I discussed
here. The Microsoft-Novell alliance is not about litigation (the
anti-trust suit related to WordPerfect and Quattro Pro continues): it's partly about IP but primarily from a customer (and Novell perspective) about the need to serve their mutual customers better. It will be interesting to revist this in a year or so and see whether this translates into more tangible outcomes in terms of virtualisation, management and document interoperability.
Finally, there has been speculations that this was motivated by Oracle and its Unbreakable Linux
announcement. Whilst this may have accelerated proceedings (Microsoft's Tech-Ed Developers and IT Forum conferences take place in the next coupe of weeks), the reality is that these sort of alliances - particularly where complicated intellectual property issues are concerned - take more than a couple of weeks. It certainly throws a spanner into the Ellison works but I see that as more of a beneficial side effect. I am equally sure though that the implications for Red Hat figured in the thinking of both companies.
Microsoft/Novell: The enemy of my enemy is my friend
I wrote the following as I was listening to the music and waiting for Microsoft and Novell's partnership
announcement. Its still pertinent; more to follow - particularly around the patents question and potential impact to other vendors.
It comes as little surprise the Novell’s shares have spiked following the announcement about the partnership with Microsoft, to extend the interoperability between Windows and Suse Linux. Perhaps we should be reeling in shock that Microsoft should cosy itself up to what the company has traditionally seen as “the enemy”, but the main sentiment I feel is one of relief. Microsoft’s anti-linux façade has been looking increasingly shaky over the past couple of years, as the company has claimed (for example) through its “Just the Facts” campaign that Linux’s benefits were being overstated, the campaign itself riding on the back of Microsoft’s seeming disinterest in Linux.
Now, apart from pointing out that Microsoft was originally a Unix vendor (remember Minix), what other signs have there been that Microsoft’s hardline stance has been wavering? For a start, the Interix subsystem, today called Services For Unix, is a Unix-compliant subsystem in all but name. The primary purpose for its existence according to Microsoft is to enable people to migrate away from Unix, but be in no doubt that the company’s resulting Unix integration expertise is substantial. I should know, I helped write the
documentation.
Second of course, we have the solid efforts made by the Microsoft Management division, to assure the manageability of Unix environments. Perhaps because it is coming from behind, Microsoft has listened hard to its customers who have asked the company to provide a management hub for heterogeneous environments. It has been working on this, along with partners like Vintela (now part of
Quest Software), and indeed, many of the Salt Lake City types involved have taken roles at Microsoft.
It would be too much to state that perhaps the likes of execs such as (ex-Novell, now Microsoft) Brad Anderson had managed to mellow Microsoft’s attitudes to Novell. Potentially true is what the pundits are saying – that this is a response to Oracle’s platform play – but it is unlikely that Microsoft started talks with Novell just two days ago, far more likely is that they’ve been talking for a while, and have had to reach a conclusion more quickly than they planned.
Overall, from the customer perspective, anything that improves interoperability is to be seen as positive, and Microsoft should be credited for biting the bullet. Oh and for anyone who is still saying, “this is about Linux, not Unix,” I say, don’t be silly. Linux is Unix in all but kernel tweaks, its just not wanting to use the name. Don’t ask me, ask an IT manager if he sees a difference – or indeed, if he cares.
