Has Microsoft got BPM? Part II
Back at the beginning of March I asked "
has Microsoft got BPM?". At that time I hadn't had the opportunity to get a briefing from Microsoft on its recent BPM moves, but now I have.
So - has Microsoft got BPM? Yes and no.
Microsoft is not about to become a fully-fledged BPM solution provider. Rather, Microsoft is attempting to do to BPM what it attempts to do in all the areas of enterprise software it's played in (think DBMSs, development tools, middleware, portals, etc etc) - commoditise the core technology and make it part of an integrated software platform that's digestible by mainstream medium-to-large enterprises. Sun wasn't the first company to realise that "
volume drives value" - it's taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book.
So a big part of the focus is on providing the technology foundation for BPM. Here Microsoft has a couple of formidable weapons:
- Office. Office is the defacto productivity suite in enterprises - and with Office 2007, is becoming the front end infrastructure for BPM scenarios in Microsoft's world, as well as a suite of apps. It's an environment very familiar to business people, so if those people are looking to get a BPM initiative started, Microsoft's proposition could look pretty attractive. [If you don't believe us about Office, see this research from our partner Freeform Dynamics.]
- Workflow Foundation. This is a core component of .NET 3.0 (the native programming model for Longhorn Server and Vista). It provides embeddable workflow execution services for both highly structured business process automation scenarios and less structured, collaborative scenarios. It's becoming the foundation of both BizTalk Server 2006 (which will drive structured process automation scenarios) and Sharepoint 2007 (which is more suited to unstructured, collaboration-focused processess). Workflow Foundation really is neat.
The big caveat, of course, is that all these weapons only really come into play if and when organisations buy into the current tranche of product releases - Office 2007, BizTalk 2006, Visual Studio "Orcas" and the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), and .NET 3.0.
Although all these pieces are either released or coming very soon, where customers have a significant investment in Microsoft in these kinds of areas, it's far from certain that they will upgrade or migrate quickly. Microsoft's success in engineering an integrated platform of software infrastructure is also a weakness, in other words - people who buy into it tend to have a lot of capabilities riding on it. That drives caution and risk aversion.
Microsoft's BPM foundation is mainly focused on the development and deployment of processes, and although BizTalk 2006 has some BAM capabilities (through integration with SQLServer OLAP and BI functionality) Microsoft isn't focusing primarily on providing tools for modelling and simulating, analysing or optimising processes. It's developed a coterie of "
Business Process Alliance" partners to fill in the gaps, and also to help it accelerate demand for the new versions of its key BPM foundation components. When it comes to Workflow Foundation in particular, the huge Microsoft-focused packaged application vendor (ISV) community which so effectively drove adoption of SQLServer will also be a key element of Microsoft's strategy.
So on paper Microsoft has a good BPM story - if you're prepared to put a lot of skin in Microsoft's game and if you're prepared to upgrade to the latest Microsoft infrastructure. The company isn't yet pushing the base technologies aggressively and directly to customers, but it is priming its partners and channels and these will drive uptake.
Another interesting angle to the technology piece of this story is the recently announced
BizTalk Services offering - a set of integration capabilities "in the cloud" which offer a hosted complement to on-premise BizTalk integration implementations. These services are designed to, in theory (it's early days), make the creation of highly federated, distributed service and process networks much more simple to develop and operate. It's a fascinating development that has some parallels with what Salesforce has been doing with the
Salesforce Platform Edition, and (a little less so) with what BT is attempting to do with
BT Integrate.
One last small thing though. If it's serious about BPM, at some point Microsoft's going to have to sort out the difference between
this BPM and
this BPM...
Labels: BPM, BT, Microsoft, SaaS, Salesforce, Workflow Foundation
Little SOA vs Big SOA
During our "off air" preamble with Miko Matsumura prior to recording
our podcast earlier this week, he mentioned that he likes MWD's focus on "Big SOA".
I'd never thought of what we tell customers about SOA in this way before, but it's true that we try and get people thinking about how SOA can help them transform their organisations in the long term by pushing the boundaries of SOA and not sticking with an overly-technical, bottom-up approach that sees SOA as "EAI with standards". So Miko got me thinking about what, precisely, "Big SOA" might be and how it might be different from something that for the sake of argument we might call "little SOA".
So I came up with a picture:
As the picture shows, I think the difference between "little" and "big" SOA comes down to how you look at the "S" and the "A" of SOA.
In "little SOA" (bottom left of the picture), organisations have a software development centric view of what a "service" is. A service is basically a standalone software component with some kind of remotely addressable invocation interface (let's say a WS-* interface for now). In "little SOA" organisations have a similarly narrow view of what "architecture" is - architecture is basically
software design with a corner office.
In "big SOA" (top right of the picture), organisations have a much broader view of what a "service" is. In this broader view a service isn't something you build; it's something that is experienced by a consumer. This view, therefore, is really about realising that delivering a service requires all sorts of IT competencies (design, development, integration, testing, deployment, admin, ops and change management) to be integrated together across the lifecycle of an investment that is packaged up as a service. That's a very different perspective on "service" that is not coincidentally much closer to what a business exec would think of if you asked them what a "service" is. In big SOA organisations also have a broader view of what architecture is about. Architecture isn't an inwardly-focused IT competence that seeks to make global optimisations to portfolios of software development projects. It's an outwardly-focused business-IT communication competence that seeks to further understanding of IT within business, and of business within IT.
I don't have hard quantitative data to back this up, but based on anecdotal evidence of customer conversations my feeling is that the majority of companies considering or starting out with SOA are doing "little SOA".
What do you think?
Labels: architecture, service, SOA
MWD FM SOA interview: webMethods
Here's another in our series of interviews with vendors offering SOA "solutions". This time we spoke to Miko Matsumura, head of product marketing for SOA at webMethods.
In this conversation we ask the usual four questions - and also chat about the importance of webMethods' SOA Link program, the role of the Infravio Governance Rules Engine, and SOA as an enabler of federated/cross enterprise business processes.
The podcast episode lasts 25'34". You can download the audio
here or you can
subscribe to the feed.Labels: MWD, podcast, SOA, webMethods
MWD FM SOA interview: Microsoft
Here's the fourth in our series of interviews with vendors offering SOA related products and services. This time it's the turn of Kris Horrocks, who's a Technical Product Manager in the Connected Systems Division of Microsoft. (The Connected Systems Division was formed in 2005 as part of the Server and Tools business, and it brings together work on .NET, BizTalk, CardSpace and other related things).
As usual we talk through our
standard four questions. In the resulting conversation we explore:
- how Microsoft deals with customers' questions about scalability and interoperability
- the importance of "high fidelity handoffs" between IT practices in quality service delivery
- how the SOA offering fits with Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and support for "design for operations", and what this means for managing service lifecycles.
The podcast episode lasts 34'41". You can download the audio
here or you can
subscribe to the feed.Labels: Microsoft, MWD, podcast, SOA
Zachman Framework != Enterprise Architecture
Just thought it would be worth linking to
this post I just made over at the
Technology Garden blog, the companion site for our
new book on IT-business alignment. See you over there!
Labels: book, EA
MWD FM SOA interview: HP
Here's the third in our series of interviews with SOA vendors. This week it's the turn of Roman Stanek - one of the founders of Systinet, which was bought by Mercury (which was then in turn bought by HP a few months back).
The 31'17" interview has some great stuff in it. As we ask our
usual four questions about HP and Systinet SOA offerings, we swing past:
- scenarios where the standardisation and interoperability that SOA introduces are particularly important
- how SOA is about outcomes, not protocols (with reference to the SOAP vs REST debate)
- how SOA wil disappear from the IT industry's lexicon in the coming years, because it will become a standard feature of the IT landscape
- the effect that SOA has on the software development lifecycle, and how the loose coupling that it introduces into development organisations and processes brings requirements for strong management of service lifecycles and service quality.
You can download the audio
here or you can
subscribe to the feed.
Labels: HP, MWD, podcast, SOA
webMethods becomes SWAG
Apologies for the poor pun, it's the evening before the Easter break (public holidays on Friday and Monday here in the UK) and I'm feeling festive.
So, it's finally happened. For those of us with the dubious title of "industry watcher" it's not a particular surprise to see webMethods acquired. We'd heard rumours for some time that the company might be readying itself financially and organisationally for a sale. Clearly the 25% price premium that Software AG (SWAG) plans to pay in purchasing the company at $9.15 a share represents a good deal for its shareholders, as webMethods' stock had got stuck around $7 for quite some months.
But what is a surprise (to me at least) is the buyer.
For one thing, we're used to big industry whales swallowing small specialist minnows: this is one medium-sized software company buying another medium-sized software company. SWAG's 2006 full-year revenue totalled in the region of
$500m$650m. webMethods has a different financial year to SWAG, but its revenue in the equivalent period totalled roughly $200m.
There's one particular feature of the two companies' income statements which is shared:
both companies make more money from software maintenance than they do from selling new product licenses. Both companies are living more off their past success than their current success (although the balance seems as if it could be tipping the right way in SWAG's case).
Software AG is a company with a long history as a middleware company, but it's not a glorious one. It scored huge success in the 1970s with the ADABAS DBMS and 1980s with the Natural language and development environment, but none of its more recent infrastructure product developments - EntireX (object and message broker), Tamino (XML database/integration platform) and Bolero (Java app server) have penetrated far beyond its established loyal customer base. What's interesting, though, is that with new SWAG products Centrasite (SOA registry/repository) and Crossvision (BPM, ESB, legacy integration, composite application development) now on the market, the webMethods acquisition certainly doesn't look like one to be based around technology. There's a hell of a lot of technology overlap.
So this acquisition appears to be more about acquisition of customers and "mindshare" in complementary regions. Despite a US subsidiary with a long history (which started off independently in 1972, was bought by its parent in 1988, then spun off through a venture buy-out in 1997, and re-purchased in 2001), SWAG's visibility in North America is not high (any of our US readers heard of EntireX, Tamino or Bolero?). Despite webMethods' reorganisations which have cut back the size of its European operations over the past years, it seems to retain very high recognition in North America.
What will I be watching? I'll be watching to see what happens to products and people as the two companies come together. Given the huge portfolio overlap, from a product and technology - and ultimately a customer - standpoint, this will be a difficult integration to pull off.
UPDATE: John Conley, webMethods' Director of PR, got in touch with me to point out a couple of errors in the original post, which I've changed above.
Labels: acquisition, SOA, Software AG, webMethods
MWD FM SOA interview: Martin Percival, BEA
Our second SOA vendor interview was with BEA's Martin Percival yesterday. Again we followed our standard format - and in the resulting 34'30" podcast we get into discussing:
- BEA's experience of delivering "information as a service" projects within SOA initiatives
- How SOA is about more than just WS-* technology
- BEA's transition from a pure Java implementation focus to a broader focus, re-embracing its "legacy" middleware platform Tuxedo, the Microsoft expertise of its Plumtree acquisition, and also pointing to the SCA/SDO effort that it's a member of
- Why it bought Flashline (a software development repository vendor) and didn't buy a SOA registry vendor (it partners with Systinet/Mercury/HP)
- How its SOA 360 initiative will impact on the admin & management of the BEA platform.
You can download the audio
here or you can
subscribe to the feed.
Labels: BEA, MWD, podcast, SOA
Our monthly signposts newsletter
Subscribers to our
website will know that we publish a monthly newsletter:
signposts. We thought it might be of interest to our blog readers too, so
here it is. You'll find:
- details of the first of our CIO interview podcasts - plus news of other upcoming research and exciting initiatives
- a "food for thought" piece asking "is it time to reappraise the idea of IT ROI?"
- a directory of our recent press commentary, podcast episodes and blog postings.
We would welcome your feedback and any suggestions for other things you would like us to include.
Labels: MWD
MMS 2007: Microsoft begins to deliver on DSI; provides some IT-business alignment pointers
I spent the beginning of last week in San Diego at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), the company's annual conference focused on all things systems management. With time to kill on the 15-hour return journey, I began to draft my thoughts only for
this post from Coté over at RedMonk to pop into my feed reader. As well as providing excellent summaries of IT management, Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and the company's System Center product family, Coté provides his impressions of MMS and Microsoft's approach to systems management. Since my impressions were much the same:
- Significant focus on delivery with System Center Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Essentials, Virtual Machine Manager and Service Manager (although the latter is still a year away)
- Emphasis on modeling - Service Modeling Language, Common Modeling Language (adding the management semantics to SML), CMDB, Management Packs
- Raising the ITIL flag - Microsoft Operations Framework (which Microsoft has until recently failed to exploit despite a long-standing ITIL foundation); System Center Service Manager and CMDB
- Plugging some notable gaps - OEM relationship with EMC for network-aware management but support for a heterogeneous environment requires more work.
I won't repeat them in detail here.
Instead, I thought I would call out something which I felt was largely absent from the two days of briefings and meetings with the Windows Enterprise Management Division team: how they help organisations align what they do from a systems management perspective with business objectives and priorities. Ultimately, as Microsoft
claims, that's what DSI is really all about:
A dynamic system is Microsoft's vision for what an agile business looks like—where IT works closely with business in order to meet the demands of a rapidly changing and adaptable environment. The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is Microsoft's technology strategy for products and solutions that help businesses enhance the dynamic capability of its people, process, and IT infrastructure using technologyMicrosoft has done a pretty good job with its
Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Model of outlining a roadmap to dynamic systems nirvana, as well as assessment tools to help organisations understand where they are on that path. The company has also gathered a significant amount of data from its customers which should help IT organisations to justify IO investment to the business.
However, the company hasn't really explained how it can help them to maintain the dialogue with the business once the investment has been secured - understanding and capturing business expectations; providing business-meaningful monitoring and metrics; correlating IT security management (as an aside, Microsoft needs to tighten the linkage between its System Center and security - Forefront,
Identity Lifecyle Manager - offerings) with business risk management etc. Microsoft needs to address this, not least because all of its enterprise systems management competitors are claiming such capabilities, be it Business Service Management from BMC, Business Service Optimization from CA, Business Technology Optimization from HP, Service Management from IBM.
There were signs, admittedly subtle ones that were obscured by the focus on new System Center products, in Bob Muglia's Tuesday morning keynote that Microsoft recognises this need:
- Plans to extend Design For Operations to a 'business analyst' audience
- The use of SML (presumably in BizTalk) for business process and key performance indicator modeling
- 2007 Office System (Project Server for portfolio management?) as a component of Microsoft's management offerings
- DSI is "ERP for IT"
Fortunately the timings of my meetings meant that I had a chance to quiz Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Windows Enterprise Management Division, about these small but important aspects of the keynote. He confirmed my interpretations of Muglia's comments in light of aligning IT operations with the business. He wasn't able to go into too much detail but I fully expect to see Microsoft begin to talk about these aspects of its management strategy in the not too distant future.
With Microsoft now four years into its ten-year management initiative it's good to see it delivering the first generation of DSI-era management tools. It's equally encouraging to see that the company recognises that it's not just an IT proposition. The company certainly has many of the assets required to help IT engage with a business audience but Microsoft is already coming from behind when it comes to IT management. There may be another six years of DSI but that's a LONG time in the IT industry, so it has to act quickly if its not to be forever trying to catch up with its competitors.
Labels: EMC, ITIL, ITSM, Microsoft
