HP tightens up its SOA governance proposition
HP yesterday
announced long-awaited (at least as far as we are concerned) enhancements to its SOA software and services, which see the company beginning to realise the potential of its acquisition of Systinet (via Mercury) when it comes to SOA governance. Back in March, the other Neil
highlighted that lifecycle management is one of the four key elements of an SOA functionality pyramid and is:
all about supporting development, integration and operations teams in linking their efforts to ensure that the consumer service experience is high-quality and consistent under potentially unpredictable circumstances. Typically the foundation of this capability is some kind of registry/repository, but ideally tools go further than this - firstly by helping to automate team workflows for implementing quality controls at design time; and secondly by helping to translate design intentions relating to operational SLAs into runtime policies which are tied into the infrastructure.
HP is attempting to go that bit further by more tightly integrating the registry/respository capabilities it acquired with Systinet to the policy-based management and monitoring capabilities of its SOA Manager product. Whilst HP also brings other valuable functionality to fill out the SOA pyramid, including business process monitoring (HP Process Insight), security and identity management (HP Select Access) and synthetic transaction monitoring and reporting (HP Business Availability Center) it does not - and nor would it claim to - have everything.
Enter the Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) it inherited from Systinet. The GIF is designed to facilitate information exchange with the Systinet Registry and Repository allowing third parties to integrate relevant technologies, such as policy enforcement and service orchestration, with the SOA lifecycle management capabilities. As well as announcing 10 new GIF partners, HP is also publishing the GIF specifications.
Integration is not totally reliant on GIF though. Systinet's registry is also embedded in the SOA infrastructure offerings from the likes of BEA, Oracle and TIBCO, which makes HP an obvious potential source of broader SOA lifecycle management functionality for their customers. The company is not such an obvious choice for customers of IBM and Software AG who are building out their own capabilities.
SOA platforms do not begin and end with BEA, IBM, Oracle, Software AG and TIBCO though. There are other choices: Microsoft, Progress, Red Hat and SAP etc. Not forgetting of course that organisations will be acquiring service oriented solutions as part of business applications. What's the story there? There are two. The first is GIF. The second is the HP SOA Registry Foundation that also formed part of yesterday's announcement and which the company describes as
a new software product expressly designed for independent software vendors. HP SOA Registry Foundation is a powerful, standards-based way to publish, categorize and discover SOA services and artifacts. This new product can be easily embedded with packaged applications and distributed solutions.
In other words, it's an OEM-specific version of the registry designed to allow HP to replicate the BEA, Oracle and TIBCO agreements.
Coupled with the HP's services capabilities, these announcements should mean that HP is able to exploit its systems management heritage and installed base to position itself as a credible SOA lifecycle management provider to organisations moving beyond project-level SOA initiatives - and to the software vendors that are helping them on that journey.
Labels: governance, HP, service, SOA, UDDI
Assessing technology: life after MQs and Waves
Earlier in January, BPM consultant-cum-analyst
Sandy Kemsley made
some interesting points about how the big analyst firms "parcel up" their analyses of technology areas and vendors. Her catalyst was an observation on the way that Gartner and Forrester each segment the BPM technology space.
BPM isn't unique, but it is challenging as a segment for the big analysts, because there are so many viable vendors offering interesting technologies that customers should know about. So - what to do?
Forrester has taken a "divide and conquer" approach, splitting the segment up into four sub-segments: human-centric BPMS (Java), human-centric (Microsoft), integration-centric and document-centric. If a vendor offers technologies which fit multiple of those sub-segments, Forrester covers them in each segment - each with its own Wave.
As Sandy points out, the challenge of Forrester's approach for the customer is that real-world scenarios don't segment themselves according to Forrester's criteria. Most companies have both Java and Microsoft platforms in place, and need to work with both. In most large companies, processes often have human-centric elements, integration-centric elements and (yes) document-centric elements. The customer has to do a fair bit of work to find out what's going to suit them best.
Gartner, on the other hand, produces just one Magic Quadrant for BPM technology - but by necessity (I imagine to do with usability rather than analyst resources - but this is pure speculation, I don't have any "Gartner insiders" to help me with this) it has scoped a number of what I would say are important vendors out of its analysis. No Microsoft, K2, Intalio, Vitria, OpenText. This is puzzling (to me at least). By representing the whole of the BPM technology space with one logical model, the result is a rather "vanilla" perspective.
This is hardly news of course. So why am I so exercised by it?
The answer is that we think there's a better way to provide comparative vendor analysis to customers.
A key problem underlying both Forrester's and Gartner's approaches is that in order to work within the constraints of their analysis and publishing infrastructure and processes, they're having to make quite a few assumptions about what kind of technologies and companies customers are interested in, and why. The hope, presumably, is that any mismatch between customer expectations and the analyst firms' delivery methods will be met through one-on-one consultation with analysts, who will interpret their own papers on the phone, (hopefully) in the context of their customers' needs. If a you don't have an opportunity for one-to-one consultation, then... it's up to you to try and figure it all out.
Wouldn't it be better if there was an approach that made as few up-front assumptions as possible, but instead provided an online, hosted interactive environment, accessing data from one broad vendor and technology database, where customers could shape analysis and recommendations themselves by providing information about what was important to them and what wasn't?
Such an environment would take customer "preferences" and use them to tune the rankings that were presented. Ideally, preferences wouldn't just be focused on elements of functionality, but also on attributes of vendors themselves (for example - do you only want to buy from big companies, or companies with offices in your geography?), technology dependencies (for example - do you only want to buy from companies who can run their software on Linux or support a certain standard?). Customers wouldn't have to provide such "preferences" - but the more information they provided about their constraints and interests, the more relevant the analysis would be.
Does that sound like too much to ask?
We don't think so. We think customers of industry analyst firms often have to do too much work in order to get relevant advice. So we're using approach described above for new MWD analyses of BPM technology offerings and Enterprise Collaboration technology offerings. We're launching new interactive, online comparison and ranking tools for these two areas as part of two new advisory services which will launch in the coming months.
Oh, and if this sounds interesting, don't worry that you'll have to pay an extortionate amount of money to get access to these tools. We'll be offering free trials to enterprise IT departments :-)
Watch this space.
Labels: BPM, collaboration, forrester, gartner, MWD
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BEA and Oracle and "caveat emptor"
As someone who
wrote a little on the potential acquisition of BEA by Oracle, I've been in a quandary since the news of the acquisition broke: frankly, I felt that I needed to write something - but there was already so much other commentary out there (much of it saying the same thing), I didn't want to just add another voice to the global
egosystem. (The perils of writing in the age of the web, I suppose.)
So I asked our excellent partners
Freeform Dynamics if they could help us look behind the headlines - to understand what regular IT people out there think of the deal. As it happened, they'd already kicked off a quick research effort on that precise topic without me knowing. Great minds think alike.
Freeform conducted a quick poll of readers of
The Register (this is a big multinational IT news site, and its readers are typically IT managers, developers and ops people - people at the coal face of enterprise IT). They asked a couple of high level questions:
- Is the acquisition of BEA by Oracle positive or negative for the IT industry?
- Will the acquisition of BEA by Oracle be positive or negative for your business specifically?
They also asked respondents to provide "free form" answers to provide reasoning for the answers to the two main questions. The Freeform guys got just under 300 responses overall. So what did people think?
Well, there were no real surprises in the response to the second ("what does it mean for you") question. There appears to be a large degree of nervousness amongst respondents who are BEA customers (this is bound to be true whenever a company buys something you've already made an investment in). In this group, around 40% were "unsure" and a further 35% or so felt the impact would be "negative". For the Oracle customers, things look a lot rosier: around 40% felt the impact would be "positive", and a further 35% or so thought the outcome would be "neutral". Given Oracle's standing as a middleware provider (the technology is good enough if you're working within an Oracle environment, but not regarded as top-tier for cross-enterprise use in a heterogeneous environment) it's understandable that Oracle customers are keen to get their hands on some more beefy middleware alternatives.
What was much more interesting to me were the responses to the first question, because they can't be explained away by understandable acquisition jitters.
When asked "is the acquisition positive or negative for the IT industry?"
fewer than 30% of respondents felt the outcome would be positive (45% or so were negative, 10% or so were unsure, and 15% or so were neutral). Within the BEA customer base, two-thirds of respondents were negative - but given my
earlier points about why people buy BEA, I'm not too surprised by that. Tellingly, though,
even among respondents with no investment in BEA or Oracle, over 40% felt the outcome would be negative for the industry (around 35% were positive, just over 10% were neutral, and under 10% were unsure).
Looking at the respondents with Oracle investments and those with investments in both BEA and Oracle, both camps were decidedly ambivalent about the impact of the deal on the IT industry in general. In both cases, more respondents answered "negative" than "positive" on this question.
When we looked at the freeform responses supplementing the other questions, there was more food for thought.
The most common explanations for "negative" responses could be grouped into one common answer: "it'll lead to reduced choice in the market". Other popular comments can be summarised as concerns about the viability of existing investments (this was cited by both BEA and Oracle customers), and concerns about the potential loss of innovation within BEA's technology. Interestingly, the poll also threw up a significant number of respondents who were concerned about the degree of power that Oracle (after the BEA acquisition) would have over them as a customer.
There were, of course, freeform comments on the positive side (there were just fewer of them). The most popular positive responses could be best summarised as "a more mature solution will emerge". The second most popular category of positive response can best be summarised as "it'll enable the rescue of some good technology from a company that has lost its way".
Looking back over all this data (and a more comprehensive analysis will appear soon on The Register, courtesy of Freeform Dynamics), my message is this: whether you're the company buying BEA, or a company that has previously bought BEA technology, this shows the eternal truth of the phrase "caveat emptor".
If you've historically bought BEA technology because BEA was an independent middleware technology provider, the lesson is that just because your middleware supplier is independent today, doesn't mean it will be independent next year. If supplier independence at key points in your IT landscape is really important to your IT strategy, do a proper risk analysis and plan what you'll do if things change.
If you're an Oracle exec, the lesson is that many of the customers you're about to acquire might already be customers of yours - but they may well have bought BEA technology precisely to avoid getting too deeply attached to companies like yours. You're going to have to tread very carefully.
Labels: acquisition, BEA, Freeform Dynamics, Oracle, strategy planning
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A new report - well several actually
Excuse the blatant promotion but I just wanted to highlight a
new On The Radar report I published today covering "operational business intelligence" vendor Altosoft.
While I'm at it I may as well call out a couple of other OTRs from Angela looking at
enterprise social networking provider blueKiwi and
enterprise wiki provider Socialtext. Oh ... in for a penny, in for a pound, there's also Neil's
perspectives report on business process management.
Labels: MWD
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SOA's five benefits in one picture
In recent discussions with one customer, I ended up drawing a series of little pictures to try and summarise the five potential benefits that can come from pursuing SOA. It seemed to work for them, so I thought I'd reproduce it here and see what our readers think.
In order to test the old adage that a picture speaks 1,000 words, I'm not going to write a whole lot to explain what the diagram is showing: if it's a good diagram then you should be able to work that out pretty quickly. Of course, if I get an avalanche of comments asking for an explanation then (1) of course, I'll post one; and (2) it's not as cute a diagram as I thought it was!
UPDATE: I managed to cut off the bottom of the original image when I uploaded it, so here's another one.
Labels: SOA
Microsoft announces bid for FAST Search
Microsoft today
announced that it has offered to acquire Norwegian search vendor Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) for approximately $1.2 billion, or 19 Norwegian kroner per share.
There are two interesting aspects to this. Firstly - assuming the acquisition goes ahead - the removal of FAST as an independent company will leave Autonomy to truly dominate the enterprise search market. Following its acquisition of arch-rival Verity in 2005, the head-to-head battle between FAST and Autonomy in terms of quarterly revenues fell by the wayside, and by Q3 2007 Autonomy's revenues were more than double those of FAST for the three month period. Alongside this, FAST has apparently been having some problems for the last few months; its
Q3 07 revenues were down 16% on the same quarter in the previous year, and there have since been rumours in the blogosphere of
accounting fraud accusations. So against this backdrop, the acquisition bid is perhaps less surprising.
However, the other interesting factor is that it is Microsoft doing the bidding. Microsoft is reknowned for picking up small software companies with good technologies - often to plug gaps in its offering, either in terms of technology or market coverage. However, at $1.2 billion, this can hardly be described as a small acquisition, and furthermore, its search focus is something into which Microsoft has already invested significant resources in terms of R&D. Clearly, as a best-of-breed solution, the FAST ESP software is more sophisticated, powerful and flexible than Microsoft's own capabilities, and its configurable, non-black box, approach to search has the potential to fit in well with Microsoft's products. However, FAST has a significant existing customer base which will need to be handled carefully to avoid giving too much advantage to Autonomy or smaller players such as Endeca, and it will be interesting to see whether the software remains a distinct business or becomes part of the Microsoft SharePoint Server solution.
A final point of note is that FAST has itself made a number of acquisitions in the last year which may be of interest to Microsoft: AgentArts, acquired in July, provides personalisation and recommendation technology; bWise, also acquired in July, provides business intelligence capabilities; and RetrievalWare, acquired from struggling search vendor Convera in August, provides yet another substantial enterprise search platform, this time with a distinct public sector focus. If the acquisition does indeed go ahead, Microsoft has got some serious work on its hands to sort out the FAST technology.
Labels: collaboration search Microsoft FAST Autonomy
