Links for 2008-05-28 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
IBM's identity management becomes user-centric: HP's identity management exit strategy
Courtesy of InternetNews on Tuesday I learned that IBM has added support for OpenID, Windows CardSpace and Eclipse's Higgins Identity Framework to its Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (FIM) offering. As one of the enterprise identity management heavyweights, IBM's announcement is an important endorsement of user-centric identity approaches. Such approaches are still in the formative phase of the adoption curve, particularly in the enterprise, so I see this is an investment for the future for IBM. IBM's significant installed base should help to increase awareness, particularly for organisations supporting external user communities.
IBM's
press release provides more details on the user-centric credentials (
no pun intended!) of FIM. It also discusses the product's SOA Identity Service, which is designed to address some of the challenges associated with identity lifecycle management and audit where service-oriented approaches are applied to siloed applications with siloed security. These challenges are something
I highlighted back in February 2006 and are a barrier to the realisation of the value of SOA as it moves out of project-level deployments. I see the SOA Identity Service as the more important aspect of this announcement, with SOA being a more pressing IT (and hopefully business) concern than user-centric identity.
As an aside, the InternetNews article mentions that the enterprise identity management market
is becoming increasingly competitive with offerings from HP, CA and Oracle.
Can't fault the journalist on CA and Oracle ... but HP! Earlier in the year the company announced that it was no longer going to be selling its Identity Center products to new customers: hardly a competitive force. As part of this (hopefully for its customers) graceful retreat from the market,
HP announced that it has established an exclusive agreement with Novell whereby the two companies will
jointly offer migration services, HP will resell Novell identity and security management solutions and Novell will license HP Identity Center technology
When HP originally announced that it was exiting the market, it stated that it would continue to support and develop Identity Center for its existing customers so I was somewhat surprised to see it offering a migration programme. I wonder whether those customers didn't see this as an effective way forward for what is critical infrastructure. Whilst the programme was a surprise, the partner wasn't. Where else could HP have gone? BMC, CA or IBM: hardly, given the competition in the IT service/systems management markets (and numerous others in the case of IBM). Sun: difficult given competition in the hardware space. Oracle: would have made things difficult for HP's SAP alliance team. Microsoft: lacks the heterogeneous environment support and breadth of functionality that HP's customers need. So, whilst I am sure the sentiments behind Ben Horowitz's (VP and GM, Business Technology Optimization, Software, HP) statement that HP chose Novell
because of its outstanding set of technologies, recognized market leadership and tremendous commitment to working with HP customers
are real, the company didn't have too many others to chose from!
Labels: BMC, CA, CardSpace, Eclipse, Higgins, HP, ibm, identity, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle
A "Start" button for a new phase of our business
Here's a little snipped screenshot from the MWD website
homepage, as it appears from today. That little green box above our main menu doesn't look like much, but it's a big deal for us - as of today, we're launching a completely new line of business that we expect to drive significant growth for us and hugely increase our ability to scale our business.
Over the past few months we've mentioned, in passing, the fact that we're developing some new services.
In mid-April we quietly published six Business Process Management (BPM)-focused reports into our free "guest pass" research library: two documents outlining our approach to BPM technology assessments, together with assessments of offerings from BEA, Lombardi, Software AG and TIBCO (you can find links to those on our
homepage - under "highlights"). These assessments follow the tried-and-tested approach we've used to great effect in the past when looking at SOA infrastructure and identity management offerings, working from a common assessment framework that seeks to get under the covers of what's important.
The publication of these reports coincided with us launching a new BPM service to a small handful of our existing paying customers. After a couple of weeks of testing and tweaking, we're now finally ready to make a lot more noise about it.
Our new
BPM Continuous Advisory Service builds on the foundation of our "guest pass" research mentioned above, but adds much more. There are three main elements:
- A deeper set of "premium" research reports covering BPM strategy issues, case studies, findings from Europe-wide surveys (which we're conducting twice a year) looking at BPM adoption, maturity and best practice, and industry news and analysis. This base is continuously added to as we go.
- An innovative online interactive vendor comparison tool which allows you to compare and rank vendor capabilities based on your specific business and IT requirements (is a rules capability particularly important to you? Is simulation not interesting? Is it imperative that you only consider vendors which support BPMN, or run on WebSphere? Specify your preferences in the tool and it will dynamically rank and filter vendors accordingly). Our guest pass assessment reports don't include comparative scoring; the tool does. All the vendors we cover in our guest pass research reports are included in the tool's database (and we're currently working on extending the list of vendors - watch this space).
- An optional Analyst Access facility, giving direct access to our analysts so that you can engage with us on topics relating to the advisory service content.
The service is licensed on an annual subscription basis, and we're pursuing an "open licensing" policy, rather than working on the established model of charging per-seat. One license covers a customer for anyone, anywhere in the world, who wants to access the research and tools.
Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?
If you work for a company looking at BPM technology or currently exploring a BPM initiative, you should check out how our service can help you to define your strategy, implementation approach, and technology procurement (particularly if you're based in Europe). More information about the service, together with pricing, is available
here. And if you work for a supplier of IT products or services and want to get more of a handle on what's really going on in the world of BPM (again, particularly in Europe), you'll want to check out
this information.
If you want to have a look at the service for yourself, we're also offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial
here.
In the coming weeks we'll be launching a new Continuous Advisory Service focused on Collaboration that is built from the same elements as the BPM service we're launching today. And over the coming months, you'll see us expanding our focus further. But all this new stuff doesn't mean the end of our commitment to delivering free research: we'll continue to make a whole raft of research, podcasts and blog posts available free of charge to our 1,500 (and growing) strong regular reader base.
Labels: MWD
Links for 2008-05-16 [del.icio.us]
- Compuware 2.0: We Make IT Rock
Compuware 2.0 - accompanied by a chugging "rawk" soundtrack and with a new COO. Part of the goal is to recruit bright young talent - but is this just like your Dad trying to look cool in a nightclub?
Labels: MWD
Links for 2008-05-14 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
Links for 2008-05-13 [del.icio.us]
- United States Patent Application: 0080082465
A patent (which includes Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie amongs its inventors!) for an intelligent agent that monitors the environment, user characteristics and preferences to advise a user in "decision-making processes for efficiency or safety concerns" - itickr.com » Blog Archive » SignOn.com / Google Apps Integration
Ping adds support for SAML to signon.com (already supports OpenID and CardSpace) through integration with Ping Federate. Also supports Google apps - Dave and Vikas Hop on the Right Bus
Oracle's Clayton Donley explains how the Identity Governance Framework and, more specifically, CARML, to enable movement of data along an identity bus by providing a means for endpoints on the bus to understand the data being passed
Labels: MWD
Oracle makes its "enterprise 2.0" play
Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with
Charles Phillips. The invitation to came pretty much out of the blue a couple of weeks ago; the reason was because "Charles is interested in having a conversation about Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise, and outlining what Oracle's looking to do in that area".
The invite was interesting not only because Oracle's been
pretty backward in coming forward about its collaboration story of late, and it sounded as if it might be preparing to say something new. It was also interesting because Oracle is renowned in analyst circles for being very structured and controlled in the way it engages with analyst firms. Whereas other vendors have long attempted to at least give the impression that they're interested in having conversations with analysts who have useful insights, no matter the size of firm they come from, Oracle has mostly stuck to its policy of only focusing on what it calls "tier 1" firms (Gartner, Forrester and IDC). I think MWD currently rates as a "tier 3" firm... so an invitation to a meeting with Oracle's President was pretty surprising. Still, as my Grandma always used to say, "
never look a gift horse in the mouth"...
As it happens the briefing wasn't a hoax, and it was rather good. In the spirit of all things 2.0ey, Oracle has started to explore a kind of "market conversation" approach to talking about the work it's doing in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Phillips was - for Oracle - close to being excitingly off-message at times. The assembled Oracleists also seemed to be genuinely interested in witnessing a conversation, rather than a prepared speech. Which was cool.
So anyway. There were four particular things of note that I took away from the conversation, all of which I think we'll be keen to track going forward:
- Oracle is putting real muscle behind Enterprise 2.0. It's building a dedicated sales force, combining pre-sales, consulting, and education resources together along with feet on the street. It'll be selling consulting offerings, together with a set of underpinning technologies, all of which exist today - Oracle Portal, Oracle Universal Content Management, and WebCenter, together with the underlying Fusion Middleware pieces. It's building out a set of "use cases" based on some internal market research and will sell its offerings through those.
- BEA's assets will be part of the picture. The Enterprise 2.0 sales initiative will bring in people,assets and resources from BEA. This is good news because it shows Oracle is looking at its acquisition of BEA not just from the standpoint of acquiring middleware market share.
- Oracle is relaunching its collaboration offering. The new Oracle Beehive technology is being developed to sit alongside Oracle's existing technology stack as outlined above, and it's not escaped Oracle's attention that if it can make market inroads with an Enterprise 2.0 story, it has a potential follow-on opportunity to displace some of the (very large chunk of) enterprise spending that goes on "heritage" collaboration software product upgrades. The company's Collaboration Suite hardly set the world on fire back in 2002-05: this shows that Oracle is revving up to have another go. But avoiding taking the incumbents on head-on this time.
- As well as building out a standalone proposition, Oracle is folding the technology into its other offerings and processes. Phillips talked about work going on to integrate the collaboration platform capabilities in Beehive together with its Fusion applications and its BPM technology offering. But it's also taking much of the technology and using that internally within Oracle - and as it learns about what works, it's infusing a number of its own business processes with an Enterprise 2.0 flavour. The Oracle Partner Network is one place where it's trying stuff out (with 9,000 Oracle products and 20,000 partners on the books, this could be viewed as Oracle's own long tail opportunity. Sidenote: Oracle has *9,000* products? Jeez. That's not good.)
As an interesting footnote for analyst-watchers: at the end of the meeting, the Oracleists said they were "very keen to continue the dialogue". This was fantastic news, given MWD's status with Oracle! But what was behind that? Had they had some kind of road-to-damascus experience about the value of smaller analyst firms? Well, no... it turns out that Oracle's PR team is interested in talking to me as a "blogger" - but this is something separate from my work as an analyst for MWD. MWD is still in the same position as an analyst firm, and it seems I'll need to have a separate relationship with Oracle as an analyst. I'll leave an analysis of what this might mean for how Oracle perceives the relative value of "bloggers" and "analysts" (particularly in light of discussions like
this one about what defines an analyst) as an exercise to the interested reader.
It's funny, though: last time I looked, I was just one person... it seems that getting collaboration and conversation right is indeed not about introducing new technology, but about adjusting your culture and organisation.
Labels: analyst biz, enterprise 2.0, Oracle
A week of firsts
You might think having been a senior analyst for 8 years that I'd have seen most things. Well, this has definitely been a week of firsts for me.
My first ever
JavaOne conference; my first week in joining MWD as a principal analyst covering the application delivery and lifecycle management market (moving from 8 years at Ovum) and finally my first blog entry.
I accepted Sun's invitation to JavaOne this year because rumour has it that interest in the conference and support for Java is waning, and I wanted to see for myself just what was going on.
To be honest, I've never given much credence to such hyperbolic scaremongering, and what I've seen over the last couple of days merely backed that up. There's no doubt that Java's progress has been and continues to be marked with difficulties: controlling interests and agendas, delays, confusion, swerving focus and industry bickering. However, this is to be expected of a technology that has been successful and widely adopted.
Java is a mature technology that has many masters, spawned a number of lucrative revenue streams, opens many doors and is consumed in many different ways. The competitive alternative –
Microsoft's .NET environment, although just as formidable, is beset with similar issues and one or two harder challenges.
That's the good news. The bad news is that Sun's role and involvement from technology, market and management perspectives alike has been opaque at best.
Sun has never been particularly clear about how it actually makes money from Java or indeed maximising the opportunities. This doesn't really look like changing in the future.
For all that, I have enjoyed these past few days at the conference and gained a good deal of valuable insight; some disturbing, some surprising, others anticipated. Rumours of the conference's lack of importance and influence are, in my view, premature, and I will share my thoughts with you in future postings.
Far from what I was expecting, there has been a general air of optimism at the conference.
In ending this blog post I find myself with two regrets:
Firstly, the sheer number of interesting and enticing presentations made it inevitable that I should miss more than I could attend. Those that I did get to which I found particularly compelling, and would certainly recommend anyone getting the presentation materials or podcasts / webcasts of the sessions, were:
"Sun Mobility General Session – Java wherever you are" (the information delivered was certainly interesting and a good insight into JavaFX mobile development - and it's clear that Sun is after the same market as
Microsoft and
Adobe in this space); and
"Real World, Real Time, Instant Results: Make Information work for you" presented by
Jeff Henry of IBM (very interesting, insightful and for the most part non-partisan). I was booked on, but missed,
"Service-oriented Architecture and Java Technology: Level-setting standards, Architecture and code" delivered by Steve Jones and Duane Nickull. By all accounts this had some good insight and valuable information from guys with a lot of end user and real world interactions. The other sessions I wanted to attend but they clashed were
"The many moons of Eclipse" and
"Case Studies from the JavaFX technology world".
My second regret is not having attended JavaOne during the past eight years as a senior analyst, if only to have seen it in its heyday when Java was the exciting new kid on the technology block and firms were rushing and fighting to be part of the show.
Given the size of the big hall and the number of organisations exhibiting I would definitely say that whilst veterans of the show might argue that the volumes are not up with its peak years (early 2000s) the show still maintains enough of an influence to entice the great and the good in this market and plenty of start-ups and innovators.
JavaOne, in my opinion, is still an incredibly important and very necessary conference. My worry is that it becomes increasingly a mouthpiece for Sun rather than a standalone entity.
Over the coming weeks and months, I am going to be writing a lot more about the state of the development market and taking a closer look at the value of some of the underlying technologies and products. I welcome any comments and questions and look forward to readers getting in touch to further the debate.
Labels: development, Java, JavaFX, JavaOne, mobility, Sun
Links for 2008-05-06 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
Which comes first: process or service? Part 2
The question of how to combine BPM and SOA came up a lot here at TIBCO's TUCON user event - and, a little disappointingly, the standard response seems to typically revolve around reinventing the three-tier architecture of the 1990s, just with more scope and scale.
I pointed out in
the previous part of this post a few ways in which that perspective is too short-sighted. It's OK to view BPM and SOA as both essentially technology approaches to building and integrating applications, but this is a perspective that misses a big part of the potential business value of the combination.
What we're starting to see, though, in a few advanced organisations, is how top-down, business-driven approaches to service orientation and business process thinking can combine with bottom-up, technology-driven approaches. The model that we see links an approach to business architecture that leans on the concepts of process and service to describe business fundamentals, with an approach to technology architecture that uses the same concept to describe the operation of automated systems. The same concepts are used at multiple levels of abstraction and composition/decomposition, so the link is seamless.
To make this link, the concepts of process and service are united through a third concept: outcome. The middle section of the diagram below, which outlines a process- and service-oriented view of business architecture, calls this out.
This is how it lays out:
- Outcomes are desired results. An outcome at the highest level is likely to be something concerned with the core value of the organisation, financial performance, etc. At this level, outcomes might link very straightforwardly to mission statements. At lower levels outcomes are going to be concerned with operational results - for example "product is delivered".
- Services are commitments to achieve outcomes.
- Processes are the methods through which outcomes are achieved.
One of the realisations that should come when you think about this approach is that service-oriented thinking can "drive" process thinking - but not only because technical process implementations can be wrapped with technical service interfaces, as I mentioned in the last post. More importantly, service-oriented thinking should drive process work because when you define business services (commitments to achieve outcomes) you're actually providing business context that shapes the KPIs and goals that you need to set for processes in BPM initiatives.
Another way to explain this aspect of service orientation is like this: when you model a process, and define a KPI and a target for that KPI, you're actually modelling aspects of a service "wrapper" for the process, as well as the process. You're defining what the commitment to achieve the outcome looks like, as well as the method you'll use to achieve the outcome. It's only when you start to think in terms of outcomes (and then services and processes) that this becomes clear, though.
There are other ways in which SOA and BPM can be intelligently combined to add value to both that aren't just about simplistic views of integration (and I'll try and get to some of those in future posts, watch this space) - but I think this is one of the most important. It's important because it helps people get their heads around a way of linking business architecture work with technical architecture work - with one consistent set of concepts. To date, there haven't been many ways to do this, and our research suggests that few organisations manage to make the link effectively today.
To come back to the post title: when you start to think about outcomes as a core concept in business and technology architecture, it becomes clear that it's not accurate to say either that services come first, or processes come first: the truth is that *outcomes* come first, and services and processes are two sides of the same coin in achieving the right results.
Labels: BPM, EA, SOA
