Software Delivery InFocus podcast - the challenge of software quality
This is the fourth in our Software Delivery InFocus series of podcast episodes, starring Bola Rotibi - the Principal Analyst of MWD's Software Delivery competency area. In this episode, she discusses the thorny issue of software quality. This is something the IT industry has talked about for decades - so why is it still so patchy? Bola's guests are Madelyn Bryant McIntire, Principal Group Manager, PQO Product Quality Management, Microsoft; and Justin Spencer, Development Manager at Lend Lease (a large publicly listed international property group). Producing quality software code is undoubtedly a desired goal of any software delivery team - irrespective of whether the delivered application is for commercial sale or internal business use. Software quality is regularly placed in the top five demand requirements of the software delivery team, yet the quality of software is regularly highlighted as a major failure point and the basis for much end user dissatisfaction. Here, Bola talks to her guests about the main points of failure in software delivery processes; the actions that Microsoft and Lend Lease take to improve the quality of delivered software in a business-driven environment; where the next challenges will come from; and what tools suppliers could do better. You can download the audio here or alternatively you can subscribe to the podcast feed to make sure you catch this and all future podcasts! Labels: Lend Lease, Microsoft, MWD, podcast, Software Quality
The cost benefits of listening and relationships during economic gloom
Over the last few months I have heard and read commentary after commentary about how to weather out the recession. Whilst there is no silver bullet, there are plenty of good tips to follow that, valuable during good times, are essential in the bad. The global financial meltdown means that IT vendors are facing the same hard times as the rest of us. But, what will be key in their rhetoric is not only "what they can do for you" by way of their products and services, but "what they are going to do for you" by way of helping you weather the tough times too. What initiatives or programs are vendors providing and how sensible and pragmatic are they in ensuring that you achieve the most out of your IT investments (past and future) and don't unnecessarily burden you with technical debt? Strong, effective and long lasting relationships are forged by the level and type of support provided in tough times as well as during good ones. Large suppliers may be able to offer more in way of financial incentives, but smaller players can often offer more flexible and accessible support. So what are the vendors' strategies for helping businesses during these tough times? One example of a vendor that has been actively talking and listening to CIOs, employees and its customer base to help direct a strategy towards helping both its client base and the wider end-user market is Microsoft. At the close of 2008, I caught up with Gordon Fraser, Microsoft's UK MD to hear more about how the company was responding to calls for help with saving time and money and improving productivity. We will be publishing the interview in more detail later this month. For now, here are some of their key directions: - Don't work harder, work smarter - Microsoft has developed features to enable smarter use of its technology with features that already exist in many of its products already in use within organisations. Most enterprises using the Windows server platform already have access to virtualisation technology that could help reduce the number of servers needed to carry out the workload or move workloads to more power efficient locations. Products like System Center target operational efficiency and excellence, whilst the company's collaboration and communications tools (e.g. Live Meeting with online video conferencing) are freeing up travel time, cutting costs and helping to reduce environmental impacts.
- Consider alternative delivery models - Cloud computing and hosted solution offerings are current hot topics because of their flexible business models for the licensing, usage, maintenance and management of IT collateral. Both technologies are high on Microsoft's priorities for engaging effectively with its client base and helping them to do more with less. The company continues to forge ahead with its "Software plus Service" offerings and announced its own cloud based server offer, Windows Azure at its 2008 Professional Developers Conference (PDC).
- Play a brighter tune with new financial instruments - To help ease the burden of obtaining credit the company has launched a number of initiatives to ease the payment costs for its technology and products. BizSpark, launched in November 2008 offers the full range of Microsoft technology and products, delivered through its partner ecosystem and deferring costs for up to three years. In a bid to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Microsoft UK has introduced a low cost financing programme for buying IT infrastructure and tooling that is tied to the bank of England base rate (currently 1.5%).
Undoubtedly, Microsoft is aware of the importance of listening and relationships, especially considering that along with other IT vendors, it is already feeling the pinch from restraints placed on IT spend. Maximising its ability to support CIOs and their IT organisations, SMEs and its own partner and community ecosystem is not surprising considering the company's vested interests. Microsoft clearly has an arsenal of solutions, services and well intentioned financial incentives at hand. Although pro-active in its messaging and smart with its incentives and product feature sets, Microsoft is by no means the only software vendor capable of offering such support. Listening and relationships are two way processes. So it is not just about vendors listening to their customers' during these hard times, but also about customers being receptive to what their vendors may have to offer them in terms of support. This will help the relationship blossom (which may bear additional fruit later on). Therefore it would be wise to check out what is being offered by vendors already in your supply chain before looking elsewhere. The fact that vendors like Microsoft are keen to talk and listen to their communities and the wider end user market is important for strengthening the overall relationship between the IT supply chain community and the businesses that they serve. Addressing calls for being as flexible in their licensing models and easing the burden of total cost of ownership and operational support, through hosted and virtualisation solutions can allow organisations to think more creatively in their strategies for applying their IT spend during these tough times. Customers are also well advised to look at what technology that they already have in place, since they may not be using them all to their full extent, before spending additional revenue. A couple of questions that I'd like to throw out to our readers for feedback are: what further support would they like to see from the vendor community as we face what looks set to be a tough economic and financial climate for the foreseeable future. What type of support matters the most? Labels: economy, Microsoft, technical debt
Notes on PDC: Windows Azure
There were always going to be high expectations for Microsoft's 2008 Professional Developer Conference (PDC). This was the first PDC without Bill Gates at the helm, and let's also not forget that the PDC event scheduled for 2007 was unceremoniously cancelled at the last minute - fuelling speculation that Microsoft's product roadmap was in the process of being torn up. So, in 2008, the key question on everyone's lips was: would the event signal a Microsoft back on track with its developer story? It turns out that 2008 has been a pretty solid year for Microsoft in terms of developer technology delivery, with the release of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQLServer 2008, Hyper-V and Sliverlight v2. And at PDC 2008, in short, Microsoft did what it had to do. It provided insight into its strategy and an outline solution set for a cloud computing era; made good some of the mess that was the release of Windows Vista; and showed the world that even with Bill gone, there's still a strong management team with leadership vision and product foresight in place. I'm going to tackle these points over a couple of blog entries. First, here, I'll tackle Microsoft's cloud computing strategy and the newly-announced "Windows Azure" initiative. After a slightly slow start, with Windows Azure, Microsoft has now placed a strong bet on cloud computing and cloud-based applications. The company now believes that "the systems for cloud computing will be setting the stage for the next 50 years - with new patterns and new models of deployment, and application models for a world of parallel computing." It was interesting to hear the company praise Amazon's innovation and exploration in this field with its EC2 offering. However, Microsoft is of the opinion that ultimately, it'll be in a better position to offer a more comprehensive end-to-end service portfolio than Amazon - owing to the fact that it can leverage strong pre-existing market positions with development tools, management solutions and server environments. As a side-note, of course, it's worth remembering that Amazon and the other "cloud innovators" counter this position by saying that new computing models don't have to rely on old tools and skills - indeed, disruptions can (and sometimes should) bring new tools and techniques that are most suited to the job in hand. When Microsoft was at the forefront of the shift towards client-server systems and away from mainframes, we don't remember it championing COBOL or CICS on the desktop. Azure, Microsoft's cloud-based service solution, will be a hosting platform for applications and services that can be built by Microsoft, Independent Software Vendors (ISV), service providers and customers using a combination of Live, .NET, SQL, SharePoint and CRM services. Azure is designed to deliver services that can be leveraged rapidly and easily, and will be delivered by Microsoft's data centres in the US and across the rest of the world. In line with its positioning vs. Amazon, it will use its existing development tools and the .NET framework as the developer entry point to the Azure platform. What's also interesting, and encouraging, is that Azure is not just for customers: Microsoft is also aiming to use Azure to host its own internal systems. Of course, Azure was expected - and widely trailed. In the coming months, we expect that most, if not all, the major software infrastructure vendors and service providers with sizeable data centres will launch some form of "cloud based" strategy for their product and services portfolios. The company's strategy to leverage existing technology and products wherever possible could be a good move - in that it could remove a potential barrier to adoption, and is likely to please many of its existing customers. However, given the side-note above, the fact that Microsoft is sticking to its existing development technology framework for Azure isn't a guarantee of market domination. In the immediate term, though, the challenge for Microsoft, as always these days, will be to ensure that it can articulate its strategy and product direction precisely and clearly. The breadth of Microsoft's portfolio and the number of markets that the company covers means that it's all too easy for the company to confuse its audiences with stories and strategies that aren't "joined up". There was one important missed opportunity in the Ray Ozzie keynote which sketched out Azure, and it was an opportunity to explain the technical, regulatory and legislative demands that developers would likely have to meet in building application services for deployment on Azure - and to explain how Microsoft would help developers with the associated challenges. The issues was skated over very lightly, and this was something that a lot of people were expecting to hear about. Many organisations are likely to struggle with implementing cloud-based services, and not only because of the technical challenges: there's an architecture and planning question to be addressed, too, which at the moment is not receiving as much attention as it might. The question is not about how to build services, so much, but *what* services to build, and *why*. This is a question that many organisations already struggle with in the context of SOA - which is one of the reasons why most SOA efforts today are still tightly constrained project-level efforts dealing largely with application integration use cases. For all these reasons, we expect the primary targets for platforms like Windows Azure - at least in the short term - to be ISVS and Service Providers rather than enterprise development shops. Labels: Azure, Microsoft, PDC, Windows
Microsoft announces Office Communications Server R2
Almost 12 months to the day after Microsoft launched its realtime messaging, presence and conferencing server, Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), the company today announced the follow-up release of the product, referred to as "R2". Currently in private beta testing (and due for public release in February 2009) , OCS R2 enhancements focus largely on telephony-based features, for example enabling individuals to dial into the audio part of a web conference without the need to be online, as well as support for SIP trunking. There is also a strong leaning towards supporting call centre and admininstrative roles within organisations. OCS R2 includes a dedicated "attendant console", which allows individuals to act as delegates so that, for example, a PA or central receptionist would be able to manage incoming calls. In a similar vein, a "response groups" feature enables a single call to be routed to multiple users in turn until it finds someone who is available. The new release also provides support for additional mobile platforms - acknowledging that perhaps some people don't use Window Mobile - and includes two-way "single number reach", which extends the existing support for the use of a single number to ring an individual at all of their locations (office, mobile, home, etc.) at once, so that calls from any of those locations appear to come from that number. The new version also marks the introduction of the persistent chat technology that came from Microsoft's acquisition of Parlano in October 2007, and provides for more seemless integration with Office Communicator for desktop sharing, as well as support for HD video and improved call monitoring. This new product release highlights the growing convergence between the historically separate worlds of software and telephony, with vendors on both sides extending their reach into the other market in a bid to deliver collaboration and/or unified communications. From my perspective (which you can see here), it is becoming increasingly difficult to consider these two vendor markets as distinct, although at the business end the budgets continue to be split in the majority of organisations. What is clear is that communication is a major underpinning of any strategy for improving collaborative working practices, and as organisations' implementations of such practices mature, the technology convergence will only increase. If you are embarking on a collaboration initiative, you need to consider the role of your telephony infrastructure as part of that initiative. Furthermore, you need to think about the integration that will be necessary to ensure that that you don’t introduce communication stovepipes and bottlenecks that will constrain the value of your collaboration investment. Finally, you should look to vendors who are able to sit on both sides of the collaboration software/telephony divide (our collaboration assessments and vendor comparison tool should help). You can see our assessment of Microsoft's collaboration portfolio (pre-OCS R2) here. Labels: collaboration, Microsoft
Ignore the spin: Microsoft's membership of the OMG is good news for all concerned
Tony Baer's one of the analysts who's picked up on Microsoft's recent announcement that it's joining the OMG and backing UML and BPMN. His post is pretty interesting and outlines some of the relevant history - particularly relating to DSLs and the OMG's UML. But I'd like to add to that, and talk a bit about what the announcement means to the IT industry and the wider community of enterprise software developers. Ignoring the "bringing modelling to the mainstream" spin that Microsoft has put on the announcement, Microsoft joining the OMG is a good thing for all concerned. Modelling is already a mainstream activity to most involved directly with the production of software, whether in the software vendor community or the wider software developer community. What it isn't, for the most part, is consistent, fully-integrated or shared within and across organisations - or seen by enterprises as something with real strategic importance. Modelling holds great powers for shared communication between stakeholders. Through the power of abstraction and collective representation, model-driven development is an efficient and effective way of communicating requirements, goals and outcomes against the backdrop of existing constraints and platforms, and then automating the activities of the delivery process (i.e. development, testing and production) to ensure that what is deployed works how it was intended to (and to a sufficient level of quality). So Microsoft's commitment to the OMG, simply put, finally gives model-driven software development a truly united voice - and also an united industry body for driving the education and strategic importance of modelling to the wider community. The environment and process framework created and managed by the OMG for collaboration, sharing strategy, and generating best practices that ultimately get incorporated into standards, has strong input from end user organisations and commercial vendors alike. A supply community that is united behind a common industry body is an important criterion for helping to drive modelling and model-driven development being seen as strategically important activities beyond the confines of the software vendor community. Ultimately this announcement says a lot about how far both Microsoft and the OMG have come (in equal measures), the importance of modelling for the future of software for all concerned – enterprises in particular – and a recognition from Microsoft that it does actually need the OMG. The OMG needs Microsoft too (but perhaps a little less so in my opinion). Microsoft joins the OMG with proven technology and a vision that makes it as good a first-class citizen as IBM with its Rational toolset and strong contribution to modelling technology (an aside: the Microsoft-OMG "war" was never really about the OMG per se, but rather about IBM Rational's dominance). Microsoft has realised the power and importance of UML and the wide adoption within the market. As Tony correctly mentioned, this was vital if Microsoft was to progress with Oslo. The outcome here is that debate (and vital energy) is no longer focused on the political and market agendas of the modelling tool vendors. Don't get me wrong, there are still political and market agendas in play, there always will be. But for the meantime and in general these will play out more "behind the scenes" than before - and that has to be good for everyone. Labels: DSL, Microsoft, Modelling, OMG, Oslo, SDL, UML
ECM vendors collaborate on interoperability standard
Yesterday EMC, IBM, and Microsoft jointly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) - a new specification designed to enable interoperability between content management repositories. The proposed standard, which was also being submitted to the open standards consortium OASIS yesterday, will create a common interface for accessing content stored in compliant repositories, simplifying the process of integrating business applications with enterprise content management (ECM) systems, particularly in a mixed environment with products from multiple ECM vendors - a situation that is common among enterprise organisations. The core ECM focus areas for version 1.0 are collaborative content creation, and delivery of content through portals and mashups, with support for applications such as workflow/BPM, archiving, compound document management and electronic legal discovery to be built on top of the CMIS interfaces. The specification provides support for both REST- and SOAP-based interfaces. The three primary parties in the development of the standard have been working on its development since 2006, and have since been joined by fellow competitors in the ECM space Alfresco, BEA/Oracle, OpenText and SAP. I have to say that this is a welcome move by the ECM vendors - a standard of this kind is well overdue, and it is encouraging that so many of the leading players are on board. Clearly the implementation of such a (proposed) standard will not happen overnight - and approval of the standard by OASIS is not expected until the second half of 2009. However, we can expect the vendors involved to begin introducing CMIS-compliant code before then, especially since a key goal of the specification was to enable it to be developed as a layer that can sit on top of existing content repositories, rather than requiring them to be redeveloped from scratch (compared to the related JSR 170 standard, for example). In fact, the Alfresco website is already offering up its draft CMIS implementation for preview by the developer community. A risk to the specification's success is that it falls into the same trap that befell the ANSI SQL standard. This provided a standard way of accessing data repositories, but allowed vendors to include their own "tweaks" which locked people in. The CMIS vendors acknowledge that CMIS is not trying to cover everything - for example security and administration is left to the individual applications - and clearly some products will have differentiating capabilities that are not covered by the standard, increasing the risk of deviation. However, despite this risk, CMIS is a positive step for the ECM market. It is also worth noting that the standard has much wider implications than just ECM - certainly any organisations looking to implement collaboration technologies should keep an eye on the progress of the standard, and should also challenge their collaboration software providers on their plans, as CMIS should make it much easier to manage collaboratively authored content in the same way as any other organisational content. Labels: Alfresco, CMIS, ECM, EMC, ibm, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, standards
Cisco strengthens collaboration portfolio
Cisco today announced its acquisition (which is expected to close by the end of October) of email and calendaring startup, PostPath, for the princely sum of approximately $215 million. The PostPath offering is Linux-based, and has been designed to drop into a Microsoft network as an alternative to Exchange, with the company claiming to offer an easier migration path from Exchange 5.5 to PostPath than from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007. This acquisition is a logical step for Cisco, which acquired conferencing vendor WebEx in May 2007, followed by policy management vendor Securent in November. Cisco wants to be a major competitor in the collaboration software market, leveraging its communications background to move up the business software stack. With the exception of its small business email offering WebEx Mail, email and personal calendaring has been a noticeable weak spot in the Cisco portfolio, and by building the PostPath technology into the SaaS-delivered WebEx Connect product (which is gradually becoming the platform for all things collaboration at Cisco), the acquisition means it can offer an alternative to customers, and further fleshes out the Cisco collaboration stack. The previously stagnant email market has seen a flush of activity recently, with hosted email services such as Google's Gmail introducing increasingly viable alternatives to the costs of maintaining an in-house Exchange environment. While it is unlikely that players such as Google and Cisco will making a major dent Microsoft's Exchange market share in the short term, the competition can only be healthy, and at least prompt Microsoft to address the challenges posed. I have yet to speak to Cisco directly about the acquisition, so I remain quite speculative about how significant a role the company sees this technology playing in the overall collaboration portfolio. $215 million is a considerable purchase price, although it pales into insignificance next to the $3.2 billion the company paid for WebEx last year. Whether the value of the PostPath technology will justify that investment however, remains to be seen. Integration is a key factor in the WebEx Connect strategy, so it will be interesting to see how effectively Cisco can leverage the PostPath features across the breadth of the collaboration portfolio, rather than simply adding a check in the "email and calendaring" box. For organisations considering hosted collaboration offerings such as WebEx Connect, this acquisition could make Cisco a more interesting proposition, especially if Cisco can leverage the Exchange migration strategy touted by PostPath in combination with both PostPath's and WebEx's Outlook integration. Labels: Cisco, collaboration, google, Microsoft, PostPath
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 privacy-enhancing acquisition for Microsoft
Microsoft has acquired Canadian cryptography specialist Credentica. This news sees Microsoft reverting back to its more traditional approach of acquiring small (Credentica is a team of three) specialist technology vendors to plug very specific gaps. In this case, Credentica brings its U-Prove technology to Microsoft's Identity & Access Group to enhance the privacy assurance capabilities of Microsoft's CardSpace and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Credentica was founded by acknowledged security expert Stefan Brands, whose team has applied some very advanced cryptography techniques to allow users to authenticate to service providers directly without the involvement of identity providers. They also limit the disclosure of personally-identifiable information to prevent accounts being linked across service providers and provide resistance to phishing attacks. Credentica's own marketing literature highlights the synergies with CardSpace: The SDK is ideally suited for creating the electronic equivalent of the cards in one’s wallet and for protecting identity-related information in frameworks such as SAML, Liberty ID-WSF, and Windows CardSpace.
This is a smart move by Microsoft. Not only does it bring some very innovative and well-respected technology (with endorsements from the likes of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada) which extends the capabilities of Microsoft's identity and security offerings; it also brings some heavyweight cryptography and privacy expertise and credibility from the Credentica team. The latter can, and undoubtedly will, be exploited by Microsoft in the short term: the former will take more time to realise with Microsoft stating that integrated offerings are more at least 12-18 months away. Businesses and public sector organisations offering B2C/G2C services should be following Microsoft's integration strategy closely as privacy becomes a more significant concern (and thus a differentiator). Labels: CardSpace, Credentica, Microsoft, privacy, WCF
Google launches Google Sites
Google is once again treading on Microsoft toes with the launch of its newest product, Google Sites. The new offering allows users to create and manage their own websites, and is based on the wiki technology the company acquired from JotSpot in October 2006. Google Sites is clearly targeted at the market currently dominated by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and the beta-version hosted derivative of SharePoint, Office Live Workspace (which I blogged about here), while highlighting its own simplicity and low cost - Google Sites is available free to existing Google Apps customers. Unusually for a new Google product it is not a beta version but a fully released product, no doubt thanks to its history under JotSpot. Most notable is the work that Google has already put into integrating the software with other Google applications - Google Calendar, Google Docs, YouTube and Picasa are all integrated to allow embedding of calendars, documents, videos, etc. into your site. It is interesting that Google has squarely removed all reference to wikis in its description of Google Sites, at a time when many enterprise software vendors are clamouring to ensure their offerings at least reference Enterprise 2.0 terms such as "wikis" and "blogs". This is the right decision: the Google Sites offering, while far from being a sophisticated site design tool, is much broader than many wiki tools in the market. It will also help Google in its attempt to "cross over" into the enterprise market - despite the success of business-focused products like Google Search Appliance, Google is still very much an Internet brand. While wikis and blogs are very "now", they are far from established in the enterprise, and the terminology can alienate less tech-savvy business users. Google needs to create confidence and trust among the enterprise market, and this branding/marketing decision seems to reflect this. Clearly Google Sites is not going to displace SharePoint in the short term. But Google continues to challenge the dominance of Microsoft in this space, and yet again it has chosen a services-based approach to achieve this. The debate around whether or not Google will displace Microsoft in office productivity will continue for a long time yet, but in the meantime, Google continues to show perceptive awareness of what it needs to do, as well as the investment capacity and determination to do it. Labels: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, google, Microsoft
Experian partners with Microsoft to develop an identity selector proof of concept
Perhaps it's because we're in the run up to the holiday season or because the press release came from the UK that accounts for the lack of commentary on the announcement that Experian has developed a CardSpace proof of concept with Microsoft. This is notable for a couple of reasons. First it's another of what is still a comparatively rare breed of "real-world" adoptions of CardSpace (Otto in Germany, which I commented on back in September, being another). Second it sees Experian exploiting the wealth of information it has gathered about individuals, together with its relationships with commerce service providers due to its position as the largest credit checking agency in the UK (it claims to process over 70% of all UK credit applications), to position itself as an identity provider. In a nutshell Experian plans to issue individuals with a 'Experian Card' information card. When the individual visits a CardSpace-enabled site, they will be able to present the 'Experian Card' when challenged to provide credentials and other identity-related data. CardSpace (and presumably non-Microsoft identity selector alternatives, such as the Bandit Project's DigitalMe) would then send a request to Experian to validate the identity and return a signed token to be used by the site to determine whether the individual is who they claim to be. Having a proof-of-concept is one thing but Experian is in a similar position to the first person to invest in a fax machine. They need others to participate if the technology isn't to languish as just an interesting experiment. Experian, because it is already trusted by service providers, is well positioned to get the identity selector ball rolling and according to the press release is already in discussion with a number of organisations and will be in a position to demonstrate it to organisations, with the ultimate intention of launching an Identity Management Service in the near future.That's only half the story though. The customers of those service providers also need to come on board. Whilst the wallet metaphor of CardSpace is intuitive, we have all grown too accustomed to the username/password/PIN/mother's maiden name ... approach to authentication and I am not convinced by Experian's claims that there will be enormous demand for such a service from ... consumersRather, I think Experian is going to have to encourage service providers to actively promote the identity selector approach, not least because individuals (unless they are using Windows Vista) are going to have to install CardSpace or a non-Microsoft alternative. I definitely don't want to pour cold water on the announcement. It's encouraging to see the adoption of "user-centric" (a term that I think is going to bandied about less in 2008) alternatives to traditional authentication mechanisms, given the enhanced usability and security, and I hope we do see a launch with a healthy group of service providers in the near future. Definitely something to watch. Labels: Bandit, CardSpace, Experian, identity, Microsoft
Google the new Microsoft? No comparison
...at least when it comes to discussion on the web. Google announced its OpenSocial social networking API project just 5 days ago - and now the company's own search engine reports over 7,700,000 hits for "OpenSocial". And it's still alpha code! A day earlier, Microsoft announced Project Oslo. And despite the announcement being what Gavin Clarke refers to as an experience of buzzword bingo, "Microsoft Oslo" garners just 1,400,000 hits or so. OK so it's not exactly scientific. But to me at least it shows just how far Google-fixation has become the psychosis du jour of the technology industry. Labels: google, Microsoft
Oracle proposes to buy BEA
Oracle today confirmedthat it delivered a letter to the Board of Directors of BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) on October 9 in which Oracle proposes to acquire BEA for $17.00 per share in cash. The $17.00 per share offer is a 25% premium over yesterday's closing price of $13.62.This acquisition has been long-discussed so I can't say I find the news particularly surprising, particularly with Carl Icahn recently upping his stake in the company. I think this just makes it more likely that Oracle's proposal will be accepted. This is primarily as a market share grab by Oracle. It does plug some gaps in the portfolio - particularly around business process management (based on BEA's Fuego acquisition), where Oracle only has basic BPEL web services orchestration; adds some telecoms vertical market capabilities to complement Oracle's vertical market push and the virtualisation work that BEA has done with the WebLogic Virtual Server Edition. Also, there's the opportunity for Oracle to tap into the healthy Tuxedo base. With a significant chunk of Oracle's profitability coming from maintenance, the revenue from BEA's customer base will suit its business far better than it did BEA which was suffering with its inability to grow license revenues. This is yet another example of the bigger specialist players getting squeezed out by the industry goliaths - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP - and the open source, smaller best-of-breed players. SAP's recent acquisition of Business Objects is another example (although that did plug a few more gaps). It leaves some of the other bigger specialist players - TIBCO, SoftwareAG (and to a lesser extent Progress and Red Hat) in an interesting position. On the one hand they will be more attractive, particularly for SOA and BPM, to customers looking for an application-independent infrastructure offering. On the other, though, taking market share for those customers from BEA is one thing: taking it from Oracle quite another. Ultimately, IBM is the big beneficiary in this regard. In summary, then, I see: the acquisition going ahead; BEA's customers looking worried as they see themselves with an application-dependent infrastructure stack; IBM looking happy at the prospect of providing those customers with an application-independent alternative; the likes of TIBCO and Software AG pondering their options; and SAP and Microsoft carrying on in there own sweet way. Labels: BEA, BPM, ibm, Microsoft, Oracle, Progress, Red Hat, SAP, SOA, Software AG, TIBCO
Collaborative productivity makes its mark on the desktop
The last couple of weeks have seen a wave of product launches and announcements at IBM Lotus, coinciding with the Lotus Collaboration Summit which took place on 18th September. A new version of Quickr is expected in the spring, along with a new product, Quickr Content Integrator, which will enable import of content from Domino libraries and teamrooms, FileNet P8, Microsoft Outlook public folders and Microsoft SharePoint sites into Quickr. Tuesday also saw the release of Lotus Forms 3.0, IBM's XForms-based technology gained through its PureEdge acquisition in 2005. Also announced was the release of Accelerators for WebSphere Portal - packaged portlets and connectors for integrating key IBM products into the portal, reducing implementation time (and cost). Five were shipped - Dashboard, Self-Service, Content, Collaboration, and Enterprise Software Suite. Of greatest interest to me was the Collaboration Accelerator, which provides integration for Sametime, Quickr and Connections. Perhaps the most interesting announcement from IBM is the release of Lotus Symphony, a suite of office productivity tools which are available for free, and which are also shipped within the latest Notes release. IBM reported over 100,000 downloads during the first week of the beta availability of the Symphony software, highlighting the growing interest in alternatives to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite. Based on OASIS' ODF (Open Document Format) standard, Lotus Symphony supports Office formats as well as Lotus Smartsuite formats, and runs on both Windows and Linux. This news was followed last week by the announcement of Microsoft Office Live Workspace - a Microsoft-hosted SharePoint workspace which allows users to access and share documents online. Described as an extension to the desktop Office suite, it can also be accessed by other desktop suites such as OpenOffice, and will be available in beta sometime in November. Widely touted as Microsoft's answer to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Microsoft claims it is not targeted at the enterprise market, rather at small businesses and home users. These announcements, along with those services from vendors such as Google and Zoho, highlight the emerging transition in how people want to use their desktop software - personal productivity, which so successfully established Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, is now giving way to collaborative productivity. It is no longer enough just to create, we now need to work with others to do this, and we are demanding that the software market catches up to support and enable this. All this activity is healthy for the desktop software market - which has been pretty stagnant for the last 10 years - and the entry into the market and buzz from players such as Google and Zoho are clearly making the giants sit up and take notice. Labels: collaboration, ibm, Microsoft
Has CardSpace become Passport?
Ben Laurie of The Bunker Secure Hosting has a provocative post about the two emerging (and that's important) leaders in user-centric identity: OpenID and CardSpace. He quite rightly points out that at present OpenID's: popularity is entirely on the provider side. There are no consumers of note.and that CardSpace: appears to live in its own little world, supported only by Microsoft productsI think this is to be expected given that we are still in the early stages of both. Where I find myself disagreeing with Ben, however, is with his conclusion about CardSpace: So why does this make Cardspace like Passport? Well, the fear with Passport was that Microsoft would control all your identity. The end result was that Microsoft was the only serious consumer of Passport. When Cardspace is deployed such that all providers and consumers of identity are really the same entity, then all its alleged privacy advantages evaporate. As I have pointed out many times before, when consumers and providers collude, nothing is secret in Cardspace (and all other standard signature-based schemes). So, there’s no practical difference between Cardspace and Passport right now.Ben's right about the implications for privacy when the those consuming identity information collude with those providing it but that's not an issue peculiar to CardSpace. Even Microsoft would (and indeed does) agree that Passport was a failure due to the company's control of identity data, I think Ben doesn't tell the whole story. It wasn't just down to control of an individual's identity data. It was also due to the fact that Passport and Hailstorm were designed from the outset to wrest control of identity data from Microsoft's business partners and customers. The same can not be said of CardSpace and that's why I believe there is a difference between CardSpace and Passport. There are already examples, Otto in Germany springs to mind, of organisations other than Microsoft using CardSpace and, as I said, it's still early days. Labels: CardSpace, identity, Microsoft, OpenID
Shock, horror: Microsoft and Concordia
Labels: identity, interoperability, Liberty, Microsoft, OpenID
Microsoft's Dynamic IT: it's a start
I have just returned from a couple of days in Orlando, where I attended a Microsoft Server and Tools Business analyst summit which coincided with the company's TechEd conference. The RedMonkers James and Coté did a great job of live blogging the event ( here, here, here, here, here and here) - and there was even some Twittering - but I needed the joys of a 9 hour transatlantic flight to collect my thoughts. The big news at TechEd and the focus of the analyst summit was Microsoft's Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business (Dynamic IT) strategy, which the company describes as building on the company’s Dynamic Systems Initiative and ongoing Application Platform efforts to provide customers with the key areas of technical innovation necessary to make their IT and development organizations more strategic to the businessIn other words it's a framework which builds on a number of Microsoft's most significant, but historically largely disconnected, initiatives which is designed to help customers understand how they can be combined to increase the business value of IT. This is long overdue, for a couple of reasons. First, whilst Microsoft has used language in the past which implies linkage between the different initiatives and associated products, such as 'design for operations' for DSI and .NET, it's not always been clear how the implication becomes reality. For example, how do the System Center management tools exploit operational policy requirements defined in Visual Studio and how do those requirements map to policies defined in Windows Communication Foundation? Dynamic IT sets out to make the linkage explicit. Second, Microsoft has lacked a cross-company vision for enterprise IT (for want of a better term) within which to frame discussions with customers and around which it can rally the troops. I'm thinking here of things like IBM's On Demand, HP's Business Technology, Oracle's Fusion etc. There's People-Ready of course but I think that's about more than Enterprise IT. Dynamic IT provides Microsoft with a competitive alternative and one that is more reflective of current reality than future aspiration. There are four aspects to Dynamic IT where Microsoft plans to focus innovation: - unified and virtualized
- process-led, model-driven
- service-enabled
- user-focused
built on a federated, interoperable and secure foundation. Obviously, it's still very early days but I do think Microsoft has a lot of work to do if it's going to achieve what I believe it hopes to with Dynamic IT. For example, in his keynote when Bob Muglia talked about process-led, model-driven he discussed process-led in terms of the application lifecycle, BizTalk, Windows Workflow Foundation and Office Business Applications and model-driven in terms of System Center and IT management models (based on Service Modelling Language and the Common Model Library). What he didn't do was explain the relationship between the two. When describing service-enabled, he focussed on .NET, SOA, web services and software plus services, primarily from the bottom-up, developer perspective (consistent with Microsoft's initial foray into SOA) but failed to tie that into the end-to-end service lifecycle - Big SOA - and thus process-led, model-driven. (As an aside, I think Microsoft is also missing a trick when it comes to information and data as a service but that's for another day). As well as explaining the relationships between the different aspects of Dynamic IT, Microsoft also has to be very careful that it doesn't fall back into the trap of using it simply as a framework for categorising its products. Increasingly, the key concerns of the people it is trying to reach with Dynamic IT don't fall into neat product categories and Microsoft has struggled in the past to articulate the joined-up propositions required to address these concerns because of its focus on product stovepipes (as I discussed here). What I think Microsoft needs, as I explained during various meetings at the summit, are scenarios and associated case studies to bridge between the framework and the products and emphasise the linkage. This will also serve to highlight the importance of the three foundational aspects - federated, interoperable and secure - which might otherwise be lost and to tie into Core, Application Platform and Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization roadmaps which Microsoft is using to help customers understand how they move forward from where they are today. For Microsoft's customers and potential customers Dynamic IT is a positive sign that company is beginning to recognise that you are more concerned with the outcomes from deploying the company's technologies than you are about the technologies themselves or the way that Microsoft chooses to structure itself to develop and sell them. Over the coming months you should be looking to Microsoft to fill out the framework and seek explanations for how the pieces fit together today and how the company plans to enhance that integration going forward. Labels: HP, ibm, Microsoft, Oracle, SOA
Realising the identity metasystem
It's perhaps unsurprising, given all the brouhaha surrounding Microsoft's claims that open source software infringes on 235 of its patents (which incidentally I take to be largely 'sabre rattling' from Redmond in the face of the implications of the GPLv3 for its deal with Novell, as discussed in the Risk Factors of the latter's recent 10-K filing), that some recent news regarding the Redmond company's very positive collaboration with the open source community has not received the attention it deserves. The news in question concerns a series of announcements the company made at last week's Interop conference in Las Vegas. These announcements, as the title of the post suggest, all revolve around Microsoft's vision for an Internet-scale, interoperable identity metasystem and range from additions to the Open Specification Promise (OSP) through to support for OpenLDAP with Microsoft's Identity Lifecycle Manager. So, what did they announce? First, Microsoft is making the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile available under the OSP to enhance interoperability in the identity metasystem for client computers using any platform. An individual open source software developer or a commercial software developer can build its identity selector software and pay no licensing fees to Microsoft, nor will it need to worry about future patent concerns related to the covered specifications for that technology In other words, third parties are free to build the equivalent of Microsoft's CardSpace, following the likes of the Higgins project, Ian Brown's Apple Safari Plug-In and Chuck Mortimore's Firefox Identity Selector. This is important not only because it extends the reach of CardSpace-like capabilities beyond Windows but also because it facilitates the consistent user experience (I know because I have used CardSpace, the Safari Plug-In and the Firefox Identity Selector) which helps to reduce errors and misunderstanding by users. Second, Microsoft is starting four open source projects that will help Web developers support information cards, the primary mechanism for representing user identities in the identity metasystem. These projects will implement software for specifying the Web site’s security policy and accepting information cards in Java for Sun Java System Web Servers or Apache Tomcat or IBM’s WebSphere Application Server, Ruby on Rails, and PHP for the Apache Web server. An additional project will implement a C Library that may be used generically for any Web site or service. These implementations will complement the existing ability to support information cards on the Microsoft® Windows® platform using the Microsoft Visual Studio® development environment.Or, to put it another way, doing for back end servers what the first announcement is doing for the front-end: enabling web sites and enterprises running a wide variety of web server infrastructure to support authentication using CardSpace and the other identity selectors. The cyncical amongst you might be forgiven for thinking that these two announcements are just Microsoft paying lip service to interoperability. This post should help to allay your concerns: at the Internet Identity Workshop earlier in May the Open Source Identity Selector (OSIS) group demonstrated interoperability amongst 5 identity selectors, 11 relying parties (the party relying on authentication to prove an identity), 7 identity providers (the party asserting the identity), 4 types of identity token (the mechanism for conveying the identity assertion), and 2 authentication mechanisms. Also, on the same day as the Microsoft press release, Internet2 announced plans to extend Shibboleth, a federated web single sign-on solution based on SAML that is widely used amongst educational institutions, to support CardSpace and compatible identity selectors. The third piece of news from Redmond last week, concerned the new Identity Lifecycle Manager product and is thus primarily focussed behind the firewall. Microsoft is going to be working with KERNEL Networks and Oxford Computer Group to enable bi-directional synchronisation of identity data between OpenLDAP, an open source implementation of the ubiquitous directory standard, and Microsoft's Active Directory. Identity Lifecycle Manager already supports a wide range of the commonly-deployed identity data repositories so I think this move is primarily in the "playing well with open source" category - but valuable nonetheless. These announcements are further evidence that the likes of Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief identity architect, and Mike Jones, the company's Director of Identity Partnerships, have been working hard to foster the relationships and commitment (both from Microsoft and third parties) required to help make the identity metasystem a reality. That reality is too important for the results of those efforts to be diluted by political shenanigans around patents and GPLv3. Labels: CardSpace, Higgins, identity, Microsoft, SAML, Shibboleth
Microsoft server and tools is now part of the business division
The ever-vigilant Redmond watcher Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet reports that Microsoft's Server and Tools unit (but not the P&L - Microsoft will still report server and tools financials), which is responsible for Microsoft Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center management products and Forefront security products, is now part of the Business Division, the home of Office and Dynamics. Mary Jo finds this move 'curious' but I can see the logic. It's hinted at (if you get past the marketing speak) in the company's official statement that it made the move to: sharpen leadership focus on the company’s top priorities and align its organization for innovation, ultimately enabling it to deliver even more value to its customers.I think this is all about making it easier for Microsoft to articulate propositions which resonate with the key concerns of senior business and IT people. The reality is that key strategic business and IT initiatives - SOA, BPM, compliance ... - increasingly depend on multiple technologies and associated competencies, which cross traditional stovepipes. Big SOA, for example, is about managing IT work across the entire service lifecycle and so touches project and portfolio management, software development and integration, IT service management. BPM, as the other Neil pointed out, is about Office as much as it is BizTalk and Workflow Foundation. In the past, the way that Microsoft has been organised has worked against the articulation of such joined-up propositions (that's in part why it took the company so long to talk about SOA). Customers would get different answers to the same cross-cutting requirement depending on which Microsoft stovepipe they were talking to: you need BizTalk and SQL Server; you need OBA and SharePoint. [As an aside, I said much of this in an interview with Microsoft PR earlier in the week]. Obviously, shifting branches of the org chart is comparatively easy (even it is very big). The hard part is going to be changing behaviour, joining up the marketing etc. The creation of the Connected Systems Division back in 2005 shows that the company can pull this sort of thing off (albeit on a smaller scale in the Server and Tools Business as was) and Jeff Raikes, who now owns the combined entity, has the influence and power to drive things through at this larger scale. I am off to a Server and Tools Business analyst event in just over a week so I will hopefully learn more then. Labels: BPM, compliance, ITSM, Microsoft, SOA
Microsoft drops virtualisation features
Yesterday, the General Manager of Microsoft's virtualization strategy Mike Neil used his blog to announce that a number of features would be missing from the initial release of Windows Server Virtualization (aka Viridian): - Live migration of virtual machines between physical servers
- Online addition of storage, network, memory and processor resources
- Support for more than 16 processor cores
No doubt Microsoft's competitors will see this announcement as an opportunity to raise FUD regarding Microsoft's virtualisation credentials ("We already do live migration and Microsoft's years behind"). It's certainly true that this does weaken Microsoft's credibility. However, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that these capabilities are not required for mainstream use cases such as server consolidation - and it's the mainstream that Microsoft is targeting. Labels: Microsoft, virtualisation
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