November 18th, 2009

IBM feels cozy on sidelines as Oracle-Sun deal languishes in anti-trust purgatory

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 3:44 am

Categories: Apache, BI, Cloud computing, Eclipse, Enterprise Java, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, Intellectual Property, Java, Microsoft, Open Source, Oracle, SAP, SOA, Silicon Valley, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, Sybase, System Z, Wall Street, business intelligence, database, datacenters, mainframe

Tags: Oracle Corp., Antitrust, Sun Microsystems Inc., Steve Mills, IBM Corp., Programming Languages, Open Source, Java, Databases, Software Development

You have to know when to hold them, and when to fold them. That’s the not just slightly smug assessment by IBM executives as they reflect — with twinkles in their eyes — on the months-stalled Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a deal that IBM initially sought but then declined earlier this year.

Chatting over drinks at the end of day one of the Software Analyst Connect 2009 conference in Stamford, Conn., IBM Senior Vice President and IBM Software Group Executive Steve Mills told me last night he thinks the Oracle-Sun deal will go through, but it won’t necessarily be worth $9.50 a share to Oracle when it does.

“He (Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison) didn’t understand the hardware business. It’s a very different business from software,” said Mills.

Mills seemed very much at ease with IBM’s late-date jilt of Sun (Sun was apparently playing hard to get in order to get more than $9.40/share from Big Blue’s coffers). IBM’s stock price these days is homing in on $130, quite a nice turn of events given the global economy.

Sun is trading at $8.70, a significant discount to Oracle’s $9.50 bid, reflecting investor worries about the fate of the deal now under scrutiny by European regulators, Mill’s views notwithstanding.

IBM Software Group Vice President of Emerging Technology Rod Smith noted the irony — perhaps ancient Greek tragedy-caliber irony — that a low market share open source product is holding up the biggest commercial transaction of Sun’s history. “That open source stuff is tricky on who actually makes money and how much,” Smith chorused.

Should Mills’s prediction that Oracle successfully maintains its bid for Sun prove incorrect, it could mean bankruptcy for Sun. And that may mean many of Sun’s considerable intellectual property assets would go at fire-sale prices to … perhaps a few piecemeal bidders, including IBM. Smith just smiled, easily shrugging off the chill (socks in tact) from the towering “IBM” logo ice sculpture a few steps away.

And wouldn’t this hold up go away if Sun and/or Oracle jettisoned MySQL? Is it pride or hubris that makes a deal sour for one mere grape? Was the deal (and $7.4 billion) all about MySQL? Hardly.

Many observers think that Sun’s Java technology — and not its MySQL open source database franchise — should be of primary concern to European (and U.S.) anti-trust mandarins. I have to agree. But Mills isn’t too concerned with Oracle’s probable iron-grip on Java …, err licensing. IBM has a long-term license on the technology, the renewal of which is many years out. “We have plenty of time,” said Mills.

Yes, plenty of time to make Apache Harmony a Java doppelganger — not to mention the Java market-soothing effects of OSGi and Eclipse RCP. [Hey, IBM invented Java for the server for Sun, it can re-invent it for something else ... SAP?]

Unlike some software titans, Mills is clearly not living in a “reality distortion field” when it comes to Oracle’s situation.

“We’re in this for the long haul,” said Mills, noting that he and IBM have have been competing with Oracle since August 1993 when IBM launched its distributed DB2 product. “All of our market share comes at the expense of Oracle’s,” said Mills. “And we love to do benchmarks again Oracle.”

Even as the Fates seem to be on IBM’s side nowadays, the stakes remain high for the users of these high-end database technologies and products. It’s my contention that we’re only now entering the true data-driven decade. And all that data needs to run somewhere. And it’s not going to be in MySQL, no matter who ends up owning it.

November 4th, 2009

HP takes converged infrastructure a notch higher with new data warehouse appliance

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:45 am

Categories: Agile Development, BI, Cisco, Cloud computing, Government, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, Microsoft, Oracle, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, Silicon Valley, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, VMware, Virtualization, business intelligence, convergence, database, datacenters, governance, mainframe

Tags: Data Warehouse, Hewlett-Packard Co., Data Centers, Storage, Roi/Tco, Databases, Hardware, Data Management, Finance, Managerial Accounting

Hewlett-Packard (HP) on Wednesday announced new products, solutions and services that leaves the technology packaging to them, so users don’t have to.

HP Neoview Advantage, HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, and HP Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services are designed to help organizations drive business and technology innovations at lower total cost via lower total hassle. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP’s measured focus

HP isn’t just betting on a market whim. Recent market research it supported reveals that more than 90 percent of senior business decision makers believe business cycles will continue to be unpredictable for the next few years — and 80 percent recognize they need to be far more flexible in how they leverage technology for business.

The same old IT song and dance doesn’t seem to be what these businesses are seeking. Nearly 85 percent of those surveyed cited innovation as critical to success, and 71 percent said they would sanction more technology investments — if they could see how those investments met their organization’s time-to-market and business opportunity needs.

Cost nowadays is about a lot more than the rack and license. The fuller picture of labor, customization, integration, shared services suppport, data-use-tweaking and inevitable unforeseen gotchas need to be better managed in unison — if that desired agility can also be afforded (and sanctioned by the bean-counters).

HP said its new offerings deliver three key advantages:

• Improved competitiveness and risk mitigation through business data management, information governance, and business analytics
• Faster time to revenue for new goods and services
• The ability to return to peak form, after being compressed or stretched.

The Neoview advantage

First up, HP Neoview Advantage, the new release of the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform, which aims to help organizations respond to business events more quickly by supporting real-time insight and decision-making.

HP calls the performance, capacity, footprint and manageability improvements dramatic and says the software also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with industry-standard components and pre-built, pre-tested configurations optimized for warehousing.

HP Neoview Advantage and last year’s Exadata product (produced in partnership with Oracle) seem to be aimed at different segments. Currently, HP Neoview Advantage is a “very high end database,” whereas Exadata is designed for “medium to large enterprises,” and does not scale to the Neoview level, said Deb Nelson, senior vice president, Marketing, HP Enterprise Business.

A converged infrastructure

Next up, HP Converged Infrastructure architecture. As HP describes it, the architecture adjusts to meet changing business needs, specifically what HP calls “IT sprawl,” which it points to as the key culprit in raising technology costs for maintenance that could otherwise be used for innovation.

HP touts key benefits of this new architecture. First, the ability to deploy application environments on the fly through shared service management, followed closely by lower network costs and less complexity. The new architecture is optimized through virtual resource pools and also improves energy integration and effectiveness across the data center by tapping into data center smart grid technology.

Finally, HP is offering Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services that aim to help customers transition from isolated product-centric technologies to a more flexible converged infrastructure. The new services leverage HP’s experience in shared services, cloud computing, and data center transformation projects to let customers design, test and implement scalable infrastructures.

Overall, typical savings of 30 percent in total costs can be achieved by implementing Data Center Smart Grid technologies and solutions, said HP.

With these moves to converged infrastructure, HP is filling out where others are newly treading. Cisco and EMC this week announced packaging partnerships that seek to deliver simiar convergence benefits to the market.

“It’s about experience, not an experiment,” said Nelson.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

November 3rd, 2009

You'll be far better off in a future without enterprise software

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 7:05 am

Categories: .NET, Agile Development, Amazon, Cloud computing, Enterprise Java, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, Microsoft, Open Source, Oracle, Progress Software, Red Hat, SAP, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, Virtualization, Web Services, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Enterprise Software, Software, Dana Gardner

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

By Ronald Schmelzer

The conversation about the role and future of enterprise software is a continuous undercurrent in the service oriented architecture (SOA) conversation. Indeed, ZapThink’s been talking about the future of enterprise software in one way or another for years.

So, why bother bringing up this topic again, at this juncture? Has anything changed in the marketplace? Can we learn something new about where enterprise software is heading? The answer is decidedly “yes” to the latter two questions. And this might be the right time to seriously consider acting on the very things we’ve been talking about for a while.

The first major factor is significant consolidation in the marketplace for enterprise software. While a decade or so ago there were a few dozen large and established providers of different sorts of enterprise software packages, there are now just a handful of large providers, with a smattering more for industry-specific niches.

We can thank aggressive M&A activity combined with downward IT spending pressure for this reality. As a result of this consolidation, many large enterprise software packages (such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) offerings) have been eliminated, are in the process of being phased out, or are getting merged (or “fused”) with other solutions.

Many companies rationalized the spending of millions of dollars on enterprise software applications because the costs could be amortized over a decade or more of usage, and they could claim that these enterprise software applications would be cheaper, in the long run, than building and managing their existing custom code. But, we’ve now had a long enough track record to realize that the result of mass consolidation, need for continuous spending, and inflexibility is causing many companies to reconsider that rationalization.

We can thank expensive, cumbersome, and tightly-coupled customization, integration, and development for this lack of innovation in enterprise software.

Furthermore, by virtue of their weight, significance in the enterprise environment, and astounding complexity, enterprise software solutions are much slower to adopt and adapt to new technologies that continuously change the face of IT.

We refer to this as the “enterprise digital divide.” You get one IT user experience when you are at home and use the Web, personal computing, and mobile devices and applications and a profoundly worse experience when you are at work. It’s as if the applications you use at work are a full decade behind the innovations that are now commonplace in the consumer environment. We can thank expensive, cumbersome, and tightly coupled customization, integration, and development for this lack of innovation in enterprise software.

In addition, no company can purchase and implement an enterprise software solution “out of the box.” Not only does a company need to spend significant money customizing and integrating their enterprise software solutions, but they often spend significant amounts of money on custom applications that tie into and depend on the software.

What might seem to be discrete enterprise software applications are really tangled masses of single-vendor functionality, tightly-coupled customizations and integrations, and custom code tied into this motley mess. In fact, when we ask people to describe their enterprise architecture (EA), they often point to the gnarly mess of enterprise software they purchased, customized, and maintain. That’s not EA. That’s an ugly baby only a mother could love.

Yet, companies constantly share with us their complete dependence on a handful of applications for their daily operation. Imagine what would happen at any large business if you were to shut down their single-vendor ERP, CRM, or SCM solutions. Business would grind to a halt.

While some would insist on the necessity of single-vendor, commercial enterprise software solutions as a result, we would instead assert how remarkably insane it is for companies to have such a single point of failure. Dependence on a single product, single vendor for the entirety of a company’s operations is absolutely ludicrous in an IT environment where there’s no technological reason to have such dependencies. The more you depend on one thing for your success, the less you are able to control your future. Innovation itself hangs in the balance when a company becomes so dependent on another company’s ability to innovate. And given the relentless pace of innovation, we see huge warning signs.

Services, clouds, and mashups: Why buy enterprise software?

In previous ZapFlashes, we talked about how the emergence of services at a range of disparate levels combined with evolutions in location- and platform-independent, on-demand, and variable provisioning enabled by clouds, and rich technologies to facilitate simple and rapid service composition will change the way companies conceive of, build, and manage applications.

Instead of an application as something that’s bought, customized, and integrated, the application itself is the instantaneous snapshot of how the various services are composed together to meet user needs. From this perspective, enterprise software is not what you buy, but what you do with what you have.

One outcome of this perspective on enterprise software is that companies can shift their spending from enterprise software licenses and maintenance (which eats up a significant chunk of IT budgets) to service development, consumption, and composition.

This is not just a philosophical difference. This is a real difference. While it is certainly true that services expose existing capabilities, and therefore you still need those existing capabilities when you build services, moving to SOA means that you are rewarded for exposing functionality you already have.

Whereas traditional enterprise software applications penalize legacy because of the inherent cost of integrating with it, moving to SOA inherently rewards legacy because you don’t need to build twice what you already have. In this vein, if you already have what you need because you bought it from a vendor, keep it – but don’t spend more money on that same functionality. Rather, spend money exposing and consuming it to meet new needs. This is the purview of good enterprise architecture, not good enterprise software.

When you ask these people to show you their enterprise software, they’ll simply point at their collection of Services, Cloud-based applications, and composition infrastructure.

The resultant combination of legacy service exposure, third-party service consumption, and the cloud (x-as-a-service) has motivated the thinking that if you don’t already have a single-vendor enterprise software suite, you probably don’t need one.

We’ve had first-hand experience with new companies that have started and grown operations to multiple millions of dollars without buying a penny of enterprise software. Likewise, we’ve seen billion-dollar companies dump existing enterprise software investments or start divisions and operations in new countries without extending their existing enterprise software licenses. When you ask these people to show you their enterprise software, they’ll simply point at their collection of services, cloud-based applications, and composition infrastructure.

Some might insist that cloud-based applications and so-called software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are simply monolithic enterprise software applications deployed using someone else’s infrastructure. While that might have been the case for the application service provider (ASP) and SaaS applications of the past, that is not the case anymore. Whole ecosystems of loosely-coupled service offerings have evolved in the past decade to value-add these environments, which look more like catalogs of service capabilities and less like monolithic applications.

Want to build a website and capture lead data? No problem — just get the right service from Salesforce.com or your provider of choice and compose it using web services or REST or your standards-based approach of choice. And you didn’t incur thousands or millions of dollars to do that.

Open source vs. commercial vs. build your own

Another trend pointing to the stalling of enterprise software growth is the emergence of open source alternatives. Companies now are flocking to solutions such as WebERP, SugarCRM Community Edition, and other no-license and no-maintenance fee solutions that provide 80% of the required functionality of commercial suites.

While some might point at the cost of support for these offerings, we point out the factor of difference between support and license/maintenance costs. At the very least, you know what you’re paying for. It’s hard to justify spending millions of dollars in license fees when you’re using 10% or less of a product’s capabilities.

Enhancing this open source value proposition is that others are building capabilities on top of those solutions and giving those solutions away as well. The very nature of open source enables creation of capabilities that further value-adds a product suite. At some point, a given open source solution reaches a tipping point where the volume of enhancements far outweighs what any commercial vendor can offer. Simply put, when a community supports an open source effort, the result can out-innovate any commercial solution.

There are now a lot of pieces and parts available that are free, cheap, or low cost that companies can assemble into not only workable, but scalable offerings that can compete with many commercial offerings.

Beyond open source, commercial, and SaaS-cum-cloud offerings, companies have a credible choice in building their own enterprise software application. There are now a lot of pieces and parts available that are free, cheap, or low cost that companies can assemble into not only workable, but scalable offerings that can compete with many commercial offerings. In much the same way that companies leveraged Microsoft’s Visual Basic to build applications using the thousands of free or cheap widgets and controls built by the legions of developers, so too are we seeing a movement to free or cheap Service widgets that can enable remarkably complex and robust applications.

The future of commercial enterprise software applications

It is not clear where commercial enterprise software applications go from here. Surely, we don’t see companies tearing out their entrenched solutions any time soon, but likewise, we don’t see much reason for expansion in enterprise software sales either.

In some ways, enterprise software has become every bit the legacy they sought to replace in mainframe applications that still exist in abundance in the enterprise. Smart enterprise software vendors realize that they have to get out of the application business altogether and focus on selling composable service widgets. These firms, however, don’t want to innovate their way out of business. As such, they don’t want to just provide the trains to get you from place to place, but they want to own the tracks as well.

The question is: Is the cost of the proprietary runtime infrastructure you are getting with those widgets worth the cost?

In many ways, this idea of enterprise software-as-a-platform is really just a shell game. Instead of spending millions on a specific application, you’re instead spending millions on an infrastructure that comes with some pre-configured widgets. The question is: Is the cost of the proprietary runtime infrastructure you are getting with those widgets worth the cost? Have you lost some measure of loose coupling in exchange for a “single throat to choke?”

Much of the enterprise software market is heading in direct collision course with middleware vendors who never wanted to enter the application market. As enterprise software vendors start seeing their runtime platform as the defensible position, they will start conflicting with EA strategies that seek to remove their single-vendor dependence.

We see this as the area of greatest tension in the next few years. Do you want to be in control of your infrastructure and have choice, or do you want to resign your infrastructure to the control of a single vendor, who might be one merger or stumble away from non-existence or irrelevance?

The ZapThink take

We hope to use this ZapFlash to call out the ridiculousness of multi-million dollar “applications” that cost millions more to customize to do a fraction of what you need. In an era of continued financial pressure, the last thing companies should do is invest more in technology conceived of in the 1970s, matured in the 1990s, and incrementally made worse since then.

The reliance on single-vendor mammoth enterprise software packages is not helping, but rather hurting the movement to loosely coupled, agile, composition-centric heterogeneous SOA. Now is the time for companies to pull up the stakes and reconsider their huge enterprise software investments in favor of the sort of real enterprise architecture that cares little about buying things en masse and customizing those solutions — but instead to building, composing, and reusing what you need iteratively to respond to continuous change.

As if to prove a point, SAP stock recently slid almost 10% on missed earnings. Some may blame the overall state of the economy, but we point to the writing on the wall: All the enterprise software that could be sold has been sold, and the reasons for buying or implementing new licenses are few and far between. Invest in enterprise architecture over enterprise software, services over customizations, and clouds over costly and unpredictable infrastructure — and you’ll be better off.

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

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October 25th, 2009

Application transformation case study targets enterprise bottom line with eye-popping ROI

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:44 am

Categories: Application Lifecycle Management, Cloud computing, Developer Tools, Enterprise Java, Government, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, Home, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Java, Linux, Open Source, Oracle, Podcasts, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, VMware, Virtualization, database, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Legacy Application, Transformation, ROI, End-user Productivity, Podcasts, Roi/Tco, Strategy, Internet, Finance, Managerial Accounting

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

This podcast is the first in the series of three to examine Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line. Through a case study, we’ll discuss the rationale and likely returns of assessing the true role and character of legacy applications, and then assess the true paybacks from modernization.

The ongoing impact of the reset economy is putting more emphasis on lean IT — of identifying and eliminating waste across the data-center landscape. The top candidates, on several levels, are the silo-architected legacy applications and the aging IT systems that support them.

Using our case study, we’ll also uncover a number of proven strategies on how to innovatively architect legacy applications for transformation and for improved technical, economic, and productivity outcomes. The podcasts coincidentally run in support of HP virtual conferences on the same subjects:

Register here to attend the Asia Pacific event on Nov. 3. Register here to attend the EMEA event on Nov. 4. Register here to attend the Americas event on Nov. 5.

Here to start us off on our series on the how and why of transforming legacy enterprise applications are Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP, and Luc Vogeleer, CTO for Application Modernization Practice in HP Enterprise Services. The discussion is moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: When the economic situation hit really hard, we definitely saw customers retreat, and basically say, “We don’t know what to do now. Some of us have never been in this position before in a recessionary environment, seeing IT budgets reduce considerably.”

That wasn’t surprising. … It was obvious that people would retrench and then scratch their heads and say, “Now what do we do?”

Now we’re seeing a different dynamic, … something like a two-fold increase in what you might call “customer interest” [in applications transformation]. The number of opportunities we’re seeing as a company has doubled over the last six or nine months.

If you ask any CIO or IT head, “Is application transformation something you want to do,” the answer is, “No, not really.” It’s like tidying your garage at home. You know you should do it, but you don’t really want to do it. You know that you benefit, but you still don’t want to do it.

This has moved from being something that maybe I should do to something that I have to do, because there are two real forces here. One is the force that says, “If I don’t continue to innovate and differentiate, I go out of business, because my competitors are doing that.” If I believe the economy doesn’t allow me to stand still, then I’ve got it wrong. So, I have to continue to move forward.

Secondly, I have to reduce the amount of money I spend on my innovation, but at the same time I need a bigger payback. I’ve got to reduce the cost of IT. Now, with 80 percent of my budget being dedicated to maintenance, that doesn’t move my business forward. So, the strategic goal is, I want to flip the ratio.

… Today, we’ll hear about a case study — with the Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (MIUR). This customer received an ROI in 18 months. In 18 months, the savings they had made — and this runs into millions of dollars — had been paid for. Their new system, in under 18 months, paid for itself. After that, it was pure money to the bottom-line.

… Our job is to minimize that risk by exposing them to customers who have done it before. They can view those best-case scenarios and understand what to do and what not to do.

Vogeleer: We take a very holistic approach and look at the entire portfolio of applications from a customer. Then, from that application portfolio — depending on the usage of the application, the business criticality of the application, as well as the frequency of changes that this application requires — we deploy different strategies for each application.

We not only focus on one approach of completely re-writing or re-platforming the application or replacing the application with a package, but we go for a combination of all those elements. By doing a complete portfolio assessment, as a first step into the customer legacy application landscape, we’re able to bring out a complete road map to conduct this transformation.

We first execute applications that bring a quick ROI. We first execute quick wins and the ROI and the benefits from those quick wins are immediately reinvested for continuing the transformation. So, transformation is not just one project. It’s not just one shot. It’s a continuous program over time, where all the legacy applications are progressively migrated into a more agile and cost-effective platform.

The Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (MIUR), is the customer we’re going to cover with this case, is a large governmental organization and their overall budget is €55 billion.

This Italian public education sector serves 8 million students from 40,000 schools, and the schools are located across the country in more than 10,000 locations, with each of those locations connected to the information system provided by the ministry.

Very large employer

The ministry is, in fact, one of the largest employers in the world, with over one million employees. Its system manages both permanent and temporary employees, like teachers and substitutes, and the administrative employees. It also supports the ministry users, about 7,000 or 8,000 school employees. It’s a very large employer with a large number of users connected across the country.

Why do they need to modernize their environment? In fact, their system was written in the early 1980s on IBM mainframe architecture. In early 2000, there was a substantial change in Italian legislation, which was called so-called a Devolution Law. The Devolution Law was about more decentralization of their process to school level and also to move the administration processes from the central ministry level into the regions, and there are 20 different regions in Italy.

This change implied a completely different process workflow within their information systems. To fulfill the changes, the legacy approach was very time-consuming and inappropriate. A number of strong application have been developed incrementally to fulfill those new organizational requirements, but very quickly this became completely unmanageable and inflexible. The aging legacy systems were expected to be changed quickly.

In addition to the element of agility to change application to meet the new legislation requirement, the cost in that context went completely out of control. So, the simple, most important objective of the modernization was to design and implement a new architecture that could reduce cost and provide a more flexible and agile infrastructure.

The first step we took was to develop a modernization road map that took into account the organizational change requirements, using our service offering, which is the application portfolio assessment.

From the standard engagement that we can offer to a customer, we did an analysis of the complete set of applications and associated data assets from multiple perspectives. We looked at it from a financial perspective, a business perspective, functionality and the technical perspective.

From those different dimensions, we could make the right decision on each application. The application portfolio assessment ensured that the client’s business context and strategic drivers were understood, before commencing a modernization strategy for a given application in the portfolio.

A business case was developed for modernizing each application, an approach that was personalized for each group of applications and was appropriate to the current situation.

… This assessment phase took about three months with the seven people. From there, we did a first transformation pilot, with a small staff of people in three months.

After the pilot, we went into the complete transform and user-acceptance test, and after an additional year, 90 percent of the transformation was completed. In the transformation, we had about 3,500 batch processes. We had the transformation. We had re-architecting of 7,500 programs. And, all the screens were also transformed. But, that was a larger effort with a team of about 50 people over one year.

… We tried to use automated conversion, especially for non-critical programs, where they’re not frequently changed. That represented 60 percent of the code. This code could be then immediately transferred by removing only the barriers in the code that prevented it from compiling.

All barriers removed

We had also frequently updated programs, where all barriers were removed and code was completely cleaned in the conversion. Then, in critical programs, especially, the conversion effort was bigger than the rewrite effort. Thirty percent of the programs were completely rewritten.

The applications are now accessed through a more efficient web-based user interface, which replaces the green screen and provides improved navigation and better overall system performance, including improved user productivity.

End-user productivity is doubled in terms of the daily operation of some business processes. Also, the overall application portfolio has been greatly simplified by this approach. The number of function points that we’re managing has decreased by 33 percent.

From a financial perspective, there are also very significant results. Hardware and software license and maintenance cost savings were about €400,000 in the first year, €2 million in the second year, and are projected to be €3.4 million this year. This represents a savings of 36 percent of the overall project.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

September 30th, 2009

Staying on legacy systems ends up costing IT more

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 7:50 am

Categories: .NET, Agile Development, Cloud computing, Enterprise Java, Government, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Service Management, ITIL, Linux, Microsoft, Open Source, Oracle, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, VMware, Virtualization, Web Services, convergence, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Assembly Line, Information Technology, Legacy System, Mainframes, Hardware Upgrade, Podcasts, Strategy, Servers, Hardware

Listen to podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard.

This latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion tackles the high — and often under-appreciated — cost for many enterprises of doing nothing about aging, monolithic applications. Not making a choice about legacy mainframe and poorly utilized applications is, in effect, making a choice not to transform and modernize the applications and their supporting systems.

Not doing anything about aging IT essentially embraces an ongoing cost structure that helps prevent new spending for efficiency-gaining IT innovations. It’s a choice to suspend applications on ossified platforms and to make their reuse and integration difficult, complex, and costly.

Doing nothing is a choice that, especially in a recession, hurts companies in multiple ways — because successful transformation is the lifeblood of near and long-term productivity improvements.

Here to help us better understand the perils of continuing to do nothing about aging legacy and mainframe applications, we’re joined by four IT transformation experts from Hewlett-Packard (HP): Brad Hipps, product marketer for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Applications Portfolio Software at HP; John Pickett from Enterprise Storage and Server marketing at HP; Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP, and Steve Woods, application transformation analyst and distinguished software engineer at HP Enterprise Services. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: What we’re seeing is that the cost of legacy systems and the cost of supporting the mainframe hasn’t changed in 12 months. What has changed is the available cash that companies have to spend on IT, as, over time, that cash amount may have either been frozen or is being reduced. That puts even more pressure on the IT department and the CIO in how to spend that money, where to spend that money, and how to ensure alignment between what the business wants to do and where the technology needs to go.

Our concern is that there is a cost of doing nothing. People eventually end up spending their whole IT budgets on maintenance and upgrades and virtually nothing on innovation.

At a time when competitiveness is needed more than it was a year ago, there has to be a shift in the way we spend our IT dollars and where we spend our IT dollars. That means looking at the legacy software environments and the underpinning infrastructure. It’s absolutely a necessity.

Woods: For years, the biggest hurdle was that most customers would say they didn’t really have to make a decision, because the [replacement] performance wasn’t there. The performance-reliability wasn’t there. That is there now. There is really no excuse not to move because of performance-reliability issues.

What’s changing today is the ability to look at a legacy source code. We have the tools now to look at the code and visualize it in ways that are very compelling.

What has also changed is the growth of architectural components, such as extract transform and load (ETL) tools, data integration tools, and reporting tools. When we look at a large body of, say, 10 million lines of COBOL and we find that three million lines of that code is doing reporting, or maybe two million is doing ETL work, we typically suggest they move that asymmetrically to a new platform that does not use handwritten code.

That’s really risk aversion — doing it very incrementally with low intrusion, and that’s also where the best return on investment (ROI) is. … These tools have matured so that we have the performance and we also have the tools to help them understand their legacy systems today.

Pickett: Typically, when we take a look at the high-end of applications that are going to be moving over and sitting on a legacy system, many times they’re sitting on a mainframe platform. With that, one of the things that have changed over the last several years is the functionality gap between what exists in the past 5 or 10 years ago in the mainframe. That gap has not only been closed, but, in some cases, open systems exceed what’s available on the mainframe.

It’s not only a matter of cost, but it’s also factoring in the power and cooling as well. Certainly, what we’ve seen is that the cost savings that can be applied on the infrastructure side are then applied back into modernizing the application.

Hipps: This term “agility” gets used so often that people tend to forget what it means. The reality of today’s modern organization — and this is contrasted even from 5, certainly 10 years ago — is that when we look at applications, they are everywhere. There has been an application explosion.

When we start talking about application transformation and we assign that trend to agility, what we’re acknowledging is that for the business to make any change today in the way it does business — in any new market initiative, in any competitive threat it wants to respond to, there is going to be an application — very likely “applications” plural.

The decisions that you’re going to make to transform your applications should all be pointed at and informed by shrinking the amount of time that takes you to turn around and realize some business initiative.

That’s what we’re seeking with agility. Following pretty closely behind that, you can begin to see why there is a promise in cloud. It saves me a lot of infrastructural headaches. It’s supposed to obviate a lot of the challenges that I have around just standing up the application and getting it ready, let alone having to build the application itself.

So I think that is the view of transformation in terms of agility and why we’re seeing things like cloud. These other things really start to point the direction to greater agility.

… I tend to think that in application transformation in most ways they’re breaking up and distributing that which was previously self-contained and closed.

Whether you’re looking at moving to some sort of mainframe processing to distributed processing, from distributed processing to virtualization, whether you are talking about the application team themselves, which now are some combination of in-house, near-shore, offshore, outsourced sort of a distribution of the teams from sort of the single building to all around the world, certainly the architectures themselves from being these sort of monolithic and fairly brittle things that are now sort of services driven things.

You can look at any one of those trends and you can begin to speak about benefits, whether it’s leveraging a better global cost basis or on the architectural side, the fundamental element we’re trying to do is to say, “Let’s move away from a world in which everything is handcrafted.”

Assembly-line model

Let’s get much closer to the assembly-line model, where I have a series of preexisting trustworthy components and I know where they are, I know what they do, and my work now becomes really a matter of assembling those. They can take any variety of shapes on my need because of the components I have created.

We’re getting back to this idea of lower cost and increased agility. We can only imagine how certain car manufacturers would be doing, if they were handcrafting every car. We moved to the assembly line for a reason, and software typically has lagged what we see in other engineering disciplines. Here we’re finally going to catch up. We’re finally be going to recognize that we can take an assembly line approach in the creation of application, as well, with all the intended benefits.

Evans: … Once we have done it, once we have removed that handwritten code, that code that is too big for what it needs to be in terms to get the job done. Once we have done it once, it’s out and it’s finished with and then we can start looking at economics that are totally different going forward, where we can actually flip this ratio.

Today, we may spend 80 percent or 90 percent of our IT budget on maintenance, and 10 percent on innovation. What we want to do is flip it. We’re not going to flip it in a year or maybe even two, but we have got to take steps. If we don’t start taking steps, it will never go away.

Listen to podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard.

June 2nd, 2009

Mainframes provide fast-track access to private cloud benefits for enterprises, process ecosystems

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 9:39 am

Categories: Application Lifecycle Management, Cloud computing, Enterprise Java, Government, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Podcasts, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, VMware, Virtualization, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Benefit, Mainframes, Servers, Hardware, Dana Gardner

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: CA.

Read a full transcript of the interview.

Enterprises are seeking cloud computing efficiency benefits, subsequent lower total costs, and a highly valued ability to better deliver flexible services that support agile business processes.

Turns out so-called private clouds, or those cloud computing models that enterprises deploy and/or control on-premises, have a lot in common with longstanding mainframe computing models and techniques. Back to the future, you might say.

New developments in mainframe automation and other technologies increasingly support the use of mainframes for delivering cloud-computing advantages — and help accelerate the ability to solve recession-era computing challenges around cost, power, energy use and reliability.

More evidence of the alignment between mainframes, mainframe automation and management, and cloud computing comes with today’s announcement that CA has purchased key assets of Cassatt Corp., maker of service level automation and service level agreement (SLA) management software.

I had the pleasure to recently learn more about how the mainframe is in many respects the cloud in a sponsored podcast interview with Chris O’Malley, executive vice president and general manager for CA’s Mainframe Business Unit.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What makes cloud so appealing and feasible right now?

O’Malley: Cloud as a concept is, in its most basic sense, virtualizing resources within the data center to gain that scale of efficiency and optimization. … Physically there are many, many servers that support the ongoing operations of a business. CFOs and CEOs are starting to ask simple, but insightful, questions about why we need all these servers and to what degree these servers are being utilized.

When they get answers back and it’s something like 15, 10, or 5 percent utilization, it begs for a solution to the problem to start bringing a scale of virtualization to optimize the overall data center to what has been done on the mainframe for years and years.

… It’s about both the need from a business standpoint of trying to respond to reduced cost of computing and increased efficiency at a time when the technologies are becoming increasingly available to customers to manage distributed environments or open systems in a way similar to the mainframe.

Larger customers are using their mainframe in a highly virtualized way. They’ve been doing it for 30 years. It was the genesis of the platform. … They try to get as much out of it as they possibly can. So, from its beginning, it was virtualized.

The viability of things like salesforce.com, CRM, and the need to coordinate that data with what for most customers is 80 percent of their mission-critical information residing on the mainframe is making people figure out how to fix those problems. It’s making this cloud slowly, but pragmatically, come true and become a reality in helping to better support their businesses.

The distributed environment and the open-system environment, in terms of its genesis, was the reverse of what I described in the mainframe. The mainframe, at some point, I think in the early ’90s, was considered to be too slow to evolve to meet the needs of business. You heard things like mounting backlog and that innovation wasn’t coming to play.

In that frustration, departments wanted their server with their application to serve their needs. It created a significant base of islands, if you will, within the enterprise that led to these scenarios where people are running servers at 15, 10, or 5 percent utilization. That genesis has been the basic fiber of the way people think in most of these organizations.

This 15 or 10 percent utilization is what we consistently see, customer after customer after customer. … You’re seeing the pendulum come back. This is just getting too expensive, too complex, and too hard to keep up with business demands, which sounds a lot like what people’s objections were about the mainframe 20 years ago. We’re now seeing that maybe a centralized model is a better way to serve our needs.

Gardner: How does that relate to where the modern mainframe is?

O’Malley: The modern mainframe is effectively an on-demand engine. IBM has created now an infrastructure that, as your needs grow, turns on additional engines that are already housed in the box. With the z10, IBM has a platform that is effectively an in-house utility … With the z10 and the ability to expand capacity on demand, it’s very attractive for customers to handle these peaks, but not pay for it all year long.

… The mainframe has always been very good at resilience from a security standpoint. The attributes that make up that which is required for a mission-critical application are basically what make your brand. So, the mainframe has always been the home for those kinds of things. It will continue to be.

We’re just making the economics better over time. The attributes that are professed or promised for the cloud on the distributed side are being realized today by many mainframe customers and are doing great work. It’s not just a hope or a promise.

Gardner: There is some disconnect, though, cultural and even generational. A lot of the younger folks brought up with the Web, think of cloud applications as being Web applications.

O’Malley: Despite all these good things that I’ve said about the mainframe, there are still some nagging issues. The people who tend to work on them tend to be the same ones who worked on them 30 years ago. The technology that wraps it hasn’t been updated to the more intuitive interfaces that you’re talking about.

CA is taking a lead in re-engineering our toolset to look more like a Mac than it does like a green screen. We have a brand new strategy called Mainframe 2.0, which we introduced at CA World last year. We’re showing initial deliverables of that technology here in May.

… Our first technology within Mainframe 2.0, is called the Mainframe Software Manager. It’s effectively InstallShield for the mainframe. We developed that with 20-somethings. In our Prague data center, we recruited 120 students out of school and they developed that in Java on a mainframe. … We have 25-year-old people in Prague that have written lines of code that, within the next 12 months, we’ll be running at the top 1,000 companies on the face of the earth. There aren’t a lot of jobs in life that present you that kind of opportunity.

… The mainframe technologically can do a lot, if not everything you can do on the distributed side, especially with what z/Linux offers. But, we’ve got to take what is a trillion dollars of investment that runs in the legacy virtual operating system environment and bring that up to 2009 and beyond.

… An open system has its virtues and has its limits. We’re raising the abstract to the point where, in a collective cloud, you’re just going to use what’s best and right for the nature of work you’re doing without really even knowing whether this is a mainframe application — either in z/OS, or z/Linux — or it’s Linux on the open system side or HP-UX. That’s where things are going. At that point, the cloud becomes true in the promise where it’s being touted at the moment.

To be very honest, it’s very important that we bring a cool factor to the mainframe to make it a platform that’s equally compelling to any other. When you do that, you create some interesting dynamics to getting the next generation excited about it.

Read a full transcript of the interview.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: CA.

May 4th, 2009

IBM cements cloud, appliance, BPM, CEP and SOA into an IMPACT 2009 solution brick

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 12:08 pm

Categories: Agile Development, Amazon, Application Lifecycle Management, Developer Tools, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, Microsoft, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, Web Services, business intelligence, datacenters, management

Tags: Business Process, Business Process Modeling, BPM, Industry, SOA, IBM Corp., Cloud, Operational Planning, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Operations

LAS VEGAS — Wasting no time in bringing a needed cohesion across its products and solutions, IBM on Monday at its IMPACT 2009 event here unveiled a cloud-based business process modeling (BPM) service, tighter alignment with Amazon, better complex event processing (CEP) integration, re-introduced a WebSphere private cloud appliance and double-downed on a slew of its industry framework solutions.

Under the umbrella of spurring on a smarter planet, the IBM push combines many of Big Blue’s strengths with the goal of taking out complexity and cutting costs as its customers seek much greater business efficiency in a recession-wracked world. The moves also further IBM’s embrace and commitment to services oriented architecture (SOA), but spread its benefits both deeper and wider than the earlier infrastructure push alone.

In a nutshell, IBM is helping enterprises create private clouds as either appliances or built on Z Series mainframes, with better connections to CEP, and managed from BPM in public cloud. It provides an excellent story for IBM, and places it at an early competitive advantage against Microsoft, Oracle/Sun, and HP in the ramp up to SOA-enabled hybrid cloud approaches that tackle tough business problems. IBM is going to the cloud with collaboration, too.

The pizza box-size WebSphere CloudBurst appliance, announced only recently, had its coming out party at today’s keynote session, moderated by a hilarious Billy Crystal. See Twitter #IBMIMPACT by searching on the tag in Twitter for more on the live event.

This appliance approach to private clouds will be a big trend in the industry, with Oracle (using acquired Sun technology), HP and perhaps Cisco sure to follow. One has t wonder how Microsoft does appliances, with one or some partners? Will be curious to watch. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

To me, though, the biggest news of IMPACT is the move of IBM to provide its own BPM cloud services, called BPM BlueWorks, beginning in Q2 this year. IBM continues to be chummy with Amazon Web Services, and there’s no reason to believe that Google will also be an IBM cloud partner.

Indeed, the shift of BPM to a separate, elevated, cloud-based service makes sense because many services and processes will increasingly come from a variety of sources and source types. Allowing the business process and workflow architects to design, manage and implement extended business processes as a cloud service allows for leverage of more services by more businesses, with control and ability to cut costs and reduce complexity.

What’s more, if BPM goes in the cloud, then it takes only a small step for IT and SOA governance to stay in the cloud, too. Will SOA, CEP and extended enterprises business processes come together better as a cloud-based management and governance model takes place? Could be.

The only rub is that IBM or some other cloud provider is host to your core control centers. But if enterprises grow comfortable with more IT functions and assets in a third-party cloud, well then the model way well offer a lot of advantages. Of course, the BPM, SOA and governance controls will also likely become hybrids.

IBM and others, like Microsoft, Oracle and HP, will also want to be in the managed management business, so the competition to do this well and right will be intense. And that will be good for users and probably (hopefully) keep the options, standards and portability largely open.

But users should still look out, as with any cloud services, for lock-in and seek contracts that protect their assets and business property. And I’d say that the governance and process models that dictate how your business works should always be considered an enterprise’s property. The cloud provider needs to be a value-added provider, not a Big Brother.

IBM is also pumping up its industry frameworks solutions of applications and expertise for retail, traffic management, and health care. Look for these too to emerge as cloud-based hybrid solutions over time. The goal, of source, is to make IBM the total supplier on these vertical industry solutions, with cost and convenience being the drivers on how they are implemented. IBM has done quite well by this so far, and the cloud moves will help it further.

IBM in the cloud in a lot of ways is a very smart move. Getting BPM there first — in the middle of processes, solutions, and moving to governance — will be hard to resist for users and tough to beat by competitors.

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Dana_Gardner.

April 13th, 2009

Open Source and Cloud: A Curse or Blessing During Recession? BriefingsDirect Analysts Weigh In.

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:37 am

Categories: Agile Development, Amazon, Apache, Application Lifecycle Management, BI, Enterprise Java, Google, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, Linux, Open Source, Podcasts, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, Virtualization, Web Services, business intelligence, datacenters, management

Tags: Software, Recession, Open Source, Dana Gardner

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Sponsor: TIBCO Software.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint’s ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

The productivity and perils of open source software has been a topic pretty much beaten to death. Yet the landscape in IT, as always, is shifting — because of the recession and because of a white hot interest in cloud computing.

It’s time again, then, to look at the pluses and minuses of open source software models in the context of tight IT budgets and the advent of cloud-based services for enterprises. Our latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights roundtable discussion, vol. 39, therefore examines open source in the context of economics, complexity, competition, and the disruption of the shifting business models in software.

The major question is: Does using open-source software pay off in a total cost sense, compared to commercial offerings today? Furthermore, how will this change over the coming several years as cloud models take hold?

[UPDATE: Gordon Haff has an excellent take on the same subject.]

Please join noted IT industry analysts and experts Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant, and David A. Kelly, president of Upside Research. Our guests are Paul Fremantle, the chief technology officer at WSO2 and a vice president with the Apache Software Foundation; Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy CTO at Software AG, and Richard Seibt, the former CEO at SUSE Linux, and founder of the Open Source Business Foundation. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by me.

Here are some excerpts:

Morgenthal: I believe that open source and noncommercial licensing is a good thing and has been very positive for the industry as a whole. My concern is for the proliferation of free software, that is, the commercial software that businesses use without paying any license and, optionally, only have to pay maintenance for to run their business. They earn their profit using that software to run their business, and yet nothing is given back to the software industry.

In my opinion, it’s like a flower that’s not getting fed through its roots, and eventually that flower will wither and die. To me, it’s almost parasitic, in that there are good parasites and bad parasites. Right now, it’s proving itself to be a little bit on the good parasite side, but with a slight permutation, this thing can turn around and kill the host.

… Anytime you have a model where something is given away for free, at some point the free stops. It’s very difficult to monetize going forth, because every buy is a buyer’s remorse. “I could have had that for free.”

… Economically long-term, I don’t believe anybody has thought about where these changes stop and what they end up cannibalizing. Maybe we end up with a great market, and maybe we don’t. I’d just love to see some attention paid to detail before people just willy-nilly go do these things. What is the long-term impact here?

Kobielus: There’s a broader range of options for the buyer in terms of how they can acquire this functionality through open-source or commercial licenses, appliances, cloud, and so forth. … Open source has been a good parasite. … Innovation is going like gangbusters, but the business model of being a pure software vendor based on pure commercial licensing is dying out.

Matsumura: Complexity is a really powerful force in the economy and in enterprise software in general. One of the things that open source is doing is helping to simplify some of the infrastructural components and to decrease the overall condition of heterogeneity. … We have learned that in the business of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) — which are called middleware businesses — is that chaos is perpetual, in the sense that there are two major driving forces in the economy: competition and consolidation.

Sure, there is commoditization in the IT platform, which is advanced by open source. Contrary to what JP was saying, one of the great things about open source is that it forces IT organizations like Software AG to selectively pick where they make their investment. They will put their investments in at the leading edge of complexity, as opposed to where things have slowed down and are not changing quite as fast.

Open source for quality innovation

Fremantle: There’s a change in the marketplace. … What I see is what you might call “managed commoditization.” In a way we’ve had commoditization of all sorts of things. No one pays money for the TCP/IP stack. That’s a piece of open-source software that has now become ubiquitous. It’s not of interest to anyone. It’s just a commodity that’s free. … I don’t think we need innovation in that space. [Disclosure: WSO2 is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

If you do something interesting and innovative, whether you are open source or not, if you partner with your customers and really add value, then they will pay you, whether or not your license forces them. The license is a blunt instrument. … To me, that’s something that was abused by software companies for many years.

What open source is doing is sorting the wheat from the chaff. It’s sorting out, “Is this something that is a commodity that I don’t want to pay for, or is this something that has real value and is innovative, and that I need the support, the subscription, and the help of this company to help me implement?”

Seibt: It’s absolutely true that open-source companies are very innovative. If you look at SaaS or even cloud computing, there are many startups that probably lead the way. For open source, we look at that market from a customer perspective. They use the software because of its innovation, its quality, and its cost, and they wouldn’t use it for any other reason. It is the innovation, quality, and cost.

Open source is moving up the stack and has reached the SOA level. Large corporations are using open-source SOA frameworks, because they want to be fully independent from any vendor. They trust themselves to develop this piece of software together with the bigger community, which becomes a community of enterprises. Innovation is not only from startups, but it’s from large corporations, as well.

Cloud masks use of open source

Kelly: I’m not sure that cloud computing necessarily opens up the field for open-source computing. To some extent, it almost shuts it down, because it then becomes cloud as a series of application programming interfaces (APIs) or a series of standardized connections or services out there that could be supported by anything. Open source is one solution. The one that’s going to win is going to be the most efficient one, rather than the lowest cost one, which may or may not be open source.

As you look at cloud computing, some of the initiative that we saw with original open-source roll outs over the past 10 years has been almost mitigated. … My question really is how far can the open-source innovation go. As organizations move into business processes and business-driven value, all the executives that I talk to don’t want to focus on the lower-level infrastructure. They want to focus on what value this software is giving in terms of supporting my business processes. … They don’t want to be in the software-development business.

How far can open source go up that stack to the business process to support custom applications, or is it always going to be this kind of really lower-level infrastructure component? That’s the question that I think about.

Morgenthal: The cloud actually hides a whole other layer of the “what and the how” from the user and the consumer, which could work in favor of open source or it could work against open source. … As long as that thing works, it’s reliable, and can be proven reliable, it can be put together with chewing gum and toothpicks and no one would know the difference.

Gardner: JP brings up an interesting issue. It’s about risk. If I go down a fully open-source path as an enterprise or as a service provider, is that going to lead me into a high-risk situation, where I can’t get support and innovation? Is it less risky to go in a commercial direction? Perhaps, the best alternative is a hedged approach, where there is a hybrid, where I go commercial with some products and I go open source with others, and I have more choice over time.

Matsumura: We’re already beginning to hybridize. Even with customers who are acquiring our technology, our technology takes advantage of a lot of open-source technologies, and we have built components. As I said, we’re very selective about how we choose to make our investments.

We’re investing in areas that obviously are not as commoditized, just because a rolling stone doesn’t gather any moss. The big sections of the market, where things have cooled off a lot, where open source can kind of create pavement, is somewhat irreversible.

Our customers need to be able to successfully compete in the market, not just on the basis of lowering the cost of operations through free stuff, but really to be able to differentiate themselves and pull away from the pack. There is always going to be a leading edge of competitive capability through technology. Companies that don’t invest in that are going to be left behind in an uptick.

Collaboration between provider and user

Fremantle: Most open-source software is not free. If you want the same things that you get from a proprietary vendor — which is support, bug fixes, patches, service packs, those kind of things — then you pay for them, just as you do with a proprietary vendor. The difference is in the partnerships that you have with that company.

What a lot of this has missed is the partnership you have in an open-source project is not just about code. It’s about the roadmap. It’s about sharing user stories more openly. It’s about sharing the development plan more openly. It’s a whole ecosystem of partnership, which is very different from that which you have with a standard commercial vendor.

There is an opportunity here to build frameworks that really scale out. For example, you may have an internal cloud based on Eucalyptus and an external cloud based on Amazon. You can scale seamlessly between those two, and you can scale up within your internal cloud till you hit that point. Open-source software offers a more flexible approach to that.

Kobielus: In many ways, the cloud community, as it grows and establishes itself as a viable business model, will increasingly be funding and subsidizing various open-source efforts that we probably haven’t even put on the drawing board yet. That will be in a lot of areas, such as possibly an open-source distribution of a shared-nothing, massively parallel processing, data warehousing platform for example. Things like that are absolutely critical for the ongoing development of a scale for cloud architecture.

If there is going to be a truly universal cloud, there is going to have to be a truly universal open-source scale-out of software.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Sponsor: TIBCO Software.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint’s ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

March 20th, 2009

If you’re an enterprise, developer or economist, IBM is not the right buyer for Sun

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 5:37 am

Categories: Amazon, Apache, Developer Tools, Eclipse, Enterprise Java, GPL, Google, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, Intellectual Property, Java, Linux, Microsoft, Open Source, Oracle, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Silicon Valley, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, Virtualization, Wall Street, database, datacenters

Tags: Developer, Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Open Source, Strategy, Management, Dana Gardner

From the perspective of IT users, developer communities and global industry as a whole, IBM may be the worst place for beleaguered Sun Microsystems to land.

Sure a merger as is rumored is good — but not urgently or obviously so — for IBM. Big Blue gains modest improvement in share of some servers, mostly Unix-based. It would actually gain just enough share of high-end servers to justly draw anti-trust scrutiny nearly worldwide.

Yet these types of servers are not today’s growth engines for IT vendors, they are the blunt trailing edge. Users have been dumping them in droves, with their sights set on far lower-cost alternatives and newer utility models of deployment and payment. IBM may want the next generation of data centers to be built of mainframes, but not too many others do.

In any event, server hardware is not a meaningful differentiator in today’s IT markets. Sun, if anyone, has proven that. IBM to claim it as the rationale for the buyout is fishy. A lot of other analysts are holding their noses too. UPDATE: Good analysis from Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady.

The rumored IBM-Sun deal for $6.4 billion is incremental improvement for IBM on several fronts: open source software (low earnings), tape storage (modest albeit dependable revenue), Java (already mostly open), engineering talent (easier to get these days given Sun layoffs), new intellectual property (targeted by design by Sun on undercutting IBM’s cash cows). In short, there are no obvious game changers or compelling synergies in IBM buying Sun other than setting the sun on Sun.

UPDATE: The purported deal is being held up by IBM’s lawyer as they peruse the contracts, say WSJ sources.

I initially thought the rumored deal, which drove up Sun’s stock, JAVA, by nearly 80 percent on rumor day one, didn’t make sense. But it does make sense. Unfortunately it only makes sense for IBM in a fairly ugly way. As Tom Foremski said, it smacks of a spoiler role.

If IBM, would you spend what may end up being $4 billion in actual cost to slow or stifle the deterioration of a $100 billion data center market, and, at the same time, take the means of accelerating the move to cloud computing off the table from your competitors? As Mister Rogers would say, “Sure, sure you would.”

Most likely, though the denials are in the works, IBM will plunder and snuff, plunder and snuff its way across the Sun portfolio — from large account to large account, developer community to developer community, employee project to project. The tidy market share and technology gems will be absorbed quietly, the rest canceled or allowed to wither on the vine.

Certain open source communities and projects that Sun has fostered will be cultivated, or not. IBM is the very best at knowing how to play the open source cards, and that does not mean playing them all.

Listen, this would be a VERY different acquisition than any IBM has done in recent memory. It’s really about taking a major competitor out when they are down. It’s bold and aggressive, and it’s ignoble. But these are hard times and many people are distracted.

The deal is not good for Sun and it’s customers (unless they already decided to move from being a Sun shop to an IBM shop), and may put in jeopardy the momentum of open source use up into middleware, SOA, databases and cloud infrastructure. That’s because, even at the price of $6.4 billion (twice Sun’s market value before the deal talk), IBM will gain far more from the deal over the long term by eradicating Sun than by joining Sun’s vector.

This deal is all about control. Control of Java, of markets, developers, cost of IT — even about the very pace of change across the industry. For much of it’s history IBM has had its hand on the tiller of the IT progression. It’s was a comfortable position except for an historically exceptional past 17 years for IBM. It’s time to get back in the saddle. Read the rest of this entry »

November 11th, 2008

Looking forward to webinar on applications modernization trends and techniques with Nexaweb

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:43 am

Categories: .NET, Agile Development, Application Lifecycle Management, Developer Tools, Enterprise Java, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Internet, Linux, Microsoft, Open Source, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, Virtualization, Web Services, Web Technology, Windows, datacenters, management

Tags: Technique, Information Technology, Webinar, Application Modernization, Productivity, Strategy, Management, Dana Gardner, Nexaweb, Roi/Tco

Application modernization as a precursor and accelerant to IT transformation is the topic of a webinar I’m on this Thursday at 1 p.m. ET.

The topic is a no-brainer. Old apps that waste money need to come out to the web services and RIA model and join the grand mashup.

Application modernization is one of those IT initiatives that packs the one-two wallop of cutting costs while improving agility and business outcomes. That combination of doing more for less makes so much sense these days, and it may be the new number one requirement for any IT budget.

Services and logic locked up in mainframes, COBOL, n-tier Java, and other 3-4GL client-server implementations can find a new life as rich Internet services on virtualized or standard hardware and platforms. The process recovers past investments, closes down wasteful operations spending, and extends value into the platforms that operate at peak efficiency and lower costs. Hard to argue.

Remember the wave of ROI studies back in 2003? Well now you need ROI plus provable business improvements of the qualitative variety. Application modernization fits the bill because application sprawl wastes server utilization, leaves apps and data in silos that resist services orientation and prevents the sun-setting of older, expensive platforms — plus you can do all kinds of innovative things with the services you couldn’t do before.

Oh, and getting these services into a SOA and on virtualized platforms opens the door to more exploitation of cloud and SaaS models, as they make more sense.

I’ll be discussing the rationale for application modernization, how to target which apps and platforms, what processes need to be in place, and how to scale app modernization projects appropriately. Joining me on the webinar will be David McFarlane, COO at Nexaweb. [Disclosure: Nexaweb is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

McFarlane, no doubt, will be explaining how the Nexaweb Reference Framework is engineered to reduce the time, costs, and architectural decisions associated with modernizing business applications and bringing them to the Web.

I like the idea of app modernization for mainframe and COBOL code, but Nexaweb goes further in terms of the webification trend: Sybase PowerBuilder, Microsoft Visual Basic, Oracle Forms and other 3GL/4GL-based applications are what it has in mind, with as much as 67 percent in total costs savings in early customer implementations, says Nexaweb.

Sign up to listen in and watch the slides go by. Q&A to follow. Should be fun.