Category: JBoss
October 13th, 2009
Engine Yard draws funding as it ushers more developers onto the Ruby services train
This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.
Developers are a mighty stubborn bunch. Unlike the rest of the enterprise IT market, where a 
convergence of forces have favored a nobody gets fired for buying IBM, Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft, developers have no such herding instincts. Developers do not always get with the [enterprise] program.
For evidence, recall what happened the last time that the development market faced such consolidation. In the wake of web 1.0, the formerly fragmented development market – which used to revolve around dozens of languages and frameworks – congealed down to Java vs .NET camps. That was so 2002, however, as in the interim, developers have gravitated toward choosing their own alternatives.
The result was an explosion of what former Burton Group analyst Richard Monson Haefel termed the Rebel Frameworks (that was back in 2004), and more recently in the resurgence of scripting languages. In essence, developers didn’t take the future as inevitable, and for good reason: the so-called future of development circa 2002 was built on the assumption that everyone would gravitate to enterprise-class frameworks.
Java and .NET were engineered on the assumption that the future of enterprise and Internet computing would be based on complex, multitier distributed transactional systems. It was accompanied by a growing risk-aversion: Buy only from vendors that you expect will remain viable. Not surprisingly, enterprise computing procurements narrowed to IOSM (IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft).
Different dynamic
But the developer community lives to a different dynamic. In an age of open source, expertise for development frameworks and languages get dispersed; vendor viability becomes less of a concern. More importantly, developers only want to get the job done, and anyway, the tasks that they perform typically fall under the enterprise radar.
Whereas a CFO may be concerned over the approach an ERP system may employ to managing financial system or supply chain processes, they are not going to care about development languages or frameworks.
The result is that developers remain independent minded, and that independence accounts for the popularity of alternatives to enterprise development platforms, with Ruby on Rails being the latest to enter the spotlight.
In one sense, Ruby’s path to prominence parallels Java in that the language was originally invented for another purpose. But there the similarity ends as, in Ruby’s case, no corporate entity really owned it. Ruby is a simple scripting language that became a viable alternative for web developers once David Heinemeier Hansson invented the Rails framework. The good news, Rails makes it easy to use Ruby to write relatively simple web database applications. Examples of Rails’ simplicity include:
- Eliminating the need to write configuration files for mapping requests to actions
- Avoiding multi-threading issues because Rails will not pool controller (logic) instances
- Dispensing with object-relational mapping files; instead, Rails automates much of this and tends to use very simplified naming conventions.
The bad news is that there are performance limitations and difficulties in handling more complex distributed transaction applications. But the good news is that when it comes to web apps, the vast majority are quite rudimentary, thank you.
The result has propelled a wave of alternative stacks, such as LAMP (Linux-Apache web server-MySQL-and either PHP, Python, or Perl) or, more recently, Ruby on Rails. At the other end of the spectrum, the Spring Framework takes the same principle – simplification – to ease the pain of writing complex Java EE applications – but that’s not the segment addressed by PHP, MySQL, or Ruby on Rails. It reinforces the fact that, unlike the rest of the enterprise software market, developers don’t necessarily take orders from up top. Nobody told them to implement these alternative frameworks and languages.
Although hardly the only cloud provider out there that supports RoR development, Engine Yard’s business is currently on a 2x growth streak. Funding stages the company either for IPO or buy out.
The latest reminder of the strength of grassroots markets in the developer sector is Engine Yard’s securing of $19 million in C funding last week. The backing comes from some of the same players that also funded SpringSource (which was recently acquired by VMware). Some of the backing also comes from Amazon, whose Jeff Bezos owns outright 37Signals, the Chicago-based provider of project management software that employs Heinemeier Hansson. For the record, there is plenty of RoR presence in Amazon Web Services.
Engine Yard is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider that has optimized the RoR stack for runtime. Although hardly the only cloud provider out there that supports RoR development, Engine Yard’s business is currently on a 2x growth streak. Funding stages the company either for IPO or buy out.
At this point the script sounds similar to SpringSource whose new owner, VMware, is launching a development and runtime cloud that will eventually become VMware’s Java counterpart to Microsoft Azure.
It’s tempting to wonder whether a similar path will become reality for Engine Yard. The answer is that the question itself is too narrow. It is inevitable that a development and runtime cloud paired with enterprise plumbing (e.g., OS, hypervisor) will materialize for Ruby on Rails. With its $19 million funding, Engine Yard has the chance to gain critical mass mindshare in the RoR community – but don’t rule out rivals like Joyent yet.
This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.
September 4th, 2009
VMworld, Red Hat Summit news takes cloud computing beyond the hype curve
Three industry conferences this week — one underlying theme: enterprise cloud computing.
If you could sum up VMworld 2009, the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World with one uber topic, cloud takes it — which begs whether the cloud hype curve has yet peaked.
Or more compelling yet, is the interest in cloud models more than just hype, more than a knee-jerk reaction to selling IT wares in a recession, more than an evolutionary step in the progression of networked computing?
Although the slew of announcements coming out of San Francisco and Chicago this week weren’t solely focused on the cloud, the pattern is unmistakable and could cause naysayers to think again.
It all started with VMworld on Monday. Dell and VMware took the stage to announce an expansion of their existing partnership where Dell will bundle VMware View as an option on some of its server and client platforms. The result: an end-to-end solution from the desktop to the data center as a foundation for cloud computing.
HP wouldn’t be excluded from the VMware announcement fray. VMware and HP took the cover 
off a solution that lets enterprises manage both physical and virtual infrastructures through the VMware vCenter console. The new HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter Server took center stage at the conference with a focus on tighter integration, simpler user experiences and greater control within virtualized environments. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Ones to Watch
In other cloud news, virtual machine management solutions firm VMLogix announced its LabManager Cloud Edition at VMworld. The LabManager Cloud Edition that lets software teams run virtual labs on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Meanwhile, Zoho inked a deal with VMware to deliver private cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) 
solutions for enterprise customers. F5 hooked up with VMware to make a way for companies to securely migrate to and from public or private clouds with no downtime or interruption. And 1,000-plus service providers – including AT&T, Verizon, and Terremark – are going to offer cloud services based on VMware’s Cloud OS.
Some newer names made some major announcements at VMworld. Virtustream announced it has raised $25 million in equity financing, validating the firm as a player in the enterprise cloud market with its strategy, integration and managed services offerings. And Mellanox Technologies and Intalio are ones to watch. The Intalio|Cloud Appliance, accelerated by Mellanox 40Gb/s Infiniband, won the Best of VMworld 2009 award in the Cloud Computing Technologies category.
Reviewing the Red Hat Summit
Even as the cloud-oriented stories continue to emerge from VMworld 2009, we’re seeing some interestin
g cloud headlines coming out of the Red Hat Summit in Chicago, too. For the first time, Red Hat hosted the Summit and JBoss World together. But let’s take the news one at a time.
Perhaps the biggest Summit news on the cloud front is Red Hat and HP expanding their collaboration to drive the next generation of converged server, storage and networking infrastructure solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. The idea is to drive customers to virtualization and cloud computing.
Jumping into JBoss World
Red Hat also delivered on its JBoss Open Choice strategy during the Summit. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 is now available. It represents the next generation Java platforms and will play a central role in Red Hat’s cloud foundation. This is significant because the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is the first commercially available Java EE application server available in Amazon’s EC2.
Ingres sent a clear message that building open source Java applications in the cloud offers companies opportunities to lower costs without losing scalability or robustness. Suggesting that social networking platforms have become a new platform for developers to launch products and services, Ingres offered a look at how to use open source technologies on Facebook.
And on the entertainment front, DreamWorks Animations discussed how the company has leveraged cloud computing technologies to product films like Antz, Shrek2 and Madagascar, partnering with RedHat and its open source technologies.
The cloud topic still remains too amorphous and enterprises are only beginning to grapple with how to move to cloud adoption in ways that support their goals. But, riding the wave of virtualization and SOA adoption, both vendors and IT architects are treating cloud computing as far ore than a passing fancy.
Many of the concepts first proposed and extolled during the Internet hype curve in the mid-1990s are now bearing fruit. Perhaps we should think of cloud computing as less than a separate hype curve, and more as the realization of the original Internet value curve , now some 15 years into its mainstream maturity.
(BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.)
August 13th, 2009
Got middleware? Got ESBs? Take this survey, please.
I keep hearing about how powerful social media is for gathering insights from the IT communities and users. Yet I rarely see actual market research conducted via the social media milieu.
So now’s the time to fully test the process. I’m hoping that you users and specifiers of enterprise software middleware, SOA infrastructure, integration middleware, and enterprise service buses (ESBs) will take 5 minutes and fill out my BriefingsDirect survey. We’ll share the results via this blog in a few weeks.
We’re seeking to uncover the latest trends in actual usage and perceptions around these technologies — both open source and commercial.
How middleware products — like ESBs — are used is not supposed to change rapidly. Enterprises typically choose and deploy integration software infrastructure slowly and deliberately, and they don’t often change course without good reason.
But the last few years have proven an exception. Middleware products and brands have shifted more rapidly than ever before. Vendors have consolidated, product lines have merged. Users have had to grapple with new and dynamic requirements.
Open source offerings have swiftly matured, and in many cases advanced capabilities beyond the commercial space. Interest in SOA is now shared with anticipation of cloud computing approaches and needs.
So how do enterprise IT leaders and planners view the middleware and SOA landscape after a period of adjustment — including the roughest global recession in more than 60 years?
This brief survey, distributed by BriefingsDirect for Interarbor Solutions, is designed to gauge the latest perceptions and patterns of use and updated requirements for middleware products and capabilities. Please take a few moments and share your preferences on enterprise middleware software. Thank you.
August 12th, 2009
VMware fleshes out its cloud computing support model with SpringSource grab
This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.
VMware’s proposed $362 million acquisition of SpringSource is all about getting serious in competing with Salesforce.com and Google App Engine as the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud with the technology that everybody already uses.
This acquisition was a means to an end, pairing two companies that could not be less alike. VMware is a household name, sells software through traditional commercial licenses, and markets to IT operations. SpringSource is a grassroots, open source developer-oriented firm whose business is a cottage industry by comparison. The cloud brought both companies together that each faced complementary limitations on their growth. VMware needed to grow out beyond its hardware virtualization niche if it was to regain its groove, while SpringSource needed to grow up and find deeper pockets to become anything more than a popular niche player.
The fact is that providing a virtualization engine, even if you pad it with management utilities that act like an operating system, is still a raw cloud with little pull unless you go higher up in the stack. Raw clouds have their appeal only to vendors that resell capacity or enterprise large firms with the deep benches of infrastructure expertise to run their own virtual environments. For the rest of us, we need a player that provides a deployment environment, handles the plumbing, that is married to a development environment. That is what Salesforce’s Force.com and Google’s App Engine are all about. VMware’s gambit is in a way very similar to Microsoft’s Software + Services strategy: use the software and platforms that you are already used to, rather than some new
The most glaring omission is need for Java object distributed caching to provide yet another alternative to scalability.
environment in a cloud setting. There’s nothing less familiar to large IT environments than VMware’s ESX virtualization engine, and in the Java community, there’s nothing more familiar than the Spring framework which – according to the company – accounts for roughly half of all Java installations.
With roughly $60 million in stock options for SpringSource’s 150-person staff, VMware is intent on keeping the people as it knows nothing about the Java virtualization business. Normally, we’d question a deal like this because the company’s are so dissimilar. But the fact that they are complementary pieces to a PaaS offering gives the combination stickiness.
For instance, VMware’s vSphere’s cloud management environment (in a fit of bravado, VMware calls it a cloud OS) can understand resource consumption of VM containers; with SpringSource, it gets to peer inside the black box and understand why those containers are hogging resource. That provides more flexibility and smarts for optimizing virtualization strategies, and can help cloud customers answer the question: do we need to spin out more VMs, perform some load balancing, or re-apportion all those Spring TC (Tomcat) servlet containers?
The addition of SpringSource also complements VMware’s cloud portfolio in other ways. In his blog about the deal, SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson noted that the idea of pairing VMware’s Lab Manager (that’s the test lab automation piece that VMware picked up through the Akimbi acquisition) proved highly popular with Spring framework customers. In actuality, if you extend Lab manager from simply spinning out images of testbeds to spinning out runtime containers, you would have VMware’s answer to IBM’s recently-introduced WebSphere Cloudburst appliance.
VMware isn’t finished however. The most glaring omission is need for Java object distributed caching to provide yet another alternative to scalability. If you only rely on spinning out more VMs, you get a highly rigid one-dimensional cloud that will not provide the economies of scale and flexibility that clouds are supposed to provide. So we wouldn’t be surprised if GigaSpaces or Terracotta might be next in VMware’s acquisition plans.
This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog . Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.
July 3rd, 2009
Oracle Fusion 11g Middleware: Executed according to plan
This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog . Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.
This week’s announcement by Oracle of the rollouts of Fusion Middleware 11g is a bit anticlimactic in that the details are pretty much according to the plan that came out exactly a year ago today. Although the Fusion stack is comprised of multiple parts, internally developed and acquired, the highlight is that it represents the fruition of the BEA acquisition. Oracle had Fusion middleware prior to acquiring BEA, but there’s little question that BEA was the main event. WebLogic filled the donut hole in the middle of the Fusion stack with a server that was far more popular than Oracle Containers for Java EE (OC4J). Singlehandedly, BEA catapulted Oracle Fusion into becoming a major player in middleware.
Oracle largely stuck to the previously announced roadmap for convergence of BEA products, with the only major surprises being in the details. As planned, Oracle incorporated WebLogic as the strategic Java platform, JDeveloper as the primary development environment, dual business process modeling paths, with master data management, data integration, and identity management driven largely by Oracle offerings with some added BEA content.
Although the Oracle Fusion product portfolio came from far more diverse sources than BEA (as Oracle was obviously a more aggressive acquirer), the result is far more unified than anything that BEA ever fielded. Before getting swallowed by Oracle, BEA had multiple portal, development, and integration technologies lacking a common framework. By comparison, Oracle has emphasized a common framework for mashing the pieces together.
That’s rooted in Oracle’s heritage for developing native tools and utilities, dating back to the Oracle Forms 4GL and the various utilities for managing the Oracle database;
It’s an outgrowth of the mentality at Oracle that good is the enemy of best, and that what Oracle is building is a platform rather than discrete products.
the tools were sufficiently native that they typically were confined to Oracle shops. But that approach to native tooling morphed with development of a broader framework that is optimized for Oracle platforms. It’s an outgrowth of the mentality at Oracle that good is the enemy of best, and that what Oracle is building is a platform rather than discrete products.
It’s an approach that also makes Oracle’s tagline of Fusion being standards-based as being more nuanced. Yes, the Fusion products are designed to support Oracle’s “hot pluggable” best of breed strategy to work with other vendors products, but for designing and managing the Fusion environment, Oracle has you surrounded with native tooling if you want them. Call it a subtle pull for encouraging customers to add more Oracle content.
That explains how, 6 – 7 years ago, Oracle began developing what has become the Application Development Framework (ADF) as its own model-view-controller alternative to the Apache Struts framework that it previously used in early versions of the JDeveloper Java tool. That approach has carried through to this day with JDeveloper, which provides a higher level, declarative approach to development that would not fit with traditional Eclipse IDEs. And that approach applies to Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM), which does not necessarily compete with BMC, CA, HP, or IBM Tivoli in application management, but provides the last mile of declarative deployment, monitoring, and performance testing capabilities for the Fusion platform.
Bringing together the Oracle and BEA technologies resulted in some synergies where the value was greater than the sum of its parts. A good example is the pairing of BA’s quasi-real time JRockit JVM with Oracle Coherence data grid, a distributed caching layer for Java objects. In essence, JRockit juices up performance of Coherence, which is used whenever you need higher performance with frequently used objects; conversely, Coherence provides a high end enterprise clustered platform that provides an excellent use case for JRockit.
As noted, while the broad outlines of Fusion 11g are hardly any mystery, there are some interesting departures that occurred along the way. One of the more notable was in BPM where Oracle added another option to its runtime strategy for Oracle BPM Suite.
Make no doubt about it, the Fusion 11g migration was a huge reengineering project, involving nearly 2000 development projects and over 5000 product enhancements. So it’s a shame that Oracle did not take the opportunity of re-architecting its middleware stack by migrating it to microkernel architecture, with OSGi being the most prominent example.
Originally, Oracle BPEL Process Manager was to be the runtime, requiring BPM users to map their process models to BPEL, essentially an XML-based sequential programming language that lacks process semantics. A year later, OMG is putting finishing touches to BPMN 2.0, a process modeling notation that has added support for executable models. And so with release of 11g, Oracle BPM Suite users will gain the option of bypassing BPEL as long as their processes are not that transactionally complex.
Make no doubt about it, the Fusion 11g migration was a huge reengineering project, involving nearly 2000 development projects and over 5000 product enhancements. So it’s a shame that Oracle did not take the opportunity of re-architecting its middleware stack by migrating it to microkernel architecture, with OSGi being the most prominent example. Oracle WebLogic Server is OSGi-based, but the BPM/SOA stack is not. Oracle remains mum as to whether it plans to adopt a microkernel architecture throughout the rest of the Fusion stack.
So why are we all hot and bothered about this? OSGi, or the principle of dynamic, modular microkernels in general, offer the potential to vastly reduce Java’s footprint through deployment of highly compact, servers that contain only the Java modules that are necessary to run. The good news is that this is potentially a highly economic, energy-efficient, space efficient green strategy. The bad news is that it’s not enough for the vendor to adopt a microkernel, as the user has to learn how to selectively and dynamically deploy them.
But as we just noted, OSGi seems to have lost its momentum of late. As we noted, in our Ovum research last year, we believed that OSGi was going to become the de facto standard for Java platforms as IBM and SpringSource fully migrated their stacks, and as rivals were providing at least tacit support. A year later, Oracle’s silence is deafening.
As we noted last week, Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun adds some interesting dynamics to the plot, as Sun has continued to speak on both sides of its mouth on the topic: supporting OSGi for its open source Glassfish Java platform, while putting its weight behind Project Jigsaw that aims to redefine Java modularity as JSR 294. Unfortunately, announcement of Fusion 11g has not cleared up matters.
This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.
July 1st, 2009
Oracle closes in on 'any'-ware with debut of middleware behemoth 11g suites family
After nearly a 20-month gestation period, Oracle today announced the arrival this month of the next generation of its sprawling middleware family, the long-anticipated Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.
Billed as a “complete, integrated, and hot-pluggable” 
middleware set of suites, the new software infrastructure offerings, which the Redwood Shores, Calif. computer giant previewed in November 2007, bolsters functionality, integration and business intelligence (BI) benefits across its vast product portfolio, including new capabilities for Oracle SOA Suite, WebLogic Suite, Web Center Suite, and opening debut for Identity Management as a suite.
With the spoils of the BEA acquisition now fully baked into the mix — and with anticipation for what the pending Sun Microsystems buy brings — Oracle is well on its way to obviating the middleware moniker. Perhaps we should call it “anyware.”
The glaring missing link now, however, is the cloud element of Oracle’s destiny. With such a broad infrastructure, data lifecycle, and apps/services development portfolio — not to mention deep hooks into Oracle’s burgeoning business applications offerings — the only needed outcome to fulfill is the “any” in “anyware.” That must include a fluid sourcing, hosting and business model future — the nearly obvious Oracle Cloud.
Now that it’s here, the 11g continental conglomeration must be the gateway for the enveloping 12c, as in “c” for cloud. You don’t need to be an oracle to factor that clear and necessary path to the future.
Meanwhile, terrestrial Oracle also announced today that its middleware remains the company’s fastest growing business with 90,000 customers worldwide, including 29 of the Dow Jones’ top 30, 98 of Fortune’s 100 Global, and 10 of the top 10 companies in major industries.
Enhancements across the platform of platforms in the Fusion Middleware 11g include:
- SOA Suite, a unifying system of human and document-centric processes and an event-driven architecture (EDA) with a complete range of SOA capabilities from development to security and governance. Deployed on the Oracle application grid infrastructure, the SOA underpinnings are optimized for building and integrating services on private and public clouds.
- WebLogic Suite (including WebLogic Server) adds new features, including Fusion Middleware GridLink for Real Application Clusters and Fusion Middleware Enterprise Grid Messaging. Fusion Middleware ActiveCache also enables rapid scale-out to meet changing user demand and system load.
- WebCenter Suite provides a broad set of reusable, out-of-the-box WebCenter Services components that can be plugged into any type of portal – intranet, composite application, Web-based community – to enhance social networking and personal productivity.
- Composer, a declarative, browser-based tool, makes it easy for both end-users and developers to create, share, and personalize applications, portals and social sites.
- WebCenter Spaces, a new pre-built social networking solution, enables end-user driven, created and managed communities (Group Spaces and Personal Spaces) to increase productivity, communication, and efficiency.
- Identity Management delivers the first components of a fully integrated Identity Management suite and features deeper integration with other Fusion Middleware solutions, as well as new features such as Deployment Accelerators, Universal Federation Framework, and a modern unified user interface based on Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces.
Fusion Middleware 11g also builds on the previously announced Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g strategic development tools including JDeveloper, Application Development Framework, and TopLink.
One of the key take-aways from 11g is the infusion of BI and analytics across the portfolio. That will also be a key of any cloud-based offerings from Oracle. Comprehensive BI as a service may very well be the killer application of cloud approaches.
Of the still standing middleware field — IBM, Microsoft, Software AG, Red Hat/JBoss, Progress, TIBCO, SAP and Sybase — only a few will be both able to get the “anyware” in terms of product breadth and of cloud delivery. [Disclosure: Progress and TIBCO and sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Oracle has sewn up its field brilliantly via its organic and aquisitions-fueled growth of the past decade. With Sun and its ID management, file system/directory, storage, Solaris community, and speedy silicon, the path to cloud seems inevitable and closer than most thought for Oracle. Incidentally, control of Java is more a strategic weapon than an enabler.
Oracle still needs more total governance (don’t we all!), a PaaS play, and a whole lot of globally established and cutting edge, cloud-delivery data centers in place humming along. Oh, and the transition from a licensed to subscription commodity services business models won’t be any much easier for Oracle than Microsoft. Has to be done, however.
But, as usual, Oracle will stride like the Rhodes Colossus the build, buy and partner spectrum of opportunity to attain a gobal cloud delivery capability. Nothing but the best will do, of course. Oracle has just about everything else in place, that’s abundantly clear.
June 29th, 2009
Oracle adds zest to SQL Developer with standalone data modeling tool, stirs the SQL market pot
Oracle has paved the way for developers to more easily build data models that create and update existing databases. The Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, which integrates with Oracle SQL Developer, arrived today as a standalone tool that supports logical, relational, multi-dimensional and data type modeling.
Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., had originally released a free version of the tool as an “early adopter” release. The full version is now available for $3,000 per named user. The new tool features multi-layered design and generation capabilities to produce conceptual entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) and transform them to relational models. Users can build, extend and modify a model as well as compare with existing designs.
The whole SQL databases and associated tools and modeling ecosystem is ripe for tumult. My best guess is that Oracle’s pending Sun Microsystems purchase will provide offense via MySQL, and the associated community, to target the Microsoft SQL Server franchise.
Oracle can both keep tabs on the MySQL evolution while under-cutting Microsoft. Good work, if you can get it. Oh, and they can attract more middleware sales as they seduce the developers and deeply snare the operations folks.
On the other big future directon, to the cloud, modeling and managing data become the points of the arrow to attacting more sticky data into your cloud. We’re ready seeing this in business process modeling as IBM is giving away such tools via BlueWorks. The enticement? To bring more process meta data and rules execution to Big Blue’s cloud.
My expectation is that Oracle, HP, IBM, Red Hat, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will begin to offer more “free” cloud-based enticements to enterprise developers and archirects that 1) hurt their competition whenever possible, and 2) solidify their respective advantages to create long-term cloud customers. Then repeat, extend, and solidify. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Remember when free and open source software began to disrupt the staus quo, and the large enterprise vendors could no longer ignore it? They played the same way. IBM, for example, embraced Linux (to hurt Microsoft and also sell more commodity hardware) and Apache web servers (ditto). But IBM did not open source DB2 or WebSphere.
We’ll see the same picking and choosing — tactical and strategic — of what is “free” or not, cloud-based or not, rationalized on a similar pattern of combined offense and defense. The good news is that the enterprise architects and developers will have more good choices, lowering costs, and be able to play the beheamoths off of one another — just like with open source.
Perhaps we need to call the cloud thing … Any Source.
Back to Oracle and its maneuvers in the SQL space … The capabilities of the new data modeler include:
- Visual entity relationship modeling, which supports both Barker and Bachman notations so developers can switch between models to suit the audience’s needs or create and save different visual displays
- Forwarding of engineering ERDs to relational models, transforming all rules and decisions made at the conceptual level to the relational model, where details are further refined and updated
- Separate relational and physical models that enable users to develop a single relational model for different database versions or different databases.
- A full spectrum of physical database definitions, supporting physical definitions such as partitions, roles, and tablespaces for specific database versions for multi-database, multi-vendor support
Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is generally available today and can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).
June 23rd, 2009
SaaS delivery of IT lifecycle and quality management functions evolves toward an IT service-delivery solutions approach
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
When people think of Software as a Service (SaaS) and web services delivery, they often envision business applications like salesforce automation, email, and human resources management.
But Hewlett-Packard has been delivering 
quality assurance and applications performance management functions via SaaS for years. It’s Business Technology Optimization (BTO) services, part of its Mercury acquisition, made the leap to SaaS delivery long before web-based business applications became popular. You could say SaaS for developers and testers — code warriors — paved the way for SaaS for salesmen — road warriors.
Now, as interest in cloud computing ramps up, the ability to deliver more aspects of IT lifecycle and quality management, along with broader project and portfolio oversight values, is also ramping up. Yet a missing ingredient for IT innovators has been how to begin and how to organize these sourcing changes effectively.
Such a SaaS whole greater than the sum of its web services parts will better help IT managers do more with less, and provide better applications faster, as well.
To better understand the expanding role of SaaS within IT, and how professional services can newly help in the transition to holistic SaaS use by IT departments, I interviewed two executives last week at HP’s Software Universe conference in Las Vegas: Scott Kupor, vice president and general manager of Software-as-a-Service, and Anand Eswaran, vice president of professional services, both in HP’s Software and Solutions group.
Here are some excerpts:
Kupor: At HP for the last nine years, we’ve
been selling IT management applications as a service delivery option. If you think about things like testing, performance management, or project and portfolio management (PPM), for example, those are traditional IT applications that we’ve been selling with this similar delivery model.
What we’ve been hearing from customers today at the conference are two key things. Number one, the cost benefits that initially drove them to SaaS are ever present and incredibly more important in this financial environment. The benefits are really coming to fruition. The second is that we’re starting to see a migration of SaaS from what was traditionally testing services toward other more complex and more customizable IT management applications.
We’re hearing a lot of interest from customers around IT service management (ITSM), service desk applications, and service management applications. These are things that have traditionally been the domain of inside-the-firewall deployments. Customers are now getting comfortable with the SaaS model so much so that they’re looking at those applications as well for deployment in a SaaS environment.
Eswaran: We’ve made a very conscious
shift from what was inherently deployment of products. The approach right now is transformed into what business outcomes can we achieve for the customer, which is something which we would have been unable to do some time back.
We have changed focus now from deploying a single product set to achieving outcomes like reduction of outages by 40 percent, increasing quality, getting service-level agreements to a certain point, and guaranteeing that level of service. That’s been hugely helpful.
All of what we do at the back end, whether it’s how we leverage SaaS, what products we use, what software we use, what consulting and professional services we use, all of that is going to be transparent to the customer. What they care about is a service, which we will deliver to the customer. SaaS enables us to get to that service, get to that time-to-market, much faster.
This all gets us to the point of what customers refer to as “killing the game,” getting to a point of being able to offer outcome-based pricing and guaranteeing that outcome, as opposed to the traditional consulting model of billing rates and hours.
Kupor: Remember, all these are complex IT management applications, they have third-party integrations.
That’s really what IT’s job is — to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.
They have custom code that customers are building on top. Those are all areas of domains of expertise for the services organization. Through the work that [Anand's team] and we are doing together, we can together deliver a cost-effective delivery option for customers, but without having to sacrifice the complexity, integration, and customization opportunities that they demand for these applications.
We’ve heard this a lot from our customers today, that they’re actually interested in looking at how, as an IT department, they can deploy their own applications in a third-party cloud environment. You hear a lot of people talking about infrastructure on demand or computing power on demand.
People are looking toward these third-party products as a way to basically take an application they’ve built in-house and deploy them externally in, perhaps, an Amazon environment or a Microsoft environment. Where the interesting opportunity is for us, as a management vendor, is that customers will still need the same level of performance, availability, security, and data integrity, associated with applications that live in a cloud environment as they have come to expect for applications that live inside their corporate firewall.
We’ve been talking to customers a lot about something called Cloud Assure, which is the first service offering that HP has brought to market to help customers solve those management problems for applications they choose to deploy in a cloud-based environment.
That’s really what IT’s job is — to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.
Eswaran: Everything is eventually going to get transformed into a service for the customer, so that they can actually focus on the core business they are in. When you have things transformed into a service, everything we do to offer that service should be transparent to the customer.
It becomes a services-led engagement, but that’s where we clearly differentiate “services” from “service,” the singular, which is the eventual outcome the customer needs to create for themselves. That’s why we really partner well between SaaS and Professional Services. We believe that we are on a path of convergence to eventually get to offering business value and a service to a customer.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
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September 5th, 2008
Red Hat buys Qumranet, adds gasoline to the spreading VDI bonfire
Open-source giant Red Hat has upped the ante in the PC desktop virtualization market with its acquisition of Qumranet, Inc. in a $107-million deal announced this week.
This acquisition clearly ups the ante in the race for Desktop Virtualization Infrastructure (VDI) solutions. I used to call VDI “desktop as a service (DaaS),” and still think that works pretty well. Anyay, the Red Hat purchase comes on the heels of HP’s major virtualization push announced this week, which includes a large VDI component. [See a sponsored podcast on HP's virtualization solutions.]
The Red Hat purchase of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Qumranet’s kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) platform and SolidICE VDI solution is targeted at enterprise customers seeking to cut the total cost of providing applications, web access and runtime features to the client edge.
The acquisition of Qumranet gives the Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat a more comprehensive portfolio of virtualization offerings, including:
- An open-source operating system with built-in virtualization.
- An embedded hypervisor that supports major operating systems.
- A consistent management platform for both virtual and physical systems.
- A cloud and grid management solution.
- Advanced, high-speed inter-application messaging.
- An integrated security infrastructure.
SolidICE debuted in April, just weeks before Citrix unveiled its updated XenDesktop, putting Qumranet — and now Red Hat — head-to-head with Citrix and VMWare in the desktop virtualization arena. Microsoft may well take is forthcoming Hyper-V in a VDI direction, but for now seems content on partnering with Citrix on VDI. Sun Microsystems should own this market, but opted to hand over Java to the world and buy a tape drive company instead.
SolidICE is a high-performance, scalable virtualization solution built specifically for desktops, and not, Red Hat says, as a retrofit from server virtualization (slap!). It is based on the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) and enables a Windows or Linux desktop to run in a virtual machine hosted on a central server or datacenter.
Virtualization has been around for decades, mostly on mainframes. It’s foray into the desktop market was originally hampered by reliability and security issues. However, recent technological advances have ramped up interest and given virtualization a new head of steam. Such vendors as HP are seemingly confident that the performance issues are no longer an inhibitor, just as the economic drivers for virtualization (like energy conservation) are mounting fast.
Red Hat says that it doesn’t expect the acquisition to contribute any substantial to its bottom line in the fiscal year that ends February 29, 2009, but after that the company is looking at $20 million in added revenue the following year.
In a nutshell, Qumranet and VDI fit Red Hat to a “T” — with the service and maintance of centralized server-based clients just gravy on the already robust Red Hat infrastructure support business. VDI allows Red Hat to take its model to the PC, without leaving the datacenter. And it allows the promulagation of Linux for the client OS in much more expedient fashion than taking on Redmond on the desktop.
As I told NewsFactor Network, the market for VDI could be in store for a large growth spurt. VDI simply solves too many problems while providing very little disruption for end users to be ignored.
VDI, somewhat ironically, may also work well for market mover Microsoft as it seeks to slow the momentum to outright web-based and OSS/LAMP-supported applications and services for large businesses. Microsoft must realize that enterprises have had it with the high cost of maintaining and managing the traditional Windows OS in all its client-side permutations.
Not even a $300 million ad campaign for Vista can stop the addition and subtraction that spells this fact out. The math simply does not lie. Help desk costs to fix user config-type and malware issues are killing IT budgets.
Yet (just in time!) VDI allows Microsoft to keep the apps as Windows apps, retains the desktop OS license fees — even if they are virtualized and server-based — and VDI on Windows keeps developers and ISVs writing new and updating old apps to run on … Windows. VDI allows converting client-server apps into Windows Server apps, without turning them into web apps.
Essentially, at the same time, virtualized and server-based VDI delivery of Windows apps and Windows desktop functionality allows enterprises to cut total costs, reuse aging desktop hardware, streamline updates and migrations, and slash security and privacy/control concerns (by maintaining management at the datacenter).
Help desks can actually be pared back, folks. Sorry, Ashish. Data can be kept safe on servers, not out in the strange world of lost hard drives and corporate espionage. Indeed, the U.S. Dept. of Defense (DoD) and other three-acronym spy agencies use VDI extensively. Nothing on the client but chips and dips. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.
Now, as Red Hat (and it’s partner IBM?) seek to enter the VDI space aggressively and perhaps add Linux as the spolier runtime, Microsoft will need to accelerate its VDI initiatives. I expect MSFT to become the leader in VDI (perhaps via major acquisitions), as a hedge against Google, Red Hat, FOSS, the web, compute clouds, Amazon, IBM, and the far too high cost of traditional Windows clients.
Speaking of IBM, VDI offers Big Blue a way to play to all its global strengths — infrastructure and services (green IT) — while moving back into the client solutions (and end-to-end) value business in a potentially Big, Big, way. There’s no reason why HP and IBM won’t be huge beneficiaries of VDI, even as Microsoft makes it easier for them based on its own need to move quickly in this direction.
Here’s a dark horse thought: If you can inject search- and web-based ads into web/SaaS apps, why could you not inject them into VDI-delivered apps? There could well be an additional business model of VDI-delivered desktops and apps supported by targeted ads. Telcos, cable providers, and service providers might (if the were smart) give away the PC/MID hardware, include the VDI/DaaS as part of triple-play connection or premium service fees, and monetize it all through relevant ads embedded intelligently in virtualized apps delivery. Nawwww!
Trust me, keep an eye on VDI, it has the potential to rock the IT market every way as much as Google/Yahoo/Amazon/SalesForce.com/SaaS — only this trend hits the enterprise directly and fully. Incidentally, cloud computing as a private enterprise endeavor hugely supports the viability and economic rationale for VDI.
It’s nice when IT megatrends align so well.
February 15th, 2008
TIBCO beefs up ActiveMatrix with 2.0 release, moves to 'Total Architecture' value
Promising hefty productivity increases and a lower
This latest release adds BusinessWorks, which is available either in standalone mode or as a container hosted in the ActiveMatrix infrastructure, and Service Bus, a new lightweight enterprise service bus (ESB), that helps integrate services while using content or context-based routing.
It was just a year ago that I had a BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition podcast devoted largely to TIBCO and ActiveMatrix. At that time, the panel of analysts saw newly announced ActiveMatrix as a definite shift in the trajectory that TIBCO had been on. You can listen to the podcast here.
I also conducted a sponsored book review podcast last year with TIBCO architect Paul Brown on the concept of Total Architecture, which ActiveMatrix 2.0 undergirds, for sure. Disclosure: TIBCO has been a sponsor of my BriefingsDirect podcasts. Read a full transcript of the discussion.
ActiveMatrix 2.0 includes expanded and deep support for service component architecture (SCA) to automate and unify the assembly, deployment, hosting, and managing of SOA projects and services.
With ActiveMatrix 2.0, TIBCO says users can manage SOAs with combinations of Java, .NET
Dana Gardner is principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions. For disclosures on Dana's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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