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IBM Exposes More of its WebSphere, Application
Integration Strategy
By Myles Suer
IBM has announced WebSphere Application Server
version 5.0. Included in this release are J2EE 1.3 certified Web Services
optimized for the QoS of zOS,
Application Server Express to allow faster deployment of dynamic Web
applications, extended J2EE application optimization and choreographing, and WebSphere
Studio Application Developer for Linux and Windows. The latter integrated
design environment enables the building workflows, J2EE Artifacts, Web
Services workflow, and sophistication application adapters. WebSphere
Application Server Enterprise v5 is priced at $25,000 per processor;
WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition v5 is priced at
$6,000 per developer seat. Both products will be available on February 21.
IBM’s announcement is not a revolution but
represents a logical extension to application integration, service
reliability, and development timelines. IBM sees itself enabling enterprises
to integrate across company business processes for partners, suppliers, and
customers and this release illustrates the growing role of Web Services in
bridging the gap between IT and business processes. What underpins this
latest release is the continuing trend of a modular approach to application
deployments through Web Services. As such, applications vendors may need to
rethink their historic stovepipe approach of providing specialized monolithic
applications. At the same time, the Web Service approach could create
opportunities for these same vendors to provide value above and below
existing application software — a case of true value added technology applied
to existing solutions — and possibly the first indication that application
vendors are beginning to see Web Services as more than just an optional
strategy.
We believe that the strategic plans of enterprise
application providers will need to account for more open environment implied
by Web Services and the decline of the monolithic application stack. In
particular, we believe that application vendors need to seriously consider
the formerly unthinkable, i.e., pulling apart and selling separately their
applications. This could eventually evolve into application canisters where
developers or systems integrators could tailor the application or its outputs
for a particular customer’s needs. Although in the past this turned out to be
a pipe dream with enterprise application services, Web Services differs in
that it is about data/application sharing versus moving data between
application stores. Nonetheless, such a time will take time. The implication
for users is that there will be more choice in the portfolio of software
functionalities at their disposal for their needs and the opportunity to match
the application to the peculiarities of their own business practices. This
would also reinvigorate the role of integrators as they would need to be more
knowledgeable at both technical and business levels, and could provide a new
set of value add to bring to their customers, thus mitigating some of the
revenue threat proffered by inhouse solutions
seeking to gain from the promise of on-demand Web Services.
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FCC Sends the Power to the States
By Jim Balderston
The FCC voted 3-2 this week to give the states the
authority to regulate how — and to what degree — the Baby Bells will allow
competitors to lease their equipment, a vote that ran counter to the wishes
of FCC Chairman Michael Powell and the phone companies themselves. Powell and
the Bells wanted the phone companies to be freed from the rules that had
required them to give discounted rates for access to their networks. The
commission, in a separate vote, did agree to free the Bells from having to
provide competitors discount access to future networks, including those
comprised of fiber optic cables. Powell, in a dissenting comment from the
losing side of the vote, said the ruling to allow states to oversee how the
regional phone companies allow access will create more chaos in the telecom
sector.
The FCC, and most notably Powell, signaled early and
often that they were intent on unburdening the Baby Bells from requirements
that they allow their competitors to access their infrastructure at rates
that allowed those competitors to offer services at or below what the phone
companies themselves could do. The phone companies pushed long and hard for
relief from these regulations, at the same time making it as difficult as possible
for the local providers of things like DSL service to gain access to central
offices and other infrastructure. Anyone who ever had to try and track down
what was wrong with their DSL line and was met with a round robin of “it’s
the phone company’s problem,” “it’s the ISP,” and “it’s the DSL provider”
knows exactly how uncooperative this arrangement is and how poorly the
consumer fares under this arrangement.
Of course, that will not necessarily change as the
individual states take over the responsibility of determining what the Baby
Bells will or will not be allowed to do, but without a doubt the uniform
application of the rules that came with the federal mandate is going to
become a thing of the past. As the lobbying pressure from the phone companies
moves from federal to state level, statewide public utility commissioners and
the people that appoint them are going to see much more in the way of
political pressure and campaign cash. How each individual state will make its
rules is unclear, but one thing is certain: the way statewide rules are
formed will impact how well or quickly new services will be offered, and as a
result individual states could gain or lose advantage over others as they try
and attract new business. Yet with that said, the increasing ubiquity in
networked information technology means that any state that inhibits the
growth of reliable telecommunications services runs the risk of hamstringing
its economy, a risk that becomes all the more formidable in the face of ongoing
economic lethargy.
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Microsoft Provides More Skinny on
Xdocs, Its Electronic Forms Alternative
By Myles Suer
Microsoft has announced that its Xdocs initiative, a
planned addition to Office 11 that would bring XML-based electronic forms to
its productivity suite, would assume the product name InfoPath. Microsoft
claims InfoPath streamlines the process of gathering information by rich,
dynamic forms, thus enabling customers to reuse information across the
enterprise. While the company indicated that InfoPath would be a new office
application, it did not disclose which versions of Office would include
InfoPath or what type of integration will be provided with existing Office
applications. Pricing information has not yet been released.
As with most things that Microsoft does, many will
question whether Microsoft’s InfoPath is part of a broader set of intentions;
specifically, to leverage InfoPath to establish a position in the content
management marketplace against current players Documentum, Filenet, IBM, and
Oracle. By including support for XML schemas, Microsoft states that InfoPath
allows companies not only to capture data that previously would have been
lost, but also to define and organize this data to meet their unique needs.
Thus, the company believes InfoPath will be a productivity boon for a number
of vertical industries with distinct industry-specific data needs. Although
some may see this yet another Redmond Giant out to dominant a market space
story, we believe this reasoning overlooks two important issues. In contrast
to the proprietary Word of past, InfoPath provides Office the ability to
create electronic forms compliant to an open standard. If Microsoft succeeds
in its efforts, it would help all application players, as no unique format
advantage is imbued to Microsoft. At the same time, Microsoft’s involvement
could make the whole business of content management easier as it would
eventually reduce if not outright eliminate the need to maintain hundreds of
document interfaces — excepting for legacy applications.
The more interesting question is what impact
InfoPath will have on the current and semi-pervasive standard called PDF.
Clearly, Adobe perceives the same opportunity as Microsoft; however, it
appears Adobe plans to respond with a forms product related to its existing
PDF franchise. Here, Microsoft may perceive the opportunity to use its Office
franchise to establish itself as the leader of the emerging electronic forms
market. One might simplistically view InfoPath as another path for Microsoft
to drive users to buy another Office upgrade, but the compelling benefit of
accelerating of the flow of information across the enterprise through forms
has not yet been a rallying cry for most enterprise users. Therefore,
Microsoft will need to do some significant market cultivation if it wishes to
drive the notion of InfoPath as a “gotta have”
technology in the enterprise. Until the time that such cultivation happens,
Adobe is well positioned to maintain its PDF franchise, but it is clear that
both companies will have much riding on their future success in driving the
market to their electronic forms solution as the expense of the competition.
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Versata Announces Availability of
Business Logic Designer for WebSphere Studio
By Jacques Halé
Versata has announced the general availability of
Versata Business Logic Designer, a free plug-in for WebSphere Studio. This
plug-in enables WebSphere developers to specify business logic as business
objects and rules, and according to the company, to generate reusable
business components without the costly hand coding of software. The company
claims its product complements the J2EE-development facilities within WebSphere
Studio by offering the ability to develop software as business logic instead
of Java coding, the ability to cut costs by using less skilled labor, and the
potential to keep development more
aligned with business specifications. Business Logic Designer can be
downloaded from Versata’s Web site or IBM’s Plug-In Central Web site.
From a commercial point of view, Versata has made an
interesting move by giving away its Studio plug-in product in what appears to
be the desire to seed the demand for its revenue-generating product, the
Versata Logic Server, which is positioned as a business logic extension for
IBM WebSphere Application Server. Versata acknowledges that some customers
will buy its product to customize packaged software applications, although
this is not the declared product focus. However, we believe that tailored
versions of Versata Business Logic Designer fitted to specialized
applications such as ERP and CRM could open up an entirely new market for
Versata. This would be consistent with the trend of software developments
tools helping with breaking up large monolithic applications into smaller,
more adaptable components, encapsulated in the notion of Web Services. This
could result in more effective and less expensive solutions for customers who
could adapt these large applications to their specific circumstances.
From a wider perspective, Versata is representative
of a breed of vendors that are seeking to tackle the challenging task of
bridging the gap between the world of software and the world of business
processes. The global name for this class of facilities is Business Process Management
(BPM). Most of the BPM vendors have come from workflow automation or document
management and are building their products “upwards” toward the process level.
However in order to enable the full involvement of the business executives in
the creation of an effective IT infrastructure, there is a need for a
methodology, supported by a workbench, for modeling the process and
generating the supporting code as automatically as possible. This requires
handling business concepts in business terms and not computer terms. We
believe that Versata is pointing in the right direction, but it will be up to
the market to decide whether Versata’s products do indeed facilitate the
involvement of the business executives in the IT provision process.
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HP OpenView
Adds Functionality to Assist Service Providers with SLAs
By Myles Suer
HP has announced OpenView
Quality Manager Software, which creates an enterprise-wide service management
view of how well voice and data services are delivered to customers, with respect
to SLAs. The company claims OpenView
Service Quality Manager automates the definition, monitoring, and reporting
of SLAs and enables active management of the
network and enterprise infrastructure to ensure SLA objectives are met. If
service level degrades below a defined threshold, corrective actions are
automatically triggered and managers notified. The product monitors and
reports on service quality by aggregating key service indicators throughout
the enterprise, including the operator’s own business processes. HP OpenView Service Quality Manager has begun field trials
with large operators and is expected to be available worldwide in April.
Although we believe service level agreements can
represent an important element of managing outside services as well as
internal datacenter performance, to date the ability to accurately measure
and take corrective action based on SLA events has been spotty at best. We
believe real-time monitoring and corrective tools are needed that cover the
end-to-end process of creating service contracts, measuring results, and
managing performance so that CIOs can establish
parameters for negotiation and measuring SLA performance. By enabling CIOs to perform these functions, they can move from
tactically managing technology to strategically managing essential corporate
services. In this modality, a CIO can act as an executive rather than technician
and his/her performance measured by the quality of key corporate business
services delivered. For this to happen, we see the need for extending
enterprise contract management software concepts into data center management
software. In particular, it will be essential to provide mechanisms for
creating XML-based SLAs so key contract parameters
can easily be extracted for competitive metrics. This would allow the CIO to
be more proactively involved in modifying service plans to increase up time
while also enabling the enterprise to ensure it gets its money worth. Thus a
company CIO would be able to act more strategically as opposed to being an
overpaid de facto Manager of Systems Administration.
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