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Market Roundup October 13, 2006 IBM Site and Facilities Services: Is This Data Center Feng Shui? Apex and AppExchange: Winter ’07 is Here and IT Looks Interesting Again |
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IBM Site and Facilities Services: Is This Data Center Feng Shui?
IBM announced new services this week to deal with
energy-related challenges in the data center. The services encompass a range of
capabilities that will be available from IBM’s Site and Facilities Services
unit and are another step in IBM’s strategy to move their labor-based
technology services into a product-oriented mode that can benefit a greater
range of customers. IBM is introducing five new service products, including High
Density Computing Readiness Assessment, which helps customers gauge the effect
of high-density computing on their existing data center; Thermal Analysis for
High Density Computing, which identifies and resolves heat-related issues
likely to lead to outages; Integrated Rack Solution for High-Density Computing,
which helps customers design, deploy, and manage racking solutions for new
technologies; Data Center Global Consolidation and Relocation Enablement, which
provides plans to help customers reduce costs by consolidating and relocating
data centers; and Scalable Modular Data Center for SMBs, which is designed to
help customers install new data centers using modular building blocks. IBM
claims to have more than 450 Site and Facility experts who have built more than
2.8 million square meters of data center space and more than 400 data centers
in IBM’s own facilities. Overall, the group focuses on four areas: data center
and facilities strategy services; IT facilities assessment, design, and
construction services; IT facilities consolidation and relocation services; and
specialized facilities services focusing on intelligent and green buildings,
clean rooms, and trading floors. IBM will offer these services as part of its CoolBlue portfolio of hardware and systems management
tools. These products focus on helping customers better optimize power
consumption, management, and cooling of infrastructure at the system, rack, and
data center levels.
Blade computing is a form factor for computing that is
gaining popularity in the data center as a way to provide high-density
computing for applications that can lead to better manageability and lower
costs. The
trick, however, is that while blades typically take up one-eighth the amount of
space of a 1U rack server, they have ten times the density, which means that
while individual servers may be lower power than their rack alternatives, the
reality is that blade chassis are an heat-intensive experience for data centers
that were designed with traditional racks in mind. Additionally, many IT
managers and business people are just beginning to think about the notion of
saving money on the power bills by changing the data center. In many European
countries, the cost of electricity and gas has been rising steadily for the last
eighteen months. The largest companies are painfully aware of the impact of the
data center on their bottom line, but many other companies have not yet started
to focus on this aspect yet. What is more likely to be a concern to IT managers
is how hot their servers are running. Most office buildings in North America
are no longer heated; they are only cooled because all of the systems running
inside keep them warm. In large data centers full of computers, cooling can
become a major issue. It is not uncommon to hear discussions of alternative
cooling methods in certain environments. IBM of course believes that it spans
the range of needs, from helping companies sort out the impact of replacing
racks with blade chassis, to helping managers of large data centers work out
alternate cooling solutions when not all the fans in the world will cut it.
This announcement of a new set of productized-services from IBM comes on the heels of its announcement a couple of weeks ago of a reorganization and change of focus for its technology services. IBM led with integrated communications and now it is following with data center power and cooling; all very practical issues from which myriad customers can benefit if IBM can work out how to get those services to a greater number of users. IBM claims to be driving this through its CoolBlue portfolio, but in typical IBM fashion, if you go to the website and type in CoolBlue, you get lots of references to press releases and no page that explains everything in a straightforward manner. We believe that data center managers need assistance and can benefit from IBM’s expertise in this situation; however, as always Big Blue is its own biggest obstacle to success. If it can get a clear message out to partners, and articulate how to buy to a range of customers, we anticipate a boost to blade server sales as well.
Apex and AppExchange: Winter ’07 is Here and IT Looks Interesting Again
This week in San Francisco, Salesforce.com held Dreamforce
’06, its annual customer and partner show at which there was a flurry of
announcements covering the company’s core application offerings and its partner
application delivery platform, AppExchange. Some of these are potentially of
great significance. At the start of the show, the company highlighted a number
of new and updated capabilities to be released later this year when Salesforce
Winter ’07 is released. Salesforce Winter ’07 will be the twenty-first
generation of the company’s software and, as a Software as a Service (SaaS)
offering, it will be deployed to the entire customer base at the same time.
Among the new features are a new Business Web Desktop and AJAX User Interface
that combine to make user interaction more intuitive and flexible. There will
also be significant feature enhancements to the entire Salesforce suite.
Amongst the specific features of the new release of the CRM and the Salesforce
Automation (SFA) components are Custom Workflows and Approvals, new integration
with Lotus Notes, a new AJAX Calendar, and Automated Reminders as pop-ups. The
Service & Support tools introduce a Call Centre Edition that supports call
centre products from Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, and Genesys as well as on demand solutions including Pandora
and Five 9. The solution provides a fully integrated Softphone
and automatic call logging. Salesforce Partner Relationship Management (PRM)
now offers Activity Sharing, Custom Price Books, and Product Line Items along
with Shared Metrics. Salesforce Marketing now includes Salesforce for Google
AdWords allowing Google keywords to be purchased and usage tracked within the
product.
To say the least, there is a lot going on at Salesforce.com
and AppExchange. However, the most important development is the fact that the
entire suite and AppExchange are now built on top of the Apex Platform. Apex
will allow customers and ISVs to utilize the same language and platform to
build and modify applications running on the Salesforce.com platform itself.
Essentially Apex will allow organizations to modify existing Salesforce and
AppExchange application execution in a controlled manner with all code running
of the Salesforce platform itself. Utilizing the Apex Programming Language will
allow customers and ISVs to do everything from creating custom objects, buttons.
and execution triggers, modifying Salesforce.com code
execution to building and executing complex business logic with everything
running in the Salesforce.com environment.
The Winter ’07 release is scheduled
to be available to all 24,800 customers and their 501,000 subscribers during
the fourth quarter of 2006. The Apex platform will be available with the Winter ’07 release while the Apex programming language is
scheduled to be available in the first half of 2007.
It is clear that Salesforce.com has now become so much more
than simply a supplier of CRM applications as a service. Indeed, the company is
now keen to position Salesforce.com as an information management company, and
in many respects this is a fair description. We believe there is no doubt at
all that while the family of on demand solutions built by Salesforce.com is
very good and the model of on demand service delivery saves many organizations
time and effort, it is the AppExchange Platform and now Apex that will become
the most important parts of the company. AppExchange makes available a secure,
very highly available, and trusted SaaS platform that now has over 400
applications available for immediate customer use. We believe that SaaS will
become a major model for software delivery in the years ahead, and not just for
SMBs. The AppExchange platform has grown rapidly in its first year and it will
be interesting to see how Salesforce looks to stretch it beyond its
Relationship Management heartland.
Apex and the new business Web Desktop allow customers tremendous flexibility to make the available applications fit their business processes quickly and with minimum risk. But for Apex and AppExchange to become as widely employed as possible, Salesforce.com needs to reach out to new customers and new partners, both ISVs and service delivery organizations. It must also attract an entirely new community to Salesforce, namely software developers. If Salesforce can make Apex attractive and interesting to developers, Apex and AppExchange could rapidly become incredibly important and even more widely deployed. To our way of thinking, there is much potential here.
Isilon Systems has announced the release of a unified file
system, the OneFS4.5, that provides ubiquitous access
to digital content and unstructured data. This is the next-generation Isilon IQ
clustered storage software system, and can power all of Isilon’s family of
clustered storage software systems, including the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 6000,
Accelerator, and EX 6000. With this release, Isilon will deliver 1PB capacity
with 10GBps throughput in a single file system and volume while seeking to eliminate
the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. The data
protection system allows customers to withstand the loss of three or four
simultaneous disks or nodes within very large clusters while maintaining 100%
availability of all of the data. The data protection system is called N+3 and
N+4. The stated goal of the new OneFS 4.5 system is
to let enterprises bring their huge data archives online, thereby making them
as accessible as any other critical business information.
Once upon a time, computer storage used to be measured by
megabytes. Isilon’s position in the storage arena seems to be generating quite
a buzz with its introduction of mega storage, and has perhaps contributed to
Isilon’s recent application for an IPO. In conjunction with other recent
announcements, these products may just be what Isilon hopes will launch it into
the big leagues. With recent legislation concerning electronic discovery laws,
storage systems and quick and easy access to data are suddenly much more
important to a company’s success. Legal fees are bad enough, but paying those
fees for every hour that the legal team is pawing through a year’s worth of
data could conceivably break some companies. So while storage and its
organization may not be glamorous, it is vitally important. Isilon’s new system
may not rock the entire market, but it does seem to raise the bar. The ability
of the system to protect data from spontaneous loss is likely to be one of the
more important selling points for the customers.
The field of data storage has come into its own and is no longer an afterthought when a company sets up or renovates its IT department. Data storage and its management are now just as—if not more—important than processor speeds and desktop applications. As the challenge for companies is to keep all of their data and not just the most current at their fingertips, it will most likely positively affect business models across the board from sales and customer service, to accounting, to electronic discovery. A customer’s entire history could be accessible to anyone in the company at any time, most likely increasing sales and ensuring the customer has a positive experience regardless of which person within the company is their contact. Of course, saying all this and doing it are two different things. We shall watch with anticipation to see if Isilon is successful is cultivating market acceptance for its approach.