View all entries in the 'Enterprise IT' Category

Siebel a decaying asset?

by eleanor on 3 May 2005 @ 5:25 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Peoplesoft didn’t really mark the end of an era for me, nor did Macromedia. I think Siebel - were it to be scarfed up - would do the trick. The Wall St. Journal had a piece yesterday that brought me short with this realization. Oracle Has Discussed Siebel Buyout Not really a big deal, but I was struck by shareholder revolt leader Herbert Denton proclaiming “Siebel can be viewed as a ‘decaying asset,’” in a letter to the board.

The logic is saturation and consolidation and customer reluctance to upgrade, which are inexorable forces at work in the enterprise space. But the phrasing seems particularly jarring in that it states the obvious: software is a decaying asset. Sure Siebel’s business was never what it seemed in 1999, with untold licenses bought but never installed. In fact, last spring I found a Gartner stat that said 42% of all CRM sw went unused, vs the industry norm of 20%. CRM software is particularly suspect because walking around enterprises you can see how few people use it.

Since then Siebel, among the big players of that day, has labored under the weight of needing to prove its usefulness. Fighting to grow sales (we could joke about how much of that 42% was later upgraded) off a bogus number that itself is cause for ill-will from your customers, in the face of competition and code-base and functional maturity that itsefl is a natural impediment to ready upgrading. Oh, and there’s the re-emergence of that pesky ASP model, call it grid, software as a service, BPO, whatever - all that puts an end to professional services around installs and custom work. Gak - what a mess. So Siebel’s got On Demand now, and might even make an acquisition here or there, but we’ll see where it all ends up.

When I started this, I was going to point out the irony that all software is decaying, in that new versions are generally welcomed. But ironically, the problem in this space is that the software is not decaying, it’s the appetite for investment on the part of customers and partners. Software gets to be good enough, and it’s clearly time to go out and find new markets. But that’s the hardest message of all to get through to big successful-feeling companies who have achieved a lot through the years. End of life is a real stage, you either do it yourself, or the market’ll do it for you.

Oh, and a note about how I derived this link. From an idea on a blog (maybe Doc’s??), I emailed myself a link, which will be good for you for a week; if you are a WSJ subscriber the 30-day link is here.

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IBM surveys perception of On Demand mktng message

by eleanor on 20 Jan 2005 @ 12:46 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Last week I received an invitation to a survey offered by Meta Group on IBM’s OnDemand program. It didn’t seem to work the first time I tried it, but apparently I misread a question (bad survey design!).

It’s worth it though because it offers a glimpse into IBM’s marketing and insights that 1). they’re perceptive enough to suspect (and willing to spend money confirming) that their marketing is missing its target, and 2). that there’s conflict within IBM groups about which message should be most prominent. Take the image below, for example, which I captured out of their survey. This question presents seven perfectly reasonable interpretations of what IBM’s OnDemand initiative means:

-

Now, I can make a guess (until they share survey findings as promised) which option ends up being the most popular (#1), and the option IBM’s marketing honchos really want to see (#6) - but what’s truly interesting is the small, yet important, differences in what each interpretation means. Each bullet lists an empirically strong value proposition, which is clearly targeted to a particular functional group in the enterprise. So, this survey is a test to see if the right message resonates with the right functional area (the survey requests role and position). That’s very good marketing execution and perfectly valid.

However, if you take a step back, and look at how different the value propositions are within each of these, and how each value propositon really points to a different level of integration and reliance upon IBM - we see exactly how confused one can get about just what IBM is supposed to bring.

If IT is looking at IBM as an infrastructure provider, and the board is looking at this as a business model intiative (which I think is pretty hard to swallow), and the procurement guys see this as a sourcing model - things get pretty convoluted when you roll all these projects up, never mind the fact that each group is convinced that their idea of IBMOnDemand is correct.

We’re all guilty of relying on high concepts such as On Demand to sell products and servics - but in this case I actually think what IBM and HP and even Gartner are doing in this space is dangerous. IBM has its version of IBMOnDemand, which is both vague and big enough to safely cover all these attributes mentioned above. HP has “Adaptive Enterprise”, which, to my mind, is even less clearly articulated than IBM’s. Then we’ve got Gartner selling their “Real Time Enterprise” which, when I can parse their texts on the matter, seems to be an even higher conceptual model of this same vision of provisioned/billed-when-needed, autonomically-managed, integrated-via-components model.

This model itself is sound - it will be a cheaper, more efficient, more robust way to operate. The migration demanded by this vision is enormous though, as is the implicit flexibility demanded of these systems. I’m troubled by the monolithic approach of IBM and HP (check out this ITWorld webcast they sponsored with Gartner for an example - site registration required) in this space. Sun seems to get it more with their talk (well Jonathan’s is the only stuff worthwhile) of Solaris 10 containers for virtualization - that seems to offer a middle path, namely in migrating currently-running applications without modification.

What’s missing here, I feel, is the simple recognition that any of these utility schemes seem to involve significant engineering, along the rough equivalent of putting in a new electrical system in a house. Why would you want a proprietary wiring system? This sounds basic, but I’m not convinced that IBM and HP (and even Sun) get that these utility infrastructures need to be open standards and portable. Customers will sign up for service contracts, but it will be very difficult (as both HP and Sun have found) to get them to rearchitect their environment to work only with their products.

So the final question of the survey was to comment on both the good and bad of all this. I shared the following with Meta, which I’ll share with you here. I absolutely think that IBM’s amoeba-swallowing-approach is dangerous to what is a genuinely important next step in enterprise architecture, even though I do admire them for cooking up discrete and compelling value propostions for each of their constituencies. It’s a heck of a marketing campaign; it’s just not particularly helpful to the ecosystem.

Question: What is the single biggest thing IBM is doing right at this time?
My Answer: The words “on demand” capture what businesses need to be doing HOWEVER…. (see mistake - next question)

Question: What is the single biggest mistake IBM is making at this time?
My Answer: The IBMOnDemand (please note - it is one word, IBM’s version of this otherwise useful phrase of OnDemand) offering pollutes the concept of flexibility and modularity that should be inherent to any given generic OnDemand solution. The IBMOnDemand framework is all IBM [ed. note - not absolutely true, but it is WebSphere everywhere] - and thus very expensive to implement given the fact that we all sit here with heterogenous infrastructures that we cannot afford to rip out and replace with a beautiful greenfield solution delivered by cheerful and skilled IGS consultants. This mistake is potentially crippling, not just for IBM, but for the whole enterprise IT market. With this mistake they are in serious danger of destroying the positive mindset around SOA, components, utility, modular systems: component-based is supposed to mean the end of the need for (not, please note, the end of the desire for - there’s ample room for selling) large IGS-style projects. IBM pushes the world-altering nature of this under the rubric of “let IBMOnDemand be your new… business model” - surely you and IBM can see how crazy sounds for enterprises. It just doesn’t seem realizable (because, as we are reminded in the ads, IBMOnDemand is a perfect state) and it’s not something that you can meaningfully implement incrementally. Lastly IBM is on thin ice with this emphasis on providing business models to enterprises. I would never want IBM to drive my business model; they might help enable me to create my own, but buying IBMOnDemand is not buying, as you said in survey, “a way of designing business models and processes”. I’m all in favor of selling at the board level (I have a great tech analyst presentation here that counsels selling to “board level” - I’ll do up a post on it one of these days), but IBM’s marketing message is just too rich here.

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Google V. Microsoft outlooked in MIT’s Technology Review

by eleanor on 20 Dec 2004 @ 6:13 pm in Emergent | Enterprise IT   ++

This month’s (January 2005) Tech Review has a lengthy piece where Charles Ferguson, veteran of past battles with Microsoft (founded Vermeer, maker of FrontPage, in the midst of the browser wars) looks at What’s Next for Google. The piece is well worth a read, as it puts the current search environment (the overview of which is a draft post I’ve never had time to complete) in perspective - both as the next frontier and as the setting for a standards battle.

One point I think Ferguson did miss was when he wrote,

Two Google employees (both of whom prefer not to be named) told me that Google’s leaders believe that the company’s expertise in infrastructure—knowing how to build and operate those 250,000 servers—constitutes a competitive advantage more important than APIs or standards. This could be a major, even fatal, error. Microsoft can certainly obtain or cultivate the skills necessary to operate large-scale computing infrastructures; indeed, it already operates MSN, with nearly 10 million users.

is the whole of the Gmail and Blogger initiatives. Looking at those two projects, Google is moving to host and support (and technically, thereby, own and control access to) customers’ data. It’s this aspect of Google’s business that goes beyond simply the operational wherewithal necessary to operate this infrastructure, what Gartner called “Tera Architectures” in a Symposium 2004 presenation, Tera Architectures Emerge from the Lab. In terms of testbed for development of new algorithms and advertising schemes, as well as adding that personal element that John Battelle noted as being missing from Google when it’s compared to Yahoo! in these two posts: here and here. We’ll see how it plays out.

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Consolidation in the PC market

by eleanor on 3 Dec 2004 @ 5:11 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

IBM’s selling their PC business to Lenovo, reports The New York Times today. This comes after research firm Gartner issued a press release on Monday predicting that 3 of the top 10 PC Manufacturers will be out of (the) business by 2007. And they pointed to IBM as a potential player.

I have to say I’m significantly less impressed by their display of foresight given the fact that IBM no doubt mentioned this to them. But who knows? Maybe the Gartner statement cleared the way before IBM’s announcement.

Regardless, Gartner is already 33% correct - wonder what that does to their probabilities. We only need two manufacturers to shut down operations now for Gartner’s prediction to come to pass, and we have 2 full years.

Who’s likely to be next? No shocking insight from Gartner. Analyst Leslie Fiering only shared specuation on two of the three. “The PC divisions of HP and IBM are vulnerable to being spun off if their drag on margins and profitability are deemed too great by their parent companies.” Big deal. We knew about HP already. Carly in her WSJ interview this week commented that any non-performing business is subject to divestiture, and IBM has already leaked.

So what, Gartner. I want to hear your predictions for who this third player is.

Adding to the connumdrum are conflicting reports as to the continued growth of the PC business over the next year and beyond. Gartner sees strong sales to continue throughout 2005. However, InformationWeek has a report with a roundup of other numbers, with the bearish title New Orders For Computers Fall; Dip In Buying Seen In ‘05:

After several months of gains, new orders for computers fell 16.1% in October, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. The government preliminarily pegged the value of those orders in October at a seasonally adjusted $5.67 billion. Still, new orders for computers in October rose 13.7% year over year.

Looking at all manufacturing industries, factory orders rose a seasonally adjusted .5% in October. That metric had been flat in September. For the year, new orders for all manufactured goods rose 11.1%.

Earlier this week, a report issued by the research firm IDC said market demand for IT products and services will dip over the next 12 months. Its Buyer Intent index slipped to 1,088 from 1,091. However, IDC says, the index is about 5% higher than it was in January.

None of us knows the future - it might be safest to make predictions that include sure bets, as Gartner did earlier this week.

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Microsoft and Sun report on progress of collaboration

by eleanor on 2 Dec 2004 @ 3:58 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

As I wrote about two weeks ago, the area of integration between Sun and Microsoft around directory services is a powerful reason for their new alliance. The Wall Street Journal has a quick piece that reports on their first joint progress report.

Sun and Microsoft executives emphasized that the collaboration has just begun and will need time to take shape. “Nine months ago we were slashing each other’s tires,” said Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos. “Now we’re helping each other fix each other’s flats.”

The companies said that they have held 15 executive-level meetings in the past five months and that they have held monthly meetings of 24 engineers from both companies. The companies also set up an advisory council of executives from corporate customers that use both companies’ products.

One of the first big tests of the alliance, executives said, will be making it possible for a user to enter one password and log on to corporate applications based on either Sun or Microsoft technology. Mr. Papadopoulos said engineering teams were grappling with how to solve that thorny problem, but weren’t ready to pronounce a solution yet.

However, a problem this big and this obvious also has a lively open source project aiming to bridge the gap. SAMBA is a project designed to provide interoperability between various OS for file, print, authentication and other services. See the full story here.
SAMBA4, a major re-coding and re-architecting initiative (see here for detail, is nearing alpha release - it’ll probably take quite a while, but they are making quick progress.

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WSJ interviews Carly Fiorina

by eleanor on 1 Dec 2004 @ 2:17 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Carly Fiorina. It’s more of the same - she emphasizes the importance of “execution” and constant focus on cost savings. And she lists HP’s 3 top priorites as “how to get more efficient and effective” at managing the cost structure, gaining greater share of wallet, and a new focus on growing by leveraging capabilities and skills to grow organically into new businesses (she cites move into digital entertainment as an example of this.) The mass layoffs are over, but HP will expand and contract as they increase focus on new areas of the business and shift away from less profitable areas.

For technology she has this to say:

I think that the tech industry is going to grow at two times growth [in U.S. gross domestic product]. It was a five-times-GDP-growth industry in the late 1990s, and that was unsustainable. Now we’ve entered a period where tech is fundamental. When something becomes fundamental it involves a more important and complex set of decisions, so growth slows. By the way, two times GDP is an OK growth industry. But it’s not what it used to be.

I think there are changes that are yet to occur. The software industry still has some consolidation to go. [So does] the communication-technology side.

Provacatively, she responded to questions about the recent departure of many of HP’s top players by saying:

‘ve retained the people we wanted to retain. I won’t say that below my direct reports there weren’t some losses that would have been better if they stayed. But in virtually every case, the reason people left is because they weren’t selected for a job they wanted. The reason they weren’t selected for the job they wanted is because we didn’t think they were the best candidate for the job.

That all may be true, but it seems a strange cultural thing that HP is unable to put them to use productively - even if they weren’t the best fit with one particular job.

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Chip Chatter - Consumer & Converged Devices

by eleanor on 29 Nov 2004 @ 1:57 pm in Enterprise IT | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I have a lot of back posts to put up over the next few days, but first a current piece from today.

Right away I’ve seen two pieces on chips from big players, tracking with themes I’m developing. First the announcment of the Cell chip, product of joint development efforts of IBM, Sony and Toshiba. This chip is designed for consumer electronics applications targeted at the digital home including Sony’s Playstation and handling video display for high resolution displays. As The Wall Street Journal reports in WSJ.com - IBM, Sony, Toshiba Unveil Chip For Home-Entertainment Sector:

Analysts said the processor might be able to reorient digitized video as it is received to provide views from above or an end-zone view. In other applications, the processing power of Cell might permit a viewer to take a TV character and place him in a videogame, or interact with a commercial to see how a dress would look on an image of herself stored in the system.

(edited 13 Dec) See also The Red Herring blog post which has more info about the Cell chip as well as comments on where it will fit in in the world of consumer electronic devices and games.

The New York Times focuses on Intel and its strategies and challenges ahead with a piece looking forward to Otellini’s ascent to CEO. Most noteworthy for the theme of convergence around multifunction advanced handsets, the piece reports on Otellini’s new strategy of “platformization” — what seems to be Intel focusing less on the hardware attributes of chips but more on the holistic solution. Looking forward to Otellini’s first strategy presentation to Wall Street, The Times expects him to announce Intel’s focus on “four areas for growth: international markets for desktop personal computers, mobile and wireless applications, the digital home, as well as a new initiative aimed at large corporate computing markets that Intel is calling the Digital Office.” We’ll have to wait to see what is shared about the “Digital Office” initiative… that makes me think of Xerox.

Perhaps to underscore this shift, the most innovative part of Intel’s strategy that’s discussed in the article talks about Intel’s investment in Craig McCaw’s wimax startup, Clearwire:

“Voice is going to be free as a result of all of this, which the carriers don’t like to hear, but that’s essentially where it’s going,” he said.

What is in it for Intel? A cellphone-like wireless handset that works seamlessly both inside and outside the home throughout an urban area.

That is a market that could easily mitigate any number of missteps and blunders - potentially a market that would remake the cellular phone world that so far has largely eluded Intel.

“Any market of 600 million small computers is not just important, but it’s critical to us,” Mr. Otellini said.

What I take away from this is more evidence that consumer facing applications are receiving the focus that was formerly centered around the enterprise. I’m going to be posting on this theme quite a bit (including backposts) so I will return to add links later.

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Solaris 10 on x86 - critical to Sun’s continued success

by eleanor on 23 Nov 2004 @ 1:23 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

The Register’s Ashlee Vance has a piece on Sun and its future - positing that Sun will only retain relevance if Solaris 10 on x86 becomes the new growth engine. Vance takes the audacious positon that Sun is in extreme danger of becoming “a bigger, richer version of SGI”. I definitely recommend you check out the full article, but it goes like this:

Sun has for many years garnered more than its fair share of attention and power for one reason and one reason only - Solaris. There are more Solaris customers on this planet than IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Dell care to remember. If HP came to you and said there are only three important operating systems on the planet - Windows, Linux and HP-UX - you would laugh. If IBM did the same with AIX, you would laugh again. When Sun pulls this trick with Solairs, the thesis flexes a bit of muscle.

This part is very insightful, because its at the crux of the fight between HP and Sun over Schwartz’s blog posts (which I blogged here) that marginalize HP-UX as a dead platform. But Solaris’ franchise is based on its success with the RISC architecture - which is itself in decline. Therefore, it is critical to Sun that they get their ‘best of breed’ operating system out there on as many x86 boxes as possible, as quickly as they can.

There are reasons to believe Sun can pull this off. Its Solaris engineering team is arguably the best operating system design group on the planet. Sun pours billions into the operating system and has countless features that neither Windows or Linux can match. It’s secure, scales incredibly well and now, Sun claims, fast. Beyond all of this, Sun faces no real Unix competition from a big player in the x86 market. It’s Sun’s segment to win.

Should Sun carve out a large chunk of the x86 market and have Solaris running on the systems, the rest of its business will likely thrive. Sun will sell more of its enterprise software - another growth area - and sell more storage. A thriving x86 business even legitimizes much of Sun’s Linux desktop play, which opens another avenue for growth.

Sun has a lot of interesting RISC technology on the way such as its multicore processors, high-end file systems and virtualization technology. This will keep its current customer base happy and might even help Sun regain some lost ground in the high-end market. No matter how well this business performs though it will not carry Sun to the $50bn mark.

Sun’s other bets such as making more money off of Java, thin clients and renting out computing power may pay off in the long run. They won’t, however, pay off like a massive Solaris x86 server business. That’s where the billions in upside are.

Interesting stuff.
Updates: So, while “El Reg” can bring a good perspective - they just don’t report on news like the other tech publications out there. Information Week has an informative rundown of what McNealy said, with more detail than offered by Ashlee:

Throughout the day, Sun execs sought to position Solaris as a low-cost operating system that’s a better choice than Red Hat Linux–the most popular version of Linux among corporate IT departments–for small computers. At the same time, Sun’s technical investment–the company spent more than four years developing the new system–would provide its platform a longer shelf life than Unix operating systems from IBM and HP, they said. Solaris 10 includes performance-increasing technology called DTrace that the company says is giving test customers 20% increases in performance over older versions of Solaris. It also includes a new file system called ZFS, security technology taken from Sun’s Trusted Solaris, which it sells to government accounts, and technology called Containers that could make servers easier to manage. Solaris 10 also includes the ability to run Linux applications with a small performance penalty, as a way to migrate apps from Linux to Solaris.

Sun also is offering its customers nontechnical incentives to buy its technology. McNealy said Sun will offer its customers indemnification against lawsuits arising from using its technology, a scenario that’s increasingly on the minds of corporate software buyers. “You, too, may have a Kodak moment,” McNealy said, referring to a $92 million payment Sun made to Eastman Kodak Co. last month to settle a patent infringement lawsuit over the Java programming language.

Sometimes the detail is nice too!

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Update on IBM Workplace

by eleanor on 15 Nov 2004 @ 9:27 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Here’s a snapshot of the current plan for IBM Workplace - IBM Workplace Changes in Store

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Microsoft takes stake in ADFS-enabling startup

by eleanor on @ 9:13 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Tonight I was at a Churchill Club event where I met Glenn Kesselman, director of channel and partner sales for Vintela, a Utah based company that works to bridge the conflicting identity management services of *nix and Microsoft. Glenn said they had big news coming out on the wires, and it turned out to be that Microsoft took a minority stake, with a cash infusion of “under $10m”.

For full details, Vintela: Microsoft’s Secret Unix/Linux Weapon?. This investment continues a positive relationship of co-development and joint sales/marketing efforts.

Tools like these help ease the pain of integration now, but I do wonder about Vintela’s long term strategy in the face of the Sun-Microsoft alliance - which is fueled by this exact issue. If big customers brought Sun and Microsoft to the bargaining table and extracted committments to deliver interoperability, it throws the long term viablity of Vintela’s product line in question. I can’t help but wonder if they would have been better off in an outright purchase.

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Security Report: Windows vs Linux | The Register

by eleanor on 2 Nov 2004 @ 9:22 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

UK tech site The Register has a report assessing the Windows-Linux security debate. Given the snarky character of the site (fondly called ‘El Reg’ by its regulars), this report seems biased in favor of Linux. It’s still an interesting examination of a complex issue and worth a read. Security Report: Windows vs Linux | The Register

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Microsoft announced “Whitehorse” product as competitor to UML modeling tools

by eleanor on 1 Nov 2004 @ 7:49 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

ArsTechnica comments on the ZDNet piece on Microsoft’s new project around developing a competing framework to the UML commonly in use todya by many large ISVs, saying:

Microsoft’s decision to shun the more commonly-used Unified Modeling Language in favor of a proprietary solution is a curious one. The software giant is apparently betting that by developing their own approach, developers will be able to take full advantage of Whitehorse using the new tools. This lets developers from different industries create their own modeling language designed for their unique specifications, constraints, and strengths.

With IBM’s acquisition of primary UML-tool developer Rational last year, Microsoft is likely responding with the increasing integration between IBM’s products and Rational tools. It does seem a shame for them to take another direction completely, but given the fact that Microsoft developers tend to raised in Microsoft environments (where Rational has not been strong historically) - this could be a win in terms of growing adoption of rigorous software development practices within Microsoft shops.

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SuSE Linux Gaining Traction

by eleanor on 28 Oct 2004 @ 8:23 pm in Enterprise IT | Open Source   ++

We have a couple reports of SuSE Linux gaining traction with Novell’s backing and enterprise experience. Bolstered by Novell ’s promises of continued support,
Dell has announced that it will offer SuSE Linux-Based PowerEdge Servers.

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‘Palladium’ Echoes in New Handheld Security Spec

by eleanor on @ 8:19 pm in Enterprise IT | Mobility   ++

‘Palladium’ Echoes in New Handheld Security Spec

Intel, IBM and NTT DoCoMo have released a specification to create a “trusted mobile platform,” which appears to take the foundation of Microsoft’s own trust initiative, “Palladium,” into the mobile space.

The three companies placed the Trusted Mobile Platform specification on the Internet for public review. An executive at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel said the company hopes to have TMP products on the market by 2005, although the timing will be heavily dependent on OEM participation.

Speculation is that someone among the handset manufacturers will jump on board in the near term. I’m not convinced that this is an enormous problem since handsets and carriers are quite well locked down today (see iscussion of the power struggles here).

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A Broader View of Currency

by eleanor on @ 7:31 pm in Enterprise IT | Strategy-Marketing | Mobility   ++

Douglas Rushkoff has a speculative piece, TheFeature :: Open Source Currency, on what the emergence of alternative electronic currencies could mean for the world at large. It’s brief and worth a reread, especially in light of the troubles experienced (and caused) by PayPal’s network outages of last week.

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That enterprise software licensing problem…..

by eleanor on @ 5:51 pm in Emergent | Enterprise IT | Strategy-Marketing   ++

At Symposium and increasingly in commentary and news, it’s apparent that the time-honored models of selling perpetual software licenses are breaking down. Customers are increasingly drawn to service providers and ASPs who sell ’software as a service’ — they sell access but not the intellectual property of the code.

To get a sense of the current mood, see eWeek’s report on discussions at the SoftSummit conference held last week in Santa Clara.

Also worth reading is this IDC report discussing the issue in a more academic way, focusing on the upcoming financial headaches for ISVs as their revenue streams are strained by disappearing upfront license payments.

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Was Gartner’s endorsement of SOA at Symposium newsworthy?

by eleanor on 27 Oct 2004 @ 9:14 am in Enterprise IT   ++

At the opening keynote at Gartner’s Symposium conference, I was struck by the opening panel’s announcment that SOA was the most important trend. Now, I’m not minimizing it - but the delivery of this was basically that the speaker (I think Gartner Distinguished Analyst, Gene Phifer) basically looked at the audience and pronounced “SOA” like it was new information and all the attenees - largely CIOs - needed to take away from the conference. Here’s “>the research piece Gartner produced to go along with their keynote theme.

I’m just surprised that they pronounced it as if it were unheard of in the industry, instead of the lively topic of hype that it already was (see such indications of preSymposium indicators of SOA’s importance as this Survey: SOA prominent on 2005 budgets) Still, the Gartner endorsement has let loose a more serious consideration of what SOA means by the tech media. Two pieces I found interesting are these from Infoworld - Coming to Terms with Service-Oriented Architectures - a more general, big picture piece - and Coming to Terms with Components - which gets more into the details of businsess models and implementations.

Sure, SOA is important, but it’s a concept, a framework not all that different than the vision behind CORBA back in the ’90s (and how successful was that? what about EJB?). The emergence of SODA (services oriented development of applications) as a methodology takes us one step further toward realizing this goal by giving us a path to follow. Make no mistake - implementing SOA involves rearchitecting applications, data centers, networks and systems. It can be implemented incrementally, as enterprises roll out new applications - but this fundamentally conflicts with the kind of projects enterprises are taking on. They’re largely incremental improvements and staged roll outs. The current climate in enterprise IT spending doesn’t point to a huge uptake in undertaking projects to implement SOA.

There are significant benefits to be gained from adoption of SOA and component-based web services. It reduces integration costs for future applications and for changes to the system - essentially increasing agility and adaptability. But we can’t forget that it involves building a fundamentally different infrastructure.

Now vendors are talking about this a lot. Package vendors are retooling their applications to include web services and support SOA - but that’s because SOA helps mitigate one of their harder-to-avoid sales objections - the sheer cost and disruption of upgrades and new installs. But we have to remember that what vendors want to sell and what customers want to buy can be quite different. Especially with lagging IT spending and a widely held sense that there is no ‘next big thing’ out there to drive spending, vendors are eager to hop on anything that will strengthen their selling propositon. And SOA - as a “revolutionary” approach to software development, integration and delivery - implies a multi-year investment cycle, similar in strength and scope to those seen with the migration to client/server and the web.

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Revisting chassis design

by eleanor on 24 Oct 2004 @ 10:31 pm in Enterprise IT | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Addressing the consumer side for a bit, we take a look at the quiet computing issue. As computers become increasingly integrated in the life of the average American home, fan noise, power consumption and form factor assume more importance in buying decisions and user satisfaction. Visit anyone with a Windows Media home system and you will be surprised by the audible hum of the processor. What works in the office or the den doesn’t work when projecting movies - the processor should not be audible over the sound of crickets. It interferes with the viewing experience.

Finally there’s growing momentum to adopt the BTX chassis, which is designed to maximize airflow over the hottest components (chips and graphics cards).

Vendors currently producing kit with this chassis configuration include IBM (ThinkCentre), Gateway (consumer-grade 700GR - see article here), and HP (Grantsdale-chip based dc7100).

I have yet to see a demo of these systems, but anything to bring entertainment convergence closer to the TV model should help to improve the customer experience and increase adoption. Could this be a way for the Windows Media home entertainment style boxes to be welcomed into living rooms?

For more information see eWeek article: Quiet Computing.

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Thin clients as model for simplifying user experience and security

by eleanor on @ 1:28 pm in Emergent | Enterprise IT   ++

In both conversations and in print, I can see that significant thought is being put into how to secure the typical user computing environment (from normal office workers to home computers). A recent

report from AOL and the National Cyber Security Alliance shows exactly how unsecure most home pc’s are: 80% of their participants had malware on their pcs.

Peter Coffee from eWeek offers a different perspective that looks at increasing automation and lack of choice (think Windows autoupdates) will alienate users and cause them to disable these critical utilities. His editorial piece addresss this perplexing issue, one that I am tracking as being a weakness of the installed-base desktop model. If systems, users, and enterprises move a rich client, server based, distributed model - there is essentially one installation to maintain. Things are patched once centrally, with each user’s system adjusting to the updates at their next login.
The logic of this progression is clear, as is the underlying math - we have ever bigger applications that require ever bigger patches. Security has finally become a concern for most users, so there is more traffic created by both the patches and the exploits. These patches are so enormous that they are unmanageable for dial up users, and onerous even for those on high speed connections.
Since we’re working off a 20-year old base for many core applications, rewrites from the ground up seem far less possible than a shift to a hosted model.
In the burgeoning software as a service model, perhaps one of the key benefits will be a shift in the mental state of users - they shift from expecting full control of their computer, to being tolerant of a web-based experience that someone else controls. ?

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MicrosoftWatch interviews Microsoft Watcher

by eleanor on 22 Oct 2004 @ 11:31 am in Enterprise IT   ++

See this interesting interview of Joel Spolsky (author of Joel on Software - a very good forum for software development issues). It’s little like eavesdropping on guys talking about last night’s game…. I’m tracking these issues because I am very curious what the true development path for Longhorn will be. The further it gets pushed back, and the more features are stripped from Rev 1, the further behind Microsoft is falling in terms of credibility and relevance. I am deeply concerned that Microsoft’s process capability to develop software has suffered as it has grown so large.

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