Archive for August, 2004

A well-specified problem set

Kelly Martin, of the security firm SecurityFocus, offers up an extremely clear view of the problem plaguing the Internet in his article,
The polluted Internet. Essentially what Kelly does is to offer a product spec for an as-yet undesigned product.

Kelly’s article describes the current state, which is manageable really for neither pro- nor novice users. But what is really thought provoking is to follow his line of thought through to mobile systems. Imagine your phone or device getting pinged that often. Imagine today’s current wireless infrastructure, which already can show strains of high usage.

This problem of users with unsecured computers ins’t going to go away with the release of Windows XP SP2, or even Longhorn. I think it will be eventually necessary to evolve locked-down but flexible systems that are hosted, where applications are provisioned as needed and all security and data cleansing done at the server. But we’ll see.

Meta on IBM’s Lotus Workplace

David Yockelson of the Meta Group with Matt Cain in a MetaView audio briefing. More information, the audio stream, and the slides can be found here.

David:  Matt, how are you doing today?
Matt:  I’m well, thank you, David.

David:  Well I’m glad to hear it. For this Meta View, we’re going to talk about Lotus Workplace and I could succinctly put this as, this is the summary… well, I guess this is two things, it’s a summary and it’s a look forward at what IBM is doing post Notes, and along with Domino. But it’s also a way for IBM to better work WebSphere into the picture and have it intermingle, if not co-exist with Domino.
Matt:  That’s right, David. Now, be careful, I think you said “post Notes”, and, so the firs thing that IBM wants you to understand is that there is no “post Notes”. And so they will clearly continue to maintain Domino at least until the end of this decade. And that’s interesting because clearly this is a message they want to get out because some of the earlier messages around this whole strategy suggested at one point that there would be more or less a forced migration over to the Workplace environment from the Domino environment. And so the first point here is really very important, that after years of conflicting messages about the relationship between Domino and WebSphere, there’s now a clear strategy and what that strategy really is is that Domino applications will become integrated with Workplace services and that new development and collaboration services are hosted on WebSphere.
Now what we believe, David, is at work here, is that ultimately what IBM really wants is to get the very large Domino customer base moved over to WebSphere Portal server. And now, what we believe is that the final bullet point - and IBM I think takes issue with it quite frankly - but we think that future Domino development will really be focused in smoothing integration with the WebSphere strategy and the Workplace strategy, at the expense of any groundbreaking functionality improvements to the core Domino platform. So we think, although IBM will continue to manage and maintain Domino for some time to come, certainly through the end of the decade, we think they’re going to put more time, effort, money and functionality on the Workplace side. So therefore kind of providing a carrot to the installed base to migrate over to the Workplace environment.

David:  OK, so we’ll look at that in a second, and I’ll take a position that that is not necessarily a bad thing, but first, it’s a good thing I said Notes, and not Ray Ozzie or Iris, because then we’d go way back. But let’s go on to the next slide, and you’re going to talk a little bit about what we call Knowledge Worker Infrastructure (KWI) frameworks. Now, to the point you made a second ago, where IBM is essentially placing its bets and world focus, now one could argue that focusing in and around the portal, given it’s ability to drive context, and aggregate and manage and perhaps to ultimately lead the end users and lead IBM through an ability to create wonderful composite applications, and so on, would be the right bet to make. But why don’t you walk us through what goes into this particular KWI framework and what does that mean.
Matt:  Yeah, that’s right, David. So, there’s no doubt about it, that the portal certainly is a natural aggregation point for applications, info, for data, collaboration and so it is important to note that we like the IBM strategy, but, by the way, portal is really just one center of gravity that you can talk about for Knowledge Worker Infrastructure, and that includes collaboration. Microsoft is really approaching at it really from an Office centricity standpoint. Then you have content guys like an OpenText or Documentum that tend to say collaboration and other KWI assets really should be focused around documents and content. And then you have enterprise app guys, like Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, who say hey, we’re kind of the center of gravity there. So portal is really just one of four different centers of gravity that you can look at for the foundation of your KWI which includes collaboration.
Now looking specifically at the IBM strategy, what we find here, on the left side, basically is old Domino, and of course it does have its own applications, like SameTime and QuickPlace for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration of course. And then on the right hand side, we’re looking at Lotus Workplace. And the first thing to note is that Workplace has different modules for different instantiations, so there are separate modules for email, for learning for collaboration, for content management. There will be more.
Now underneath that is WebSphere Portal DNA. Now we’re careful there, because you don’t get a full WebSphere Portal license. It does utilize quite a bit of WebSphere code, but again, it’s not necessarily a full license, though there are some different packaging you can buy.
Now underneath, basically you have the WebSphere App Server and then DB2 as a core store, a directory, and then we believe that over time Tivoli will be increasingly used for managing this environment.
David:  Sure, it makes sense. And just as a point of clarification in terms of the Portal DNA, I would suspect, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that some of the things you don’t get along with this are the (?Critical Fusion?) or reportlets that are available or the packaged integrations to other applications.
Matt:  Yeah that’s exactly right. Some of the middleware stuff and other things.
And so, why is IBM doing this? Well, to a certain extent it doesn’t make sense for the Software Group to manage and maintain two separate stacks and they know that DB2, Tivoli, and WebSphere are their strategic products moving forward. So if they can basically move to kind of one code base over time that is, of course, to their advantage. It goes without saying that this is all a J2EE environment, and of course that’s the core part of the IBM strategy moving forward. It certainly is logical.
And let’s face it, David, that Domino came out, what?, in 1989 I believe, so we’re talking about a 15 yr old product. So basically what we would suggest is that if you think about IBM’s overall Knowledge Worker Infrastructure strategy, it’s really very much focused on the portal.

David:  Ok, so now given that you gave us a little bit of a preview at, say, a 20,000 foot level, of Workplace. Next slide, walk us through a little bit more of the nuts and bolts of the Workplace client, and what goes on there.
Matt:  The workplace client is interesting from a number of perspectives. Basically, I believe that what we’re looking at here is IBM’s long term plan to basically get some real estate back on the client, they were really pushed off by Microsoft. And all the sudden they recognized that with Longhorn coming from Microsoft, and that’s really going to be a fairly dramatic change, if they could have a very flexible and low cost management client that would sit on top of your existing Windows so that you don’t have to upgrade your Windows, and it would sit on top of Linux, so they could certainly begin to enjoy the benefits of that should Linux really begin to escalate its presence on the desktop.
They will be well positioned to come back on the desktop, and some of the components that we have with this Workplace client… First of all it is based on a lot of open source Eclipse components. Eclipse originally was a development environment, an IDE, but since it’s been repurposed more toward the client end and you have something called the Open Services Gateway Initiative that allows you in real time basically to download and upload services that are going to be requisite for whatever task is at hand. So it’s not a fat client, basically it loads in real time but it does have some persistent components, like a Cloudscape database, which would allow you to take all of the backend Workplace components offline. And so this is essentially kind of a fat client, but has the attributes of browsers as well.
You have the Lotus folks that are contributing things like the system tray and the status bar. You’ve got some IBM-specific components. And of course, they’re going to have some office plug-ins to make it somewhat compatible with MS Office. And over time, David, what they’ll be doing is actually taking the Notes client functionality and wrappering it into Workplace. And so at that point in time, basically, you can have one client for both Domino on the back end and Workplace on the back end. So you can start to see some of those integration strategies.
What I would suggest to listeners is, as you contemplate the IBM strategy, you’re also going to have to look at the impact on the client, oddly enough, but this is a very intriguing client play that they’re making here.

David:  OK - so from the client, let’s extend almost every place, go on to the next slide, and we’ll look at what is the IBM collaboration story four years from now.
Matt:  That’s right David, I got my crystal ball out and I rubbed it around and this is what I saw. The first thing to mention here is that we do see some common elements here between the Domino legacy and the Workplace stuff. So we would expect to see common message hygiene services - spam blocking, virus blocking - for both mail systems, common management, common LDAP directory, common authentication, common backup, so there is some efficiencies to be gained when you are running both with common elements.
We still suspect that most organizations will still have a large number of Legacy Domino applications, and one of the very interesting things here to note is that one would kind of assume that, let’s say, calendar services from Domino calendar and Workplace calendar would work together - but they don’t. The integration will be through something called iCal, the iCal standard, which isn’t the greatest. And one would also assume that IM would work flawlessly across SameTime and Workplace Collaboration, and the answer is no, it won’t. You’re going to need a SIP gateway in between. So you can see that the Workplace stuff is basically brand new stuff.
And of course, over on the Workplace side we see J2EE apps and you may take Domino apps and run them as JSR168 applications on top of that platform. We’ve got some more generic modules like Workplace Learning, but some specific Workplace modules for things like Business Controls.
And then of course, what we see beginning to create a common access layer is really the portal services that we’ve talked about. When you utilize the full Portal Server license, you do get access to the portlet library we mentioned before as well as the middleware and kind of we’ll have to assume that we’re really talking about a Workplace client here that will, again, act as a common interface to two back ends.
The notable point here, David, is that nothing has been superseded here. You’re really managing a dual system environment and despite the common elements, still no one wants to manage two environments when you could manage one. And so over time we think the Domino side will start to fade out and we’ll see more and more investment on the Workplace side.

David:  OK, so there’s certainly opportunity for people to take a bet and in some cases, as you’re saying, it would make sense for people to move in one direction, or in only one direction. Now, moving to a different crystal ball, looking at Domino development, what do you think happens there?
Matt:  Well, it’s interesting, because if you think about Domino developers today, they’re typically associated with the business unit and that they’re outside of the core AD function, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that they can bat out applications really rapidly that business people love, and on the other hand there’s the lack of standards…
David:  It’s not exactly a growing market.
Matt:  It’s not a growing market, and it leads to a lot of redundancy, and quite frankly, a lot of inappropriate Domino applications. And really, traditionally it’s been things like Domino Designer and Lotus Script. Over time of course, if you move into a J2EE environment, now all of a sudden, we’re talking not about knowledge of Domino, but of WebSphere App Server, the Portal Server, Tivoli Management, and high-falutin things like MQSeries, and requiring DB2 DBA people and development…. From a skills transfer, central IT development function, now you’ve got a range of services depending on a particular application. But David, I will tell you that in my opinion, the greatest challenge for IBM to get people to adopt the Workplace environment comes down to this: Domino has a great rapid application development environment. If you try to write the same application in J2EE, you can, but what might be weeks in a Domino environment, would be months in a J2EE environment. So I talk to many many Domino shops, and they say that until they get that same AD capability in Workplace, we’re going to be a little suspicious. And so therefore the challenge, the onus on IBM is really to develop this rapid application development environment on top of a J2EE framework.

David:  Yeah, and I think a piece of that, just to move it up a level, but one of the popular and convincing things about Domino applications is that they always had, and you could argue good-bad, but it always had workflow built into it. In other words they were very tight into process. And there really isn’t much, there certainly isn’t anything in the native J2EE environment to do that, so the other thing that’s incumbent would be for IBM to bring that along. Whether it’s a sense of industry process, something at a slightly lower level in terms of specific business process, but something that will, in addition to the look and the feel and the underlying logic, something that can move things along and get work done. That was a hugely appealing piece of the Domino puzzle.
Matt - Right, said another way, Domino apps have always been great for routing and tracking. And they need to bring that to J2EE.

David:  OK, so bottom line for us, what should clients do in the future?
Matt:  The first thing to note clearly is to thoroughly understand this Workplace strategy and what has been all over the map for the last couple years. I think they’ve got a good strategy. They all seem to be singing out of the same hymn book these days and time is ripe to go and get briefed and to really understand the strategy and the implications at the infrastructure level, the development level, and the applications. And certainly understand it’s inherent portal centricity, You also may want to play around with your own sketch, which is, what would our environment look like if we were to invest in Workplace a couple years out, and that needs to part of a strategic Knowledge Worker Infrastructure plan.
We talked a little bit about the different centers of gravity in terms of portals and Office and process applications, as well as content applications, you know, clearly understand those dynamics (ek there’s a good opportunity for some research here). And then look at your Domino infrastructure, do an inventory of your developers and your applications and look at how people use it. Would it be applicable in a Workplace environment? Certainly be aware of the skill sets and the political implications of a shift from Domino to Workplace. Again, just looking at the developers, that could be very political, where they end up and to whom they report to.
Also I would suggest that, even though IBM is making some fairly broad claims about the fact that you can swap in Oracle for DB2 or you could use a BEA App Server, we’re a little skeptical of that and we need to see more of that before we’re entirely convinced. And also this is a bold new world for IBM so we would suggest that everyone take with a grain of salt promised release dates and product maturity as you would with any vendor these days. David, that’s basically the quick tour of what we’re thinking these days.

David:  Ok, so it sounds like there’s certainly a lot of promise but also potentially some pain, or at least work to do, whether it’s relative to migration or whether it’s relative to skill sets, trying to discern what sort of applications should live in which environments. So lots of decisions for our clients to make.
Matt:  Precisely so.

David:  Well, thanks very much, and for all those listening, thanks very much and that was today’s Meta View.