IBM

IBM-Sun talks on rocks? “Sun being Sun?”

It is opening day for baseball in the U.S. and blogger Dana Blakenhorn finds a suitable metaphor to describe the latest reported dealings of Sun and IBM. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported the two computer companies were near an agreement on a merger.

The rumor now is that a faction in Sun (one led by former CEO Scott McNealy) is pushing for more money from Big Blue. Further rumors have IBM reducing its offer. This all puts the proposed deal in something less than limbo.

Blogger Blakenhorn likens the situation to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ off-season negotiations with Manny Ramierez - a talented hitter of the baseball whose self-esteem seems to know no upper boundaries.

Over the winter, Ramierez walked away from a lucrative deal with the Dodgers, only to find there was not a wider market for his skills.

Eventually, Ramierez signed with the Dodgers for a deal somewhat less rich.

Blakenhorn suggests a similar outcome may yet transpire in the negotiations of IBM and Sun.

Related computer industry news
IBM and Sun reportedly in merger talks – SearchSOA.com, Mar. 18, 2009
If McNealy thinks he is Manny Ramirez, has another think coming – ZDNet Linux and Open Source blog

Compute cloud services cross chasm, analyst says

IT cloud services are “crossing the chasm,” argues Frank Gens of IDC. But what do enterprises want and expect from the new paradigm in software delivery? Continued »

Red Hat’s JBoss open source ’superplatform’ - Burton

Red Hat’s is transforming JBoss middleware into a “superplatform” providing an open source alternative to commercial offering from IBM WebSphere, Oracle, and SAP, writes Chris Hadad, analyst with Burton Group. Continued »

IBM re-architects SOA market strategy

IBM is ahead of the curve in providing vertical and horizontal service-oriented architecture products, but may be too far ahead of most of its customers, who are still in the early stages of SOA implementation, writes Dwight B. Davis at Ovum. Continued »

IBM vs. standards bodies?

Can major vendors buy standards bodies’ approval for specifications that support their products?

Continued »

XTP limits?

Extreme transaction processing (XTP) has limits that have nothing to do with its 500+ transactions per second performance.

The limits are in its applicability in applications, which may benefit from grid technology, but may not require extreme processing, says Mike Piech, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Continued »

XTP powers SOA

Extreme transaction processing (XTP) gets down to business in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications at AbeBooks.com, a Canada-based online bookstore, profiled in a SearchSOA user story earlier this month. The marketplace for books is using Oracle Coherence, a distributed in-memory data grid designed for XTP environments. A product of Oracle’s purchase of Java performance specialist Tangosol in 2007, Coherence automatically partitions data in-memory across multiple servers.

Continued »

Pearls of wisdom from SOA users at IBM Impact

It’s amazing what happens you put a few thousand SOA users together. Suddenly you start to get a clearer picture of what service orientation can achieve at both the business and IT levels. That was probably the biggest takeaway for this attendee at IBM’s Impact 2008 conference last week: a lot of users are well down the road with this stuff. They’ve thought about it, put it into action and it’s responsible for a significant amount of mission critical business.

(The other revelation was that the B-52s have a keyboard player who looks like Jose Canseco, but I digress.)

Here’s a smattering of comments made by SOA users at the show:

John Roach, director of architecture and governance at Wal-Mart, focused on using SOA to help manage store stock levels and customer demand. “If SOA doesn’t trace back to you finding the right thing when you walk into our store at the time you need it, then it isn’t material for us,” he said.

Kumar Murugan, application development manager at pharmaceutical manufacturer and marketer Novo Nordisk, talked about centralized policy management and stressed the need to view all SOA projects as part of a continuous process improvement cycle. He also highlighted the importance of having a rigorous QA process.

“You need to do a system discovery for any new service,” he said. “You need to understand how reuse affects your existing services.”

Manny Montejano, CTO at Cars.com, called governance “the key thing we need to resolve to be successful” as his company deals with explosive growth.

“It’s important to say no sometimes,” he said. “You have to let people know that some things are going to be more trouble than they’re worth.”

Anne McDiarmid, CIO for Australian fabric and crafts retailer Spotlight, made a case against trying to solve every problem with a software purchase.

“I’ve got middleware hanging out of my middleware,” she said. “I don’t need more middleware.”

A whirlwind of corporate acquisitions in foreign countries has created an integration challenge for SEB, a Swedish banking and insurance company. Enterprise architect Anders Jader targeted data as a key element in bringing together this international banking conglomerate.

“We are now in a phase where we need to transform everything into one data model and then be able to use that data as a service,” he said.

Tony John, domain lead architect at Allstate Insurance, echoed the importance of data in all things service-oriented, stating “we need more data analysts and data architects.” He noted that the bulk of a $30 million mainframe-to-SAP project “was spent on understanding the data.”

John also made the case that technologists have to understand the business they work for, not just how their niche of IT functions.

“No matter what machine or network it goes through, it’s still a group of people doing some business activity,” he said.

IBM showing off SOA’s impact

Things Kate Pierson surely never thought she’d say during a concert when the B-52s were taking off 30 years ago: “Happy birthday WebSphere!”

Now, THAT is what I call a mashup.

Artists who debut high on the Billboard charts plugging your products is also what happens when a company pulls off a big show, which is what IBM has done at Impact 2008. It’s easy to be cynical about these sorts of events. In fact, I’m paid to be cynical about pretty much everything. It’s a job requirement. Yet it’s impossible not to notice all the users in attendance and presenting in the sessions. Anyone who doubts whether SOA is happening at the corporate level only needs to spend an afternoon here and it will quickly prove that SOA is not only happening, but it’s happening in a big way.

After four days I’m starting to wonder if there’s a company that isn’t pursuing service-orientation. One interesting observation from a senior IT exec with whom I had lunch the other day was that a lot of his developers and IT ops people probably don’t even know the company is heading down the SOA path because the higher ups don’t use the term. The company just happened to build a loosely coupled, modular order-to-cash process. Only the folks with an enterprise architectural view tossed around the SOA acronym. Everyone else was working on an order-to-cash overhaul.

By the way, this is how SOA dies — not with obsolescence, but with ubiquity.

The event has also generated a ton of coverage. Dana Gardner has a great recap of the first day highlights in his BriefingsDirect blog. In it he’s got a killer quote from WebSphere GM Tom Rosamilia:

“You can do BPM without SOA, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” says Rosamilia.

I’ll note here that SearchSOA.com did a special report on this very topic two years ago. Business process management has always been a good idea, but without service orientation it’s largely unimplementable. How you compose those processes and manage them is critical.

In his OnStrategies Perspectives blog, Tony Baer recaps his conversation with IBM software head honcho Steve Mills about whether SOA is getting boring and then talks about the parallels between SOA and enterprise databases.

There’s yet another parallel between SOA and the evolution of databases. Twenty years ago, there were debates over whether SQL databases could handle the load and deliver the performance of legacy databases or file systems. The answer was throwing Moore’s law at the problem. Today, there are similar questions regarding SOA, because if Web services standards are used, that means a lot of fat, resource-hungry XML messages whizzing around. Mills’ answer is that there’s a glut of underutilized processing capacity out there and a crying need for virtualization to make that iron available for XML.

A lot of software-oriented folks tend to miss out on how much of a role hardware has to play in SOA. We’re talking about architecture here, not software. Hardware, networks, databases, storage — each one comprises a major component of the enterprise architecture. IBM’s talking about monster transaction volumes this week, the sort of thing you’d associate with TPF. So don’t be surprised if you’re in an app dev meeting in the future and you’re sitting next to the corporate mainframe guru and a data architect. Comfortably living within the artificial barriers created within IT shops is probably a luxury you won’t enjoy much longer. Those imaginary cubicle walls are coming down.

James Taylor has been a one-man Impact blogging machine this week over at Smart (enough) Systems. One entry covered a customer panel comprising Michelin, The Hartford, Health Care Services Corporation and the U.N.

Randy [Wallace from Michelin] discussed how far they had come from having a very small percentage of IT spend aligned with key business goals (6%) to one that is much more so (81%). For instance, in the past business units in different regions picked i2 and Manugistics at the same time and both were implemented resulting in separate systems. A stronger governance process and overall architecture are now established, driven by business ambitions and regularly updated. Far fewer and more focused projects as a result. Senior executive user satisfaction has risen steadily.

Here’s where I note Michelin sells tires. We’re not talking about a financial services company that stands to make a killing if it can combine information in new and dynamic ways or some Web business. These folks have a supply chain, logistics and customer care to manage and they’re finding value in SOA. This is why I really start to wonder who isn’t doing this stuff. It’s working in the tire business. The tire business!

Floyd Marinescu has a great summary of IBM’s “Smart SOA” vision up at InfoQ. In it, he lists five SOA best practices that IBM showed off a few times during the event.

1. Linking business and IT from the beginning. Set the business vision first and see how IT can support it.
2. Develop an architecture with a vision for the future. Not just one that will satisfy one process or one LOB, but something that can work over time.
3. Skills and culture, governance.
4. Scalabilty and process integrity – how do you plan for the spikes?
5. Maintain end-to-end operational visibility

That’s a solid list. I’ll add one of my own, make the QA folks a central player in all of this. I don’t think I’ve spoken with one person over the past year who claimed to have a working SOA who didn’t tell me that service-oriented QA was essential. You’ve got to know what to test, what architectural principles need to be followed and whether your service can be expected to meet its service-level agreements. From everything I hear, it’s one thing to say that, but no mean feat to do it.

As such, it won’t surprise me overly much if at Impact 2009, IBM is pounding away on the theme of quality SOA.

And speaking of new themes, there was a presentation on “Green SOA” that I admittedly didn’t make, but there is a summary of the presentation up at Greenmonk Associates blog. The nut of the case made by RedMonk’s James Governor for “Green SOA” is:

My argument at the event is basically that if SOA is a means to better alignment between IT and the business, then we should also drive sustainability into the mix. Componentising services gives you freedom to leave, for example, potentially allowing you to swap a provider out for a greener, or more importantly from a bottom line perspective, more energy efficient service.

Now that is what I call a forward-thinking take on the whole consumer-provider relationship. At the end of the day, that’s what SOA is: an arrangement between producers and consumers. People classically think about it in IT terms. IBM is pitching it in pure business terms, but the model can be extended beyond that. Choice is perhaps the greatest product of a truly decoupled world and, as Governor points out, profit isn’t the only choice on the menu.

Big Blue sMashes into Web 2.0

At its Impact 2008 event, IBM today launched a REST-based development environment called WebSphere sMash, based on its open source Project Zero. sMash supports both the PHP and Groovy scripting languages, the latter was chosen in order to “attract the Java developers,” according to Jason McGee, IBM distinguished engineer and chief architect for WebSphere sMash.

It creates a serverside runtime for RESTful services. The browser-based development tools allow for REST-based components to be exposed via Ajax with the Dojo toolkit. McGee said the goal of the project had been to create a simple, intuitive component model for developers looking to create RESTful services. There is a developer guide, which goes into the nitty-gritty on runtime management, RSS/ATOM support, REST API documention, configuring data access and dozens of other topics.

Some good news for those looking to do more with REST development is that sMash won’t be a standalone REST offering inside the Big Blue product ocean.

“We look at REST enablement as a core capability across the IBM portfolio,” said Kareem Yusuf, director of product development for WebSphere sMash. WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo made the same vow, promising that REST support will be driven across IBM’s platforms, particularly on the SOA front.

“We’re systematically going through our product line and REST-enabling everything from MQ to CICS, DB2, WebSphere Application Server and on and on. This liberates these products and the content they represent to the Web,” Cuomo said. “With all that content dangling out on the Web, programmers can now agilely write new applications by interacting with those programs.”

Using sMASH coders can mashup content and then deploy it as a Web application, he explained. Mashups developed with the Project Zero technology also lend themselves to being hosted in a Software as a Service (SaaS) mode, Cuomo said.

“So Zero as a service is the next thing on the horizon,” he added.

The scripting language support should lower the barriers to entry for developers looking to try sMash.

“It’s not a new language people have to learn,” McGee said.

A limited community version will be available through the Project Zero website and the full version, with support, will be available on a license model.

For a developer level take, check out the TSS.com discussion of the sMash release.

Joining sMash in the Web 2.0 offering mix is a new product called IBM Mashup Center, designed for non-technical line of business users. It combines Lotus Mashups technology on the front end with the InfoSphere MashupHub on the back end. Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web interaction hubs at Lotus, said the product is designed to put mashup technology in the hands of knowledge workers, enabling them to pull information out of enterprise applications (like ERP and CRM) and combine that with market data and other 3rd party applications.

“The differentiator is we know where all that information is at,” Bowden said, noting that mashup development has become a hotbed for venture capital investment.

A visual wizard tool will allow users to create RESTful services and widgets without having to know specific programming languages.