Lustratus LiteBytes

Lustratus has just published the 2010 edition of its popular infrastructure software market predictions. This year, highlighted areas include BPM, BRMS, Cloud Computing, SOA Appliances, Integration, Security and even software patent litigation.

Every year Lustratus goes through this exercise, trying to identify the key trends for the year. Perhaps the most traumatic part of the forecast is the scoring of the predictions from the previous year – always an opportunity for embarassment. Fortunately, Lustratus has had a pretty good record over the years.

This year Lustratus is highlighting trends such as the continuing success of business alignment software like BPM, the effects that Cloud Computing is likely to have on the market, the resurgence of interest in good old integration. The Lustratus predictions can be downloaded at no charge from the Lustratus web store.

Steve

So Progress Software has bought yet another software company; this time a BPM vendor, Savvion. But is this the right move for Progress?

Progress Software has spent most of its life growing through acquisition, making use of the piles of cash generated by its legacy mid-range database product to find new areas of growth. After all, the legacy business may be highly profitable, but its returms are dwindling by the year and Porgress desperately needs something else to shore up its balance sheet. Unfortunately its acquisitions have had a bit of a patchy record of success. Perhaps it will be different this time.

Savvion is a credible BPM (Business Process Management) software provider, and 2009 was a bumper year for BPM sales. Specialist companies like Pegasystems and Lombardi showed huge growth rates, bucking the downward trend triggered across many technology sectors by the economic upheaval. On top of this, Progress has been trying to establish itself as a viable SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and business integration vendor ever since it launched the Sonic ESB in the early years of the last decade, and BPM was a glaring hole in its portfolio. For these reasons, it is easy to see why Savvion would seem a good fit.

There seem to be two problems for Progress, however. Firstly, BPM is now rarely a solution bought in its own right – hence the rapid consolidation of the BPM market with Pegasystems more or less the only major oure-play BPM left standing following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi. Instead, BPM is deployed more and more as part of a business transformation strategy involving components such as SOA, application and data integration, business rules, business monitoring and business events management.  Secondly, the gorillas in the space are now IBM, Oracle and SAP. These companies all offer a full suite of products and more importantly services based around BPM and the rest of the modern infrastructure stack. Companies such as Software AG, TIBCO and Axway form a credible second tier, too.

In previous acquisitions, Progress has treated each acqusition as purely software products. This is not surprising, since selling databases is more about selling products than selling solutions. However, it is this factor that has been at the root of the patchy performance of Progress acquisitions. For instance, the Data Direct division of Progress, where it placed a number of acquisitions in the data space, has fared reasonably well. This is because it is more of a product business. However its attempts in areas such as ESBs and SOA governance have suffered due to a seeming reluctance to embrace a more industry-specific, services-based solution model.

With its acqusition of Savvion, Progress once again has the chance to try to show the market that it has learnt from its mistakes. BPM is absolutely an area where companies need to be offered solutions – products together with services and guidance to develop effective and affordable business solutions. It will be hard enough for Progress to cut a share of the BPM pie with all the big players involved, but it does have one outstanding advantage; it has a strong and accessible customer base in the mid-range market where the larger companies struggle. However, if it fails to take on board the need to hire industryvertical skills and solution-based field and service professionals then this acquisition could prove to be yet another lost opportunity.

Steve

IBM’s acquisition of ILOG has resulted in a great new opportunity to unlock the business value of CICS applications by turning the COBOL logic into easy-to-read/edit ‘business rules’.

IBM has taken the ILOG JRules Business Rules Management System (BRMS) and made it part of the WebSphere family. But even better for CICS users, IBM has made this business rules capability available for CICS applications too. This whole subject is discussed in more detail in a new and free Lustratus Report, downloadable from the Lustratus web store, entitled “Using business rules with CICS for greater flexibility and control”. But why is this capability of interest?

The answer is that many of the key business applications in the corporate world are still CICS COBOL mainframe applications, and although these applications are highly effective and reliable, they sometimes lack in terms of flexibility and adaptability. Not unreasonably, companies are loath to go to the expense and risk of rewriting these essential programs, but are instead looking for some technology-based answer to their needs for greater agility and control. The BRMS idea provides just that. Basically, the logic implementing the business decisions in the operational CICS applications is extracted and turned into plain-speaking, non-technical business rules, such as ‘If this partner has achieved GOLD certification, then apply a 10% discount to all transactions’. This has a number of benefits:

• It becomes easy for rules to be changed
• It becomes easy for a business user to verify the rules are correctly implemented
• If desired, business users can edit operational rules directly

While BRMS is a technology with a lot to offer in many scenarios, it seems particularly well suited to legacy environments, providing a way to unlock increased potential and value from existing investments.

Steve

IBM has agreed an acqusition of Lomardi, one of the few remaining pure-play BPM suppliers, with target of closing the deal in 2010.

 IBM has reaffirmed its position of strength in the burgeoning Business Process Management (BPM) space with this acquisition. Lombardi has three assets that IBM is particularly interested in; its human-centric BPM capabilities, its extensive professional services resources and its reputation and success with BPM at the departmental level.

For the uninitiated, business processes tend to span some or all of three distinct areas of usage – human-oriented processes, document-oriented processes and prorgram-oriented processes. Human processes involve such aspects as task lists that people use as they carry out their assigned tasks, document processes upgrade traditional paper-oriented models and program-based processes involve the dynamic interaction of applications. IBM has always been most experienced at dealing with program-to-program interaction, delivering its own WebSphere BPM offering. A few years ago it also acquired FileNet, a major player in document-based processing that had document-related BPM products. Now it is making the Lombardi acquisition to strengthen its human interaction BPM capabilities.

This is an exciting acquisition, closing out the weakest areas of IBM’s BPM solutions. However, the challenge for IBM will be to properly integrate the new product set with its existing BPM offerings. Frankly, IBM has not done a good job to date on this with its previous BPM acquisition of FileNet – IBM marketing collateral exhibits confusion over what are essentially two differnent product solutions that both claim to be BPM. Hopefully it will handle the Lombardi acquisition better.

Steve

I was on a call this week with Platform Computing, a well-known software vendor in the high-performance computing (HPC) world of grids and clusters that is now trying to make the leap to the Cloud Computing market.

Platform Computing has a strong reputation in the HPC world, selling software that helps manage these multi-processing environments, but it is keen to expand its market coverage and open up new opportunities in more general areas of IT, and it has selected the Cloud Computing marketplace to help it achieve these diversification aims. At first, this may seem odd, but a little thought quickly shows that this is not nearly as big a leap for Platform as it might at first seem. After all, internal clouds almost always involve virtualization, and handling the management needs of a virtualized environment is very much up Platform Computing’s street.

But for me, the real nugget that came out of this briefing was an interesting distinction that helps improve understanding of Cloud Computing and its relationship to Virtualization. I meet a growing number of people who have heard about Cloud, but do not see the distinction between Cloud and virtualization. While there are a number of ways to look at this distinction, as I discussed in my Executive Overview to Cloud which Lustratus offers at no charge from its web store, the discussions with Platform brought another one that I think is an interesting take. The Platform position is that virtualization solutions by definition only make virtualized resources available for usage. Its Cloud management software differentiates itself from virtualization by offering heterogeneous access to resources – that is, Cloud-based access to resources that have already been virtualized AND ones that haven’t. I think this is a useful distinction to keep in mind when looking at data centre strategies.

Steve

Over the past two years, a little Canadian company called Teilhard has been suing IBM, Microsoft, SAP and many others over a data exchange patent it acquired from JuxtaComm, but all parties have now settled.

I have occasionally blogged in the past on this case, regarding a patent from a company called JuxtaComm (now owned by Teilhard which is in turn owned by Shopplex.com) on a ‘System for transforming and exchanging data between distributed heterogeneous computer systems’ (US patent number 6,195,662). Legal activities were leading up to a November 2009 trial date. Many people have contacted me recently to try to find the current status, since there is little information available in the public domain and what is available in the blogosphere seems terribly polarized one way or the other. In answer to these frequent contacts, I thought I would post an update.

Firstly, the trial is off. All parties reached mutually acceptable settlement agreements, and these agreements included protection for all parties from future legal action. It should be noted that no information has been released by any party yet on the terms of these settlements. Settlements are exactly what they say – the dispute has been settled between the parties, for good. The only other point to note is that settlement amounts reflect the confidence and risk for each party in continuing to trial – therefore settlements can be large or they can be small or even zero. It all depends how strong each party thought its case was, and how much each was prepared to risk in terms of legal costs and potentially unexpected trial outcomes.

Secondly, as part of the pre-trial legal process, the judge involved formalized definitions for the terms involved in the patent, for example ‘script’. By choosing unusually wide-reaching interpretations for these terms which programmers would find highly eccentric, the result was that the patent applicability was increased dramatically from what it had originally covered, that is ETL (extract/transform/load). In the ‘script’ example, for instance, while the defence argued that a script was “a series of text commands’ that were interpretively run sequentially by the script processor”, the judge decided that a script meant “a group of commands”! However, the reason this is important is that subsequent to these definition rulings, the US patent office is now re-examining the patent for validity based on the new definitions. This work should be finished in the new year, and will have a bearing on future legal actions against new perceived infringers.

The big question to some, particularly those who own shares in the private Canadian company owning the patent now,  is how big or small the settlements are. As I said, this will be determined by a combination of risk, confidence and desire to avoid burning legal costs unnecessarily. On the plus side for the patent holder, the judge’s definitions strengthened the case substantially, making it far more wide reaching and therefore widening the impact on potential infingers. On the negative side there were an awful lot of examples of software that seemed to do the same thing as the patent describes which predated the patent, although in legal terms this sort of prior art does not necessarily invalidate the patent or law suits, apparently. But in the end, the truth is no-one knows whether settlements were huge or miniscule.

The only trustworthy sources for this settlement information in my view would be any formal announcements from any of the parties involved. For example, if a company has had to make a large payment for settlement, then depending on how much this payment is as a percentage of its turnover it might be legally required to make a statement about it in its SEC filings. Similarly, if the patent holder announces any substantial dividends then that would be another indication of settlement sizes, since the patent-holder makes very little revenue in software sales and therefore any significant profit would have to have come from patent settlements. Perhaps the next six months or so will make things a little clearer, but don’t hold your breath; as a private company, the only people Shopplex.com is required to keep informed is its own shareholders – it is not required to make any statements at all to the wider public.

Steve

In the “Cloud Computing without the hype – an executive guide” Lustratus report, available at no charge from the Lustratus store, one of the trade-offs I touch on is flexibility against complexity.

To be more accurate, flexibility in this case refers to the ability to serve many different use cases as opposed to a specific one.

This is an important consideration for any company looking to start using Cloud Computing. Basically, there are three primary Cloud service models; Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). In really simple terms, an IaaS cloud provides the user with virtual infrastructure (eg storage space, server, etc), PaaS offers a virtual platform where the user can run home-developed applications (eg a virtual server with an application server, database and development tools) and SaaS provides access to third-party supplied applications running in the cloud.

The decision of which is the most appropriate choice is often a trade-off. The attraction of SaaS is that it is a turn-key option – the applications are all ready to roll, and the user just uses them. This is pretty simple, but the user can only use those applications supplied. There is no ability to build new applications to do other things. Hence this approach is specific to the particular business problem addressed by the packaged application.

PaaS offers more flexibility of usage. A user builds the applications that will run in the cloud, and can therefore serve the needs of many different business needs. However, this requires a lot of development and testing work, and flexibility is restricted by the pre-packaged platform and tools offered by the PaaS provider. So, if the platform is WebSphere with DB2, and the user wants to build a .NET application for Windows, then tough.

IaaS offers the most flexibility, in that it effectively offers the infrastructure pieces and the user can then use them in any way necessary. However, of course, in this option the user is left with all the work. It is like being supplied with the raw hardware and having to develop all the necessary pieces to deliver the project.

So, when companies are looking at their Cloud strategies, it is important to consider how to balance this tradeoff between complexity/effort and flexibility/applicability.

Steve

At Lustratus we have been doing a lot of research into Cloud Computing, as have many firms.

I must confess the more I have dug into it, the more horrified I have become at the hype, confusion, miscommunication and manipulation of the whole Cloud Computing concept.

In the end, I decided the time was right for an Executive Guide to Cloud – defining it in as simple terms as possible and laying out the Cloud market landscape. Lustratus has just published the report, entitled “Cloud Computing without the hype; an executive guide” and available at no charge from the Lustratus store. Not only does the paper try to lock down the cloud definitions, but it also includes a summary of some 150 or so suppliers operating in the Cloud Computing space.

The paper deals with a number of the most common misunderstandings and confusions over Cloud. I plan to do a series of posts looking at some of these, of which this post is the first. I thought I would start with the Private Cloud vs Internal Cloud discussion.

When the Cloud Computing model first emerged, some were quick to try to define Cloud as a public, off-premise service (eg Amazon EC2), but this position was quickly destroyed as companies worldwide realized that Cloud Computing techniques were applicable in many different on and off premise scenarios. However, there has been a lot of confusion over the terms Private Cloud and Internal Cloud. The problem here is that analysts, media and vendors have mixed up discussions about who has access to the Cloud resources, and where the resources are located. So, when discussing the idea of running a Cloud onsite as opposed to using an external provider such as Amazon, people call one a Public Cloud and the other an Internal Cloud or Private Cloud.

This is the root of the problem. This makes people think that a Private Cloud is the same as an Internal Cloud – the two terms are often used interchangeably. However, these two terms cover to different Cloud characteristics, and it is time the language was tightened up. Clouds may be on-premise or off-premise (Internal or External), which refers to where the resources are. (Actually, this excludes the case where companies are running a mix of clouds, but let’s keep things simple). The other aspect of Cloud usage is who is allowed to use the Cloud resources. This is a Very Important Question for many companies, because if they want to use Cloud for sensitive applications then they will be very worried who else might be running alongside in the same cloud, or who might get to use the resources (eg disk space, memory, etc) after they have been returned to the cloud.

A Public Cloud is one where access is open to all, and therefore the user has to rely on the security procedures adopted by the cloud provider. A Private Cloud is one that is either owned or leased by a single enterprise, therefore giving the user the confidence that information and applications are locked away from others. Of course, Public Cloud providers will point to sophisticated security measures to mitigate any risk, but this can never feel as safe to a worried executive than ‘owning’ the resources.

Now, it is true that a Public Cloud will always be off-premise, by definition, and this may be why these two Cloud characteristics have become intertwined. However, a Private Cloud does not have to be on-premise – for example, if a client contracts with a third party to provide and run an exclusive cloud which can only be used by the client, then this is a Private Cloud but it is off-premise. It is true that USUALLY a Private Cloud will be on-premise, and hence equate to an Internal Cloud, but the two terms are not equal.

The best thing for any manager or exec trying to understand the company approach to cloud can do is to look at these two decisions separately – do I want the resources on or off premise, and do I want to ensure that the resources are exclusively for my use or am I prepared to share. It is a question of balancing risk against the greater potential for cost savings.

Steve

I am doing a lot of research into Cloud Computing at the moment, and spent an enjoyable morning with Salesforce.com, one of the largest Cloud vendors.

However, one thing that particularly piqued my interest was the discussion on Cloud lock-in. One of the most frequent concerns I hear from companies thinking about Cloud is that they are worried about vendor lock-in. After all, with Cloud being so new, what if you lock into a supplier who does not survive?

The discussions with Saleforce.com highlighted an interesting aspect to this debate. One of its offerings, force.com, provides a ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) cloud offering, where users are presented with an environment in the cloud complete with a whole host of useful tools to build their own applications to run int he cloud or customize existing ones. However, Salesforce.com offers its own programming environment which is “java-like” in its own words. This immediately raises the lock-in concern. If a company builds applications using this, then these applications are not portable to other Java environments, so the user is either stuck with Salesforce.com or faces a rewrite.

A bad thing, you might think. BUT Salesforce.com claims that the reason it has had to go with a Java-like environment is that this enables it to provide much improved isolation between different cloud tenants (users) and therefore better availability and lower risk. For the uninitiated, the point about Cloud is that lots of using companies share the same cloud in what the industry calls a multi-tenancy arrangement, and this obviously raises a risk that these tenants might interfere with each other in some way, either maliciously or accidentally. Salesforce.com has mediated that risk by offering a programming environment that specifically helps to guard against this happening, and hence differs from pure Java.

So, is this lock-in a bad thing or good? I don’t know whether Salesforce.com could have achieved its aims a different way, and I have to admit that to a cynic like me the fact that solving this problem ‘unfortunately’ locks you into the supplier seems a bit suspicious. However, this is irrelevant since the vendor is doing the work and has chosen its implementation method, which it is of course free to do. Therefore, the question facing the potential force.com user is simple – the strategic risk of being locked in to the supplier has to be balanced against the operational risk of possible interference from other tenants. Depending on how the user reads this balance, this will determine how good or bad the lock-in option is.

Steve

No-one can have missed the marketing and media explosion over Cloud Computing.

Vendors talk of nothing else in an attempt to hook onto this latest hype, and analyst and media firms have stirred the pot. However, although very early in its lifecycle, there really could be value in Cloud Computing in the future.

But the problem is no-one seems to be able to cut through all the conflicting messages to describe what the emerging Cloud Computing market actually looks like – UNTIL NOW! Danny Goodall, marketing strategistand gurru at Lustratus, has just published his Cloud Computing market landscape in the Lustratus REPAMA blog. The blog post includes a slide presentation that summarizes in simple terms the different Cloud Computing models, splits these models into easy-to-understand pieces and then helpfully lists a selection of vendors playing in each.

This presentation is well worth a read for anyone interested in Cloud Computing. For myself, I think I would like to be the first to propose a possible extra category to be included – a new Cloud Platform service, B2B. As communities move to Cloud, it is likely there will be more and more need for B2B linkage, and although Danny includes an Integration platform service which is similar in nature to B2B, B2B actually has specific requirements that would not fit in most integration services.

However, a great piece of work that should provide a strong base for understanding the developing Cloud Computing market.

Steve