First it acquired Cast Iron, the leading provider of appliances for use in Cloud Computing, and now it is buying Netezza, one of the top suppliers of data warehouse appliances. Netezza has built up an impressive market presence in a very short time, dramatically accelerating time to value for data analytics and business intelligence applications. In addition, it has continued to extend its DataPower range, with the addition of a caching appliance and the particularly interesting ‘ESB-in-a-box’ integration appliance in a blade form factor. For any doubters, IBM has clearly stated its intentions of making appliances a key element of its strategic business plans.

This just leaves the question of why. Of course the cynical answer is because IBM must see itself making a lot of money from appliances, but behind this is the fact that this must indicate that appliances are doing something really useful for users. The interesting thing is that the key benefits are not necessarily the ones you might expect. In the early days of appliances such as firewalls and internet gateways, one key benefit was the security of a hardened device, particularly outside the firewall.  The other was commonly performance, with the ability in an appliance to customize hardware and software to deliver a single piece of functionality, for example in low-latency messaging appliances. But the most common driver for appliances today is much broader – appliances reduce complexity. An appliance typically comes preloaded, and can replace numer0us different instances of code running in several machines. You bring in an appliance, cable it up and turn it on. It offers a level of uniformity. In short, it makes operations simpler and therefore cheaper to manage and less susceptible to human error.

Perhaps it is this simplicity argument and its harmonization with current user needs that is the REAL driving force behind IBM’s strategic interest in Appliances.

This is good news for SOA implementers, but also introduces an interesting new stress point for IBM. Back in 2007 I was on a podcast where I identified the five SOA security traps, one of which was the XML problem. To summarize, most virus and other threat detection solutions look at the datastreams coming into the system and identify threat signatures that indicate the presence of some noxious code, but unfortunately they cannot see inside the XML wrapper, so to all intents and purposes the contents of any attached XML file are invisible. This offers the opportunity for malicious agencies to pop in some nasty code into the XML content and smuggle it through the security gates to the enterprise. Of course, it is not immediately obvious how this would help, in that getting this code executed might not be so easy, but hackers are smart….therefore it is best to close this exposure.

One way to close the window is simply to forbid any XML file sharing, but since industries such as healthcare now more or less rely on this to conform to industry standards and regulations, this is not really practical. The new Ultramatics product claims to be able to protect from these types of intruders. It runs on the IBM DataPower XI50 Integration Appliance, providing a hardware-based shield that can see into the XML files and weed out anything unpleasant. This solution will be very valuable to many SOA companies worried about security.

But there is something else interesting in the product details. The datasheet for the product says it can be used (in conjunction with IBM’s MQSeries) to:

Create a SOA ESB that can perform routing, transformation and protocol mediation functions

This is intriguing. Of course, the idea of an ESB appliance is not new, but the interesting point is that IBM is supplying this capability through the Ultramatics product…..I wonder if the other IBM ESBs, WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Message Broker, see this is encroachment?

Steve