As ESB vendors look for more reasons for users to buy their products, the Cloud model has emerged at just the right time. Companies looking to take advantage of Cloud Computing quickly discover that because of key inhibitors like data location, they are forced to run applications that are spread between the Cloud and the Enterprise. But the idea of hooking up the safe, secure world of the enterprise, hiding behind its firewall, and the Cloud which lies out in the big, wide and potentially hostile world is frightening to many. Step forward the ESB – multi-platform integration with security and flexibility, able to hook up different types of applications and platforms efficiently and securely.

More and more ESB vendors are now jumping on the ‘Cloud ESB’ bandwagon. Cast Iron, now part of IBM, made a great name for itself as the ESB for hooking Salesforce.com with in-house applications; Open Source vendor MuleSource has been quick to point to the advantages of its Mule ESB as a cost-effective route to cloud integration; Fiorano has tied its flag to the Cloud bandwagon too, developing some notable successes. Recently, for instance, Fiorano announced that Switzerland’s Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) had adopted the Fiorano Cloud ESB to integrate 70 on-premise applications with its Salesforce.com CRM system.

Over the next few months, we expect to see a growing number of these ‘cloud ESB’ implementations as more companies realize the potential benefits of combining ESBs and Cloud.

The latest set of predictions for 2011 can be found in this Lustratus Insight, available at no charge from the Lustratus store. However, one in particular deserves further mention. Lustratus predicts that in 2011 the use of Business Rules software (BRMS) will continue to grow rapidly.

To me, business rules represent the peak of business / IT alignment. For the uninitiated, the idea of Business Rules and Business Rules Management Systems is to enable a repository of rules to be created that control how the It implementation of business operates. These rules are written in non-technical (or at least non-IT technical) language, and can be authored and edited by business professionals. As a simple example, a bank might have a business rule governing how it charges its customers for their bank payments activities. This rule might say something along the lines of

“If payee is a personal customer, charge x per transaction. If payee is a business customer, charge y per transaction”.

Now, suppose the bank decides that it wants to have a marketing campaign to try to encourage more small businesses to start using its services. it might decide that as an incentive it will offer free payments processing for any business payments of less the £5,000. Most larger business clients would probably far exceed this number. Changing the IT systems to support this new initiative would involve no more than a business user editing the rule setting payment charges, and modifying it to

“If payee is a personal customer, charge x per transaction. If payee is a business customer and the amount is > £5000 then charge y per transaction. If payee is a business customer and the amount is <= £5,000 then set charge to zero.”

When the rule is altered, the BRMS would interpret this change into the necessary technical implementation to achieve the desired aims.

This is the root of Business Rules popularity. They provide the ultimate means for business users to change and adapt their business approach without having to involve heavy IT investment each time a change is made -efficient agility if you like. However, this business rules-based approach to IT implementation has another extremely useful by-product; it becomes much easier to demonstrate compliance with corporate or external policies and regulations. A compliance officer can review the easily-understandable business rules to validate that the company is correctly implementing regulatory requirements, without needing an IT translator.

I expect to see a lot of activity in 2001 in the area of Business Rules.

The only issue is that there is an element of catch-up here, since major BPM/SOA vendors like IBM and Oracle have had MDM capabilities for some time. But putting that aside, the fit between Data Foundations, Inc. and Software AG looks very neat. There is no product overlap to worry about, and the Data Foundations solution excels in one of the key areas that is also a strength for Software AG – that of Governance. Software AG offers one of the best governance solutions in the industry, built around its CentraSite technology, and Data Foundations has also made governance a major focus, which should result in a strong and effective marriage between the two technology bases. From a user perspective, MDM brings major benefits to business process implementations controlled through BPM technology, because the data accuracy and uniqueness enables more efficient solutions, eliminating duplication of work and effort while avoiding the customer relations disaster of marketing to the same customer multiple times.

Good job Software AG.

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.

On the face of it, this was a natural move for Vision. Its strength was in providing availability solutions based on IBM’s 64-bit Power servers. This market is a strong and inflential market, but is nowhere near the size of the Windows market. Also, since there are few players in the more specialist IBM Power market, Vision already holds a reasonable share. For growth, it was essential for Vision to do something. It had choices – it was already partnering with Double-Take to supply Windows to its IBM base, and had other partners for Linux. But by choosing to acquire Double-Take, it is definitely buying a Windows availability provider who also does Linux rather than the other way around.

My concern is that my instincts tell me the Linux market is going to be much more interested in availability than the Windows one. UNIX in general is a more secure and robust operating system than Windows, and therefore people using Linux may have greater expectations of availability, provided through file mirrors, backups, network switchovers and disaster recovery scenarios. In contrast, any user of Windows knows that the system is always going to have its availability problems – just think how many times you have to reboot when you use your own Windows laptop or desktop. The question is therefore; how strong and widespread is the demand for availability on Windows?

At some level, there is demand. For example, a lot of people would like their office data backed up so the can get it back quickly if there is a problem. But beyond this basic data level, it seems to me demand may be limited. Indeed, this seems to be backed up by the fact that in the past year or so Double-Take has suffered slowing growth and market pressures on its finances. Maybe Vision would have been wiser to acquire a Linux availability provider, like SteelEye Software for instance.

The cost advantages of putting all your desktop files and storage into the cloud are very persuasive, not to mention the attractions of access anywhere. But as Lustratus has pointed out before, there is a concern here. There are LOTS and LOTS of cloud suppliers – not unexpected when a new and radical idea comes along. But remember the real problem with cloud from the supplier’s side; the supplier has to put in all the investment in infrastructure up front, and then receives income in small per-user usage charges. This might look a great plan on a five-year basis with a rapidly expanding user base, but when year one or year two is tied to a period of tighter credit conditions it is easy to get over-extended. Look at G.host for instance, which went bust two or three months ago because it found its cloud no longer economical. Not a nice situation for all the people who had files and data living in it, although to be fair they got reasonable warning from the company.

The sensible thing to do is check the escape routes before you go in. Perhaps your cloud vendor will be fine, growing into the market leader with oodles of cash to invest in new infrastructure to sustain the huge number of users, but just maybe it might be one of the ones that doesn’t make it. Look at your back-up procedures, and put in place an emergency plan to avoid any disruption if the worst happens. And make sure above all that you do your due diligence before selecting your cloud.

The initial description to me was ‘adding PHP support for CICS transactions’. Now I am not so old that I do not understand the power of PHP, and its ability to quickly generate nice, modern interfaces for websites and the like. But my own experience of PHP is playing games on the Internet (“Sorry the server has crashed, the damn PHP code has gone pear-shaped again”)  and messing about building pages and making a mess of them. I therefore initially viewed the idea of PHP in CICS as a great way to take reliable applications and make them unreliable/unpredictable, while probably crashing the rest of the innocent CICS apps at the same time.

However, it turns out IBM is not stupid. The biggest point that relieved my fears is that the PHP support is provided in its own address space. Now, CICS is REALLY good at protecting different address spaces from hurting each other – in fact I was part of the team that delivered the multi-region operations (MRO) capabilities to I can vouch personally that this is the case.  So all of a sudden, what had me running screaming for the hills begins to sound like something quite exciting and yet also non-threatening. As I thought about it more (and talked to some people half my age who are PHP fans and really understand the sorts of things it can do) I began to realize how smart IBM has been here. This is a great way to provide a more flexible and rapid way to build jazzy front ends to CICS apps, extending their life sustantially. It also offers the modern wave of technical people an environment with which they are initmately familiar.

The upshot is, PHP support for CICS looks like a winner. There is no need to panic about disruption to operations, because of IBM’s smart thinking in isolating the PHP functionality, but on the other hand this support offers companies a way to leverage their CICS investments, keep the technology vital and alive, respond far more quickly to the need for more attractive interfaces enabling more efective multi-channel delivery and get the kids excited and contributing.

The report, entitled A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances focuses on Intel’s SOA Expressway, IBM’s DataPower range and Layer7′s SecureSpan SOA Appliance. In the report I compare and contrast the technical and strategic approaches each vendor takes to addressing the task of creating, managing, accelerating and securing a service oriented architecture using appliances.

The report can be found here.

Steve Craggs

While Cast Iron may only be a small company, the acquisition has major implications. Over the past few years, Cast Iron has established itself as the prime provider of Cloud to Cloud and Cloud to on-premise integration, with a strong position in the growing Cloud ecosystem of suppliers. Cast Iron has partnerships with a huge number of players in the Cloud and application packages spaces, including companies such as  Salesforce.com, SAP and Microsoft, and so IBM is not just getting powerful technology but also in one move it is taking control of the linkage between Cloud and anything else.

On the product front, the killer feature of Cast Iron’s offering is its extensive range of pre-built integration templates covering many of the major Cloud and on-premise environments. So, for example, if an organization wants to link invoice information in its SAP system with the Salesforce.com sales force environment,  then the Cast Iron offering includes prepared templates for the required definitions and configurations. The result is that the integration can be set up in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

So why is this so important? Well, for one, most people have already realized that Cloud usage must work hand-in-hand with on-premise applications, based on such things as security needs and prior investments. On top of this, different clouds will serve different needs. So integration between clouds and applications is going to be a fact of life. IBM’s acquisition leaps it into the forefront of this area, in both technology and partner terms. But there is a more strategic impact of this acquisition too. Noone knows what the future holds, and how the Cloud market will develop. Think of the situation of mainframes and distributed solutions. As the attractions of distributed systems grew, doomsayers were quick to predict the end of the mainframe. However, IBM developed a powerful range of integration solutions in order to allow organizations to leverage the advantages of both worlds WITHOUT having to choose one from the other. This situation almost feels like a repeat – Cloud has a lot of advantages, and some misguided ‘experts’ think that Cloud is the start of the end for on-premise systems. However, whether you believe this or not, IBM has once again ensured that it has got a running start in providing integration options to ensure that users can continue to gain value from both cloud and on-premise investments.

Steve

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