LiteBytes from Lustratus Research

SOA success, and what causes it

I was recently pointed to an articlein Mainframe Executive magazine written by David Linthicum on the subject of "Mainframe SOA: When SOA Works/When SOA fails". I think the friend who suggested I read it was making mischief, knowing my views on the subject of SOA and guessing (correctly) that this article would wind me up.

In summary, the article says that SOA is a large and complex change to your core architecture and working practices and procedures, and that the success or failure is dictated by questions such as executive buy-in/resourcing/funding/skills, and not technology selection.

"The truth about success with SOA is that it has little to do with the technology you want to drag into the enterprise to make SOA work, and more to do with the commitment to the architectural changes that need to occur"

I have two problems with the opinions stated in this article. The first is to do with changing attitudes to SOA, and the second with the technology comments. 

Let me first state that I am well aware that if a company wants to adopt an enterprise-wide SOA strategy designed to take maximum long-term benefit from this new way of leveraging IT investments, then this requires all ofthe areas brought up in the article to be addressed - skills, management buy-in, political will, funding and a strategic vision coupled with a tactical roadmap. I have no beef with any of this.

But I would contend that the world has changed from two years ago. The financial constraints all companies are experiencing have more or less forced the long-term strategic play onto the back burner for many. Some analysts actually like to claim that SOA is dead, a statement designed to be controversial enough to gain attention but to some extent grounded in the fact that a lot of companies are pulling back from the popular SOA-based business transformation strategies of the past. In fact, SOA is absolutely not dead, but it has changed. Companies are using SOA principles to implement more tactical projects designed to deliver immediate benefits, with the vague thought of one day pulling these projects together under a wider strategic, enterprise-wide SOA banner. 

So, as an example, today a company might look at a particular business service such as 'Create Customer', or 'Generate Invoice', and decide to replace the 27 versions of the service that exist in its silos today with a single shared service. The company might decide to use SOA principles and tools to achieve this, but the planning horizon is definitely on the short term - deliver a new level of functionality that will benefit all users, and help to reduce ongoing cost of ownership. While it would have been valid a few years ago to counsel this company to deliver this as part of an overarching shift to an SOA-oriented style of operations, today most companies will say that although this sounds sensible, current circumstances dictate that focus must remain on the near term.

The other issue I have with this article is the suggestion that SOA success is little to do with the technology choice. Given that the topic here was not just SOA but mainframe SOA, I take particular exception to this. There are a wide range of SOA tools available, but in the mainframe arena the quality and coverage of the tools vary widely. For example, although many SOA tools claim mainframe support, this may in actuality simply be anMQ adapter 'for getting at the mainframe'. Anyone taking this route is more than likely to fail with SOA, regardless of how well it has taken on the non-technical issues of SOA. Even for those SOA tools with specific mainframe support, some of these offer environments alien to mainframe developers, thereby causing considerable problems in terms of skills utilization. It is critical that whatever technology IS chosen, itcan be used by CICS or IMS-knowledgable folk as well as just disributed specialists. Then there is the question of how intuitive the tools are. Retraining costs can destroy an SOA project before it even gets going.

For anyone interested, there is a free Lustratus report on selecting mainframe SOA tools available from the Lustratus store. However, I can assure companies that, particularly for mainframe SOA, technology selection absolutely IS a key factor for success, and that while all the other transformational aspects of SOA are indeed key to longer term, enterprise-wide SOA there are still benefits to be gained with a more short-term view that is more appropriate in today's economic climate.

Steve      

IBM 1Q09 results implications

When I posted last week on looking ahead to the IBM first quarter results, I put my head on the block by stating that I felt the results would hold up pretty well. The formal results were announced yesterday, and I am pleased to say I live to look into my crystal ball another day, at least when discounting the effects of swinging currency markets.

Firstly, I had suggested that the IBM services arm would probably benefit from users wanting to cut costs and looking for help to do it. In fact, IBM claims that overall signings were up 10% at constant currency, and up 27% in the larger projects category. This bodes well for future revenue recognition as these projects flow through. I had also pointed to the desire for quick hit benefitsdriving the IBM WebSphere-based SOA offerings such as BPM, and indeed while overall IBM software was down 6% (up 2% at constant currency), WebSphere revenues grew 5% (14% at constant currency). My forecast was that hardware would take a bit of a hit, but that this shouldn;t damage the overall numbers too much. Once again this seems to be borne out in the IBM announcements, pointing to a 23% drop (18% at constant currency) of its Systems and Technology segment where the hardware products live. However, overall this had little adverse impact on IBM's overall figures as predicted because IBM has swung its business model much more heavily in favour of software and services now. 

Looking ahead, these results can only be good news for IBM, even though revenue at common currency was down 4%. From a global market perspective this should also prove encouraging to other IT vendors, particularly those with investments in the high-growth enterprise middleware area and those providing advisory professional services. However, companies reliant on hardware revenues will probably suffer most. 

The final interesting point was that IBM claims it is sitting on $12B cash in hand....I wonder what it plans to do with all that money at a time when assets are cheap and it has just missed out on SUN....

Steve 

Looking ahead to IBM 1Q09 results

IT market watchers are eagerly awaiting IBM's 1Q09 results, to be announced in the next few days, anxious to see how IBM is finding the current global market conditions. Putting my own neck on the block, I suspect the results will look pretty good despite the economic downturn. There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, Lustratus is seeing a lot of users looking for professional services assistance in reducing IT costs and increasing flexibility and agility. This is pretty natural in a downturn. Doing more with less is obvious, but also companies are looking to expand their customer bases into new markets with new offerings as quickly as possible to shore revenues up, driving the need for better agility and adaptability. This plays into IBM's hands with its extensive services experience, so services revenue could well hold up OK.

Secondly, one thing users ARE looking for at the moment seems to be quick hits - do something that isn't too costly and is not a major architectural shift to get a fast return. As I have blogged about before, BPM (Business Process Management) and Business Events processing offer two areas that fit beautifully with this need - and note this is not the BPM where a company sets about rewriting all its processes, but instead BPM targeted on fast return, pragmatic sweet spots. Both BPM and Events will tend to drag in SOA requirements (although again at the pragmatic rather than 'change the world' level) which is another strong area for IBM. Although other companies such as Oracle and SAP offer technology in these areas, the advantage of being able to link the products to services engagements from IBM's massive services arm to help aim the investment most effectively is a big one for IBM. Given that IBM also has a large portion of software revenue on 'contract' basis, this means the software revenues should hold up well too.

Hardware may have taken a bit of a ding in 1Q09, but this is unlikely to do too much damage to the overall numbers.

So, a reasonable set of results to come from IBM? We shall see.....

Steve

Ultramatics works with IBM to defuse SOA security threat

Ultramatics has just announced SOA SafeGuard product, which is designed to shut one of the major SOA security holes - the opportunity to inject virus and other malware threats through XML file sharing. 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 datasheetfor 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  

Vendors like to back standards - as long is it is in their interests!

I was reading Danny Goodall's post on his strategic marketing blog about standards-based marketing, and it brilliantly illustrated a point that I think is often experienced in the software marketplace - some vendors rush to back standards and push them, but only to the point that they fit with their own goals.

The example Danny discusses is Sonic Software, part of software vendor Progress. Sonic is well known as the first software vendor to use the ESB acronym (Enterprise Service Bus), and did indeed peddle the standards message hard asDanny, the marketing guru behind Sonic's early success, remembers:

"All the while I was creating marketing programs that stressed Sonic's commitment to standards and, by implication, I was de-positioning other vendors' technologies as being the Devil's spawn due to their reliance on proprietary features. "How," we asked "would organisations ensure interoperability between their, and their trading partners' infrastructures if they didn't conform to the emerging standards?""

Of course the standards message is very attractive to users. Buyers are keen to be able to ensure that not only can components interoperate without a lot of extra work, but also that vendor lock-in is weakened through the ability to substitute components from different suppliers, bringing prices down and reducing risk. Therefore, vendors that preach standards may come across initially as 'good guys'. However, it pays to look more closely to find out how serious the vendor REALLY is about standards. In the Sonic case, while it talked a great story, the mystery was that its own ESB product was unable to run over any standard JMS-based messaging pipe for years. Instead, it used a proprietary interface that ensured Sonic ESB would only work over SonicMQ, the Sonic messaging pipe. This was a real problem for many prospects, because IBM's WebSphereMQowns around 80% of the messaging pipe business and therefore prospects interested in an ESB were frequently looking to run it over their existing software. This restriction was arguably one of the key reasons Sonic lost its leadership position in the ESB market.

So why did Sonic take this line? Obviously, only Sonic knows, but a cynic would argue that it consistently refused to support the JMS standard in the early years to ensure that it could force the sale of its own messaging pipe. No matter that this meant the user often had to buy another one on top of the incumbent solution. 

I am not picking on Sonic here - this is only one of many examples where vendors claim to be standards-based while not shrinking from proprietary solutions when in their own interests. And of course, it is entirely understandable - after all, software vendors are businesses too. To me, the important thing is that users keep away from the rose-colored spectacles. Standards are valuable, and vendors do provide important support, but there will always be compromises. 

Steve 

What software buyers are looking for in 2009

With the global downturn in full swing, there are a lot of concerns over how software markets will perfom. However, one trend is emerging as a vital ingredient if software companies are to succeed, and those companies that have recognized it are already benefiting.

Software buyers in 2009 are finding an industry vertical specialization to be essential to support any investment justification. The problem for many users is that although the technologies and products available offer the same sorts of benefits as before, in order to get any purchase through the system it has become critical to have a strong business backing all the way. Nothing will move if a business sponsor is not pushing for it. Of course, investments have always had to be justified, and a business alignment is a key part of this process, but in the economic downturn this focus has moved from being part of the justification to being the overriding element. A business sponsor has to be brought on board right at the beginning if the particular project has any chance of success.

As a result, companies that do more than pay lip-service to describing business benefits are prospering. The software vendors that offer truly vertical solutions, tuned for particular industry needs and taken to market by field teams with the relevant industry domain knowledge, are the ones that are succeeding. One proof point is Pegasystems, who I blogged about a few days ago. Onereason that Pegasystems has maintained such strong growth in 2008 with its BPM offerings is a strong industry vertical sensitivity. 

Another excellent example is IBMand in particular its Information Management division. Information Management software is regarded as unsexy - although still important, it has tended to be neglected in the rush towards application-oriented strategies and initiatives. Enter a new IBM management team that has restructured the go-to-market approach for Information Management software to an industry-vertical one, generating models of particular industry challenges and processes, looking at the specific needs of these industries and carrying the industry-vertical business messages to prospective buyers. Whether serendipitous or the result of impressiveexecutive insight, this approach has almost exactly dovetailed with the software buyers' needs for a more relevant, industry-related message in order to secure investment. The result is that IBM is claiming significant sales and successes in its information management software business segment, even in the current environment. 

Other software companies would do well to take note. If you want to sell software this year, you have to help your prospective buyers by going to market with clearly aligned business vertical offerings and messages.

Steve   

Is this what you get with Enterprise 2.0?!

Once upon a time I was a developer on CICS, IBM's ubiquitous mainframe transaction processing product. CICS runs in just about every large business in the world, carrying out many of the corporate 'bread-and-butter' transactions, and is particularly notable for its long life of more than three decades. To many, CICS remains the gold standard of Enterprise infrastructure.

So imagine my surprise when I saw CICS on Youtube today! The clip provides a simple and crisp introduction to the power of events processing in a CICS environment, and is actually rather good, but I am still in shock that Youtube, which I usually use for watching Eric Clapton or any of the three Kings (Albert, Freddie and BB) playing storming blues, is featuring CICS! Is this what they mean by Enterprise 2.0 I wonder? The old world colliding with the new? Is the next step to see CICS programmers throwing themselves from 5th story windows into drifts of snow?

I guess this is the mark of a truly successful software tool - something that constantly evolves to meet the shifting and developing needs and expectations of its customers. Good for you, CICS! 

One final observation - there was also a small victory in the Youtube clip for any old hands. The voice-over is by an American lady, but she still refers to CICS as 'kicks'. This is the way CICS has been known in the UK for years, but in the US it was always spoken as the four letters - C.I.C.S. Perhaps CICS has become the subject of a new international standard!

Steve   

Will Swordfish make its point?

The ECLIPSE organization has finally made its announcement of the first release ofSwordfish, the open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) framework. A lot of the work for Swordfish has come from Sopera, a German open source company that has developed an offering around the DeutschePost service bus development. Sopera offers a valid and competent framework for service integration, and therefore it is assumed that Swordfish might also work.

So, will Swordfish make a successful strike at the ESB market? So far, open source ESB projects have not had a great deal of success, and as far as 2009 goes Lustratus has forecast that open source projects will suffer due to the lack of the necessary people resources to turn open source frameworks into a useful user implementation. However, Swordfish has the backing of the influential ECLIPSE organization, which has done a lot to standardize the look and feel of many software infrastructure tools. 

Looking at the initial marketing thrust for Swordfish, things don't look to good. From the announcement letter, the top functional bullet reads 

Support for distributed deployment, which results in more scalable and reliable application deployments by removing a central coordinating server.

Well - duh! This is not new - it is part of the basic definition of what an ESB does! However, this initiative is still worth watching, despite the ill-fated marketing attempts so far. ECLIPSE has significant industry backing for its GUI look-and-feel stuff, and indeed most of the big industry names like IBM, Oracle and SAP are involved in the running of ECLIPSE, and provide a lot of the financial backing.  

It is this that might be the source of most excitement with Swordfish. Oracle and IBM both actively market and sell their own ESBs, and SAP offers its own equivalent functionality as part of its NetWeaver set of offerings. I wonder how they feel about ECLIPSE driving an open-source ESB version that competes on functionality and is free? I would love to be a fly on the wall in internal ECLIPSE meetings about the future of Swordfish. 

Steve  

TIBCO 1Q09 earnings will make interesting reading

In a week's time, TIBCO Software will release its earnings figures for its 1Q09 quarter ending March 1st. These earnings should make interesting reading, and will start to indicate how well the company is standing up to a number of squeezes on its business. TIBCO has been caught recently in a two-way fight with both traditional and new-wave vendors. On the one hand, it sees a key growth market as the general area of SOA, BPM and wider business integration where it is having to cope with the IBM steamroller, while on the other its 'traditional' market of core messaging for financial services front-office needs is coming under attack from new market entrants with radical shifts in technology.

IBM goes from strength to strength with its SOA / BPM WebSphere product suite, claiming throusands of deployments, and was always going to be a hard fight for TIBCO. The new TIBCO ActiveMatrix architecture is an attempt to fight back, but it remains to be seen how effective this approach might be. Perhaps more worrying for TIBCO is the surge of new competition in the high-speed financial messaging marketplace, where companies such as 29West and Solace Systems have emerged with messaging offerings that outperform traditional TIBCO Rendezvous messaging. The TIBCO response has been to partner with Solace Systems to produce a messaging appliance that implements Rendezvous software in hardware, since it recently claimed that 

"Software has reached its limit in ultra-low latency messaging, focusing increasing importance on the hardware "plumbing" to deliver future performance increases."  

This brings TIBCO into competition with appliance offerings from Solace Systems, Tervela and IBM (DataPower). However, other vendors have taken a different approach to the performance issue in these highly demanding financial messaging markets, instead revolutionising the messaging architecture to generate the necessary high performance figures through software. Offerings have appeared from companies such as 29West, who pioneered this approach, and latterly IBM (LLM), with even NYSE promising to get in on the act.

So this set of TIBCO results are likely to be even more closely scrutinized than previously. Is the TIBCO strategy working, or is the company getting more and more squeezed? Technologies such as BPM seem to be riding out the recession particularly well, but will TIBCO show similarly resilient figures? Has TIBCO's admission that Rendezvous software is out of steam carried its customer base across to the idea of appliances, or is it going to open the door to competition? It certainly looks like 2009 will be an interesting year for TIBCO.

 

What use is technology without flexibility?

I was reading a post today from mainframe integration vendor GT Software about its support of IBM's mainframe speciality engines, and I was suddenly hit by the realization that in order to really add value for users, technology almost always has to be accompanied by flexibility. The two need to go hand in hand if returns are to be maximized and business risk minimized. 

The specific example discussed relates to an IBM mainframe invention called a speciality engine. For the uninitiated, think of a logical processing box within the overall mainframe environment where processing is much cheaper, with different boxes being aligned to specific activities such as running LINUX operations, data access or Java-type activities. What this basically means is that if part of your workload is doing something that is supported by one of the speciality engine types, then you can choose to run it more cheaply by moving it into this engine, and in fact this can often improve performance too.

This is neat technology, offering the opportunity to reduce costs and improve effectiveness, and various mainframe software suppliers have jumped on the opportunity this offers by moving eligible workloads onto these specaility engines. However, as with any new technology development, things are not quite as simple as they seem. In the IT industry there is a terrible tendency to jump for a new technology and push everything onto it, without appreciating the implications. But, in this example, as pointed out in the referenced post, 

"There are many use cases where it is much more efficient to NOT shift workload to a specialty engine.  Why -- because, there is overhead associated with moving workload"

This is typical with just about any new technology. It is great in SOME circumstances, but loses out in others. iPODs are great for listening to pop music, sounding little different to CDs and being very much more convenient, but try them on classical symphonies and you will wonder what has happened to the color and magic of the piece. The key is to use new technology for WHAT MAKES SENSE, as opposed to what is possible. There is another angle to this flexibility too. IT vendors often ignore the fact that users are not starting from a clean sheet of paper; they have existing investments and technologies that cannot just be written off. Therefore, it is important to have the flexibility to operate with whatever is in place rather than demand a specific new technology component. This is not a static need, but a dynamic one - it may be that a company might change its approach further down the line, and a rigid, inflexible technology implementation can cause terrible future headaches.  

While new technology may promise a lot, it is only when coupled with flexibility over which technologies to use, for what, and when that technology can REALLY deliver its full value.