Can IBM turn information management upside down?

I am here at IBM’s IOD (Information on Demand) conference. The keynote is interesting because of the focus on outcomes. IBM has invested more than $12 billion over the past five years in the information management market. More than $8 billion has come through acquisitions (Cognos, SPSS, etc.) and the rest from organic growth.

The biggest changes that I have seen over the past 20 years or so of watching IBM in the information technology market is the change in focus from the database engine and tools to a focus on a process centric approach to information management. In essence, this means that IBM is building a foundation based on outcomes through the lifecycle of information. Last year IBM called this movement to using information holistically to help companies anticipate the future the Information Agenda. Now, there is an interesting and subtle shift to what IBM is calling information-led transformation.  What’s the difference? I think that IBM is actually attempting to turn the information management market upside down.  There is no doubt that data and information management is a technical discipline. What IBM is saying is that the focus is on business transformation that is supported by information management technology. It is a subtle difference but really important. It is very easy to get caught up in the details about schemas, data cleansing, etc. But if information doesn’t support key business processes and business strategy needs, it is just a pile of technology.

With the growth of social networks, an ever expanding world of information sources – structured, unstructured, images, video, data feeds, and more, it is more important than ever that these sources of data be managed in context with the business goals.  The movement to cloud computing will add a lot more information to the mix.  It is going to be a complex journey. One only has to look at complexities of managing information in the healthcare industry to start to understand what the implications for managing costs and lives. Today we cannot easily look across information across individual doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, patients, medical equipment, digital images, and more. We don’t have consistent definitions of data; nor can we keep track of how effective a treatment might impact individuals with a symptom. Nor do we have the ability today to use information to determine what solutions could be used to reduce medical errors by 5% a year. If healthcare information management were focused on predicting outcomes rather than creating the next report, image what we could accomplish.

Five things I learned at IBM’s Rational Conference

I haven’t been to IBM’s Rational Conference in a couple of years so I was very interested not just to see what IBM had to say about the changing landscape of software development but how the customers attending the conference had changed. I was not disappointed.  While I could write a whole book on the changes happening in software development (but I have enough problems) I thought I would mention some of the aspects of the conference that I found noteworthy.

One. Rational is moving from tools company to a software development platform. Rational has always been a complex organization to understand since it has evolved and changed so much over the years. The organization now seems to have found its focus.

Two. More management, fewer low level developers. In the old day, conferences like this would be dominated by programmers. While there were many developers  in attendance, I found that there were a lot of upper level managers. For example, I sat at lunch with one CIO who was in the process of moving to a sophisticated service oriented architecture. Another person at my table was a manager looking to update his company’s current development platforms. Still another individual was a customer of one of the company’s that IBM had purchased who was looking to understand how to implement new capabilities added since the acquisition.

Three. Rational has changed dramatically through acquisitions. Rational is a tale of acquisitions. Rational Software, the lynch pin of IBM’s software development division, itself was a combination of many acquisitions. Rational, before being bought by IBM in 2002 for $2.1 billion, had acquired an impressive array of companies including Requiste, SQA, Performance Aware, Pure-Atria, and Object Time Ltd.  After a period of absorbtion, IBM started acquiring more assets. BuildForge (build and release management) was purchased in 2006; Watchfire (Web application security vulnerability and compliance testing software) was bought in 2007; and Telelogic (requirements management) was purchased in 2008.

It has taken IBM a while to both absorb all of the acquisitions and then to create a unified architecture so that these software products could share components and interoperate. While IBM is not done, under Danny Sabbah’s leadership (General Manager), Rational made the transition from being a tools company to becoming platform for managing software complexity. It is work in progress.

Four. It’s all about Jazz. Jazz, IBM’s collaboration platform was a major focus of the conference.  Jazz is an architecture intended to integrate data and function.  Jazz’s foundation is the REST architecture and therefore it is well positioned for use in Web 2.0 applications. What is most important is that IBM is bringing all of its Rational technology under this model. Over the next few years, we can expect to see this framework under all of the Rational’s products.

Five. Rational doesn’t stand alone. It is easy to focus on all of the Rational portfolio (which could take a while). But what I found quite interesting was the emphasis on the intersection between the Rational platform and Tivoli’s management services as well as Websphere’s Service Oriented Architecture offerings. Rational also made a point of focusing on the use of collaboration elements provided by the Lotus division.  Cloud computing was also a major focus of discussion at the event. While many customers at the event are evaluating the potential of using various Rational products in the cloud it is early.  The one area that IBM seem to have hit a home run is its Cloud Burst appliance which is intended create and manage virtual images. Rational is also beginning to deliver its testing offerings as cloud based services. One of the most interesting elements of its approach is to use tokens as a licensing model. In other words, customers purchase a set number of tokens or virtual licenses that can be used to purchase services that are not tied to a specific project or product.

Oracle Plus Sun: What does it mean?

I guess this is one way to start a Monday morning. After IBM decided to pass on Sun, Oracle decided that it would be a great idea. While I have as many questions as answers, here are my top ten thoughts about what this combination will mean to the market:

1. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun definitely shakes up the technology market. Now, Oracle will become a hardware vendor, an operating system supplier, and will own Java.

2. Oracle gets a bigger share of the database market with MySQL. Had IBM purchased Sun, it would have been able to claim market leadership.

3. This move changes the competitive dynamics of the market. There are basically three technology giants: IBM, HP, and Oracle. This acquisition will put a lot of pressure on HP since it partners so closely with Oracle on the database and hardware fronts. It should also lead to more acquisitions by both IBM and HP.

4. The solutions market reigns! Oracle stated in its conference call this morning that the company will now be able to deliver top to bottom integrated solutions to its customers including hardware, packaged applications, operating systems, middleware, storage, database, etc. I feel a mainframe coming on…

5. Oracle could emerge as a cloud computing leader. Sun had accumulated some very good cloud computing/virtualization technologies over the last few years. Sun’s big cloud announcement got lost in the frenzy over the acquisition talks but there were some good ideas there.

6. Java gets  a new owner. It will be interesting to see how Oracle is able to monetize Java. Will Oracle turn Java over to a standards organization? Will it treat it as a business driver? That answer will tell the industry a lot about the future of both Oracle and Java.

7. What happens to all of Sun’s open source software? Back a few years ago, Sun decided that it would open source its entire software stack. What will Oracle do with that business model? What will happen to its biggest open source platform, MySQL? MySQL has a huge following in the open source world. I suspect that Oracle will not make dramatic changes, at least in the short run. Oracle does have open source offerings although they are not the central focus of the company by a long shot. I assume that Oracle will deemphasize MySQL.

8. Solaris is back. Lately, there has been more action around Solaris. IBM annouced support earlier in the year and HP recently announced support services. Now that Solaris has a strong owner it could shake up the dynamics of the operating system world. It could have an impact on the other gorilla not in the room — Microsoft.

9. What are the implications for Microsoft? Oracle and Microsoft have been bitter rivals for decades. This acquisition will only intensify the situation. Will Microsoft look at some big acquisitions in the enterprise market? Will new partnerships emerge? Competition does create strange bedfellows. What will this mean for Cisco, VMWare, and EMC? That is indeed something interesting to ponder.

10. Oracle could look for a services acquisition next. One of the key differences between Oracle and its two key rivals IBM and HP is in the services space. If Oracle is going to be focused on solutions, we might expect to see Oracle look to acquire a services company. Could Oracle be eyeing something like CSC?

I think I probably posed more questions than answers. But, indeed, these are early days. There is no doubt that this will shake up the technology market and will lead to increasing consolidation. In the long run, I think this will be good for customers. Customers do want to stop buying piece parts. Customers do want to buy a more integrated set of offerings. However, I don’t think that any customer wants to go back to the days where a solution approach meant lock-in. It will be important for customers to make sure that what these big players provide is the type of flexibility they have gotten used to in the last decade without so much pain.

Why Sun Microsystems can’t go it alone

Like everyone else, I have been looking what would happen if IBM were to buy Sun Microsystems. I actually thought it sounded pretty good. IBM would get hardware, some database, virtualization, cloud, and operating system software. Oh, and did I mention that they would control Java. But it sounds (at least as I am writing this) the negociations have broken down. Greed is an interesting phenomenon. Prior to overtures by IBM, Sun’s stock price was around $3.00 a share. IBM was offering as much as $9.50 a share.  I actually thought that price was a bit high — but what do I know.

So, what happens now? I suspect this little drama is far from over. It is possible, if rumors are to be believed that Sun’s Chairman Scott McNealy will take over the reigns of the company once again to try to restore the company to its former glory. It has happened before. Steve Jobs returned to put Apple back on the right path. Michael Dell is trying to turn Dell into the innovator that it had been a decade ago.  Will it happen this time? I think that there are some difficulties with this plan, if it is indeed true. A lot has changed since Sun declared in the 1980s that the network was the computer. Clearly, the company leadership was right. I was an observer of the pragmatic and brilliant marketing company that Sun became in the 1980s, when I worked for its competitor Apollo Computer that was later purchased by HP.

Today, the market is quite different than the market Sun and McNealy had successfully finessed.  Today, the market is consolidating around either very strong global leaders such as IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, etc. There is a new generation of leaders emerging that had their start in the Internet era such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook and even Twitter. So, is there room for Sun to remake itself in this new world?

I guess that my take is that it will be very hard for Sun to resurface and remake itself. Here are the three main reasons that I have doubts and why I think that shareholders and board members should sell the company to IBM.

1. Sun Microsystems will have trouble regaining hardware leadership.  While it has some reasonable hardware assets, it is not big enough to take on HP or the emergence of Cisco as a hardware players.  Even companies like Google and Amazon play an important role in hardware — in the commodity relm.

2. While it owns some impressive software assets that it has bought over the past decade, Sun has never learned to leverage these assets to propel it into a leadership role.  It has further confused the market by opening sourcing its software. While this might be popular in a down market, it is not enough to create a repeatable revenue stream. I was watching a funny video of Steve Gilmore interviewing current CEO Jonathan Swartz (as a puppet) that I think captures part of Sun’s problems.

3. Is there a single area of technology where Sun can innovate and out shine its competitors? I imagine there might be some hidden jewels that are transformational and will turn the market upside down inside Sun — but I doubt it. I think that as Cloud Computing moves to center stage, Sun could be a player but not a leader. To be successful, Sun will have to find a way to lead in some area.

The bottom line is that I do not see a good future for Sun as an independent company.  I think that the damage has been done. Not only does the company have to regain shaky customer confidence but it quickly has to start making a profit. It is not an easy climate even for the strongest companies.  While it is possible that McNealy will surprise us all and turn Sun from a struggling player in a consolidating market to a leader but it is probably too late.  Customers who are watching this drama unfold will have to be convinced that Sun has staying power — not just for this year for future decades. If Sun tries to maintain independent, I predict a long and difficult path that will not necessarily end in success.

What’s a Smarter Planet (and what does that have to do with technology?)

So, who could argue that we need a smarter planet. I certainly couldn’t. I am at an IBM software analyst meeting. I have been attending this meeting for many years. The focus, as you might imagine is on the software strategy. But  there was something this time that I think is worth talking about.  Rather than providing us analysts with a laundry list of products and go to market strategies (yes, they did some of that too), the focus this year is around vertical solutions and markets.  But more than that, there is an overarching theme that is about to become the major theme that will envelope IBM over the coming years – Smarter Planet.  This initiative is driven by Sam Palmisano not just with his operational good sense, but his ability to provide vision for the company.
In his address to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York City on November 6, 2008, Palmisano proclaimed that the next challenge as our world gets more interconnected, hotter, and challenged for growth we need to leverage a new approach to innovation that is smarter.
This approach according to Palmisano, “This isn’t just a metaphor. I mean infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works – the systems and processes that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold…services to be delivered…everything from people and money to oil, water, and electronics to move…and billions of people to work and live.”
Good thinking but what does this mean from a technology lens? It is clear that we have an overabundance of technology. What we lack right now is the right way to leverage technology to truly focus on customer benefit from both an agility perspective (being able to change quickly and without too much pain) and the ability to support an increasingly connected world.  It is interesting to think about looking at the world this way.

If you think about it, the world is, in fact, a system. To make the concept even further, the world can be viewed as a biological system. The human body itself is an interconnected set of sensors, actions that trigger other actions. The body interacts with other humans, with the physical world as well as the virtual world. We take actions based on the information we are given or intuit from our experiences.
IBM is trying to tap into one of the most important transitions in our world today. And they are not shy about focusing these transformations to their products and services (it is a commercial world, after all).
Here’s a quick view of this idea of the Smarter Planet.  If we look at the idea of a Smarter Planet, it starts with the idea that everything is an asset that takes inputs processes them and produces outcomes.  Therefore, we can look at this from Smarter Planet from five different perspectives:
•    Innovation can transform companies, countries, and governments to lower costs and increase revenue
•    Intelligence that provides an ability to learn from the vast amounts of information in the world (I call this anticipation management). In essence, this means managing information, predicting outcomes, leveraging information across partners, suppliers, and customers
•    Optimizing, managing, and changing based on the customer experience. Organizations no matter how big or small are looking for ways to transform themselves so they are ready for whatever happens.  Companies that focused on this type of change are better able to weather very tough and complicated times.
•    Greening of business. You can’t talk about the planet without thinking about the impact of green on everything we do. This includes everything from saving cash by better usage of energy to protecting the climate.
•    Leveraging smart people.  I think that people makes or breaks this noble goal. Leveraging all these innovative approaches to doing things smarter and more responsibly typically fail if people don’t work together as effective teams.  Politics can kill innovation more quickly than anything else.

Now begin to take this concept out of the general view and apply it to specific industries, their problems, and opportunities. That is precisely what makes the idea of the Smarter Planet intriguing.  For example, manufacturing itself is being transformed as we speak.  Manufacturing has been transformed by technology with sensors and actuators so that the information produced is helping smart companies better control the manufacturing process both in terms of innovation, efficiency, and energy conservation.  In retail, companies are leveraging new processes and technology to leapfrog the competition. If a retailer can optimize the way they change inventory based on an early understanding of changing buying habits of customers they can become a leader.

I think it is important that IBM is talking about this idea now.  This idea of a Smarter Planet is really tailor made for a time when the natural inclination is to hide until things get better.  There is no question that we are in very challenging time.  It isn’t the first time that we have found ourselves in this position and it certainly won’t be the last.  But in my experience, the companies that take action when everyone else is hiding under the bed to innovate, change, and learn will win.  When the world comes back, these companies will be way ahead and everyone else will be playing catchup.

What’s an information agenda?

I had an opportunity to have a chat with Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of IBM’s Information Management division about the idea of an information agenda –  an initiative that IBM recently announced. The company intends to make a major investment in methodologies, best practices, and technologies over the coming years as way to help its customers implement the information on demand strategy.
While it may seem confusing at the outset, I think that the idea of an information agenda makes sense.  But first, I want to clear up a confusion that I have seen.  I asked Ambju to define the difference between information on demand and the information agenda.  While he agreed that both ideas are aspirational goals, he distinguishes between the two.  Information on Demand is really the specific techniques and technology that help companies architect their information assets so that they can be able to deliver business value on time and in context.  In contrast, he explains that an information agenda is really the business strategy for information that becomes the road map for the future.  While the distinctions are subtle it is interesting to think about these two concepts.
Here are my thoughts.  This problem is not new, it has been around for many generations of information management.  I won’t use this blog to remind you that we have so many disconnected information sources, with differing definitions of what the simplest concepts – what’s a customer and what’s a price – just to name a few.  And the problem is really getting worse. It isn’t enough anymore to just do joins across relational data sources. There is so much information that is stored in documents, on websites, in social networks, and customer service sites.  And you can’t just throw everything into one massive warehouse.
I think that the initial instinct of most technically oriented organizations is to react.  They embark on a Master Data Management strategy to quickly get one consistent view of data across relational sources.  Or in many situations, they might go out and buy a tool that makes it easier to query many different sources.  In some situations, customers are apt to invest in a massive data warehouse.  Each one is a valid strategy and will work to solve one specific problem.  But here is the difference that I see — reacting to one problem at a time is what has always gotten us into a mess with enterprise software in the first place.
Our team has been finalizing the second edition of Service Oriented Architectures for Dummies.  One of the key lessons we have taken away from this project is that customers who are successful are those that have moved away from being reactive to the crisis de jour to creating a business focused strategy.  For example, rather than taking on a project in isolation, these managers will make that project fit into an overall strategy for managing their business services or managing data across lots of business units.  So, while they are solving problems on an incremental basis, they are ensuring that these problems are solved in context with the overall business strategy.
What I like about the idea of an information agenda is that it focuses customers on the idea of having a strategy and a plan.  So, here’s my view of the top three things that should be in a customer’s information agenda:
1.    Starting with an honest assessment. Companies need to start by taking a step back and determine how they use information as part of their business strategy.  Information is used in different ways – both formal and informal.  It is used as part of structured databases, document management systems, warehouses, and informal paper based workflows.  Companies still use spreadsheets as their formal information management strategy.  Taking stock is critical.
2.    Imagining success. What would it look like if information could be available on demand and if that information could be trusted?  I think this approach could become a strategic differentiation for companies.  In fact, many of the companies that were interviewed for the second edition of SOA for Dummies were in the process of creating a strategy based on this idea.  Most of these companies were looking for ways to leverage information as part of the strategy to proactively engage customers.
3.    Fit small steps into a roadmap. I think this is the most important issue for companies.  It is so easy to devolve into a reactive state – especially in complex financial times.  I suspect that many companies will dump the idea of having a strategy and just try to do only what is necessary to survive.  You can’t blame them.  But, it is dangerous to take this approach.  Yes, companies should implement pragmatic projects that match their current pain. However, they should be a step in a journey towards a strategic approach to managing information.

Can HP Lead in Virtualization Management?

HP has been a player in the virtualization market for quite a while.  It has offered many hardware products including its server blades have given it a respectable position in the market. In addition, HP has done a great job being an important partner to key virtualization software players including VMWare, Red Hat, and Citrix. It is also establishing itself as a key Microsoft partner as it moves boldly into virtualization with HyperV.  Thus far, HP’s virtualization strategy did not focus on software. That has started to change.  Now, if this had been the good old days, I think we would have seen a strategy that focused on cooler hardware and data center optimization. Now, don’t get me wrong — HP is very much focused on the hardware and the data center. But now there is a new element that I think will be important to watch.

HP is finally leveraging its software assets in the form of virtualization management.  If I were cynical I would say, it’s about time.  But to be fair, HP has added a lot of new assets to its software portfolio in the last couple of years that make a virtualization management strategy more possible and more believable.

It is interesting that when a company has key assets to offer customers, it often strengthens the message. I was struck by what I thought was a clear message that a found on one of their slides from their marketing pitch, “Your applications and business services don’t care where resources are, how they’re connected or how they’re managed, and neither should you. ”  This statement struck me as precisely the right message in this crazy overhyped virtualization market.  Could it be that HP is becoming a marketing company?

As virtualization goes mainstream, I predict that management of this environment will become the most important issue for customers. In fact, this is the message I have gotten load and clear from cusotmers trying to virtualize their applications on servers.  Couple this will the reality that no company virtualizes everything and even if they did they still have a physical environment to manage.  Therefore, HP focuses its strategy on a plan to manage the composite of physical and virtual.  Of course, HP is not alone here. I was at Citrix’s industry analyst meeting last week and they are adopting this same strategy. I promise that my next blog will be about Citrix.

HP is calling its virtualization strategy its Business Management Suite.  While this is a bit generic, HP is trying to leverage the hot business service management platform and wrap virtualization with it.  Within this wrapper, HP is including four componements:

• Business Service Management — the technique for linking services across the physical and virtual worlds. This is intended to monitor the end-to-end health of the overall environment.
• Business Service Automation — a technique for provisioning assets for distributed computing
• IT Service Management — a technique for discovering what software is present and what licenses need to be managed
• Quality Management — a technique for testing, scheduling, and provisioning resources across platforms. Many companies are starting to use virtualization as a way of testing complex composite applications before putting them into production. Companies are testing for both application quality and performance under different loads.

I am encouraged that HP seems to understand the nuances of this market.  HP’s strategy is to position itself as the “Switzerland” of the virtualization management space.  It is therefore creating a platform that includes infrastucture to manage across IBM, Microsoft, VMWare, Citrix, and Red Hat.  Therefore, it is positioning its management assets from its heritage software (OpenView) and its acquisitions to execute this strategy. For example, its IT Service Management offering is intended to manage the compliance with license terms and conditions as well as charge backs across hetergenous environments. It’s Asset manager is intended to track virtualized assets through its discovery and dependency mapping tools.  HP’s Operations Manager has extended its performance agents so that it can monitor capabilities from virtual machines to hypervisors.  The company’s SiteScope provides agentless monitoring of hypervisors for VMWare.  The HP Network Node manager has extended support for monitoring virtual networks.

HP’s goal to to focus on the overall health of these distributed, virtualized services from an availability, performance, capacity planning, end user experience, and service level management perspective.  It is indeed an ambitious plan that will take some time to develop but it is the right direction. I am particularly impressed with the partner program that HP is evolving around its CMDB (Configuration Management Database).  It is partnering with VMWare to embark on a joint development initiative to provide a federated CMDB that can collect information from a variety of hosts and guest hosts in an on demand approach. Other companies such as Red Hat and Citrix have joined the CMDB program.

This is an interesting time in the virtualization movement.  As virtualization matures, companies are starting to realize that simply virtualizing an application on a server does not by itself save the time and money they anticipated.  The world is a lot more complicated than that.  Management wants to understand how the entire environment is part of delivering value.  For example, an organization might put all of its call center personnel on a virtualized platform which works fine until an additional 20 users with heavy demands on the server suddenly causes performance to falter.  In other situations, everything works fine until there is a software error somewhere in the distributed environment.  The virtualized environment suddenly fails and it is very difficult for IT operations to diagnose the problem. This is when management stops getting excited about how wonderful it is that they can virtualize hundreds of users onto a single server and starts worrying about the quality of service and the reputation of the organization overall.

The bottom line is that HP seems to be pulling the right pieces together for its virtualization management strategy. It is indeed still early. Virtualization itself is only the tip of the distributed computing marketplace.  HP will have to continue to innovate on its own while investing in its partner ecosystem. Today partners are eager to work with HP because it is a good partner and non-threatening.  But HP won’t be alone in the management of virtualization.  I expect that other companies like IBM and Microsoft will be very aggressive in this market.  HP has a little breathing room right now that it should take advantage of before things change again. And they always change again.

Taking the Pulse of The New Tivoli

It is ironic that I was at the first Tivoli user conference called Planet Tivoli back in the early 1990s. Now, I am sitting at Tivoli’s first full blown user conference called Pulse. Pulse is very much like Tivoli itself, it is a combination of the Netcool, Maximo, and Tivoli user conferences. Over the past several years, IBM has had the challenge of taking its portfolio of individual products, rationalize them and create a management platform. One of the most fortunate events that helped Tivoli is the growing importance of service management. Service Management, the ability to manage a highly distributed computing environment in a consistent and predictable manner. Therefore, all of Tivoli’s offerings can be defined from this perspective. IBM’s Al Zolar, who runs the Tivoli organization said in his opening remarks that Tivoli common goal across its portfolio is to assure the effective delivery of services.

One of the interesting aspects of IBM’s management strategy is that the company intends to apply the idea of service management beyond IT operations. “Everything needs to be managed,” says Steve Mills, the senior vice president and GM of the software business. He points to many industries that are increasingly enabling intelligence into everything from trucks to assembly lines. Therefore, everything is becoming a manageable system. Companies are increasingly using RDIF tags to track products and equipment, for example. As everything becomes a “virtual system” — everything becomes a service to be managed. What an interesting opportunity and makes it clear by IBM would have bought a company like Maximo — a company that manages physical assets.

So, it is becoming clear that Tivoli is reinventing itself by focusing on service management in the broader corporate perspective. At the foundational level, Tivoli is looking at what the foundational services that are required to make this a viable strategy. I liked the fact that Zolar focused on Identity Management as one of the foundational services. Without managing the identity of the user or the device in a highly distributed environment, service management might work but it couldn’t be trusted.

Another major focal point for IBM’s emerging service management strategy is process automation. Now, this isn’t a surprise since process is the foundation of traditional operations management. However, it has a broader persona as well that transcends operations management. As we move to a more service oriented architecture, service management takes on a broader and more strategic role in the organization. You aren’t just managing the physical servers running applications but you are looking at managing an environment that requires the integration of business services, middleware, transactions, and a variety physical assets. Some of these pieces will be located at the client site while others might live in the cloud and yet others will live in a partner’s environment. These sets of virtual services have to be managed as though they are a physical system. Therefore, they are responsible for managing a meaningful process flow that is in compliance with corporate and IT governance rules. And all of this has to be done in a way that doesn’t require so many people that it is not economically feasible.

From my discussions at Pulse, I came away with the understanding that this is, in fact, IBM’s vision for service management. What is impressive is that IBM has taken begun to create a set of foundational services that are becoming the underpinnings of the Tivoli offerings. This metadata based framework was designed from some innovative (and very early technology) that came to IBM from the Candle acquisition. In fact, I had looked at this integration technology many years ago and always thought it was one of Candle’s crown jewels. I had wondered what happened to it — now I know.

IBM’s challenge will be to capitalize on this rationalization of its management assets. IBM has managed services it is offerings. IBM needs to be able to create an ecosystem based on its offerings so that it can compete with the emerging breed of cloud and service providers like Amazon.com and Google. It is becoming clear to me that customers and software vendors alike are looking for the emerging utility infrastructure providers. I think that with the right type of packaging, IBM could become a major player.

So, my take away from my first day at Pulse is this:

• Tivoli is working to create a set of foundational meta data level services that link its various managed service offerings.
• Because of the foundational services, Tivoli can now package its offerings in a much more effective way. It should make its offerings more competitive.
• Tivoli’s goal is to leverage its operational management expertise in software to move up the food chain and manage both the IT and the business process infrastructures
• Cloud computing is very important to IBM. It is still early but the investment is intense and being designed as the next generation of virtualization, SOA, and utility computing.
• Green IT and energy efficiency is a key driver of Tivoli’s emerging services as a growth engine.

One of the primary themes that I heard is the industrialization of computing as the foundation for IBM’s management services. Indeed, I have often said that we are at the beginning of a new era where we computing moves from being an art based on experimentation and hope. The next generation focused on software and infrastructure as a service are becoming a reality and the last mile will be the management of all of those resources and more. This management focus is an imperative as we move towards the industrialization of software and computing

The Desktop as a Service: Can Desktone be a Focal Point?

I have been thinking a lot about the evolution of virtualization lately and so I was intrigued when a company I had never heard of called Desktone asked to come in for a briefing. When I heard that the company specialized on desktop virtualization I was intrigued. I was even more interested when I learned that the founder came from Softricity, the OS virtualization company bought by Microsoft.

What I liked about Desktone is its focus on desktops as a service. The company has been around since 2006 and has its developers in Shaghai. The company has taken a $17 million investment round. I liked David Marshall’s overview of the technology.

What is important about what Desktone has to say is that the desktop environment can become a service offering. While I don’t expect the masses of Microsoft Windows desktops to all move en masse to desktop as a service, it is an approach that is a leading indicator of where the desktop is headed. Think back to when Windows became the platform for desktop computing. In those days, customers wanted a easy to use and pragmatic way to write letters, create a spreadsheet, follow up on email, and surf the web.

What has changed over the past five years is the growing complexity of the desktop environment. Simply put, the desktop moved from its role as a terminal for corporate applications and a tool for productivity applications into a true computing platform. The implications are complex and startling. Customers who thought of their desktop as personal where suddenly forced to deal with everything from viruses, security of stored data, updates to the operating system, the need to coordinate between service components on the desktop and the server. Now, add to this, the need to add more power on the desktop to support the growing needs for a growing number graphics and computing requirements — and of course power.

What Desktone is proposing is that service providers establish themselves as the provider of desktop capability. Clearly, an emerging player like Desktone couldn’t take on this goal but its partners are stepping up. In my discussion with CEO, Harry Ruda, the company has signed on partners including IBM, Verizon, Softbanks, and T-Systems. These companies all plan to use desktone to offer the virtual desktop as a subscription based service. Therefore, the desktone service provides an annuity stream for companies like Verizon as an alternative to the corporate desktop. Desktone has signed up a few high profile customers like Merill Lynch. Merrill Lynch are signing up for a very simple reason — they simply cannot get any more power in their data centers — even if they wanted to pay for it. Likewise, Verizon, which has substantial data center capacity in New York City simply cannot take on new co-location customers without a managed services approach.

What I found very interesting about Desktone is how the company positions the technology. The company seems want to from the traditional approaches to desktop virtualization right to the world of cloud computing — of course, for the desktop world. I am providing a link to Dana Gardner’s blog on the topic. Unlike some of the clouds that we hear a lot about, Desktone’s version is based on a private cloud that will be owned and run by the serivce providers. The approach is intended to treat the virtual desktop as PCs connected to a service provider that provides the “virtual container” for the desktops. This solves a lot of problems for both Desktone and service providers. In essence, the end customer is responsible for their own operating system and PC application licenses. Desktone is provide a virtual desktop grid — what Desktone called an access fabric. This fabric is intended to provide a management platform for desktop virtualization.

Desktone has an interesting opportunity. It is stretching what we have traditionally thought about for desktop virtualization. While desktop virtualization is not new but it is changing dramatically. One only has to look at the work that VMware, Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and HP are doing — to mention but a few of the players that understand the importance of virtualizing the device in front of the customer. I think that desktop as a service is the right conversation for the industry to be having just about now.

My Impressions of IBM’s SOA Impact Conference

Last week I attending IBM’s Impact conference which Sandy Carter, VP of SOA for IBM contends is the largest SOA conference in the world. With more than 6,000 attendees all focused on SOA, I think she might be right. So, it is interesting to listen to see what the key messages and issues. I have some time to take stock of what I heard and saw at the meeting. This is the second year of the Impact conference and it is interesting to see the difference a year makes

While I could go on for a long time about the details of the conference, I wanted to give you my top three impressions of the meeting.

Impression One. SOA is about end-to-end business process. IBM is maturing with the market. When IBM first started on its SOA journey, the focus was primarily on the Enterprise Service Bus but that has changed. While the ESB is still important (although there are camps in the industry who think it isn’t so important anymore), there is a new focus that is more holistic. IBM is now much more focused on end-to-end business process. I think this is an important move for customers and for IBM’s go to market strategy. It is a more business centric view and approach to SOA. I think that this is a testament to the fact that SOA is starting to mature. Customers are beginning to think of SOA not just as a substitute for applications integration but as a way of managing business. This is a step in the right direction.

Impression Two. SOA gets Smart. IBM is using the Smart SOA brand as a natural evolution of its SOA strategy. I come away from the conference understanding that IBM is beginning to leverage its experience with thousands of customers into a set of best practices that are codified into a set of industry frameworks. Many of these frameworks are culled from IBM Global Services experience working with customers. Pre-defined and extensible frameworks are an essential solution to the problem customers face in trying to pull together the pieces of a SOA architecture from scratch. Part of IBM’s journey as a SOA vendor is to pull its elements of software together into a cohesive SOA approach. I observed that IBM is working to create a SOA approach that leverages its five software areas: Tivoli (service management, security, etc.), Rational (development and quality), Information Management (databases, search, content management, information infrastructure, information services, etc.), WebSphere (application server, enterprise service bus, etc.), and Lotus (collaboration and social computing). Implementing a long term SOA strategy really does require all of these areas to be intertwined. It is not an easy path for any vendor.

Impression Three: It’s about the customer. IBM made it clear that it was putting its focus on customers at this meeting. There were more than 250 sessions run by its customers. It was pretty overwhelming with often more than 50 sessions going on simultaneously. Our team ran a SOA for Dummies session and had standing room only. We weren’t sure what to expect. Were all IBM customers too smart to attend a introduction to SOA session? We found that, in fact, a lot of attendees that we met during our session are figuring out the basics: how to work with the business, how to think about governance, and what does it mean to capture code out of an existing application and make it into a reusable service. Many of the other customers we spoke with at the meeting are well along in their SOA journey. They are getting real business value because they are looking at SOA from a customer experience perspective.

I was struck by the comments made by Jim Haney, CIO of Harley-Davidson who started off the conference by driving onto the stage on a motorcycle (a Harley, of course!). His words were so good that I’ll quote some of what he said (If I got some words wrote, you’ll have to forgive me). He spoke about the customer facing SOA application the company has put into production. “SOA is not about technology, it is about how you use technology to change the business.” The application called rideplanner.com is designed to help Harley customers plan trips. The application is intended to enhance the customer experience. It is not as simple as providing a trip map, rather as Jim explained, “it is about defining the process and bringing all these technology together to create an end to end experience. It is about pulling everything together with soa to change the way the customer interacts with us.” He pointed to the need to determine the right route to travel and what sights are along the way. Is it a long ride or a short one? Are there events that a Harley rider might be interested in? “We are creating a different customer experience. It isn’t about the individual transactions. We had to look at the person behind the application — not just at the technology. It is a cultural change.” I think that says it all…