Can IBM become a business leader and a software leader?

When I first started as an industry analyst in the 1980s IBM software was in dire straits. It was the era where IBM was making the transition from the mainframe to a new generation of distributed computing. It didn’t go really well. Even with thousands of smart developers working their hearts out the first three foresees into a new generation of software were an abysmal failure. IBM’s new architectural framework called SAA(Systems Application Architecture) didn’t work; neither did the first application built on top of that called OfficeVision. It’s first development framework called Application Development  Cycle (AD/Cycle) also ended up on the cutting room floor.  Now fast forward 20 years and a lot has changed for IBM and its software strategy.  While it is easy to sit back and laugh at these failures, it was also a signal to the market that things were changing faster than anyone could have expected. In the 1980s, the world looked very different — programming was procedural, architectures were rigid, and there were no standards except in basic networking.

My perspective on business is that embracing failure and learning from them is the only way to really have success for the future. Plenty of companies that I have worked with over my decades in the industry have made incredible mistakes in trying to lead the world. Most of them make those mistakes and keep making them until they crawl into a hole and die quietly.  The companies I admire of the ones that make the mistakes, learn from them and keep pushing. I’d put both IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle in that space.

But I promised that this piece would be about IBM. I won’t bore you with more IBM history. Let’s just say that over the next 20 years IBM did not give up on distributed computing. So, where is IBM Software today? Since it isn’t time to write the book yet, I will tease you with the five most important observations that I have on where IBM is in its software journey:

1. Common components. If you look under the covers of the technology that is embedded in everything from Tivoli to Information Management and software development you will see common software components. There is one database engine; there is a single development framework, and a single analytics backbone.  There are common interfaces between elements across a very big software portfolio. So, any management capabilities needed to manage an analytics engine will use Tivoli components, etc.

2. Analytics rules. No matter what you are doing, being able to analyze the information inside a management environment or a packaged application can make the difference between success and failure.  IBM has pushed information management to the top of stack across its software portfolio. Since we are seeing increasing levels of automation in everything from cars to factory floors to healthcare equipment, collecting and analyzing this data is becoming the norm. This is where Information Management and Service Management come together.

3. Solutions don’t have to be packaged software. More than 10 years ago IBM made the decision that it would not be in the packaged software business. Even as SAP and Oracle continued to build their empires, IBM took a different path. IBM (like HP) is building solution frameworks that over time incorporate more and more best practices and software patterns. These frameworks are intended to work in partnership with packaged software. What’s the difference? Treat the packages like ERP as the underlying commodity engine and focus on the business value add.

4. Going cloud. Over the past few years, IBM has been making a major investment in cloud computing and has begun to release some public cloud offerings for software testing and development as a starting point. IBM is investing a lot in security and overall cloud management.  It’s Cloud Burst appliance and packaged offerings are intended to be the opening salvo.   In addition, and probably even more important are the private clouds that IBM is building for its largest customers. Ironically, the growing importance of the cloud may actually be the salvation of the Lotus brand.

5. The appliance lives. Even as we look towards the cloud to wean us off of hardware, IBM is putting big bets on hardware appliances. It is actually a good strategy. Packaging all the piece parts onto an appliance that can be remotely upgraded and managed is a good sales strategy for companies cutting back on staff but still requiring capabilities.

There is a lot more that is important about this stage in IBM’s evolution as a company. If I had to sum up what I took away from this annual analyst software event is that IBM is focused at winning the hearts, minds, and dollars of the business leader looking for ways to innovate. That’s what Smarter Planet is about. Will IBM be able to juggle its place as a software leader with its push into business leadership? It is a complicated task that will take years to accomplish and even longer to assess its success.

Unintended consequences of the cloud – part II

As I was pointing out yesterday, there are many unintended consequences from any emerging technology platform — the cloud will be no exception. So, here are my next three picks for unintended consequences from the evolution of cloud computing:

4. The cloud will disrupt traditional computing sales models. I think that Larry Ellison is right to rant about Cloud Computing. He is clearly aware that if cloud computing becomes the preferred way for customers to purchase software the traditional model of paying maintenance on applications will change dramatically.  Clearly,  vendors can simply roll in the maintenance stream into the per user per month pricing. However, as I pointed out in Part I, prices will inevitably go down as competition for customers expands. There there will come a time when the vast sums of money collected to maintain software versions will seem a bit old fashioned. In fact, that will be one of the most important unintended consequences and will have a very disruptive effect on the economic models of computing. It has the potential to change the power dynamics of the entire hardware and software industries.The winners will be the customers and smart vendors who figure out how to make money without direct maintenance revenue. Like every other unintended consequence there will be new models emerging that will emerge that will make some really cleaver vendors very successful. But don’t ask me what they are. It is just too early to know.

5. The market for managing cloud services will boom. While service management vendors do pretty well today managing data center based systems, the cloud environment will make these vendors king of the hill.  Think about it like this. You are a company that is moving to the cloud. You have seven different software as a service offerings from seven different vendors. You also have a small private cloud that you use to provision critical customer data. You also use a public cloud for some large scale testing. In addition, any new software development is done with a public cloud and then moved into the private cloud when it is completed. Existing workloads like ERP systems and legacy systems of record remain in the data center. All of these components put together are the enterprise computing environment. So, what is the service level of this composite environment? How do you ensure that you are compliant across these environment? Can you ensure security and performance standards? A new generation of products and maybe a new generation of vendors will rake in a lot of cash solving this one.

6. What will processes look like in the cloud. Like data, processes will have to be decoupled from the applications that they are an integral part of the applications of record. Now I don’t expect that we will rip processes out of every system of record. In fact, static systems such as ERP, HR, etc. will have tightly integrated processes. However, the dynamic processes that need to change as the business changes will have to be designed without these constraints. They will become trusted processes — sort of like business services that are codified but can be reconfigured when the business model changes.  This will probably happen anyway with the emergence of Service Oriented Architectures. However, with the flexibility of cloud environment, this trend will accelerate. The need to have independent process and process models may have the potential of creating a brand new market.

I am happy to add more unintended consequences to my top six. Send me your comments and we can start a part III reflecting your ideas.

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.

Has IBM Changed its Partner Strategy? The Hunt for OEMs

Partners are getting more and more important to the major software players. IBM announced a very interesting relationship with Kana, a $60 million solution provider of multi-channel customer service software. This is indeed a growing area in the market. Kana sells its software to about 60% of the Fortune 100. The company started in 1996 and has managed to survive some rough times and come out strong.

While IBM, like other major industry players rely on their partner ecosystem as an important go to market strategy. Some partnerships work better than others. What I thought was particularly interesting about the Kana partnership is its depth. Kana has decided to embed IBM’s DB2, WebSphere (including the WebSphere Process Server) into its solutions. SOA is an important new direction for Kana and the two companies plan to do some joint development in this area. Relationships like this don’t just happen. More than half of Kana’s customers are also IBM customers. This is important because increasingly the customers that I am talking to are looking to buy solutions from one trusted provider rather than trying to get a bunch of individual vendors to work together.

IBM has had a strategy for more than a decade of partnering with packaged software providers rather than being in that business. On one level, this can be viewed as a risky strategy. One only has to look at the roles of Oracle and SAP in the market to wonder if these packaged offerings will swallow up the entire ISV partner ecosystem like a black hole. I guess that my conclusion is that it just isn’t that simple. Customers that I have spent time with look at software packages from a different vantage point than infrastructure software. Because Oracle or SAP provides an excellent package for supply chain management or accounting management does not necessarily mean that they are the right choice for middleware or SOA infrastructure.

IBM’s partner strategy with ISVs has evolved over the past several years. I see a change from the desire to have lots of partners who will enable their software to run one or more IBM software offerings to deeper more strategic relationships. The Kana relationship is an OEM relationship — not a simple membership in a partner program. In fact, IBM has more than 30 of these OEM partnerships with vendors including Fair Issacs, Cisco, Nortel, and PTC — to name a couple. I expect that OEM partners are going to became an important center focus of IBM’s partnering strategy in the coming year.

Packaging SOA: What serves the customer?

I was talking to a CIO the other day about the whole area of Service Oriented Architectures. It was one of those interesting probing discussions around key players, emerging technologies and the like. One of the interesting topics that came up was around packaged software. This CIO was confused about a major issue. What is the benefit and danger of implementing a package software offering that has all the industry best practices, business process, and middleware integrated together. What are the opportunities and risks of this approach? Likewise, what are the risks of buying piece parts and integrating them together?

This is an important question and one that I have obvious opinions about. I think that it can be dangerous for companies to buy a too well integrated SOA environment from a single vendor. While it might seem like the path of least resistance might be to just buy an entire software suite from a company like SAP or Oracle and be done with it. While this may seem like a pretty straight forward question it actually is much more complicated. On the plus side, a customer could get a head start by using a SOA model where everything is designed to work together. On the other hand, I would submit that this approach is antithetical to the reason companies are approaching SOA in the first place. Companies are moving to SOA in order to create a flexible, modular environment where it is easier to add or subtract components based on either a new business initiative or a new innovative technology. If the SOA platform is too well integrated, change becomes hard.

So, what did I suggest to my CIO friend? I told him that it is better to look at packaged software as components in an overall SOA strategy rather than the lynch pin of that strategy. It is better to begin with the overall business strategy and an Enterprise Architecture and select technologies that are designed with standardized interfaces. The foundation should be based on loose coupling of services.

A packaged offering can work if customers finds a package that is standards based and extensible does not lock them into one perspective on the world. I think we’d all like to have a world where you just buy what you need off the shelf and life is good. But unless you are buying a commodity, I think the world is still too complicated for packaged SOA. Are there SOA commodities? Of course, for example, a set of best practices that are well understood across a broad spectrum of customers can be packaged as a business service and used broadly. Even a large service such as those offered by ADP is an example of a service offering that is well understood and not differentiated. Who would want to write their own service for managing payroll.

I do think that there will be a time when the SOA software market has matured to the point where building blocks are mature and well structured enough to be able to link together services smoothly and easily. But I don’t think we are there yet…do you? Let me know what you think.

Oracle plus BEA…Sun Plus MySQL

Just when it began to look like BEA might take itself private, the company gave into the mounting pressure and became the latest Oracle acquisition. A few months ago I wrote about my thoughts on the potential acquisition. While on the surface it might appear that Oracle is going after the customer base, I think that the move is more significant in terms of the software assets including middleware and business process management software. An interesting and little discussed asset is the high end Tuxedo transaction monitoring software developed by Bell Labs in the 1980s and commercialized by AT&T Unix Systems Labs, then owned by Novell and finally sold as part of the formation of BEA.

So, I think that Oracle did the right thing in acquiring BEA to fill in its middleware stack. However, the real question remains: how will Oracle be able to rationalize all of the middleware components to create a platform. For example, I predict that it will take years for BEA to have a Fusion middleware stack that incorporates BEA’s value. The same issue will persist for business process software. The assets from various acquisitions will have to be sorted out. I thought that James Governor made some interesting observations in his recent blog on Oracle. Josh Greenbaum, as usual has some interesting thoughts about Oracle’s approach to the market…At least where Oracle is concerned, we won’t be bored.

Now, about Sun Microsystems. I have to say that the acquisition of MySQL left me scratching my head. Sun seems to have taken on the mantle of the place where software goes to die. Can you spell Forte (a development environment with $80 million in revenue that Sun acquired for $450 million — what a deal!)? How about other notable acquisitions like NetDynamics, and Netscape Application Server? There are others, of course, but I can’t remember their names anymore. Even with the Java franchise Sun hasn’t figured out how to make money on software.

So, what about MySQL which Sun payed $1 billion dollars for? Jonathan Swartz in his blog makes a case that Sun can win in the market though a focus on open source software. While commercial support of open source is important for customers I suspect that it won’t really help Sun’s revenue climb. Clearly, one of the reasons that MySQL has been successful is that it works and is open source — I can’t figure out how Sun will leverage this asset to build a successful commercial business.

Can Experience and Performance Management Transform Business?

Just as I finished writing my last entry about how complicated it was to install my router I met with a company called Knoa that focuses on the customer experience. That got my attention.

The company was started by two engineers (Yee-Ping Wu and Dr. Philip Lui) in 2003 with experience in the consumer market. Clearly, the average consumer does not expect to require training to use products. In fact, the team’s last project before starting Knoa was creating a multimedia authoring tool for Microsoft Home project. A good background for tackling the customer experience in the enterprise application space. In essence, the company decided to follow the pain and has focused on customer experiences with SAP solutions and Oracle E-Business suite. I guess that if you are looking to solve customer problems you might as well start by focusing on real pain!

 

Knoa positions itself in the experience and performance management space. Big words that basically mean that the company focuses on how the end customer or user interacts with software. The software sits between the graphical interface of packaged software and the operation system. The software is intended to determine what is impacting the user’s ability to get their work done and is intended to pinpoint user adoption issues. There are some interesting distinctions. For example, there are mistakes that are user error such as inputting the wrong product code. This is a problem related to how that individual has been trained in their job. However, there are other errors that are related to a response time problems, poor navigation within the software, or problems related to the network or the operating system. Knoa’s focus is providing technology that monitors the behavior of the user as they are using these packaged applications.

The company uses a passive monitoring 864K agent that is implementing on each desktop. This agent intercepts any application that is running. The agent is mapped to a specific template designed to discover and monitor a core application from SAP or Oracle. In essence, these templates are intended to measure a specific set of metrics that are important to managing the end user experience. Knoa focuses on issues ranging from response time to what part of the application the user is actually using. What I thought was interesting is the type of metrics that the company focuses on. For example, the software can be used to track which parts of a CRM system a majority of the sales team is actually using. It could also be used to see where employees are having difficulty with a packaged application. Is the problem a bug in the software or is it that users do not understand how to use an application and therefore bypass it altogether. The application has obvious uses in support of call centers.

 

The company seems to be off to a good start. It’s 2007 revenues tripled from 2006. Knoa won’t state revenues, its revenue per customer ranges from $300,000 to several million dollars. It has an impressive customer list including brand names like BT, AstraZeneca, AOL, McKesson, Kimberly Clark, and Pfizer. In all the company has 50 customers and 50 employees.

I think that the company is in an interesting position in the market. It has wisely positioned itself as a packaged application in support of SAP and Oracle applications rather than a tool. Because of the design of the underlying engine, the company says that it can add support for a new packaged application in a few weeks. I like the fact that the company is not trying to be all things to all people in the application management space. It can integrate into an existing HP/Mercury dashboard and is planning to expand to support other vendors as well. The key question will be how well the company does in expanding its partner base. Clearly, customer experience management is an area that all of the major performance management/system management companies will like to have as a complementary capability. And Knoa is just scratching the surface of what is possible in this area.

 

 

 

 

 

What’s SAP’s Plan: Innovation, SOA, and Winning?

I am back from SAP’s annual industry influencer conference. When I attend one of these meetings I typically take lots of notes on my laptop so that after the fact I can go back and make sense of what the executives actually said. It is a fascinating process. When I take these notes and analyze them I begin to see through the “show business” factor of an event intended to influence.

I enjoyed spending time with fellow blogger Michael Krigsman (IT Project Failures blog) who makes some interesting observations in his blog and the blog of his colleague, Joe McKendrick, who writes a SOA blog for ZDNet. Their perceptions on SOA and SAP are worth paying attention to.

Now, back to my point. So, what do my notes tell me? First, SAP leadership is obsessed with three things: innovation, service oriented architectures, and winning.

So, here is my quick take on each of these issues:

Innovation. In the seven pages of pages I took during the opening keynote sessions of the meeting, I typed the word innovation 25 times. While I am sure that is not a record – every vendor meeting I have attended in the past six months has focused on innovation. SAP’s definition of innovation is not surprising — it is tied to innovation in process. In many ways, SAP is correct. You can have enormous potential for efficiency breakthroughs through a process approach. Here’s a quote that I liked from one of the keynotes, “

It is about continuous innovation. You take the process innovation and industry innovation in SAP, multiply that with the blueprint of SOA. This creates a possible incremental breakthrough. This approach can be adopted in a step-by-step way to create break through. You can bring in new processes and add more flexibility to create a business breakthrough..”

Since I don’t take dictation, this is as close as I got to a direct quote. But what is interesting here is that SAP is talking about innovation in terms of an incremental approach, an approach that assumes a structured service architecture, and the fact that the end result will create a business breakthrough. No one could argue with these points. However, what I kept waiting for and never got was examples that put these words in context with customers’ experiences.

Service Oriented Architecture. SAP loves SOA. In several conversations I had with SAP executives I was told that they were the leader in SOA. And I agree that SAP has done a good job in taking on the task of breaking down monolithic code into modular components. This is a good approach for SAP internally since it means less work for their own development organization when they need to move from one version to the next. Using standards based web services interfaces instead of proprietary APIs helps tremendously. SAP is strong on adhering to industry standards within their platform. What I question is the company’s ability to claim leadership in SOA if it is intended to be an SAP dominated architecture where they own and control all the moving parts.

In my view, SOA has to be based on a heterogeneous approach to architecture. Business services have to be loosely coupled — no matter what platform they were build for. SAP is not the only company I have a beef with on this point — Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, BEA, etc. all would like to have their platform become the SOA standard. This would be a dangerous move for customers.

Winning. I actually think that if any one vendor “wins” the architectural game, customers lose. If I write next year that SAP has accomplished its goal and become the standard for SOA, I will be there first to proclaim SOA is dead. While SAP is a smart, competitive, and technically sophisticated company, it needs to focus on winning based on their customers success in a highly fragmented, complicated, and heterogeneous world.

 

The Oracle Syndrome: why there are no big bangs

I was thinking this week about Oracle. You remember them. The big database company that decided that it would be a big packaged applications company and a big middleware company. I have to give them credit for swooping in and buying their way into a leadership position. While it is hard to buy companies and keep them going, in the packaged software arena it isn’t as hard as it looks. For example, customers who buy a PeopleSoft HR application are not going to dump it just because the company was purchased by Oracle. Software is a funny thing — it lingers for decades after everyone assumed that it would be dead. As I always say, old software never dies.

So, what is my point about the Oracle Syndrome? The reality is that Oracle is not about innovation. It is about leveraging a captive installed base. It is about stitching together packaged applications with business process connectors so that one package can send an piece of data to another application.

Therefore, forget about Fusion middleware. Rather than a big bang common platform under all of Oracle’s packaged applications, it is a slow methodical revamping of small components of Oracle’s applications. It will take decades before Oracle could claim to have a common infrastucture under its applications.

I think that this is the future of software. No big bangs. Incremental business focused innovation will be the rule — not the exception. Does this mean that there will be no unexpected innovations? Of course not. There will be innovations that come out of nowhere and transform the world of software. However, they will not be overnight wonders — the most important innovations take years even decades before they mature and change the world overnight.

Five things I learned at IBM’s Software Group Industry Analyst Meeting

Every year at about this time I attend IBM Software Group IT Industry Analyst meeting. This meeting is attended by about 90 industry analysts and about three times that number of IBM software group leaders, managers, and support staff. It is quite the event! While I can’t possibly talk about everything I am hearing, but I will give you an overview of the events and some of the highlights.

Since I have been traveling to a lot of analyst conferences lately, I can compare the approach of different market leaders. Next week, for example, I will be at EMC’s analyst meeting and in early December I will attend SAP’s analyst event.

But I digress. Here is what I came away thinking about IBM and its software strategy. One of my first thoughts is to compare Microsoft’s SOA/BPM event the other week to IBM’s. One of the big differences is that while Microsoft is announcing new long term initiatives (Oslo) for SOA, IBM is executing on a long term plan that has been in the works for more than five years. I think the best way to understand IBM’s software DNA is to look at the perspective of its leader.

I start with an observation that is actually not new for me. Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Software Group has been the force behind herding the multiple business areas within the software group to have a common set of underlying services. While this may make perfect sense, it not an easy achievement for a company with thousands of software offerings across hundreds of different business units. As an example, when I first met Steve he was grappling with a few hundred different data stores under hundreds of different products. Somehow he managed to get all of these groups to use DB2 as their underlying database engine. But that was just the start. Steve’s next big leap was to move out of the packaged software market and into the middleware and horizontal software market.

 

 

 

 

I thought Steve’s remarks were quite insightful: In essence, Mills pointed out that IBM’s focus with its horizontal software approach is on what he calls industry frameworks. With this approach he believes that IBM is armed with the right stuff to focus on what he calls “customer business outcomes.”

Rather than packaged software these frameworks are a combination of best practices and business services. For example, in the financial services industry these services would include financial services for payments platforms, high performance event processing, and large scale data mining and analytics. Therefore, the overarching strategy for the software business is to provide the building blocks that apply to business requirements across business domains.

Mills contents that the real benefit that customers are looking for is to gaining operational efficient and innovative business performance from this horizontal. He contends that the greatest benefit from a growth and cost containment basis comes from a focus on harmonizing business practices across the organization. Simply automating and re-automating vertical slides such as customer relationship systems, booking keeping, inventory, and the like not where the opportunity is. Could this be a swipe at companies like Oracle and SAP?

 

Like Microsoft, IBM is moving its focus to process and models-based approaches but with a horizontal flavor. Mills believes that transactions, messaging, information integration, management of an increasingly virtualized enviornment, data management, and collaboration are at the heart of the requirements to make this vision a reality. This is where IBM software is putting its money and its bets.

So, here are the five things I learned from this meeting (I probably learned more but I know that people who read blogs have a short attention span…):

1. IBM is focused horizonally and will not get into the packaged software market. The exception will be software packages that focuses on more horizontal requirements.

2. IBM is reinventing Lotus into a collaboration platform. There are many exciting initiatives unfolding in Lotus that focus on a true distributed platform. I expect to see some important Software as a Service initiatives come out of the new Lotus. I would like to see IBM move faster into Software as a Service.

3. Information Management is an increasingly strong part of the IBM platform that transcends the database. IBM is doing a good job at integrating a large number of acquisitions into a substantial SOA based information platform.

4. IBM is doing SOA well. Clearly, the investment in SOA is paying off for IBM. It has more than 5700 SOA engagements under its belt. It is now able to leverage its expertise across key verticals to present a sound strategy to customers.

 

5. Now, I don’t want you to think that everything is perfect at IBM. There are still areas of concern. For example, the Tivoli organization has plenty of work to do to explain its portfolio to the market and give customers better techniques to get started without getting indigestion . Like other parts of IBM software, it is, in essence a software company in its own right with hundreds of products that don’t always work together as they should. Likewise, IBM Websphere is a huge set of technologies — some better integrated that others. Sometimes customers get overwhelmed with the portfolio.

Trying to reduce IBM software strategy to under 1,000 words is a task few humans should undertake (without a stiff drink of something). I have left out a lot — and there is plenty to say. For example, I haven’t talked at all about the herculean task that Danny Sabbah (I have added a link to Amy Wohl’s blog. She has a good interview with Danny from the same meeting) has taken on to reinvigorate Rational. (Yes, he is making progress. The direction is well conceived — it will just take some time). I also have not talked about the important Express software platforms that are probably IBM’s best kept secret. There are a series of impressive product offerings designed for ease of installation and ease of use required by the mid-market. I always wonder why it is o.k. for big companies to have to do things the hard way (but that’s just me…).

I guess this means that I have to write more about IBM’s software strategy in future entries…