BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Analysts on Appliances, BPEL4People, and GPL v.3

Edited transcript of weekly BriefingsDirect[TM] SOA Insights Edition podcast, recorded June 29, 2007.

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Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Volume 21, a weekly discussion and dissection of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) related news and events with a panel of industry analysts and guests.

I’m your host and moderator, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. We are joined this week on our panel by Tony Baer. He's a principal at OnStrategies. Welcome back, Tony.

Tony Baer: Hey, Dana, how are you doing?

Gardner: Great. Also Jim Kobielus, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Hey, Jim.

Jim Kobielus: Good morning, one and all.

Gardner: Brad Shimmin, also principal analyst at Current Analysis. Welcome back, Brad.

Brad Shimmin: Thanks for having me back, Dana.

Gardner: Also joining us, Todd Biske, an enterprise architect at Momentum SI, an Austin, Texas consultancy. Good to have you, Todd.

Todd Biske: Thanks, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: And our guest this week, and it is the week of June 25, 2007, is Jim Ricotta. He is the vice president and general manager of appliances within IBM’s software group. Glad you could be with us, Jim.

Jim Ricotta: Glad to be here.

Gardner: Now, Jim, let’s get into a little bit of background on how you came to be at IBM. You were with DataPower, a Boston-based XML messaging appliance vendor until -- when was it -- about a year ago, maybe a little bit more?

Ricotta: That’s about right, Dana. We’ve been part of IBM for about 18 months. We were acquired toward the end of 2005. Before that, I was the CEO of DataPower for the previous three years starting in 2003. Prior to that, I ran the content networking division of Cisco Systems. So, I went from Layer 4 through Layer 7 of networking to this middleware appliance concept, and now I find myself on the other end of the fence in the world’s biggest middleware business, which is IBM.

Gardner: Could you explain what your purview is there under appliances? How wide is your role in terms of product and development?

Ricotta: IBM acquired DataPower for the current products, but really more for the potential. IBM sees a lot of potential to take appropriate functions, "appliance-ize" them, and deliver a lot more value to clients that way.

I know we're going to talk about this in the discussion, but the basic concept of an appliance is to allow customers to get their projects going more quickly, experience lower total cost of ownership (TCO), etc. My role is the general manager and VP of appliances, not just WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances. We have a broader remit and we are looking at a number of different appliance efforts for different parts of the IBM product set.

Gardner: Right. I wonder if you could also relate this to the SOA discussion. In general, SOA conceptually aligns with appliances rather well. It’s about individual parts that contribute to the larger iterative types of development and being able to manage the runtime more dynamically. How do appliances conceptually, in your mind, align with SOA?

Ricotta: One of the reasons that SOA has been a very fertile ground for appliances is the standards -- the idea of standards and the idea of a layered architectural approach. Thinking of my background, if you look at networking products, what really made routers and other types of networking such big horizontal businesses was that there were standards. The first routers were software products that ran on Unix Boxes.

But as you got standard protocols and the ISO stack took hold, it became possible to build a device that you didn’t have to program or patch. You just turned it on, configured it, it did its function, and that allowed that business to really grow.

SOA has its own version of an ISO stack with the WS-Standards and the layers from things like BPEL, all the way down to XML and the basics. That’s what enabled this approach of putting together a device that supports a bunch of these standards and can fit right into anybody’s SOA architecture, no matter what they are doing with SOA.

Gardner: Okay. Another topic, a subset of SOA, is the discussion around Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Is the relationship between an appliance improvement for performance aligned with where you see ESBs in the market?

Ricotta: At IBM, we see ESB as a key part of any SOA architecture and deployment. If you do it properly, and we can talk later about what it means to do an appliance well, you tend to get a performance solution. You’ve done optimization. You’ve done a pruning back of all the potential functions.

So, the ones that you have, you tend to have good performance from, as well as the other benefits I pointed to, easy deployment and low TCO. So, given that ESB is the core of SOA, in many ways having an appliance alternative is important.

Gardner: Let’s go to Jim Kobielus. Jim, you were curious about the scope of appliances as a term, but also as a concept. Why don’t you take the questioning from here?

Kobielus: Okay. Thank you, Jim, and thank you, Dana. The notion of appliances in the industry has been expanded and stretched almost to the breaking point over the last few years.

I agree with Jim on what he's saying in terms of some of the core features of any so-called appliance -- quick deployment, low TCO, a basic function-limited component of some sort that is fairly easy to slot into your existing architecture and be deployed because it incorporates open standards and all that. But, the notion of an appliance comes out of the hardware world.

That’s no problem for IBM/DataPower, because from the get-go your appliances have been hardware based -- circuit boards and other devices that could be merged into racks and so forth. In recent years, the term "appliances" has been stretched to the point where now there is something called a "software appliance," or a concept of a software appliance, that many vendors are starting to tout in their products -- and not just individual vendors, but in collaborations.

In fact, just this very week, actually it was a couple of weeks ago, I ran across a couple of additional new mentions of software appliances or when Sybase and Red Hat announced that they're working together on a so-called software appliance that’s just a bundling and integration of two software products: Sybase’s database in business intelligence (BI) products and the Red Hat Linux operating system. Ingres about five months ago announced that it has a software appliance-product family called Icebreaker.

Some BI vendors, like JasperSoft, have been saying, “Hey, we're going to integrate our product with that so-called software appliance and voila! Here's something that you can install quickly at low TCO, etc.”

What I'm getting at is what they are now calling a software appliance is no different than what has been traditionally simply been called a solution, or simply a software package, that integrates two or more disparate components into a single component -- a single package with a single install.

I'm trying in my small way to beat the drum that the industry needs to scale the definition of an appliance back to its traditional scope. It’s a hardware-centric performance-built component, because, at some point, if everything is a software appliance, then the very term "appliance" is redundant.

Gardner: How about that, Jim? I guess you mentioned that appliances started with software and then became baked into a hardware lock-down, and now the term is expanding.

Ricotta: We've got to be careful, Dana. When I talked about routers, what I meant to say was that they were software products and then they became appliances. When they became appliances, they ceased to be software plus hardware. They were one thing. We see that in our industry all the time. It’s good to be at the beginning of a trend, but then, if your trend becomes too popular, everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and the message can get diluted.

In fact, some of you who we talked to years ago when we were DataPower, might recall that, for a while, we stopped using "appliance." We started using the term "network device," because everyone saw what we were doing. Even though all they had was a Dell server with a CD with preinstalled Linux and their app, they would put a badge on the front say it’s an appliance.

I agree. You've got to be careful, because, again, there’s usually a performance value, although not always. Think about your TiVo or your iPod. That’s not a high performance-value proposition, but you always have to have a consumability value proposition and a low cost-of-ownership value proposition.

Our customers say, “Geez. We could do what your box does with software running on a server, but the operations folks tell us it would be two times or four times more expensive to maintain, because we have to patch all the different things that are on there. It’s not the same everywhere in the world in our infrastructure. Whereas with your box, we configure it; we load a firmware image, and it’s always the same wherever it exists.” Again, from my experience, that’s the way people treat routers.

So, our view is an appliance is three things that the customer buys at the same time: They buy hardware, software, and support, and it’s all together. That’s really what we think is the core value proposition. It’s cool to make a VMware image with your stuff that someone can easily deploy, but that’s something different. That's a solution, an application, a bundle, or something.

Kobielus: I think that the three core definitions of an appliance should be, "It is tangible." That’s something that you can actually throw against the wall if it screws up. Next, "Is it simple?" Now, Dana, "warehousing appliance" is not an appliance. It’s like saying that my Toyota Camry is an appliance. It’s the assemblage of many components, each of which can individually screw up. Then, thirdly, it should be pain free -- no setup and no administration or very little.

Gardner: Okay, so to understand, Jim Ricotta, you don’t consider a virtualized instance of something that’s bundled to be really an appliance?

Ricotta: No, we don’t. Again, you have to put that on a server somewhere and it doesn’t have the properties that an appliance has.

Gardner: You've got to be able to plug-in, swap-in, swap-out physically.

Ricotta: Yeah. I read a good article about the history of the networking business, and it talked about this transition I just described, where routing software moved into these boxes and then became very, very popular. This article noted that some of the early networking companies -- Cisco, Nortel, and others -- found that if you took software, locked it down, and put it in a box that had a fan and got warm, people had an affinity. IT people have an affinity for things that you plug-in, have a fan, get warm and do something useful.

Gardner: Todd Biske, as an enterprise architect, you probably concern yourself mostly with software. Do you think through on the level of an appliance or do you let the operations people worry about that?

Biske: No. Actually, I’ve got a lot of background in working with appliances. When I was an enterprise architect back at an enterprise, or actual Fortune company, we had this natural convergence that was always occurring between the group responsible for our middleware, or our software infrastructure, with the network engineering team. You can look at something like an HTTP proxy, and you’ve got Apache as a software-based solution, but then there is also a whole variety of appliances that can do the same thing.

So, there is always this natural tension of smart network devices versus some of the software products that were involved. The key thing for me that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that it does have to be more than just commodity hardware with some preconfigured software put on it.

Marketers for companies looking at leveraging either VMware machines and things that are preconfigured are looking for a term for this. "Appliance" does fit, because it gives you the right conceptual model.

A manager I worked for had the term "Dial-tone Infrastructure." You want to plug it in, pick it up, and it works. That’s the model that everybody is trying to get to with their solutions. But, when you're dealing with an appliance, you have to have that level of integration between the hardware and the software, so that you're getting the absolute best you can out of the underlying physical infrastructure that you have it on.

Any software-based approach that’s on a commodity hardware is not going to be optimized to the extent that it can be. You look at where you can leverage hardware appropriately and tune this thing to get every last ounce of performance out of it that you can.

Gardner: So, you like the notion of having some secret sauce in this, but you also like the notion of not having to create that secret sauce yourself?

Biske: Absolutely. You always have to look at where you want to leverage it. Another example where the technology could be applied would be in the use of blade servers. The biggest knock that I see from software guys on appliances is that it’s this gateway model. You’ve got to figure out the appropriate choke point at which to have it. If you adopt a blade server architecture, now you’ve got this backplane that's the perfect gateway for a lot of these hardware-based capabilities.

The ability to leverage some of these appliance technologies and hardware-optimized solutions in a blade center approach has a lot of potential as well. Then, you’ve naturally got that choke point, and you don’t have to figure out, "Well, because I’ve got datacenters all over the place, I really need hundreds of these appliances, rather than just two or three, because of how I’ve designed my middleware distribution."

Ricotta: That’s a great point, Todd. I'm not here to introduce products on this call, lest I run afoul of all of IBM’s attorneys, but we are looking at different form factors, like blades, as a good way to expand the appliance portfolio.

Gardner: Great. Thanks, Jim. Brad Shimmin, any thoughts in this subject?

Shimmin: Absolutely. When I look at this, I see two camps. You’ve got the hardware manufactures and then the software manufacturers in the SOA space, both seeing the benefits we’ve all been talking about thus far in terms of TCO, ease of use, and simplicity. Back to what Todd was saying, the key differentiator we’ve been talking about this far is the performance; the speed at which these things run, and their abilities based on that.

When you look historically at appliances like SSL accelerators, the reason they're not sitting on servers today is because servers can’t keep up with that wire speed you need. If I look at something like Layer 7 Technologies, they have their XML accelerators, and I see that as a perfect way to utilize a piece of hardware to run something that needs to go fast. I look at companies like Cape Clear and others in the ESB space, and I see them desperately trying to make their ESBs go as close to wire speed as possible, although we know they’ll never get there. I see them saying, “I wish I was running on an appliance.”

I see the two sides converging, but at the same time, I see there being something very valid about a piece of software that acts like an appliance. Layer 7, for example, released what they called a "virtual soft-appliance." If it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it is a duck, right?

But the difference is, it’s just not going to go as fast as it was going to go on the Layer 7 device. If you and your enterprise are going to get all the advantages from a piece of software that you are going to get from a single piece of server hardware, you don’t need the performance from it. I don’t see that as being a problem and something we should try to shun.

Gardner: Let’s talk about the hardware for a moment. Jim Ricotta, the conventional thinking around appliances is commodity-level x86 hardware, perhaps a Linux kernel, but IBM has other hardware lines, and there is Power and this new Cell architecture. We're also getting into multi-core in a big way. For an appliance, perhaps the end user isn’t necessarily concerned with the hardware or even the kernel. Is there an opportunity for the secret sauce to extend across different types of hardware in the future?

Ricotta: The idea with an appliance is that the clients don’t care what’s inside. They care about the functions that the device does. The way we have architected our product, we do have lots of choices. We can pick the right processors and, even before we became part of IBM, we had used some ASICS to speed up certain parts of the XML processing pipeline.

Now, we are doing much more of that, we’ve got some new projects kicked off, because IBM has a lot of various state-of-the-art custom silicon and ASIC technology. So, yes, we will continue to leverage whatever hardware constructs give us the qualities we need, from performance, cost, and reliability, and we will continue to shield the IT users from that, because they don’t want to see it really.

Gardner: I know you can’t pre-announce it, and we don’t certainly expect that, but there seems to be some momentum building here for a cascade of announcements at some point -- the year of the IBM appliance if you will. Is that going to be in 2007 or 2008?

Ricotta: We'll be active in both. You'll hear from us, later this year, as well as next year.

Gardner: Okay. So, the "years" of IBM appliances. Let’s revert to the SOA discussion. Is there anyone on the panel who want to discuss why they think appliances dovetail conceptually and with SOA?

Kobielus: They dovetail, because the very concept of an appliance is something that’s loosely coupled. It’s a basic, discrete component of functionality that is loosely coupled from other components. You can swap it out independently from other components in your architecture, and independently scale it up or scale it out, as your traffic volume grows, and as your needs grow. So, once again, an appliance is a tangible service.

Shimmin: I see it similarly, in that an appliance can act as an enabler for other pieces of software in terms of providing that level of performance and scalability that those pieces can't do on their own. Such as we are seeing with ESBs and other areas. Those pieces of software need desperately some piece of hardware somewhere that can get them the information need in any timely manner.

Gardner: Do you think there is a parallel here between what we’ve seen on the World Wide Web in terms of content delivery networks and application management and acceleration -- what the enterprises are going to want to do internally, and not just enterprises, but also service providers, those who are going to be doing software-as-a-service (SaaS) and co-location activities, similar top what we’ve seen from Amazon and others.

I'll throw this back to Jim Ricotta. Is there a bit more than what we are discussing in terms of the role here?

Ricotta: We definitely see some parallels to what went on with the Web and CDNs. We have some discussions underway with network providers that have big corporate clients who are now launching their first B2B Web services, and they are basically utilizing SOA-type functions between organizations across Wide Area Networks. These carriers are looking at how to provide a value-added service, a value-added network to this growing volume of XML, SOA-type traffic. We see that as a trend in the next couple of years.

Gardner: Before we move on to our next subject, did anyone else want to address the general issue of appliances?

Baer: I have a very short observation, which is that history tends to go in cycles, and I imagine or recall similar discussions with the CAD/CAM vendors back in the 1980s with all their turnkey systems.

Gardner: Whoa! We're going way back.

Baer: Exactly. So, appliances are not new in this space. There’s always been a need to do optimized processing. We've just taken a detour during the era of open systems, but now we can start the approach again without the religious wars that we fought about 10 or 15 years ago.

Gardner: Great.

Ricotta: Let me make one comment also. I’ve heard a lot about performance in appliances, and I want to implore you all to think more, and maybe talk to someone like Todd, who has done the ROI, the evaluations, and all that kind of thing. It’s really much more. In fact, when I talked to our customers, it’s about TCO and then "time to solution" and "time to deployment." And, then performance.

Gardner: Jim Ricotta, do you have any metrics, a typical instance of a better ROI or reduction in total cost, compared to a distributed computing environment approach?

Ricotta: I can give you some data points that I collected. I’ve heard big global IT organizations, when they do their TCO calculation, say a router is $100 a month to support, a server is $500, and a DataPower SOA appliance is maybe $200 to $250. Those are the kind of ranges I hear.

Gardner: So, we are talking a potential 50 percent reduction in total cost?

Ricotta: Yes.

Gardner: Well, that does tend to get people’s attention.

Ricotta: Yes.

Biske: Something that hasn’t been brought up, and I think it’s something organizations have to consider, when they look at appliances versus software-based solutions, is the operational model. A lot of this space in the middle in SOA is all about what I would call a "configure-not-code" approach. Appliances, by definition, are something you configure, not something that you are going to be developing code for. So, it’s really tuned for an operational model, and not for a developer having to go in and tinker around with it.

A lot of the vendors claiming to produce software appliances are now trying to move closer to that. There’s still a big conceptual difference there and that’s really where a lot of the savings can come in the total cost of ownership. It isn’t how much work you have to go through it to actually make a change to the policies that are being enforced by this software appliance or device, and there are big differences between the products out there.

Gardner: So, you really like the idea of specifying, and that perhaps is another layer of efficiency in cost reduction when it comes to creating an architecture.

Biske: Absolutely, but the key to it all that Jim mentioned earlier on is standards. You don’t have much of a market for devices in the space, unless you’ve got the standards.

Gardner: You're back to an integration problem.

Biske: Exactly.

On BPEL4People and WS-Human Task ...

Gardner: Speaking of standards, let’s move on to our next topic. The BPEL4People specification came to fruition this week. Tony Baer, you wrote about it. Why don’t you tell us about this extension to BPEL, and a separate specification, WS-Human Task.

Baer: It’s interesting that they made both spec proposals separate. But, it’s not any type of surprise. IBM and SAP have been talking about this for about 18 months to two years, if I recall. What was a little interesting was that Oracle originally dissented from this, and now Oracle is part of that team.

Essentially what the hubbub is all about is that all the SOA folks have looked at BPEL and find something interesting. It does well with machine-to-machine, or at least with designed-for-automated processes to trigger other automated processes based on various conditions and scenarios, and do it dynamically. But, the one piece that was missing was most processes are not 100 percent automated. There’s going to be some human input somewhere. It was pointed out that this is a major shortcoming of the BPEL spec.

So, IBM, SAP, Oracle, BEA, Adobe and Active Endpoints have put together a proposal to patch this gap, and we’re going to submit it to OASIS. We’re going to do with two pieces. One we’re going to call this BPEL4People. We’re going to add a stopping point to say, "Put a human task here." That’s essentially BPEL4People. It’s a little more than that, but essentially boils down to that.

In terms of the actual description of the task, the semantics of the task, this could be a whole separate standard called WS-HumanTask. Where I tend to see the value in this is that invoking a human task as a service is not necessarily a call for relationship with orchestration. You don’t necessarily have to orchestrate in order to invoke a human task.

What makes this little more interesting than a normal spec announcement is that it’s pretty controversial. It draws a lot of heated opinion, as you don’t sit on the fence on something like this. The BPM folks, who tend not to be IT folks, but more process analysts, said, “Heck, BPEL has never been robust enough for our needs. It’s too simple. It’s too much of a lowest common denominator. It doesn't represent subtleties of complex processes.”

So, you have this “tug-of-war.” The announcement of BPEL4People and WS‑HumanTask has simply not settled this. It’s brought the issue back even louder again. It just makes life kind of interesting here.

Gardner: Now, let’s go to Todd Biske. In the real world that you live in, people and process coexist, and we'd like them to coexist better. Does this satisfy some of the needs that you observe in the market?

Biske: I think that we definitely need this. There's a constant tension with trying to take a business-process approach within IT when developing solutions. If you look at the products that are out there, you have one class of products that are typically called "workflow products" that deal with the human task management, and then you have these BPM Products or ESBs with orchestration in them that deal with the automated processes. Neither one, on their own, gives you the full view of the business process.

As a result, there’s always this awkward hand-off that has to occur between what the business user is defining as the business process and what IT has to turn around and actually cobble together as a solution around that. Finally getting to a point where we’re saying, "Okay, let’s come up with something that actually describes the true business process in the business definition of it," is really important. The challenge, though, is that it does potentially involve a fundamental change to the architecture of the solution.

It’s very different to develop a middleware product that can handle human workflow, because now you’ve got to have that state management. Previously, in an orchestration product, you didn't really have to worry about the state. The initial process gets kicked off, it automates that all the way through to the end, and you’re done. Then, you can release all of those resources for processing.

Now, you have to sit and go into this "wait" cycle for humans to do what they need to do, and you have to have a fundamentally different architecture for the solutions that provide that. It will be interesting to see when we actually see products that are claiming to support BPEL4People, what it changes to the landscape these vendors provide, and whether they have to take two products they previously had and combine them into one.

Gardner: I wonder, on one level, whether this is going to address something, but open up a potential can of worms around how things are done. It seems to me that this is a Pandora’s Box that we’ve attached to business process and now have opened up. But, potentially there are some benefits, particularly if you consider more interest these days in Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 activities, where collaboration, social networking, and the “wisdom of crowds” is brought to bear on how businesses behave and how systems react.

Any response to that, Jim Kobielus or Brad Shimmin?

Kobielus: That’s right, Dana, because if you look at the whole notion of orchestration, it implies a rule-driven flow of context and control throughout a distributed process. It’s very much the machine assembly-line metaphor, but if you look at actual business processes, they’re very unstructured or semi‑structured and dynamically self-redefining. In other words, most real-world workflows are a coordination or collaboration process and not really amenable to strict rule definition or strict flow definitions upfront. Everything is very ad hoc.

I am not very sanguine about the prospects for BPEL4People to take off in terms of actual adoption in the real world, in real human driven workflows. It’s just messy for standards.

Gardner: So, you think there’s a need but you don’t think this is the band aid or approach?

Kobielus: There is a need for modeling tools that can help organizations to find roles, rules, and routes among human beings within workflows. I see the human workflow industry and the BPM market as being two distinct markets that don’t really benefit from a common standards framework. I am the jury that is still out on this whole issue.

Gardner: They remain orthogonal for you.

Kobielus: They definitely are orthogonal.

Gardner: Brad, how about you?

Shimmin: I'm glad we’re doing this, although I also feel it’s weird that we’re pushing it out as two different standards, one with a really sad name, and the fact that if it takes the same course that we took with BPEL, it’s going to take another two years at least for this to become truly actionable.

Gardner: You don’t think there will be a line outside of the store waiting for a BPEL4People.

Shimmin: No, the iPhone line was not to be confused with the BPEL4People line. This can be useful, if other standards come along for the ride, like BPMN. If we can pull those along together, then this is going to make a big difference for people. As Jim was saying, the idea of creating business processes that involves humans is nothing new, but it’s something that's very fleeting and hard to nail down. The folks who have been doing B2B integration for years have been looking at this problem and have been trying to solve it, because most of their tasks, like order-to-cash, has some sort of human aspect to it, no matter what.

Gardner: Do we need to put little chips in people’s heads to communicate by, say, Bluetooth to an appliance? Is that what’s needed? Jim Ricotta, what’s your take on this?

Ricotta: It does seem like you’re not going to be able to realize the vision of SOA, unless you can work in the human aspect. I haven’t spent a lot of time with things like BPEL and the top levels of the SOA stack, so I can’t really comment about how workable it is, but it seems like it certainly has to be addressed somehow.

Gardner: So, we seem in agreement about the need. Tony Baer, do you want to have the last word on this -- or Todd Biske? We have pessimism about this approach.

Baer: I'm not very sanguine about BPEL4People. The HumanTask probably has some potential interesting application, if you have a very simple task, a real commodity task that’s done often and you want to be able to reuse it.

The fact that it’s divorced from the BPEL4People stack, is probably a good thing, because there’s some use for this outside of that. I'm very leery about BPEL4People, and I think even the BPEL4People folks are not exactly sure of themselves either. The other thing I'll throw in, and I am not trying to imply any sort of ultimate solution, is that there are other approaches that are being attempted to solve the problem and to get around the bottleneck.

The analysts, the process folks, do take to modeling tools, because they provide a high-level picture of their processes. I don’t know what’s going to come of this, but you’re starting to see some efforts to make models executable. Now, it’s not going to boil the ocean or anything like that, but it’s an interesting approach and might have some niche uses.

Biske: Following up on Tony’s and Brad’s comments, from the enterprise perspective, I have much more interest in things like BPMN than I do in BPEL4People or even the original BPEL. Unlike some of the Web services specifications, when you are to hide a lot of that, developers had to deal with WSDL. There was no getting around it.

A business process developer doesn’t have to deal with BPEL. They’re dealing with some graphical interface that the BPM product has provided, and behind the scenes, that may be turned into BPEL. I may want it for portability, if I decide to change my business process engine, but the average developer shouldn’t even have to see that.

They do need to work on things like the modeling tools. So, the efforts around BPMN are much more important for enterprise developers. The BPEL space is probably of interest just to the vendors in the space, so they can promote some level of portability for these solutions across products. Or, if you’ve got a heterogeneous environment, can we make sure that we go across the environment. The average developer shouldn’t have to deal with it.

On iPhone Day and GPL v.3 Day ...

Gardner: Okay, thanks. Today, and people who listen to this or read it in the future weeks might not recognize the importance of the 29th of June, but it’s iPhone Day, and it’s also GPL Version 3 Day. Apparently at noon eastern, we’re going to hear about the long-awaited and somewhat controversial drop of the new GNU Public License Version 3.

I suppose one of the things that’s caught my attention about this is, since the Microsoft-Novell covenant on patent issues and protection for Novell users of SUSE Linux distribution through Novell, the people who were drafting this new version of the license decided that there was a loophole that needed closing.

Apparently, new terms were designed to prevent a repeat of the Microsoft patent covenant with Novell, and also to extend any patent protection across anyone using the similar products under GPL v3. It’s a little bit murky, this license, as it comes out. Apparently, some people will be moving to this by default, without even knowing it. There are other people who have already put in a statement saying that we’re still going to adhere to GPL v2, and, therefore, not going to version 3. I think it’s going to be a challenge for those using, deploying, and managing open source to sort that out.

We’re also addressing some possible issues around the Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris kernel and operating system, and there might be an opportunity for them to come together in such a way that you could get OpenSolaris under a GPL v3 license. Sun has as much as said that they’re interested, but hasn’t committed.

There’s also an interesting aspect of this in that the Apache software license is going to be closer, and that there’s more agreement, so that developers who have the ability, can merge these two code bases without running afoul of, or being in violation of, either license. So, some potentially large impacts by the arrival of this new GPL v3.

Let’s go around the table and see what the impressions are. Tony Baer, do you think this is a big deal or does is cast more confusion? And, do you think it’s really politics more than technology?

Baer: My sense is it’s going to cast more confusion. I mean even Linus Torvalds has come out against GPL v3, saying that it puts too much of a straightjacket. I just think it’s just adding yet another new variant. If there were 50 Open Source licenses, I am just picking that number arbitrarily, today there are now 51.

Gardner: Well, they say that three quarters of open-source code in use is under the GPL.

Baer: Right, but the thing is whether it’s under GPL or whether it’s under GPL3. I haven’t followed this real closely, I would presume that if you’ve licensed your code or you’re licensing code under GPL v2, that it's not automatically advanced to v3, but correct me if I am wrong.

Gardner: I think that is actually the case with some licenses that don’t state otherwise.

Baer: Okay, that would make sense. It’s going to create a lot of confusion, because obviously the Microsoft-Novell deal was very controversial. The idea that an open-source vendor would even concede that a non-open source vendor might have some intellectual property rights here, after the joke of the SCO lawsuit. Novell was trying to get a halo effect, saying, "Hey, we’ll protect all you SUSE Linux users," and instead it just incurred a lot of ire throughout the community which is saying, "You just admitted that we might have some transgressions here."

Gardner: Novell came back and said, “No, no, we didn’t mean to make such a statement,” right?

Baer: Then Microsoft said, “No, no, no, that was our statement.” So, I just don’t see this solving anything, I think it’s just adding a lot more turbulence to the waters.

Gardner: What we haven’t heard is the response from Microsoft as to whether they think that this license closes a loophole, and that those who now go and get these coupons or these vouchers for support, in doing so, extend this protection across any users. As you point out, the actual Linux kernel is apparently going to remain under version 2. As with an appliance, do we need to bolt a lawyer onto every software distribution? It seems like it’s getting a little bit more complicated, whereas the point of open source was to get away from that. Anybody want to respond?

Shimmin: The open-source community is playing right into the hands of those who are detractors of the open-source community with this GPL v3. So, I can understand why Linus Torvalds is against it, just from that perspective alone. Even if it closes a loophole, it doesn’t matter what it does, if it fractures an already shattered -- if I could say something bold -- landscape in terms of licensing.

The people or the companies I worry about mostly with this are the ISVs who are utilizing open-source software for their wares. Over the last five or six years, we’ve seen a huge upswing, and companies are making good money utilizing open source in their foundations. If you don’t have to build a J2EE Server, great. You can build something on top of that and make good money on it. But, now they’re going to be dissuaded a bit, and they’re going to have to look over their shoulder a lot more than they did in the past.

Gardner: Do you think the compatibility with the Apache license will make some things easier?

Shimmin: Well, go all the way to the MIT license, if you really want to take away any limitations and restrictions. You’re going to see a lot of vendors try to use software that is utilizing those more open licenses. If they can utilize something that’s going to not come back and bite them two years later, I would do it. Wouldn’t you?

Gardner: That’s the whole point, isn’t it, to try to alleviate future complications and gotchas, and have a straightforward focus on the software and not the legality issues? Todd Biske is a practitioner. I assume that you’re involved with using open-source code from time to time. Does this announcement and new version make your life easier or more complicated?

Biske: It’s probably going to make things more complicated. Again, I have been involved with enterprises where, as they figure out how they were going to leverage open source, they had to get the legal department involved. The more complexities that are introduced into that environment, the longer it’s going to take and the more painful it’s going to be for developers who want to leverage some of these solutions.

While we haven’t seen any significant legal activity around the use of open source, with the exception of IBM and SCO efforts and some of the other things out there, you haven’t really seen any end users gone after. Should we get to that point, enterprises are really going to be running in terror from anything open source. I hope that doesn’t happen, because that’s really against everything that the open-source community is trying to achieve. I tend to be pragmatic on these things, and any time I see someone that’s really taking an extreme position, it gives me concern.

Gardner: I guess the complexity is there, but virtually all companies in the software business have some relationship with open source now, whether they use it in their development, base their products on top of a platform that can use it, or is an open-source or partially open-source company. It seems like this is not something to reverse, but something we need to manage. I wonder if Tony has any thoughts on that -- or any of you?

Ricotta: One thing I've observed, being part of IBM and product development, is that we devote a lot of resources, time, engineers, lawyers, and other people being very, very certain that if any open-source is used, we know about its origin and we can clear the legal hurdles. What this means is we’re going to have to spend even more resources doing that. I don’t know if there’s a solution in sight, but that’s our view of it.

Gardner: So, this might require a little bit more due diligence, and perhaps there are some caveats in the license that will make things easier for some folks and more difficult for others. But, in the final analysis, if open source still has compelling business and technical value that overrides this now additional delta of complexity, it’s probably business as usual.

Ricotta: Yeah, and companies, ISVs, or commercial producers of software will still utilize open source, but it’s going to be more work to do it, more expensive, and the clients, the enterprise architects and others who select the vendors, are going to have to ask more tough questions.

Gardner: So, the lawyers end up winning.

Ricotta: I don’t know about that, but it ends up raising the cost of development of software. That’s for sure.

Gardner: Well, if we have no other thoughts on the GPL v3, I think we can wrap up our show. I want to thank our panel.

We’ve been joined by Tony Baer, principal at onStrategies. Thanks, Tony.

Baer: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Jim Kobielus, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Great to have you with us, Jim.

Kobielus: It’s been a pleasure.

Gardner: Brad Shimmin, also principal analyst at Current Analysis.

Shimmin: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Todd Biske, enterprise architect at Momentum SI. Thanks again, Todd.

Biske: Thanks, Dana. Good luck with your iPhone.

Gardner: I'm going to wait a little while on that. Also, a special thank you to our guest, Jim Ricotta, vice president and general manager of appliances at IBM Software Group. Thanks for coming, Jim.

Ricotta: Thank you for asking me, and a very good discussion. Glad to be part of it.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition Vol. 21. Come back and listen again next week.

Listen to the podcast here. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production. If any of our listeners are interested in learning more about BriefingsDirect B2B informational podcasts or to become a sponsor of this or other B2B podcasts, please fill free to contact Interarbor Solutions at 603-528-2435.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Vol. 21. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.

BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Analysts on IBM’s SOA Strategy and Evolving Definitions of ‘Business Applications’

Edited transcript of weekly BriefingsDirect[TM] SOA Insights Edition podcast, recorded May 25, 2007.

Listen to the podcast here. If you'd like to learn more about BriefingsDirect B2B informational podcasts, or to become a sponsor of this or other B2B podcasts, contact Interarbor Solutions at 603-528-2435.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Vol. 19, a weekly discussion and dissection of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) related news and events with a panel of industry analysts and guests. I’m your host and moderator, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Our panel this week consists of show regular, Joe McKendrick. Joe is a research consultant and columnist and blogger. Thanks for coming along Joe.

Joe McKendrick: Glad to be here, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: Also with us again is Tony Baer, principal at OnStrategies and also a blogger and columnist. How are you doing, Tony?

Tony Baer: Not too bad, Dana.

Gardner: Again joining us too, Jim Kobielus, a principal analyst and blogger at Current Analysis. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Kobielus: Thanks, Dana. Hi, everybody.

Gardner: Also, on our panel this week, Dave Linthicum. He’s the CEO with the Linthicum Group and also a prolific blogger and podcaster. Welcome again, Dave.

Dave Linthicum: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Thanks for joining, everybody. We’re here to talk about a serious new topic that has gotten lot of additional news and events around it, and that is this whole notion of a "business application."

Now, we’ve been discussing SOA on this show for a long time. We’ve been looking at it from the position of technology, business, governance, but the elephant in the room is the idea of what a business application is going to be? We’ve had a long history of packaged business applications, mainframe applications that have been comprehensive across an entire business. Now, we’re looking at a mixture, a hybrid of highly customized enterprise application, packaged applications, and the increased compositing of services.

There were three announcements this week, the week of May 21, 2007. There was a series of announcements at the IBM Innovate Conference in Orlando, Florida, and I attended that as well as Tony. Hewlett-Packard (HP), also had sort of a coming-out party around SOA. Then, Salesforce.com also had an SOA announcement.

So, let’s look at these individually and try to come up with some analysis, some perspective, on what IBM is trying to accomplish vis-à-vis its compositing and its emphasis on business services around creating applications. It sure sounds like an applications business. And, lets look at what these other vendors are doing.

First, let’s go to Tony. You were at the IBM event. Give us a quick rundown of what you took away from the IBM announcements.

Baer: Essentially, they summarized some of the pieces that they have been putting together and became more vocal on some new pieces that they’re putting on top of that. It’s not been any secret that, for a while, IBM has been starting to verticalize SOA. I may get my order wrong with all this, but it’s a layered approach. It starts with some industry frameworks, which basically say these are things that companies in certain sectors do. It’s not quite decomposed down to process as yet, but it lays the groundwork for it.

Then, they have a component business model, which is how to model those activities in the process, but it hasn’t yet been put into anything that’s executable. Then, they have different parts, including what used to be known as Webify and what’s now known as WebSphere Business Services Fabric, putting together some content packs that include some of the actual business components, which are drawn from those models. In turn, Global Business Services (GBS), which was the old Price Waterhouse/PWC consulting arm that IBM acquired sometime back, is putting together more specific parts. I forget the exact term they used for it, but it sounded an awful lot like "applications," except, of course, they don’t really want to say the "A word."

Dana, you and I, were sitting through that presentation, where I really started to feel sorry for that GBS guy, because the whole room just laid on him. It raises a couple of questions. Number one, what’s an application anymore? Number two -- but I think more important because it’s not just a questions of semantics -- is: who is going to command the software dollars? Arguably, you could say that most companies with an ERP system -- outside of putting in version upgrades -- are not going to change the general ledger part of it, but rather the part that deals with actual B2B procurement with their business partners. That's where you start having activity at the edges. That’s where the action is. That could either happen to SAP NetWeaver, IBM’s various layered frameworks, or name the business process management vendor of your choice. That’s where the next battleground’s going to be.

Gardner: IBM, between its announcements around certification and helping to create more of a core in their labor force for SOA architecture, is saying, "We’re going to help create this workforce and we’re going to compete against the applications, but we’re going to do it in a different way. We’re going to change the game, rather than compete in the old game."

Of course, they had a few updates to the registry repository and a simulation game to help people learn about SOA. Fundamentally, I agree. This is really IBM saying, "We’re going to redefine applications and we’re going to compete with everybody." The new revenue growth is going to be at this vertical edge, where it’s a balance between customized apps that you build from scratch and packaged apps, but finding a middle ground. Jim Kobielus, you also had some takeaways from IBM this week. What did you find?

Kobielus: It’s not just IBM, but pretty much all their competitors at the high level of SOA in terms of the major platform vendors -- Oracle, Microsoft, SAP -- are just differentiating themselves in the SOA space through their abilities to provide industry business models, which, conveniently, "IBM" is the acronym for. They're able to provide deep-domain expertise that is packaged up into industry business models that they then deliver as part of an overall middleware-based solution portfolio. That’s really what applications are coming to.

They’re turning into vertical and horizontal, and in some cases diagonal, business models to address a broad variety of business processes or sector-specific requirements.

I didn't go to Innovate, but I was on the IBM Information-on-Demand Refresher Update call yesterday with the analyst community. SOA permeates the information-on-demand strategy through and through. Master Data Management (MDM) is one of my core areas at Current Analysis. I’ve written half-dozen solution assessments on MDM vendors, including IBM. What I’ve noticed is that the SOA-focused MDM vendors -- IBM, Oracle, SAS, DataFlux, TIBCO, and others -- are differentiating themselves based on the prepackaged domain models that they that they provide with their MDM solutions to target particular niches.

In their slides, IBM had a very good graphic called "MDM solutions." They’ve mapped out horizontally and vertically MDM solutions, vertically for banking, insurance, government, healthcare, etc., and then horizontally for customer care, risk and compliance, etc. Then, they had check marks to indicate their functional coverage of these various domain models.

That ties into the announcements from Innovate, which is that IBM is saying, "Here’s how we’re going to differentiate going forward. How we already differentiate is that we, with our global services, are a huge pool of deep-domain expertise that we are deploying out, providing, delivering to customers through these human beings, these professional services people. But, we are also going to package that expertise into these domain models, accelerators, frameworks, or business content templates that we deliver as part of the packaged solutions.

Oracle’s doing the same thing. A couple of weeks ago, they had a similar announcement about domain models that they’re delivering into various verticals and horizontals. SAP is doing likewise with the xApps and so forth. That’s really what it’s coming down to -- domain models and deep expertise.

Gardner: So, if it has a lot more to do with expertise, with feet on the street, with consultants and consultancies, let’s take a look at the HP announcements.

Tony, you also wanted to give us a little overview there. HP came out and said, "We’re going to be folding in more of the Mercury acquisition, the Systinet acquisition. We’re going to embrace this notion of Business Technology Optimization, BTO, as a go-to-market." They’ve also decided that they’re going to remain neutral. They want to be Switzerland. Of course, many of these vendors profess to be neutral, but I think HP has to be neutral, because it doesn’t have a lot of the SOA pieces. Isn’t that right, Tony?

Baer: Yeah, and if you and I had a penny for every time a vendor called themselves Switzerland, we probably would be too rich to be doing these calls on Friday mornings.

Gardner: We’ll have to have a Swiss bank account.

Baer: That whole neutral stance shows that HP is unique in not trying to verticalize its SOA. The announcement that made an impression on me was the Business Availability Center, which was the old Mercury piece. It will include some functionality from the OpenView side, which has been something most of the vendors in these systems and SOA runtime governance space have had a hard time dealing with up until now.

I wrote about this some time ago. It’s called the "blood-brain barrier." When you’re trying to manage a service level or a governance service level at run-time, part of it deals with what type of service. Are we giving this customer the current version, are we adhering to the policy? A key part of that is how this thing is going to rely on what happens physically in the data center, and these SOA governance pieces just have lacked that.

That was actually one of the things that I’ve been waiting for after HP announced it was acquiring Mercury -- or putting it out of its misery -- whichever way you want to interpret that. I need to drill down on this more and get some details of what exactly the piece was about. I haven’t had a real detailed briefing on it yet, but that was the part that really made an impression on me.

Gardner: HP is basically coming out and saying, "Here’s where we’re strong. We’ve got OpenView. We’ve got governance. We’ve got tools and registry and repository. So, we think that that’s fundamental and important. We’ve also got professional services. Our consulting and integration group, which is global, has vertical expertise, and also works diligently at these major consolidation trends, application modernization, ITO, shared services, and some other major trends and projects that cut total costs and improve agility."

What’s interesting, though, is that we’ve seen a combination of either larger integrated suites that provide the means to achieve SOA or we’ve seen individual parts, best-of-breed approach. We've seen people jumping up and down and saying, "Hey, we can do it better than anybody else, and we’re green fields, so we can move quickly, and we can be pure in terms of a services orientation."

The big question for HP now is, "How are you going to fill the middle? Are you going to be Switzerland, are you going to partner, are you going to acquire?" There's talk about BEA being out there as a possible target for acquisition, and this is at least the fourth year of that we’re in now. Then, there’s also the open-source side. There are a number of projects and providers that could, with HP’s assistance, really make open source and SOA a much more powerful activity.

Before we go further into this analysis, let’s just look over one last announcement this week. Todd Biske, did you just join the call a few minutes ago?

Todd Biske: Yes, I’m on.

Gardner: I would like to introduce Todd Biske. He is an enterprise architect at MomentumSI, an Austin, Texas consultancy. Welcome to the show, Todd.

Biske: Thanks, I apologize for being late.

Gardner: Not a problem, because the timing is perfect. You sent out an email to us this week with some thoughts about the Salesforce.com and SOA activities. Would you tell us a little bit about what Salesforce did, and why you thought it was interesting?

Biske: Salesforce.com announced what looked like a development platform for not just using their Web services, but consuming other Web services. I thought it was particularly interesting, because from an enterprise perspective you think of going to Salesforce.com for more of an outsourcing or software as a service standpoint. I’m a consumer of those applications. To think that they’re now opening themselves up as a development environment for their solution customers, made me raise an eyebrow and say, "Well, wasn’t I trying to get away from doing development by going with this solution?"

So, it had an interesting twist to what kind of a model the enterprise is moving to. Is there still always going to be a need to integrate and build custom solutions around these products, regardless of whether it’s a hosted environment like Salesforce.com or if it’s an off-the-shelf solution and I’m installing inside the firewall? Now, are we going to have to support both internal development environments as well as external development environments in order to get our solutions done?

Gardner: I suppose it’s a slippery slope. Once you become integrated with the internal components, assets, and resources, you’re going to have to get involved with tooling. There’s no way around it.

Linthicum: Absolutely. I was quoted in that release from Salesforce, and the strategy is a bit more sophisticated than that. What they’re trying to do is provide some of the patterns that we typically see in SOAs within the enterprise, which is to create solutions out of their own processes and processes that exist within the enterprise, and also provide a development environment to bind things together.

This is a bit more holistic. They have a virtual operating system out there supporting multi-tenancy. They have a database out there. They have an application design center, a testing center, and language that they’re supporting. They’re trying to provide not only applications, but, as complete as they can, a service-oriented stack on demand. As time goes on, knowing Salesforce, they’re just going to get better at that.

Gardner: So, would you call this "infrastructure as a service?"

Linthicum: It would be a complete platform-as-a-service inclusive of an SOA. In other words, instead of you maintaining hardware and software yourself, having to get servers, application servers, governance systems, and all that stuff, they’re trying to move to where you’re going to get a lot of this stuff through a subscription-based service. This means that a lot of people will have a much more cost-effective mechanism to get into SOA, which is a rich man’s game right now.

Gardner: I suppose this also requires integration of the service. One of the things that I had CEOs chirp on, when I sent out a couple of queries on this, was they'd like the idea of keeping the data themselves, but making CRM and these other business functions commoditized through a service provider. They seem to now sense they could get it both ways.

The reason I also brought up integration-as-a-service is that it sounds like what Grand Central was talking about a few years ago, and you’re familiar with that.

Linthicum: Absolutely, and not only Grand Central, but Bridgeworks and Hubspan and a few other folks. The difference is that you have the services and the processes, which are also bound in the same platform. Another difference is that people in the market are going to be more accepting of this technology right now than they were five years ago.

Gardner: So, I think we have three different announcements here, but there’s a common thread. As Tony mentioned earlier, the common thread is that the definition of a business application is up for grabs. Is it a professional service? Is it a custom development activity? Is it taking packaged applications, exposing them as services, and then compositing them with other, perhaps off-the-wire, services, and/or internal green field services -- or all of the above. Let’s take it to Joe McKendrick. How do you see this notion of a new definition of business application shaking out?

McKendrick: Tony provided an analysis on the OnStrategies site. He made an interesting point there that IBM is still trying to sort out who SOA should be sold to? Who in the organization will be ultimately responsible for SOA? Will it be the traditional IT development folks, architects, or will it be more of a focus on the business side?

Gartner, in one of its future-looking statements, stated that a lot of the traditional IT functions, or IT as we know it, will be moving into the business. Business units will be subsuming or taking on the task traditionally performed by a dedicated IT department, which implies that, as time goes on, you’re going to see IT more tightly integrated with units across the business. Therefore, that raises the question of, who is going to be doing the hard-core development, the heavy lifting, in terms of application development? A lot of the solutions that are coming to the fore are increasingly emphasizing automating the development process.

Gardner: Your point here is well taken, Joe. If you’re going to start changing the definition of a business application, then you also have to start changing the way in which people are involved with creating, modifying, and deploying, those applications and/or services as well.

That was another big theme we saw at the IBM Innovate event, this notion of a "T Person." They have across the top, on a horizontal basis, a strong business and domain expertise, particularly within a vertical industry, if possible. They also have the stem, the vertical part of the T, which is a strong understanding of technology, as a practitioner, a developer, or an architect.

One of the recurring themes was, "Where do you find these people?" If you go out to some of the job-listing sites and search under "SOA Architect" right now, you’ll find begging to be filled dozens, probably hundreds, of jobs that combine a domain and business expertise with a technical background. That's an indicator that something is shifting in the market.

Let’s go back to Jim Kobielus. Do you think that this a transformative and highly disruptive effect, this notion of changing the definition of an application, and having to change the way in which applications are created?

Kobielus: Oh, for sure. In fact, as you were speaking, I was thinking that what these announcements this past week illustrate is the changing definition of what an application is. One way that we might define an application now is an SOA platform plus domain content. So, the differentiators are not only the maturity of your SOA platform -- be it IBM's, Oracle's, or Salesforce.com's -- but also the breadth, depth, and extent of the domain content available to plug in to that platform and address specific business requirements.

Where does the domain expertise come from? Well, it can come from your own -- you the vendor -- your own global business services or professional services team. It can come from your partner ecosystem. You might have hundreds and thousands of partners in various niches.

In the case of Salesforce.com, it can come from your marketplace of thousands upon thousands of companies that are hosting this content in your own environment. It can come from an open-source community for an open-source platform like Red Hat, and so forth.

These are all hugely disruptive. The thing is, the traditional notion of an application is a very monolithic stack, a platform-plus-content, shrink-wrapped, delivered, and boom, that’s it. It's not really fully extensible with third-party content. Now, the whole notion of third-party content comes to the fore. A platform is only as good as the breadth of the ecosystem, community, or marketplace that can deliver new fresh business content, data definitions, rules, etc.

Gardner: What’s interesting from IBM’s perspective is they have strengths in just about all these areas, and this is really their game to lose. While SOA right now might be a rich person’s game, that suits IBM just fine. They want the big accounts. What we were hearing, Tony and I, in this meeting was that the more instances where IBM can go into a vertical domain-oriented account, the more they learn from that experience that they can push back out as componentized services, which they then take to the next engagement.

What happens is that there's a sort of race now. IBM has basically drawn a line and said, "We’re now in a race. Whoever can get to the combination of infrastructure and customization and professional services with a domain accent first, wins." In a sense, they’re competing against the IT departments, as well, because in these large enterprises, these IT departments take 12 to 16 months to put together a full set of new business processes. IBM can walk in and say, "We can reuse a king pin. We can do it in half the time." What’s the company going to do? The company is going to start favoring the IBM approach over its internal IT approach, which is what Salesforce is offering as well.

Kobielus: The game now is expertise-on-demand. Who could provide that expertise to bear down on a business problem right away? I mean, which vendor.

Gardner: And who can take advantage of past experience, breadth, and the coordination of different projects? That’s what this IBM Jazz thing is about, by the way. This Rational Development Conference announcement that’s coming out in June is a way of coordinating all of these different projects in such a way that reuse becomes possible. I think IBM is doing this largely for its own internal purposes, as well as a community basis. It’s a combination of business expertise, but also the ability to do things fast through reuse, which is what SOA is all about.

Biske: Dana, you were at the conferences. I’d love to get a sense of how many of the customers at the conference were strong IBM customers, Big Blue shops with mainframes, eSeries, iSeries?

Gardner: These were clearly dyed-in-the-blue kinds of folks, but the rate at which they’re moving and their interest in SOA is the issue.

Biske: Also, IBM has a stake in moving these customers forward. It has this installed base, very much a legacy base, and there are some arguments out there about how well services created from legacy applications can be reused. Ronan Bradley, with Lustratus Research, has argued in the past that services generated from Cobol-based applications, zSeries for example, are difficult to put forth in a SOA context for reuse.

Gardner: IBM has done some work along those lines, but they have a wide variety. As they go into these accounts on a professional-services basis, they’re not just looking for IBM applications. They’ll take anything.

Biske: A lot of this is a WebSphere story.

Gardner: Clearly, IBM is putting up the software to accomplish just about anything you want to do in an enterprise, but it’s the way in which they’re taking SOA to market and realizing SOA. Dave Linthicum, what do you think about this notion of a raised SOA, and that the people who can combine domain expertise, professional services and reuse are not only going to try to beat out other players in the field, but also the IT departments themselves?

Linthicum: That’s absolutely the strategy here. What I’ve been listening to is spot on. Everybody is trying to own, not only the domain of the technology, but the domain of the IT infrastructure within these organizations. In fact, I just got a briefing this morning for something that was embargoed for a few weeks. They’re really trying to displace traditional IT. The analogy to Salesforce.com was spot on. In other words, Salesforce.com kind of got in there through the back door, allowing people to buy their infrastructure via credit cards.

I think IBM and some of the other strategic thinkers in the space are trying to run as quickly as they can to grab land right now, because the more land they grab, the more they can hold for a long period of time. Everybody on this call knows, it’s a great business to be in -- the infrastructure game -- because once you’re in these organizations and you’re adding value there and you're core to their business processes, you’re never going to leave.

Gardner: IBM clearly sees that they want to be partners with these companies. They don’t want to displace IT, but they want to get in a way that you can’t, as you say, be removed. Todd Biske is someone who is in the consulting business. You probably want to get into accounts where they can’t get rid of you either. Is this a good business strategy for IBM?

Biske: I think it is a good business strategy for IBM, but one of the comments I was just going to make, and you actually just hit on it, is that I don’t know that IBM can come across with a strategy of replacing IT. I absolutely agree that the business side needs to work with IT as partners. We need to establish this "T," as IBM put it, where we’ve got technical depth, as well as business depth, and a team that really embodies both of them. The only way to do that is going to be through a partnership, rather than having this customer-supplier type of relationship between the business and IT.

I’ve actually blogged on this, even prior to becoming a consultant and talking about what's going to be the role? I saw this convergence of business consulting areas, whether it was Six Sigma-based or some of these other initiatives from years ago that were primarily business focused with the IT consulting services part of it. Just as IT workers in the enterprise need to become business aware, so do the consulting firms. Having a business offering, where you have focus on the domain models that have been discussed, is critical both to the consulting vendors, as well as the actual technology vendors.

So, IBM is in a great position, where they’ve got both. They’ve got the whole technology stack. They’ve got the whole consulting stack on top of that, and the business domain expertise, whether they’re doing the peer technology side of it or the business domain modeling and providing all of the business consulting. If they’re going to get into a situation, though, where IT is outsourced, now they've got this customer-supplier relationship again. To what extent can business really partner with that group, and how comfortable are they going to be putting all their eggs in the basket of an organization that may be trying to do this with too many enterprises and can't create that competitive difference?

Kobielus: What's interesting is that this platform land grab -- I like the phrase you used there, Dana – extends on top of your SOA platform. One of the linchpins of any SOA architecture or application environment is your data warehouse. On top of that you build your business intelligence. On top of that you build your corporate performance management. On top of that you build your governance risk and compliance tools, and so forth. Each of these layers requires additional business content and domain models. Each of these vendors, at least in data management, are continually migrating up the stack by layering ever more finely nuanced business content on top of this underlying SOA platform. Then, using those business content-rich applications as a platform for their professional services, teams, and partners, they go out and market these packaged solutions into ever more finely graded niche markets.

Gardner: Do you think that in five years, if we look at some of these leading-edge, large global enterprises, their IT departments are going to become operational efficiency experts? They’re going to take whatever it is that’s been decided on to keep running. And, they’re going to figure out the best way to virtualize, consolidate, unify, and modernize to keep those things running the best way they can for the least amount of money. That the new role that companies like IBM and these other SOA business services-focused companies will find to add value -- how to innovate, how to create new business processes.

So, it’s almost taking on the role of the SOA architect, recognizing that the companies themselves can’t pull this all together. They’ve got some high-performing custom development capabilities. They’ve got packaged applications. They’ve been fumbling around trying to figure out integration for five or seven years.

And, now IBM and others can walk in and say, “Well, listen, we’re going to rationalize this for you. We’re going to show you how to innovate around compositing. We’re going to reuse what we know and we’re going to be really tight with you in your vertical industry.” So, it seems like a new role, it’s like not outsourcing IT per se, but it’s outsourcing the role of innovation, and architectural innovation.

Kobielus: Exactly. I see the whole area of composite applications built on SOA, in terms of professional services teams, as the primary delivery channel for these solutions. The productization, as it were, of professional services is taking place through the concept of the center of excellence. Every vendor has multiple centers of excellence now, each of them focused on a particular horizontal or vertical space. Over time, then, as we see more of a momentum and more of the premium margins shifting to professional services, the centers of excellence are now the product groups now in an SOA vendor organization. They’re the stewards of the domain content, domain models, and expertise.

Gardner: If there is a more finally grained approach to these verticals, then they can create the ecology where they’ve got individual consultancies that are even more down in the weeds on these vertical business issues, and they just partner with them, while IBM and its ilk just associate those services in with this business compositing capability.

Biske: That may be an appropriate strategy for IBM, It would be somewhat risky for a large enterprise to take the approach of outsourcing innovation. I would think the business is going to want to outsource things that are not going to be competitive differentiators. Innovation clearly can’t be a competitive differentiator, if you’re saying “IBM, just give it to us.” Guess what? All of your competitors are going to be saying the same thing. So, how do you create a difference out there?

Innovation needs to remain inside the enterprise, looking at those vertical areas. It may not be technical innovation any more. It may be a shift back to where the driver is more business-process centric. Technology is just a supporting aspect of that. Then, maybe another 10 years from now, it will shift back with some new technological change. That’s just the way things work, but to outsource innovation would be a very risky approach for a large enterprise, because inherently it’s not a commodity.

Gardner: That’s a point well taken. Perhaps if the enterprises were smart, they would view a company like IBM coming in to teach them how to innovate, or learn how to fish, rather than have someone fish for them, and therefore take the next step, but I think the race is on. IBM is challenging people, “If you let us do this first and best, then we’re going to make the economics such that you can’t resist that.” That’s a challenge to the companies to take your advice and say, “Listen, we can’t lose track of our core competencies around innovation and we need to start thinking about SOA more seriously.”

[[[Speaker:]]] Right, and maybe they’re taking advice from the Tom Watson Playbook from many years ago. IBM, when it started in the computer business back in the 1950s, positioned themselves as a consultant to the business. They did not position themselves as a technical firm, such as Sperry might have done, or DEC in the early days.

Gardner: Well, they certainly took pains at the Innovate event to portray that they are a business-partnership company and the technology is merely a means to achieving that. Let’s take a look now at the field. How many companies can actually come up to the plate with the broad set of services to be a full SOA partner? I would say this is probably the big four. We have Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP. I suppose now there’s a question mark about HP. How is HP going to rise to be the full player, and will they do it through the Switzerland, open-source approach? Will they do it though acquisition?

We also need to look at SAP as to how they are going to do this. We thought they had a strategy around more of a services approach and NetWeaver. Then, Shai Agassi left, and there was an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal where Shai said that the innovation doesn’t seem to be happening at the right pace. Any thoughts there about how we handicap the field, given this move towards the larger definition of SOA under the business services umbrella?

Speaker: [[[Todd Biske]]] You’ve captured it with really the top four, I can’t think of anybody else that comes to mind. In one of the articles talking about the HP release, Anne Thomas Manes pointed out that HP is a management company from the technology side. Unless there is a partnership with someone that can fill that middleware gap and the development environment, they don’t have the full story. It doesn’t necessarily have to be through acquisition, because there is a multitude of open-source products out there, but if you look at the Java side, everybody is pretty much using Eclipse. Who is the biggest backer of Eclipse? Well, it’s IBM. So, in trying to get an advantage there, IBM still really rules the roost and has significant influence in that direction. You nailed it, though, in terms of there really is a small set of players who can bring that much to the table.

The other space to look at would be: Who can come at it purely from the business and technology consulting side of it to build that on? Maybe it’s not strictly a technology player. Maybe it’s someone from the consulting side and someone from the consulting firms.

Gardner: There’s the rub. What will these SIs do? What about Accenture, EDS, CapGemini, and BearingPoint, and the Indian companies like Tata and Infosys -- or even another higher level consultancy like a McKinsey? Who are they going to partner with. They don’t want to lose this ability. Folks are working with how to organize the management, the actual conduct of how a company operates -- which we could probably put under governance generally. How does that relate to technology? So, the other shoe to fall here is, as these companies that are outside the pure technology space look at the technology companies moving in towards the business services space, how will that shake out? Dave Linthicum, any thoughts on that?

Linthicum: Basically, the large players are going to have to have an impact in terms of the technology sector. The service stuff is going to augment the technology, and they’re going to drive in this area. The larger consulting organizations are behind right now in how they’re defining and deploying SOAs. I’m always taken aback, as I walk around my clientele and review some of the proposals from these larger guys, by how much is missing from their strategy and the lack of understanding of how this stuff is going forward.

What may happen is that some of these large-stack players -- IBM is definitely included in that -- are going to come behind and eat their lunch. Some of the smaller consulting organizations are also going to do the same thing. They may protect themselves through acquisition and within these organizations, so they can control a lot of the political infrastructure, who makes decisions, and how you buy services from these folks.

At the end of the day, enterprises are about results. If their competitors are able to jump by leaps and bounds, using somebody’s technology or somebody’s approach, they’re going to go with that technology and approach. The big consulting organizations have a long way to go in really understanding the value, processes, and methodologies, and how you define those things within those organizations.

Gardner: Because of these three announcements, because of the influence that IBM has across the industry and across the globe, we have a little seismic shift here this week in raising the stakes to the business services level, and perhaps highlighting some of the new competitive relationships among and between these companies.

As the vendors themselves face new types of competition, enterprises also have to consider whether it makes sense to try to save a few dollars and push SOA initiatives off into the future, or that their ability to do SOA sooner than later might put them in an advantageous position, or, as someone said earlier, not to lose their ability to innovate.

So, let’s go around the panel one last time. Do we see a seismic shift, and do you really think the landscape has changed? Let’s start with Joe McKendrick.

McKendrick: I just want to add one more vendor. You mentioned the big four, but BEA Systems should also be one of the bigger SOA movers and shakers. They offer a wide range of products including the development side and the deployment side.

Gardner: Of course, they’ve also mentioned this neutrality and Switzerland approach, where they would be a preferred partner to the Accentures and the other large system integrators because there is not this "co-opetition" affair.

McKendrick: One thing I’ve seen in Microsoft statements in the past, is that they take a contrary position to what the other large infrastructure vendors say about SOA. Microsoft says SOA should not be about big science. It should not be big SOA, huge multi-million dollar deployments, affecting organizations, but rather more of organic or gradual incremental approach on a case-by-case basis.

Gardner: Their application strategy sort of follows along those lines.

McKendrick: Exactly. In fact, their history follows along those lines. They’ve always kind of seeped in at the grassroots level within organizations, and moved up the chain that way. I see them doing that with SOA as well.

Gardner: Okay, Jim Kobielus, do you sense a seismic shift here. Has the game changed in anyway for you?

Kobielus: It has, and I sort of laid out how it has changed. Deep-domain expertise is being incorporated into a new type of packaged application that to some degree competes with or complements traditional line of business applications, corporate performance management (CPM) applications. Over the last month, there has been a rash of industry announcements, acquisitions, and so forth related to CPM -- SAP acquiring OutlookSoft, Oracle with Hyperion, Business Objects, -- and Microsoft of course. I want to get back to Microsoft. They are very much a major SOA player.

What Joe just said was instructive about Microsoft. They are always ingratiating themselves. They’re always weaving their way into an organization from the ground-up, and they’re doing the same thing with CPM, with Office Performance Point Server, which is coming out in a few months.

When I was at their business intelligence (BI) conference, I spoke to Alex Payne who heads up the BI unit and I asked him point blank, “Does Microsoft, plan to develop verticalized CPM applications to run on Performance Point?” He said, “Well, we want those applications to be built and we’re gong to rely on our channel partners, on the ISVs and so forth, who have that expertise.”

So, getting back to your original point, yes, the move toward domain models and so forth, as a way of differentiating solutions, is disruptive in the sense that the traditional application is dissolving and being replaced by composite services. But, it’s not really changing the vendors themselves in the sense that each vendor has their own history, their own character that’s coming to the fore. In this case, Microsoft’s character is to be a provider of ubiquitous infrastructure at the desktop. They are not a professional services firm, and I don’t get the sense that they’re going to get beat in global services. They’re going to rely on the third parties, the Accentures of the world, for that.

Gardner: Interestingly, at the keynote event, Steve Mills, the software general manager and vice president at IBM, referenced some research. I’m not sure whether IBM sponsored the research or not, but it defined SOA-related revenues. Number two, after IBM, was Microsoft, albeit a fourth of the total number of dollars that IBM cites, but clearly Microsoft is big in this game.

Now, to you, Dave Linthicum, game changing week, how do you see this impact?

Linthicum: I don’t see this as a seismic shift. I see it as an evolution in thinking and the way people are positioning the market. The hype out there is so loud that people are just trying to figure out how to out-innovate each other in how they message to the marketplace -- this is an instance of that – and in the products and services they’re going to bring to market, and how they’re going to dominate those. It’s the point that was made earlier; it’s a land grab.

Going forward, one of the key things to remember is that we’re evolving an enterprise application to service-based distributed systems, where you can actually use composite applications to meet many of your business process needs. That’s only going to continue, especially as people outsource business processes to folks like Salesforce, who are moving from monolithic enterprises-on-demand to granular services they’re going to sell very much like Amazon is selling services today, and making a lot of money in making that happen. That’s going to be a key thing.

We always return to the domain verticalization stuff within any technology push. Remember when the integration was the hot issue back in 1998, 1999? When I wrote the AI part, everybody was almost saturated with technology in terms of hype. Everybody started moving in the vertical spaces, and verticalized integration was all the key. We’re seeing a similar pattern here. Probably we’re spending more money, and the hype is noisier than it was back then, but it’s the same thing. I think it’s a good thing, because you can meet the needs of a particular problem domain, if you verticalize and you have specialized processes and services to drive that. But, it’s nothing new. I don’t think it’s hugely disruptive -- just the evolution that I expected.

Gardner: Tony Baer, do you see this as IBM defining the world as best suits IBM or more of a larger shift in the market?

Baer: I’m going to be a classic straddler here -- it’s really both. IBM is obviously playing up to its strength, which is that it’s the glue that puts pieces together.

It’s very much a challenge to what was the established order for about the last 15 years of the primacy of the monolithic apps vendors. There are a couple of things I was just jotting down during the discussion. If SOA and composite apps are to succeed, they’re not going to succeed by being consultant ware, the type of stuff that can only be put together on a custom piece basis. The whole idea behind SOA is this is stuff that you can put together very rapidly.

So, obviously, there will be a role for professional services here, but they need to be enablers so that my team internally -- whether they be business architect or whichever role that evolves -- can readily combine and configure different composite services to deal with a particular challenge or as I introduce a new product. I’m talking about a product in the classic, manufacturing sense. I’m not talking about an IT product. So, the fact is, if SOA is to succeed, it will not succeed as being consultant ware.

Gardner: I agree with that. What we might need to see in order to hedge or balance the power of the consultancies is the equivalent of open-source composited services. One of the things I asked IBM, after the discussion about business services was, “What do you guys do about IP, Intellectual Property?” They said, “Oh, that’s one of the first things we talk about, and we bring lawyers in every time we’re getting engaged with a client. We have to decide if they want the IP, and, if so, there is a certain cost associated with that. If we get to keep the IP, that is, we can create services that will be then reused elsewhere, then the cost comes down.”

So, what might need to happen is a third way, where when people get engaged with companies like IBM, and they’re going to do compositing of business services. Perhaps they say, “We want to put this intellectual property under an open-source license, and we’re going to use it in a commoditized sense. Then, we’re going to highly customize and we’re going to take that and make it our own intellectual property.”

Perhaps the way to make this whole SOA business-services thing work is licensing around those composite services, so that it’s not just a competitive hedge or some sort of a balancing act. I’m just blue skying at this point, but it seems like a licensing of the property around these services is going to become important.

Let’s go to Todd Biske for the last word, seismic shift or just more IBM market positioning?

Biske: I tend to agree with Dave on this one. This is just an evolutionary approach, and IBM’s marketing is making some significant rumblings that are making people more aware of what’s going on. I’ve been thinking about this at least for the last couple of years. I’m seeing it coming, and no, I’m not the only one who is thinking along these lines. This is just part of a natural progression that we’ll see with this. Whenever any of those big four or big five vendors have a major sales or user conference, we’re going to see announcements like this as they try to position themselves better in the marketplace.

So, I do think that it’s evolutionary. I think it’s good and it’s the direction that things need to go in, but the hype will die down after a little while, and most people will still keep trudging along. I would still like to see more case studies out there, showing concrete success, where the adoption of SOA has really created a true change in the organization. A lot of the case studies we see today come from companies that were already well positioned to be successful, and they have just extended their model in an evolutionary manner.

Gardner: Obviously, we’re still very early on. Maybe we went from the first inning to the second inning in this, so a minor transition. But, I think the takeaway is that IBM has made some moves that then force people to think a little bit different, which, of course, gets us a little closer to making some of this happen in the enterprise. I want to thank our panel for joining us. We’ve had Joe McKendrick, thanks Joe.

McKendrick: Thank you Dana.

Gardner: Jim Kobielus, thanks for joining.

Kobielus: Thank you, it was a pleasure like always.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, thank you for coming.

Linthicum: Thank you, you guys, have a great three day weekend.

Gardner: Tony Baer, thanks for your input.

Baer: Well, thanks again Dana.

Gardner: Also, Todd Biske, thank you.

Biske: Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at InterArbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Volume 19. Come back next week. Thanks, everyone.

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Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Vol. 19. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.