Gary Barnett's Blog

This morning IBM announced that it has acquired Cast Iron Systems, for an undisclosed sum. Cast Iron Systems a 75 person strong “cloud integration vendor”. I’m at IBM’s Impact 2010 conference, and have mulled this one over with James Governor and Neil Ward-Dutton already (James has already blogged on this here and Neil here. I don’t have much to add to either Neil or James, but – never the less…

• This is a really good move for IBM as it establishes IBM as the de facto leader in Cloud integration
• This gets IBM some really good mid-sized clients and a mid-sized client-friendly business model
• Cast Iron offers significant value to IBM’s customers by radically simplifying the process of integrating cloud-based apps like SalesForce.com, google docs and a host of others either with eachother or with “non-cloud” apps like SAP.
• The number of different API’s and, indeed, API approaches adopted by different SaaS and Cloud players makes it a real pain to integrate them – Cast Iron makes it possible to link SAP with SalesForce.com in seconds rather than days or weeks
• While this is an excellent addition to IBM’s integration portfolio, it has also added (yet) another way to specify how two applications interact which places the onus on IBM to help customers decide which approach/technology to use

Read the rest of this entry »

Oracle’s recent strategy day presented a union filled with love and romance, but despite the apparent confidence, Oracle’s strategy misses some important points. Jonathan Steel and I spent some time mulling it all over and here’s our initial take.

This post may be read to the strains of the wonderful Ella Fiztgerald singing “There may be trouble ahead”.

Having slogged through the marathon that was the Oracle-Sun announcement day, we’re left with two immediate impressions:
1.They took a heck of a lot of time to say so little
2.Oracle’s back to the future pitch, while nothing like as badly thought out as some people say, just isn’t going to cut it.

If you’re in a hurry, here are the headlines:

• The back to the 60’s mantra is both more and less nuanced than you might think
• But the integrated stack pitch simply isn’t well enough thought out
• There are two killer reasons why the “single stack” pitch fails: Innovation, and Focus
• Ultimately Oracle’s hardware strategy is simply not convincing enough
• Oracle’s software strategy is much more coherent but Sun brings a mixed bag
• The absence of a services story is the elephant in the room

We’ll be thinking, talking and writing in much more detail about this – so if you’re interested in knowing more, drop me a line – gary@bathwick.com

Read the rest of this entry »

Canalys has released its Q3 smartphone market data, showing Apple and RIM taking a ton of market share away from Symbian.

Check out detailed information here

Now, I freely admit that I’m an iPhone fan – it’s a rocking phone, wrapped in a business model that is rocking too (for now at least).

But, Canalys seems a little “down” on Droid -

Rather than eating into RIM and Apple’s integrated platform sales, Android appears largely to have cannibalized the use of other free Linux minority platforms and taken the lunch away from Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

(Pete Cunningham – Canalys)

I think that Pete may well have a point right now – but I expect droid-based phones to put up an increasingly strong showing as time passes. It wont be as quick as supporters of Android like but the ecosystem is still in its very early days.

My wild stab in the dark (and I mean wild stab in the dark) for the next 12 months…

• The number of droid-based phones will grow in number to create the real potential for a world-beathing ecosystem – Provided that droid phone makers don’t rush off in too many directions
• If Apple can negotiate data roaming deals with the leading global mo-telcos then RIM is going to be in big big danger
• Apple needs to be ready to adapt the closed-garden a) for the enterprise and b) for non-commercial apps
• WinMo and Symbian are going to see their share of the market halve.

Richard Holway posted this morning about Kashflow (a small but growing UK-based software company that offers accounting software via software as a service).

In Richard’s post he mentions that it seems that Michael Jackson (former Chairman of Sage) had made an offer for the Kashflow business of £1m, which was rejected by Kashflow’s founder Duane Jackson.

According to Richard, Jackson made the offer with a view to using the Kashflow product to act as the “heart” of a new SaaS venture he was planning.

Well done Duane for saying no to the £1m for 100%… If I were him I wouldn’t give the company up at this point in time, but I’d be very keen to find a way to sell Michael Jackson some kind of stake since he’d made a very city-friendly supporter and has a wealth of experience that money cannot buy.

I’m only posting this, because it reminded me of a conversation I’ve had several times with Holway – I’ve always been critical of what I perceive to be a deep lack of innovation at Sage, and have given Richard a hard time in the past over his positive opinion of the company. Richard only needs to point to the company’s long-term financial performance to justify his view of course, but I believe that Sage will be dead in 5 years unless it can develop a completely new platform around SaaS – which is something you don’t do by buying lots of companies and cobbling them together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Katy Ring has joined us at Bathwick.

On a personal note, I can’t tell you how delighted and excited I am. Katy is an amazing person to work with – and I’m over the moon.

Here’s the press release:

Bathwick Group Press Release:

For Immediate Release

5.6.2008

Dr. Katy Ring joins The Bathwick Group

Dr. Katy Ring has joined the Bathwick Group as a Principal analyst in the IT Services field. Highly regarded internationally as an analyst with insightful and challenging views on the development of the IT services market, Dr Ring will be responsible primarily for developing Bathwick’s new Global IT Services research programme, due for launch in Q4 2008.
Jonathan Steel, CEO at The Bathwick Group, said “I am delighted to welcome someone of Katy’s calibre to Bathwick; her experience and ability adds a sharp edge to Bathwick’s IT Services research and consulting business.”
Latterly with NelsonHall, Dr. Ring spent 12 years at Ovum leading research into the opportunities for emerging software and services markets as well as developing the company’s Outsourcing Practice. Prior to her tenure as a Principal analyst and Practice Leader at Ovum, Katy was a journalist with publications such as Computer Weekly and Computergram, and was founding editor of Software Futures.
Commenting on her appointment at Bathwick, Dr Ring said, “It is refreshing to join a research organization committed to developing research that is both commercially relevant and intellectually engaging. The Bathwick Group has the operational agility, professionalism and cultural audacity to enable its researchers to think differently. I am very excited by the opportunity to build a Global IT Services programme here.”

Dr Ring holds two degrees: an Honours degree in politics, philosophy and history from the London School of Economics and a PhD in the popularisation of science from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Two major announcements to comment on today (Sun and MySQL, and Oracle and BEA)- but they both merit separate posts.

Sun has acquired MySQL AB the Swedish software company behind the eponymous (well without the “AB”) open source database. for what the press release describes as “approximately$1 billion”.

This move is of real interest to me since I’m currently writing a “MySQL and VB.NET” how to guide (see my development blog for the first installment).

I think that on balance this is good news. Of course there are caveats – Sun has a mixed record when it comes to acquisitions – but provided that they keep faith with the user base (and I think that they will) and can keep a few of the key MySQL engineers (and I think that they can) MySQL will continue to prosper.

There are couple of other “wrinkles” two key database vendors own bits of technology that are pretty “core” to MySQL; Oracle owns InnoDB (one of the core database engines that MySQL uses), and IBM owns Solid (another storage engine). But both Oracle and IBM should be smart enough to know “not to go there” when it comes to horsing with something as popular with the community as MySQL.

Read the rest of this entry »