• 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

This is a really good move for IBM as it establishes IBM as the de facto leader in Cloud integration

Cast Iron Systems was originally founded as a web-EAI company and has recently repositioned as a cloud integration company. The company offers a combination of middleware, tooling and adapters that allow a range of cloud and non-cloud applications to interconnect.

IBM has been working on addressing the integration challenge presented by the explosive growth in the number (and adoption) of SaaS applications so will have been well aware of the the value that buying all of this technology already built – and pretty widely deployed.

This gets IBM some really good mid-sized clients and a mid-sized client-friendly business model

Looking at Cast Iron’s client list, it’s clear that the company has enjoyed a deal of success in the mid-market – which is the segment that is most actively adopting SaaS in anger, so in acquiring the company IBM is gaining an important foothold in a very important part of the market for SaaS and cloud.

Cast Iron also supports a more mid-sized business-friendly way of doing business (low entry cost, and a range of pricing/charging options that IBM is very likely to replicate elsewhere.

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.

It would be disingenuous to write this announcement of as “IBM Buys some adapters” – but even if it were just that,  the coverage is pretty impressive – with adaptors in place for Salesforce.com,  Oracle CRM On Demand, Google Apps, NetSuite, and others as well as adaptors for  SAP,Oracle EBS,PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel as well as several others on the non-cloud side of the fence.

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

Having waded through the docs for the google API set, Twitter’s, PayPal’s and SugarCRM’s (to name a few), I can tell you with personal experience that it’s a real pain. While all of the API’s are essentially service oriented, they’re all documented differently and all implemented differently. They’re also subject to change. Managing the integration of one of these apps with one that you’ve either developed yourself or that you run on your own systems is “a bit of a pain”, doing it with two is “gnarly” and doing it with more than two starts to become really annoying.

You don’t quite appreciate how much of a pain it is till you see someone demo Cast Iron’s solution to the problem – SAP to SalesForce.com integration was demoed, live, in under five minutes.

Really… it took less than five minutes to have SAP injecting new clients into SalesForce.com. That’s less than 300 seconds!

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

There is a minor caveat – IBM has now got “another” integration technology to offer customers, who are already perhaps a little spoilt for choice when it comes to picking places to drop that integration logic. Unwary clients could find themselves doing really unpleasant and gnarly things by writing custom transformations or business rules within the Cast Iron tooling (which even allows clients to write custom logic in Javascript) . IBM needs to make it clear that the Cast Iron technology is really, really, useful in the context of COTS to Cloud integration but that there may be better places for describing complex business rules and transformations.

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

The back to the 60′s mantra is both more and less nuanced than you might think
Perhaps the most headline grabbing component of the strategy is the notion that Oracle is planning to emulate the IBM of the 1960′s by delivering a highly integrated stack from top to bottom.

Superficially this seems like total nonsense and no doubt the die-hard Oracle knockers will make much of this “backward thinking”. But you have to remember that when Charles Phillips presented the idea he added the caveat “…but built on open standards”. Oracle isn’t advocating a return to the tightly closed proprietary systems of the 60′s; the company is focussing on the “up-side” that came with those integrated systems – improved reliability, better integration, and a single source of support.

The problem with this guiding strategy is that it isn’t anything like as revolutionary as the sound bite might appear. Of course clients want things that are more reliable, offer better performance and deliver better economics (can you imagine anyone saying they want less?). This may be why IBM has been offering tightly integrated hardware and software bundles for a long time, even before it became necessary to describe them as “appliances”.

But the integrated stack pitch simply isn’t well enough thought out
The “integrated from top to bottom” story is superficially appealing, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny particularly well.

Let’s begin with the “complete systems” chart above. Firstly there is a pretty compelling argument (made by IBM) that there is significant benefit from not having an apps business. IBM argues that customers gain by using a platform that supports the widest possible applications ecosystem – Apps vendors and clients then both gain the best infrastructure expertise and the best industry expertise. When it comes to industry expertise IBM can argue that it offers a breadth of industry expertise that spans a wider range of verticals and runs deeper into the infrastructure than Oracle and Sun’s (with the possible exception of telecoms where Sun really does have deep roots). We were also entertained by Oracle’s characterisation of SAP – they will no doubt be a bit surprised in Walldorf to learn that they don’t have any vertically focussed apps.

Oracle’s primary assertion is that it’s easier to deliver an innovative stack if you own all the components – a point made repeatedly throughout the briefing. In his opening pitch Charles Phillips said this:-

“If you have separate companies at each layer, one company building the DB, another building the storage etc it’s very hard to get those engineers to work together”

He then nodded towards the “big” problem when he said this:

“It’s hard to get those engineers to work together even when they’re in the same company – ask IBM, they know.”

We choked on our collective coffee at this; because IBM does actually know really quite well how challenging it is to get engineers from different groups to work together, because IBM has been doing it for half a century.

In short, Oracle claims that everything will be better in Oracle stack-land because all of the release dates can be synchronised, and integration can be “engineered in ahead of time”. Well, we wish them the best of luck with that; but, saying “we know it’s hard” and even “believing” that it’s hard are a long way from experiencing the challenges associated with coordinating so many different technology life-cycles. All joking aside, as Oracle discovers that this kind of integration really is very hard to do, the company might be well advised to go and ask IBM.

The final point on the ‘total stack’ approach is that some parts of it simply aren’t core to ‘engineering in integration’ – like storage. There’s a reason IBM backed away from manufacturing hard disk drives – If IBM felt that retaining its manufacturing capability would have given it a competitive edge it would have done so. Instead the company sold it, and created a very close partnership with the company that bought it (Hitachi).

There are two killer reasons why the “single stack” pitch fails: Innovation, and Focus
The single stack pitch fails for two key reasons – It doesn’t mean that you can innovate more quickly, and a “focus” on a dozen things nets out as no focus at all.

Innovation first. Oracle is promising to invest $4.3 billion on R&D in 2011 to cover the apps business, middleware, servers, processor design, storage, workstations, and network equipment. By comparison, IBM spent $5.8billion on R&D in 2009, on middleware, servers, processor design, and storage. In other words, IBM is spending $1.5bn more, on fewer things. Oracle won’t be able to invest as much in server design, processor design or middleware development as IBM, either from an overall budget, or a return on investment point of view. IBM’s R&D is already bolstered by partnerships with vendors like Hitachi (hard disks and semiconductors) and Sony (processors) which exist because they deliver far more innovation than IBM (or Hitachi or Sony) could deliver alone.

The further point is that coordinating development to ‘engineer integration in’ means that the whole will generally advance at the speed of the slowest, which will by definition slow innovation down.

Second, the question of focus. Oracle’s acquisition strategy prior to the Sun purchase was absolutely focussed on augmenting Oracle’s already successful applications and middleware businesses. The justification and value creation arguments were clear, and more importantly were focussed on something that Oracle was already very good at. The addition of Sun with its mixture of businesses (and particularly hardware) creates too many areas for Oracle’s senior management to think about – which argues against the ability to focus at all.

Ultimately Oracle’s hardware strategy is simply not convincing enough
While we’re prepared to believe that Oracle will do a better job than Sun did of making their businesses more commercially focussed (although that’s not saying much), we think that at best Oracle will buy a temporary reprieve for the hardware business, rather than preventing a decline that we see as inevitable.

There’s a real danger that Oracle will come to discover, between 12 and 18 months from now, precisely why IBM’s strategy was to walk away from certain elements of the hardware stack and, indeed, why IBM chose not to acquire Sun when it had its chance. In the meantime, IBM (and HP for that matter) will continue to provide a warm welcome to those clients who decide that while the Sun platform isn’t yet “burning”, there’s a distinct whiff of smoke in the air, and they’d rather be on a platform with a clearer more secure future.

One particularly interesting point is that Oracle stated that it’s not all that interested in the X86 market, which implies a level of confidence in Sun’s proprietary processors that the market doesn’t share. Sun cannot ship the volume that is necessary to maintain a viable processor family. A focus on “high value, differentiated products” can easily turn into “unprofitable but expensive niche” unless Oracle can find a way to bankroll the ongoing development of the Sun processor technology similar to the one that IBM found in its deals with the games console suppliers. IBM has shipped tens of millions of processors for games consoles, all of which form part of, and help to fund, the Power family of processors.

Oracle’s software strategy is much more coherent but Sun brings a mixed bag
While Java is the big prize, there are some niche technologies (the identity management technology for example) that add value to Oracle’s software portfolio. Much of Sun’s Java middleware is to be positioned as the reference implementation (which much of it originally was).

Given Oracle’s stewardship of InnoDB we think Oracle will most likely provide a good home for MySQL. But we’re not convinced that technologies like NetBeans are going to enjoy much attention as time goes on.

The absence of a services story is the elephant in the room
For a while now we’ve been characterising this decade as the decade when the power shifts from software to services. In simple terms the 1970′s and 80′s were the decades of hardware, the 90′s and the 00′s the decades of software and we’re now into an era where services holds sway.

It’s a simplistic characterisation of an industry that’s too complex to be defined in such a pat way, but it was interesting to hear the word “solutions” used over and over again by Oracle – as so many others have for the past 20 years – just as vendors like IBM are beginning to talk about “business outcomes”.

Yes, Oracle will be able to find customers that want to buy hardware, and even “solutions”, but the real money, particularly in the high end of the market, increasingly lies in the ability to help customers deliver business outcomes.

This is why, even before Oracle started talking about a return to the 60′s, we felt that the acquisition of a hardware company was basically a retrograde step, and that Oracle’s long term success would have been better served if the company had bought a services organisation. Of course, there’s still plenty of time for Oracle to do that. Watch this space.

• A good move by IBM
• the acquisition builds on IBM’s portfolio in a number of respects
• Lombardi gains access to IBM’s partner community
• Lombardi’s partners gain access to IBM’s sales channel
• Lombardi’s customers gain too
• But of course there’s overlap…
• To get the most IBM needs to do some hard integration
• The billion dollar question (which came from James Governor) is Lotus Live..

A good move by IBM
This is a good acquisition, it gives IBM a more complete story to tell (adding “People” to the Process (WebSphere) and Information (Filenet) triangle that IBM uses when talking about BPM.

The acquisition builds on IBM’s portfolio in a number of respects
But it’s not just the “addition” of more people-centric BPM tooling, Lombardi brings a portfolio of industry vertical expertise, and a methodology/coaching approach that goes down very well with clients.

As I (along with many many others) have been saying for a long old time – “Cool tools” are a fraction of what it takes to effectively “do” BPM, strong middleware gets you just a step closer and the rest is down to your behaviour; The methodology you choose (and how you choose to apply it) represents a big component of BPM success, followed by your organisation’s cultural ability (or willingness) to commit to it.

Lombardi gains access to IBM’s partner community
This move is good for Lombardi too, while the company has managed to gather an impressive customer list, from a broad range of verticals on its own. By becoming part of the IBM family Lombardi gets access to a customer base,  sales force, geographic reach and a partner network that very very few can boast of (I can only think of two tech co’s that come close – Microsoft and HP).

Lombardi’s partners gain access to IBM’s sales channel
I think it’s also good for Lombardi’s partners, who will also get access to geos, channels and potential customers that it would have taken Lombardi decades to develop.

Lombardi’s customers gain too
This acquisition makes Lombardi’s technology more secure not less. This isn’t an acquisition on a whim, Steve Mills has signed off on a few acquisitions over the years and he’s not one for spending IBM money just for laughs.

IBM clearly sees the acquisition as adding that essential “third element” – people-centric BPM where they admit they’ve not been overly strong in the past: IBM is not going to throw this technology away.

But of course there’s overlap…
The natural first question (asked by Judith Hurwitz) related to the potential overlap between the Websphere BPM technology, Filenet and Lombardi. Craig did a sterling job of pointing out the fairly natural positioning of Websphere Dynamic Process Edition as “Process”, Filenet as “Information” and now Lombardi as “People”. But IBM is well aware that without some clear indications about how the overlaps will be dealt with, the “third leg on the stool” gambit will only get them so far.

I agree with IBM’s contention that these different “modes” or “styles” of BPM tend to be done by different people in different parts of the organisation – But if you really want to claim to be “end to end” your integration needs to be a whole lot stronger than BPMN or XPDL file exchange.

In fairness I ought to make a couple of points:

• there has been progress in doing integration between Filenet and Websphere , even if I’d like to see even more
• Lombardi is one of the longest standing WebSphere partners – the Lombardi platform has been running on WebSphere since the early 2000′s so a fair amount of integration already comes for free
• Craig did acknowledge that there’ll be integration work to do

To get the most IBM needs to do some hard integration
In the medium term the “three legs” pitch will work, but long term I’d like to see the links between the modelling tools and the underlying middleware become much more seamless – getting the middleware together should be straightforward, getting the modelling tools to integrate is likely to be gnarly.

The billion dollar question (which came from James Governor) is Lotus Live..
James asked about the integration with Lotus Live, which is closely related to other questions about the two companys’ online offerings (BlueWorks from IBM and Blueprint from Lombardi. As it happens BlueWorks runs on the Lotus Live infrastructure (the url is apps.lotuslive.com/bpmblueworks/), but isn’t all that integrated into the other Lotus Live offerings. Like James, I think there’s a big, big , opportunity here, perhaps more for Blueprint (which is simpler and easier to use than BlueWorks).

This is an important announcement for two quick reasons – firstly the outblaze technology can bring added functionality to IBM’s Bluehouse platform, and secondly it signifies that IBM is pretty committed to investing in its  “big play” in the online collaboration space.

I reckon 2009 and 2010 are going to be busy years in terms of acquisitions – Steve Mills (the chap who runs IBM’s software business) has a track record of smart purchases, and while I don’t expect him to go crazy with the corporate credit card, I reckon there’ll be a few bargains that he just won’t be able to pass up in the coming two years.

I’m expecting to hear lots and lots on Bluehouse from IBM at the upcoming Lotusphere 2009. It’s very much something to watch…

What is Bluehouse?

Bluehouse (which is from the Lotus guys in IBM’s Software Group) is an online collaboration platform – that allows people to connect to eachother, share documents and form groups. It has a lot in common with Google’s “Apps”, and with other companies like Huddle.

Bluehouse was announced more or less a year ago at the 2008 LotuSphere event, and at the time I reckoned it was the most exciting announcement at the event. I signed up there and then for the beta program and have been a fairly regular visitor ever since.

Is it any good?

It will be.

At the time it was first announced I thought that Bluehouse had the potential to offer organisations an “enterprise quality” alternative to Google Apps and Facebook. That potential remains, but so far Bluehouse has been something of a “slow burn”. In order to get people excited about signing up to “yet another collaboration platform” you have to offer them something special, and BlueHouse isn’t quite there… yet.

At the moment, it feels a little like an empty Cathedral – Beautiful, Well built… but somehow “waiting”.

Bluehouse integrated with a slew of Lotus products (although I’d like the integration to be slicker)… and there’s a really good opportunity for IBM to deliver something that will provide a reliable, trusted, SaaS alternative to Microsoft’s small business server.

I’m off to Lotusphere 2009 in a couple of weeks… and I hope I’ll have a LOT more to say on the topic of Bluehouse then.

The initiative is the result of an agreement between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

“The announcement states;

IBM will work with Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited; the Wuxi municipal government; and its business partners to build the China Cloud Computing Center, which will be a shared facility providing each software company in the park with its own virtualized computing resource. For example, a company will be able to use the allocated resource for designing, developing and testing its software products. Such virtual environments can replace the traditional data center model, in which each company owns and manages its own hardware and software.

While this is one of many announcements that IBM has made with respect to its investment, and business interests, in China (And you can expect to see LOTS of announcements from IBM concerning projects that it is kicking off in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries, as well as in other emerging economies like Vietnam, and continental Africa over the coming 12 months) – I think it’s important because it highlights a number of things that western companies, and indeed western governments, seem to completely misunderstand.

Another very smart move by IBM

Perhaps you need to be an organisation that is nearly a 100 years old to take the kind of “long view” that IBM takes to some of its strategic decisions. IBM will be “officially” 100 years old on the 16th June 2011 – The company can trace its roots back to the late 1800′s, but the current corporation was founded as CTR in 1911 and then changed its name to International Business Machines in 1924 (See this history of IBM).

As an aside, I once asked an audience of IT Managers to put their hand up if they could tell me precisely how many employees, how many data centres, and how many sites their organisation would have in 10 years time. Only one person was confident that he could tell me that – He was from a 2000 year old organisation; the Catholic Church.

IBM’s age does, I believe, bring a level of maturity that younger organisations simply lack. I met Steve Mills (GM of IBM’s Software Group) yesterday, and one of the things he said highlighted this level of maturity-

We don’t think in terms of eliminating the competition, we expect most of our key competitors to be around for a long time to come

A far cry from the “we’re gonna Kill XYZ” utterances of some of IBM’s competitors.

IBM’s investment in China has a long history, and the current investments that the company is making will pay dividends over the long term (and for a long time).

And, remember, that IBM isn’t just making investments in China. You can add India, Brazil, Russia, Vietnam, and Africa to the list of places where IBM is investing.

These are long term plays, that only a smart company that has a long-term vision makes.

IBM and the “Globally Integrated Organisation”

IBM has done a lot of thinking about what it means to be “Global”. They’ve come up with the term “Globally Integrated Organisation” to describe an organisation that isn’t “directed” from a single HQ in a single country. A Globally Integrated Organisation is one where business processes are performed wherever makes most sense for the corporation as a whole. Instead of the classic “Hierarchy”, business units span the globe – teams are global, lines of management span timezones and the corporation is fully engaged wherever it is located.

IBM is fast becoming a template for the Globally Integrated Organisation (which helps to explain why they like to talk about it so often!) – it’s a template that other companies ought to emulate.

IBM and the Global Innovation Outlook

Another initiative that ties in closely with this topic is IBM’s very significant investment in genuinely global research on key topics. IBM’s GIO programme runs on an annual basis and seeks to engage with smart people from business, technology, and academia all over the world to consider specific questions. Last year’s GIO programme was focussed on Africa – and IBM (along with a couple of partners who joined in supporting the GIO project – including Cisco) – presented the results at a hugely interesting conference at the end of last year.

The GIO process undoubtedly benefits IBM – but any benefits that IBM derives from it will be over a long term, something like the GIO would be hard to justify on a quarter-by-quarter basis but as a means to establish what opportunities might be available to you in three (or ten) years it’s a powerful approach.

My analysis

There are several reason why I think this is significant, I could (and in fact I intend to) write a much longer piece on this But briefly, I’ll look at this from a global economic perspective, from the perspective of national economic policy, and from the perspective of the global corporation.

The Global Economic Perspective
Looking at things from a global economic perspective, you can’t deny that the balance of economic power in the world is changing. While many in the west (and I’m using the term “western” to describe the economies of greater Europe and North America) have fallen into the trap of believing that “Globalisation” means the ability to exploit resources on a global basis – A kind of economic imperialism that is much celebrated by the Right (Rumsfeld et al) and much decried by the thinking Left (Chomsky et al) , the emerging economies have largely figured out that they have as much of an opportunity to exploit their internal resources as the western, and they plan to do so.

In Tom Feidman’s book “The World Is Flat” (a book I have serious issues with, as it happens) Friedman quotes Rajesh Rao, CEO of Dhruva Interactive;

India is going to be a superpower and we are going to rule
(Friedman, T – “The World Is Flat” (Hardback edition) p191

No matter how many smug and narrow-minded books we read, describing the changes that are taking place as a “threat” is like describing the tide as a “threat”. They’re happening now, and we can either huddle together like King Canute and his pals and deny the inevitable – Or we can figure out how to manage our way through this inevitable change.

The winners of the future are the ones that embrace the change that is coming – and do something positive about it

National Economic Policy

Many of the emerging economies (notably China, India and Brazil) have very well defined programs designed to promote commerce within their national boundaries. China and India are creating dozens of special “zones” that are intended to act as a cradle for commerce, innovation and entrepreneurship. These zones are the subject of massive investment, and very significant long-term planning. In China, for example, the siting of Schools, Universities, Power Plants, Transport infrastructure etc etc is all influenced (if not completely governed) by a long term plan.

None of the western nations make anything like the same investment in long term economic planning – We trust “the market” while the likes of China are choosing to “change the market”.

China’s investment in special commercial and industrial zones will make China more competitive, more innovative and more successful – and western nations have to step up in terms of their willingness to make the same kind of investment

The Global Corporation

Too many western corporations view countries like China as simply a “market” to exploit. The number of times I’ve heard marketing people waxing lyrical about China being a market of “1.4 billion consumers”, without a single thought as to what proportion of those consumers can afford their products (When you look at wikipedia you see that if you separate the rural population in China which had an average annual per capita disposable income of household in 2005 of U.S.$397 from the urban population with an average annual disposable household income of U.S.$1,281 the “market” opportunity narrows to something similar to the population of the US (only with an annual income of 1/20th of the average in the US).

This “market to exploit” notion is a fallacy not just because of the reality of that market’s spending power – but also because international corporations simply wont be permitted to get away with exploitation. The governments of the emerging economies (and this is particularly true of China) will reward companies that demonstrate a long-term commitment to investment in their countries. Smart global corporations will already have invested in China (IBM has been present for two decades), those corporations that haven’t yet will need to step up and show some commitment.

Smart corporations will see emerging markets as an investment opportunity, not just a “market of potential buyers”

That said – The opening session (which was introduced by the Orlando symphony orchestra – and a superb and very fetching solo violinist) was full of news.

The guest speaker was Bob Costas, an American Sports commentator – I was a teensy bit disappointed, given that in the past they’ve had Neil Armstrong and Walter Cronkite – Bob was a relatively entertaining speaker – but very very US-centric in his outlook and message. I’ve no doubt he’s well known and loved by many of the US attendees – but he’s more or less unknown outside the states.

The formal session was opened by Mike Rhodin, the GM of Lotus who took on the job in 2005, he’s a savvy experienced exec who really does know what he’s talking about – and what’s going on in his business.

The keynote began with a little bit of justified bragging – IBM made a series of product promises at last year’s event – then delivered them early – So early that they announced a “mini-roadmap” update in the third quarter to deliver even more.

There were a bunch of announcements aimed largely at the Lotus faithful, all good and important stuff. But there were also a number of announcements that were very interesting…

// Caveat – This is all pretty fresh, so if I praise or criticise I reserve the right to completely change my point of view when I’ve had more time to mull it over… //

The guys at Lotus have done a very impressive job of componentising the different parts of Lotus, and in integrating many of the Lotus assets with non Lotus IBM software products – Like WebSphere portal. The work they’ve done on making it very (and I mean very) easy to mix and combine components and assets within the Mashup designer is extremely impressive. IBM’s portfolio of products is huge – and the challenge that integrating them represents is equally big – the fact that they’ve achieved this much integration is impressive to say the least.

IBM is continuing to invest a lot in Symphony, IBM’s open office suite which is a very close cousin to Open Office – the product is largely developed in Beijing – and the work is moving apace – Internally there’s a new release every five or so weeks – For a project of that scale that’s noteworthy too. I had a few discussions about how I think Symphony is great… but that I haven’t been sufficiently motivated to break the habit of opening documents using Open Office. There’s a level of inertia when it comes to transition – which means that the alternative can’t just be “better” but has to be dramatically so before someone will really change their habits. Interestingly, the consistent response from a number of IBM’ers was “That’s ok… we just want you to be using the Open Document Format”… which is a pretty smart reaction.

The two announcements that really chime with me were the unveiling of the Lotus Appliance – Now this is memorable because Rhodin pulled a tiny Lotus appliance out of a brown padded envelope – In a reprise of Steve Jobs’s unveiling of the Mac Air… Mac can build a notebook that fits in an envelope – IBM can build a server that does! In truth, while I think a Lotus appliance is a great idea – It was the showmanship that really puts it at “top of mind” – I’ll mull the impact of a Lotus appliance a little more before producing a considered opinion.

Like Rhodin, I’m saving the best till last… The last and by far and away the most important announcement in my view was “IBM BlueHouse” – a hosted Web 2.0 environment for collaboration, communication,email, asset sharing (documents, images, files etc etc), asset creation (editing etc), forums… the list goes on. BlueHouse is still in beta… (rolling out over the next few months) and lots of things still have to be figured out (pricing, go to market etc etc)… but this is ROCKING in terms of its potential. It’s an offering that IBM will be targeting at smaller businesses (and I hope consumers too….).

I’ll be writing about the “open” aspects of the various announcements (mashups, and IBM’s work on an open standard for mashable widgets are two in particular), and about where BlueHouse might go in the next week or so… but for now… Keep an eye out for BlueHouse… it has the potential to be game changing.

Oracle / BEA

James Governor’s post on the subject is worth a read – He’s absolutely right to mention the Telco market (Big OSS is a major consumer of Object middleware), but there are a couple of things that I’d challenge – Firstly while I’d agree that this move will place IBM and Oracle the leadering infrastructure vendors in SOA (although Microsoft should be mentioned) but I wouldn’t put them in positions #1 and 2# when talking about SOA generally – Home grown SOA (via PHP, python, ruby etc etc) is surely responsible for the majority of service-oriented apps that are out there today?

James also mentions a great comment by Erik Bengtson pretty much nails it in his comment on the story at InfoQ:

my take on this acquisition: OC4J, Oracle ESB, Oracle BPM, Oracle web services manager will be replaced by better BEA products, WebLogic, Aqualogic ESB, Aqualogic BPM, WL Integration, Aqualogic Enterprise Security. Oracle BAM will evolve from microsoft environment and will integrate Aqualogic BPM Bam functionality. Oracle and BEA have both licensed HP Systnet as their Service Registry, so this is an easy integration. BEA engineers will focus into Front End / Web 2.0 era..

All of that makes very good sense. But lordy! That’s not a trivial amount of stuff to do.

Sun / MySQL

Judith Hurwitz is a sceptic like many of us, Judith has watched Sun make a mess of software for a lot of years, and I understand her scepticism. I’m a little more confidant, though, that Sun can make the acquisition work and ought to be able to make it work commercially too – Although Sun really does need to work on the latter – and on explaining “how” they’ll make it work commercially.

Oh and if you like to get an “Ann Coulter”-style take on a topic – check out John Dvorak’s punditry – It’s all a conspiracy by Oracle it seems – as is global warming no doubt.

So when I say “Well I reckoned that $20.00 a share was going to be the magic number, but hey I was pretty close given it went for $19.38!” It’s ok to say “You lying little scamp, you’re just saying that…”

But I did. Honest!

/* I’ve now managed to find a back-up of the original thinkovation database, and have restored the original Oracle/BEA Post */

My wordpress incompetence aside…

I still think that this is a good thing… But there are plenty of challenges ahead of the Oracle and BEA teams. I know it’s ancient history, but I have painful memories of going to visit the NetDynamics and Netscape (Kiva) teams at Sun, soon after the “merged” app server was announced. I ended up meeting the teams separately – and got the impression that all the NetDynamics guys really wanted to talk about was how rubbish Kiva was, and the Kiva guys did the opposite..

Back to today… There are now two pretty rich and fully fledged middleware offerings in the mix;

• Oracle’s Fusion is strong but badly described, and hasn’t got much traction outside Oracle’s well understood and well sold-to customer base.
• BEA’s Aqualogic story is also strong… and better described

The problem now is …. how do you merge the two technology sets… Ellison is quoted in a Washington Post article as saying that while both companies have “numerous” middleware offerings, BEA’s line is nonetheless “overwhelmingly complementary,”.

I guess that I’d say that if I was Larry Ellison too – But it’s really not that accurate a statement…

As Micheal Meehan points out in his commentary if the deal goes through Oracle will be the proud owner of;
2 ESB products

2 BPM products

2 Portals

2 SOA stacks

2 Data integration platforms

2 Development tools

Even if you step back and let your eyes go out of focus… that’s still two pretty overlapping sets of technology.

In fairness, Oracle has a better track record than some (Sun for instance) where it comes to taking the tough decisions that are needed when merging products – and it’s going to have some tough decisions to make.

Meanwhile – IBM’s Websphere still has the #1 slot, by some margin. At best Oracle bumps up to #2 in the J2EE middleware space – And to number three if you talk about platform middleware and don’t exclude Microsoft’s .NET – Which by my (admittedly wet finger in the air) reckoning is grossly overlooked, or grossly under-estimated by most analysts.

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.

Some people have asked me whether this makes MySQL a “contender” – in other words should Oracle and IBM be scared by the threat that MySQL poses to their databases? My answer is that MySQL was already a “contender” in many respects – Sure, banks haven’t flocked to use MySQL as the data store for their core systems – but gazillions of web-sites and “Web Two-do-Oh” businesses are built on MySQL.

Where it comes to existing applications, and the data that resides in them, people don’t just “swap out” one database for another – As a general rule, databases only get switched off when the apps that use them get switched off – And here’s the long-term “gotcha” for the existing DB vendors – As new applications emerge MySQL will increasingly be the database that runs them. Whether it’s SugarCRM, dotProject or WordPress… the next generation of CRM, Collaboration, and publishing applications all (more or less) use MySQL.

Some of my colleagues are still sniffy about MySQL – one past colleague even refused to call it a “Database” – insisting on referring to it as a “data-store” – And, indeed, I would have said the same right up until the end of 2005 when version 5.1 was released (which added vastly improved support for transactions, along with cursors, stored procedures, triggers and views).

MySQL is out there – in production. It sits behind millions of websites (including mine), and it’s increasingly finding itself used as the data store for custom and ISV applications.

I’m developing a client-server application for a client, they’re an all windows shop, and the client will be written in VB.NET (so that they can maintain it themselves) and I’ve chosen to use MySQL rather than add to my client’s cost by licensing SQLServer or another database.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Sun were to capitalise on this – Add a few simple API’s to make it easy for a third party application to administer a MySQL database (not that it’s that hard to do today) but with a small investment on embeddability – MySQL could be even more attractive to ISV’s.

Another commonly asked question relates to MySQL’s scalability. MySQL’s scalability isn’t really in doubt – it’s sitting behind some massive applications already – and the work on improving the performance of the different core “engines” that you can choose continues.

So.. MySQL’s adoption will grow, surely and steadily – and in a couple of years from now, some of the bigger database vendors will notice some eating away at the edges of their market share – Their choice will be to carry on competing in a market that will be essentially commodtised, or to carry on adding value over and above the core database – IBM didn’t buy Cognos for $5bn just for laughs, let’s face it.

DB2 and Oracle will retain their blue chip client-base – residing at the top of the market in terms of scale and complexity – They’ll just begin to notice that the number of “little apps” that are deployed on their technology will first stop growing as quickly as it once did and will then begin to slow.

The biggest potential loser, I reckon, is Microsoft’s SQLServer – SQLServer is a tremendously sophisticated, scalable and fast database and for 99.99% of applications it’s every bit as good as DB2 and Oracle… but Microsoft hasn’t been able to get past the “toy database” stigma – which is really very very unfair – and now there’s a free database that can also cater for the vast majority of applications – MySQL.

This is the key point – So what if MySQL can’t, yet, scale to a gazillion writes/second… the number of applications that require that kind of scale is so low that it can almost be written off as a statistical error. Steve O’Grady at Redmonk blogged on this topic this morning and produced a quote that I’ve never heard before – Apparently someone at Oracle once said “MySQL is a Toyota Corolla to our 747″ in order to disparage MySQL… what an utterly stupid thing to say – As Steve points out – there are many many more Corollas kicking about than there are 747′s and very very few of us would choose a 747 to nip down to the shops or to deliver goods to our clients – And just as the corner shop is far more likely to choose a Corolla over a 747 for the delivery – it seems that the budding e-commerce and social networking sites are choosing MySQL’s Corolla over Oracle’s 747 to build their businesses on.