Who’s On Phirst

I am pleased to inform our customers, partners and suppliers that Phurnace Software has been acquired by BMC Software. This is great news for everyone: Especially our customers. We will accelerate our innovation and product expansion and we now have the global reach through BMC for sales, support and services. All of the things that you liked about Phurnace, you will love about BMC. The product will continue to be offered as a standalone solution, as well as part of a larger more robust enterprise suite, as part of the BMC BladeLogic family. The product will continue to integrate into a wide range of third party systems; and that capability will not be lost – it will be enhanced. The pace of new feature additions and new platforms supported will also accelerate. BMC shares the vision that Phurnace was formed on – automation of application deployments and configurations that save time, money and eliminate costly errors.

The entire Phurnace team is staying in place and you will work with the same team that you have come to know. In fact, we will be growing. BMC has become the leader in data center automation and adding Phurnace furthers that lead. BMC is the ONLY provider of a full suite of automation tools that include the auto-deploy of Java enterprise applications. BMC recognizes that the real business value is in the application layer and the complete line of BladeLogic products are being enhanced and extended to handle the all important application layer – and unlike other vendors – BMC views the data center as a integrated and interchangeable set of physical, virtual and cloud environments.

It has been a great ride at Phurnace Software as an independent, venture capital backed company, and it will be an even more exciting ride as we move into the future with the backing, resources and market reach of BMC. Join us for the ride.

For more information, visit http://www.bmc.com/home/2010/bmc-acquires-phurnace-software.html

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A few months ago, I went to France to help my friend, Will, work on his house. He lives in New York and travels to France once a year to put in some work. In turn for manual labor, he picks up the accommodations tab and buys us wine.

One of my travel buddies was Will’s brother-in-law, Henry. He’s a great photographer and has a killer digital SLR camera. He took lots of pictures. However, once I checked out the pictures online, I realized that the only way to truly appreciate the shots he took was to have the pictures developed and printed on photo paper and put in an album. Given that I was simply going to view and share the pictures online, wouldn’t a point-and-shoot model have worked just as well? Moreover, we were constantly making sure Henry’s camera didn’t get stepped on or stolen. I’m certainly grateful for the pictures, as I didn’t take any, but I can’t help but think that the pictures would have been just as good if he had a lower-end camera.

Robert Capps wrote an article on that same concept. Sure, vinyl LP’s have the best audio reproduction, but an MP3 is so much more convenient. In the long run, your ROI might not be as much with an MP3, but you’ll be able to see a return much faster. Sometimes, that’s just good enough for songs with a short half-life.

When it comes to Java Application Server management, there are quite a few products on the market that are simply overkill and don’t solve your true problems. The installation is painful and difficult, an army of consultants are needed for integration, and the price is outrageous. Moreover, they don’t solve your problems with configuration management and application deployment NOW. The only thing they are good at is separating you from your money.

Sometimes, an easy-to-install, easy-to-use tool is all you need. But, here’s a big secret: Phurnace Deliver isn’t just a disposable point-and-shoot camera. It’s a samurai sword tucked inside a Leatherman made out of adamantium.

Our customers see less than 100-day ROI after purchase. No other solution around, homegrown or purchased, can get close to a 100-day ROI. If you think you found one, let me know. I’d love to have a public Pepsi Challenge.

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Like it or not, you have a heterogeneous environment. You are using a variety of OS’s, hardware architectures, databases, you name it. And, it’s proliferating. As companies continue to seek the best bargain for their IT purchases, they are more willing to use a different technology in order to stretch a dollar.

We’ve seen this shift for some years now with open source software. Companies that are in need of a database for a specific application are less likely to purchase more DB2, Oracle or SQL Server licenses and more likely to build the application using MySQL. The same can be said for Java middleware. At Phurnace, we have seen a large portion of our customers moving from WebSphere and WebLogic to open source alternatives such as JBoss or Geronimo.

Typically, these decisions are being made by internal development groups or by the companies’ external vendors. For example, we are good friends with two software vendors in Austin that have migrated their applications to support JBoss exclusively. Thus, they provide their customers with a complete stack and not just the application.

For internal development groups, the decision to build their application on an open source alternative to WebSphere or WebLogic is driven by economics and ease of use. Typically, the development group does not have the resources nor desire to use a non-free middleware platform.

The danger here is caused by lack of experience within the IT organization tasked with managing the application and its middleware platform. First comes the challenges of learning how to manage a completely new application. In turn, this is compounded by learning a completely new middleware platform. Often, determining if the cause of an application failure is due to inexperience with the middleware or the application itself is near impossible.

For this reason, we support JBoss, WebSphere and WebLogic. Our customers have the ability to manage existing middleware configurations and application deployments and can use the same tool they are familiar with to manage all of the platforms. Or, even better, this can help with their migration from one platform to the next.

Simply put, Phurnace wants you to be successful with your application server middleware choice, regardless of what you choose. Don’t worry. You won’t hurt our feelings when choosing one platform over another. We support the three most popular today and will be adding support for more.

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Today we announced a great new feature for Phurnace Deliver™ - the Configuration Viewer. With this feature, Phurnace is providing not just system administrators but also business managers an easily viewable, graphical representation of the applications, components, and resources running on web application servers including how they all interrelate.

Here are a few ways to check it out:

• View the Demo
• Have a look at the Screenshots
• Read the Press Release

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Evelyn Hubbert of Forrester Research just came out with a new report, “Low Hanging Fruit That Service Operations Teams Should Consider Now”, which details some of the IT tools that organizations can use in the short term to increase efficiency and save money. I had the chance to have lunch with Evelyn this summer and get some of her thoughts on the IT tools landscape, and boy, does she know this space well.

Here are some of the nuggets from the report that I think everyone in IT ops should be thinking about:

• Approximately 75% of the IT budget is spent on simply maintaining existing IT operations, and IT organizations must evaluate automation solutions.
• Leverage existing tools to their fullest, but also look for complementary tools that can support your focus area and bring immediate benefits of improving efficiency, reducing risk, and supporting end-to-end business services and at the same reduce cost.
• In 2009, the general IT battle cry will be to do more — or at least as much — with less and that most IT organizations will be able to keep their IT staff constant at best.

In evaluating tools, IT organizations are going to have to look at fast implementation times, and fast returns on their investment. Tools will need to be able to show how they can either cut costs directly or allow current staffing levels to scale to more support more assets. Or both. The time of soft ROI is over. Paybacks should be measured in months, not quarters.

Click here to read the full report.

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At Phurnace, we take great pride in our customer service. Since day one, we have created processes and employed systems to help us reach our goal of 100% Customer Satisfaction. A world class product like Phurnace Deliver is only as good as our customers’ ability to implement our solution. To that end, we utilize Salesforce.com’s Customer Portal and provide our customers the ability to directly contact our engineers. We are so confident with our solution, that every single one of our customers has my mobile number.

To reach our goals of 100% Customer Satisfaction and sub-100 day ROI, we partner with our customers and don’t simply sell them software. Our customers drive our product road map and feature list. We have chosen that route because, simply put, it’s easy. After all, why throw darts at a wall of new features when we can simply ask our customers what they want?

To that end, I have found that two qualities in our customers leads to greater success and faster ROI: being communicative and having a desire to change.

Communicative: Simply put, we want our customers to tell us what’s they need. To help us answer any of their questions or to guide the future features, we have adopted an agile development model that allows us to shift priorities without risking deliverables. However, that model presupposes that our customers will let us know what is on their mind and what is truly important to them. If there is a request , our engineering staff is able to quickly produce hot fixes for our customers once they have been notified. It pains me considerably to hear from a customer “Oh, that’s been happening for months,” or “We ran across that in February.” Of course, once we are able to prove to our customers that we aren’t like other software companies and that we will actually fix our problems, that communication comes much more freely.

Desire to Change: Our product requires a shift in how customers think about managing their configurations and deployments. Instead of thinking linearly about the mechanism of change, we ask that our customers just think about the change itself. “Concentrate on the ‘what’, not the ‘how’” is what we like to say to them. For some of our customers’ team members this is difficult as it does require them to approach problems in a different manner. As with all change, you should only initiate change only when you have a clear path to a benefit. To this end, we continually work with our customers to assure that they are tracking to reach ROI in under 100 days. In fact, we have sent engineers to customer sites well after training to help move them closer to that ROI target, simply to make them a happy customer.

100% Customer Satisfaction and sub-100 day ROI are lofty goals. Yet, they are attainable if you partner with communicative customers with a desire to change.

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Check out this new report on Phurnace, the cloud, and automation by Julie Craig of EMA (Enterprise Management Associates).

A few of the key points made in the brief include:

• The key to Cloud success is going to be your management tooling. Doesn’t matter how fast you can spin up images if it still takes you three weeks to deploy your application.
• Infrastructure independence is key: your strategy for the Cloud has to take into account bridging the gap from the Cloud to on-premises infrastructure.
• We need more, and more sophisticated, automation.

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This video is the first of a series we will be doing on Phurnace and other cool stuff that relates to us. At the end of each episode we plan to burn something up. Do you have a great idea of something to burn? Leave me a comment here and we will try to get it into a video.

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I and a few other folks from Phurnace attended the Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego this week. Some quick thoughts from the show:

• Insurance and Banking seemed to be the biggest verticals represented at the show.
• There were quite a few folks there that weren’t current Portal customers, but were considering migrating from another platform to WebSphere Portal. The most common reason they gave was nervousness about all the recent consolidation in the Portal space (i.e., Oracle acquiring BEA, OpenText acquiring Vignette, etc.)
• More talk about WCM (IBM Web Content Management) than in prior years. WCM seems to be catching on with the WAS Portal customer space.
• IBM is an excellent host at these events. Thanks guys! We had a good time.

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Yesterday, the leading tech analyst, The 451 Group, published a report on Phurnace. They talk quite a bit about how Phurnace is starting to look like a “cloud foundry”. It is a great report that gives their insights after they were briefed on some of our upcoming product enhancements (Phurnace 4.0 and cloud targeted products).

One of the most interesting lines in the report is this: “It is not yet clear how clouds will be used in the enterprise, but it is likely they will underpin J2EE applications. If that does turn out to be true, the sheer scale and speed of elastic cloud deployments will preclude hand-coded provisioning. Something like Phurnace Deliver will be required.”

Please check out the full report here.

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