Who’s On Phirst

Phurnace Software makes its home at the MCC building, which is owned and managed by the Unversity of Texas at Austin . Quite a few really neat companies are located here, including Bigfoot Networks . But, there is no company in the building named MCC. So, what the heck does MCC stand for? Short answer: Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

Wikipedia has a brief article on MCC . Here's a brief snippet:

"In late 1982, several major computer and semiconductor manufacturers in the United States banded together and founded MCC ... as an American answer to Japan's Fifth Generation Project, a large Japanese research project aimed at producing a new kind of computer by 1991."

Most of the projects they worked on involved Artifical Intelligence. A really cool project, InfoSleuth which was a very early web search engine. This focus on AI can still be seen, to some degree, at the University's CS department. Of course, the good times couldn't last forever. Mainframe companies began to get pushed aside by IT companies, but when the bubble popped, the members support for external R&D evaporated. MCC ended in 2000.

So, what happened to the Fifth Generation Project? Total and complete failure . They got their butts whipped by Sun and Intel processors. Cheap and fast beats expensive and fast. Always.

The reason I began thinking about this is because of the NY Post article yesterday about the Abu Dubai Investment Council purchasing the Chrysler Building. Of course, Drudge picked up on it and has had it in RED as the top link all of yesterday. Seeming to say that our most treasured symbols of America are being purchased by a foreigner. OH NOES!

Please. Sony bought Columbia Pictures. Matsushita bought Universal Studios. Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center. From my perspective, when a foreign investor starts investing in the US, they are typically 12 months from a fall . You read it here first, folks.

So, what is the difference between Sun and Intel versus MCC in the 1980s? Profit. Pure and simple. By allowing the companies that researched and developed x86 and RISC to directly profit, we have provided them a strong incentive to create jobs and wealth.
 
Thankfully, profit is a better motivator than hand-wringing, chicken-little jingoism.
 

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IBM has begun the WebSphere 7.0 Open Beta program. Here is a snippet from the email notice:

You may review the features and highlights on the Open Beta overview page at this URL:
https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/websphere/
wasndv7/

The Code and Library downloads may also be found at these URLs:
https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/websphere/
wasndv7/download.shtml https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/websphere/
wasndv7/library.shtml

For support issues related to this Open Beta program, we have also provided a discussion forum, which you may access from this URL:
https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/websphere/
wasndv7/support.shtml

 

The first thing I noticed about this release is the VMWare images. IBM has included SuSe images with WAS 7 previously installed. Just download the images, point your VMWare Player or Server at them, and test drive WAS 7. (Hint: root password is ‘password’.) I hope this means that IBM will be releasing other WebSphere based applications as VMWare images for evaluation, such as WebSphere Portal.

After starting my standalone Profile and visiting the Admin Console, I was struck by how similar to the WAS 6.1 console the WAS 7.0 console is. There was quite a bit of change from WAS 5.1 to WAS 6.0 and some marginal change in WAS 6.1. But, it seems that WebSphere has stuck with the same layout. That’s very good news for companies that rely on manual deployment.

However, there is cause for concern. The following MBeans have been removed:

 

• SIBJMSConnectionFactory
• SIBJMSProvider
• SIBJMSQueue
• SIBJMSQueueConnectionFactory
• SIBJMSTopic
• SIBJMSTopicConnectionFactory

Of course, this might simply be an oversight that the Open Beta program is meant to address. Or, it appears the JMS aspects of the Service Information Bus have been removed.

We’ll do some sleuthing on our end to see where they went to. But, this marks a change in how IBM has done WebSphere releases in the past. In fact, they still have WAS 4.0 MBeans in WAS 7.0 (e.g., WAS40ConnectionPool, WAS40DataSource). Heck, they still have it in the Admin Console, too!

In WebSphere 7.0, Open Beta Program
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Just got back from IBM IMPACT 2008 show

3 things I learned about WebSphere customers:

Last week Jessica (our Marketing Manager) and I spent about 4 days doing booth duty at a conference, IMPACT 2008. I thought I would share 3 quick impressions that I got from the show, the people there, and what companies where showing off. Two quick caveats: first, since I was only talking to people who went to IMPACT, my impressions should probably not be fully extrapolated to a state of the general market; second, I was talking primarily to people who either stopped at the Phurnace booth or were hanging out at the same bars as me – so there may be some selection bias.

1. WebSphere is SO main-stream. It’s everywhere. No one industry dominates. Everyone is using WAS, and its add-on products. I knew that there were lots of folks using Portal, but what surprised me was the number of people I talked to who were currently using Process Server or were planning to. Personally, I thought adoption would be slower than that. But lots of companies seem to be embracing it.
2. There were tons of consultants. Everyone from GBS, to Perficient, Accenture, CSC, CapGemini, etc., etc., etc. Sure, they were prospecting for customers just like I was, and I get that, but doesn’t that say something about the industry that the thing we are there to see/learn/discuss is so complex that about a third of the people I talked to where consultants?
3. There were some small companies doing some pretty cool things (and not just Phurnace). For example, the people right next to us was Clear App (a competitor of CA’s Wiley) who had some interesting stuff on performance monitoring of Portal apps. And I met Michael Dag, a solo owner of a company called MQSystems. He has an interesting tool for the modeling of MQ configs and object relationships. Start-ups and early stage companies are alive and well. And they are driven by some interesting innovation.

So that’s my quick three: WebSphere -- it’s everywhere, lots of people want you to pay them to help you with it, and there is some real innovation happening in start-up land. Oh, and next year I am not staying at the Tropicana Hotel. But that’s a whole different topic.

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