We are gearing up for a great show next week at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego. If you are headed to the show, please stop by our session on Monday from 4:30 - 5:30PM PT in the Marina 5 Ballroom and/or visit us at Booth 13.
Also, we put together a quick video of the Greatest Moments in Software History. Have a look!
Today I had lunch with Duane Tharp from StreamStep. Duane is a software technology leader and has had great success with NetSuite, BetweenMarkets (acquired by Inovis) and mValent (acquired by Oracle), which he cofounded with his current cofounder, Clyde Logue.
StreamStep automates and optimizes all aspects of release management. But, it’s not just limited to pushing code out the door. They can also help you with server management. Basically, if you’re using an Excel spreadsheet and hacked together scripts, you need StreamStep.
They just formed a partnership with BMC and are integrated with BMC BladeLogic for Application Release Management. They’ve also partnered with Splunk to allow customers to easily search StreamStep data. Sounds like you can now answer the question “What did we deploy last Thursday?” without getting into a war room.
So, please check them out and let us know what you think in the comments below.
Here is a link to a new write up by leading data center automation analyst Bill Keyworth of Ptak Noel & Associates. It is their observations on our product and market opportunity. They specifically highlight our architectural choice to build an abstracted data model to replace complex (and hard to maintain) deployment scripts.
I love talking to customers. It makes product planning so much easier if all you do is listen to them and give them what they want. And from the looks of things, most all of our large WebSphere customers are planning to or have already moved to WebSphere Virtual Enterprise (VE).
Quick synopsis of VE (or the product-formerly-known-as OO or XD; IBM has played around with the name more than Prince). Virtual Enterprise allows WebSphere clusters to dynamically allocate resources to applications based on a series of policies, either for service levels or health statistics. The VE on-demand router can gather utilization information and then implement topology or prioritization changes. It’s pretty cool.
There are some challenges though. Just like anything in WebSphere (or middleware in general), it’s a bear to configure and maintain. It’s critical to implement the policies correctly and unlike static configuration where it’s often immediately evident if something isn’t right, with policy based configuration everything can look perfectly fine, but under load the environment might behave quite a bit differently than anticipated -- if the policies aren’t set up exactly right.
About 80% of our Fortune 500 customers that use WebSphere are either currently using VE or have concrete plans to move to it in the next six to nine months. That’s pretty compelling. That’s also why we have extended our products to support VE. With our VE support we help insure that our customer’s environments are set up exactly the way they want them and eliminate a lot of the complexity and heart burn that comes with the added functionality. So, rest assured: go ahead and move to VE, we have your back.
Phurnace just released some new and powerful features for the management of IBM WebSphere and WebSphere Portals. In the Portal area, our product, Phurnace Deliver, can manage the auto-deployment and on-going configuration management for all of the pieces of a Portal instance (portlets, themes, skins, content, etc.) and the understandings of the interdependencies between them. This makes changing and managing Portals substantially easier than it is without Phurnace.
Brand new capabilities include a “roll-back in time” feature that allows Portal administrators to fully archive points in time and roll-back (on-demand) to a previous known state. It can fully archive all objects needed to deploy an IBM WebSphere Portal application including binaries (wars, skins, themes, etc.) and the associated configuration information.
This is a life saver for Portal administrators that have consistently complained to us that there is no concept of “state” for their portals. We hear again and again from prospects that xmlaccess alone simply doesn’t cut it to manage the constantly changing objects and configurations of their Portals.
Other cool new capabilities include more robust management and deployment of virtual Portals and a graphical representation of relationships between WebSphere objects (such as references and containment of those elements).
Alright, I keep getting asked this so here are my thoughts, in bullet form. Take them for what you will:
First, this is what FastScale provides, in a nutshell: on demand, they would examine an application and strip out all the superfluous fluff in it to make it streamlined and easier to manage/deploy, etc. Cool stuff. But, no, not what Phurnace does.
This is a good move for EMC. It adds to their system management suite, and FastScale provides them a compelling differentiator.
M & A in this space is heating up. More deals are happening with better valuations. The slope is now up and to the right.
The companies that are surviving the downturn are well positioned for strong performance moving forward.
Notice how we are hearing the word application more and more? (application deployment, application virtualization, application management, etc.). Also notice how we are hearing the word server less and less? That’s not a coincidence. I.T. is making the correct migration from thinking about servers and provisioning them to applications and enabling them. This is good for the industry and to help align business goals with I.T. goals.
We are gearing up for our next tradeshow, the IBM Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego, Oct 12 - 14, 2009. We attended a ton of great sessions last year and chatted with some really cool Portal admins at our booth. This year we have a booth and our CTO, Robert Reeves, will be doing a live demo of Phurnace WebSphere Portal® Deliver™ during our technical session. Check the website in the next few weeks for the details. This is a must attend event for any Portal admin. See you there!
There is a lot of discussion in the market right now on the Spring Framework and development language because of the recent VMware acquisition of SpringSource. First, for those of you not that familiar with Spring, it is a lightweight J2EE application platform and integration model. Spring also helps reduce the complexities involved when developing J2EE applications. For example, in the J2EE EJB model, Spring only requires you to create your Domain Module using Java Beans freeing your from a lot of code writing required by J2EE. Spring has found a place in thousands of companies worldwide. In fact, we use Spring at Phurnace to help us manage the multitude of MBeans we support.
Now, if you’re going to be running your Spring application on its own, you have a very simple deployment process. However, most companies want the ease of development that Spring provides but the robustness that a full-blown Java Application Server can provide. In this case, your Spring based application has all of the same deployment challenges as a J2EE spec application has. It still needs to have the target app server configured, tweaked and set up to correctly run the app. That is where Phurnace comes in. So, yes, Spring-developed apps as well as J2EE apps are handled by our deployment automation product.
Now, a comment on the SpringSource acquisition. The VMware acquisition of SpringSource is all about the assembling of a “stack” for the quicker and easier building and deploying of applications in the cloud. Finally, the world is starting to move to a more application-centric view of IT. No longer is the data center a place where servers run infrastructure. IT is about applications. Everything is there for the support of those applications. The cloud is an environment with a very application-centric approach. However, it will not replace the data center, but instead, augment it. AND, applications will need to migrate between instances in the cloud and between images and servers on premises behind the firewall. To and from the cloud. That is a bunch of configurations tasks or custom scripts that will need to be constantly tweaked and maintained. Unless you use Phurnace. You see, Phurnace can move the applications to and from the cloud and to and from any virtual image, regardless of where it is.
VMWare made a good move by acquiring SpringSource and it will speed adoption of the cloud for development and testing. However, the story isn’t complete without Phurnace. Thank you VMware for laying the groundwork for more robust cloud usage, we are ready willing and able to make sure the applications are actually deployed correctly with Phurnace.
We are in the middle of a two week industry analyst tour right now and we completed some really good briefings last week. Lots of discussion on the need to provide rapid ROI, the need to show immediate cost savings to IT departments, how to leverage the desire in companies to use even more automation and of course, the Cloud. Phurnace is in a very good place related to the hottest trends in IT. Automation, a shift to an application centric mind-set in IT, cost reduction, and cloud computing. The analysts see this and almost before we got to slide 2 in our presentation asked the question, “what do you think of VMWare’s acquisition of SpringSource? Is the bubble back?” First, no, the bubble isn’t back. While $420 million is a great price for SpringSource, this is NOT like the days of $1.2 billion for Toothpaste.com or such silly things. Those days are gone forever. SpringSource has a huge following, real revenue and will add to VMWare’s product portfolio in a good way. I see the SpringSource acquisition as good for everyone. For them, for VMWare, for the market, for the momentum of virtualization and cloud computing.
We took the opportunity with the analysts that we met to talk about the future of app deployment in the cloud and where Phurnace fits today, but even more exciting, where we will fit in the near future. We got great feedback and our ideas were validated. We have some exciting plans for additional products targeted at the cloud. Amazon Web Services first, other public clouds after that.
We were continually asked, “why aren’t you partnering with VMWare?” Actually, that makes sense. Our software deploys applications into physical, virtual or cloud environments. VMWare would be a logical partner. We have just been so busy with other customer requests. I guess since our software works out of the box with VMWare, we didn’t really see a need to call them and bother them. I bet they have their hands full right now with SpringSource.
