Who’s On Phirst

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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