Who’s On Phirst

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.

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We launched a press release today about our latest customer win & largest healthcare customer. Have a look!

Also, Phurnace is presenting during IBM's Cloud Computing for Developers virtual workshop this Thursday, October 1. We will be speaking during the Lotus on AWS: Partner Solutions Show and Tell session from 4:00PM ET - 5:30PM ET. We hope you will join us!

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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.

 

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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).

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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.

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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!

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