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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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!
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.
According to a new survey by research and consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates, manual configuration errors are wreaking havoc across IT organizations, not only impacting developer and staff productivity, but also causing significant delays in the roll out of customer-facing web applications. These errors are resulting in application downtime costing companies as much as $72,000 per hour.
Key findings of the research titled: The Sources of Web Application Downtime:
Web Applications are Critical to Business Operations
86 percent of companies reported their web applications were now either very important or mission-critical.
Web applications are now viewed as one of the primary methods for interacting with customers, partners and suppliers. When errors occur, critical customer-facing web applications fail.
Manual Scripting is Killing IT Budgets
The average company is spending $852,187 per year in personnel costs to create, maintain and support deployment scripts.
56 percent of organizations have 11 employees or more dedicated to the ongoing configuration, installation and deployment of web applications.
14 percent of respondents were shown to have more than 81 employees assigned to this task.
38 percent of organizations employ 11 or more employees to write and maintain custom deployment scripts.
Downtime is Costly and Unnecessary:
Internal costs for large sites were shown to be as high as $72,000 an hour for downtime.
Almost 35 percent of respondents said that at least a quarter of their downtime was caused by configuration changes and errors. In addition, 72 percent of respondents regarded this downtime as “significant”.
Many errors are caused by the inability to keep track of what changes have been made to configuration and deployment scripts.
The Problem is Getting Worse, Not Better:
Organizations with large web applications are seeing up to a 20 percent increase in annual maintenance.
As more companies move to virtualization, the workloads of existing web applications are increasing. 58 percent acknowledged this as a serious problem.
