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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At Phurnace, we take great pride in our customer service. Since day one, we have created processes and employed systems to help us reach our goal of 100% Customer Satisfaction. A world class product like Phurnace Deliver is only as good as our customers’ ability to implement our solution. To that end, we utilize Salesforce.com’s Customer Portal and provide our customers the ability to directly contact our engineers. We are so confident with our solution, that every single one of our customers has my mobile number.

To reach our goals of 100% Customer Satisfaction and sub-100 day ROI, we partner with our customers and don’t simply sell them software. Our customers drive our product road map and feature list. We have chosen that route because, simply put, it’s easy. After all, why throw darts at a wall of new features when we can simply ask our customers what they want?

To that end, I have found that two qualities in our customers leads to greater success and faster ROI: being communicative and having a desire to change.

Communicative: Simply put, we want our customers to tell us what’s they need. To help us answer any of their questions or to guide the future features, we have adopted an agile development model that allows us to shift priorities without risking deliverables. However, that model presupposes that our customers will let us know what is on their mind and what is truly important to them. If there is a request , our engineering staff is able to quickly produce hot fixes for our customers once they have been notified. It pains me considerably to hear from a customer “Oh, that’s been happening for months,” or “We ran across that in February.” Of course, once we are able to prove to our customers that we aren’t like other software companies and that we will actually fix our problems, that communication comes much more freely.

Desire to Change: Our product requires a shift in how customers think about managing their configurations and deployments. Instead of thinking linearly about the mechanism of change, we ask that our customers just think about the change itself. “Concentrate on the ‘what’, not the ‘how’” is what we like to say to them. For some of our customers’ team members this is difficult as it does require them to approach problems in a different manner. As with all change, you should only initiate change only when you have a clear path to a benefit. To this end, we continually work with our customers to assure that they are tracking to reach ROI in under 100 days. In fact, we have sent engineers to customer sites well after training to help move them closer to that ROI target, simply to make them a happy customer.

100% Customer Satisfaction and sub-100 day ROI are lofty goals. Yet, they are attainable if you partner with communicative customers with a desire to change.

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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.

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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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At the beginning of March this year, I got to spend a couple of days at the BMC Lexington campus prototyping our BladeLogic integration with some of their product, architecture, and development folks. Other than the four feet of snow, it was a great experience meeting the guys there as well as seeing what Phurnace can do with a product like BladeLogic. Together we can do lots of neat things that today just aren’t possible with either product alone. Recently one of our customers brought up an interesting use case that reminded me of one of the BladeLogic features.

In BladeLogic, you can setup heuristic rules to evaluate a task, decision, etc, and then take the appropriate action based on the rule. It’s a pretty rich interface, with full support for all first-order logic. This is pretty cool in its own right. But as they were showing the product to us, I kept thinking that if we combine this with the Phurnace data model for configurations, we can do some very amazing stuff.

For example, one of the things that scares the pants off IT operations guys is there being inadvertent changes to security or tuning settings. Both of those result in big fires and lots of unwanted attention. The problem is that sometimes they get packages to deploy that aren’t as sensitive to those requirements as they should be. Or, even worse, they get an app that HAS TO BE configured in a way that violates their policy in order to work – a hard-coded port, for example. See, the problem is the system administrators know what their environment needs for things like performance and security, and the devs know what the application needs for configuration and deployment, but the melding of those two bases of knowledge is always nasty, and often explosive.

So, watching the BMC guys take us through BladeLogic, I was thinking that this would be a great way to solve that problem. Have the SAs program in their tuning and security requirements actually in the heuristic engine, and then when Phurnace provides the data model for the configuration of the application, run a check to see if it violates any of those policies. The heuristics don’t have to be explicit – they can be a range of options, or settings, or what have you. They can be as complex or as simple as desired. But the important point here is that this check is now done programmatically, in an automated fashion, with no heartache or lost time. Good things happen when you combine good data with good process.

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We occasionally get the question, “Does HP, BMC, CA or IBM offer what Phurnace does?” The answer is simply – NO. We have a unique patent-pending approach (a software system and methodology patent) to deployment automation and there is no other vendor that addresses the problem the way that we do. This is not to say that there aren’t other ways to deploy J2EE applications and to configure web application servers. There are other ways, but they rely on hand-crafted, custom-written scripts or manual processes involving the app server console or configuration file editing. We think there is a much better way. The Phurnace way. It is a way that A.) reduces errors, B.) saves time, and C.) saves money. With the introduction of Phurnace, an entirely new way of managing web application deployment has emerged. It is quite frankly, a breakthrough.

Many of our customers have already spent a significant amount of money on I.T. operations platforms such as HP Server Automation, IBM Rational, IBM Tivoli or BMC BladeLogic, to name a few. They want to make sure that those systems don’t provide the functionality that Phurnace does. It is totally understandable and we welcome the question. What they have all found is that we provide a value-add to these systems and are not an overlap. Granted, you will find the terms “deployment automation” in each of their respective product brochures, but without exception, this means “auto launching of the custom-scripts that someone writes for your unique environment.” Phurnace replaces the mechanism of deployment, not the process. Remove the script mechanism, place Phurnace in its place. Boom -- Big cost savings immediately. No more writing of scripts, updating of scripts, maintenance of all of that “scaffolding”. And, Phurnace has integrations available directly to just about every build, source code, release and IT operation system out on the market (even open source tools).

So, feel free to ask the question – “Does Phurnace overlap with my current system?” We will answer with a confident NO and then install our software in your existing environment and prove it. Please give us a chance to put that question to bed.

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Ops folks hate agents. Hate them. I was in the same camp back in my data center days. The reasons are pretty obvious, right? Who wants to have to install and maintain another piece of software on every server? No one. Not only that, but agents scare the bejesus out of people running production systems. A small program that executes commands locally from a remote source is super scary no matter what. Like clowns with fangs scary. Add in the chance for that little agent to go rogue and start consuming resources or leaking memory or hording ports and scary quickly morphs into dread.

With all the revolutions going on in server infrastructure agents are also becoming more and more inconvenient. Virtualized environments and cloud computing make the servers themselves much more ephemeral than in other days past. Maintaining agents to these here-today-gone-tomorrow servers, and all the references to them, and the configurations they require, is just too time consuming and troublesome. It’s a hold over architecture from days past when “server” meant a thing with a form factor and a fan, not dynamically allocated memory and processor time.

Phurnace doesn’t play that game. We connect over the network – no agents required. That gives us tremendous flexibility to fit into the existing infrastructure architecture of our clients. Also, it allows us to configure and maintain servers regardless if they are physical, virtual, or cloudy. Ultimately our customers don’t like being told how they have to do things – they want products that fit how they want to work, not have to work the way a product demands. Being agentless is part of our flexibility that let’s our customers do that. And of course, makes us far less scary.

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You may have already heard the news that Oracle has made a bid for Sun. The IBM acquisition deal fell through two weeks ago. In my opinion, it looks like the market is making a slow move back to the one-stop-shop “system house” approach. IBM, HP, Oracle/Sun and maybe soon Cisco, will all offer systems with hardware, software and services. Is this a trend toward a conservative IT approach? “I want one vendor responsible for my environment?” “I don’t care if all the pieces are best of breed, I just want it to work together and lower my TCO.” We shall see.

The pendulum swings again. This has happened throughout my long career in the computer and software industry. The current buzz around cloud computing fits this mind set as well. “I don’t care what it is or who it is from, just make it work and charge me just for what I use.”

The challenges of system and data center management will not go away, however. This latest consolidation move will just bring them in to the limelight again. The future is bright for data center automation tools. Customers are demanding that complexity be reduced and big systems vendors are making promises that they will answer the call. Phurnace Software is in a good place. Our customers know that we can make their deployment process much, much more simple and for sure – pull out real costs.

It will be intriguing to see what else happens in this “system house” building era. SAP? Cisco? BMC? CA? Dell? Microsoft? Are they next? And don’t think that Amazon and Google don’t have a grand plan up their sleeves. Should be interesting.

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You really can’t beat Austin in the Spring. This week has made me especially happy to live here. We have tons going on right now – SXSW, Flatstock, Rodeo, Spring Break, March Madness, bluebonnets, a new awesome food truck on South Congress, Mighty Cone….this city is BUZZIN! Oh and did I mention that it is in the 80’s and sunny and that we can hear SXSW bands from our parking lot? Life is Good!

Phurnace had some great news this week. We were included in a Gartner report of Cool Vendors in IT Operations and Virtualization. Take a few seconds to check out the report. Once you are done reading that, you can check out the links above and book your next trip to Austin!

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