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Thanks for visiting our blog. I am the contributor for the Marketing team. Please let me know if there is anything you would like to see us discuss here.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
Hello all, the registration is now open for our July 30th webinar with Evelyn Hubbert from Forrester Research. She is going to talk about ways that you can cut immediate costs in your I.T. organization. Daniel Nelson from Phurnace will discuss some recent case studies on how customers have seen quick ROI with Phurnace. We are excited to host this event with such a great analyst.
Click here to learn more and register. See you there!
We had a great time last week at IBM IMPACT. Thanks again to everyone who came to our session or stopped by the booth. We should have a posting later this week from Robert on thoughts about the show.
If you haven't had the chance yet, take a look at our press release from last week on how we can help companies "On-Ramp" their applications to the Amazon cloud. We collaborated with teams from Amazon Web Services, IBM WebSphere Portal and Ixion, LLC to put this together. Very cool stuff...
Finally, we have a little over a week before our webinar on the state of the Data Center and the Cloud with Rachel Chalmers from the 451 Group. Join us on Thursday, May 21st, at 11AM CST to hear all about it.
Phurnace is a Silver Sponsor next week at the IBM IMPACT 2009 conference. The conference is focused on SOA and the leveraging of WebSphere products – WebSphere application server, WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Process Server, and more. There are even going to be sessions and announcements related to IBM and Amazon and the cloud platform AWS, including some exciting news on this topic from Phurnace.
We found this to be a great event last year. It was good to connect face to face with our customers and our prospects. We generated good quality sales leads and the audience was perfect for us. I encourage any WebSphere system admins or IBM Portal customers to stop by and see us in our show floor booth or join us Monday morning for a “birds of a feather” session that will discuss how to eliminate your deployment scripts and the headaches that they present . We will be demonstrating the deployment of java apps into WebSphere, the management of updates and changes to IBM Portal and how to use Phurnace as an “on ramp” into the Amazon cloud (Amazon Web Services).
Finally, set a meeting with us if you plan to be there. If you would like to reserve a time slot or just want to let us know that you will be there for us to keep an eye out, please email jessica.gass@phurnace.com. She will make sure you connect with all of the right Phurnace people. This is a must go conference if you are a WebSphere user. If you don’t have your ticket, go online and sign up now. You shouldn’t miss this one.
