Who’s On Phirst

On September 26th, IBM will stop supporting WebSphere 5.1 and its various flavors. Nothing is particularly unusual about software companies ending support for aging products. But, the timing is terrible for customers who wish to upgrade to WebSphere 7.0.

IBM does provide an option for extending your support in a new “5 + 3” support policy. The policy has expanded the standard length of support to five years from three and the length of available extended support to three years from two.

Applying this new policy to WebSphere 6.1, we can expect IBM to reach end standard support on June 30, 2011. If one was to upgrade immediately to 6.1, you would have to migrate again in less than three years. Considering that most upgrades are measured in months, if not years, one could argue that three years is simply not enough time to amortize the upgrade costs. The end result: with the end of life of 5.1 happening before the general availability of 7.0, customers are feeling pressure to purchase the extended support to help them bridge to 7.0.

Moreover, the uncertainty of how long that migration will take is unnerving. Without a large investment of time and energy, one is unable to effectively estimate the migration effort. Simply put, most companies will have to leap before they look. Scary.

There is another option. Phurnace Deliver provides customers the ability to Snapshot a 5.1 instance and Deploy to a 6.1 instance. We will take your System Resources, Servers and other usual suspects, and migrate them to a 6.1 instance. Phurnace Deliver will even redeploy the Applications for you. You might find that you don’t need to rewrite any code and simply needed to move the EAR and System Resources to the new 6.1 instance. Or, you may be able to quickly identify problem areas to resolve before migration.

Either way, it’s a simple, cost effective way to have a look before you leap into an upgrade.

In WebSphere
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Just got back from IBM IMPACT 2008 show

3 things I learned about WebSphere customers:

Last week Jessica (our Marketing Manager) and I spent about 4 days doing booth duty at a conference, IMPACT 2008. I thought I would share 3 quick impressions that I got from the show, the people there, and what companies where showing off. Two quick caveats: first, since I was only talking to people who went to IMPACT, my impressions should probably not be fully extrapolated to a state of the general market; second, I was talking primarily to people who either stopped at the Phurnace booth or were hanging out at the same bars as me – so there may be some selection bias.

1. WebSphere is SO main-stream. It’s everywhere. No one industry dominates. Everyone is using WAS, and its add-on products. I knew that there were lots of folks using Portal, but what surprised me was the number of people I talked to who were currently using Process Server or were planning to. Personally, I thought adoption would be slower than that. But lots of companies seem to be embracing it.
2. There were tons of consultants. Everyone from GBS, to Perficient, Accenture, CSC, CapGemini, etc., etc., etc. Sure, they were prospecting for customers just like I was, and I get that, but doesn’t that say something about the industry that the thing we are there to see/learn/discuss is so complex that about a third of the people I talked to where consultants?
3. There were some small companies doing some pretty cool things (and not just Phurnace). For example, the people right next to us was Clear App (a competitor of CA’s Wiley) who had some interesting stuff on performance monitoring of Portal apps. And I met Michael Dag, a solo owner of a company called MQSystems. He has an interesting tool for the modeling of MQ configs and object relationships. Start-ups and early stage companies are alive and well. And they are driven by some interesting innovation.

So that’s my quick three: WebSphere -- it’s everywhere, lots of people want you to pay them to help you with it, and there is some real innovation happening in start-up land. Oh, and next year I am not staying at the Tropicana Hotel. But that’s a whole different topic.

In WebSphere
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