Industry Opportunity
Today’s mission critical Web applications are constantly changing, with applications continually moving from build to test to production and back again to development. At the very time when business units are demanding more versatile, dynamic infrastructures to accommodate these agile Web applications, we’re beginning to witness the management handicaps of virtualization and cloud computing as current IT service management tools don’t scale in automating the configuration and deployment of applications. In resolving the complexity created by the deployment of larger and larger instances of Java EE applications, scripting has been one option continually leveraged to reduce errors and save time in system administration functions. The explicit nature of scripts and the constantly changing applications and environments make them cumbersome at best. Unfortunately, stress is induced upon scripting frameworks as servers are continually going up and down and hosting, ports and IP addresses must be known. Finally, scripts have a well deserved reputation for being error-prone, making them harmful for high availability web environments.

Phurnace Solution
Phurnace technology targets the transition from the development of applications (output) to the input required by IT operations for the deployment of applications. The software product is positioned as “expert” in knowing everything there is to know about the configuration of IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, and RedHat JBoss Web application servers. Being agent-less, the product requires only network connectivity to accommodate physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Phurnace communicates to the target server and makes the necessary changes, additions and deletions to all configuration objects. With its abstraction and tokenization, it is independent of deep infrastructure knowledge so often associated with scripting. An automated, intelligent model is thereby introduced that “trickles” through the dynamic IT environment capturing configuration content and controlling drift while reducing errors.

Phurnace breaks the solution into three pieces. First element addresses the “what” or data model that describes how you want the server environment to look when the application is deployed, addressing dependencies, shared libraries, sizing, data sources, etc. The configuration is abstracted from and independent of any target specifics, allowing re-use for new types of application servers and infrastructure requirements. Second element addresses the “where” or server profiles that identify the environment-specific information necessary to connect and to install applications effectively, including environment-specific details, such as hostname, database location, cluster size, etc. Third element delivers the “how” or the Phurnace “expert software” engine that reads in the data model (what) and connects to the server profile (where) and compares the two, understanding what is different and only making the incremental changes necessary. Such action enables capabilities of rollback, preview and truly enhanced reporting.

The Market Observation
The obvious advantage to the Phurnace approach stems from an early design decision to capture the configuration and deployment elements for specific types of application servers in a data model. From that specific, they’ve been enabled to successfully replicate capabilities to other types of Web application servers. Phurnace wisely didn’t attempt the generic implementation of configuration management …which frequently requires explicit knowledge of applications and environment (…and substantial effort by the IT organization) in order to develop the appropriate scripting and manual processes for specific server platforms. Their inventory of Web application servers, when Apache TomCat and IBM WebSphere Process Service are added, provides a critical mass of the Web application servers that are currently leveraged within the newer dynamic infrastructures, as well as the opportunity of leveraging a single deployment process across the enterprise.

The goodness of this solution is evidenced by the excellent traction (license sales) within the last twelve months and by the willingness of those new end users to promote Phurnace within business service management (BSM) solutions coming from HP, IBM and BMC. IBM has been somewhat proactive in introducing Phurnace to a few of their larger WebSphere accounts. However, long term success of Phurnace will be in proportion to its success in gaining the attention of the pre-sales teams within these larger BSM vendors. Particularly those individuals who understand the difficulty and magnitude of automating large scale configuration and deployment of Java EE applications and want a complimentary, non-competitive solution to resolve such IT management issues.

Phurnace’s ability to accommodate the increasingly fluid demands of Web application servers that are critical to business operations is significant. Today’s mission critical Web applications are constantly changing, with applications continually moving from build to test to production and back again to development. Such capacity to handle agile business practices is at the heart of the value of Business Service Management and Phurnace can illustrate “qualitative” business oriented ROI metrics, including value to time savings, productivity gains, application downtime reduction and less time troubleshooting.

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