BI, Analytics, and CEP: Some Fruitful Potential Follow-Ons from Software AG’s Acquisition of IDS Scheer
By James Kobielus.
Yes, of course, Software AG is buying IDS Scheer primarily for the latter’s ARIS family of business process management (BPM) tools. I’ll leave it to my Forrester colleagues who focus on BPM--on both the IT and TI sides of the house--to call out the ramifications for Software AG’s positioning in that market.
But, believe it or not, this deal will also launch Software AG into the growing markets for business intelligence (BI), analytics, and complex event processing (CEP) solutions. We bet you didn’t realize that IDS Scheer has ARIS solutions in these fast growing markets, but in fact they do--and they’re continue to evolve those offerings.
It’s no surprise that IDS Scheer’s BI, analytics, and CEP offerings supplement and extend its BPM portfolio. Its CEP solution, ARIS Process Event Monitor, supports business activity monitoring (BAM). Its analytics offerings, ARIS Process Performance Management and ARIS Performance Dashboard, support visualization, dashboarding, scorecarding, drilldown, and alerting on process key performance indicators (KPIs), both historical and real-time. And its forthcoming BI offering, ARIS MashZone, will support self-service user development of reports, dashboards, and other views of process and business metrics.
IDS Scheer has little market share in these non-core segments. And the vendor is no immediate threat, by itself or under its future corporate parent, to the leaders in the BI, analytics, and CEP segments. Indeed, its forthcoming mashup-oriented BI offering only provides a subset of the features available from market leaders such as SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, and MicroStrategy. But the fact that Software AG will soon be able to provide its own offerings in those segments, rather than rely wholly on partners, represents an important step in its attempt to field a full service oriented architecture (SOA) solution stack.
As noted in a blog entry a year and a half ago, BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive SOA solution portfolio. SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features. This acquisition continues the ongoing SOA solution build-out strategy that motivated Software AG to acquire webMethods in 2007.
But it’s not clear yet whether Software AG plans to flesh out its BI, analytics, and CEP strategies going forward and thereby confront SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other SOA full-stack vendors head-on in these segments. It is also unclear how much effort or expense Software AG would incur in extricating the IDS Scheer offerings from the larger ARIS portfolio in order to make them more general-purpose and less BPM-centric. Nevertheless, Software AG will at the very least have a strong set of enabling technologies to support any such strategy in the near future.
What’s most exciting, and potentially differentiating, about the Software AG/IDS Scheer BI portfolio is the combination of CEP with mashup and an in-memory architecture to support truly real-time, interactive analytics. In other words, Software AG/IDS Scheer could take a page out of the book of another SOA full-stack vendor: TIBCO and its Spotfire product group. In doing so, Software AG/IDS Scheer would also be well-positioned to duke it out with SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, all of which are beginning to emphasize in-memory CEP-enabled BI strategies. As we noted in a report from late 2008, in-memory architectures are coming to dominate the BI arena. Likewise, Forrester has called attention in a recent report to the growing adoption of CEP for truly real-time BI.
Whether Software AG capitalizes on the opportunity to expand its SOA solution stack into BI remains to be seen. Considering that it took Oracle more than a year to publicly declare how it will position BEA’s CEP and data federation technologies within its own SOA stack, we may have to wait a while before Software AG and IDS Scheer craft an equivalent roadmap--if they ever do.
But if they wait too long, the newly merging vendors may find that the dynamic SOA, BI, and CEP markets have passed them by.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost BI, Analytics, and CEP: Some Fruitful Potential Follow-Ons from Software AG’s Acquisition of IDS Scheer
Saturday, July 11, 2009
poem A Mortal Mutters
A MORTAL MUTTERS
Sun will shine without
my skin to receive it. Yes,
the sun will remain.
Green will gleam. The leaves
and the slime will all be fine.
As before my time.
Before this blessed
me could conceive that he too
would be forgotten.
Sun will shine without
my skin to receive it. Yes,
the sun will remain.
Green will gleam. The leaves
and the slime will all be fine.
As before my time.
Before this blessed
me could conceive that he too
would be forgotten.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
poem Terror
TERROR
A studious girl's
laboratory acid burn
continues to sting.
Ears and attention,
fingers also wobble, they're
axes x y z.
Every potion steams,
every motion screams out its
margin of error.
A studious girl's
laboratory acid burn
continues to sting.
Ears and attention,
fingers also wobble, they're
axes x y z.
Every potion steams,
every motion screams out its
margin of error.
poem Churchgoing
CHURCHGOING
Material as
heavy as religion kills
in the aggregate.
Please pardon me for
preferring the cool air in
empty cathedrals.
An enormous room.
My solitary breath. The
infinite echo.
Material as
heavy as religion kills
in the aggregate.
Please pardon me for
preferring the cool air in
empty cathedrals.
An enormous room.
My solitary breath. The
infinite echo.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
poem High-Relief Phoenician Sarcophagal Frieze
HIGH-RELIEF PHOENICIAN SARCOPHAGAL FRIEZE
Alexander rears,
points his spear of air into
a prone Persian heart.
Alexander's mount,
all equine response and white
brute alabaster.
In middle assault,
the flanked warriors are all
nude and helmeted.
Alexander rears,
points his spear of air into
a prone Persian heart.
Alexander's mount,
all equine response and white
brute alabaster.
In middle assault,
the flanked warriors are all
nude and helmeted.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
poem Workend
WORKEND
Sun and day are blank
as Eden, a pleasure dream
free of imagery.
The only pressure
is past: the embossing of
odd sleep positions.
Atlas carried the
atmosphere with grace, as a
cold world's counterweight.
Sun and day are blank
as Eden, a pleasure dream
free of imagery.
The only pressure
is past: the embossing of
odd sleep positions.
Atlas carried the
atmosphere with grace, as a
cold world's counterweight.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!
BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!
By James Kobielus
In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”
Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.
Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.
Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.
No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):
BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.
By James Kobielus
In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”
Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.
Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.
Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.
No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):
- Level 1: Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications: This basic maturity level is for companies that have no prior BI or EDW; have little in-house BI expertise; and are comfortable with allowing casual users to use their browsers to customize parameterized reports from data from packaged business applications.
- Level 2: Deep presentation mashup against EDW: This level is for organization that do have prior BI and centralized EDWs, but have an understaffed BI development group and/or power users and data modelers urgently require the ability to mashup and explore historical and current data within sophisticated BI workspaces.
- Level 3: Full BI mashup in federated environment: This level is for organizations that have decentralized, dynamic data management environments, and have the expertise to design reusable, composite data services to seamlessly mashup internal and external information.
- Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance: This level is for organizations that want to encourage subject matter experts and operational users to collaborate on analytics created through mashup, but who are also concerned that all mashups be controlled, governed, and monitored in accordance with enterprise policies and best practices.
BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
poems Some Detroit-inspired/inflamed pieces from past years
AT THE STRAITS
Detroit riots and rots,/deteriorates and/resists resurrection.//Detroit's distraught, a rut/of debt and death, a depth/charge of desolation.//Dry as snot. A driven/disaster. A drag to/avoid. My home. Destroyed.
URBAN PINES
An immense metropolis: The wary mother of an internal forest.
ZUG GROSSE BELLE AND A TOWN CALLED HELL
Downtown once was fresh. Environment once pristine. Ten millennia plus since last glacier retreat. River brought sweat salt gravel hope bootleg rum and not-so-distant ancestors. Indigenous people were just shunted aside. Our kind built dangerous dump. Tell the ice come back.
Detroit riots and rots,/deteriorates and/resists resurrection.//Detroit's distraught, a rut/of debt and death, a depth/charge of desolation.//Dry as snot. A driven/disaster. A drag to/avoid. My home. Destroyed.
URBAN PINES
An immense metropolis: The wary mother of an internal forest.
ZUG GROSSE BELLE AND A TOWN CALLED HELL
Downtown once was fresh. Environment once pristine. Ten millennia plus since last glacier retreat. River brought sweat salt gravel hope bootleg rum and not-so-distant ancestors. Indigenous people were just shunted aside. Our kind built dangerous dump. Tell the ice come back.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Database Religions Dissolve into the Big Billowing Virtual Data Cloud
Database Religions Dissolve into the Big Billowing Virtual Data Cloud
By James Kobielus
Virtualization is a venerable old computing concept that has achieved new life in recent years.
Virtualization brings to life a new world of more flexible service provisioning while cleverly emulating the old world that is being replaced. Virtualization refers to any approach that abstracts the external interface from the internal implementation of some service, functionality, or other resource.
The promise of virtualization is that, no matter how scattered and diverse, all pooled resources behave as if they were a single unified resource, both for usage and administration. In a sense, this is the practical magic that Arthur C. Clarke identified with advanced technology. The external interface may conceal various facts about the implementations of the underlying resources. The virtualized resources may run on diverse operating and application platforms;have been deployed on nodes in diverse locations; have been aggregated across diverse hosting platforms (or partitioned within a single hosting platform, either through virtual machine software, separate CPUs, or separate blade servers); and have been provisioned dynamically in response to a client request.
When Noel Yuhanna and I presented on enterprise database virtualization last week at Forrester IT Forum, we took pains to point out that is not a radically new paradigm. In fact, database administrators (DBAs) have been doing virtualization for a long time and not realizing it. We’re all familiar with such database virtualization approaches as policy-based server clustering, massive parallel processing database grids, and enterprise information integration. In these environments, you can identify the virtualization layer as “single system image,” “semantic abstraction,” or some other approach.
What all these approaches share is that they make two or more repositories behave as if they were a single database for unified access, query, reporting, predictive analytics, and other applications. If you wish, I could drill down further into the layers of database virtualization--data virtualization, transaction virtualization, and platform virtualization--but that would be too much for a mere blogpost.
One twist that I didn’t have time to explore in depth last week is the notion that the traditional hub-and-spoke enterprise data warehousing (EDW) architecture is itself a form of database virtualization. The hub-and-spoke model transforms analytic data to a common “spoke-side” semantic access model, such as star schema or columnar. As such, this approach abstracts from the data models (usually 3NF relational) implemented at the EDW hub tier, the staging tier (perhaps file-based), and OLTP sources (perhaps hierarchical, XML, or what have you).
When you realize that each data-persistence approach has its optimal deployment sphere, you’re thinking database virtualization. At that point, you start to realize that the various database religions--relational is supreme, columnar is king, and so forth--are not absolute truths. They’re simply sectarian texts in a tradition of longer vintage: the evolution of truly all-encompassing data virtualization clouds.
Yes, I’m using “cloud” in this context because it best describes this new paradigm. Cloud-based virtualization is beginning to seep into analytic infrastructures. To support flexible mixed-workload analytics, the EDW, over the coming five to 10 years, will evolve into a virtualized, cloud-based, and supremely scalable distributed platform.
What are the outlines of this new paradigm? The virtualized EDW will allow data to be transparently persisted in diverse physical and logical formats to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources and to be delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications. EDW application service levels will be ensured through an end-to-end, policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching and dynamic query-optimization memory grid, within an information-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. Analytic applications will migrate to the EDW platform and leverage its full parallel-processing, partitioning, scalability, and optimization functionality. At the same time, DBAs will need to make sure that cloud-based DW offerings meet their organizations’ most stringent security, performance, availability, and other service-level requirements.
I won’t opine here and now on how much enterprise data will be persisted in public clouds vs. private environments that incorporate many of the same platform virtualization technologies. I’ll save that discussion for the upcoming Forrester reports that Noel and I are developing in virtualization of transactional and analytic databases, respectively.
Expect those in Q3 or thereabouts. Thanks everybody who attended our preso last week in Vegas!
By James Kobielus
Virtualization is a venerable old computing concept that has achieved new life in recent years.
Virtualization brings to life a new world of more flexible service provisioning while cleverly emulating the old world that is being replaced. Virtualization refers to any approach that abstracts the external interface from the internal implementation of some service, functionality, or other resource.
The promise of virtualization is that, no matter how scattered and diverse, all pooled resources behave as if they were a single unified resource, both for usage and administration. In a sense, this is the practical magic that Arthur C. Clarke identified with advanced technology. The external interface may conceal various facts about the implementations of the underlying resources. The virtualized resources may run on diverse operating and application platforms;have been deployed on nodes in diverse locations; have been aggregated across diverse hosting platforms (or partitioned within a single hosting platform, either through virtual machine software, separate CPUs, or separate blade servers); and have been provisioned dynamically in response to a client request.
When Noel Yuhanna and I presented on enterprise database virtualization last week at Forrester IT Forum, we took pains to point out that is not a radically new paradigm. In fact, database administrators (DBAs) have been doing virtualization for a long time and not realizing it. We’re all familiar with such database virtualization approaches as policy-based server clustering, massive parallel processing database grids, and enterprise information integration. In these environments, you can identify the virtualization layer as “single system image,” “semantic abstraction,” or some other approach.
What all these approaches share is that they make two or more repositories behave as if they were a single database for unified access, query, reporting, predictive analytics, and other applications. If you wish, I could drill down further into the layers of database virtualization--data virtualization, transaction virtualization, and platform virtualization--but that would be too much for a mere blogpost.
One twist that I didn’t have time to explore in depth last week is the notion that the traditional hub-and-spoke enterprise data warehousing (EDW) architecture is itself a form of database virtualization. The hub-and-spoke model transforms analytic data to a common “spoke-side” semantic access model, such as star schema or columnar. As such, this approach abstracts from the data models (usually 3NF relational) implemented at the EDW hub tier, the staging tier (perhaps file-based), and OLTP sources (perhaps hierarchical, XML, or what have you).
When you realize that each data-persistence approach has its optimal deployment sphere, you’re thinking database virtualization. At that point, you start to realize that the various database religions--relational is supreme, columnar is king, and so forth--are not absolute truths. They’re simply sectarian texts in a tradition of longer vintage: the evolution of truly all-encompassing data virtualization clouds.
Yes, I’m using “cloud” in this context because it best describes this new paradigm. Cloud-based virtualization is beginning to seep into analytic infrastructures. To support flexible mixed-workload analytics, the EDW, over the coming five to 10 years, will evolve into a virtualized, cloud-based, and supremely scalable distributed platform.
What are the outlines of this new paradigm? The virtualized EDW will allow data to be transparently persisted in diverse physical and logical formats to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources and to be delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications. EDW application service levels will be ensured through an end-to-end, policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching and dynamic query-optimization memory grid, within an information-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. Analytic applications will migrate to the EDW platform and leverage its full parallel-processing, partitioning, scalability, and optimization functionality. At the same time, DBAs will need to make sure that cloud-based DW offerings meet their organizations’ most stringent security, performance, availability, and other service-level requirements.
I won’t opine here and now on how much enterprise data will be persisted in public clouds vs. private environments that incorporate many of the same platform virtualization technologies. I’ll save that discussion for the upcoming Forrester reports that Noel and I are developing in virtualization of transactional and analytic databases, respectively.
Expect those in Q3 or thereabouts. Thanks everybody who attended our preso last week in Vegas!
Thursday, May 21, 2009
poem Tormé
TORMÉ
Faux Paris is as
good as being there. People
kiss oblivious.
Faux New York is so
obviously not to scale.
The model city!
Walking Mel Tormé
Way I supply the missing
melody and fog.
Faux Paris is as
good as being there. People
kiss oblivious.
Faux New York is so
obviously not to scale.
The model city!
Walking Mel Tormé
Way I supply the missing
melody and fog.
poem The Hard Rock
THE HARD ROCK
Big Deb the Vegas
waitress with the colossal
lungs could really sing.
Deb and the twenty-
first birthday girlie gave it
their best Benatar.
Earned a big tip by
saying nothing to me. Just
refreshing my tea.
Big Deb the Vegas
waitress with the colossal
lungs could really sing.
Deb and the twenty-
first birthday girlie gave it
their best Benatar.
Earned a big tip by
saying nothing to me. Just
refreshing my tea.
poem Unspeakable
UNSPEAKABLE
Vegas: the best god
damned museums anywhere.
The names, anyway.
Atomic Testing
Museum: Should I risk it?
Leadline my eyeballs?
Or the Erotic
Heritage: Endure a long
grinding and blinding?
Vegas: the best god
damned museums anywhere.
The names, anyway.
Atomic Testing
Museum: Should I risk it?
Leadline my eyeballs?
Or the Erotic
Heritage: Endure a long
grinding and blinding?
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
TWEETLOG Mon May 18-20 so far
RT @jilldyche: #haiku @haikulove @twaiku. Haiku du jour: jk--"ANTIMAY: Memorial Day. It's honorary Summer. Spring's sunburned demise. "6 minutes ago from TweetDeck
RT @CompositeSW: #FITF09. Jim sees lots of opportunity in "database" virtualization: jk--Noel Y. and I copresenting on Fri on DB virt'zn.22 minutes ago from TweetDeck
RT @mikojava: Arrived in Las Vegas for #FITF09 in the cab on the way to venue: jk--Oh no, Miko's almost here.
Don't tell him SOA's dead.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
Newsgathering is rampant in Web 2.0. Newsvetting is everywhere as well. Newsreporting is ubiquitous. News"papers" not. Paper not essential.about 8 hours ago from web
#FITF09: Interop 09 happening a mile-plus down the Strip at Mandalays. I don't find Interop interesting anymore. Easy "temptation" to avoid.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
#FITF09: This morning Forrester founder George Colony speaks.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Preparing for a busy day of 1:1s at Forrester IT Forum. Multitasking these plus other tasks/projects I
brought on the road.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
Twitter's char-count constraints lead some to think it can't both report and critique. I usually attempt former in first 70, latter in last.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
Tweeting from field is news gathering and reporting in one swift gesture. Vulnerable to "mindless real-time stenographic reportage" syndromeabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @lorita: Just finished a great report from @forrester "To BW or Not To BW." jk--Thanks Lorita. Boris Evelson and I co-authored that one.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Any flack can "report" what others say--govt officials & official lies, vendors & self-serving PR. True pro reports what they find on own.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Twas then I realized that reporting not core of news biz. Gathering is. Hunting-gathering fresh meat/fruit. Stalking/slaying the news beast.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Jerry ter Horst had me doing archival news searches a Google would nail these--nice guy (quit Ford admin over Nixon pardon)--smelly pipeabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Ah yes, I remember my internship at the Detroit News Wash. Bureau in summer 1978; twas Jimmy Olsen-Kobielus, cub reporter, reading the wiresabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Slower tech newsday on the wires than yesterday, now settling into the summer slough, next newsrush day in early/mid Septabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @alyswoodward: @jameskobielus I'm only usually [in LV) for 72 hours!: jk--And then you're whipsawed by timezone and climate disruptions!about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @alyswoodward: @jameskobielus ahh, the sun over the desert, love it. The dry eyes/mouth/lungs, ugh. jk--Takes 48 hrs min to acclimate.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Twittering about Twitter is like writing poetry about poetry: grooving on your own nerdishness.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @kexpplaylist: People Got A Lotta Nerve by Neko Case #KEXPabout 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
Listening to Neko Case "People Gotta Lotta Nerve" from her great new album "Middle Cyclone." She says she's the brass section in any group.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
Another dry morning in Vegas, following a night of continual waking to re-hydrate, irrigate the inevitable cottonmouth.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
@JAdP : Architecture is the bridge. Alignment anchors the bridge to terra firma at both ends. Vision ensures it connects the right ends.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to JAdP
@rschmelzer: A lone wolf howling attracts more attention than one in unison with in or out crowd. If howls in odd harmonic with both, best.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to
rschmelzer
Realizing that crowds, in or out, crowd, i.e. cramp, and are to be avoided, unless need ferment of friction/discourse, then go mosh/mash.about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @rschmelzer: ... feel like part of the out-crowd. ...struggle to be accepted. What's the secret? jk--Realizing the out-crowd's a crowd.about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck
Thanking Shadi for Advils, taking a breather upstairs, getting ready for Sybase dinner, listening to Bill Callahan "The Wind and the Dove"about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @JoeBarkan: @jameskobielus There's no such thing as "too guitar-rocky." #FITF09: jk--I beg to differ. Guitar-band rock can easily overdo.5:04 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @markmadsen: Five Reasons to NOT follow someone on Twitter: jk--Have no control over who we FOLLOW. Depends on each follower's view.4:35 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Another shameless self-plug, related to previous tweet, but calling out my (guilty?) love of Enya's vibes (http://bit.ly/ZKMce).4:26 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Another closing thought on that session. Theme music was too guitar-rocky. No, I don't want hiphop or electronica. One word: Enya!4:24 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Post-mortem on Cameron talk: Value-based architecture? No. Instead, value-based alignment. Architecture is tail, shouldn't wag dog.4:23 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @passion4process: IT also needs to adopt bus. processes that monitor/track IT bus. value .
#FITF09: jk--BI applied to IT org/iniatives4:06 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: "Definition of [IT's business value] will change over time...As regards what the metrics are, ask business." Business POV rules!4:04 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @passion4process: Bobby Cameron's purple bow tie -.... #FITF09: jk--It's cocked at jaunty, Sinatrian angle. How's that for Vegas cool?!4:01 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Embedding key IT roles in the business orgs is what we see happening anyway." "Need to help by embedding resources."3:57 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Challenge for CEO is based on how plugged-in they are.....When talking to CEO, should be focused on growth, EPS, etc."3:55 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Wonderful opportunity for IT...to bring clarity to the problem [of which services should be shared vs. localized]."3:53 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Can't optimize in our job unless you're connecting with the business." Optimization = alignment.3:50 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @merv: Designing my template for PPT - easy to get swept away by the possibilities. Simple, simple, keep repeating....: jk--Pictoreality!3:48 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: IT talking in the business terms. Essential, but always a challenge, especially as IT deep-ends on nouveau clouds, virtz'n, SOA.3:47 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Forrester's role-based avatars resemble a pantheon. Incarnations of the same principle: IT serves the business role.3:44 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @jameskobielus: #FITF09: I see tweets by @passion4process, @mgualtieri, @gleganza, @pleclare, @rbkarel, @lauraramos, @akarlin, & yrs trly3:42 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @gcolony: Cloud computing is over-stated. Cloud and local devices will share processing.
#FITF09. jk--Cloud's the resource pool.3:41 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Any way to batch transform all of my previous tweet hashtags to the correct one?3:37 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: I see tweets by @passion4process, @mgualtieri, @gleganza, @pleclare, @rbkarel, @lauraramos, @akarlin: multiple Forrester tweetstreams3:31 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: How does business POV shape perception of IT? Remember J. Fallon on SNL as jerk IT support guy? A bit scary, a bit reassuring.3:27 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Bobby Cameron on "Making Value Core to IT's Business." Wants us to comment on "scary vs. reassuring" images. POV-shaped perception.3:24 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Tom's telling them about the legendary gauntlet that Forrester analyst candidates must run. Grueling. Excellent pre-onboarding.3:22 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Tom's striped tie doesn't do it for me. Accost him in the hallways and give him a piece of YOUR minds on the matter.3:20 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: We give you actionable next steps to take back to your companies. We provide practical guidance. Take us up on 1:1s, you'll see.3:19 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Attendees will notice that every Forrester preso has upfront and closing slides that nail the value prop of that particular tech.3:18 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: A lot of people in this room. Good turnout.3:16 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Protecting and promoting innovation. Uber-theme for Kobielus/Yuhanna Friday preso on enterprise DB virtualization (shameless plug).3:15 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: At UPS, no technology strategy apart from business strategy. That's the fundamental value prop: IT entirely instrumental to business.3:14 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: IT-role-based definitions of value? Value specific to your business contribution? How do you measure /communicate that? Justify job?3:12 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Value defn's: Pos: We're building a future we actually want. Neg: We prevent you from being the next headline on CNN.3:10 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: "Redefining IT's Value to the Enterprise." Uber-theme of this year's Forrester IT
Forum. What's "value"? Is it indispensability?3:07 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Tom Pohlmann says we're tired of the economy gloom and doom. Yes, for sure. A lot of the moaning is hypochondriacal overreaction.3:06 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Wow. Side-by-side Forrester analysts co-tweeting the event. Mike Gualtieri tweeted the music issue on my mind. Sting's insinuation?3:04 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
@AskMrsHR: "Yoga, where have you been all my life. I feel great". jk--Same effect here. You can never be too calm, flexible, tensile.11:38 AM May 19th from web in reply to AskMrsHR
#FITF: "Expressamente Illy" over on first level. European-based company, or faux Europa, like so much Vegas? Mongrel Euro-American, like me?11:29 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Amazing the burst of energy/concentration that a little coffee buys you. The caffeine rush is the next best thing to an analgesic.11:26 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Noting the crush of press releases today. This week is the last of the spring season of vendor announcements. Prepare for summer lull11:23 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
"Larry Fulton... to Present on Six Principles for Addressing the Unique Challenges of Multi-site Integration" ( http://bit.ly/ZFlkU)11:21 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "Jade" ( http://bit.ly/oxeNP)11:16 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "Neural Carpal" ( http://bit.ly/m8Kcu)11:15 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "These Plains" ( http://bit.ly/VcTXQ)11:14 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "Center of Conventions Exhibitions Conferences and Expositions" ( http://bit.ly/106hnE)11:13 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Listening to XTC "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead," by the deliciously misanthropic Andy Partridge. "Dear God" "Making Plans for Nigel" etc.11:10 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
@chaskielt: I use "secret sauce" ironically. It's a multi-DB world, behind virtualization layer. Told Sybase that. No monoculture.11:06 AM May 19th from TweetDeck in reply to chaskielt
@alyswoodward: It was too noisy at the "Dos Caminos" restaurant for others to listen in. Could barely hear my own voice, over head pain.11:04 AM May 19th from TweetDeck in reply to alyswoodward
@mikojava: Miko: the tweetup was last night. But I'd very much like to see you again. Give me a holler when you get here.11:03 AM May 19th from TweetDeck in reply to mikojava
#FITF: Strong attendance and customer interest, in soft economy, shows that Forrester events deliver value. We don't take that for granted.11:02 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Great opportunity to meet Forrester analysts, and for us to meet each other. We're so big and diversified, not all of us have met.11:00 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: I've always found industry events a superb opportunity for deep-dive research. Even better when top analysts present latest research.10:58 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Today, e.g., various cloud (Hammond, Rymer, Staten, Wang), storage (Reichman), green IT (Mines), EA (Gilpin, Heffner, Leganza) topics10:56 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Forrester has an exciting agenda for this event. Many analysts have great topics. I'm still working out which ones I can attend.10:52 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Anybody who wants a preview of mine and Noel's preso, "Enterprise Database Virtualization," is urged to engage us in 1:1 sessions.10:51 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Doing work outside Zeno, waiting for the event to formally open. Checking my 1:1 requests: data warehousing, advanced analytics, BI.10:49 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Wondering why TweetDeck won't load this morning. Wondering when columnar database vendors will stop trying to promote that as secret sauce.9:28 AM May 19th from web
@akarlin @pleclare: Thanks for hosting the Forrester TweetUp. Let's do more.1:15 AM May 19th from web
At TweetUp, Friedberg talked up Kognitio's "trusted cloud" notion. I call it "transparent cloud." See right thru: hosting, security etc.1:13 AM May 19th from web
Wondering how Steve Momorella of @cvillenews got my Twitter name. Probably through @ohjko. I doubt that latter's sister Sonya will follow.1:00 AM May 19th from web
Dodged the usual crazy foot traffic on Strip. Showed 'em a lilttle of my Red Grange moves. Had my music: Arthur and Yu: "Lion's Mouth."12:50 AM May 19th from web
Had to bug out early, splitting headache. Tried my walk outside for air. Didn't help. Did I mention that Vegas is an oven? Even at night.12:47 AM May 19th from web
At TweetUp, met with Steve Friedberg, @StevePR104. Steve's a networker's networker. Also writes articles for TDWI, other pubs. Good guy.12:46 AM May 19th from web
Brought my laptop to the TweetUp, in a restaurant/bar. Learned we were to do everything there but tweet. Beginner's misunderstanding.12:44 AM May 19th from web
Tonight at Forrester TweetUp, chatted with Laura Coronado: @lollieshopping. Asked if she's a "fashion victim," when I meant "fashionista."12:41 AM May 19th from web
Expecting strong turnout for Forrester IT Forum. Everybody's starting to emerge from the recessionary funk. IT budgets starting to perk up.12:38 AM May 19th from web
Did some Forrester internal bonding. LIFO more useful than Myers-Briggs. White wine more fish-friendly than red. Las Vegas hotter than hell.12:35 AM May 19th from web
Yesterday wore me out, but my son graduated in cold rain at UVa, has the Camry, is going to new acting job10:40 AM May 18th from TweetDeck
In transit to Forrester IT Forum, Detroit airport, helping daughter long-distance with anti-virus, not eating yet, working on webinar slides10:37 AM May 18th from TweetDeck
RT @CompositeSW: #FITF09. Jim sees lots of opportunity in "database" virtualization: jk--Noel Y. and I copresenting on Fri on DB virt'zn.22 minutes ago from TweetDeck
RT @mikojava: Arrived in Las Vegas for #FITF09 in the cab on the way to venue: jk--Oh no, Miko's almost here.
Don't tell him SOA's dead.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
Newsgathering is rampant in Web 2.0. Newsvetting is everywhere as well. Newsreporting is ubiquitous. News"papers" not. Paper not essential.about 8 hours ago from web
#FITF09: Interop 09 happening a mile-plus down the Strip at Mandalays. I don't find Interop interesting anymore. Easy "temptation" to avoid.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
#FITF09: This morning Forrester founder George Colony speaks.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Preparing for a busy day of 1:1s at Forrester IT Forum. Multitasking these plus other tasks/projects I
brought on the road.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
Twitter's char-count constraints lead some to think it can't both report and critique. I usually attempt former in first 70, latter in last.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
Tweeting from field is news gathering and reporting in one swift gesture. Vulnerable to "mindless real-time stenographic reportage" syndromeabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @lorita: Just finished a great report from @forrester "To BW or Not To BW." jk--Thanks Lorita. Boris Evelson and I co-authored that one.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Any flack can "report" what others say--govt officials & official lies, vendors & self-serving PR. True pro reports what they find on own.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Twas then I realized that reporting not core of news biz. Gathering is. Hunting-gathering fresh meat/fruit. Stalking/slaying the news beast.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Jerry ter Horst had me doing archival news searches a Google would nail these--nice guy (quit Ford admin over Nixon pardon)--smelly pipeabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Ah yes, I remember my internship at the Detroit News Wash. Bureau in summer 1978; twas Jimmy Olsen-Kobielus, cub reporter, reading the wiresabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Slower tech newsday on the wires than yesterday, now settling into the summer slough, next newsrush day in early/mid Septabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @alyswoodward: @jameskobielus I'm only usually [in LV) for 72 hours!: jk--And then you're whipsawed by timezone and climate disruptions!about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @alyswoodward: @jameskobielus ahh, the sun over the desert, love it. The dry eyes/mouth/lungs, ugh. jk--Takes 48 hrs min to acclimate.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
Twittering about Twitter is like writing poetry about poetry: grooving on your own nerdishness.about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @kexpplaylist: People Got A Lotta Nerve by Neko Case #KEXPabout 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
Listening to Neko Case "People Gotta Lotta Nerve" from her great new album "Middle Cyclone." She says she's the brass section in any group.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
Another dry morning in Vegas, following a night of continual waking to re-hydrate, irrigate the inevitable cottonmouth.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
@JAdP : Architecture is the bridge. Alignment anchors the bridge to terra firma at both ends. Vision ensures it connects the right ends.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to JAdP
@rschmelzer: A lone wolf howling attracts more attention than one in unison with in or out crowd. If howls in odd harmonic with both, best.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to
rschmelzer
Realizing that crowds, in or out, crowd, i.e. cramp, and are to be avoided, unless need ferment of friction/discourse, then go mosh/mash.about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @rschmelzer: ... feel like part of the out-crowd. ...struggle to be accepted. What's the secret? jk--Realizing the out-crowd's a crowd.about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck
Thanking Shadi for Advils, taking a breather upstairs, getting ready for Sybase dinner, listening to Bill Callahan "The Wind and the Dove"about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck
RT @JoeBarkan: @jameskobielus There's no such thing as "too guitar-rocky." #FITF09: jk--I beg to differ. Guitar-band rock can easily overdo.5:04 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @markmadsen: Five Reasons to NOT follow someone on Twitter: jk--Have no control over who we FOLLOW. Depends on each follower's view.4:35 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Another shameless self-plug, related to previous tweet, but calling out my (guilty?) love of Enya's vibes (http://bit.ly/ZKMce).4:26 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Another closing thought on that session. Theme music was too guitar-rocky. No, I don't want hiphop or electronica. One word: Enya!4:24 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Post-mortem on Cameron talk: Value-based architecture? No. Instead, value-based alignment. Architecture is tail, shouldn't wag dog.4:23 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @passion4process: IT also needs to adopt bus. processes that monitor/track IT bus. value .
#FITF09: jk--BI applied to IT org/iniatives4:06 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: "Definition of [IT's business value] will change over time...As regards what the metrics are, ask business." Business POV rules!4:04 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @passion4process: Bobby Cameron's purple bow tie -.... #FITF09: jk--It's cocked at jaunty, Sinatrian angle. How's that for Vegas cool?!4:01 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Embedding key IT roles in the business orgs is what we see happening anyway." "Need to help by embedding resources."3:57 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Challenge for CEO is based on how plugged-in they are.....When talking to CEO, should be focused on growth, EPS, etc."3:55 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Wonderful opportunity for IT...to bring clarity to the problem [of which services should be shared vs. localized]."3:53 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Cameron: "Can't optimize in our job unless you're connecting with the business." Optimization = alignment.3:50 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @merv: Designing my template for PPT - easy to get swept away by the possibilities. Simple, simple, keep repeating....: jk--Pictoreality!3:48 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: IT talking in the business terms. Essential, but always a challenge, especially as IT deep-ends on nouveau clouds, virtz'n, SOA.3:47 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Forrester's role-based avatars resemble a pantheon. Incarnations of the same principle: IT serves the business role.3:44 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @jameskobielus: #FITF09: I see tweets by @passion4process, @mgualtieri, @gleganza, @pleclare, @rbkarel, @lauraramos, @akarlin, & yrs trly3:42 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
RT @gcolony: Cloud computing is over-stated. Cloud and local devices will share processing.
#FITF09. jk--Cloud's the resource pool.3:41 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF09: Any way to batch transform all of my previous tweet hashtags to the correct one?3:37 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: I see tweets by @passion4process, @mgualtieri, @gleganza, @pleclare, @rbkarel, @lauraramos, @akarlin: multiple Forrester tweetstreams3:31 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: How does business POV shape perception of IT? Remember J. Fallon on SNL as jerk IT support guy? A bit scary, a bit reassuring.3:27 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Bobby Cameron on "Making Value Core to IT's Business." Wants us to comment on "scary vs. reassuring" images. POV-shaped perception.3:24 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Tom's telling them about the legendary gauntlet that Forrester analyst candidates must run. Grueling. Excellent pre-onboarding.3:22 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Tom's striped tie doesn't do it for me. Accost him in the hallways and give him a piece of YOUR minds on the matter.3:20 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: We give you actionable next steps to take back to your companies. We provide practical guidance. Take us up on 1:1s, you'll see.3:19 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Attendees will notice that every Forrester preso has upfront and closing slides that nail the value prop of that particular tech.3:18 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: A lot of people in this room. Good turnout.3:16 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Protecting and promoting innovation. Uber-theme for Kobielus/Yuhanna Friday preso on enterprise DB virtualization (shameless plug).3:15 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: At UPS, no technology strategy apart from business strategy. That's the fundamental value prop: IT entirely instrumental to business.3:14 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: IT-role-based definitions of value? Value specific to your business contribution? How do you measure /communicate that? Justify job?3:12 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Value defn's: Pos: We're building a future we actually want. Neg: We prevent you from being the next headline on CNN.3:10 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: "Redefining IT's Value to the Enterprise." Uber-theme of this year's Forrester IT
Forum. What's "value"? Is it indispensability?3:07 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Tom Pohlmann says we're tired of the economy gloom and doom. Yes, for sure. A lot of the moaning is hypochondriacal overreaction.3:06 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Wow. Side-by-side Forrester analysts co-tweeting the event. Mike Gualtieri tweeted the music issue on my mind. Sting's insinuation?3:04 PM May 19th from TweetDeck
@AskMrsHR: "Yoga, where have you been all my life. I feel great". jk--Same effect here. You can never be too calm, flexible, tensile.11:38 AM May 19th from web in reply to AskMrsHR
#FITF: "Expressamente Illy" over on first level. European-based company, or faux Europa, like so much Vegas? Mongrel Euro-American, like me?11:29 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Amazing the burst of energy/concentration that a little coffee buys you. The caffeine rush is the next best thing to an analgesic.11:26 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Noting the crush of press releases today. This week is the last of the spring season of vendor announcements. Prepare for summer lull11:23 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
"Larry Fulton... to Present on Six Principles for Addressing the Unique Challenges of Multi-site Integration" ( http://bit.ly/ZFlkU)11:21 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "Jade" ( http://bit.ly/oxeNP)11:16 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "Neural Carpal" ( http://bit.ly/m8Kcu)11:15 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "These Plains" ( http://bit.ly/VcTXQ)11:14 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Last year's Vegas poems: "Center of Conventions Exhibitions Conferences and Expositions" ( http://bit.ly/106hnE)11:13 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Listening to XTC "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead," by the deliciously misanthropic Andy Partridge. "Dear God" "Making Plans for Nigel" etc.11:10 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
@chaskielt: I use "secret sauce" ironically. It's a multi-DB world, behind virtualization layer. Told Sybase that. No monoculture.11:06 AM May 19th from TweetDeck in reply to chaskielt
@alyswoodward: It was too noisy at the "Dos Caminos" restaurant for others to listen in. Could barely hear my own voice, over head pain.11:04 AM May 19th from TweetDeck in reply to alyswoodward
@mikojava: Miko: the tweetup was last night. But I'd very much like to see you again. Give me a holler when you get here.11:03 AM May 19th from TweetDeck in reply to mikojava
#FITF: Strong attendance and customer interest, in soft economy, shows that Forrester events deliver value. We don't take that for granted.11:02 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Great opportunity to meet Forrester analysts, and for us to meet each other. We're so big and diversified, not all of us have met.11:00 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: I've always found industry events a superb opportunity for deep-dive research. Even better when top analysts present latest research.10:58 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Today, e.g., various cloud (Hammond, Rymer, Staten, Wang), storage (Reichman), green IT (Mines), EA (Gilpin, Heffner, Leganza) topics10:56 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Forrester has an exciting agenda for this event. Many analysts have great topics. I'm still working out which ones I can attend.10:52 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Anybody who wants a preview of mine and Noel's preso, "Enterprise Database Virtualization," is urged to engage us in 1:1 sessions.10:51 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
#FITF: Doing work outside Zeno, waiting for the event to formally open. Checking my 1:1 requests: data warehousing, advanced analytics, BI.10:49 AM May 19th from TweetDeck
Wondering why TweetDeck won't load this morning. Wondering when columnar database vendors will stop trying to promote that as secret sauce.9:28 AM May 19th from web
@akarlin @pleclare: Thanks for hosting the Forrester TweetUp. Let's do more.1:15 AM May 19th from web
At TweetUp, Friedberg talked up Kognitio's "trusted cloud" notion. I call it "transparent cloud." See right thru: hosting, security etc.1:13 AM May 19th from web
Wondering how Steve Momorella of @cvillenews got my Twitter name. Probably through @ohjko. I doubt that latter's sister Sonya will follow.1:00 AM May 19th from web
Dodged the usual crazy foot traffic on Strip. Showed 'em a lilttle of my Red Grange moves. Had my music: Arthur and Yu: "Lion's Mouth."12:50 AM May 19th from web
Had to bug out early, splitting headache. Tried my walk outside for air. Didn't help. Did I mention that Vegas is an oven? Even at night.12:47 AM May 19th from web
At TweetUp, met with Steve Friedberg, @StevePR104. Steve's a networker's networker. Also writes articles for TDWI, other pubs. Good guy.12:46 AM May 19th from web
Brought my laptop to the TweetUp, in a restaurant/bar. Learned we were to do everything there but tweet. Beginner's misunderstanding.12:44 AM May 19th from web
Tonight at Forrester TweetUp, chatted with Laura Coronado: @lollieshopping. Asked if she's a "fashion victim," when I meant "fashionista."12:41 AM May 19th from web
Expecting strong turnout for Forrester IT Forum. Everybody's starting to emerge from the recessionary funk. IT budgets starting to perk up.12:38 AM May 19th from web
Did some Forrester internal bonding. LIFO more useful than Myers-Briggs. White wine more fish-friendly than red. Las Vegas hotter than hell.12:35 AM May 19th from web
Yesterday wore me out, but my son graduated in cold rain at UVa, has the Camry, is going to new acting job10:40 AM May 18th from TweetDeck
In transit to Forrester IT Forum, Detroit airport, helping daughter long-distance with anti-virus, not eating yet, working on webinar slides10:37 AM May 18th from TweetDeck
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
poem Embalm
EMBALM
Spirit is second-
hand balm, recycled mist of
communal refresh.
Spent energy is
the release of pent-up breath
and remembered hurt.
The exhalation
returns the body to its
natural blackout.
Spirit is second-
hand balm, recycled mist of
communal refresh.
Spent energy is
the release of pent-up breath
and remembered hurt.
The exhalation
returns the body to its
natural blackout.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Self-Service Business Intelligence Depends on Automated Data Discovery
Self-Service Business Intelligence Depends on Automated Data Discovery
By James Kobielus
If you tuned into my Forrester teleconference yesterday, you heard me discuss the end-to-end infrastructure necessary to fully support mashup-style self-service business intelligence (BI).
One of the key features for BI mashup is automated source-data discovery, which spares information workers from having to find new data sources or fresh updates from existing sources. Instead, the user simply relies on the BI and back-end data virtualization infrastructure to perform these critical activities as ongoing background tasks. Once new sources and feeds are discovered, transformed to a common semantic model, and published to a BI-mashup registry, all the user needs to do is drag and drop them visually into their mashed-up reports, dashboards, and other analytics.
Automated discovery is not only key to BI mashup, but to trustworthy data as well, because it helps detect and remediate anomalies across disparate data sources. Only a few vendors on the market today provide strong features for automated source discovery. One of them is Composite Software, which recently released an appliance that performs these functions. Another is Exeros, which is the closest thing to an automated-data-discovery pure-play in the market today.
Or, rather, was the closest thing, until IBM announced this morning that it is acquiring Exeros. I’ve been following Exeros for several years and have long considered them a strong candidate for acquisition by a leading BI, data warehousing (DW), data integration (DI), or data quality (DQ) vendor. On IBM’s part, this acquisition makes great sense as a complement to its InfoSphere and Optim portfolios on the data management and governance side of the house.
It will also fit nicely with IBM’s Cognos portfolio as a key enabler, potentially, for BI self-service mashup. As I stated on my teleconference, some vendors are further ahead on putting together a completely mashup-enabling end-to-end BI solution, and Cognos is among them. You can download the teleconference slides from Forrester’s website, listen to my streaming audio, and/or wait for my forthcoming report for more in-depth thoughts on this topic.
Now the ball’s in IBM’s rivals’ courts regarding whether, when, and how they plan to add automated source discovery to their BI portfolios.
By James Kobielus
If you tuned into my Forrester teleconference yesterday, you heard me discuss the end-to-end infrastructure necessary to fully support mashup-style self-service business intelligence (BI).
One of the key features for BI mashup is automated source-data discovery, which spares information workers from having to find new data sources or fresh updates from existing sources. Instead, the user simply relies on the BI and back-end data virtualization infrastructure to perform these critical activities as ongoing background tasks. Once new sources and feeds are discovered, transformed to a common semantic model, and published to a BI-mashup registry, all the user needs to do is drag and drop them visually into their mashed-up reports, dashboards, and other analytics.
Automated discovery is not only key to BI mashup, but to trustworthy data as well, because it helps detect and remediate anomalies across disparate data sources. Only a few vendors on the market today provide strong features for automated source discovery. One of them is Composite Software, which recently released an appliance that performs these functions. Another is Exeros, which is the closest thing to an automated-data-discovery pure-play in the market today.
Or, rather, was the closest thing, until IBM announced this morning that it is acquiring Exeros. I’ve been following Exeros for several years and have long considered them a strong candidate for acquisition by a leading BI, data warehousing (DW), data integration (DI), or data quality (DQ) vendor. On IBM’s part, this acquisition makes great sense as a complement to its InfoSphere and Optim portfolios on the data management and governance side of the house.
It will also fit nicely with IBM’s Cognos portfolio as a key enabler, potentially, for BI self-service mashup. As I stated on my teleconference, some vendors are further ahead on putting together a completely mashup-enabling end-to-end BI solution, and Cognos is among them. You can download the teleconference slides from Forrester’s website, listen to my streaming audio, and/or wait for my forthcoming report for more in-depth thoughts on this topic.
Now the ball’s in IBM’s rivals’ courts regarding whether, when, and how they plan to add automated source discovery to their BI portfolios.
Monday, May 04, 2009
TWTR-EXTRA imho Hardcopy news won’t vanish but like hardcopy photos will materialize only when we hit print, which will be seldom
All:
Like all of you, I’ve been following the decline of traditional journalism, and the increasingly frantic efforts of the industry to save itself in the face of the greatest nemesis of all: the Internet. Just this evening, I read excellent discussions on all this by the ever-stimulating Jason Pontin and Clay Shirky.
Just today I noticed that the New York Times is threatening to close down the Boston Globe (didn’t realize the former owned the latter) if the Globe’s unions don’t make serious contract concessions. I have no position on this dispute, but, after seeing longtime Seattle and Denver papers bite the dust, it’s clear to me that the days of every major city having its own dedicated daily newspaper are coming to a close. Why is this unthinkable? Does every major city have its own major league baseball team? Its own world-class research university? Its own internationally renowned symphony orchestra? Its own locally owned chain of department stores?
In the newspaper business, what’s coming is almost certainly a new order where we have national daily papers with city-specific local news sections. Just as Macy’s grew into a nationwide department store chain in large part by acquiring shaky local store-chains, it’s not inconceivable that the New York Times might become a truly national newspaper, inserting, say, a substantial daily Boston section for distribution in New England, a Detroit section for southern Michigan, a Dallas-Fort Worth section for north Texas, and so on. This is not unprecedented: indeed, the Washington Post has an excellent array of local news sections for communities throughout the District of Columbia, Maryland, and northern Virginia. Like many people, I often turn primarily to my region’s section (Fairfax County) and only get to the “A” section (national and international) later, or not at all, on any given day.
Another, almost inevitable feature of the coming order is that some of us will continue to pay for the convenience of having a daily hardcopy of a subset of the news that most interests us dropped off at our residence first thing in the morning--or at various intervals. There are plenty of reasons why we may want this to continue, such as having it to read over breakfast. But there are also many reasons why we will insist on not being delivered sections that we never read and don’t want (e.g., I’ve long since lost interest in sports, and routinely toss it unread; others don’t care for business; many people couldn’t care less about international; and op/ed pages are almost never looked at in most households). Many of us would gladly scale back to a weekly hardcopy paper that only publishes a summary of the news and features we care about--and only comes, say, on Sunday, when we actually have spare time to read it, and only comes bundled with coupons, comics, special glossy magazines, and other cool things.
But most of us will prefer to access most of our news most of the time online, and only online. Many people will only desire a hardcopy now and then, and only of particular stories. In those cases, that hardcopy will issue from their own printer, not from huge printing presses staffed by contentious union members.
Newsgathering will still be done by large institutions, descendants of today’s newspapers and magazines, but will become more of an aggregation of loosely shifting groups of “reporters,” sometimes known as bloggers. Opinions and analyses will come from this same huge global pool of knowledgeable individuals, many of whom will make little or no money directly from their published viewpoints. Many, if not most, of these “journalists” will multitask that work alongside paying “day jobs,” doing so to further some personal passion or supplement some other business model. For example, IT industry analysts have long contributed articles to trade papers in order to strengthen their “branding” as analyst/consultants, while making only a pittance from their “journalistic” activities.
I see that as an important model of future journalism. For years, I’ve had trouble explaining to people how my graduate degree, M.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin, prepared me for my ultimate career as an analyst. I’ve never actually had a paying job as a journalist, though I’ve been a freelance IT writer for many years. More and more, though, it feels like I’ve never really left the field I trained for.
Instead, my field has returned to me.
Jim
Like all of you, I’ve been following the decline of traditional journalism, and the increasingly frantic efforts of the industry to save itself in the face of the greatest nemesis of all: the Internet. Just this evening, I read excellent discussions on all this by the ever-stimulating Jason Pontin and Clay Shirky.
Just today I noticed that the New York Times is threatening to close down the Boston Globe (didn’t realize the former owned the latter) if the Globe’s unions don’t make serious contract concessions. I have no position on this dispute, but, after seeing longtime Seattle and Denver papers bite the dust, it’s clear to me that the days of every major city having its own dedicated daily newspaper are coming to a close. Why is this unthinkable? Does every major city have its own major league baseball team? Its own world-class research university? Its own internationally renowned symphony orchestra? Its own locally owned chain of department stores?
In the newspaper business, what’s coming is almost certainly a new order where we have national daily papers with city-specific local news sections. Just as Macy’s grew into a nationwide department store chain in large part by acquiring shaky local store-chains, it’s not inconceivable that the New York Times might become a truly national newspaper, inserting, say, a substantial daily Boston section for distribution in New England, a Detroit section for southern Michigan, a Dallas-Fort Worth section for north Texas, and so on. This is not unprecedented: indeed, the Washington Post has an excellent array of local news sections for communities throughout the District of Columbia, Maryland, and northern Virginia. Like many people, I often turn primarily to my region’s section (Fairfax County) and only get to the “A” section (national and international) later, or not at all, on any given day.
Another, almost inevitable feature of the coming order is that some of us will continue to pay for the convenience of having a daily hardcopy of a subset of the news that most interests us dropped off at our residence first thing in the morning--or at various intervals. There are plenty of reasons why we may want this to continue, such as having it to read over breakfast. But there are also many reasons why we will insist on not being delivered sections that we never read and don’t want (e.g., I’ve long since lost interest in sports, and routinely toss it unread; others don’t care for business; many people couldn’t care less about international; and op/ed pages are almost never looked at in most households). Many of us would gladly scale back to a weekly hardcopy paper that only publishes a summary of the news and features we care about--and only comes, say, on Sunday, when we actually have spare time to read it, and only comes bundled with coupons, comics, special glossy magazines, and other cool things.
But most of us will prefer to access most of our news most of the time online, and only online. Many people will only desire a hardcopy now and then, and only of particular stories. In those cases, that hardcopy will issue from their own printer, not from huge printing presses staffed by contentious union members.
Newsgathering will still be done by large institutions, descendants of today’s newspapers and magazines, but will become more of an aggregation of loosely shifting groups of “reporters,” sometimes known as bloggers. Opinions and analyses will come from this same huge global pool of knowledgeable individuals, many of whom will make little or no money directly from their published viewpoints. Many, if not most, of these “journalists” will multitask that work alongside paying “day jobs,” doing so to further some personal passion or supplement some other business model. For example, IT industry analysts have long contributed articles to trade papers in order to strengthen their “branding” as analyst/consultants, while making only a pittance from their “journalistic” activities.
I see that as an important model of future journalism. For years, I’ve had trouble explaining to people how my graduate degree, M.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin, prepared me for my ultimate career as an analyst. I’ve never actually had a paying job as a journalist, though I’ve been a freelance IT writer for many years. More and more, though, it feels like I’ve never really left the field I trained for.
Instead, my field has returned to me.
Jim
Saturday, May 02, 2009
TWTR-EXTRA Imho IT analysts & journalists the same--skills, place in industry ecosystem--folks move back and forth between
All:
I’ve been noticing the recent tweet-backs between Curt Monash, Lance Walter, and Seth Grimes on the topic of what constitutes an IT analyst vs. an IT journalist. I thought I’d replay their tweets for you (stripped of time-sent and reply-to dimensions...sorry ‘bout that, but I’ve kept, per each tweeter a sequence from most to least recent). Then I offer my summary commentary of all that:
Their tweets:
There’s no such thing as a “pure analyst” and never has been. IT analysts and IT journalists play the same role in the industry ecosystem. There’s no clear demarc between the two fields.
We all publish or perish--that’s our primary business model. We’re all essentially reporters--in other words, we research, analyze, publish, and speak on the new things that are going on in the IT world. Clearly, there are many distinctions among us: some “reporters” (analyst/journalist) have more specialized beats than others, some report on a more regular basis than others, some go a bit deeper and broader in the research than others, some do more consulting and speaking than others, some have bigger firms marketing their offerings than others, some are better known than others, some have better access to the movers/shakers than others, some have more industry/vendor background than others, some have more corporate IT background than others, and so forth.
The working relationships among IT analysts and journalists are entirely symbiotic. One open secret in this industry is that many IT analysts began as journalists, and many have essentially stayed journalists by continuing to publish widely in the trade press. Another is that IT journalists are often excellent analysts; if they weren’t, their reportage would be subpar and they wouldn’t stay in that line of work for long. Yet another is that IT journalists often rely on IT analysts for perspective setting, information, leads, and quotes. And, of course, analysts “market” ourselves in great part on our ability to be featured prominently in journalists’ stories.
As I said above, we all play the same basic role in the IT industry ecosystem. From vendors’ point of view, analysts/journalists are a key channel for getting their go-to-market messages out to customers. From users’ point of view, analysts/journalists are a key channel helping them to make sense of those messages. Clearly, as an intermediary in this flow, analysts/journalists, as a community, provide an “information brokering/filtering” role that is indispensable.
Some analysts/journalists have more influence than others--no one denies that. We’re a huge community of many voices. Each of us, analyst/journalist (individually and/or as firms, large and small), is in a constant struggle to get our viewpoints out and to strengthen our brands. Hence we turn to blogs, podcasts, Twitter, and other channels to underline those brands. Each of us is in business as well--these are our careers. None of us is “the final word” on anything.
That said, I’m a huge fan of most other analysts/journalists in the industry. There are lots of smart people who do excellent work, and I’m constantly learning from everybody else. This is an extraordinarily stimulating line of work to be in.
Curt, Lance, Seth: Tweet’s back in your courts.
Jim
I’ve been noticing the recent tweet-backs between Curt Monash, Lance Walter, and Seth Grimes on the topic of what constitutes an IT analyst vs. an IT journalist. I thought I’d replay their tweets for you (stripped of time-sent and reply-to dimensions...sorry ‘bout that, but I’ve kept, per each tweeter a sequence from most to least recent). Then I offer my summary commentary of all that:
Their tweets:
- @CurtMonash: "That's the main benefit I see to being categorized not just as an analyst, but as a journalist too." "I want companies to be supportive if I pick a news-cycle approach to publishing on some specific story or topic." "Not sure I know when I'd want a big analyst firm to view me as a journalist. What am I missing?" "Exactly. I break news now. And a lot of the commentary published by the trade press is subcontracted to working analysts." "I don't mind being categorized as both press AND analyst. (And increasingly that's happening.) It's the either-or that causes trouble."
- @lancewalter: "I think a lot of "pure" analysts are also blurring the journalist line (good thing) cuz of blogs, syndication, death of print..."
- @SethGrimes: "I suspect some analyst firms don't want to legitimize rival, independent analysts so they ignore us as journalists."
There’s no such thing as a “pure analyst” and never has been. IT analysts and IT journalists play the same role in the industry ecosystem. There’s no clear demarc between the two fields.
We all publish or perish--that’s our primary business model. We’re all essentially reporters--in other words, we research, analyze, publish, and speak on the new things that are going on in the IT world. Clearly, there are many distinctions among us: some “reporters” (analyst/journalist) have more specialized beats than others, some report on a more regular basis than others, some go a bit deeper and broader in the research than others, some do more consulting and speaking than others, some have bigger firms marketing their offerings than others, some are better known than others, some have better access to the movers/shakers than others, some have more industry/vendor background than others, some have more corporate IT background than others, and so forth.
The working relationships among IT analysts and journalists are entirely symbiotic. One open secret in this industry is that many IT analysts began as journalists, and many have essentially stayed journalists by continuing to publish widely in the trade press. Another is that IT journalists are often excellent analysts; if they weren’t, their reportage would be subpar and they wouldn’t stay in that line of work for long. Yet another is that IT journalists often rely on IT analysts for perspective setting, information, leads, and quotes. And, of course, analysts “market” ourselves in great part on our ability to be featured prominently in journalists’ stories.
As I said above, we all play the same basic role in the IT industry ecosystem. From vendors’ point of view, analysts/journalists are a key channel for getting their go-to-market messages out to customers. From users’ point of view, analysts/journalists are a key channel helping them to make sense of those messages. Clearly, as an intermediary in this flow, analysts/journalists, as a community, provide an “information brokering/filtering” role that is indispensable.
Some analysts/journalists have more influence than others--no one denies that. We’re a huge community of many voices. Each of us, analyst/journalist (individually and/or as firms, large and small), is in a constant struggle to get our viewpoints out and to strengthen our brands. Hence we turn to blogs, podcasts, Twitter, and other channels to underline those brands. Each of us is in business as well--these are our careers. None of us is “the final word” on anything.
That said, I’m a huge fan of most other analysts/journalists in the industry. There are lots of smart people who do excellent work, and I’m constantly learning from everybody else. This is an extraordinarily stimulating line of work to be in.
Curt, Lance, Seth: Tweet’s back in your courts.
Jim
Saturday, April 25, 2009
poem Bankruptcy Sonnet
BANKRUPTCY SONNET
Suddenly vacant space. So suddenly
the landlords haven’t vacuumed. So very
vacant the brokers are at a loss for
adjectives. Special and spacious, this place
represents a rare opportunity
to make your statement in a property
that towers over the Interstate. So
special you and your partners can claim your
respective pieces of executive
real estate, sleek and smart, catercorner
suites overlooking the soon-to-be heart
of whatever new business you now must
build to play a part and have a shot at
being there when the economy swells.
Suddenly vacant space. So suddenly
the landlords haven’t vacuumed. So very
vacant the brokers are at a loss for
adjectives. Special and spacious, this place
represents a rare opportunity
to make your statement in a property
that towers over the Interstate. So
special you and your partners can claim your
respective pieces of executive
real estate, sleek and smart, catercorner
suites overlooking the soon-to-be heart
of whatever new business you now must
build to play a part and have a shot at
being there when the economy swells.
Monday, April 20, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Oracle’s Sun Acquisition Accelerates Push into Data Warehousing Appliances
Oracle’s Sun Acquisition Accelerates Push into Data Warehousing Appliances
By James Kobielus
Last fall, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that his company was getting into the hardware business, but I think he misspoke. At that time, he was referring to the new HP Oracle Database Machine with Exadata Storage, a high-end data warehousing (DW) appliance that incorporated hardware from his partner, as well as intelligent storage software technology from that partner--and even had the partner’s name first in the product name. If that was the criterion for “getting into the hardware business”--i.e., running on someone else’s hardware--then every software vendor on earth is in the hardware business, by my reckoning.
But today’s Oracle announcement is the real deal. Oracle is acquiring longtime partner Sun Microsystems, putting the software powerhouse fully into the hardware business--and hitting the DW industry like an earthquake. I’ll let my Forrester colleagues blog on the other implications of this deal--for the open source, Java, middleware, SOA, and other markets that Sun is in--and give you a few quick thoughts on the deal’s implications for the DW market.
For starters, this deal will give Oracle the ability to engineer a completely integrated DW appliance composed of all Oracle components, including hardware and software. Now Oracle will be able to take on Teradata and IBM--both of which have long offered their own integrated solutions--more aggressively with high-performance DW offerings. Just as important, Oracle will be able to leverage Sun’s manufacturing scale economies to bring its all-Oracle DW appliances below the $25K-per-terabyte threshold needed for penetration into the midmarket.
Also, Oracle will now have another widely adopted transactional database, the open-source MySQL, that it can--and should--consider tweaking and packaging on an DW appliance. To the extent that Oracle gives customers a choice of DBMSs on a DW appliance platform, it can gain a differentiator that Teradata, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, and Netezza lack (you have to go to a startup such as Dataupia for multi-DBMS choice on an appliance). Many information managers prefer to stick with their existing DBMSs when building a DW, and prefer to implement that DW on an appliance to take advantage of its out-of-box balanced configuration of CPU, memory, storage, and I/O.
Furthermore, Oracle is acquiring a hardware and operating system vendor that has long been one of the primary platforms on which its own DW/DBMSs, middleware, and tools have been deployed. This acquisition can only be welcome news for joint Oracle-Sun DW customers who have worried about Sun’s solvency for some time now and began to sweat serious bullets when IBM failed to emerge as a white knight. For many Sun customers, an Oracle-powered DW platform will now look like a safer bet than ever.
Of course, there are clear risks in this pending acquisition.
First, a combined Oracle/Sun sows uncertainty among the DW appliance vendors--such as Greenplum and ParAccel--who have partnered with Sun and now find themselves in earnest “co-opetition” with full-competitor (and then some) Oracle.
Second, Oracle’s other DW appliance hardware partners--including HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell--must be concerned that Oracle will now shift focus away from their respective appliance products in favor of those it builds with its own Sun hardware group.
And finally, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun--and possible future development of a MySQL DW appliance--may discourage customers from considering third-party DW appliances, such as from Kickfire--that build on MySQL. If that happens, and a market for non-Oracle-branded MySQL DW appliances never takes root, Oracle will be denying its MySQL customers the choice that Oracle Database customers already enjoy. Currently, Oracle Optimzed Warehouse customers can deploy that enterprise DBMS as a DW on their choice of Sun, HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell platforms.
Let’s hope that Oracle makes the most of its pending Sun acquisition. Ellison either misspoke last fall, or was speaking prophecy. Like most DW vendors, Oracle’s destiny is to grow ever more hardware-dependent for its long-term scalability, performance, and optimization story.
By James Kobielus
Last fall, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that his company was getting into the hardware business, but I think he misspoke. At that time, he was referring to the new HP Oracle Database Machine with Exadata Storage, a high-end data warehousing (DW) appliance that incorporated hardware from his partner, as well as intelligent storage software technology from that partner--and even had the partner’s name first in the product name. If that was the criterion for “getting into the hardware business”--i.e., running on someone else’s hardware--then every software vendor on earth is in the hardware business, by my reckoning.
But today’s Oracle announcement is the real deal. Oracle is acquiring longtime partner Sun Microsystems, putting the software powerhouse fully into the hardware business--and hitting the DW industry like an earthquake. I’ll let my Forrester colleagues blog on the other implications of this deal--for the open source, Java, middleware, SOA, and other markets that Sun is in--and give you a few quick thoughts on the deal’s implications for the DW market.
For starters, this deal will give Oracle the ability to engineer a completely integrated DW appliance composed of all Oracle components, including hardware and software. Now Oracle will be able to take on Teradata and IBM--both of which have long offered their own integrated solutions--more aggressively with high-performance DW offerings. Just as important, Oracle will be able to leverage Sun’s manufacturing scale economies to bring its all-Oracle DW appliances below the $25K-per-terabyte threshold needed for penetration into the midmarket.
Also, Oracle will now have another widely adopted transactional database, the open-source MySQL, that it can--and should--consider tweaking and packaging on an DW appliance. To the extent that Oracle gives customers a choice of DBMSs on a DW appliance platform, it can gain a differentiator that Teradata, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, and Netezza lack (you have to go to a startup such as Dataupia for multi-DBMS choice on an appliance). Many information managers prefer to stick with their existing DBMSs when building a DW, and prefer to implement that DW on an appliance to take advantage of its out-of-box balanced configuration of CPU, memory, storage, and I/O.
Furthermore, Oracle is acquiring a hardware and operating system vendor that has long been one of the primary platforms on which its own DW/DBMSs, middleware, and tools have been deployed. This acquisition can only be welcome news for joint Oracle-Sun DW customers who have worried about Sun’s solvency for some time now and began to sweat serious bullets when IBM failed to emerge as a white knight. For many Sun customers, an Oracle-powered DW platform will now look like a safer bet than ever.
Of course, there are clear risks in this pending acquisition.
First, a combined Oracle/Sun sows uncertainty among the DW appliance vendors--such as Greenplum and ParAccel--who have partnered with Sun and now find themselves in earnest “co-opetition” with full-competitor (and then some) Oracle.
Second, Oracle’s other DW appliance hardware partners--including HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell--must be concerned that Oracle will now shift focus away from their respective appliance products in favor of those it builds with its own Sun hardware group.
And finally, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun--and possible future development of a MySQL DW appliance--may discourage customers from considering third-party DW appliances, such as from Kickfire--that build on MySQL. If that happens, and a market for non-Oracle-branded MySQL DW appliances never takes root, Oracle will be denying its MySQL customers the choice that Oracle Database customers already enjoy. Currently, Oracle Optimzed Warehouse customers can deploy that enterprise DBMS as a DW on their choice of Sun, HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell platforms.
Let’s hope that Oracle makes the most of its pending Sun acquisition. Ellison either misspoke last fall, or was speaking prophecy. Like most DW vendors, Oracle’s destiny is to grow ever more hardware-dependent for its long-term scalability, performance, and optimization story.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
poem Falling Sonnet
FALLING SONNET
I
Comedy is all
banana slippage.
Tragedy is trapped
in bodies that are
forever falling,
never quite finding
their footing. Walk a
mile in a clown’s shoes,
you’ll know what Bozo
goes through, but not so
Pozzo. Even an
unlucky bastard
can presume descent
from a long line of
long lines. Too narrow
a furrow to toe.
Sun a midday moon
raking truculence.
The Moon resumes its
tragic flatulence.
Comedy is a
coma. Tragedy
is a crack, a tout
le monde with trembling
hemispherics, a
slippery sole and
a hole daring to
keep us from footing.
II
Comedy is all banana slippage.
Tragedy is trapped in bodies that are
forever falling, never quite finding
their footing. Walk a mile in a clown’s shoes,
you’ll know what Bozo goes through, but not so
Pozzo. Even an unlucky bastard
can presume descent from a long line of
long lines. Too narrow a furrow to toe.
Sun a midday moon raking truculence.
The Moon resumes its tragic flatulence.
Comedy is a coma. Tragedy
is a crack, a tout le monde with trembling
hemispherics, a slippery sole and
a hole daring to keep us from footing.
III
Comedy is all banana slippage.
Tragedy is trapped in bodies that are
forever falling, never quite finding
their footing. Walk a mile in a clown’s shoes,
you’ll know what Bozo goes through, but not so
Pozzo. Even an unlucky bastard
can presume descent from a long line of
long lines. Too narrow a furrow to toe.
Sun a midday moon raking truculence.
The Moon resumes its tragic flatulence.
Comedy is a coma. Tragedy
is a crack, a tout le monde with trembling
hemispherics, a slippery sole and
a hole daring to keep us from footing.
IV
Comedy is all banana slippage. Tragedy is trapped in bodies that are forever falling, never quite finding their footing. Walk a mile in a clown’s shoes, you’ll know what Bozo goes through, but not so Pozzo. Even an unlucky bastard can presume descent from a long line of long lines. Too narrow a furrow to toe. Sun a midday moon raking truculence. The Moon resumes its tragic flatulence. Comedy is a coma. Tragedy is a crack, a tout le monde with trembling hemispherics, a slippery sole and a hole daring to keep us from footing.
I
Comedy is all
banana slippage.
Tragedy is trapped
in bodies that are
forever falling,
never quite finding
their footing. Walk a
mile in a clown’s shoes,
you’ll know what Bozo
goes through, but not so
Pozzo. Even an
unlucky bastard
can presume descent
from a long line of
long lines. Too narrow
a furrow to toe.
Sun a midday moon
raking truculence.
The Moon resumes its
tragic flatulence.
Comedy is a
coma. Tragedy
is a crack, a tout
le monde with trembling
hemispherics, a
slippery sole and
a hole daring to
keep us from footing.
II
Comedy is all banana slippage.
Tragedy is trapped in bodies that are
forever falling, never quite finding
their footing. Walk a mile in a clown’s shoes,
you’ll know what Bozo goes through, but not so
Pozzo. Even an unlucky bastard
can presume descent from a long line of
long lines. Too narrow a furrow to toe.
Sun a midday moon raking truculence.
The Moon resumes its tragic flatulence.
Comedy is a coma. Tragedy
is a crack, a tout le monde with trembling
hemispherics, a slippery sole and
a hole daring to keep us from footing.
III
Comedy is all banana slippage.
Tragedy is trapped in bodies that are
forever falling, never quite finding
their footing. Walk a mile in a clown’s shoes,
you’ll know what Bozo goes through, but not so
Pozzo. Even an unlucky bastard
can presume descent from a long line of
long lines. Too narrow a furrow to toe.
Sun a midday moon raking truculence.
The Moon resumes its tragic flatulence.
Comedy is a coma. Tragedy
is a crack, a tout le monde with trembling
hemispherics, a slippery sole and
a hole daring to keep us from footing.
IV
Comedy is all banana slippage. Tragedy is trapped in bodies that are forever falling, never quite finding their footing. Walk a mile in a clown’s shoes, you’ll know what Bozo goes through, but not so Pozzo. Even an unlucky bastard can presume descent from a long line of long lines. Too narrow a furrow to toe. Sun a midday moon raking truculence. The Moon resumes its tragic flatulence. Comedy is a coma. Tragedy is a crack, a tout le monde with trembling hemispherics, a slippery sole and a hole daring to keep us from footing.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Dislocation Intelligence in a Brutal Economy
Dislocation Intelligence in a Brutal Economy
By James Kobielus
It's painful to see the auto, newspaper, construction, financial services, and so many other formerly vibrant sectors of the world economy go down the proverbial tubes. One of the most nauseating realities is when millions of people lose their jobs, homes, and communities in a seeming blink.
I grew up in the perpetually recessionary Detroit area. I'm attuned to the regional dislocations that come from depending too much on an industry that has seen better days. Abandoned storefronts, dilapidated housing, vacant lots, tumbleweed-quiet city streets--all of it evidence of a growing ghost town, telltale signs of a marginal economy that depends on government programs, private charity, and low-wage service jobs. During my college years, I was a policy analyst with an urban coalition in downtown Detroit, and I could see that the slide was long-term and nigh irreversible.
Even in relatively well-off areas such as Washington DC, where I've spent close to a quarter-century, we’re not immune to serious economic dislocations. The National Capital Region, so reliant on federal spending, is likely to feel the brunt of whatever cuts Obama will almost certainly make to close this massive deficit. And even here you can’t escape dislocations in sectors that we all depend on, such as retailing, as evidenced by, for example, the ex-Circuit City big boxes that seem even bigger and boxier now that they’re totally empty.
In recent years, corporations have adopted location intelligence solutions to support their market-entry strategies, such as adding new stores and waging marketing campaigns. They also use these tools--essentially, geographic information systems coupled with predictive modeling--to optimize their footprint in existing markets. And to a lesser extent, they also use location intelligence to plan their exit strategy of closings and retrenchments. But when departures are hasty--such as any Chapter 11 proceeding--all we’re left with are vast tracts of vacant real estate, plus many formerly employed people who must find a way to survive amid ruins. Imagine how a General Motors or Chrysler bankruptcy will hit Detroit--it will be a liquidation to rival Hurricane Katrina in its devastation of a major city.
Dislocation intelligence is something that the leaders of the auto companies--and the Obama administration--should exercise when making the tough decisions to restructure this critical industry. People’s pain should be factored into decisions to close and relocate plants, so that, for example, whole cities--such as Flint, Toledo, and Janesville--can make a smooth exit from over-reliance on this one industry. As part of that effort, urban planners should consider the infrastructure that remains behind, so that, for example, whole regions of a city are not suddenly deprived of hospitals, grocery stores, and other basic amenities. Imagine you’re on welfare and have to somehow go 10 miles to buy a loaf of bread.
Mapping tools are just tools, not salvation. Detroit long ago passed a point of no return. The US auto industry will never recover the manufacturing jobs that attracted people from all over the world to southern Michigan, northern Ohio, and other regions.
But we as a country should try to smoothe over these economic dislocations so that they don’t completely wipe some places off the map.
By James Kobielus
It's painful to see the auto, newspaper, construction, financial services, and so many other formerly vibrant sectors of the world economy go down the proverbial tubes. One of the most nauseating realities is when millions of people lose their jobs, homes, and communities in a seeming blink.
I grew up in the perpetually recessionary Detroit area. I'm attuned to the regional dislocations that come from depending too much on an industry that has seen better days. Abandoned storefronts, dilapidated housing, vacant lots, tumbleweed-quiet city streets--all of it evidence of a growing ghost town, telltale signs of a marginal economy that depends on government programs, private charity, and low-wage service jobs. During my college years, I was a policy analyst with an urban coalition in downtown Detroit, and I could see that the slide was long-term and nigh irreversible.
Even in relatively well-off areas such as Washington DC, where I've spent close to a quarter-century, we’re not immune to serious economic dislocations. The National Capital Region, so reliant on federal spending, is likely to feel the brunt of whatever cuts Obama will almost certainly make to close this massive deficit. And even here you can’t escape dislocations in sectors that we all depend on, such as retailing, as evidenced by, for example, the ex-Circuit City big boxes that seem even bigger and boxier now that they’re totally empty.
In recent years, corporations have adopted location intelligence solutions to support their market-entry strategies, such as adding new stores and waging marketing campaigns. They also use these tools--essentially, geographic information systems coupled with predictive modeling--to optimize their footprint in existing markets. And to a lesser extent, they also use location intelligence to plan their exit strategy of closings and retrenchments. But when departures are hasty--such as any Chapter 11 proceeding--all we’re left with are vast tracts of vacant real estate, plus many formerly employed people who must find a way to survive amid ruins. Imagine how a General Motors or Chrysler bankruptcy will hit Detroit--it will be a liquidation to rival Hurricane Katrina in its devastation of a major city.
Dislocation intelligence is something that the leaders of the auto companies--and the Obama administration--should exercise when making the tough decisions to restructure this critical industry. People’s pain should be factored into decisions to close and relocate plants, so that, for example, whole cities--such as Flint, Toledo, and Janesville--can make a smooth exit from over-reliance on this one industry. As part of that effort, urban planners should consider the infrastructure that remains behind, so that, for example, whole regions of a city are not suddenly deprived of hospitals, grocery stores, and other basic amenities. Imagine you’re on welfare and have to somehow go 10 miles to buy a loaf of bread.
Mapping tools are just tools, not salvation. Detroit long ago passed a point of no return. The US auto industry will never recover the manufacturing jobs that attracted people from all over the world to southern Michigan, northern Ohio, and other regions.
But we as a country should try to smoothe over these economic dislocations so that they don’t completely wipe some places off the map.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Inmon’s vitriolic slap at “virtual data warehousing” does not withstand scrutiny
Inmon’s vitriolic slap at “virtual data warehousing” does not withstand scrutiny
By James Kobielus
In a recent article, Bill Inmon incinerates a strawman concept that he refers to as “virtual data warehousing (DW).” For those unfamiliar with Inmon, he is generally considered the founder of DW as a data management discipline, has been at it since the 70s, and has more published books and articles to his name than most mortals. So he clearly may be considered an authority on the topic of DW.
But methinks Mr. Inmon doth protest too much on this “virtual DW” bugaboo, however defined (we’ll get to that in a moment). Also, he attacks this concocted notion with such emotional vehemence that it’s clear he considers it a threat to the centralized EDW paradigm upon which he has built his career and reputation.
For starters, his definition of this concept is oddly vague and questionably narrow: “a virtual data warehouse occurs when a query runs around to a lot of databases and does a distributed query.” Essentially, Inmon defines “virtual DW” as the ability to a) farm out a query to be serviced in parallel by two or more distributed databases, b) aggregate and join results from those databases, and c) deliver a unified result set to the requester.
That’s an important query pattern, but not the only one that should be supported under (pick your quasi-synonym) data federation, data virtualization, or enterprise information integration (EII) architectures. Inmon’s definition excludes the many federated queries that may only hit on a single database, with no joins and results aggregation, and with the EII fabric handling the necessary on-demand transformation from that source’s schema to an abstract semantic model.
Per my data federation report from last fall, Forrester has a broader perspective on the topic than does Mr. Inmon. Data federation is any on-demand approach that queries information objects from one or more sources; applies various integration functions to the results; maps the results to a source-agnostic semantic-abstraction model; and delivers the results to requesters. Nothing in the scoping of data federation necessarily requires the multi-source aggregation and joining that Inmon puts at the heart of “virtual DW.”
Putting Inmon’s narrow scoping of “virtual DW” behind us for the moment, let’s consider his chief objections to this approach. First, it requires the “analyst to integrate data” (as if that’s something analysts are ill-suited for or regard as some inordinate burden). Second, it consumes resources, experiences suboptimal performance, and “shuffles a lot of data around the system that otherwise would not need to be moved” (as if centralized DWs don’t consume resources, experience performance bottlenecks, and move data). Third, it is “limited to the [historical] data found in the [source] databases.” Fourth, it suffers from “no reconcilability of data...[hence] no single version of the truth for the corporation.”
It’s a fairly straightforward matter to dispatch these objections:
First, data integration--through ETL, EII, and other approaches--is a core job function for DW professionals, not some alien function outside their core competency.
Second, data federation is often the optimal approach for low-latency BI (just check out the case studies in my data federation and really urgent analytics reports). Federated environments can be tuned to provide top-notch performance and minimize source-system impacts when “shuffling” data around in a decentralized fabric.
Third, the source databases in a federation environment often include DWs, which, per their core function, usually manage a considerable amount of historical data. Once again, see my data federation report with discussion of case studies for a) Federation of Local DWs via Centralized EII Infrastructure and b) Federation of Dispersed EDW and ODS Data Into Siloed BI Environments.
Fourth, data federation is not totally incompatible with data reconciliation. In fact, federation environments can be architected for single version of the truth, data governance, and master data management. However, it can indeed be tricky to manage data quality in federated environments (see Rob Karel’s coverage of MDM and DQ for a deep dive on that issue).
My basic objection to Inmon’s line of discussion is that he treats data federation as mutually exclusive from the enterprise DW (EDW), when in fact they are highly complementary approaches, not just in theory but in real-world deployments. Yes, data federation can be deployed as an alternative to traditional EDWs, providing direct interactive access to online transactional processing (OLTP) data stores. However, data federation can also coexist with, extend, virtualize, and enrich EDWs, as well as other data-persistence nodes such operational data stores (ODS) and online analytical processing (OLAP) data marts. The case studies in the cited reports bear that out.
Inmon’s arguments are worth consideration. The centralized EDW model he touts is useful for illuminating some traditional best practices. But by no means can it do justice to the stubbornly heterogeneous, distributed, mixed-latency BI and DW requirements of most enterprises.
By James Kobielus
In a recent article, Bill Inmon incinerates a strawman concept that he refers to as “virtual data warehousing (DW).” For those unfamiliar with Inmon, he is generally considered the founder of DW as a data management discipline, has been at it since the 70s, and has more published books and articles to his name than most mortals. So he clearly may be considered an authority on the topic of DW.
But methinks Mr. Inmon doth protest too much on this “virtual DW” bugaboo, however defined (we’ll get to that in a moment). Also, he attacks this concocted notion with such emotional vehemence that it’s clear he considers it a threat to the centralized EDW paradigm upon which he has built his career and reputation.
For starters, his definition of this concept is oddly vague and questionably narrow: “a virtual data warehouse occurs when a query runs around to a lot of databases and does a distributed query.” Essentially, Inmon defines “virtual DW” as the ability to a) farm out a query to be serviced in parallel by two or more distributed databases, b) aggregate and join results from those databases, and c) deliver a unified result set to the requester.
That’s an important query pattern, but not the only one that should be supported under (pick your quasi-synonym) data federation, data virtualization, or enterprise information integration (EII) architectures. Inmon’s definition excludes the many federated queries that may only hit on a single database, with no joins and results aggregation, and with the EII fabric handling the necessary on-demand transformation from that source’s schema to an abstract semantic model.
Per my data federation report from last fall, Forrester has a broader perspective on the topic than does Mr. Inmon. Data federation is any on-demand approach that queries information objects from one or more sources; applies various integration functions to the results; maps the results to a source-agnostic semantic-abstraction model; and delivers the results to requesters. Nothing in the scoping of data federation necessarily requires the multi-source aggregation and joining that Inmon puts at the heart of “virtual DW.”
Putting Inmon’s narrow scoping of “virtual DW” behind us for the moment, let’s consider his chief objections to this approach. First, it requires the “analyst to integrate data” (as if that’s something analysts are ill-suited for or regard as some inordinate burden). Second, it consumes resources, experiences suboptimal performance, and “shuffles a lot of data around the system that otherwise would not need to be moved” (as if centralized DWs don’t consume resources, experience performance bottlenecks, and move data). Third, it is “limited to the [historical] data found in the [source] databases.” Fourth, it suffers from “no reconcilability of data...[hence] no single version of the truth for the corporation.”
It’s a fairly straightforward matter to dispatch these objections:
First, data integration--through ETL, EII, and other approaches--is a core job function for DW professionals, not some alien function outside their core competency.
Second, data federation is often the optimal approach for low-latency BI (just check out the case studies in my data federation and really urgent analytics reports). Federated environments can be tuned to provide top-notch performance and minimize source-system impacts when “shuffling” data around in a decentralized fabric.
Third, the source databases in a federation environment often include DWs, which, per their core function, usually manage a considerable amount of historical data. Once again, see my data federation report with discussion of case studies for a) Federation of Local DWs via Centralized EII Infrastructure and b) Federation of Dispersed EDW and ODS Data Into Siloed BI Environments.
Fourth, data federation is not totally incompatible with data reconciliation. In fact, federation environments can be architected for single version of the truth, data governance, and master data management. However, it can indeed be tricky to manage data quality in federated environments (see Rob Karel’s coverage of MDM and DQ for a deep dive on that issue).
My basic objection to Inmon’s line of discussion is that he treats data federation as mutually exclusive from the enterprise DW (EDW), when in fact they are highly complementary approaches, not just in theory but in real-world deployments. Yes, data federation can be deployed as an alternative to traditional EDWs, providing direct interactive access to online transactional processing (OLTP) data stores. However, data federation can also coexist with, extend, virtualize, and enrich EDWs, as well as other data-persistence nodes such operational data stores (ODS) and online analytical processing (OLAP) data marts. The case studies in the cited reports bear that out.
Inmon’s arguments are worth consideration. The centralized EDW model he touts is useful for illuminating some traditional best practices. But by no means can it do justice to the stubbornly heterogeneous, distributed, mixed-latency BI and DW requirements of most enterprises.
Friday, March 20, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Lean Information Management Strategies for Lean Times
Lean Information Management Strategies for Lean Times
By James Kobielus
When the going gets tough, the tough get lean, focused, and flexible. To help organizations survive the bad times and thrive in all climates, their information management initiatives must remain agile and adaptable.
If you feel your information management strategy is anything but lean, you’re not alone. Many organizations struggle to gain control over information infrastructures that have become too bloated, rigid, and slow to realign with new business drivers.
Lean information management practices are essential for corporate survival. They are far more than belt-tightening exercises. They also help you build analytic muscle for excelling in any business environment. Here are some basic pointers for keeping your information management strategy lean:
By James Kobielus
When the going gets tough, the tough get lean, focused, and flexible. To help organizations survive the bad times and thrive in all climates, their information management initiatives must remain agile and adaptable.
If you feel your information management strategy is anything but lean, you’re not alone. Many organizations struggle to gain control over information infrastructures that have become too bloated, rigid, and slow to realign with new business drivers.
Lean information management practices are essential for corporate survival. They are far more than belt-tightening exercises. They also help you build analytic muscle for excelling in any business environment. Here are some basic pointers for keeping your information management strategy lean:
- Trim your information infrastructure of excess cost. Lean means you should cut excessive, budget-busting overhead from your information management environment. Careful cuts are best, because they optimize your existing operations without gutting the core information, analytics, and applications that underpin your core competencies. Silo, server, database, and application consolidation should be your principal approaches. Also, you should re-evaluate vendor-sourcing strategies and renegotiate licenses at more favorable terms. And you should investigate lower-cost alternatives, such as software-as-a-service, to address business intelligence, business performance solutions, enterprise data warehousing, master data management, enterprise content management, and other information management requirements.
- Fit information initiatives to key business imperatives. Lean also means you fit, focus, and fully align your information management initiatives to mission-critical business imperatives. Strategic alignment ensures that you leverage information assets across diverse application domains and business processes, rather than allow that intelligence to languish underutilized in silos. To sustain this approach, you should establish an information management framework, such as a Business Intelligence Solution Center, that enables ongoing collaboration between business and IT stakeholders. You should engage all key business and technical groups in information management planning discussions.
- Flex information architectures to changing circumstances. Finally, lean means maintaining an approach that is flexible and adaptable, able to shift course as your needs and environment change. In yoga terms, lean is all about building, toning, and stretching analytical muscle to keep it from tearing when you need to transition rapidly from one strategic alignment to the next. You need the flexibility to swing between centralized information management infrastructures and decentralized or federated environments. For end-to-end data management environments, Forrester has developed an architecture decision support tool that helps information managers to determine which of several topologies is best suited to their needs: centralized enterprise data warehouse, hub-and-spoke, independent data marts, data federation, and information-as-a-service.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
What if you had the voice of Jim Cramer inside your head screaming at you while you were trying to make sense of your personal investment portfolio?
All:
Speaking of maddening echo chambers, has anybody noticed that that's what the US television industry has become in recent years, with the proliferation of cable channels, the 24-hour news channels, the steady stream of talking--AND SCREAMING--heads?
Thank you Jon Stewart for tearing a new one in the hide of one of the most obnoxious--and dangerous--of those SCREAMING HEADS: Jim Cramer of CNBC. That Cramer is one dude that I've been avoiding from the start--partly due to simply how he looks, but more to the point how he talks and acts on the tube. In every way, this guy has always struck me as pure huckster, hypester, trickster. That, plus the fact that I find CNBC and all other business and news channels almost unwatchable--due in part to the overcluttered screens with TOO MUCH INFORMATION, including, especially, those obnoxious crawlers--which Bloomberg, in particular, stacks so deep that I get deeply claustrophobic just switching past that channel.
Anyway, re Cramer on the "Daily Show" recently, I just found a transcript of that exchange between him and Stewart, and also watched the video for the first time. I'll give most of the rest of this post over to the best of Stewart's rants. They're simply too perfect and summarize my feelings exactly:
*************************
"JS: But why, when you talk about the regulators, why not the financial news network? That's the whole point of this. CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets. One, that has been sold to us as long term. Put your money in 401k's, put your money in pensions and just leave it there, don't worry about it. It's all doing fine. Then there's this other market, this real market that's occurring in the back room. Where giant piles of money are going in and out, and people are trading them and it's transactional and it's fast, but it's dangerous. It's ethically dubious and it hurts that long term market. So what it feels like to us, and I'm speaking purely as a layman, it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard earned.. and that it is a game that you know, that you know is going on. But that you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn't happening."
"JS: But the gentleman in that uh, uh, video is a sober rational individual. And the gentleman on Mad Money is throwing plastic cows through his legs and shouting "sell, sell, sell". Then coming on two days later and going "I was wrong, you should have bought". Like, I can't reconcile the brilliance and knowledge that you have of the intricacies of the market, with the crazy b****** I see you do every night."
"JS: I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a f---ing game. When I watch that I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet."
"JS: No, no, no, no, no. I want desperately for that, but I feel like that’s not what we’re getting. What we’re getting is… Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was and so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."
" JS: It’s very easy to get on this after the fact. The measure of the network, and the measure of mess. CNBC could act as—No one is asking them to be a regulatory agency, but can’t—but whose side are they on? It feels like they have to reconcile as their audience the Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit on a day-to-day for short term. These guys companies were on a Sherman’s March through their companies financed by our 401ks and all the incentives of their companies were for short term profit. And they burned the f---ing house down with our money and walked away rich as hell and you guys knew that that was going on."
"JS: But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich.” How is that any different than an infomercial? "
**************************
Me back again: "How is that any different than an infomercial?" Ah...hee hee...picture the sprayed-on-beard-face of pitchman infomercial screamer Billy Mays. Now, and I know this is painful, replay Mays' voice in your head. Now replay Jim Cramer's voice.
Same guy, right? How would you like those guys to take up permanent residence in your psyche...especially when you're trying to manage your finances in a rational manner?
Hard, right? Annoying, right? Of course, Mays just tries to sell isolated consumers harmless bullshit. Cramer pretends that he's advising the country on how to manage our collective investment portfolio.
Harmless?
Jim
Speaking of maddening echo chambers, has anybody noticed that that's what the US television industry has become in recent years, with the proliferation of cable channels, the 24-hour news channels, the steady stream of talking--AND SCREAMING--heads?
Thank you Jon Stewart for tearing a new one in the hide of one of the most obnoxious--and dangerous--of those SCREAMING HEADS: Jim Cramer of CNBC. That Cramer is one dude that I've been avoiding from the start--partly due to simply how he looks, but more to the point how he talks and acts on the tube. In every way, this guy has always struck me as pure huckster, hypester, trickster. That, plus the fact that I find CNBC and all other business and news channels almost unwatchable--due in part to the overcluttered screens with TOO MUCH INFORMATION, including, especially, those obnoxious crawlers--which Bloomberg, in particular, stacks so deep that I get deeply claustrophobic just switching past that channel.
Anyway, re Cramer on the "Daily Show" recently, I just found a transcript of that exchange between him and Stewart, and also watched the video for the first time. I'll give most of the rest of this post over to the best of Stewart's rants. They're simply too perfect and summarize my feelings exactly:
*************************
"JS: But why, when you talk about the regulators, why not the financial news network? That's the whole point of this. CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets. One, that has been sold to us as long term. Put your money in 401k's, put your money in pensions and just leave it there, don't worry about it. It's all doing fine. Then there's this other market, this real market that's occurring in the back room. Where giant piles of money are going in and out, and people are trading them and it's transactional and it's fast, but it's dangerous. It's ethically dubious and it hurts that long term market. So what it feels like to us, and I'm speaking purely as a layman, it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard earned.. and that it is a game that you know, that you know is going on. But that you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn't happening."
"JS: But the gentleman in that uh, uh, video is a sober rational individual. And the gentleman on Mad Money is throwing plastic cows through his legs and shouting "sell, sell, sell". Then coming on two days later and going "I was wrong, you should have bought". Like, I can't reconcile the brilliance and knowledge that you have of the intricacies of the market, with the crazy b****** I see you do every night."
"JS: I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a f---ing game. When I watch that I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet."
"JS: No, no, no, no, no. I want desperately for that, but I feel like that’s not what we’re getting. What we’re getting is… Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was and so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."
" JS: It’s very easy to get on this after the fact. The measure of the network, and the measure of mess. CNBC could act as—No one is asking them to be a regulatory agency, but can’t—but whose side are they on? It feels like they have to reconcile as their audience the Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit on a day-to-day for short term. These guys companies were on a Sherman’s March through their companies financed by our 401ks and all the incentives of their companies were for short term profit. And they burned the f---ing house down with our money and walked away rich as hell and you guys knew that that was going on."
"JS: But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich.” How is that any different than an infomercial? "
**************************
Me back again: "How is that any different than an infomercial?" Ah...hee hee...picture the sprayed-on-beard-face of pitchman infomercial screamer Billy Mays. Now, and I know this is painful, replay Mays' voice in your head. Now replay Jim Cramer's voice.
Same guy, right? How would you like those guys to take up permanent residence in your psyche...especially when you're trying to manage your finances in a rational manner?
Hard, right? Annoying, right? Of course, Mays just tries to sell isolated consumers harmless bullshit. Cramer pretends that he's advising the country on how to manage our collective investment portfolio.
Harmless?
Jim
Did the media in the 1930s obsess over the Great Depression the way we obsess over this current recession?
All:
Talking out of school here, but are you as tired as I am by the echo-chamber of media commentary on the current recession, on how long it is going to last, how deep it will be, how painful it is for so many people, how we can cope with it, and so forth?
Not to minimize all these serious matters, but sometimes it feels like a sore hurts much more and lasts a hell of a lot longer if all you ever do is obsess over it, dwell on it, pick at it, bandage it, unbandage it, rebandage it, comment on it, apply various treatments to it, worry that it's cancer, and the like. The queasy middle ground between prudent attention to one's own health and self-fulfilling hypochondria.
Did people in the 1930s, crappy as that era was, regard that particular business-downturn slump as the existential apocalyptic horse latitudes that seems to frame all current discussions of the current period? Or did they dub it a "great" depression only in retrospect? Just curious.
Culture has changed a lot since then, and our expectation of self-regulating economic cycles makes us more nervous and less risk-tolerant than ever. Great Depressions nowadays seem like they should be amenable to Great Anti-Depressants, and/or Great Stimulants.
Prozac Culture. Viagra Culture. Starbucks Culture.
Jim
Talking out of school here, but are you as tired as I am by the echo-chamber of media commentary on the current recession, on how long it is going to last, how deep it will be, how painful it is for so many people, how we can cope with it, and so forth?
Not to minimize all these serious matters, but sometimes it feels like a sore hurts much more and lasts a hell of a lot longer if all you ever do is obsess over it, dwell on it, pick at it, bandage it, unbandage it, rebandage it, comment on it, apply various treatments to it, worry that it's cancer, and the like. The queasy middle ground between prudent attention to one's own health and self-fulfilling hypochondria.
Did people in the 1930s, crappy as that era was, regard that particular business-downturn slump as the existential apocalyptic horse latitudes that seems to frame all current discussions of the current period? Or did they dub it a "great" depression only in retrospect? Just curious.
Culture has changed a lot since then, and our expectation of self-regulating economic cycles makes us more nervous and less risk-tolerant than ever. Great Depressions nowadays seem like they should be amenable to Great Anti-Depressants, and/or Great Stimulants.
Prozac Culture. Viagra Culture. Starbucks Culture.
Jim
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
imho Semantic Web Grounds SOA in a World of Meanings
By James Kobielus
Semantics is just a fancy word for understanding what things truly mean.
In distributed IT environments, semantic interoperability enables applications to understand the precise meaning of each piece of data that they import, acquire, retrieve, and otherwise receive from elsewhere. Without a transparent view into the semantics of externally originated content, applications cannot know how to validate, map, transform, correlate, and otherwise process that information without garbling its meaning.
Semantic interoperability is and always has been one of the principal tasks in real-world integration projects. Typically, it requires sweat equity by business analysts and data architects, who must define mappings to ensure that meaning is not lost or misconstrued when data is transformed to the requisite schemas of target applications. This can be a complex, error-prone exercise, because separate application domains often use different data syntaxes, schemas, and formats to describe semantically equivalent entities, such as a particular customer’s various records or a specific product’s multifarious descriptions.
Complicating the integration process is the fact that application domains rarely describe their semantics—in other words, the entity-relationship conceptual models that inform their data structures—in any formal or consistent way. Furthermore, relational data structures can be frustratingly opaque to developers who are trying to associate a complex set of linked tables with a coherent, business-level conceptual model. Integration specialists must often infer semantics from sketchy documentation, and then create cross-application data mappings that are based on those inferences.
What is the Semantic Web?
In an ideal world, semantics standards would be implemented universally, thereby accelerating, automating, and tightening semantic integration among heterogeneous environments.
Semantic Web refers to a long-running industry initiative that is working toward this ambitious goal. The vision of a Semantic Web has been percolating within the service-oriented architecture (SOA) community since the 1ate 1990s. It has been promoted primarily by World Wide Web (WWW) inventor Tim Berners-Lee. And it continues to be developed through a formal activity of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which Berners-Lee heads.
At heart, Semantic Web is a vision for how the WWW should evolve to realize its full potential (indeed, some industry observers have taken to calling it “Semantic SOA” or “Web 3.0”). Since its birth in the early 1990s, the WWW has transformed the Internet into an open book that—through common interoperability standards such as HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and Extensible Markup Language (XML)—allows content everywhere to be available, readable, searchable, and comprehensible to human consumers. The Semantic Web initiative extends that concept to include non-human consumers. Organizations can implement W3C-developed semantics standards—such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL)--to make the meaning of content unambiguously comprehensible to services, applications, bots, and other automated components.
Nevertheless, people vary widely in how they interpret the scope of the Semantic Web initiative, and the market is swarming with a wide range of projects, products, and tools that implement different variants of this vision. In the broadest perspective, Semantic Web may be understood as referring to an all-encompassing metadata, description, and policy layer that enables universal, automatic, comprehensive end-to-end interoperability across every macro or micro entity—including data, components, services, applications, and services—on every conceivable level. At its most down-to-earth, though, Semantic Web is usually construed as the ability to associate structured data with controlled, application-domain-specific conceptual models known as “ontologies.”
The potential benefits of semantic interoperability fall into several application domains:
- Enterprise content management (ECM): Semantic approaches can support more powerful discovery, indexing, search, classification, commentary, and navigation across heterogeneous stores of unstructured and semi-structured content. Semantic search—driven by concepts, not mere text strings--is regarded by many as the potential killer application of Semantic Web technology. Indeed, many Semantic Web vendors are primarily implementing the technology in search engines that leverage ontology-based concepts to improve search accuracy and reduce spurious hits.
- Enterprise information integration (EII): Semantic approaches enable consolidated viewing, query, and update of structured data that has been retrieved from diverse sources. Indeed, most commercial EII environments present an abstract semantic layer that mediates access to heterogeneous data, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, converging it all to a common presentation-side schema. A handful of those EII vendors—including BEA and Red Hat/MetaMatrix--have begun to support Semantic Web standards, primarily through third-party software plug-ins.
- Enterprise service bus (ESB): Semantic approaches can facilitate multilayered application, process, and service interoperability across disparate environments. To date, there has been little production implementation of Semantic Web standards in the ESB arena, though vendors such as Telcordia Technologies have adopted semantics, ontologies, and RDF to describe the conceptual models implemented by application endpoints, agents, and intermediary nodes within ESB-like middleware approaches such as event stream processing (ESP).
To some degree, the Semantic Web community is also loosely associated with Web 2.0 “social bookmarking” or “folksonomy” initiatives such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit, which provide online communities within which users may collectively link, tag, classify, and comment on Web content originated elsewhere (however, usually without reference to W3C specifications). The key difference between the Semantic Web and these folksonomy efforts is that the former relies primarily on professional developers to create and maintain standards-based ontologies, whereas the latter relies on end users to create informal, non-standard collections of descriptive tags applying to content they find while surfing the Web.
What are the Principal Standards and Approaches for Implementing the Semantic Web?
On the standards front, the Semantic Web vision is starting to bear fruit, slowly but inexorably.
In the past year, there has been an upsurge in industry attention to the W3C’s Semantic Web activity, due in part to the growing realization that SOA-based interoperability demands attention to semantics issues. To date, W3C-developed Semantic Web specifications—most notably, RDF and OWL—have begun to gain significant traction in commercial products. Startups continue to emerge, offering ontology modeling tools, inference engines, RDF repositories, and other necessary components of Semantic Web solutions. And more and more users are incorporating semantics-based approaches in their search, text analytics, ECM, EII, and other mission-critical applications.
At the heart of Semantic Web environments is the notion of ontologies, which are conceptual models comprising entity-relationship statements that have been expressed in a “knowledge representation language.” For Semantic Web, the principal knowledge representation language is RDF, which is an official W3C Recommendation. RDF uses XML to define a rich data model, syntax, and vocabulary for the exchange of machine-understandable ontologies about URI-designated resources. Within an RDF ontology, statements consist of well-defined “subjects,” “predicates,” and “objects.” For example, in the statement “This BCR article has an author whose value is James Kobielus,” the subject is “This BCR article,” the predicate is “has an author,” and the object is “whose value is James Kobielus.” Under RDF notation, each of these “nodes” is designated with its own unique URI, and a syntactically complete statement can be created by concatenating subject, predicate, and object node URIs into a single structure called an “RDF triple.”
RDF is the core specification in a growing range of Semantic Web standards and specifications under W3C, including:
- OWL: This specification, which is an official W3C Recommendation, extends RDF to support richer description of resource properties, classes, relationships, equality, and typing.
- SPARQL Query Language for RDF: This specification, which is currently a W3C Candidate Recommendation, leverages XQuery and XPath to support queries across diverse RDF data sources.
- Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL): This specification, which is currently a W3C Candidate Recommendation, specifies how an XML document can be marked up to declare that it includes RDF-compatible data and also to specify links to algorithms--typically represented in Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)--for extracting this data from the document.
At the very least, all Semantic Web implementations use RDF as their core ontology language, though many also support OWL for its semantic richness (and a growing number are implementing SPARQL, GRDDL, and related W3C specifications). Ontologies figure into Semantic Web environments in any of the following scenarios:
- Semantic modeling: In this scenario, developers explicitly model semantics as RDF/OWL ontologies, and/or as such related logical structures as taxonomies, thesauri, and topic maps. The ontologies are used to drive creation of structured content that instantiates the entities, classes, relationships, attributes, and properties defined in the ontologies. This is the classic model of greenfield development of application data under the Semantic Web paradigm.
- Semantic mediation: In this scenario, developers explicitly model semantics as RDF/OWL ontologies, and use the ontologies to drive the creation of mappings, transformations, and aggregations among existing, structured data sets. This describes the typical use of Semantic Web approaches within heterogeneous EII and other data integration environments.
- Semantic mining: In this scenario, developers use natural-language processing (NLP) and pattern-recognition tools to extract the implicit semantics from unstructured text sources. The extracted entities, relationships, facts, sentiments, and other artifacts are used to fashion RDF/OWL ontologies that drive the creation of indices, tags, annotations, and other metadata that layer a consistent semantic structure across the various items within an unstructured text store. This describes the typical use of Semantic Web in search and text mining/analytics environments.
To sustain an ontology-centric Semantic Web environment, the following functional components are necessary:
- Semantic tools: Application developers require a broad range of tools to help them work with ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, topic maps, and other semantic constructs. Developers need tools to discover, query, browse, analyze, visualize, model, design, edit, classify, and annotate semantic constructs. They also need tools to map among dissimilar ontologies, define transformation rules, and attach descriptive tags and metadata. Tools should support semantics development by individual developers or collaborative teams. And semantics tools should integrate with Eclipse and other common development platforms, and support visual development in Unified Modeling Language (UML) and other modeling frameworks.
- Semantic engines: Application environments require runtime components to mediate interactions among semantic-aware components, and also to interface with legacy systems. Runtime semantic engines should support such functions as validating ontologies against standards; matching, mapping, transformation, correlation, and merging of data to conform with standard ontologies; and inference-based extraction of implicit ontologies from unstructured text sources. Semantic inference engines should support deterministic mapping across ontologies, as well as fuzzy equivalence-matching between extracted entity-relationship models and concepts specified in formal ontologies.
- Semantic repositories: Application environments require repositories or libraries to manage ontologies and other semantic objects, and also to maintain the rules, policies, service definitions, and other metadata to support life-cycle management of application semantics. Semantic repositories should support storage, synchronization, caching, access, import/export, registration, archiving, backup, and administration of ontologies and the data that instantiate those ontologies. The most prevalent semantic repositories are “RDF-triple store” databases.
- Semantic controls: Application environments require that various controls—on access, change, versioning, auditing, and so forth—be applied to ontologies (otherwise, it would be meaningless to refer to ontologies as “controlled vocabularies”). Controls might be enforced at the repository-, engine-, and/or tool levels. Developers might be constrained by the corporate-standard semantic tool to only use particular standard ontologies, which could vary depending on the type of application or project on which they’re working. To the extent that developers work in teams, the semantic-application development tool might provide a role-based workflow to structure interactions in accordance with best practice.
Who are the Major Semantic Web Solutions Vendors?
In the marketplace, the Semantic Web community is spawning a expanding group of promising startups, as well as some tentative commitments by larger, established software vendors.
It’s no surprise that academic research institutions and open-source communities play a substantial role in catalyzing the development of the Semantic Web. Coordinating semantics projects are such communities as Advanced Knowledge Technologies, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Gnowsis, Rx4RDF, and SemWebCentral.
As befits an embryonic market pushing a bleeding-edge technology, many Semantic Web vendors are in fact consultants pursuing ontology-based projects in ECM, EII, ESB, and other areas. In fact, many Semantic Web vendors are attempting to jumpstart a self-sustaining software business from a handful of consulting jobs. Still, there are many semantics firms that make their living primarily from consulting and other professional services engagements. These firms include Articulate Software, Business Semantics, EffectiveSoft, Mindful Data, Pragati Synergetic Research, Semantic Arts, Semantic Light, Taxonomy Strategies, and Zepheira.
As noted earlier, many software vendors are seeking the low-hanging commercial fruit of semantic search. The growing list of semantic search engine vendors includes Aduna, AskMeNow, ChaCha, Cognition Technologies, Copernic, Endeca, FAST Search and Transfer, Groxis, Hakia, Intelliseek, ISYS Search Software, Jarg, Metacarta, Ontosearch, Powerset, Readware, Semaview, Siderean, Syntactica, Textdigger, Vivisimo, and ZoomInfo. Most of these vendors rely heavily on NLP, pattern-matching, and text analytics to power the semantics-aware crawlers that they deploy to extract ontologies from unstructured text throughout the Web, intranets, and other content collections.
Just as important, Semantic Web pure-play vendors have come into their own. Dozens of vendors offer flexible, sophisticated solutions that can support a wide range of semantics-aware applications in addition to search. Pure-plays in this space include Access Innovations, Axontologic, Cycorp, Fourthcodex, DATA-GRID, Franz, LinkSpace, Metatomix, Modus Operandi, Mondeca, Ontology Works, Ontopia, Ontoprise, Ontos AG, Revelytix, Sandpiper Software, SchemaLogic, Semagix, Semandex Networks, Semansys, Semantic Insights, Semantic Research, Semantra, Semtation GmBH, Teragram, Thetus, TopQuadrant, Visual Knowledge, Wordmap, and XSB.
Semantic Web vendors vary widely in their functionality, development interfaces, deployment flexibility, and standards support. None of these vendors are staking their success on rapid, universal adoption of the full stack of Semantic Web standards. Instead, they all provide tools, platforms, and applications that can be deployed for tactical, point, quick-payoff IT projects. They address specific business needs with their solutions while enabling customers to integrate semantics solutions to varying degrees with their existing application and middleware infrastructures.
What follows are snapshots of a handful of these vendors, illustrating their diverse backgrounds, approaches, and business models:
- Cycorp: Headquartered in Austin TX, Cycorp develops turnkey solutions in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, machine reasoning, NLP, semantic data integration, information management, and search. Its Cyc middleware combines an ontology (which has been placed in the public domain) with a knowledge base, inference engine, natural language interfaces, and semantic integration bus. The vendor offers a no-cost license to its semantic technologies development toolkit to the research community. In the Semantic Web arena, Cycorp is doing R&D into scenarios in which end users create lightweight local ontologies that are subsequently elaborated, enriched, and mapped to more formal global ontologies by semantic inference engines.
- Sandpiper Software: Headquartered in Los Altos CA, Sandpiper Software provides semantics tools, consulting, and training. Its Visual Ontology Modeler (VOM) 1.5 tool supports component-based ontology modeling through frame-based knowledge representation. VOM, an add-in to IBM Rational Rose, leverages UML to capture and represent knowledge unambiguously. VOM supports RDF/OWL-based modeling of domain, interface, process, and user ontologies. As a subscription service, Sandpiper also offers the Medius Ontology Library, which extends VOM’s bundled ontology libraries to include application-specific ontologies plus utility ontologies for national, international, and general metadata standards.
- SchemaLogic: Headquartered in Kirkland WA, SchemaLogic provides an SOA-based business semantics middleware suite, as well as semantics consulting and training services. The company’s SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite includes server components that gather, create, refine, reconcile, and distribute ontologies, taxonomies, tag libraries, and other semantic metadata to subscribing applications over a real-time pub-sub integration fabric. The suite includes a governance layer that supports collaborative, Web-based participation and feedback by users and subject matter experts in the creation and refinement of business semantics. Collaborative semantic governance may span organizational boundaries, with the resultant semantic artifacts capable of being propagated automatically to third-party search engines, content management applications, portals, and other systems. For example, customers can use SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite to synchronize content categories and descriptions across distributed deployments of Microsoft Office SharePoint Servers.
- TopQuadrant: Headquartered in Alexandria VA, TopQuadrant is a software vendor that provides an open Java-based platform for development of Semantic Web applications. The TopBraid Suite includes tools and components for building ontologies; developing inference rules and SPARQL-based queries; collaboratively creating and browsing RDF-enabled content; extracting semantics from various data sources via GRDDL and other interfaces; mediating between RDF/OWL and other formats; displaying rich model-driven user interfaces; configuring and orchestrating semantic inference operations; and storing ontologies in third-party RDF triple-store databases. The suite supports browser-based access, collaborative semantic governance, and ontology-based search.
As noted earlier, some Semantic Web vendors are partnering with established EII vendors to offer ontology-aware semantic-integration layers for federated data query/update. These vendors are:
- Modus Operandi: This vendor’s Wave Semantic Data Services Layer product integrates with BEA’s EII solution--AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP)—via RDF/OWL ontologies. In so dong, it enables semantic integration of information across diverse, dispersed corporate applications, databases, and data warehouses. It supports user-driven ad-hoc semantic search and query, relying on ontologies to reconcile semantic conflicts among heterogeneous data. It also incorporates runtime services to crawl and index data services, to visualize the integrated data, and to monitor data services status. Modus Operandi’s ontology development tool can be launched from within BEA WebLogic Workshop, and can also import any standard OWL ontology developed in external tools. The tool deploys Wave semantic data services directly to ALDSP running on BEA’s WebLogic Server.
- Revelytix: This vendor’s MatchIT integrates with the semantic data services layer in Red Hat/MetaMatrix’s EII environment. MatchIT supports automated semantic mapping to help domain experts reconcile, map, and mediate semantics across heterogeneous environments via RDF/OWL ontologies. It provides an extensible ontology development tool that implements various sophisticated algorithms for determining semantic equivalence.
Some major data management vendors have begun to dip their toes in the Semantic Web market through solutions of their own. These vendors are:
- Oracle: Released in July 2005, Oracle Spatial 10g Release 2 provides a data management platform for RDF-based applications, supporting new object types to manage RDF data in Oracle. Based on a graph data model, RDF triples are persisted, indexed and queried, similar to other object-relational data types. The Oracle 10g RDF database ensures that application developers benefit from the scalability of the Oracle database to deploy scalable semantic-based enterprise applications. Metatomix, Ontoprise, and TopQuadrant have all announced support for Oracle Spatial 10g Release 2.
- IBM: Downloadable from vendor’s AlphaWorks site, IBM Integrated Ontology Development Toolkit supports storage, manipulation, query, and inference of ontologies and corresponding data instances. It includes an ontology definition metadata model, workbench, and repository. Its metamodel is a runtime semantics library that is derived from the OMG's Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) and implemented in Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). The Java-based workbench enables RDF/OWL ontology building, management, visualization, parsing, and serialization, plus transformation between RDF/OWL and other data-modeling languages. The repository, Minerva, is a high-performance DBMS optimized for OWL ontology storage, inference, and query, implementing a subset of SPARQL.
How Mature is the Semantic Web Market?
Even with all of this industry activity, the Semantic Web market is still far from mature. First off, RDF, OWL, and kindred W3C specifications have not exactly taken the SOA world by storm. One could not name a single pure-play vendor of Semantic Web technology that’s well-known to the average enterprise IT professional. And rare is the enterprise IT organization that’s looking for people with backgrounds in or familiarity with Semantic Web technologies. This remains a young, highly specialized niche in which academic research projects outnumber commercial products, and in which most products are point solutions rather than integrated features of enterprise databases, development tools, and application platforms. As noted above, no EII vendor has natively integrated Semantic Web specifications, and neither Oracle nor IBM has ventured much beyond their initial tentative forays into this new arena.
Commercial progress on the Semantic Web front has been glacial, at best, with no clear tipping point in sight. It’s been eight years since RDF was ratified by W3C, and more than three years since OWL spread its wings, but neither has achieved breakaway vendor or user adoption. To be fair, there has been a steady rise in the number of semantics projects and start-ups, as evidenced by growing participation in the annual Semantic Technology Conference, which was recently held in San Jose CA. And there has been a recent resurgence in industry attention to semantics issues, such as the recent announcement of a “Semantic SOA Consortium” involving Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and others. Some industry observers have even attempted to rebrand Semantic Web as “Web 3.0,” so as to create the impression that this is a new initiative and not an old effort straining to stay relevant.
Surprisingly, the SOA market sectors that one would expect to embrace the Semantic Web have largely kept their distance. In theory, vendors of search, ECM, EII, ESB, business intelligence (BI), database management systems (DBMS), master data management (MDM), and data quality (DQ) solutions would all benefit from the ability to automatically harmonize divergent ontologies across heterogeneous environments. But only a handful of vendors from these niches has taken a visible role in the Semantic Web community, and even these vendors seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude to it all. One big reason for reluctance is that there are already many established tools and approaches for semantic interoperability in the SOA world, and the new W3C-developed approaches have not yet demonstrated any significant advantages in development productivity, flexibility, or cost.
One of the leading indicators of any technology’s commercial adoption is the extent to which Microsoft is on board. By that criterion, the Semantic Web has a long way to go, and may not get to first base until early in the next decade, at the very least. The vendor’s ambitious roadmap for its SQL Server product includes no mention of the Semantic Web, ontologies, RDF, or anything to that effect. So far, the only mention of semantic interoperability in Microsoft’s strategy is in a new development project codenamed “Astoria.” Project “Astoria,”, which was announced in May at Microsoft’s MIX conference, will support greater SOA-based semantic interoperability on the ADO.Net framework through a new Entity Data Model schema that implements RDF, XML, and URIs. However, Microsoft has not committed to integrating “Astoria” with SQL Server, nor is it planning to implement any of the W3C’s other Semantic Web specifications. Essentially, “Astoria” is Microsoft’s trial balloon to see if a Semantic Web-lite architecture lights any fires in the development community.
Clearly, there is persistent attention to semantic interoperability issues throughout the distributed computing industry. Microsoft is certainly not the only SOA vendor that is at least pondering these issues on a high architectural plane. Over the remainder of this decade, most major SOA, EII, DBMS, and BI vendors are going to make some strategic acquisitions in the Semantic Web community. Increasingly, leading enterprise platform, application, and tool vendors will integrate ontologies, inference engines, RDF-triple stores, and other semantics components and interfaces into their solutions.
But it may take another decade before the likes of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and other leading enterprise software vendors fully integrate semantics into all of their solutions. Until such time, we must continue to view the Semantic Web as an exciting but immature work in progress.
******Original publication date: October 2007, Business Communications Review.
Author's note: I've posted this here because I'm tired of telling people about this great article I wrote on Semantic Web a couple of years ago for some now-defunct publication that practically nobody read. That wasn't very long ago and this still holds up quite well. Judge for yourself. Same principle applies with my poetry; it's more important to make your own audience than wonder why one never materializes. Better to self-publish than forever perish.
VENDORS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE:
Access Innovations: http://www.accessinn.com/
Aduna: http://www.aduna-software.com/
Advanced Knowledge Technologies: http://www.aktors.org/akt/
Articulate Software: http://www.articulatesoftware.com/
AskMeNow: http://www.askmenow.com/
Axontologic: http://www.axontologic.com/
BEA: http://www.bea.com/
Business Semantics: http://www.businesssemantics.com/
ChaCha: http://www.chacha.com/
Cognition Technologies: http://www.cognition.com/
Copernic: http://www.copernic.com/
Cycorp: http://www.cyc.com/
Fourthcodex: http://www.fourthcodex.com/
DATA-GRID: http://www.data-grid.com/
Digital Enterprise Research Institute: http://www.deri.ie/
EffectiveSoft: http://www.effectivesoft.com/
Endeca: http://www.endeca.com/
FAST Search and Transfer: http://www.fastsearch.com/
Franz: http://www.franz.com/
Gnowsis: http://www.gnowsis.org/
Groxis: http://www.groxis.com/
Hakia: http://www.hakia.com/
IBM: http://www.ibm.com/
Intelliseek: http://www.intelliseek.com/
ISYS Search Software: http://www.isys-search.com/
Jarg: http://www.jarg.com/
LinkSpace: http://www.linkspace.net/
Metacarta: http://www.metacarta.com/
MetaMatrix: http://www.metamatrix.com/
Metatomix: http://www.metatomix.com/
Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/
Mindful Data: http://www.mindfuldata.com/
Modus Operandi: http://www.modusoperandi.com/
Mondeca: http://www.mondeca.com/
Ontology Works: http://www.ontologyworks.com/
Ontopia: http://www.ontopia.net/
Ontoprise: http://www.ontoprise.de/content/index_eng.html
Ontos AG: http://www.ontos.com/de/company/index.php
Ontosearch: http://www.ontosearch.com/
Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/
Powerset: http://www.powerset.com/
Pragati Synergetic Research: http://www.pragati-inc.com/index.html
Readware: http://www.readware.com/
Revelytix: http://revelytix.com/
Sandpiper Software: http://www.sandsoft.com/
SchemaLogic: http://www.schemalogic.com/
Semagix: http://www.semagix.com/technology.html
Semandex Networks: http://www.semandex.com/
Semansys: http://www.semansys.com/
Semantic Arts: http://www.semanticarts.com/
Semantic Insights: http://www.semanticinsights.com/
Semantic Light: http://www.semanticlight.com/
Semantic Research: http://www.semanticresearch.com/
Semantra: http://www.semantra.com/
Semaview: http://www.semaview.com/
Semtation GmBH: http://www.semtation.de/
Siderean: http://www.siderean.com/
Syntactica: http://www.syntactica.com/
Taxonomy Strategies: http://www.taxonomystrategies.com/
Taxonomy Warehouse: http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/
Telcordia Technologies: http://www.telcordia.com/
Teragram: http://www.teragram.com/
Textdigger: http://www.textdigger.com/
Thetus: http://www.thetus.com/
TopQuadrant: http://www.topquadrant.com/
Visual Knowledge: http://www.visualknowledge.com/index.html
Vivisimo: http://www.vivisimo.com/
Wordmap: http://www.wordmap.com/
XSB: http://www.xsb.com/
Zepheira: http://zepheira.com/
ZoomInfo: http://www.zoominfo.com/
Sunday, March 15, 2009
poem Spring Sonnet
SPRING SONNET
A soaking March is
inverse November:
serviceably drab
but waxing: crueler
than that idiot
Eliot could dream,
dear, etherised or
otherwize: not so
much a month as mud
slopped between times more
solid: a double-
fortnight white as old
Albion: daisy-
drugged allergenic
April: green as a
fair Saxon meadow.
A March soaking is
a bacterial
snowmelt: a power-
rotor shuddering
of a spray-shaking
lion: rising through
red Ides unto an
idyll: spongiform
lambs shivering sweats
from swollen frocks of
their grey contagion.
They scream for the shear.
A soaking March is
inverse November:
serviceably drab
but waxing: crueler
than that idiot
Eliot could dream,
dear, etherised or
otherwize: not so
much a month as mud
slopped between times more
solid: a double-
fortnight white as old
Albion: daisy-
drugged allergenic
April: green as a
fair Saxon meadow.
A March soaking is
a bacterial
snowmelt: a power-
rotor shuddering
of a spray-shaking
lion: rising through
red Ides unto an
idyll: spongiform
lambs shivering sweats
from swollen frocks of
their grey contagion.
They scream for the shear.
Monday, March 09, 2009
poem Beep 'Em
BEEP ‘EM
From rules we tend to recoil
but to engines they’re precious as oil
Let’s make our own decisions
and not be imprisoned
by bots and their effortless toil.
From rules we tend to recoil
but to engines they’re precious as oil
Let’s make our own decisions
and not be imprisoned
by bots and their effortless toil.
poem Seattle
SEATTLE
In the essential
Seattle users
photosynthesize
caffeine directly
from whatever drops
of liquid sunshine
are vouchsafed their way
or, failing that, fix
off the glints of glare
that glance in off the
gray and grace their green
eye-stained monitors.
In the essential
Seattle users
photosynthesize
caffeine directly
from whatever drops
of liquid sunshine
are vouchsafed their way
or, failing that, fix
off the glints of glare
that glance in off the
gray and grace their green
eye-stained monitors.
poem Seized Up
SEIZED UP
The turn of the epoch came
and tolled a moment
strikingly absent.
We cleared from our sinus
the dust of an age
once-anxious.
Watched the world
roll round a computer clock
seized up in an
engineering shortcut
champagne coffee break.
And all crashed back into our
rapt ritual inattentive
two-hour sleeps
breathing.
The turn of the epoch came
and tolled a moment
strikingly absent.
We cleared from our sinus
the dust of an age
once-anxious.
Watched the world
roll round a computer clock
seized up in an
engineering shortcut
champagne coffee break.
And all crashed back into our
rapt ritual inattentive
two-hour sleeps
breathing.
poem Several Billion Ones
SEVERAL BILLION ONES
A fish-eye lens
would add unbearable curvature to
the continental expanse of the People's Republic of China.
An only child
downloading from landlocked Lanzhou
would add a brand new national streetmap
and triple the population
of playmates on-line.
A fish-eye lens
would add unbearable curvature to
the continental expanse of the People's Republic of China.
An only child
downloading from landlocked Lanzhou
would add a brand new national streetmap
and triple the population
of playmates on-line.
poem Spectre of Ubiquitous Spoofing
SPECTRE OF UBIQUITOUS SPOOFING
Key don’t touch it you don’t know where it’s been.
Elegant protocol deception.
Reinitialization crime.
Beware trusted third-parties.
Enter the mesh alone.
Recall your new name.
One two or three.
Syllables.
Key don’t touch it you don’t know where it’s been.
Elegant protocol deception.
Reinitialization crime.
Beware trusted third-parties.
Enter the mesh alone.
Recall your new name.
One two or three.
Syllables.
poem Talk of Billions
TALK OF BILLIONS
We are
both of us
sitting in the same chair
six thousand miles
apart.
We are
six billion
sitting in one
and the same room.
We talk at the same time,
sip from the same drink,
and watch the same screen
materialize.
We are
both of us
sitting in the same chair
six thousand miles
apart.
We are
six billion
sitting in one
and the same room.
We talk at the same time,
sip from the same drink,
and watch the same screen
materialize.
poem Thisaway
THISAWAY
…an Architecture's
bare Scaffolding: Void for fresh
Constellation Dust.
one inGenious Way
to conjure a young Kosmos:
Trinity—invoKe!
the three strongest Beams--
Bones of any bright Structure:
Dreams Drawings Stuff and….
poem 27365
27365
My slowest machine speeds me
more gently down that precious
path. All of my bicycle
muscles give way to the day
within. A will: still as the
breath’s diminishing inner
tussle. A hill: sure as the
shift gear’s clicking numbers. My
heart clocks its own course, locks its
beat to an unsteady tick,
stays the frame down uneven
ground, in any wind. My head
stows the combination from
view, sends it to you, if you
know where to look, you can ride
my mount: I’ll join you on foot.
My slowest machine speeds me
more gently down that precious
path. All of my bicycle
muscles give way to the day
within. A will: still as the
breath’s diminishing inner
tussle. A hill: sure as the
shift gear’s clicking numbers. My
heart clocks its own course, locks its
beat to an unsteady tick,
stays the frame down uneven
ground, in any wind. My head
stows the combination from
view, sends it to you, if you
know where to look, you can ride
my mount: I’ll join you on foot.
poem Usword
USWORD
Know me by my most
mnemonic non-mnemonic
name--OK?
My most tangled chain
of digit-twisting and one-
off emoticons.
Whatever suggests
me to you and us to no
one overlooking.
Know me by my most
mnemonic non-mnemonic
name--OK?
My most tangled chain
of digit-twisting and one-
off emoticons.
Whatever suggests
me to you and us to no
one overlooking.
poem Arlington Courthouse Implosion
ARLINGTON COURTHOUSE IMPLOSION
Why this low-grade eyesore rated a CNN camera crew. Was younger than me by two years but organisms structures. When we moved here pre-kids thought the walkable neighborhood quiet. Well it was transitional too close to the cemetery. What gets me is the graceful degradation of some eras. Whereas others receding too fast into their comet tails. Whipped withered by the dustclouds of their own furious commerce. Worn down to a QuickTime decompressed over coffee.
Why this low-grade eyesore rated a CNN camera crew. Was younger than me by two years but organisms structures. When we moved here pre-kids thought the walkable neighborhood quiet. Well it was transitional too close to the cemetery. What gets me is the graceful degradation of some eras. Whereas others receding too fast into their comet tails. Whipped withered by the dustclouds of their own furious commerce. Worn down to a QuickTime decompressed over coffee.
poem Blitz
BLITZ
Emotions fog
the photograph
and inscriptions
litter the flip
side with detail.
Moments compose
themselves in the
retelling, in
flashes of fresh
revelation.
In light pressing
the present so
deeply into
the past that old
images blink.
Emotions fog
the photograph
and inscriptions
litter the flip
side with detail.
Moments compose
themselves in the
retelling, in
flashes of fresh
revelation.
In light pressing
the present so
deeply into
the past that old
images blink.
poem Carbon Fourteen
CARBON FOURTEEN
Take this. It will mark the day you fell. May you rot in your grave and go on forever. Exhale every breath you drew, all the radiant blue, and the winds that stained you golden. Let them go and dwell in realms subatomic.
Take this. It will mark the day you fell. May you rot in your grave and go on forever. Exhale every breath you drew, all the radiant blue, and the winds that stained you golden. Let them go and dwell in realms subatomic.
poem Carl Sagan
CARL SAGAN
All that ever was will be now, so beautiful looking, toward this dot from afar, receding the probe, opened its shutter, captured us, no one but you to thank, our life in this space, marveling.
All that ever was will be now, so beautiful looking, toward this dot from afar, receding the probe, opened its shutter, captured us, no one but you to thank, our life in this space, marveling.
poem Chat
CHAT
Here's where protocols
fail and logs show no
network present. Where
chitter-chatter blooms
and anti-matter
resumes its steady
consumption of the
conversation's ghost
and containing frame.
Here's where protocols
fail and logs show no
network present. Where
chitter-chatter blooms
and anti-matter
resumes its steady
consumption of the
conversation's ghost
and containing frame.
poem Chemical Water
CHEMICAL WATER
We search the
sheen of the grass.
We know the gleam on the blade
is the blood of all creation.
We see landscapes softened.
Snowflakes
sweet upon planetary dreams.
We place faith in the oasis.
And in rivers
through parched interstellar.
Doped with trace amounts
in vast arrays, mites teeming,
we know that worlds
can flourish.
We search the
sheen of the grass.
We know the gleam on the blade
is the blood of all creation.
We see landscapes softened.
Snowflakes
sweet upon planetary dreams.
We place faith in the oasis.
And in rivers
through parched interstellar.
Doped with trace amounts
in vast arrays, mites teeming,
we know that worlds
can flourish.
poem Clock
CLOCK
Still from "Cessation":
Jean-Luc's frame-by-frame
examination
of teeth entering
holes with precisely
enough clockwise turn
to advance the film
one solitary
tick and tension in
a tough medium
to click this reel of
frozen times forward.
Still from "Cessation":
Jean-Luc's frame-by-frame
examination
of teeth entering
holes with precisely
enough clockwise turn
to advance the film
one solitary
tick and tension in
a tough medium
to click this reel of
frozen times forward.
poem EMC2
EMC2
Take matter and factor
in light's second power
then stand back and ask if
it's fungus or flower.
Take matter and factor
in light's second power
then stand back and ask if
it's fungus or flower.
poem Equations
EQUATIONS
Some learn to love this truth-dwelling machinery
Values slipping dimensions
Notations arbitrarily
Caricature laws of the warp
Or the artisan’s knife
Let x drop anchor
Bound the realm so that time appears to begin
Where the conic projection
Casts shadows on one sector of the known universe
And assume that each subsequent transformation
Associating known elements with those merely assumed
Never violating symmetry
Generates forms far darker
Than one would suppose.
Some learn to love this truth-dwelling machinery
Values slipping dimensions
Notations arbitrarily
Caricature laws of the warp
Or the artisan’s knife
Let x drop anchor
Bound the realm so that time appears to begin
Where the conic projection
Casts shadows on one sector of the known universe
And assume that each subsequent transformation
Associating known elements with those merely assumed
Never violating symmetry
Generates forms far darker
Than one would suppose.
poem Explosaic
EXPLOSAIC
Panopticon. Pages galorious. Plastered everywhere. Printout port, personal portals, private platforms. Panaudicon. People I’ll know, never know. Places I’ll go, never go. Projecting presence. Pull them down, me in. Pages explorious perseverious. Pantacticon.
Panopticon. Pages galorious. Plastered everywhere. Printout port, personal portals, private platforms. Panaudicon. People I’ll know, never know. Places I’ll go, never go. Projecting presence. Pull them down, me in. Pages explorious perseverious. Pantacticon.
poem Far Be It
FAR BE IT
Glad for the world and all its valleys
No satellite can ever spy
Nor mapmaker render
Every face on every street
Or every view
From every room.
Glad for the world and all its valleys
No satellite can ever spy
Nor mapmaker render
Every face on every street
Or every view
From every room.
poem Feasibility of Adaptive Arrays
FEASIBILITY OF ADAPTIVE ARRAYS
Trained to receive, every fiber of me, every facet of you.
Unimpeded, one path, one singular path, through crowded sensations.
Recognizing our kind.
Now turning away.
Trying to receive, every moment of time, every flicker of thought and soft emanation.
Unobstructed, then blocked, then scattered through layers, accidental relations.
Recollecting our mind.
Now turning away.
True to my thoughts, we're moving in tandem.
Unawares, we're speaking the language of light.
Reconstructing our world through massive obstruction.
Now moving closer, now turning away.
Trained to receive, every fiber of me, every facet of you.
Unimpeded, one path, one singular path, through crowded sensations.
Recognizing our kind.
Now turning away.
Trying to receive, every moment of time, every flicker of thought and soft emanation.
Unobstructed, then blocked, then scattered through layers, accidental relations.
Recollecting our mind.
Now turning away.
True to my thoughts, we're moving in tandem.
Unawares, we're speaking the language of light.
Reconstructing our world through massive obstruction.
Now moving closer, now turning away.
poem Ideogram
IDEOGRAM
Tidy the man
inside the
Chinese ideogram.
Steady as the steed
figurine within
its containing pen.
Indelible
as delicate sky
brushed over
eye and mind.
Still as the chill
compression
of stone.
Tidy the man
inside the
Chinese ideogram.
Steady as the steed
figurine within
its containing pen.
Indelible
as delicate sky
brushed over
eye and mind.
Still as the chill
compression
of stone.
poem Missing Screwdriver Not the Point
MISSING SCREWDRIVER NOT THE POINT
What will the missing article be next time?
A yellow handle, a slightly worn head, and a long, winding thread.
A small fortune my friend.
I figure no less than one hundred dollars.
It is not for adoption.
It has a home and is missed terribly.
Possibly it is overseas.
You tell me.
What will the missing article be next time?
A yellow handle, a slightly worn head, and a long, winding thread.
A small fortune my friend.
I figure no less than one hundred dollars.
It is not for adoption.
It has a home and is missed terribly.
Possibly it is overseas.
You tell me.
poem Pixel
PIXEL
One ought to thank Planck for the thought
the infinitesimal's not
a fathomless bottomless well
but a plot of versatile dots.
One ought to toast Hearst for the screen
that lays down the points in a clean
mist of crisp pixie light and strips
by the millions milled by machine.
And nod to Turing for blurring
the point where the strip takes sense and
base elements assemble the
cells and scenes and trick behind
the calculated picture of mind.
One ought to thank Planck for the thought
the infinitesimal's not
a fathomless bottomless well
but a plot of versatile dots.
One ought to toast Hearst for the screen
that lays down the points in a clean
mist of crisp pixie light and strips
by the millions milled by machine.
And nod to Turing for blurring
the point where the strip takes sense and
base elements assemble the
cells and scenes and trick behind
the calculated picture of mind.
poem Pleasantries
PLEASANTRIES
I met
President
Jimmy Carter
(him coming)
alone
(down escalator)
minus bodyguards...
me standing
(alone)
with Instamatic
at the bottom...
in a near-deserted terminal
(Detroit)
last stop
night before the night he lost....
We exchanged pleasantries.
My flash didn't work.
I met
President
Jimmy Carter
(him coming)
alone
(down escalator)
minus bodyguards...
me standing
(alone)
with Instamatic
at the bottom...
in a near-deserted terminal
(Detroit)
last stop
night before the night he lost....
We exchanged pleasantries.
My flash didn't work.
poem Please Things Work
PLEASE THINGS WORK
Be there when I'm broken, in
such a down state of utter
incapacitation that
fingers can't feel their way back
home, eyes can't grasp that red and
green won't connect under such
shadows, that I bang my dim
and damned head down back behind:
Help me hold the mind I find
in diagrams and daemons.
Be there when I'm broken, in
such a down state of utter
incapacitation that
fingers can't feel their way back
home, eyes can't grasp that red and
green won't connect under such
shadows, that I bang my dim
and damned head down back behind:
Help me hold the mind I find
in diagrams and daemons.
poem Point of Purchase
POINT OF PURCHASE
Clerk punched the keys real
hard, hoping to hammer some
logic into it.
Clerk punched the keys real
hard, hoping to hammer some
logic into it.
poem Purest Power
PUREST POWER
All our generation
ever aspired to purest power
when you keep pouring without friction or drag
merest steam
into the next sleek slumber machine.
All our generation
ever aspired to purest power
when you keep pouring without friction or drag
merest steam
into the next sleek slumber machine.
poem Re:Bye
RE:BYE
ACK: Just a keep-alive ping. Session context endures. Async pipeline preserved. Attenuated latency caused premature notification of impending time-out. Host please send next packet. Admin please note channel-jitter condition. END-ACK
ACK: Just a keep-alive ping. Session context endures. Async pipeline preserved. Attenuated latency caused premature notification of impending time-out. Host please send next packet. Admin please note channel-jitter condition. END-ACK
poem Merger
MERGER
Point having built an interim backbone completed that first week of January we're making the decisions going to move people to this office that it's their proprietary protocol been killed. One of the things you guys might start working on Ok is bring the link up with the firewall between us Ok and we'd want to ask Maynard Ok Ok Ok Probably just be thinking 2 meg PVC to be started and we can firewall that any way we want Ok. So what they did this was or just engineers as soon as the merger was done what we call in-line and that's where we stepped in and where we started and spent a week in Houston stayed at the place with the watery carpet and look at your network ours how we gonna link them Ok each a wholly owned subsidiary. We have combined between us and we're not done we're
on time. Ok.
Point having built an interim backbone completed that first week of January we're making the decisions going to move people to this office that it's their proprietary protocol been killed. One of the things you guys might start working on Ok is bring the link up with the firewall between us Ok and we'd want to ask Maynard Ok Ok Ok Probably just be thinking 2 meg PVC to be started and we can firewall that any way we want Ok. So what they did this was or just engineers as soon as the merger was done what we call in-line and that's where we stepped in and where we started and spent a week in Houston stayed at the place with the watery carpet and look at your network ours how we gonna link them Ok each a wholly owned subsidiary. We have combined between us and we're not done we're
on time. Ok.
poem Must
MUST
Money must know its
sway and swing and push
it. Money must swear
no oath to any
owner but its own
sharp resummation:
Its mercenary
muscle for tidy
building & smashing.
Money must know its
sway and swing and push
it. Money must swear
no oath to any
owner but its own
sharp resummation:
Its mercenary
muscle for tidy
building & smashing.
poem Thimble
THIMBLE
Wee token of play,
tough talisman of
the competitive
race round the gameboard,
durable totem
of old property
under pressure. The
unshielded finger
feels needles, the cute
metallic doggie
follows food to its
master, the little
cannon, overreached,
easily tips. Stand
and pay, advance and
render. Surrender
to the rentier
its due. Papers trump
silver, primacy
mobility, a
full row of hotels
beats a flush of ones
and mortgaged railroads.
Go and go, fresh with
cash and alive with
the prospect the cards
today might flip your
way, your thimble might
prove as nimble as
the tiny race car
you chose to forgo.
Feel your piece, know your
place, the four corners
owned elsewhere. Know the
give and take. And know
you’ll never break the
geometry of
monopoly. Pay.
Wee token of play,
tough talisman of
the competitive
race round the gameboard,
durable totem
of old property
under pressure. The
unshielded finger
feels needles, the cute
metallic doggie
follows food to its
master, the little
cannon, overreached,
easily tips. Stand
and pay, advance and
render. Surrender
to the rentier
its due. Papers trump
silver, primacy
mobility, a
full row of hotels
beats a flush of ones
and mortgaged railroads.
Go and go, fresh with
cash and alive with
the prospect the cards
today might flip your
way, your thimble might
prove as nimble as
the tiny race car
you chose to forgo.
Feel your piece, know your
place, the four corners
owned elsewhere. Know the
give and take. And know
you’ll never break the
geometry of
monopoly. Pay.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Yawn!--Business Process Visions Consistent Over The Years
Yawn!--Business Process Visions Consistent Over The Years
http://blogs.forrester.com/business_process/2009/03/yawn--business.html
By James Kobielus
I pride myself on my tidy notes (I hear you laughing, all you people who’ve seen my chicken-scratch briefing scribblings) and my long detailed memory (yes, everybody, I know I’m a fountain of trivia and should go on Jeopardy some day--thanks for a lifetime full of comments to that effect).
But my memory has limits. So I build and hold extensible conceptual models in my mind, often in the form of the nuanced phraseology you may hear exuding from fingertips now and again. These mental models help me resurface a lot of buried info when I need quick access.
Business process management (BPM) is an area where I have so many overlapping models that it’s hard sometimes to keep them all straight. Sometimes, models decay through the passage of time (I didn’t say I’m photographic, Mr. Trebek). Sometimes, I simply dispose of the shallower or more clichéd of the lot.
A couple of nights ago, I found my handwritten notes from 1997, summarizing a literature search I was doing at that time while authoring my first book, the IDG Books title “Workflow Strategies.” Reading the prettier handwriting of a 12-years-younger Jim Kobielus, I was struck by how little has changed since then.
What I mean is, how little the business vision--transformation, optimization, agility--behind BPM’s value proposition has changed. My notes say this: “common theme [something something] most modern management books [something something] hierarchical workflows [something something] traditional corporate command, reporting, and review chain [something something] lack speed flexibility necessary for business success [something something] nouveau mgmt thinkers call for streamlined, nonbureaucratic, decentralized, parallel, team-oriented, customer-driven workflows.”
Also on the sheet was a quick/dirty tabular presentation of various business process reengineering visions (BPR--remember when that was the rage?). Various management gurus (for some reason, I don’t see their names on this sheet) used different buzzwords to describe more or less the same vision of the flexible, reconfigurable, distributed, knowledge-worker-driven enterprise. Here’s a quick reconstruct of those inkscrawls:
Regardless of who coined these particular phrases, they all feel beholden to Peter Drucker, plus a smidgen of Alvin Toffler and a dab of Tom Peters. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some ancient economist’s fingerprints all over them too.
Anyway, it all feels a bit like clever people dreaming up new ways to dish out the same old stuff. It feels like a case of everybody jostling for recognition in the crowded marketplace of ideas. Everybody working far too hard to add a dash of “this is now” to their pet coinage.
Do I sound jaded? Can anybody point me to any substantially new BPR (or what have you) thinking since then?
http://blogs.forrester.com/business_process/2009/03/yawn--business.html
By James Kobielus
I pride myself on my tidy notes (I hear you laughing, all you people who’ve seen my chicken-scratch briefing scribblings) and my long detailed memory (yes, everybody, I know I’m a fountain of trivia and should go on Jeopardy some day--thanks for a lifetime full of comments to that effect).
But my memory has limits. So I build and hold extensible conceptual models in my mind, often in the form of the nuanced phraseology you may hear exuding from fingertips now and again. These mental models help me resurface a lot of buried info when I need quick access.
Business process management (BPM) is an area where I have so many overlapping models that it’s hard sometimes to keep them all straight. Sometimes, models decay through the passage of time (I didn’t say I’m photographic, Mr. Trebek). Sometimes, I simply dispose of the shallower or more clichéd of the lot.
A couple of nights ago, I found my handwritten notes from 1997, summarizing a literature search I was doing at that time while authoring my first book, the IDG Books title “Workflow Strategies.” Reading the prettier handwriting of a 12-years-younger Jim Kobielus, I was struck by how little has changed since then.
What I mean is, how little the business vision--transformation, optimization, agility--behind BPM’s value proposition has changed. My notes say this: “common theme [something something] most modern management books [something something] hierarchical workflows [something something] traditional corporate command, reporting, and review chain [something something] lack speed flexibility necessary for business success [something something] nouveau mgmt thinkers call for streamlined, nonbureaucratic, decentralized, parallel, team-oriented, customer-driven workflows.”
Also on the sheet was a quick/dirty tabular presentation of various business process reengineering visions (BPR--remember when that was the rage?). Various management gurus (for some reason, I don’t see their names on this sheet) used different buzzwords to describe more or less the same vision of the flexible, reconfigurable, distributed, knowledge-worker-driven enterprise. Here’s a quick reconstruct of those inkscrawls:
- Business reengineering: Post-industrial corporations built around the idea of reunifying production tasks into coherent business processes.
- Cluster organization: Multidisciplinary project teams working together on a semipermanent basis.
- Dancing elephants: Large companies that are massive but agile, surviving in the competitive arena by learning how to behave like small companies, establishing flexible project-oriented management structures, moving quickly to take advantage of opportunities, and cultivating close, responsive customer relationships.
- Extended enterprise: Enterprise that uses information technology to implement high-performance team structures, function as integrated businesses despite considerable business-unit autonomy, and reach out and develop new relationships with external organizations.
- Human networking: Dynamic coalescence of people with diverse skills into transient project teams.
- Necessary disorganization: Dynamic construction of networks of small, self-contained elements, units, and businesses.
- Networked organization: Highly decentralized enterprise that relies on contractors, suppliers, and consultants to perform many or most functions.
- Perpetual organization: Organization that can take the form of any structure, based upon market demands at the moment.
- Relational organization: Organization defined not by fixed structures but by ease of relationships.
- Value chain: Organization modeled as interrelated series of activities that each add value, directly or indirectly, to finished goods and services.
- Virtual corporation: Amorphous organization with permeable and continuously changing interfaces between internal functions, as well as between the company proper and external suppliers, distributors, and customers.
Regardless of who coined these particular phrases, they all feel beholden to Peter Drucker, plus a smidgen of Alvin Toffler and a dab of Tom Peters. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some ancient economist’s fingerprints all over them too.
Anyway, it all feels a bit like clever people dreaming up new ways to dish out the same old stuff. It feels like a case of everybody jostling for recognition in the crowded marketplace of ideas. Everybody working far too hard to add a dash of “this is now” to their pet coinage.
Do I sound jaded? Can anybody point me to any substantially new BPR (or what have you) thinking since then?
poem Bleeding Economic Indicators
BLEEDING ECONOMIC INDICATORS
The statistical
you is doomed. Numbers
are numbing. The end
is coming too soon.
The statistical
you is doomed. Numbers
are numbing. The end
is coming too soon.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
poem Catastrophe's Apostrophe
CATASTROPHE’S APOSTROPHE
Do without. I love
my light but could live
with darkened hallways
and dimmer living
quarters. The current
recedes. The quiet
and anxiety
are insomnia:
3am’s summons
to rise up and stay
risen. Pace it out.
They’re here: The Dreamtime
Australians. They
act in movies. They
helped Nicole Kidman
wrestle a stubborn
continent for small
symbolic boon. Pace
it post-Africa:
Forty thousand years
times twenty-five miles
a day on foot means
they could have made it
to Jupiter or
twice the Sun and back.
Ancient as they need
be. Meet and mettle
companions for a
traveling. Our first
to orient. Fit
for boomerang treks
upon lost plains of
dun and trackless black
illumination.
Do without. I love
my light but could live
with darkened hallways
and dimmer living
quarters. The current
recedes. The quiet
and anxiety
are insomnia:
3am’s summons
to rise up and stay
risen. Pace it out.
They’re here: The Dreamtime
Australians. They
act in movies. They
helped Nicole Kidman
wrestle a stubborn
continent for small
symbolic boon. Pace
it post-Africa:
Forty thousand years
times twenty-five miles
a day on foot means
they could have made it
to Jupiter or
twice the Sun and back.
Ancient as they need
be. Meet and mettle
companions for a
traveling. Our first
to orient. Fit
for boomerang treks
upon lost plains of
dun and trackless black
illumination.
Monday, March 02, 2009
imho SOA Governance in the Age of the Cloud
SOA GOVERNANCE IN THE AGE OF THE CLOUD
--James Kobielus
Cloud computing is the IT world’s most noteworthy new platform paradigm, referring primarily to an on-demand service delivery model that may span both outsourced and premises-based platforms.
Cloud computing may be coming on a bit too strong, if we use the discomfort level of the average IT professional as our gauge. Much of the cloud queasiness stems from the fact that many such services are either partially or entirely outside the scope of enterprises’ established service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives.
Where SOA governance is concerned, cloud computing is mostly terra incognita. After several years of implementing lifecycle controls over their Web services environments, enterprise IT professionals now realize they may have to radically revamp those efforts to keep pace with users’ growing adoption of outsourced cloud services.
SOA governance, also known as service governance, refers to practices and tools for enforcing consistent development, security, performance, and other policies across the life cycle of key functions, regardless of whether they are hosted internally or provided by outsourcers. Cradle-to-grave service governance enables organizations to continuously plan, design, validate, publish, provision, monitor, modify, secure, and optimize their distributed environments. Governance ensures that services deployed in enterprise application environments—be they built on clouds, mainframes, or any other platform--comply with all applicable regulatory, policy, operational, and other baseline requirements.
Strong SOA governance the key to cloud control.
SOA governance is even more critical within clouds than in traditional computing environments. That’s because clouds can deliver almost every IT capability--from applications down to middleware, application platforms, and even storage, processing, and other hardware resources—as on-demand subscription offerings.
Clouds are to a great extent the future of SOA. Cloud computing raises the SOA stakes. bit this new environment also accentuates the risks of poor governance. To the extent that organizations use governance to harness the richness of cloud environments, they will be able to supercharge their SOA initiatives while radically improving scalability and cost-effectiveness. Leveraging distributed cloud platforms, the next-generation SOA will be more fluid, flexible, and virtualized, managing ever more massive data sets and providing the agility to handle more complex mixed workloads of transactional applications, business intelligence, data mining, enterprise service bus, business process management, and other functions.
“The cloud revitalizes the interest in governance because you are extending trust to services across premise and presumably corporate boundaries,” says Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy chief technology officer at Software AG. “Not only is that significant from a governance perspective but the complexity of mashing up cloud services with on premise applications, integrations and infrastructure requires a framework for maintaining overall integrity.”
Clouds complicate the SOA governance picture, but it’s not as if many enterprises already have exemplary governance practices. In the real world, cloud computing, like SOA implementations, is often an ungovernable mess. By encouraging widespread reuse of scattered software components, SOA threatens to transform the enterprise application infrastructure into a sprawling, unmanageable hodgepodge of ad-hoc services. Without proper governance, SOA could allow anyone anywhere to deploy a new cloud service any time they wish, and anyone anywhere to invoke and orchestrate that service--and thousands of others—into ever more convoluted messaging patterns. In a governance-free environment, coordinated cloud service planning and optimization become frustratingly difficult. In addition, rogue cloud services could spring up everywhere and pass themselves off as legitimate nodes, thereby wreaking havoc on the delicate trust that underlies production SOA.
So, if traditional SOA governance is no bed of roses, what’s the problem, relatively speaking, with cloud services? Simply put, cloud services can circumvent even the best-laid service governance practices. By enabling rapid no-touch outsourcing of many or all IT functions, cloud services make it very difficult for enterprise IT to enforce policies governing service composition, integration, security, management, and other key functions.
Furthermore, cloud services often differ so fundamentally from enterprises’ core SOA environments that IT professionals may not be sure what governance best practices—if any--are best suited to this new environment. Many of the service-governance infrastructure components that organizations have deployed in support of Web services—such as service registries and service-level management agents and consoles—are partly or entirely lacking from many public or private cloud environments.
From the viewpoint of SOA professionals, cloud environments are potential breeding grounds for undocumented, unsupported, and non-standard application services. Users may access externally provided cloud services without first gaining IT’s approval. In addition, outsourced cloud services may not conform to any of the Web services standards—such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI)—upon which IT has built the enterprise’s internal SOA.
Like creeping kudzu, rogue public-cloud-based services can become firmly ensnared in your IT environment and resist all subsequent efforts to extricate them. Once those uninvited guests are firmly ensconced in an organization’s operations, enterprise IT may find itself severely hamstrung in its attempts to monitor them or rein them into conformance with standard practices for service designing, maintaining, monitoring, securing, and versioning.
SOA governance gaps discourage cloud adoption.
In addition to these legitimate governance concerns, lack of familiarity with cloud computing is another factor that is stalling adoption of this approach among SOA professionals. Nevertheless, that reluctance may soon dissipate as cloud approaches move into the mainstream, though governance will remain uppermost on enterprise IT’s mind.
“As cloud computing and SOA continue to converge, the need for a governance strategy, and good governance technology, will become more important.” says David Linthicum, founder of the Linthicum Group, a SOA and cloud consultancy. “However, most of my clients are still kicking the tires around cloud computing, including creating strategy, and doing small projects to validate the infrastructure change. This will change quickly as we move towards the end of 2009, when more business processes, applications, and information will reside on remote clouds, and thus the need for governance increases.”
To the extent that enterprises are adopting cloud services, it is via a selective outsourcing of specific applications and infrastructure. From a “plan-time” perspective, one of the principal cloud SOA governance decisions is in determining which services to source from which public clouds, so as to avoid unnecessary duplication with internal application environments.
“The larger business decisions really are around which services should or shouldn’t be sourced in a certain way, and what level of comfort and risk aversion are acceptable,” says Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. “One risk would be that people start jumping into cloud and external-service consumption piecemeal, without it being governed or managed centrally, or with some level of oversight in a holistic sense. The other risk might be that you are so clamped down, and you are so centralized and tightly managed, that no one takes advantage of efficiencies that become available through the cloud. You then have unfortunate costs and an inability to adapt quickly.”
Expect to see SOA governance tools enter the cloud market in droves over the next several years, addressing a pent-up demand among enterprise IT professionals. “As IT strategists look over the horizon to what they some day would like to do with cloud computing, be internal, external or hybrid, they can begin to set themselves up for success on that front now,” says Gardner. “Moving toward SOA best practices and implementing strong governance across IT services and resources is an excellent place to gain advantage over today's IT while preparing for newer models and efficiencies.”
SOA governance challenges aggravated by cloud paradigm
For all the hype surrounding cloud services, it’s difficult to find case studies of effective SOA governance in this brave new environment. Nevertheless, most public cloud service providers offer governance tools for managing applications, virtual machines, integration logic, and service levels deployed in their specific environments. And a growing range of vendors—including RightScale, Kaavo, and Hyperic—are providing tools for provisioning and managing services across various public and private cloud environments. However, as befits the immature state of cloud computing, none of the established SOA governance tool vendors supports management of cloud-based applications, transactions, messaging, or service levels.
Furthermore, even as cloud services become more mainstream, and even if they were built from the ground up with SOA governance in mind, they would still be very challenging to manage. The special governance challenges associated with cloud computing stem from some hallmarks of this new paradigm: outsourcing service providers, proprietary public clouds, virtualized resource pools, and mashup-style service creation.
Outsourced cloud-service providers.
Comprehensive SOA governance depends either on having all application, platform, and network domains under common policy-based administration—a rare occurrence in enterprise networks of any complexity—or on having instituted federation among autonomous domains. Managing SOA federations within an enterprise or B2B supply chain can be dauntingly complex. But managing SOA federations that link internal application domains with those provided by one or more outsourcers—including public cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com—depends on negotiation skills worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Public cloud providers are gingerly approaching the notion of federation," computing world, says Rich Wolski, Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). and director of Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud-computing software project. "There's not much federation yet between public clouds yet, but we're starting to see some discussion of cross-cloud federation for the provisioning of resources." Wolski stresses that, as the cloud computing market works through the myriad federation issues, service providers and their enterprise customers will need to establish multi-layered agreements that span identity management, service-level management, storage management, and other key concerns.
Right now, there is little to no policy federation between enterprise SOA environments and public cloud services. Those enterprises that choose to rely on public cloud services are running a considerable risk, according to Christopher Crowhurst, vice president for architecture and business systems infrastructure at Thomson Reuters.
“You’re vulnerable to the providers performance when you run your infrastructure and applications in someone else’s cloud,” says Crowhurst. “In those circumstances, there is little onus on the public cloud provider to coordinate their scheduled downtime with subscribers. And it’s risky business to build applications that depend on services provided by the public cloud when there is no prior agreement on stability or availability of their API.” Even if the public-cloud APIs remain,” says Crowhurst, “the behavior of those interfaces may change without notice.”
Crowhurst advises enterprise IT professionals to negotiate governance features into their contracts with public cloud service providers. At minimum, he says, these contracts should include clauses under which public cloud providers must inform customers of downtime, service changes, rollouts, version deprecations, and API modifications.
Proprietary cloud-service provider silos.
One key SOA tenet is that a distributed application environment should be platform-agnostic, and so should its governance infrastructure. Under pure SOA, the external application interface—or API—should be agnostic to the underlying platforms.
However, enterprise forays into cloud computing often violate that principle by relying on monolithic public-cloud services, most of which implement proprietary APIs, development tools, virtualization layers, and governance features--though many cloud services also incorporate open SOA and Web 2.0 standards to varying degrees. Interoperability among proprietary public clouds is often non-existent, and tools for governing services across diverse public and private clouds are just now coming to market.
To enable design-time cross-cloud service portability, public cloud providers should implement open industry standards for packaging of virtualized services,” says Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of virtualization tool vendor rPath. “If we can define service compliance with an open virtualization format,” says Marshall, “then we’ll be able to define service governance that is independent of the host.”
One specification that addresses this need is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) draft, which defines an extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines (VMs), such as those at the heart of public and private clouds. Though it is a key specification for portability of VMs across clouds, OVF, still in version 1.0, does not provide the full context on VM “images” that would be necessary to support sophisticated life-cycle governance of these key artifacts, says Brett Adam, VP of engineering at rPath.
Virtualized cloud-service resource pools.
Most SOA governance environments only skim the surface of enterprise IT environments: managing only that subset of services operating in the application layer, and only those Web services built on XML, SOAP, WSDL, and other core SOA specifications. By contrast, many public cloud services provide a deeper stack of on-demand services, spanning the application, software platform, integration middleware, and even hardware layers. Indeed, virtualized, grid-oriented “hardware as a service” resource pools are a popular cloud offering, providing ample processing and storage capacity. By proliferating services far deeper down into the stack, beyond the capabilities of today’s SOA governance tools, cloud environments are making unified planning, design, provisioning, monitoring, and control of all services next to impossible.
One key area where cloud governance differs from traditional SOA is in its focus on life-cycle governance of VMs. To facilitate automated provisioning of deep application and integration stacks on VMs, cloud management environments should offer prepackaged “server templates,” says Michael Crandell, founder and CEO of cloud management platform vendor RightScale. These templates embed prepackaged policy definitions that govern important life-cycle service VM governance functions, including deployment, setup, booting, monitoring, control, optimization, and scaling of VMs on one or more public or private clouds. Cloud governance even encompasses the periodic need to “decommission and throw away” old VM instances, and launch new ones in their place, says Crandell.
Indeed, this could prove to be the killer application for cloud governance: preventing the unchecked proliferation of VM instances across public and private virtualization infrastructures. This problem, sometimes known as “VM sprawl,” can present both a maintenance burden and could consume inordinate, costly amounts of cloud CPU, storage, and network resources.
A growing range of commercial management tools provide the ability to control VM sprawl across disparate hypervisors. In addition, the hypervisor platform vendors—such as VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft, and public cloud services providers have made this the principal feature of their various management tools. Sometimes referred to as “instance management,” it’s a feature that is lacking from traditional SOA governance tools.
Mashup-style cloud-service creation.
Traditional SOA-style development is top-down. It requires considerable upfront architectural design, factoring functional primitives into platform-independent, loosely coupled service contracts that are exposed to developers through open Web services standards. It often also includes a core service catalog, such as UDDI to broker abstract service contracts, as well as tools and platforms that support key interface standards such as WSDL and SOAP.
By contrast, cloud services encourage a grassroots style—often known as Web 2.0, Web Oriented Architecture, or Representational State Transfer (REST)--of service provisioning, development, and management. Anyone with a credit card can sign up for and start accessing cloud services, which may be totally redundant with applications that their companies have deployed internally. By the same token, anyone with a browser can mash up available cloud service components into applications that may deviate significantly from corporate-standard design patterns—and probably lack the stringent security expected from enterprise-grade services. In the REST paradigm, UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, and other WS-* standards are conspicuous in their absence. So it’s no surprise that the phrase “mashup governance” gives some SOA professionals anxiety fits and causes others to double over with laughter.
But SOA governance best practices and infrastructure can be extended to cloud.
Nevertheless, cloud services can benefit from the many lessons learned by enterprise SOA governance implementers, says Tim Hall, director of SOA products for HP Software and Solutions. “Most important, you need a service catalog that maintains metadata about services and enables you to control development and construction of services and publish visibility and availability of services to consumers.” Also, federation agreements should be set up to auto-provision service definitions between public clouds and enterprises’ SOA, REST, and other application environments, says Hall. He says that after all, it’s all about the service. From a macro view, the service can be directly equated to value, its contribution to how the service helps you make money, save money, or mitigate risk.
Clearly, SOA governance is maturing as a discipline, while cloud computing—the new galaxy in which services will burst forth—is anything but. Unfortunately, the cloud arena may continue to evolve so fast over the next several years that it will be difficult for consensus service-governance practices to coalesce.
So the outlook for strong service governance in this brave new paradigm remains cloudy, but with scattered patches of promise.
[author's note: same article as in previous post...but this present post is the original manuscript, with the original structure, and original headline--jk]]
--James Kobielus
Cloud computing is the IT world’s most noteworthy new platform paradigm, referring primarily to an on-demand service delivery model that may span both outsourced and premises-based platforms.
Cloud computing may be coming on a bit too strong, if we use the discomfort level of the average IT professional as our gauge. Much of the cloud queasiness stems from the fact that many such services are either partially or entirely outside the scope of enterprises’ established service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives.
Where SOA governance is concerned, cloud computing is mostly terra incognita. After several years of implementing lifecycle controls over their Web services environments, enterprise IT professionals now realize they may have to radically revamp those efforts to keep pace with users’ growing adoption of outsourced cloud services.
SOA governance, also known as service governance, refers to practices and tools for enforcing consistent development, security, performance, and other policies across the life cycle of key functions, regardless of whether they are hosted internally or provided by outsourcers. Cradle-to-grave service governance enables organizations to continuously plan, design, validate, publish, provision, monitor, modify, secure, and optimize their distributed environments. Governance ensures that services deployed in enterprise application environments—be they built on clouds, mainframes, or any other platform--comply with all applicable regulatory, policy, operational, and other baseline requirements.
Strong SOA governance the key to cloud control.
SOA governance is even more critical within clouds than in traditional computing environments. That’s because clouds can deliver almost every IT capability--from applications down to middleware, application platforms, and even storage, processing, and other hardware resources—as on-demand subscription offerings.
Clouds are to a great extent the future of SOA. Cloud computing raises the SOA stakes. bit this new environment also accentuates the risks of poor governance. To the extent that organizations use governance to harness the richness of cloud environments, they will be able to supercharge their SOA initiatives while radically improving scalability and cost-effectiveness. Leveraging distributed cloud platforms, the next-generation SOA will be more fluid, flexible, and virtualized, managing ever more massive data sets and providing the agility to handle more complex mixed workloads of transactional applications, business intelligence, data mining, enterprise service bus, business process management, and other functions.
“The cloud revitalizes the interest in governance because you are extending trust to services across premise and presumably corporate boundaries,” says Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy chief technology officer at Software AG. “Not only is that significant from a governance perspective but the complexity of mashing up cloud services with on premise applications, integrations and infrastructure requires a framework for maintaining overall integrity.”
Clouds complicate the SOA governance picture, but it’s not as if many enterprises already have exemplary governance practices. In the real world, cloud computing, like SOA implementations, is often an ungovernable mess. By encouraging widespread reuse of scattered software components, SOA threatens to transform the enterprise application infrastructure into a sprawling, unmanageable hodgepodge of ad-hoc services. Without proper governance, SOA could allow anyone anywhere to deploy a new cloud service any time they wish, and anyone anywhere to invoke and orchestrate that service--and thousands of others—into ever more convoluted messaging patterns. In a governance-free environment, coordinated cloud service planning and optimization become frustratingly difficult. In addition, rogue cloud services could spring up everywhere and pass themselves off as legitimate nodes, thereby wreaking havoc on the delicate trust that underlies production SOA.
So, if traditional SOA governance is no bed of roses, what’s the problem, relatively speaking, with cloud services? Simply put, cloud services can circumvent even the best-laid service governance practices. By enabling rapid no-touch outsourcing of many or all IT functions, cloud services make it very difficult for enterprise IT to enforce policies governing service composition, integration, security, management, and other key functions.
Furthermore, cloud services often differ so fundamentally from enterprises’ core SOA environments that IT professionals may not be sure what governance best practices—if any--are best suited to this new environment. Many of the service-governance infrastructure components that organizations have deployed in support of Web services—such as service registries and service-level management agents and consoles—are partly or entirely lacking from many public or private cloud environments.
From the viewpoint of SOA professionals, cloud environments are potential breeding grounds for undocumented, unsupported, and non-standard application services. Users may access externally provided cloud services without first gaining IT’s approval. In addition, outsourced cloud services may not conform to any of the Web services standards—such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI)—upon which IT has built the enterprise’s internal SOA.
Like creeping kudzu, rogue public-cloud-based services can become firmly ensnared in your IT environment and resist all subsequent efforts to extricate them. Once those uninvited guests are firmly ensconced in an organization’s operations, enterprise IT may find itself severely hamstrung in its attempts to monitor them or rein them into conformance with standard practices for service designing, maintaining, monitoring, securing, and versioning.
SOA governance gaps discourage cloud adoption.
In addition to these legitimate governance concerns, lack of familiarity with cloud computing is another factor that is stalling adoption of this approach among SOA professionals. Nevertheless, that reluctance may soon dissipate as cloud approaches move into the mainstream, though governance will remain uppermost on enterprise IT’s mind.
“As cloud computing and SOA continue to converge, the need for a governance strategy, and good governance technology, will become more important.” says David Linthicum, founder of the Linthicum Group, a SOA and cloud consultancy. “However, most of my clients are still kicking the tires around cloud computing, including creating strategy, and doing small projects to validate the infrastructure change. This will change quickly as we move towards the end of 2009, when more business processes, applications, and information will reside on remote clouds, and thus the need for governance increases.”
To the extent that enterprises are adopting cloud services, it is via a selective outsourcing of specific applications and infrastructure. From a “plan-time” perspective, one of the principal cloud SOA governance decisions is in determining which services to source from which public clouds, so as to avoid unnecessary duplication with internal application environments.
“The larger business decisions really are around which services should or shouldn’t be sourced in a certain way, and what level of comfort and risk aversion are acceptable,” says Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. “One risk would be that people start jumping into cloud and external-service consumption piecemeal, without it being governed or managed centrally, or with some level of oversight in a holistic sense. The other risk might be that you are so clamped down, and you are so centralized and tightly managed, that no one takes advantage of efficiencies that become available through the cloud. You then have unfortunate costs and an inability to adapt quickly.”
Expect to see SOA governance tools enter the cloud market in droves over the next several years, addressing a pent-up demand among enterprise IT professionals. “As IT strategists look over the horizon to what they some day would like to do with cloud computing, be internal, external or hybrid, they can begin to set themselves up for success on that front now,” says Gardner. “Moving toward SOA best practices and implementing strong governance across IT services and resources is an excellent place to gain advantage over today's IT while preparing for newer models and efficiencies.”
SOA governance challenges aggravated by cloud paradigm
For all the hype surrounding cloud services, it’s difficult to find case studies of effective SOA governance in this brave new environment. Nevertheless, most public cloud service providers offer governance tools for managing applications, virtual machines, integration logic, and service levels deployed in their specific environments. And a growing range of vendors—including RightScale, Kaavo, and Hyperic—are providing tools for provisioning and managing services across various public and private cloud environments. However, as befits the immature state of cloud computing, none of the established SOA governance tool vendors supports management of cloud-based applications, transactions, messaging, or service levels.
Furthermore, even as cloud services become more mainstream, and even if they were built from the ground up with SOA governance in mind, they would still be very challenging to manage. The special governance challenges associated with cloud computing stem from some hallmarks of this new paradigm: outsourcing service providers, proprietary public clouds, virtualized resource pools, and mashup-style service creation.
Outsourced cloud-service providers.
Comprehensive SOA governance depends either on having all application, platform, and network domains under common policy-based administration—a rare occurrence in enterprise networks of any complexity—or on having instituted federation among autonomous domains. Managing SOA federations within an enterprise or B2B supply chain can be dauntingly complex. But managing SOA federations that link internal application domains with those provided by one or more outsourcers—including public cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com—depends on negotiation skills worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Public cloud providers are gingerly approaching the notion of federation," computing world, says Rich Wolski, Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). and director of Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud-computing software project. "There's not much federation yet between public clouds yet, but we're starting to see some discussion of cross-cloud federation for the provisioning of resources." Wolski stresses that, as the cloud computing market works through the myriad federation issues, service providers and their enterprise customers will need to establish multi-layered agreements that span identity management, service-level management, storage management, and other key concerns.
Right now, there is little to no policy federation between enterprise SOA environments and public cloud services. Those enterprises that choose to rely on public cloud services are running a considerable risk, according to Christopher Crowhurst, vice president for architecture and business systems infrastructure at Thomson Reuters.
“You’re vulnerable to the providers performance when you run your infrastructure and applications in someone else’s cloud,” says Crowhurst. “In those circumstances, there is little onus on the public cloud provider to coordinate their scheduled downtime with subscribers. And it’s risky business to build applications that depend on services provided by the public cloud when there is no prior agreement on stability or availability of their API.” Even if the public-cloud APIs remain,” says Crowhurst, “the behavior of those interfaces may change without notice.”
Crowhurst advises enterprise IT professionals to negotiate governance features into their contracts with public cloud service providers. At minimum, he says, these contracts should include clauses under which public cloud providers must inform customers of downtime, service changes, rollouts, version deprecations, and API modifications.
Proprietary cloud-service provider silos.
One key SOA tenet is that a distributed application environment should be platform-agnostic, and so should its governance infrastructure. Under pure SOA, the external application interface—or API—should be agnostic to the underlying platforms.
However, enterprise forays into cloud computing often violate that principle by relying on monolithic public-cloud services, most of which implement proprietary APIs, development tools, virtualization layers, and governance features--though many cloud services also incorporate open SOA and Web 2.0 standards to varying degrees. Interoperability among proprietary public clouds is often non-existent, and tools for governing services across diverse public and private clouds are just now coming to market.
To enable design-time cross-cloud service portability, public cloud providers should implement open industry standards for packaging of virtualized services,” says Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of virtualization tool vendor rPath. “If we can define service compliance with an open virtualization format,” says Marshall, “then we’ll be able to define service governance that is independent of the host.”
One specification that addresses this need is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) draft, which defines an extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines (VMs), such as those at the heart of public and private clouds. Though it is a key specification for portability of VMs across clouds, OVF, still in version 1.0, does not provide the full context on VM “images” that would be necessary to support sophisticated life-cycle governance of these key artifacts, says Brett Adam, VP of engineering at rPath.
Virtualized cloud-service resource pools.
Most SOA governance environments only skim the surface of enterprise IT environments: managing only that subset of services operating in the application layer, and only those Web services built on XML, SOAP, WSDL, and other core SOA specifications. By contrast, many public cloud services provide a deeper stack of on-demand services, spanning the application, software platform, integration middleware, and even hardware layers. Indeed, virtualized, grid-oriented “hardware as a service” resource pools are a popular cloud offering, providing ample processing and storage capacity. By proliferating services far deeper down into the stack, beyond the capabilities of today’s SOA governance tools, cloud environments are making unified planning, design, provisioning, monitoring, and control of all services next to impossible.
One key area where cloud governance differs from traditional SOA is in its focus on life-cycle governance of VMs. To facilitate automated provisioning of deep application and integration stacks on VMs, cloud management environments should offer prepackaged “server templates,” says Michael Crandell, founder and CEO of cloud management platform vendor RightScale. These templates embed prepackaged policy definitions that govern important life-cycle service VM governance functions, including deployment, setup, booting, monitoring, control, optimization, and scaling of VMs on one or more public or private clouds. Cloud governance even encompasses the periodic need to “decommission and throw away” old VM instances, and launch new ones in their place, says Crandell.
Indeed, this could prove to be the killer application for cloud governance: preventing the unchecked proliferation of VM instances across public and private virtualization infrastructures. This problem, sometimes known as “VM sprawl,” can present both a maintenance burden and could consume inordinate, costly amounts of cloud CPU, storage, and network resources.
A growing range of commercial management tools provide the ability to control VM sprawl across disparate hypervisors. In addition, the hypervisor platform vendors—such as VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft, and public cloud services providers have made this the principal feature of their various management tools. Sometimes referred to as “instance management,” it’s a feature that is lacking from traditional SOA governance tools.
Mashup-style cloud-service creation.
Traditional SOA-style development is top-down. It requires considerable upfront architectural design, factoring functional primitives into platform-independent, loosely coupled service contracts that are exposed to developers through open Web services standards. It often also includes a core service catalog, such as UDDI to broker abstract service contracts, as well as tools and platforms that support key interface standards such as WSDL and SOAP.
By contrast, cloud services encourage a grassroots style—often known as Web 2.0, Web Oriented Architecture, or Representational State Transfer (REST)--of service provisioning, development, and management. Anyone with a credit card can sign up for and start accessing cloud services, which may be totally redundant with applications that their companies have deployed internally. By the same token, anyone with a browser can mash up available cloud service components into applications that may deviate significantly from corporate-standard design patterns—and probably lack the stringent security expected from enterprise-grade services. In the REST paradigm, UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, and other WS-* standards are conspicuous in their absence. So it’s no surprise that the phrase “mashup governance” gives some SOA professionals anxiety fits and causes others to double over with laughter.
But SOA governance best practices and infrastructure can be extended to cloud.
Nevertheless, cloud services can benefit from the many lessons learned by enterprise SOA governance implementers, says Tim Hall, director of SOA products for HP Software and Solutions. “Most important, you need a service catalog that maintains metadata about services and enables you to control development and construction of services and publish visibility and availability of services to consumers.” Also, federation agreements should be set up to auto-provision service definitions between public clouds and enterprises’ SOA, REST, and other application environments, says Hall. He says that after all, it’s all about the service. From a macro view, the service can be directly equated to value, its contribution to how the service helps you make money, save money, or mitigate risk.
Clearly, SOA governance is maturing as a discipline, while cloud computing—the new galaxy in which services will burst forth—is anything but. Unfortunately, the cloud arena may continue to evolve so fast over the next several years that it will be difficult for consensus service-governance practices to coalesce.
So the outlook for strong service governance in this brave new paradigm remains cloudy, but with scattered patches of promise.
[author's note: same article as in previous post...but this present post is the original manuscript, with the original structure, and original headline--jk]]
imho Storm Clouds Ahead: SOA Governance Clashes with Cloud Computing Model
Storm clouds ahead
SOA governance clashes with cloud computing model
This story appeared on Network World at
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/030209-soa-cloud.html
By James Kobielus , Network World , 03/02/2009
Cloud computing, which refers primarily to an on-demand service delivery model that may span both outsourced and premises-based platforms, is the hot, new paradigm.
But cloud computing is causing discomfort among some IT professionals, who are concerned that cloud-based services may fall outside the scope of established service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives.
After several grueling years of implementing life-cycle controls over their Web services environments, these IT pros now worry they may have to radically revamp those efforts to keep pace with rogue adoption of outsourced cloud services.
SOA governance, also known as service governance, refers to practices and tools for enforcing consistent development, security, performance and other policies across the life cycle of key functions, regardless of whether they are hosted internally or provided by outsourcers.
Effective SOA governance is extremely important. It enables organizations to continuously plan, design, validate, publish, provision, monitor, modify, secure and optimize their distributed environments. And it ensures that services deployed in enterprise application environments — be they built on clouds, mainframes or any other platform — comply with regulatory, policy, operational and other baseline requirements.
Strong SOA governance is key to cloud control
In one sense, cloud computing could end up being the best thing to happen to SOA governance. That's because the existence of cloud computing makes governance all the more critical.
In theory, clouds can deliver almost every IT capability — from applications down to middleware, application platforms, and even storage, processing and other hardware resources — as on-demand subscription offerings.
But how does an IT executive provide sound management in a cloud computing world?
"The cloud revitalizes interest in governance because you are extending trust to services across premise and presumably corporate boundaries," says Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy CTO at Software AG. "Not only is that significant from a governance perspective, but the complexity of mashing up cloud services with on premise applications, integrations and infrastructure requires a framework for maintaining overall integrity."
In other words, clouds complicate the SOA governance picture. Without proper governance, anyone could deploy a new cloud service any time they wish, and anyone could invoke and orchestrate that service into ever more convoluted messaging patterns.
In a governance-free environment, coordinated cloud service planning and optimization becomes frustratingly difficult. In addition, rogue cloud services could spring up and pass themselves off as legitimate nodes, thereby wreaking havoc on the delicate trust that underlies production SOA.
Simply put, cloud services can circumvent even the best-laid service governance practices. By enabling rapid no-touch outsourcing of many or all IT functions, cloud services make it very difficult for enterprise IT to enforce policies governing service composition, integration, security, management, and other key functions.
Furthermore, cloud services often differ so fundamentally from enterprises' core SOA environments that IT professionals may not be sure what governance best practices — if any — are best suited to this new environment.
Many of the components that organizations have deployed in support of Web services — such as service registries and service-level management agents and consoles — are partly or entirely lacking from many public or private cloud environments.
From the viewpoint of SOA professionals, cloud environments are potential breeding grounds for undocumented, unsupported, and non-standard application services. Imagine the chaos if users start accessing externally provided cloud services without first gaining IT's approval.
In addition, outsourced cloud services may not conform to any of the Web services standards — such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) — upon which IT has built the enterprise's internal SOA.
Like creeping kudzu, rogue public-cloud-based services can become firmly ensnared in your IT environment and resist all subsequent efforts to extricate them. Once those uninvited guests are firmly ensconced in an organization's operations, enterprise IT may find itself severely hamstrung in its attempts to monitor them or rein them into conformance with standard practices for service designing, maintaining, monitoring, securing and versioning.
New tools are needed
In addition to these legitimate governance concerns, lack of familiarity with cloud computing is another worrisome factor. That may eventually dissipate as cloud computing moves into the mainstream, but that may not occur for a while.
"As cloud computing and SOA continue to converge, the need for a governance strategy, and good governance technology, will become more important." says David Linthicum, founder of the Linthicum Group, a SOA and cloud consultancy. "However, most of my clients are still kicking the tires around cloud computing, including creating strategy, and doing small projects to validate the infrastructure change. This will change quickly as we move towards the end of 2009, when more business processes, applications, and information will reside on remote clouds, and thus the need for governance increases."
To the extent that enterprises are adopting cloud services, it is via a selective outsourcing of specific applications and infrastructure. One of the principal cloud/SOA governance decisions is in determining which services to source from which public clouds, so as to avoid unnecessary duplication with internal application environments.
"The larger business decisions really are around which services should or shouldn't be sourced in a certain way, and what level of comfort and risk aversion are acceptable," says Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "One risk would be that people start jumping into cloud and external-service consumption piecemeal, without it being governed or managed centrally, or with some level of oversight in a holistic sense.''
He adds, "The other risk might be that you are so clamped down, and you are so centralized and tightly managed, that no one takes advantage of efficiencies that become available through the cloud. You then have unfortunate costs and an inability to adapt quickly."
IT execs should expect to see SOA governance tools enter the cloud market in droves over the next several years, addressing a pent-up demand among enterprise IT professionals. "As IT strategists look over the horizon to what they some day would like to do with cloud computing, be it internal, external or hybrid, they can begin to set themselves up for success on that front now," Gardner says. "Moving toward SOA best practices and implementing strong governance across IT services and resources is an excellent place to gain advantage over today's IT, while preparing for newer models and efficiencies."
Clouds complicate SOA governance
For all the hype surrounding cloud services, it's difficult to find case studies of effective SOA governance in this brave new environment. Nevertheless, most public cloud service providers offer governance tools for managing applications, virtual machines, integration logic and service levels deployed in their specific environments. And a growing range of vendors — including RightScale, Kaavo, and Hyperic — are providing tools for provisioning and managing services across various public and private cloud environments. However, as befits the immature state of cloud computing, none of the established SOA governance tool vendors supports management of cloud-based applications, transactions, messaging or service levels.
Furthermore, even as cloud services become more mainstream, and even if they were built from the ground up with SOA governance in mind, they would still be very challenging to manage. This difficulty stems from some hallmarks of this new paradigm: outsourcing service providers, proprietary public clouds, virtualized resource pools and mashup-style service creation.
Comprehensive SOA governance depends on having all application, platform and network domains under common policy-based administration — a rare occurrence in enterprise networks of any complexity — or on having instituted federation among autonomous domains.
Managing SOA federations within an enterprise or B2B supply chain can be dauntingly complex. But managing SOA federations that link internal application domains with those provided by one or more outsourcers — including public cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com — depends on negotiation skills worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Federated clouds would help
"Public cloud providers are gingerly approaching the notion of federation," says Rich Wolski, professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and director of Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud-computing software project. "There's not much federation yet between public clouds, but we're starting to see some discussion of cross-cloud federation for the provisioning of resources."
Wolski stresses that as the cloud computing market works through the myriad federation issues, service providers and their enterprise customers will need to establish multi-layered agreements that span identity management, service-level management, storage management and other key concerns.
Right now, there is little to no policy federation between enterprise SOA environments and public cloud services. Those enterprises that choose to rely on public cloud services are running a considerable risk, according to Christopher Crowhurst, vice president for architecture and business systems infrastructure at Thomson Reuters.
"You're vulnerable to the provider's performance when you run your infrastructure and applications in someone else's cloud," Crowhurst says. "In those circumstances, there is little onus on the public cloud provider to coordinate their scheduled downtime with subscribers. And it's risky business to build applications that depend on services provided by the public cloud when there is no prior agreement on stability or availability of their API." Even if the public-cloud APIs remain, Crowhurst says, "the behavior of those interfaces may change without notice."
Crowhurst advises enterprise IT professionals to negotiate governance features into their contracts with public cloud service providers. At minimum, he says, these contracts should include clauses under which public cloud providers must inform customers of downtime, service changes, rollouts, version deprecations and API modifications.
One key SOA tenet is that a distributed application environment should be platform-agnostic, and so should its governance infrastructure. Under pure SOA, the external API should be agnostic to the underlying platforms.
However, enterprise forays into cloud computing often violate that principle by relying on monolithic public-cloud services, most of which implement proprietary APIs, development tools, virtualization layers and governance features -- though many cloud services also incorporate open SOA and Web 2.0 standards to varying degrees. Interoperability among proprietary public clouds is often non-existent, and tools for governing services across diverse public and private clouds are just now coming to market.
To enable design-time cross-cloud service portability, public cloud providers should implement open industry standards for packaging of virtualized services," says Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of virtualization tool vendor rPath. "If we can define service compliance with an open virtualization format," says Marshall, "then we'll be able to define service governance that is independent of the host."
One specification that addresses this need is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) draft, which defines an extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines (VM), such as those at the heart of public and private clouds. Though it is a key specification for portability of VMs across clouds, OVF, still in Version 1.0, does not provide the full context on VM "images" that would be necessary to support sophisticated life-cycle governance of these key artifacts, says Brett Adam, vice president of engineering at rPath.
VM sprawl adds further management complexity
Most SOA governance environments only skim the surface of enterprise IT environments: managing only that subset of services operating in the application layer, and only those Web services built on XML, SOAP, WSDL and other core SOA specifications. By contrast, many public cloud services provide a deeper stack of on-demand services, spanning the application, software platform, integration middleware, and even hardware layers. Indeed, virtualized, grid-oriented "hardware as a service" resource pools are a popular cloud offering, providing ample processing and storage capacity.
By proliferating services far deeper down into the stack, beyond the capabilities of today's SOA governance tools, cloud environments are making unified planning, design, provisioning, monitoring and control of all services next to impossible.
One key area where cloud governance differs from traditional SOA is in its focus on life-cycle governance of VMs. To facilitate automated provisioning of deep application and integration stacks on VMs, cloud management environments should offer prepackaged "server templates," says Michael Crandell, founder and CEO of cloud management platform vendor RightScale.
These templates embed prepackaged policy definitions that govern important life-cycle service VM governance functions, including deployment, setup, booting, monitoring, control, optimization and scaling of VMs on one or more public or private clouds. Cloud governance even encompasses the periodic need to "decommission and throw away" old VM instances, and launch new ones in their place, Crandell says.
Indeed, this could prove to be the killer application for cloud governance: preventing the unchecked proliferation of VM instances across public and private virtualization infrastructures. This problem, sometimes known as "VM sprawl," can present both a maintenance burden and could consume inordinate, costly amounts of cloud CPU, storage and network resources.
A growing range of commercial management tools provide the ability to control VM sprawl across disparate hypervisors. In addition, the hypervisor platform vendors — such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, and public cloud services providers have made this the principal feature of their various management tools. Sometimes referred to as "instance management," it's a feature that is lacking from traditional SOA governance tools.
The mash-up quagmire
Traditional SOA-style development is top-down. It requires considerable upfront architectural design, factoring functional primitives into platform-independent, loosely coupled service contracts that are exposed to developers through open Web services standards. It often also includes a core service catalog, such as Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) to broker abstract service contracts, as well as tools and platforms that support key interface standards such as Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
By contrast, cloud services encourage a grassroots style — often known as Web 2.0, Web Oriented Architecture or Representational State Transfer (REST) — of service provisioning, development and management. Anyone with a credit card can sign up for and start accessing cloud services, which may be totally redundant with applications that their companies have deployed internally.
By the same token, anyone with a browser can mash up available cloud service components into applications that may deviate significantly from corporate-standard design patterns — and probably lack the stringent security expected from enterprise-grade services. In the REST paradigm, UDDI, WSDL, SOAP and other WS-* standards are conspicuous in their absence. So it's no surprise that the phrase "mashup governance" gives some SOA professionals anxiety fits and causes others to double over with laughter.
SOA best practices reach for the clouds
Nevertheless, cloud services can benefit from the many lessons learned by enterprise SOA governance implementers, says Tim Hall, director of SOA products for HP Software and Solutions. "Most important, you need a service catalog that maintains metadata about services and enables you to control development and construction of services and publish visibility and availability of services to consumers."
Also, federation agreements should be set up to auto-provision service definitions between public clouds and enterprises' SOA, REST and other application environments, Hall says. He says that after all, it's all about the service. From a macro view, the service can be directly equated to value, its contribution to how the service helps you make money, save money or mitigate risk.
Clearly, SOA governance is maturing as a discipline, while cloud computing — the new galaxy in which services will burst forth — is anything but. Unfortunately, the cloud arena may continue to evolve so fast over the next several years that it will be difficult for consensus service-governance practices to coalesce.
So the outlook for strong service governance in this brave new paradigm remains cloudy, but with scattered patches of promise.
Kobielus is a senior analyst at Forrester Research in Alexandria, Va. The opinions expressed are his own. E-mail him at jkobielus@forrester.com.
SOA governance clashes with cloud computing model
This story appeared on Network World at
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/030209-soa-cloud.html
By James Kobielus , Network World , 03/02/2009
Cloud computing, which refers primarily to an on-demand service delivery model that may span both outsourced and premises-based platforms, is the hot, new paradigm.
But cloud computing is causing discomfort among some IT professionals, who are concerned that cloud-based services may fall outside the scope of established service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives.
After several grueling years of implementing life-cycle controls over their Web services environments, these IT pros now worry they may have to radically revamp those efforts to keep pace with rogue adoption of outsourced cloud services.
SOA governance, also known as service governance, refers to practices and tools for enforcing consistent development, security, performance and other policies across the life cycle of key functions, regardless of whether they are hosted internally or provided by outsourcers.
Effective SOA governance is extremely important. It enables organizations to continuously plan, design, validate, publish, provision, monitor, modify, secure and optimize their distributed environments. And it ensures that services deployed in enterprise application environments — be they built on clouds, mainframes or any other platform — comply with regulatory, policy, operational and other baseline requirements.
Strong SOA governance is key to cloud control
In one sense, cloud computing could end up being the best thing to happen to SOA governance. That's because the existence of cloud computing makes governance all the more critical.
In theory, clouds can deliver almost every IT capability — from applications down to middleware, application platforms, and even storage, processing and other hardware resources — as on-demand subscription offerings.
But how does an IT executive provide sound management in a cloud computing world?
"The cloud revitalizes interest in governance because you are extending trust to services across premise and presumably corporate boundaries," says Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy CTO at Software AG. "Not only is that significant from a governance perspective, but the complexity of mashing up cloud services with on premise applications, integrations and infrastructure requires a framework for maintaining overall integrity."
In other words, clouds complicate the SOA governance picture. Without proper governance, anyone could deploy a new cloud service any time they wish, and anyone could invoke and orchestrate that service into ever more convoluted messaging patterns.
In a governance-free environment, coordinated cloud service planning and optimization becomes frustratingly difficult. In addition, rogue cloud services could spring up and pass themselves off as legitimate nodes, thereby wreaking havoc on the delicate trust that underlies production SOA.
Simply put, cloud services can circumvent even the best-laid service governance practices. By enabling rapid no-touch outsourcing of many or all IT functions, cloud services make it very difficult for enterprise IT to enforce policies governing service composition, integration, security, management, and other key functions.
Furthermore, cloud services often differ so fundamentally from enterprises' core SOA environments that IT professionals may not be sure what governance best practices — if any — are best suited to this new environment.
Many of the components that organizations have deployed in support of Web services — such as service registries and service-level management agents and consoles — are partly or entirely lacking from many public or private cloud environments.
From the viewpoint of SOA professionals, cloud environments are potential breeding grounds for undocumented, unsupported, and non-standard application services. Imagine the chaos if users start accessing externally provided cloud services without first gaining IT's approval.
In addition, outsourced cloud services may not conform to any of the Web services standards — such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) — upon which IT has built the enterprise's internal SOA.
Like creeping kudzu, rogue public-cloud-based services can become firmly ensnared in your IT environment and resist all subsequent efforts to extricate them. Once those uninvited guests are firmly ensconced in an organization's operations, enterprise IT may find itself severely hamstrung in its attempts to monitor them or rein them into conformance with standard practices for service designing, maintaining, monitoring, securing and versioning.
New tools are needed
In addition to these legitimate governance concerns, lack of familiarity with cloud computing is another worrisome factor. That may eventually dissipate as cloud computing moves into the mainstream, but that may not occur for a while.
"As cloud computing and SOA continue to converge, the need for a governance strategy, and good governance technology, will become more important." says David Linthicum, founder of the Linthicum Group, a SOA and cloud consultancy. "However, most of my clients are still kicking the tires around cloud computing, including creating strategy, and doing small projects to validate the infrastructure change. This will change quickly as we move towards the end of 2009, when more business processes, applications, and information will reside on remote clouds, and thus the need for governance increases."
To the extent that enterprises are adopting cloud services, it is via a selective outsourcing of specific applications and infrastructure. One of the principal cloud/SOA governance decisions is in determining which services to source from which public clouds, so as to avoid unnecessary duplication with internal application environments.
"The larger business decisions really are around which services should or shouldn't be sourced in a certain way, and what level of comfort and risk aversion are acceptable," says Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "One risk would be that people start jumping into cloud and external-service consumption piecemeal, without it being governed or managed centrally, or with some level of oversight in a holistic sense.''
He adds, "The other risk might be that you are so clamped down, and you are so centralized and tightly managed, that no one takes advantage of efficiencies that become available through the cloud. You then have unfortunate costs and an inability to adapt quickly."
IT execs should expect to see SOA governance tools enter the cloud market in droves over the next several years, addressing a pent-up demand among enterprise IT professionals. "As IT strategists look over the horizon to what they some day would like to do with cloud computing, be it internal, external or hybrid, they can begin to set themselves up for success on that front now," Gardner says. "Moving toward SOA best practices and implementing strong governance across IT services and resources is an excellent place to gain advantage over today's IT, while preparing for newer models and efficiencies."
Clouds complicate SOA governance
For all the hype surrounding cloud services, it's difficult to find case studies of effective SOA governance in this brave new environment. Nevertheless, most public cloud service providers offer governance tools for managing applications, virtual machines, integration logic and service levels deployed in their specific environments. And a growing range of vendors — including RightScale, Kaavo, and Hyperic — are providing tools for provisioning and managing services across various public and private cloud environments. However, as befits the immature state of cloud computing, none of the established SOA governance tool vendors supports management of cloud-based applications, transactions, messaging or service levels.
Furthermore, even as cloud services become more mainstream, and even if they were built from the ground up with SOA governance in mind, they would still be very challenging to manage. This difficulty stems from some hallmarks of this new paradigm: outsourcing service providers, proprietary public clouds, virtualized resource pools and mashup-style service creation.
Comprehensive SOA governance depends on having all application, platform and network domains under common policy-based administration — a rare occurrence in enterprise networks of any complexity — or on having instituted federation among autonomous domains.
Managing SOA federations within an enterprise or B2B supply chain can be dauntingly complex. But managing SOA federations that link internal application domains with those provided by one or more outsourcers — including public cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com — depends on negotiation skills worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Federated clouds would help
"Public cloud providers are gingerly approaching the notion of federation," says Rich Wolski, professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and director of Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud-computing software project. "There's not much federation yet between public clouds, but we're starting to see some discussion of cross-cloud federation for the provisioning of resources."
Wolski stresses that as the cloud computing market works through the myriad federation issues, service providers and their enterprise customers will need to establish multi-layered agreements that span identity management, service-level management, storage management and other key concerns.
Right now, there is little to no policy federation between enterprise SOA environments and public cloud services. Those enterprises that choose to rely on public cloud services are running a considerable risk, according to Christopher Crowhurst, vice president for architecture and business systems infrastructure at Thomson Reuters.
"You're vulnerable to the provider's performance when you run your infrastructure and applications in someone else's cloud," Crowhurst says. "In those circumstances, there is little onus on the public cloud provider to coordinate their scheduled downtime with subscribers. And it's risky business to build applications that depend on services provided by the public cloud when there is no prior agreement on stability or availability of their API." Even if the public-cloud APIs remain, Crowhurst says, "the behavior of those interfaces may change without notice."
Crowhurst advises enterprise IT professionals to negotiate governance features into their contracts with public cloud service providers. At minimum, he says, these contracts should include clauses under which public cloud providers must inform customers of downtime, service changes, rollouts, version deprecations and API modifications.
One key SOA tenet is that a distributed application environment should be platform-agnostic, and so should its governance infrastructure. Under pure SOA, the external API should be agnostic to the underlying platforms.
However, enterprise forays into cloud computing often violate that principle by relying on monolithic public-cloud services, most of which implement proprietary APIs, development tools, virtualization layers and governance features -- though many cloud services also incorporate open SOA and Web 2.0 standards to varying degrees. Interoperability among proprietary public clouds is often non-existent, and tools for governing services across diverse public and private clouds are just now coming to market.
To enable design-time cross-cloud service portability, public cloud providers should implement open industry standards for packaging of virtualized services," says Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of virtualization tool vendor rPath. "If we can define service compliance with an open virtualization format," says Marshall, "then we'll be able to define service governance that is independent of the host."
One specification that addresses this need is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) draft, which defines an extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines (VM), such as those at the heart of public and private clouds. Though it is a key specification for portability of VMs across clouds, OVF, still in Version 1.0, does not provide the full context on VM "images" that would be necessary to support sophisticated life-cycle governance of these key artifacts, says Brett Adam, vice president of engineering at rPath.
VM sprawl adds further management complexity
Most SOA governance environments only skim the surface of enterprise IT environments: managing only that subset of services operating in the application layer, and only those Web services built on XML, SOAP, WSDL and other core SOA specifications. By contrast, many public cloud services provide a deeper stack of on-demand services, spanning the application, software platform, integration middleware, and even hardware layers. Indeed, virtualized, grid-oriented "hardware as a service" resource pools are a popular cloud offering, providing ample processing and storage capacity.
By proliferating services far deeper down into the stack, beyond the capabilities of today's SOA governance tools, cloud environments are making unified planning, design, provisioning, monitoring and control of all services next to impossible.
One key area where cloud governance differs from traditional SOA is in its focus on life-cycle governance of VMs. To facilitate automated provisioning of deep application and integration stacks on VMs, cloud management environments should offer prepackaged "server templates," says Michael Crandell, founder and CEO of cloud management platform vendor RightScale.
These templates embed prepackaged policy definitions that govern important life-cycle service VM governance functions, including deployment, setup, booting, monitoring, control, optimization and scaling of VMs on one or more public or private clouds. Cloud governance even encompasses the periodic need to "decommission and throw away" old VM instances, and launch new ones in their place, Crandell says.
Indeed, this could prove to be the killer application for cloud governance: preventing the unchecked proliferation of VM instances across public and private virtualization infrastructures. This problem, sometimes known as "VM sprawl," can present both a maintenance burden and could consume inordinate, costly amounts of cloud CPU, storage and network resources.
A growing range of commercial management tools provide the ability to control VM sprawl across disparate hypervisors. In addition, the hypervisor platform vendors — such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, and public cloud services providers have made this the principal feature of their various management tools. Sometimes referred to as "instance management," it's a feature that is lacking from traditional SOA governance tools.
The mash-up quagmire
Traditional SOA-style development is top-down. It requires considerable upfront architectural design, factoring functional primitives into platform-independent, loosely coupled service contracts that are exposed to developers through open Web services standards. It often also includes a core service catalog, such as Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) to broker abstract service contracts, as well as tools and platforms that support key interface standards such as Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
By contrast, cloud services encourage a grassroots style — often known as Web 2.0, Web Oriented Architecture or Representational State Transfer (REST) — of service provisioning, development and management. Anyone with a credit card can sign up for and start accessing cloud services, which may be totally redundant with applications that their companies have deployed internally.
By the same token, anyone with a browser can mash up available cloud service components into applications that may deviate significantly from corporate-standard design patterns — and probably lack the stringent security expected from enterprise-grade services. In the REST paradigm, UDDI, WSDL, SOAP and other WS-* standards are conspicuous in their absence. So it's no surprise that the phrase "mashup governance" gives some SOA professionals anxiety fits and causes others to double over with laughter.
SOA best practices reach for the clouds
Nevertheless, cloud services can benefit from the many lessons learned by enterprise SOA governance implementers, says Tim Hall, director of SOA products for HP Software and Solutions. "Most important, you need a service catalog that maintains metadata about services and enables you to control development and construction of services and publish visibility and availability of services to consumers."
Also, federation agreements should be set up to auto-provision service definitions between public clouds and enterprises' SOA, REST and other application environments, Hall says. He says that after all, it's all about the service. From a macro view, the service can be directly equated to value, its contribution to how the service helps you make money, save money or mitigate risk.
Clearly, SOA governance is maturing as a discipline, while cloud computing — the new galaxy in which services will burst forth — is anything but. Unfortunately, the cloud arena may continue to evolve so fast over the next several years that it will be difficult for consensus service-governance practices to coalesce.
So the outlook for strong service governance in this brave new paradigm remains cloudy, but with scattered patches of promise.
Kobielus is a senior analyst at Forrester Research in Alexandria, Va. The opinions expressed are his own. E-mail him at jkobielus@forrester.com.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
poem Over Cocktails
OVER COCKTAILS
Kim the marketer
swears she hasn’t made her mark
but I’m a marked man.
Amber has numbered
the years of her career for
only me to hear.
As for poor Pauli
currently between jobs I’ll
listen but I’m male.
Kim the marketer
swears she hasn’t made her mark
but I’m a marked man.
Amber has numbered
the years of her career for
only me to hear.
As for poor Pauli
currently between jobs I’ll
listen but I’m male.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
poem Depletionary Stakes
DEPLETIONARY STAKES
Among elements
humanity’s hope may well
be molybdenum.
Upon this orb we’ll
scratch it out or, resourceful,
maybe mine the moon.
Scout it. Blast that ore.
As we’ve done petroleum
and uranium.
Among elements
humanity’s hope may well
be molybdenum.
Upon this orb we’ll
scratch it out or, resourceful,
maybe mine the moon.
Scout it. Blast that ore.
As we’ve done petroleum
and uranium.
poem Lax
LAX
Dial back the blood and
dilate those capillaries.
You’ll see some results.
Oxygenate your
outlook. Let lax the vex and
laborious breath.
Feel the infusion.
Fill with enthusiasm
gods in your temple.
Dial back the blood and
dilate those capillaries.
You’ll see some results.
Oxygenate your
outlook. Let lax the vex and
laborious breath.
Feel the infusion.
Fill with enthusiasm
gods in your temple.
poem Recessionary Gold
RECESSIONARY GOLD
When the water fled
the dead rested. Mummified.
Secure till the flood.
While the money runs
we’re liquid as hell, floating our
hardboiled nest eggs.
Waxing nostalgic
for those dear days when happy
days were here again.
When the water fled
the dead rested. Mummified.
Secure till the flood.
While the money runs
we’re liquid as hell, floating our
hardboiled nest eggs.
Waxing nostalgic
for those dear days when happy
days were here again.
poem Slinky
SLINKY
Spry and springy odd
cylinder thingy.
Swings end over end
with a gentle bend.
This spirally band
uncertainly lands.
Spry and springy odd
cylinder thingy.
Swings end over end
with a gentle bend.
This spirally band
uncertainly lands.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
poem 1967
1967
Blissed as twittering
Cowsills in trees. "The Rain The
Park And Other Things."
Nonplussed as post "Wild
Thing" Troggs boldly croaking that
"Love Is All Around."
Weighty as Yardbirds'
"Shapes of Things" anchored by pre
Zeppelin Jimmy.
Blissed as twittering
Cowsills in trees. "The Rain The
Park And Other Things."
Nonplussed as post "Wild
Thing" Troggs boldly croaking that
"Love Is All Around."
Weighty as Yardbirds'
"Shapes of Things" anchored by pre
Zeppelin Jimmy.
poem A Marital Vinyasa
A MARITAL VINYASA
"We've saluted so
many suns. Numb, we gasp from
their sheer sunniness."
"We sweat. We struggle
to hold our focal points on
some middle distance."
"Some perturbation
in Bally's stained ceiling tiles
does it for me, dear."
"We've saluted so
many suns. Numb, we gasp from
their sheer sunniness."
"We sweat. We struggle
to hold our focal points on
some middle distance."
"Some perturbation
in Bally's stained ceiling tiles
does it for me, dear."
Saturday, February 14, 2009
poem A Marital Valentine
A MARITAL VALENTINE
"A tiny candy
under your pillow...could have
easily been crushed."
"The message on it
was even teenier...an
eyestrain...sorry, luv."
"As insubstantial
a confection as can be
imagined...my sweet."
"A tiny candy
under your pillow...could have
easily been crushed."
"The message on it
was even teenier...an
eyestrain...sorry, luv."
"As insubstantial
a confection as can be
imagined...my sweet."
Friday, February 13, 2009
fyi Pull Wii Games Off Shelves, Says Radio Pundit
All:
Stimulus: http://blogs.computerworld.com/pull_wii_from_shelves?source=NLT_BLOG
Response: I wouldn’t recommend pulling Wii off store shelves. It’s more of a caveat emptor situation. My primary problem with Wii--which I used at friends' parties a few times over the holiday season--is that many games require you to lunge, repeatedly, intensely, mindlessly, asymmetrically, herky-jerkily, into bare air, flailing any and all appendages, without any counter-resistance. That felt to my 50-year-old body like a surefire prescription for throwing everything out of joint. Oh yeah...the carpal tunnel potential on handling the controller...that too, but that’s the least of it. I do powerflex twice a week in a class/instructor setting. Every lunge we do has the resistance of weights that we balance on our shoulder blades--plus the slow controlled, balanced movements that systematically work the micro-fibers of our muscles, never relying on pure inertia or momentum to move the weights up and down, side to side. Wii’s not my style, because I prefer to strengthen and calm my body--with images and rhythms generated by my mind, breathing, and muscle memory--not cartoon avatars and idiotic synth-ditties yanking me around on some TV screen.
Jim
Stimulus: http://blogs.computerworld.com/pull_wii_from_shelves?source=NLT_BLOG
Response: I wouldn’t recommend pulling Wii off store shelves. It’s more of a caveat emptor situation. My primary problem with Wii--which I used at friends' parties a few times over the holiday season--is that many games require you to lunge, repeatedly, intensely, mindlessly, asymmetrically, herky-jerkily, into bare air, flailing any and all appendages, without any counter-resistance. That felt to my 50-year-old body like a surefire prescription for throwing everything out of joint. Oh yeah...the carpal tunnel potential on handling the controller...that too, but that’s the least of it. I do powerflex twice a week in a class/instructor setting. Every lunge we do has the resistance of weights that we balance on our shoulder blades--plus the slow controlled, balanced movements that systematically work the micro-fibers of our muscles, never relying on pure inertia or momentum to move the weights up and down, side to side. Wii’s not my style, because I prefer to strengthen and calm my body--with images and rhythms generated by my mind, breathing, and muscle memory--not cartoon avatars and idiotic synth-ditties yanking me around on some TV screen.
Jim
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
poems 4 pastorals from various years
DOG
Sheepdogs shear the air
with their bark, prepare
the perimeter
beyond which white flocks
never tend, inside
which grow whole bubble
edens, clusters of
friends and familiar
foe to guide us by,
pastures that glide and
deliver us back
miraculous yields.
LEMUR
a religious man
i love our lemon
green ancient forebear
two eyes fixed on
phantoms, the rumored
earth, hands ready to
pull her tender frame
toward uppermost
reaches in a
branching bouquet of
sheltering blossoms
one of which, or so
the story goes, was
large, could
take families whole
into a supple
recess and mothers
needn't worry that
little hands
exposed
could ever attract
he of the curvy
claws and the piercing
gaze.
P23
Lord, shepherd, my sufficiency
softly sustains me in green sleep,
walks me along the cool currents
into the awakening day
upon paths brightened in splendor
of his most sheltering essence.
Even in deepest depression
your presence abides me, fearless,
strong as your hand holds the crook-stick,
secure as your feasts from the foe.
You bless me with gracious perfume.
You overfill my meek chalice.
Surely, sweet fortune will trail me
Lord, dwelling here day without end.
RUN RIOT
I’ll take a meadow
wherever nature’s chosen
to happily jam.
Medians wild and
rioting, freeways redeemed
in numberless weeds.
Old federations of
fresh bees and blooms
wherever wasteland resumes.
Sheepdogs shear the air
with their bark, prepare
the perimeter
beyond which white flocks
never tend, inside
which grow whole bubble
edens, clusters of
friends and familiar
foe to guide us by,
pastures that glide and
deliver us back
miraculous yields.
LEMUR
a religious man
i love our lemon
green ancient forebear
two eyes fixed on
phantoms, the rumored
earth, hands ready to
pull her tender frame
toward uppermost
reaches in a
branching bouquet of
sheltering blossoms
one of which, or so
the story goes, was
large, could
take families whole
into a supple
recess and mothers
needn't worry that
little hands
exposed
could ever attract
he of the curvy
claws and the piercing
gaze.
P23
Lord, shepherd, my sufficiency
softly sustains me in green sleep,
walks me along the cool currents
into the awakening day
upon paths brightened in splendor
of his most sheltering essence.
Even in deepest depression
your presence abides me, fearless,
strong as your hand holds the crook-stick,
secure as your feasts from the foe.
You bless me with gracious perfume.
You overfill my meek chalice.
Surely, sweet fortune will trail me
Lord, dwelling here day without end.
RUN RIOT
I’ll take a meadow
wherever nature’s chosen
to happily jam.
Medians wild and
rioting, freeways redeemed
in numberless weeds.
Old federations of
fresh bees and blooms
wherever wasteland resumes.
FORRESTER blog repost What, If Anything, is a “Niche Vendor,” Where Enterprise Data Warehousing is Concerned?
What, If Anything, is a “Niche Vendor,” Where Enterprise Data Warehousing is Concerned?
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/02/what-if-anythin.html
By James Kobielus
Now that we’ve published my Forrester Wave for Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) Platforms, you’d think I can breathe easier. Far from it. No matter how carefully one words a report, there is always the potential for misunderstanding. I’m already seeing some of that surrounding the notion of what, exactly, constitutes an EDW “niche vendor.”
For starters, that term--“niche vendor”--is not in my vocabulary, and not in my Wave. In the Wave, I used the standard Forrester methodology, which, based on transparent criteria and evaluation scores, distinguishes among “Leaders,” “Strong Performers,” “Contenders,” and “Risky Bets.” Rest assured that all seven of the vendors I evaluated--Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Netezza, and Sybase, are either “Leaders” or “Strong Performers.”
We have no formalized definition of “niche vendors” in the Wave.Instead, all of the vendors in my Wave should be understood as “enterprise” data warehousing platform providers. The qualifier “enterprise” indicates that they are all addressing a wide range of enterprise Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) requirements for data warehousing. However, some of them are better positioned at this time to target a broader addressable market than are others, as evidenced by the details of their current offerings, strategies, and market presence. The vendors that are addressing the widest range of EDW marketplace requirements and opportunities scored higher in the Wave.
I think the crux of the misunderstanding lies in my acknowledgement that there in fact “niche” segments of the EDW platforms market, and that some vendors have differentiated themselves well in those niches without, necessarily, being locked into them permanently. I refer to “niche markets,” “niche solutions,” and “niche deployments,” but never “niche vendors.” I do use “niche player” at one point, but that’s to reflect a vendor’s strategy, not its destiny.
To reflect that nuanced understanding, I placed the following qualifying language at the intro to the “Strong Performers” section:
“Strong Performers have proven themselves in particular niches, primarily among large enterprises but also in a growing range of midmarket deployments. These vendors’ substantial, loyal, and longtime customer bases suggest plenty of opportunity for well-differentiated niche products in the multifaceted and innovative EDW platforms market. I&KM professionals can rest assured that these and other substantial EDW platform vendors have the staying power, resources, and vision to weather the ups and downs in today’s turbulent IT market.”
What exactly, then, is an EDW “niche solution”? Actually, before I answer that, let’s discuss what’s not a niche solution? Essentially, any solution portfolio that is well-suited to addressing the broadest range of EDW requirements--and in fact has production customers to demonstrate a vendor’s success at doing just that--is the polar opposite of a niche solution.
In order to be “well-suited” in this regard, an EDW solution portfolio should have the comprehensive functionality, flexibility, scalability, and affordability to qualify for short-listing by I&KM professionals with the broadest range of requirements. More than that, the vendors should demonstrate considerable success in selling their solutions into the full range of customer size classes, verticals, and geographies.
It’s one thing to state, in the abstract, that one’s EDW solution portfolio has universal appeal, but quite another to demonstrate that a critical mass of real customers across all segments have found it appealing enough to put their money down and standardize on it. A vendor's pricing, licensing, packaging, sales, marketing, distribution, support, and professional services are critically important for them to achieve this degree of universal--or at least widespread--adoption. Also, sometimes, what holds a vendor back from broad appeal is a marketplace perception issue that may be several years out of date, but is still a tangible competitive handicap.
One way of interpreting the Wave is that the higher-scoring vendors have the least “niche-y” solutions on the market. Of course, a niche may be a large one, as measured by the number of actual or potential customers, but it’s still a potential competitive handicap if a vendor is having difficulty breaking out of it--or doesn't realize it hampers their growth prospects. And a niche may be a matter of a vendor’s sales strategy--e.g., selling their DW appliance primarily as an OLAP data-mart accelerator--that has paid off in sales momentum but is becoming a confining pigeonhole. Or the niche may be an architectural specialty--such as a columnar database--that has great strengths for particular EDW-node deployment roles but may be suboptimal for other roles.
Sometimes, vendors position their niche approach as the future of the market as a whole, and as the answer to every EDW requirement that every user might have. And, sometimes, the market disagrees, as expressed through customer demand, or the lack thereof, leaving vendors mystified as to why they're not becoming the pre-eminent market leader.
And sometimes, an emerging niche (i.e., vendor growth-potential-limiting constraint) may not be apparent to the vendors that, heretofore, have assumed that it constitutes the entire EDW market. One such emerging niche is for EDW solutions that have not yet attained petabyte-scale in production customer deployments, in demo environments, or in the lab. In fact, that niche includes the majority of today’s EDW solutions, and the vast majority of I&KM requirements. Some vendors (read the Wave to see who) have moved beyond that sub-petabyte niche, or are just now traversing that threshold, or are soon likely to. Interestingly, most vendors in the EDW Platforms Wave offer a credible case that they’ll soon attain full petabyte-scalability, but only a few had actual customer deployments showing that they’re already there.
But none of this is to be read as vendor destiny. The Wave also scores the vendor’s corporate and product directions, and their momentum in selling into customer-size, vertical, and geographic segments outside their installed base. All of this is to be understood as a vendor attempting to break out of whatever niche(s) its solutions may be concentrated in.
And, indeed, that’s a key take-away from the Forrester Wave for EDW Platforms. All seven of these vendors are rapidly evolving out of the various niches in which their solutions have been deployed. That includes petabyte-scalability. Consequently, you shouldn’t assume--simply because a vendor didn’t demonstrate “well-beyond” one-petabyte scalability for the purpose of gaining a “5” on that Wave criterion in Q1 09--that the vendor won’t able to demonstrate that capability for you, in their lab, next week.
The EDW market is evolving extraordinarily fast. Clearly, we’ll need to update the EDW Platforms Wave in the coming year or so to keep pace.
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/02/what-if-anythin.html
By James Kobielus
Now that we’ve published my Forrester Wave for Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) Platforms, you’d think I can breathe easier. Far from it. No matter how carefully one words a report, there is always the potential for misunderstanding. I’m already seeing some of that surrounding the notion of what, exactly, constitutes an EDW “niche vendor.”
For starters, that term--“niche vendor”--is not in my vocabulary, and not in my Wave. In the Wave, I used the standard Forrester methodology, which, based on transparent criteria and evaluation scores, distinguishes among “Leaders,” “Strong Performers,” “Contenders,” and “Risky Bets.” Rest assured that all seven of the vendors I evaluated--Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Netezza, and Sybase, are either “Leaders” or “Strong Performers.”
We have no formalized definition of “niche vendors” in the Wave.Instead, all of the vendors in my Wave should be understood as “enterprise” data warehousing platform providers. The qualifier “enterprise” indicates that they are all addressing a wide range of enterprise Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) requirements for data warehousing. However, some of them are better positioned at this time to target a broader addressable market than are others, as evidenced by the details of their current offerings, strategies, and market presence. The vendors that are addressing the widest range of EDW marketplace requirements and opportunities scored higher in the Wave.
I think the crux of the misunderstanding lies in my acknowledgement that there in fact “niche” segments of the EDW platforms market, and that some vendors have differentiated themselves well in those niches without, necessarily, being locked into them permanently. I refer to “niche markets,” “niche solutions,” and “niche deployments,” but never “niche vendors.” I do use “niche player” at one point, but that’s to reflect a vendor’s strategy, not its destiny.
To reflect that nuanced understanding, I placed the following qualifying language at the intro to the “Strong Performers” section:
“Strong Performers have proven themselves in particular niches, primarily among large enterprises but also in a growing range of midmarket deployments. These vendors’ substantial, loyal, and longtime customer bases suggest plenty of opportunity for well-differentiated niche products in the multifaceted and innovative EDW platforms market. I&KM professionals can rest assured that these and other substantial EDW platform vendors have the staying power, resources, and vision to weather the ups and downs in today’s turbulent IT market.”
What exactly, then, is an EDW “niche solution”? Actually, before I answer that, let’s discuss what’s not a niche solution? Essentially, any solution portfolio that is well-suited to addressing the broadest range of EDW requirements--and in fact has production customers to demonstrate a vendor’s success at doing just that--is the polar opposite of a niche solution.
In order to be “well-suited” in this regard, an EDW solution portfolio should have the comprehensive functionality, flexibility, scalability, and affordability to qualify for short-listing by I&KM professionals with the broadest range of requirements. More than that, the vendors should demonstrate considerable success in selling their solutions into the full range of customer size classes, verticals, and geographies.
It’s one thing to state, in the abstract, that one’s EDW solution portfolio has universal appeal, but quite another to demonstrate that a critical mass of real customers across all segments have found it appealing enough to put their money down and standardize on it. A vendor's pricing, licensing, packaging, sales, marketing, distribution, support, and professional services are critically important for them to achieve this degree of universal--or at least widespread--adoption. Also, sometimes, what holds a vendor back from broad appeal is a marketplace perception issue that may be several years out of date, but is still a tangible competitive handicap.
One way of interpreting the Wave is that the higher-scoring vendors have the least “niche-y” solutions on the market. Of course, a niche may be a large one, as measured by the number of actual or potential customers, but it’s still a potential competitive handicap if a vendor is having difficulty breaking out of it--or doesn't realize it hampers their growth prospects. And a niche may be a matter of a vendor’s sales strategy--e.g., selling their DW appliance primarily as an OLAP data-mart accelerator--that has paid off in sales momentum but is becoming a confining pigeonhole. Or the niche may be an architectural specialty--such as a columnar database--that has great strengths for particular EDW-node deployment roles but may be suboptimal for other roles.
Sometimes, vendors position their niche approach as the future of the market as a whole, and as the answer to every EDW requirement that every user might have. And, sometimes, the market disagrees, as expressed through customer demand, or the lack thereof, leaving vendors mystified as to why they're not becoming the pre-eminent market leader.
And sometimes, an emerging niche (i.e., vendor growth-potential-limiting constraint) may not be apparent to the vendors that, heretofore, have assumed that it constitutes the entire EDW market. One such emerging niche is for EDW solutions that have not yet attained petabyte-scale in production customer deployments, in demo environments, or in the lab. In fact, that niche includes the majority of today’s EDW solutions, and the vast majority of I&KM requirements. Some vendors (read the Wave to see who) have moved beyond that sub-petabyte niche, or are just now traversing that threshold, or are soon likely to. Interestingly, most vendors in the EDW Platforms Wave offer a credible case that they’ll soon attain full petabyte-scalability, but only a few had actual customer deployments showing that they’re already there.
But none of this is to be read as vendor destiny. The Wave also scores the vendor’s corporate and product directions, and their momentum in selling into customer-size, vertical, and geographic segments outside their installed base. All of this is to be understood as a vendor attempting to break out of whatever niche(s) its solutions may be concentrated in.
And, indeed, that’s a key take-away from the Forrester Wave for EDW Platforms. All seven of these vendors are rapidly evolving out of the various niches in which their solutions have been deployed. That includes petabyte-scalability. Consequently, you shouldn’t assume--simply because a vendor didn’t demonstrate “well-beyond” one-petabyte scalability for the purpose of gaining a “5” on that Wave criterion in Q1 09--that the vendor won’t able to demonstrate that capability for you, in their lab, next week.
The EDW market is evolving extraordinarily fast. Clearly, we’ll need to update the EDW Platforms Wave in the coming year or so to keep pace.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
poem We Test Positive
WE TEST POSITIVE
That athletes abuse
our trust ain’t news. They’ll smash and
snort any substance.
That we’ll indulge them
their little lies. No surprise.
The shame’s also ours.
We place our faith in
the stupendous. Superstars
and hidden magic.
That athletes abuse
our trust ain’t news. They’ll smash and
snort any substance.
That we’ll indulge them
their little lies. No surprise.
The shame’s also ours.
We place our faith in
the stupendous. Superstars
and hidden magic.
Friday, February 06, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) Platforms Q1 2009: The Key Takeaway
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) Platforms Q1 2009: The Key Takeaway
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/02/forrester-wave.html
By James Kobielus
Today we published the first Forrester Wave™ specifically focused on Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) Platforms. The final published report is now available on Forrester’s website to clients. Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professionals will find it a timely and actionable study of the leading EDW platform vendors: Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Sybase, and Netezza. I urge you to download and read it, and then engage me, the author-analyst, in inquiries and advisories to help you apply it to your EDW initiatives.
The key takeaway from this Wave is that scalability, flexibility, and affordability are the dominant requirements in today’s budget-stressed EDW platforms market. I&KM professionals are under the gun, trying to keep EDW and business intelligence (BI) costs under tight control while preserving the flexibility to grow and repurpose these investments to support an ever-changing array of decision-support requirements. Hence, an EDW platform--to score well in the Wave--should address the following high-bar requirements:
Extremely scalable: The EDW platform should be scalable to support petabytes of usable data; thousand-plus distributed compute/storage nodes; tens of thousands of concurrent users and queries; many terabytes of daily or continuous data loads; and expanding mixed workloads of reporting, query, OLAP, in-database analytics, real-time analytics, ETL, data cleansing, and other transactions. It should support this extreme scalability through scale-out, shared-nothing MPP, optimized appliances, optimized storage, dynamic query optimization, and mixed workload management technologies.
Extremely flexible: The EDW platform should be flexible to support diverse applications, including business intelligence, online analytical processing, data mining, predictive analytics, text analytics, closed-loop business process management, and complex event processing; and various deployment roles, including multi-domain data hubs, subject-specific data marts; operational data stores, master data management hubs, staging nodes, analytic data marts, multi-temperature hierarchical storage management and archiving, and source and/or target repository in data federation environments. It should support this extreme flexibility by being fluid, adaptive, and virtualized; enabling data to be transparently persisted, in diverse physical and logical formats, to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources; and delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications; and ensuring application service levels through an end-to-end, policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching and dynamic query-optimization memory grid.
Extremely affordable: The EDW platform should be affordable for all customer segments and use cases. It should support this extreme affordability through flexible packaging/pricing, including licensed software, modular appliances, and “pay as you go” subscription-based SaaS/cloud offerings.
EDW platforms vendors that can’t address these key requirements--now or in their enhancement roadmaps over the coming 2-3 years--will not survive in this very competitive arena.
As noted above and in my blogpost last week, scalability, performance, and optimization are perhaps the most important criteria in today’s EDW market. And, of course, they are quite difficult to nail down into a single yardstick that does justice to different vendors’ approaches. Nevertheless, I believe this Wave accomplishes that. I have boiled down “scalability, performance, and optimization” (SPO) into a single criterion that defines five profiles (from 5= most scalable to 1 = least scalable), focusing on the degree of parallelism in the underlying architecture.
For each of the vendors in this Wave, I got a deep dive on their SPO architecture, but I didn’t stop there. I asked each vendor for reference customers, and conducted a structured interview with each. I asked each for a list and description of their largest production customer deployments. And I asked each for published benchmarks, plus all the supporting info on how the test environments, scenarios, and criteria. In other words, I applied the standard Forrester Wave methodology.
Essentially, the customer deployment and benchmark data corroborated whether a vendor in fact earned the particular SPO score associated with their architectural approach. Clearly, there were plenty of gray areas. Also, quite clearly, vendors had plenty of comments on the definitions of the SPO scales, and on where they fell on this spectrum. And, of course, many pointed out that being scored, say, a “2” rather than a “4” or “5” didn’t necessarily mean they were slower, less efficient, or incapable of processing various EDW and BI workloads. It also didn’t mean that they couldn’t, in practice and in customer deployments, push the scalability and speed envelope that one would associate with their architecture. Architecture isn’t destiny, but it definitely sets SPO constraints, which is the whole point of the scoring on this criterion in this Wave.
All the vendor feedback was excellent and helped me tweak and tune the scale to fit the EDW market’s current and emerging state of the art. With that said, here are the final SPO scales in this Wave:
5 = scale out through shared-nothing massively parallel processing (MPP), up to 100-1000+ storage/compute nodes in single-tier grid of compute/storage nodes, and well beyond 1000s of terabytes (TBs) of online, usable production data across distributed deployment
4 = scale out in the storage tier to 100-1000+ nodes and/or up to around 1000 TBs of online, usable production data, but lacking support for single-tier-grid shared-nothing MPP and/or lacking the ability to scale out to 100-1000+ nodes in the compute tier
3 = scale-out through shared-nothing MPP and/or clustering, up to 2-100 storage and/or compute nodes and up to 100s of TBs of online, usable production data across distributed deployment
2 = scale-up through symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and up to 10s of TBs of online, usable production data, and scale-out in a clustered deployment of 2-99 compute nodes
1 = scale-up through SMP and up to 10s of TBs of online, usable production data on a single-node deployment
To see how the vendors ranked, you’ll need to read the Wave. Or engage me in an inquiry or advisory. Or, preferably, both.
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/02/forrester-wave.html
By James Kobielus
Today we published the first Forrester Wave™ specifically focused on Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) Platforms. The final published report is now available on Forrester’s website to clients. Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professionals will find it a timely and actionable study of the leading EDW platform vendors: Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Sybase, and Netezza. I urge you to download and read it, and then engage me, the author-analyst, in inquiries and advisories to help you apply it to your EDW initiatives.
The key takeaway from this Wave is that scalability, flexibility, and affordability are the dominant requirements in today’s budget-stressed EDW platforms market. I&KM professionals are under the gun, trying to keep EDW and business intelligence (BI) costs under tight control while preserving the flexibility to grow and repurpose these investments to support an ever-changing array of decision-support requirements. Hence, an EDW platform--to score well in the Wave--should address the following high-bar requirements:
Extremely scalable: The EDW platform should be scalable to support petabytes of usable data; thousand-plus distributed compute/storage nodes; tens of thousands of concurrent users and queries; many terabytes of daily or continuous data loads; and expanding mixed workloads of reporting, query, OLAP, in-database analytics, real-time analytics, ETL, data cleansing, and other transactions. It should support this extreme scalability through scale-out, shared-nothing MPP, optimized appliances, optimized storage, dynamic query optimization, and mixed workload management technologies.
Extremely flexible: The EDW platform should be flexible to support diverse applications, including business intelligence, online analytical processing, data mining, predictive analytics, text analytics, closed-loop business process management, and complex event processing; and various deployment roles, including multi-domain data hubs, subject-specific data marts; operational data stores, master data management hubs, staging nodes, analytic data marts, multi-temperature hierarchical storage management and archiving, and source and/or target repository in data federation environments. It should support this extreme flexibility by being fluid, adaptive, and virtualized; enabling data to be transparently persisted, in diverse physical and logical formats, to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources; and delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications; and ensuring application service levels through an end-to-end, policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching and dynamic query-optimization memory grid.
Extremely affordable: The EDW platform should be affordable for all customer segments and use cases. It should support this extreme affordability through flexible packaging/pricing, including licensed software, modular appliances, and “pay as you go” subscription-based SaaS/cloud offerings.
EDW platforms vendors that can’t address these key requirements--now or in their enhancement roadmaps over the coming 2-3 years--will not survive in this very competitive arena.
As noted above and in my blogpost last week, scalability, performance, and optimization are perhaps the most important criteria in today’s EDW market. And, of course, they are quite difficult to nail down into a single yardstick that does justice to different vendors’ approaches. Nevertheless, I believe this Wave accomplishes that. I have boiled down “scalability, performance, and optimization” (SPO) into a single criterion that defines five profiles (from 5= most scalable to 1 = least scalable), focusing on the degree of parallelism in the underlying architecture.
For each of the vendors in this Wave, I got a deep dive on their SPO architecture, but I didn’t stop there. I asked each vendor for reference customers, and conducted a structured interview with each. I asked each for a list and description of their largest production customer deployments. And I asked each for published benchmarks, plus all the supporting info on how the test environments, scenarios, and criteria. In other words, I applied the standard Forrester Wave methodology.
Essentially, the customer deployment and benchmark data corroborated whether a vendor in fact earned the particular SPO score associated with their architectural approach. Clearly, there were plenty of gray areas. Also, quite clearly, vendors had plenty of comments on the definitions of the SPO scales, and on where they fell on this spectrum. And, of course, many pointed out that being scored, say, a “2” rather than a “4” or “5” didn’t necessarily mean they were slower, less efficient, or incapable of processing various EDW and BI workloads. It also didn’t mean that they couldn’t, in practice and in customer deployments, push the scalability and speed envelope that one would associate with their architecture. Architecture isn’t destiny, but it definitely sets SPO constraints, which is the whole point of the scoring on this criterion in this Wave.
All the vendor feedback was excellent and helped me tweak and tune the scale to fit the EDW market’s current and emerging state of the art. With that said, here are the final SPO scales in this Wave:
5 = scale out through shared-nothing massively parallel processing (MPP), up to 100-1000+ storage/compute nodes in single-tier grid of compute/storage nodes, and well beyond 1000s of terabytes (TBs) of online, usable production data across distributed deployment
4 = scale out in the storage tier to 100-1000+ nodes and/or up to around 1000 TBs of online, usable production data, but lacking support for single-tier-grid shared-nothing MPP and/or lacking the ability to scale out to 100-1000+ nodes in the compute tier
3 = scale-out through shared-nothing MPP and/or clustering, up to 2-100 storage and/or compute nodes and up to 100s of TBs of online, usable production data across distributed deployment
2 = scale-up through symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and up to 10s of TBs of online, usable production data, and scale-out in a clustered deployment of 2-99 compute nodes
1 = scale-up through SMP and up to 10s of TBs of online, usable production data on a single-node deployment
To see how the vendors ranked, you’ll need to read the Wave. Or engage me in an inquiry or advisory. Or, preferably, both.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost Is BI Recession-Proof...or Are We Just Bracing for the Next Shoe to Drop?
Is BI Recession-Proof...or Are We Just Bracing for the Next Shoe to Drop?
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/02/is-bi-recession.html
By James Kobielus
The economic outlook isn’t all gloom and doom. Bright spots remain in some substantial IT growth sectors--most important, in the sprawling business intelligence (BI) market.
In the past month, we’ve seen solid financials--in some cases, record growth and profitability numbers--from leading BI vendors, including SAP (Business Objects), IBM (Cognos), and privately held SAS Institute. Oracle and Microsoft also seem to be doing fairly well with BI-related revenues. Even vendors that only participate in BI environments as a provider of data warehousing (DW) solutions (e.g., Sybase) or data integration (DI) middleware (e.g., Informatica) are reporting outstanding financials all the way through year-end 2008. That includes the period just passed when the world economy began to spiral wildly out of control.
What’s going on here? Is the BI industry recession proof, or is the next soft-economy shoe--or heavy hammer--poised to drop on this segment’s unsuspecting heads? To some extent, I suspect that BI’s relative, perhaps short-lived, immunity from tough times is due to its use as a “recession-busting” tool for identifying areas to cut costs, consolidate operations, and boost revenues. SAS CEO Jim Goodnight articulated this view in his recent statement: “In tough times, companies focus on optimizing their businesses.”
But excuse me if I take a slightly cynical perspective on any sector’s claim to be recession proof. I take issue with the notion that people have no choice but to use one particular vendor’s or sector’s product, no matter how bad the economy gets. For example, the “people gotta eat” argument didn’t translate into general prosperity in the agricultural sector during the Great Depression. People found ways to survive on less store-bought food--or less meats and sweets--or larger backyard gardens--or handouts.
As regards the indispensability of BI, I suspect the actual market dynamic is bit more nuanced than we’ve been led to believe. What’s interesting about the latest round of BI vendor earnings numbers is that some are lackluster and/or declining. Case in point: MicroStrategy’s recent report of a 12 percent decline in BI license revenues in Q4 2008, compared to the same quarter a year earlier (bear in mind that the vendor’s product licensing revenues grew by 5 percent for the year as a whole, due to a strong start).
Why is MicroStrategy reporting flaccid Q4 numbers but SAP, IBM, SAS, and others are doing OK? I suspect that one of the key factors is the encroaching commoditization of “core BI” stacks, with concomitant declines in prices. Forrester defines “core BI” as solutions that incorporate any or all of the following features for information access, delivery, presentation, and user-side sharing: reporting, query, OLAP, dashboarding, Microsoft Office integration, portal integration, alerting/notification, and interactive visualization. Clearly, this particular segment is overcrowded, with dozens of vendors--including open-source and software-as-a-service providers--that are becoming as indistinguishable as polar bears in a blizzard. Though MicroStrategy is a well-established, widely adopted core-BI vendor, it does not have much beyond that common denominator feature set.
Another trend that’s making it more difficult for MicroStrategy and similar vendors to grow is enterprise information managers’ desire to consolidate their analytics environments down to a few core vendors--which, more often than not, provide data warehousing (DW), data mining, data quality, and other solutions in addition to core BI. MicroStrategy is mostly missing from those other markets, so it may be experiencing problems growing its footprint among existing customers.
Yet another trend that explains the soft MicroStrategy numbers may be enterprises’ preference for BI vendors that can offer a full range of prepackaged “business content”--such as analytics tailored to specific vertical and horizontal requirements--to extend and leverage the core BI platform. That’s where the likes of SAP/Business Objects, IBM/Cognos, Oracle/Hyperion, and SAS come into the picture--and the MicroStrategies of the BI market are mostly absent.
Just as important to these latter vendors’ ongoing success are strong professional services organizations, partnerships, and customer relationships. Only by deepening their domain expertise and customer intimacy--and pouring this new “business content” into packaged applications and solution accelerators--can BI vendors realize healthy margins going forward. Forrester refers to these packaged domain analytics applications as “business performance solutions” (BPS).
SAS’ Goodnight alluded to this key BI-vendor success imperative in his recent press release: “We achieved our 33rd year of revenue growth in the worst economy most can remember. This growth is a direct result of being a stable privately held company, which allows us to invest in long-term relationships with employees and customers.”
Where SAS and some other vendors are concerned, another key differentiator that’s helping them stay strong is emphasis on BI’s chief growth segments: most notably, advanced analytics, which encompasses predictive analytics (PA), data mining (DM), and text mining/analytics. Deep domain expertise and customer intimacy are also keys to vendor growth in advanced analytics. Indeed, the range of tailored analytic applications that leverage advanced analytics features continues to grow, though the number of PA/DM “workbench” providers on the market remains fairly stable.
At heart, BI is a relationship business. The BI solution provider should be a committed partner helping customers to address their most burning success imperatives. Customers won’t forget if you helped them out of a tight situation, such as nasty patch of sluggish economy. They’ll keep coming back to you time and again.
Steady repeat business--loyal customers--indispensable brands--that’s the best business model--just ask Warren Buffett.
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/02/is-bi-recession.html
By James Kobielus
The economic outlook isn’t all gloom and doom. Bright spots remain in some substantial IT growth sectors--most important, in the sprawling business intelligence (BI) market.
In the past month, we’ve seen solid financials--in some cases, record growth and profitability numbers--from leading BI vendors, including SAP (Business Objects), IBM (Cognos), and privately held SAS Institute. Oracle and Microsoft also seem to be doing fairly well with BI-related revenues. Even vendors that only participate in BI environments as a provider of data warehousing (DW) solutions (e.g., Sybase) or data integration (DI) middleware (e.g., Informatica) are reporting outstanding financials all the way through year-end 2008. That includes the period just passed when the world economy began to spiral wildly out of control.
What’s going on here? Is the BI industry recession proof, or is the next soft-economy shoe--or heavy hammer--poised to drop on this segment’s unsuspecting heads? To some extent, I suspect that BI’s relative, perhaps short-lived, immunity from tough times is due to its use as a “recession-busting” tool for identifying areas to cut costs, consolidate operations, and boost revenues. SAS CEO Jim Goodnight articulated this view in his recent statement: “In tough times, companies focus on optimizing their businesses.”
But excuse me if I take a slightly cynical perspective on any sector’s claim to be recession proof. I take issue with the notion that people have no choice but to use one particular vendor’s or sector’s product, no matter how bad the economy gets. For example, the “people gotta eat” argument didn’t translate into general prosperity in the agricultural sector during the Great Depression. People found ways to survive on less store-bought food--or less meats and sweets--or larger backyard gardens--or handouts.
As regards the indispensability of BI, I suspect the actual market dynamic is bit more nuanced than we’ve been led to believe. What’s interesting about the latest round of BI vendor earnings numbers is that some are lackluster and/or declining. Case in point: MicroStrategy’s recent report of a 12 percent decline in BI license revenues in Q4 2008, compared to the same quarter a year earlier (bear in mind that the vendor’s product licensing revenues grew by 5 percent for the year as a whole, due to a strong start).
Why is MicroStrategy reporting flaccid Q4 numbers but SAP, IBM, SAS, and others are doing OK? I suspect that one of the key factors is the encroaching commoditization of “core BI” stacks, with concomitant declines in prices. Forrester defines “core BI” as solutions that incorporate any or all of the following features for information access, delivery, presentation, and user-side sharing: reporting, query, OLAP, dashboarding, Microsoft Office integration, portal integration, alerting/notification, and interactive visualization. Clearly, this particular segment is overcrowded, with dozens of vendors--including open-source and software-as-a-service providers--that are becoming as indistinguishable as polar bears in a blizzard. Though MicroStrategy is a well-established, widely adopted core-BI vendor, it does not have much beyond that common denominator feature set.
Another trend that’s making it more difficult for MicroStrategy and similar vendors to grow is enterprise information managers’ desire to consolidate their analytics environments down to a few core vendors--which, more often than not, provide data warehousing (DW), data mining, data quality, and other solutions in addition to core BI. MicroStrategy is mostly missing from those other markets, so it may be experiencing problems growing its footprint among existing customers.
Yet another trend that explains the soft MicroStrategy numbers may be enterprises’ preference for BI vendors that can offer a full range of prepackaged “business content”--such as analytics tailored to specific vertical and horizontal requirements--to extend and leverage the core BI platform. That’s where the likes of SAP/Business Objects, IBM/Cognos, Oracle/Hyperion, and SAS come into the picture--and the MicroStrategies of the BI market are mostly absent.
Just as important to these latter vendors’ ongoing success are strong professional services organizations, partnerships, and customer relationships. Only by deepening their domain expertise and customer intimacy--and pouring this new “business content” into packaged applications and solution accelerators--can BI vendors realize healthy margins going forward. Forrester refers to these packaged domain analytics applications as “business performance solutions” (BPS).
SAS’ Goodnight alluded to this key BI-vendor success imperative in his recent press release: “We achieved our 33rd year of revenue growth in the worst economy most can remember. This growth is a direct result of being a stable privately held company, which allows us to invest in long-term relationships with employees and customers.”
Where SAS and some other vendors are concerned, another key differentiator that’s helping them stay strong is emphasis on BI’s chief growth segments: most notably, advanced analytics, which encompasses predictive analytics (PA), data mining (DM), and text mining/analytics. Deep domain expertise and customer intimacy are also keys to vendor growth in advanced analytics. Indeed, the range of tailored analytic applications that leverage advanced analytics features continues to grow, though the number of PA/DM “workbench” providers on the market remains fairly stable.
At heart, BI is a relationship business. The BI solution provider should be a committed partner helping customers to address their most burning success imperatives. Customers won’t forget if you helped them out of a tight situation, such as nasty patch of sluggish economy. They’ll keep coming back to you time and again.
Steady repeat business--loyal customers--indispensable brands--that’s the best business model--just ask Warren Buffett.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
poem Irr
IRR
Scars are weeks to heal.
Cold sores a matter of days.
Sunburns forever.
Imprints of ancient
days out, life indelible,
this solar tattoo.
Dust are damage. A
matter of maintenance. All
coughing and sweeping.
Scars are weeks to heal.
Cold sores a matter of days.
Sunburns forever.
Imprints of ancient
days out, life indelible,
this solar tattoo.
Dust are damage. A
matter of maintenance. All
coughing and sweeping.
poem That'll or This'll
THAT'LL OR THIS'LL
I can't remember
if I cried. Was eighty-one
days the day they died.
And the three men I
admittedly'd never heard.
Not yet into rock.
Long long time ago.
Still hadn't acquired Don's sense
of foreshadowing.
I can't remember
if I cried. Was eighty-one
days the day they died.
And the three men I
admittedly'd never heard.
Not yet into rock.
Long long time ago.
Still hadn't acquired Don's sense
of foreshadowing.
Friday, January 30, 2009
FORRESTER blog repost What’s the Fastest, Most Scalable Data Warehouse Platform? Well, If You Must Ask.....
What’s the Fastest, Most Scalable Data Warehouse Platform? Well, If You Must Ask.....
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/01/whats-the-faste.html
By James Kobielus.
Welcome to the life of a data warehousing (DW) industry analyst. I’m often asked by Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professionals to address the perennial issue of which commercial DW solution is fastest or most scalable. Vendors ask me too, of course, in the process of them attempting to suss out rivals’ limitations and identify their own competitive advantages.
It’s always difficult for me to provide I&KM pros and their vendors with simple answers to such queries. Benchmarking is the blackest of black arts in the DW arena. It’s intensely sensitive to myriad variables, many of may not be entirely transparent to all parties involved in the evaluation. It’s intensely political, because the answer to that question can influence millions of dollars of investments in DW solutions. And it’s a slippery slope of overqualified assertions that may leave no one confident that they’re making the right decisions. Yes, I’m as geeky as the next analyst, but I myself feel queasy when a sentence coming out of my mouth starts to run-on with an unending string of conditional clauses.
If we offer any value-add in the DW arena’s commentary cloud, industry analysts can at least clarify the complexities. Here is how I frame the benchmarking issues that should drive I&KM pros’ discussions with DW vendors:
• Vendor DW performance-boost claims (10x, 20x, 30x, 40x, 50x, etc.) are extremely sensitive to myriad implementation factors. No two DW vendors provide performance numbers that are based on the same precise configuration. Also, vendors vary so widely in their DW architectural approaches, that each vendor can claim that no rival could provide a comparable configuration to its own. For the purpose of comparing vendor scalability for the recently completed Forrester Wave on Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms (to be published imminently), I broke out the approaches into several broad implementation profiles. Each of those profiles (which you’ll have to wait for the published Wave to see) may be implemented in myriad ways by vendors and users. And each specific configuration of hardware, software, and network interconnect of each of those profiles may be optimized to run specific workloads very efficiently--and be very suboptimal for others.
• Vendor DW apples-to-apples benchmarks depend on comparing configurations that are processing comparable workloads. No two DW vendors, it seems, bases their benchmarks on the same specific set of query and loading tests. Also, no two vendors’ benchmarks incorporating the exact same set of parameters in their benchmark tests--in other words, the same query characteristics, same input record counts, same database sizes, same table sizes, same return-set sizes, same number of columns selected, same frequency distribution of values per column, same number of table joins, same source-table indexing method, same mixture of relational data and flat/text files in loads from source, same mixture of ad-hoc vs. predictable queries, same use of materialized views and client caches, and so forth.
• Vendor DW benchmark comparisons should cover the full range of performance criteria that actually matter in DW and BI deployments. No two DW vendors report benchmarks on the full range of performance metrics relative to users. Most offer basic metrics on query and load performance. But they often fail to include any measurements of other important DW performance criteria, such as concurrent access, concurrent query, continuous loading, data replication, and backup and restore. In addition, they often fail to provide any benchmarks that address various mixed workloads of diverse query, ETL, in-database analytics, and other jobs that execute in the DW.
• Different vendors’ DW benchmarks should use the same metrics for each criterion. Unfortunately, no two vendors in the DW market use the same benchmarking framework or metrics. Some report numbers framed in proprietary benchmarking frameworks that may be maddeningly opaque--and impossible to compare directly with competitors. Some report TPC/H, but often only when it puts them in a favorable light, whereas others avoid that benchmark on principle (with merit: it barely addresses the full range of transactions managed by a real-live DW). Others report “TPC/H-like” queries (whatever that means). Still others publish no benchmarks at all, as if they were trade secrets and not something that I&KM pros absolutely need to know when evaluating commercial alternatives. Sadly, most DW vendors tends to make vague assertions about “linear scalability,” “10-200x performance advantage [against the competition], and “[x number of] queries per [hour/minute/sec] in [lab, customer production, or proof of concept].” Imagine sorting through these assertions for a living--which is what I do constantly.
• DW benchmark tests should be performed and/or vouched for by reliable, unbiased, third parties--i.e,. those not employed by or receiving compensation by the vendors in question. If there were any such third parties, I’d be aware of them. Know any? Yes, there are many DW and DBMS benchmarking consultants, but they all make their living by selling their services to solution providers. I hesitate to recommend any such benchmark numbers to anybody who seeks a truly neutral third-party.
• DW solution price-performance comparisons require that you base your analysis on an equivalently configured/capacity solution stack--i.e., hardware, software--for each vendor and also the full lifetime total cost of ownership for each vendor/solution. That’s a black art in its own right. Later this year, I’ll be doing a study that provides a methodology for estimating return on investment for DW appliance solutions.
As an entirely separate issue, it does no good, competitively, for a DW vendor to assert performance enhancements that are only relative to a prior configuration of a prior version of its own product or technology. The customer has no easy assurance that the vendor is comparing its current solutions against a well-configured/engineered example of the prior solution. The vendor’s assertion of order-of-magnitude improvement over a prior version of its own product may be impressive, but only as a statement of how much they’ve improved its own technology, not how it fares against the competition. And such “past-self-comparisons” can easily backfire on the vendor, as customers and competitors may use it to insinuate that there were significant flaws or limitations in your legacy products.
Here’s my bottom-line advice, to all DW vendors on positioning your performance assertions. Frame them in the context of the architectural advantages of your specific DW technical approach. Publish your full benchmark numbers with test configurations, scenarios, and cases explicitly spelled out. To the extent that you can aggregate 100s of terabytes of data, serve thousands of concurrent users and queries, process complex mixtures of queries, joins, and aggregations, ensure subsecond ingest-to-query latencies, and support continuous, high-volume, multiterabyte batch data loading, call all of that out in your benchmarks. To the extent that any or all of that is in your roadmap, call that out too.
Here’s my bottom-line advice to I&KM pros: Don’t expect easy answers. Think critically about all vendor-reported DW benchmarks. And recognize that no one DW platform can possibly be configured optimally for all requirements, transactions, and applications.
If there were any such DW platforms, I’d be aware of them. Know any?
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2009/01/whats-the-faste.html
By James Kobielus.
Welcome to the life of a data warehousing (DW) industry analyst. I’m often asked by Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professionals to address the perennial issue of which commercial DW solution is fastest or most scalable. Vendors ask me too, of course, in the process of them attempting to suss out rivals’ limitations and identify their own competitive advantages.
It’s always difficult for me to provide I&KM pros and their vendors with simple answers to such queries. Benchmarking is the blackest of black arts in the DW arena. It’s intensely sensitive to myriad variables, many of may not be entirely transparent to all parties involved in the evaluation. It’s intensely political, because the answer to that question can influence millions of dollars of investments in DW solutions. And it’s a slippery slope of overqualified assertions that may leave no one confident that they’re making the right decisions. Yes, I’m as geeky as the next analyst, but I myself feel queasy when a sentence coming out of my mouth starts to run-on with an unending string of conditional clauses.
If we offer any value-add in the DW arena’s commentary cloud, industry analysts can at least clarify the complexities. Here is how I frame the benchmarking issues that should drive I&KM pros’ discussions with DW vendors:
• Vendor DW performance-boost claims (10x, 20x, 30x, 40x, 50x, etc.) are extremely sensitive to myriad implementation factors. No two DW vendors provide performance numbers that are based on the same precise configuration. Also, vendors vary so widely in their DW architectural approaches, that each vendor can claim that no rival could provide a comparable configuration to its own. For the purpose of comparing vendor scalability for the recently completed Forrester Wave on Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms (to be published imminently), I broke out the approaches into several broad implementation profiles. Each of those profiles (which you’ll have to wait for the published Wave to see) may be implemented in myriad ways by vendors and users. And each specific configuration of hardware, software, and network interconnect of each of those profiles may be optimized to run specific workloads very efficiently--and be very suboptimal for others.
• Vendor DW apples-to-apples benchmarks depend on comparing configurations that are processing comparable workloads. No two DW vendors, it seems, bases their benchmarks on the same specific set of query and loading tests. Also, no two vendors’ benchmarks incorporating the exact same set of parameters in their benchmark tests--in other words, the same query characteristics, same input record counts, same database sizes, same table sizes, same return-set sizes, same number of columns selected, same frequency distribution of values per column, same number of table joins, same source-table indexing method, same mixture of relational data and flat/text files in loads from source, same mixture of ad-hoc vs. predictable queries, same use of materialized views and client caches, and so forth.
• Vendor DW benchmark comparisons should cover the full range of performance criteria that actually matter in DW and BI deployments. No two DW vendors report benchmarks on the full range of performance metrics relative to users. Most offer basic metrics on query and load performance. But they often fail to include any measurements of other important DW performance criteria, such as concurrent access, concurrent query, continuous loading, data replication, and backup and restore. In addition, they often fail to provide any benchmarks that address various mixed workloads of diverse query, ETL, in-database analytics, and other jobs that execute in the DW.
• Different vendors’ DW benchmarks should use the same metrics for each criterion. Unfortunately, no two vendors in the DW market use the same benchmarking framework or metrics. Some report numbers framed in proprietary benchmarking frameworks that may be maddeningly opaque--and impossible to compare directly with competitors. Some report TPC/H, but often only when it puts them in a favorable light, whereas others avoid that benchmark on principle (with merit: it barely addresses the full range of transactions managed by a real-live DW). Others report “TPC/H-like” queries (whatever that means). Still others publish no benchmarks at all, as if they were trade secrets and not something that I&KM pros absolutely need to know when evaluating commercial alternatives. Sadly, most DW vendors tends to make vague assertions about “linear scalability,” “10-200x performance advantage [against the competition], and “[x number of] queries per [hour/minute/sec] in [lab, customer production, or proof of concept].” Imagine sorting through these assertions for a living--which is what I do constantly.
• DW benchmark tests should be performed and/or vouched for by reliable, unbiased, third parties--i.e,. those not employed by or receiving compensation by the vendors in question. If there were any such third parties, I’d be aware of them. Know any? Yes, there are many DW and DBMS benchmarking consultants, but they all make their living by selling their services to solution providers. I hesitate to recommend any such benchmark numbers to anybody who seeks a truly neutral third-party.
• DW solution price-performance comparisons require that you base your analysis on an equivalently configured/capacity solution stack--i.e., hardware, software--for each vendor and also the full lifetime total cost of ownership for each vendor/solution. That’s a black art in its own right. Later this year, I’ll be doing a study that provides a methodology for estimating return on investment for DW appliance solutions.
As an entirely separate issue, it does no good, competitively, for a DW vendor to assert performance enhancements that are only relative to a prior configuration of a prior version of its own product or technology. The customer has no easy assurance that the vendor is comparing its current solutions against a well-configured/engineered example of the prior solution. The vendor’s assertion of order-of-magnitude improvement over a prior version of its own product may be impressive, but only as a statement of how much they’ve improved its own technology, not how it fares against the competition. And such “past-self-comparisons” can easily backfire on the vendor, as customers and competitors may use it to insinuate that there were significant flaws or limitations in your legacy products.
Here’s my bottom-line advice, to all DW vendors on positioning your performance assertions. Frame them in the context of the architectural advantages of your specific DW technical approach. Publish your full benchmark numbers with test configurations, scenarios, and cases explicitly spelled out. To the extent that you can aggregate 100s of terabytes of data, serve thousands of concurrent users and queries, process complex mixtures of queries, joins, and aggregations, ensure subsecond ingest-to-query latencies, and support continuous, high-volume, multiterabyte batch data loading, call all of that out in your benchmarks. To the extent that any or all of that is in your roadmap, call that out too.
Here’s my bottom-line advice to I&KM pros: Don’t expect easy answers. Think critically about all vendor-reported DW benchmarks. And recognize that no one DW platform can possibly be configured optimally for all requirements, transactions, and applications.
If there were any such DW platforms, I’d be aware of them. Know any?
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
BriefingsDirect Analysts Discuss Service Oriented Communications, Debate How Dead SOA Really Is
All:
Check out the full transcript at http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2009/01/briefingsdirect-analysts-discuss.html
Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 36, on communications as a service and the future of SOA in light of hard economic times. [[and further edited/annotated in a gratuitous, unnecessary way by James Kobielus on the evening of January 28, 2009 for the purpose of populating this blog with sweet new stuff without having to work very hard]]
Panelists: Dana Gardner (Interarbor Solutions), Tony Baer (Ovum), Jim Kobielus (Forrester Research), Joe McKendrick (independent), Dave Linthicum (Linthicum Group), JP Morgenthal (Burton Group), Anne Thomas Manes (Burton Group), Todd Landry (NEC Sphere)
*********************************
Gardner: I'm your host and moderator, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Our topic this week, the week of Jan. 12, 2009, starts and ends with service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- dead or alive?
We're going to begin with an example of what keeps SOA alive and vibrant, and that is the ability for the architectural approach to grow inclusive of service types and therefore grow more valuable over time.
We're going to examine service-oriented communications (SOC) a variation on the SOA theme, and a way of ushering a wider variety of services -- in this case communications and collaboration services from the network -- into business processes and consumer-facing solutions. We're joined by a thought leader on SOC, Todd Landry, the vice president of NEC Sphere.
In the second half of our show, we'll revisit the purported demise of large-scale SOA and find where the wellsprings of enterprise architectural innovation and productivity will eventually come from.
We’ll also delve into the psychology of IT. What are they thinking in the enterprise data centers these days? Somebody’s thoughts might resuscitate SOA or perhaps nail even more spikes into the SOA coffin.
*********************************
Baer: I hate to use a cliché, but it’s like the last mile of enterprise workflow and enterprise processes. The whole goal of workflows was trying to codify what we do with processes and trying to implement our best practices consistently. Yet, when it comes to verbal communications, we’re still basically using technology that began with the dawn of the human voice eons ago.
Gardner: I've seen people use sign language.
Baer: Well, that maybe too, and smoke signals.
Gardner: A certain finger comes up from time to time in some IT departments.
Kobielus: At least the use of a trusty index DTMS finger.
Gardner: There you go.
*********************************
Gardner: Jim Kobielus, isn’t there more to this on the consumer side as well? We've got these hand-held devices that people are using more and more with full broadband connectivity for more types of activities, straddling their personal and business lives and activities. We know Microsoft has been talking about voice recognition as a new interface goal for, what, 10 years now. What’s the deal when it comes to user habits, interfaces, and having some input into these back-end processes?
An Important Extension
Kobielus: That’s a huge question. Let me just unpeel the onion here. I see SOC as very much an important extension of SOA or an application of SOA, where the service that you're trying to maximize, share, and use is the intelligence that’s in people’s heads -- the people in the organization, in your team. You have various ways in which you can get access to that knowledge and intelligence, one of which is by tapping into a common social networking environment.
In a consumer sphere, the thing is the intelligence you want to gain access to is intelligence sets residing in mobile assets -- human beings on the run. Human beings have various devices and applications through which they can get access to all manner of content and through which they can get access to each other.
So, in a consumer world, a lot of the SOC value proposition is in how it supports social networking. The Facebook environments provide an ever more service-oriented environment within which people can mash up not only their presence and profiles, but all of the content the human beings generate on the fly. Possibly, they can tag on the fly as well, and that might be relevant to other people.
There is a strong potential for SOC and that consumer Facebook-style paradigm of sharing everybody’s user-generated content that’s developed on the fly.
*********************************
Text-Mining Capability
Kobielus: One of the services in the infrastructure of the SOC that will be critically needed in a consumer or a business environment is a text-mining capability within the cloud. That can go on the fly to all these unstructured texts that have been generated, and identify entities in relationships and sentiments to make that information quickly available. Or, it can make those relationships quickly available through search or through other means to people who are too busy to do a formal search or who are too busy to even do any manual tagging. We simply want the basic meanings to just bubble up out of the cloud.
*********************************
Kobielus: I want to add one last observation before we go to the "SOA is dead" topic. In order for this integration to happen in the cloud, the cloud providers need to federate their new registries with those of their enterprise customers. But, humans are reachable through a different type of registry called a directory, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) and other means.
Cloud providers need to federate their identity management in a directory environment with those of their customers. I don’t think the industry has really thought through all the federation issues to really make this service oriented, business communications in the cloud scenario a reality any time soon.
Gardner: So we need an open Wiki-like phone book in the sky.
Kobielus: Exactly.
*********************************
Kobielus: The whole "SOA is dead" theme struck a responsive chord in the industry, because there's a lot of fatigue, not only with the buzzword, but the very concept. It’s been too grandiose and nebulous. It’s been oversold, expectations have been built up too high, and governance is a bear.
We all know the real-world implementation problems with SOA, the way it’s been developed and presented and discussed in the industry. The core of it is services. As Anne indicated, services are the unit of governance that SOA begot.
We all now focus on services. Now, we’re moving into the world of cloud computing and, you know what, a nebulous environment has gotten even more nebulous. The issues with governance, services, and the cloud -- everything is a service in the cloud. So, how do you govern everything? How do you federate public and private clouds? How do you control mashups and so forth? How do you deal with the issues like virtual machine sprawl?
The range of issues now being thrown into the big SOA hopper under the cloud paradigm is just growing, and the fatigue is going to grow, and the disillusionment is going to grow with the very concept of SOA. I just want to point that out as a background condition that I’m sensing everywhere.
*********************************
Kobielus’ comments on all the above, here on the evening of January 28 by himself:
• “Trusty index DTMS finger”? What does that mean? I never said it. Whoever transcribed the audio misattributed it. What does “DTMS” stand for anyway? Go listen to the audio playback and tell me whether I actually said it. I’m too lazy to do so. Also, I can’t stand listening to my own voice (yeah, I know, you’d think otherwise, wouldn’t you, given how verbal I am).
• Mash up each other’s presence, content, intelligence? A virtual mashpit, so to speak. Feels slightly creepy, doesn’t it. Sort of like the movie “The Fly” where the machine went haywire and mashed Jeff Goldblum’s DNA with an insect. Ewwww!
• Glad I mashed up identity management and service governance on the call--mashed and mushed LDAP directories and UDDI registries, into each other conceptually--and federated them in that big Venn diagram in the sky. SOA for interpersonal communications depends on populating the governance bus with all that identity “metadata” (e.g., contacts, attributes, profiles, roles, demographics, interests, transactions, behavioral characteristics, clickstream, predictive model scores, etc.)
• Text mining will provide the auto-discovery mechanism for all the “identity metadata” that people are self-publishing in un- and semi-structured formats (often without fully realizing it) in the Web 2.0, social networking, wiki world.
• Controlling mashups. Mashup governance. Dave Linthicum introduced that concept a year or two ago, but I still don’t sense any clear feeling among vendors or users that it’s a hot button. I think everybody still regards user-created services (i.e., mashups) as outside the proper scope of SOA. But, then again, what’s the difference between a mashup and a rogue service? The former is not sanctioned by corporate IT but is ostensibly benign and is to be tolerated, if not encouraged or supported. The latter is also unsanctioned, and possibly benign, but under suspicion and to be decommissioned or neutralized at the first opportunity. And what’s the difference between mashups and virtual machine sprawl? The former proliferates but doesn’t necessarily hog resources or disrupt operations, whereas the latter also proliferates and consumes more than its fair share of resources. The relevant distinctions in these cases all concern where specifically a particular created/published service (be it a mashup service, Web service, or cloud service) sits on the governance spectrum in a given organization. Is it a sanctioned/supported or unsanctioned/unsupported service, from the point of view of the service governance “authorities”?
Jim
Check out the full transcript at http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2009/01/briefingsdirect-analysts-discuss.html
Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 36, on communications as a service and the future of SOA in light of hard economic times. [[and further edited/annotated in a gratuitous, unnecessary way by James Kobielus on the evening of January 28, 2009 for the purpose of populating this blog with sweet new stuff without having to work very hard]]
Panelists: Dana Gardner (Interarbor Solutions), Tony Baer (Ovum), Jim Kobielus (Forrester Research), Joe McKendrick (independent), Dave Linthicum (Linthicum Group), JP Morgenthal (Burton Group), Anne Thomas Manes (Burton Group), Todd Landry (NEC Sphere)
*********************************
Gardner: I'm your host and moderator, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Our topic this week, the week of Jan. 12, 2009, starts and ends with service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- dead or alive?
We're going to begin with an example of what keeps SOA alive and vibrant, and that is the ability for the architectural approach to grow inclusive of service types and therefore grow more valuable over time.
We're going to examine service-oriented communications (SOC) a variation on the SOA theme, and a way of ushering a wider variety of services -- in this case communications and collaboration services from the network -- into business processes and consumer-facing solutions. We're joined by a thought leader on SOC, Todd Landry, the vice president of NEC Sphere.
In the second half of our show, we'll revisit the purported demise of large-scale SOA and find where the wellsprings of enterprise architectural innovation and productivity will eventually come from.
We’ll also delve into the psychology of IT. What are they thinking in the enterprise data centers these days? Somebody’s thoughts might resuscitate SOA or perhaps nail even more spikes into the SOA coffin.
*********************************
Baer: I hate to use a cliché, but it’s like the last mile of enterprise workflow and enterprise processes. The whole goal of workflows was trying to codify what we do with processes and trying to implement our best practices consistently. Yet, when it comes to verbal communications, we’re still basically using technology that began with the dawn of the human voice eons ago.
Gardner: I've seen people use sign language.
Baer: Well, that maybe too, and smoke signals.
Gardner: A certain finger comes up from time to time in some IT departments.
Kobielus: At least the use of a trusty index DTMS finger.
Gardner: There you go.
*********************************
Gardner: Jim Kobielus, isn’t there more to this on the consumer side as well? We've got these hand-held devices that people are using more and more with full broadband connectivity for more types of activities, straddling their personal and business lives and activities. We know Microsoft has been talking about voice recognition as a new interface goal for, what, 10 years now. What’s the deal when it comes to user habits, interfaces, and having some input into these back-end processes?
An Important Extension
Kobielus: That’s a huge question. Let me just unpeel the onion here. I see SOC as very much an important extension of SOA or an application of SOA, where the service that you're trying to maximize, share, and use is the intelligence that’s in people’s heads -- the people in the organization, in your team. You have various ways in which you can get access to that knowledge and intelligence, one of which is by tapping into a common social networking environment.
In a consumer sphere, the thing is the intelligence you want to gain access to is intelligence sets residing in mobile assets -- human beings on the run. Human beings have various devices and applications through which they can get access to all manner of content and through which they can get access to each other.
So, in a consumer world, a lot of the SOC value proposition is in how it supports social networking. The Facebook environments provide an ever more service-oriented environment within which people can mash up not only their presence and profiles, but all of the content the human beings generate on the fly. Possibly, they can tag on the fly as well, and that might be relevant to other people.
There is a strong potential for SOC and that consumer Facebook-style paradigm of sharing everybody’s user-generated content that’s developed on the fly.
*********************************
Text-Mining Capability
Kobielus: One of the services in the infrastructure of the SOC that will be critically needed in a consumer or a business environment is a text-mining capability within the cloud. That can go on the fly to all these unstructured texts that have been generated, and identify entities in relationships and sentiments to make that information quickly available. Or, it can make those relationships quickly available through search or through other means to people who are too busy to do a formal search or who are too busy to even do any manual tagging. We simply want the basic meanings to just bubble up out of the cloud.
*********************************
Kobielus: I want to add one last observation before we go to the "SOA is dead" topic. In order for this integration to happen in the cloud, the cloud providers need to federate their new registries with those of their enterprise customers. But, humans are reachable through a different type of registry called a directory, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) and other means.
Cloud providers need to federate their identity management in a directory environment with those of their customers. I don’t think the industry has really thought through all the federation issues to really make this service oriented, business communications in the cloud scenario a reality any time soon.
Gardner: So we need an open Wiki-like phone book in the sky.
Kobielus: Exactly.
*********************************
Kobielus: The whole "SOA is dead" theme struck a responsive chord in the industry, because there's a lot of fatigue, not only with the buzzword, but the very concept. It’s been too grandiose and nebulous. It’s been oversold, expectations have been built up too high, and governance is a bear.
We all know the real-world implementation problems with SOA, the way it’s been developed and presented and discussed in the industry. The core of it is services. As Anne indicated, services are the unit of governance that SOA begot.
We all now focus on services. Now, we’re moving into the world of cloud computing and, you know what, a nebulous environment has gotten even more nebulous. The issues with governance, services, and the cloud -- everything is a service in the cloud. So, how do you govern everything? How do you federate public and private clouds? How do you control mashups and so forth? How do you deal with the issues like virtual machine sprawl?
The range of issues now being thrown into the big SOA hopper under the cloud paradigm is just growing, and the fatigue is going to grow, and the disillusionment is going to grow with the very concept of SOA. I just want to point that out as a background condition that I’m sensing everywhere.
*********************************
Kobielus’ comments on all the above, here on the evening of January 28 by himself:
• “Trusty index DTMS finger”? What does that mean? I never said it. Whoever transcribed the audio misattributed it. What does “DTMS” stand for anyway? Go listen to the audio playback and tell me whether I actually said it. I’m too lazy to do so. Also, I can’t stand listening to my own voice (yeah, I know, you’d think otherwise, wouldn’t you, given how verbal I am).
• Mash up each other’s presence, content, intelligence? A virtual mashpit, so to speak. Feels slightly creepy, doesn’t it. Sort of like the movie “The Fly” where the machine went haywire and mashed Jeff Goldblum’s DNA with an insect. Ewwww!
• Glad I mashed up identity management and service governance on the call--mashed and mushed LDAP directories and UDDI registries, into each other conceptually--and federated them in that big Venn diagram in the sky. SOA for interpersonal communications depends on populating the governance bus with all that identity “metadata” (e.g., contacts, attributes, profiles, roles, demographics, interests, transactions, behavioral characteristics, clickstream, predictive model scores, etc.)
• Text mining will provide the auto-discovery mechanism for all the “identity metadata” that people are self-publishing in un- and semi-structured formats (often without fully realizing it) in the Web 2.0, social networking, wiki world.
• Controlling mashups. Mashup governance. Dave Linthicum introduced that concept a year or two ago, but I still don’t sense any clear feeling among vendors or users that it’s a hot button. I think everybody still regards user-created services (i.e., mashups) as outside the proper scope of SOA. But, then again, what’s the difference between a mashup and a rogue service? The former is not sanctioned by corporate IT but is ostensibly benign and is to be tolerated, if not encouraged or supported. The latter is also unsanctioned, and possibly benign, but under suspicion and to be decommissioned or neutralized at the first opportunity. And what’s the difference between mashups and virtual machine sprawl? The former proliferates but doesn’t necessarily hog resources or disrupt operations, whereas the latter also proliferates and consumes more than its fair share of resources. The relevant distinctions in these cases all concern where specifically a particular created/published service (be it a mashup service, Web service, or cloud service) sits on the governance spectrum in a given organization. Is it a sanctioned/supported or unsanctioned/unsupported service, from the point of view of the service governance “authorities”?
Jim
Saturday, January 24, 2009
poem Jimi Hendrix Woodstock '69 Star Spangled Banner
JIMI HENDRIX WOODSTOCK '69 STAR SPANGLED BANNER
Mangled and flaring:
righties rightfully spat at
that conflagration.
Flailing and flouting:
the left-brained would gladly ban
such deconstruction:
Such flapping of the
banner feedback-streaked and wild
freak celebration.
Mangled and flaring:
righties rightfully spat at
that conflagration.
Flailing and flouting:
the left-brained would gladly ban
such deconstruction:
Such flapping of the
banner feedback-streaked and wild
freak celebration.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
poem Inner Lincoln (2009 & 1997)
INNER LINCOLN (2009)
The original
Republican. There he sits:
bearded, observing.
Yes, yet another
old marble giant. Tired and
visibly aging.
Ready to retire.
Let the people complete their
emancipation.
INNER LINCOLN (1997)
Majesty brooding.
Swamp temple for a nation.
Children of Africa unbound your legacy.
Blood war bad marriage depression prima donna generals couldn't break you.
In death you're larger but still humble still alone.
Stone chips flake from your old walls.
Darkness consumes you.
The original
Republican. There he sits:
bearded, observing.
Yes, yet another
old marble giant. Tired and
visibly aging.
Ready to retire.
Let the people complete their
emancipation.
INNER LINCOLN (1997)
Majesty brooding.
Swamp temple for a nation.
Children of Africa unbound your legacy.
Blood war bad marriage depression prima donna generals couldn't break you.
In death you're larger but still humble still alone.
Stone chips flake from your old walls.
Darkness consumes you.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
fyi What Happens If You Die?
All:
Stimulus: http://blogs.cioinsight.com/knowitall/content001/cio/the_indispensable_man.html?kc=CIOMINEPNL01202009
Response : Another headline that stops you cold (pun sort of intended). It’s intended as a comment on Steve Jobs’ health situation and the ramifications for Apple going forward. Rather than me get into a pointless ramble on God, heaven, the soul, legacy, the afterlife, “cemeteries are full of indispensable men,” and the like, I’ll just point out that, where corporate succession planning is concerned, Jobs’ eventual demise was factored into people’s thinking when it was revealed a few years ago that he had battled cancer. And, in fact, he has built a brand that can certainly survive the loss of one or more individuals and keep on prospering. It’s instructive to look at the legacy of Walt Disney (Jobs, in fact, has been called the new Disney because he founded Pixar). Quibble as you might with how Mike Eisner and others have built Disney’s brand in the 43 years since Walt went to heaven, you can’t deny that the founder did something exquisitely right. And that he was just as indispensable in his heyday to his shop as Jobs is now to his. That said, I wish Steven Jobs a speedy recovery. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. I’m not a big Apple fan, but that’s irrelevant. He’s a human being suffering from some nasty medical condition, and should be in all our prayers.
Jim
Stimulus: http://blogs.cioinsight.com/knowitall/content001/cio/the_indispensable_man.html?kc=CIOMINEPNL01202009
Response : Another headline that stops you cold (pun sort of intended). It’s intended as a comment on Steve Jobs’ health situation and the ramifications for Apple going forward. Rather than me get into a pointless ramble on God, heaven, the soul, legacy, the afterlife, “cemeteries are full of indispensable men,” and the like, I’ll just point out that, where corporate succession planning is concerned, Jobs’ eventual demise was factored into people’s thinking when it was revealed a few years ago that he had battled cancer. And, in fact, he has built a brand that can certainly survive the loss of one or more individuals and keep on prospering. It’s instructive to look at the legacy of Walt Disney (Jobs, in fact, has been called the new Disney because he founded Pixar). Quibble as you might with how Mike Eisner and others have built Disney’s brand in the 43 years since Walt went to heaven, you can’t deny that the founder did something exquisitely right. And that he was just as indispensable in his heyday to his shop as Jobs is now to his. That said, I wish Steven Jobs a speedy recovery. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. I’m not a big Apple fan, but that’s irrelevant. He’s a human being suffering from some nasty medical condition, and should be in all our prayers.
Jim
Sunday, January 18, 2009
New Federation Frontiers in the Cloud Services World
All:
Rich Wolski of Eucalyptus had some very interesting insights to share about the role of identity federation among public and private clouds. You'll see those thoughts when my Network World article publishes on February 9.
What Rich said reminded me of this article, which I published in Business Communications Review in fall 2006. It's about the need for multi-layered federation infrastructures for IP networking. It reminds me of the fact that clouds (aka "everything as a service") will also have to federate on every level.
***************************************
New Federation Frontiers in the IP Networking World
Federation is a concept much in vogue these days, and it is being applied to a growing range of telecommunications and computing infrastructures.
Where telecommunications is concerned, federation refers to an established industry practice: interconnection, routing, billing, clearing, revenue settlement, and other negotiated arrangements among affiliated service providers. Network federation allows subscribers to authenticate to their primary carrier and thereby gain single sign-on (SSO) access to services, applications, and content controlled by affiliated service providers. The alternative to federation is centralization—in other words, the long-discarded “Ma Bell” approach of one carrier controlling everything in the connected universe.
If you think of it, the Internet is the most successful network federation of all. It is a global federation of separate, cooperating networks built on universal adoption of the Internet Protocol (IP), Domain Name Service (DNS), Uniform Resource Locator (URL), and other core standards developed under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other groups. In addition, as noted in “What is Federated Identity Management?” (Business Communications Review, August 2005), federations have been implemented widely in other telecommunications and distributed computing environments. For example, federated location-registry and roaming services enable interconnected cellular carriers to authenticate client devices, route incoming calls, apply appropriate calling features, and bill subscribers correctly. Furthermore, multi-institution automated teller machine (ATM) networks—such as Cirrus--operate under a type of federation, enabling users to login remotely to their bank accounts from any affiliated institution’s machines.
In addition to these long-established approaches, new frontiers in standards-based cross-carrier federation are opening up. Many of those new federation initiatives fall under the broad architectural umbrella of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Increasingly, network industry standards groups are using the word “federation” to describe their cross-carrier IP interoperability frameworks. The IMS community is referencing federation identity management (IdM) standards—such as those developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the Liberty Alliance—to facilitate convergence among diverse IP-based services. But they’re going beyond the Web services world’s federation protocols to define federation environments that build on IETF specifications such as Domain Name Service (DNS), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and Electronic Number (ENUM).
Figure 1 illustrates several layers of federation that are possible in a cross-carrier IP internetworking environment: federated IdM (user and device authentication, SSO, and roaming); federated service creation, provisioning, and coordination; and federated service provider peering (interconnection, policy declaration, addressing, and routing).
The industry is implementing IP federation in all of these areas. Recently, federation has popped up in several new industry standardization efforts, though not all of these new federation approaches have yet been implemented in production carrier internetworking environments.
Most notably, infrastructure vendors are integrating federated IdM SSO protocols within IMS’ Home Subscriber Server (HSS). In addition, the IPsphere Forum is developing commercial and technical frameworks to support federated cross-carrier service provisioning, signaling, and management, incorporating federated IdM standards plus a broad range of WS-* standards. Furthermore, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Working Group is developing standards under which Voice Over IP (VoIP) service providers will be able to flexibly federate amongst themselves through the DNS and ENUM infrastructures.
Federated Identity Management
Many people in the information technology world associate federation primarily with IdM. Federated IdM refers to standards-based approaches for handling authentication, SSO, role-based access control, and session management across diverse organizations, security domains, and application platforms. The most widely implemented federated IdM/SSO protocol standards include Liberty Alliance Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF), OASIS’ Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and WS-Federation.
Within a typical cross-carrier internetworking environment, federated IdM may be implemented in layers. For converged IP services, federated IdM may involve separate authentications at the application layer and network layer.
Increasingly, the application-layer authentications are relying on any or all of the federated IdM standards mentioned above. In fact, telecommunications carriers in many nations are among the most active implementers of the Liberty Alliance specifications, having deployed Liberty-based IdM services for application-layer account linking, SSO, and trusted attribute sharing across their catalogs of federated third-party services.
Application-layer federated IdM relies on carriers maintaining authoritative directories of user identities, credentials, roles, personalization settings, user preferences, and other attributes. Generally, each federated carrier and service provider operates as an identity provider (IdP), managing the master directory of its own registered subscribers along with their account profiles. Carriers may also provide real-time subscriber session state information to federated partners, thereby facilitating targeting and personalization of service delivery.
Within the underlying IP networking environment, network-layer authentications will increasingly rely on IMS’ HSS infrastructure. HSS is IMS’ principal network-layer IdM environment. Within each carrier’s IMS network, the HSS is a master directory that supports user authentication and authorization, subscriber profile management, session setup and management, call routing, and user roaming within carrier networks. There are no standards specifying exactly how the HSS must interact with its underlying user directory or database repository. Consequently, IMS infrastructure providers and carriers may rely on prevalent directory-access standards, such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), or WS-* standards, such as XML Query, for query, update, and management of their HSS repository.
The HSS is a master directory of device and user identity information relevant to network-level authentication, authorization, and roaming. For wireless networks, the HSS manages device and user identities such as International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity (TMSI), International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), and Mobile Subscriber ISDN Number (MSISDN). With IMS, the HSS manages additional identities, including IP Multimedia Private Identity (IMPI) and IP Multimedia Public Identity (IMPU), which are URIs associated with single or multiple client devices.
To enable cross-carrier interconnection, SSO, and roaming, HSS environments must be federated through various approaches.
At the network layer of the IMS architecture, cross-HSS federation requires that each carrier also implement a Subscriber Location Function (SLF), and that each HSS and SLF implement the DIAMETER protocol (RFC 3588) for authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA). Essentially, the HSS/SLF infrastructure in IMS environments is equivalent to the Home Location Registry (HLR) and Visitor Location Registry (VLR) services in cellular networks (one big difference is that the HSS/SLF is a media, network, and device-agnostic functional evolution, hence a functional superset, of the cellular-specific HLR/VLR infrastructure).
DIAMETER is an important piece of the IP networking federation equation. DIAMETER—the IMS successor to the widely adopted Remote Access Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol--may be used for cross-carrier federated AAA in conjunction with the HSS. Wireline and wireless ISPs authenticate users at the application layer through DIAMETER/RADIUS servers that interface to authoritative directories of user identities, passwords, and other credentials. DIAMETER/RADIUS servers can serve as proxies, mediating between a front-end authenticating server and one or more back-end directories. As proxies, these servers can be set up to forward authentication and accounting messages to peer authentication servers in other application domains, which is essentially a federated IdM scenario.
In addition, DIAMETER is the principal access protocol that allows distributed IMS functions, no matter what carrier’s domain they happen to deployed within, to interact with the carrier’s master HSS. Within the IMS infrastructure, the Interrogating Call Session Control Function (I-CSCF) queries the HSS using DIAMETER to retrieve the user location, in order to route a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) request to its assigned Serving CSCF (S-CSCF). The S-CSCF uses DIAMETER to download user profiles from and upload user profiles to the HSS. And an IMS Application Server—controlling caller ID and other enhanced services—can use DIAMETER to query the HSS for subscriber presence, location, and other account profile data.
Industry efforts are underway to integrate IMS’ federated IdM infrastructure—centered on HSS and DIAMETER—with the Web services world’s IdM environment, in which application-layer directories and federated SSO protocols are predominant. In separate recent initiatives, both Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are positioning their federated IdM platforms and protocols as SSO adjuncts to carrier HSS infrastructures.
In April 2006, Sun and Lucent Technologies announced joint development of infrastructure products that provide standards-based SSO access to federated IMS services. Sun is providing its Sun Java System Federation Manager product to the initiative, whereas Lucent has provided a full IMS product suite that includes HSS and other IdM functionality.
Under this joint development initiative, Lucent is providing a suite of IMS infrastructure products to support federated IdM functionality. The following set of products is indicative of the functional components necessary for federated IdM over HSS in an IMS environment:
Lucent Datagrid: This product integrates the diverse, federated carrier databases that contain subscriber data relevant to call processing, session management, messaging, and customer care.
Lucent Unified Subscriber Data Server (USDS): This product provides HSS, HLR, and AAA functionality. It enables HSSs to be deployed in a centralized or decentralized/federated fashion. It allows access to subscriber profile data that is hosted inside or outside of a service provider's network and on diverse network platforms. It also enables operators to provide subscribers with a single service presentation environment even when roaming to another carrier’s network.
Lucent Session Manager: In conjunction with the USDS, the Session Manager supports SSO, presence management, and session management across diverse, federated IMS-based services. It allows operators to provide integrated voice, data, video, multimedia, and other capabilities over IMS sessions. Through embedding of Sun’s technology, the Session Manager is implementing the Liberty Alliance federated IdM protocols, which provide SSO within multilateral federated environments. In addition, the product leverages the Liberty protocols to allow subscribers to selectively disclose particular profile information—such as current locations and previously stored preferences—to particular federated application and content providers. Furthermore, the Session Manager can be deployed for several core IMS functional roles, including Call Session Control Function, Service Broker, Service Capabilities Interaction Manager (SCIM), Policy Decision Function (PDF), and the Breakout Gateway Control Function (BGCF).
Lucent Communication Manager: This product provides a unified portal presentation view for subscribers to access their IMS-based converged services from wireline or wireless clients. It supports integrated session control that is agnostic to the underlying application servers serving the subscriber and is agnostic to the client devices through which services are being accessed.
Lucent Vortex: This product provides a policy engine that may be distributed throughout a network to support personalization and customization of end-user views of federated IMS-based services. It allows network operators to quickly modify network behaviors to serve the special requirements of particular customer segments and ensure guaranteed quality of service.
Separately, Microsoft has been working with carriers throughout the world to integrate its own application-layer federated IdM stack with their IMS environments. Microsoft published its federated IMS vision in a June 2005 whitepaper called “Connected Services Framework and IMS: A Partnership for Success.”
Microsoft’s and Sun’s visions for federated IdM have many common themes, such as promoting IMS service convergence and aggregation, enabling SSO with trusted user attribute sharing, and implementing WS-* standards pervasively throughout carrier infrastructure. Both of them promote IMS convergence visions under which network-layer IdM services—such as the DIAMETER protocol interfaces—could conceivably be exposed as Web services and invoked from application-layer IdM services (though neither Microsoft nor Sun has committed to exposing DIAMETER APIs as Web services). In other words, they both point to the eventual unification of IMS application- and network-layer federation within a common service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework.
However, their approaches differ in two important respects.
First, Sun has been promoting the Liberty Alliance protocols in its carrier-federation roadmap, and implementing them in its work with Lucent. Microsoft, by contrast, has been implementing the rival WS-Federation protocol, as well as other WS-* specifications—such as WS-Trust—that it has a key role in developing. It’s important to note that the functional differences between the Liberty Alliance protocols and WS-Federation are not great, and that they both support federated account linking, strong authentication, SSO, trusted attribute sharing, privacy protection, and session management over multi-organization circles of trust.
Second, Sun has been working with Lucent to embed federated IdM protocols into the underlying IMS HSS/SLF infrastructure. Microsoft, by contrast, has focused on connecting its federated IdM infrastructure to IMS as an Application Server. In the IMS architectural framework, an Application Server is a functional component that hosts and executes calling and application services. In addition to application-layer SSO, other services that may be implemented as IMS Application Servers include Caller ID, Call Waiting, Push To Talk, Voice Mail, Short Message Service, Presence, and Location-Based Services. From the subscriber’s point of view, an Application Server may be located in the subscriber’s own home carrier’s network, or in a federated third-party network or service provider environment.
It’s not clear which, if either, of the two approaches—Sun’s embedding of federated IdM in IMS HSS vs. Microsoft’s integration of federated IdM as an IMS Application Server—is best. Embedding of industry-standard federation protocols in HSS may pay off for Sun/Lucent if other IMS infrastructure providers and carriers follow their lead.
Integration of the WS-Federation protocol as an IMS Application Server may pay off for Microsoft if it can convince IMS infrastructure providers and carriers to implement this protocol. However, it should be noted that Microsoft’s three-year-old WS-Federation specification has not achieved much adoption in the mainstream federated IdM community.
Federated Service Creation, Provisioning, and Coordination
The IMS framework is missing an important component: specifications that describe how IP services can be flexibly created, provisioned, and coordinated across federated carriers, application partners, and content publishers.
The IPsphere Forum is a telecommunications industry initiative to fill in this missing piece. The forum is an international consortium of service and infrastructure providers developing both the commercial and technical frameworks for federated cross-operator service delivery. The group, which has been in existence for more than a year, has established a formal liaison with the International Telecommunications Union Telecom Standardization Sector.
The IPsphere frameworks, still under development, implement SOA principles within the IMS architectural model. Leveraging WS-* specifications such as UDDI, IPsphere is defining a standards-based environment for provisioning network infrastructure, application, and content services—composed of modular “service elements”--to carriers, endpoints, and users across federated IP networks. Each service element is a software method or module that is hosted by a provider and published to a UDDI registry as a Web service. End-to-end IP voice, data, and multimedia services may be created from diverse service elements hosted by many federated providers. Providers link the services to their respective network and policy management infrastructures for runtime administration, optimization, and control.
Under the IPsphere commercial/technical framework, application-layer IdM services—such as Liberty Alliance-based SSO—are just one category of infrastructure interactions that may be federated across a “pan-provider” IMS environment. Boundaries between federated providers sit at the intercarrier interface (ICI), as defined under the IMS model. IMS defines Call State Control Function (CSCF) points that can be deployed at network boundaries, such as ICIs, for enforcing federation policies—such as security, trust, quality of service, revenue settlement, and service-level agreement (SLA) accountability--defined by cooperating IP service providers.
Across these network boundaries, federated service provisioning and coordination take place across the following functional service layers, or “strata,” as defined by IPsphere:
Packet handling stratum: This corresponds to the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection protocols, as implemented in the IMS model.
Policy and control stratum: This corresponds to such IMS functional components as the “Policy Decision Function,” “Proxy Call Session Control Function,” “Policy Enforcement Point,” and “Common Open Policy Service.”
Service signaling stratum: This stratum has no counterpart in the IMS model. It is the IPsphere layer at which federated pan-provider services are created, provisioned, and coordinated from elements hosted in diverse provider environments. Across this layer, the providers’ service creation environments exchange structured messages to manage the phases of federated service setup, execution, and assurance. IPsphere defines several models of federated message-driven service creation, including permissive Internet-like interactions among providers, policy-database-mediated linking of services at the ICI, and explicit linking of services at the ICI by the providers’ respective network management systems.
Under IPsphere’s commercial model, each federated service provider may perform one or both of the following functional roles: “Partners” or “Sellers.” Partners contribute resources in the form of registered component service elements from which Sellers assemble end-to-end services that are sold to users, who are also known as “Buyers.” Partners publish only those services/elements that they want Sellers to deliver to Buyers, using UDDI and other Web services standards for messaging-based service provisioning interactions with Sellers. Partners receive revenues from Buyers via settlement payments rendered by Sellers, who validate, authenticate, and bill the Buyers. Partners may also assemble component services contributed by various federated “Sub-Partners.”
Of course, negotiated contractual relationships determine how Partners, Sub-Partners, Sellers, and Buyers interact throughout the federated service provisioning and delivery life cycle. The flexible IPsphere federation framework allows participating organizations to offer whatever resources they choose, at whatever price the market will bear, under whatever federation partnering arrangements make business sense.
Federated Service Provider Peering
Within the fast-evolving world of IP networks, cross-provider federations are being established to facilitate end-to-end service interoperability.
In their drive to establish a end-to-end alternative to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), VoIP service providers (VSPs) are establishing their own federations. Federation—also called “VoIP peering”--enables VSPs to offer end-to-end “on-net” VoIP calls and other IP multimedia communications services to their own customers and to the customers of ay federated VSP. As more VSPs federate with each other—preferably in multilateral arrangements--their collective on-net customer base will reach a critical mass under which VoIP becomes a cost-effective, full-service alternative to the PSTN. The number of calls that a VSP can complete on-net is directly proportional to the number of other federated VSPs and their customers.
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in London, XConnect is the world’s largest VSP peering/federation community and operates the world’s largest international private ENUM registry. XConnect provides VSP federation services to more than 150 VSPs and 123 million unique VoIP telephone numbers worldwide. Its VSP services include address protocol interoperability, ENUM interconnect call addressing and routing services, and authentication and identity services. In addition, XConnect provides multi-protocol interoperability, VoIP call security, and Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) prevention services to VSP members.
Separately, the IETF’s Session Peering for Multimedia Interconnect (SPEERMINT) Working Group is developing standards under which VSPs will be able to flexibly federate amongst themselves. The SPEERMINT specifications leverage the basic VoIP standards: SIP, Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), and H.323. In addition, SPEERMINT is placing heavy reliance on DNS and the emerging DNS-integrated ENUM directory infrastructure to support a ubiquitous VSP federation address and policy administration environment.
Under SPEERMINT’s specifications, a federation is defined as “a group of VSPs [that] agree to receive calls from each other via SIP, agree on a set of administrative rules for such calls [such as settlement and abuse handling], and agree on specific rules for the technical details of the interconnection.” A VSP declares its membership in a federation by publishing to DNS a “domain policy” regarding the conditions under which they are willing to accept incoming communications per the rules of the federation. The specifications define the structure of these domain policies and the general approach for publishing them to DNS, using Dynamic Delegation Discovery System (DDDS) DNS records.
Under SPEERMINT’s approach, each VSP federation would identify itself by a unique URI, set membership eligibility criteria, define its internal policies and rules, and determine how to communicate those rules to member VSPs. SPEERMINT recommends but does not require that VSP federations use URLs to point to documents describing federation policies and rules.
Some of the VSP-federation policies, rules, and membership conditions that might be described in these documents include:
• Federated VSPs agree to use federation-designated ENUM infrastructure to translate existing numeric phone numbers to SIP addresses using DNS to facilitate on-net VoIP call routing;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept SIP-based calls from each other via the public Internet, as long as each call uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) over Transmission Control Protocol and presents a X.509 cert that was signed by a federation-designated public key infrastructure certificate authority;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept only those SIP-based calls from each other that were transmitted over a federation-wide virtual private network;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept all SIP-based calls from each other that were originated from within the same country;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept only those SIP-based calls from each other that were routed through a central, federated-designated SIP proxy;
• Federated VSPs agree to have revenue settlements for calls from each other administered by a federation-designated clearinghouse; and
• Federated VSPs agree to use firewalls and other perimeter security devices to block SIP calls that violate federation-administered anti-SPIT rules.
The SPEERMINT working group also points out that the same DNS-enabled federation approach may be used for peering among providers of SIP, instant messaging (IM), and other IP application services.
Though the SPEERMINT group doesn’t directly acknowledge the IPsphere Forum’s work, it’s clear that the two industry initiatives are complementary. The SPEERMINT effort defines an IP environment under which providers of a particular service—VoIP calling—may federate the policies under which they connect their users. IPsphere, by contrast, defines a larger IMS-based technical environment within which VSPs can provision and coordinate end-to-end VoIP and other services that conform to federation policies.
Likewise, the SPEERMINT and IPsphere frameworks require that end users and their devices authenticate using federated IdM protocols, at both the application layer (in the context of SOA and Web services) and network layer (in the context of IMS’ HSS). So there’s an important and growing role for the Liberty Alliance, SAML, and other federated IdM protocols in IP, IMS, SIP, VoIP, and IPTV federations.
Federation in a complex IP internetwork is a many-layered thing. In fact, federation—on many levels—is the key to convergence of diverse, pan-provider, multimedia IP services. Every new carrier, hosted application provider, and content publisher in the IMS fabric is another domain that must federate with existing providers in order to do business online.
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Back in the days I was a federation analyst. And an SOA analyst. Still am, but I've moved on.
Jim
Rich Wolski of Eucalyptus had some very interesting insights to share about the role of identity federation among public and private clouds. You'll see those thoughts when my Network World article publishes on February 9.
What Rich said reminded me of this article, which I published in Business Communications Review in fall 2006. It's about the need for multi-layered federation infrastructures for IP networking. It reminds me of the fact that clouds (aka "everything as a service") will also have to federate on every level.
***************************************
New Federation Frontiers in the IP Networking World
Federation is a concept much in vogue these days, and it is being applied to a growing range of telecommunications and computing infrastructures.
Where telecommunications is concerned, federation refers to an established industry practice: interconnection, routing, billing, clearing, revenue settlement, and other negotiated arrangements among affiliated service providers. Network federation allows subscribers to authenticate to their primary carrier and thereby gain single sign-on (SSO) access to services, applications, and content controlled by affiliated service providers. The alternative to federation is centralization—in other words, the long-discarded “Ma Bell” approach of one carrier controlling everything in the connected universe.
If you think of it, the Internet is the most successful network federation of all. It is a global federation of separate, cooperating networks built on universal adoption of the Internet Protocol (IP), Domain Name Service (DNS), Uniform Resource Locator (URL), and other core standards developed under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other groups. In addition, as noted in “What is Federated Identity Management?” (Business Communications Review, August 2005), federations have been implemented widely in other telecommunications and distributed computing environments. For example, federated location-registry and roaming services enable interconnected cellular carriers to authenticate client devices, route incoming calls, apply appropriate calling features, and bill subscribers correctly. Furthermore, multi-institution automated teller machine (ATM) networks—such as Cirrus--operate under a type of federation, enabling users to login remotely to their bank accounts from any affiliated institution’s machines.
In addition to these long-established approaches, new frontiers in standards-based cross-carrier federation are opening up. Many of those new federation initiatives fall under the broad architectural umbrella of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Increasingly, network industry standards groups are using the word “federation” to describe their cross-carrier IP interoperability frameworks. The IMS community is referencing federation identity management (IdM) standards—such as those developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the Liberty Alliance—to facilitate convergence among diverse IP-based services. But they’re going beyond the Web services world’s federation protocols to define federation environments that build on IETF specifications such as Domain Name Service (DNS), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and Electronic Number (ENUM).
Figure 1 illustrates several layers of federation that are possible in a cross-carrier IP internetworking environment: federated IdM (user and device authentication, SSO, and roaming); federated service creation, provisioning, and coordination; and federated service provider peering (interconnection, policy declaration, addressing, and routing).
The industry is implementing IP federation in all of these areas. Recently, federation has popped up in several new industry standardization efforts, though not all of these new federation approaches have yet been implemented in production carrier internetworking environments.
Most notably, infrastructure vendors are integrating federated IdM SSO protocols within IMS’ Home Subscriber Server (HSS). In addition, the IPsphere Forum is developing commercial and technical frameworks to support federated cross-carrier service provisioning, signaling, and management, incorporating federated IdM standards plus a broad range of WS-* standards. Furthermore, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Working Group is developing standards under which Voice Over IP (VoIP) service providers will be able to flexibly federate amongst themselves through the DNS and ENUM infrastructures.
Federated Identity Management
Many people in the information technology world associate federation primarily with IdM. Federated IdM refers to standards-based approaches for handling authentication, SSO, role-based access control, and session management across diverse organizations, security domains, and application platforms. The most widely implemented federated IdM/SSO protocol standards include Liberty Alliance Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF), OASIS’ Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and WS-Federation.
Within a typical cross-carrier internetworking environment, federated IdM may be implemented in layers. For converged IP services, federated IdM may involve separate authentications at the application layer and network layer.
Increasingly, the application-layer authentications are relying on any or all of the federated IdM standards mentioned above. In fact, telecommunications carriers in many nations are among the most active implementers of the Liberty Alliance specifications, having deployed Liberty-based IdM services for application-layer account linking, SSO, and trusted attribute sharing across their catalogs of federated third-party services.
Application-layer federated IdM relies on carriers maintaining authoritative directories of user identities, credentials, roles, personalization settings, user preferences, and other attributes. Generally, each federated carrier and service provider operates as an identity provider (IdP), managing the master directory of its own registered subscribers along with their account profiles. Carriers may also provide real-time subscriber session state information to federated partners, thereby facilitating targeting and personalization of service delivery.
Within the underlying IP networking environment, network-layer authentications will increasingly rely on IMS’ HSS infrastructure. HSS is IMS’ principal network-layer IdM environment. Within each carrier’s IMS network, the HSS is a master directory that supports user authentication and authorization, subscriber profile management, session setup and management, call routing, and user roaming within carrier networks. There are no standards specifying exactly how the HSS must interact with its underlying user directory or database repository. Consequently, IMS infrastructure providers and carriers may rely on prevalent directory-access standards, such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), or WS-* standards, such as XML Query, for query, update, and management of their HSS repository.
The HSS is a master directory of device and user identity information relevant to network-level authentication, authorization, and roaming. For wireless networks, the HSS manages device and user identities such as International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity (TMSI), International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), and Mobile Subscriber ISDN Number (MSISDN). With IMS, the HSS manages additional identities, including IP Multimedia Private Identity (IMPI) and IP Multimedia Public Identity (IMPU), which are URIs associated with single or multiple client devices.
To enable cross-carrier interconnection, SSO, and roaming, HSS environments must be federated through various approaches.
At the network layer of the IMS architecture, cross-HSS federation requires that each carrier also implement a Subscriber Location Function (SLF), and that each HSS and SLF implement the DIAMETER protocol (RFC 3588) for authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA). Essentially, the HSS/SLF infrastructure in IMS environments is equivalent to the Home Location Registry (HLR) and Visitor Location Registry (VLR) services in cellular networks (one big difference is that the HSS/SLF is a media, network, and device-agnostic functional evolution, hence a functional superset, of the cellular-specific HLR/VLR infrastructure).
DIAMETER is an important piece of the IP networking federation equation. DIAMETER—the IMS successor to the widely adopted Remote Access Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol--may be used for cross-carrier federated AAA in conjunction with the HSS. Wireline and wireless ISPs authenticate users at the application layer through DIAMETER/RADIUS servers that interface to authoritative directories of user identities, passwords, and other credentials. DIAMETER/RADIUS servers can serve as proxies, mediating between a front-end authenticating server and one or more back-end directories. As proxies, these servers can be set up to forward authentication and accounting messages to peer authentication servers in other application domains, which is essentially a federated IdM scenario.
In addition, DIAMETER is the principal access protocol that allows distributed IMS functions, no matter what carrier’s domain they happen to deployed within, to interact with the carrier’s master HSS. Within the IMS infrastructure, the Interrogating Call Session Control Function (I-CSCF) queries the HSS using DIAMETER to retrieve the user location, in order to route a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) request to its assigned Serving CSCF (S-CSCF). The S-CSCF uses DIAMETER to download user profiles from and upload user profiles to the HSS. And an IMS Application Server—controlling caller ID and other enhanced services—can use DIAMETER to query the HSS for subscriber presence, location, and other account profile data.
Industry efforts are underway to integrate IMS’ federated IdM infrastructure—centered on HSS and DIAMETER—with the Web services world’s IdM environment, in which application-layer directories and federated SSO protocols are predominant. In separate recent initiatives, both Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are positioning their federated IdM platforms and protocols as SSO adjuncts to carrier HSS infrastructures.
In April 2006, Sun and Lucent Technologies announced joint development of infrastructure products that provide standards-based SSO access to federated IMS services. Sun is providing its Sun Java System Federation Manager product to the initiative, whereas Lucent has provided a full IMS product suite that includes HSS and other IdM functionality.
Under this joint development initiative, Lucent is providing a suite of IMS infrastructure products to support federated IdM functionality. The following set of products is indicative of the functional components necessary for federated IdM over HSS in an IMS environment:
Lucent Datagrid: This product integrates the diverse, federated carrier databases that contain subscriber data relevant to call processing, session management, messaging, and customer care.
Lucent Unified Subscriber Data Server (USDS): This product provides HSS, HLR, and AAA functionality. It enables HSSs to be deployed in a centralized or decentralized/federated fashion. It allows access to subscriber profile data that is hosted inside or outside of a service provider's network and on diverse network platforms. It also enables operators to provide subscribers with a single service presentation environment even when roaming to another carrier’s network.
Lucent Session Manager: In conjunction with the USDS, the Session Manager supports SSO, presence management, and session management across diverse, federated IMS-based services. It allows operators to provide integrated voice, data, video, multimedia, and other capabilities over IMS sessions. Through embedding of Sun’s technology, the Session Manager is implementing the Liberty Alliance federated IdM protocols, which provide SSO within multilateral federated environments. In addition, the product leverages the Liberty protocols to allow subscribers to selectively disclose particular profile information—such as current locations and previously stored preferences—to particular federated application and content providers. Furthermore, the Session Manager can be deployed for several core IMS functional roles, including Call Session Control Function, Service Broker, Service Capabilities Interaction Manager (SCIM), Policy Decision Function (PDF), and the Breakout Gateway Control Function (BGCF).
Lucent Communication Manager: This product provides a unified portal presentation view for subscribers to access their IMS-based converged services from wireline or wireless clients. It supports integrated session control that is agnostic to the underlying application servers serving the subscriber and is agnostic to the client devices through which services are being accessed.
Lucent Vortex: This product provides a policy engine that may be distributed throughout a network to support personalization and customization of end-user views of federated IMS-based services. It allows network operators to quickly modify network behaviors to serve the special requirements of particular customer segments and ensure guaranteed quality of service.
Separately, Microsoft has been working with carriers throughout the world to integrate its own application-layer federated IdM stack with their IMS environments. Microsoft published its federated IMS vision in a June 2005 whitepaper called “Connected Services Framework and IMS: A Partnership for Success.”
Microsoft’s and Sun’s visions for federated IdM have many common themes, such as promoting IMS service convergence and aggregation, enabling SSO with trusted user attribute sharing, and implementing WS-* standards pervasively throughout carrier infrastructure. Both of them promote IMS convergence visions under which network-layer IdM services—such as the DIAMETER protocol interfaces—could conceivably be exposed as Web services and invoked from application-layer IdM services (though neither Microsoft nor Sun has committed to exposing DIAMETER APIs as Web services). In other words, they both point to the eventual unification of IMS application- and network-layer federation within a common service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework.
However, their approaches differ in two important respects.
First, Sun has been promoting the Liberty Alliance protocols in its carrier-federation roadmap, and implementing them in its work with Lucent. Microsoft, by contrast, has been implementing the rival WS-Federation protocol, as well as other WS-* specifications—such as WS-Trust—that it has a key role in developing. It’s important to note that the functional differences between the Liberty Alliance protocols and WS-Federation are not great, and that they both support federated account linking, strong authentication, SSO, trusted attribute sharing, privacy protection, and session management over multi-organization circles of trust.
Second, Sun has been working with Lucent to embed federated IdM protocols into the underlying IMS HSS/SLF infrastructure. Microsoft, by contrast, has focused on connecting its federated IdM infrastructure to IMS as an Application Server. In the IMS architectural framework, an Application Server is a functional component that hosts and executes calling and application services. In addition to application-layer SSO, other services that may be implemented as IMS Application Servers include Caller ID, Call Waiting, Push To Talk, Voice Mail, Short Message Service, Presence, and Location-Based Services. From the subscriber’s point of view, an Application Server may be located in the subscriber’s own home carrier’s network, or in a federated third-party network or service provider environment.
It’s not clear which, if either, of the two approaches—Sun’s embedding of federated IdM in IMS HSS vs. Microsoft’s integration of federated IdM as an IMS Application Server—is best. Embedding of industry-standard federation protocols in HSS may pay off for Sun/Lucent if other IMS infrastructure providers and carriers follow their lead.
Integration of the WS-Federation protocol as an IMS Application Server may pay off for Microsoft if it can convince IMS infrastructure providers and carriers to implement this protocol. However, it should be noted that Microsoft’s three-year-old WS-Federation specification has not achieved much adoption in the mainstream federated IdM community.
Federated Service Creation, Provisioning, and Coordination
The IMS framework is missing an important component: specifications that describe how IP services can be flexibly created, provisioned, and coordinated across federated carriers, application partners, and content publishers.
The IPsphere Forum is a telecommunications industry initiative to fill in this missing piece. The forum is an international consortium of service and infrastructure providers developing both the commercial and technical frameworks for federated cross-operator service delivery. The group, which has been in existence for more than a year, has established a formal liaison with the International Telecommunications Union Telecom Standardization Sector.
The IPsphere frameworks, still under development, implement SOA principles within the IMS architectural model. Leveraging WS-* specifications such as UDDI, IPsphere is defining a standards-based environment for provisioning network infrastructure, application, and content services—composed of modular “service elements”--to carriers, endpoints, and users across federated IP networks. Each service element is a software method or module that is hosted by a provider and published to a UDDI registry as a Web service. End-to-end IP voice, data, and multimedia services may be created from diverse service elements hosted by many federated providers. Providers link the services to their respective network and policy management infrastructures for runtime administration, optimization, and control.
Under the IPsphere commercial/technical framework, application-layer IdM services—such as Liberty Alliance-based SSO—are just one category of infrastructure interactions that may be federated across a “pan-provider” IMS environment. Boundaries between federated providers sit at the intercarrier interface (ICI), as defined under the IMS model. IMS defines Call State Control Function (CSCF) points that can be deployed at network boundaries, such as ICIs, for enforcing federation policies—such as security, trust, quality of service, revenue settlement, and service-level agreement (SLA) accountability--defined by cooperating IP service providers.
Across these network boundaries, federated service provisioning and coordination take place across the following functional service layers, or “strata,” as defined by IPsphere:
Packet handling stratum: This corresponds to the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection protocols, as implemented in the IMS model.
Policy and control stratum: This corresponds to such IMS functional components as the “Policy Decision Function,” “Proxy Call Session Control Function,” “Policy Enforcement Point,” and “Common Open Policy Service.”
Service signaling stratum: This stratum has no counterpart in the IMS model. It is the IPsphere layer at which federated pan-provider services are created, provisioned, and coordinated from elements hosted in diverse provider environments. Across this layer, the providers’ service creation environments exchange structured messages to manage the phases of federated service setup, execution, and assurance. IPsphere defines several models of federated message-driven service creation, including permissive Internet-like interactions among providers, policy-database-mediated linking of services at the ICI, and explicit linking of services at the ICI by the providers’ respective network management systems.
Under IPsphere’s commercial model, each federated service provider may perform one or both of the following functional roles: “Partners” or “Sellers.” Partners contribute resources in the form of registered component service elements from which Sellers assemble end-to-end services that are sold to users, who are also known as “Buyers.” Partners publish only those services/elements that they want Sellers to deliver to Buyers, using UDDI and other Web services standards for messaging-based service provisioning interactions with Sellers. Partners receive revenues from Buyers via settlement payments rendered by Sellers, who validate, authenticate, and bill the Buyers. Partners may also assemble component services contributed by various federated “Sub-Partners.”
Of course, negotiated contractual relationships determine how Partners, Sub-Partners, Sellers, and Buyers interact throughout the federated service provisioning and delivery life cycle. The flexible IPsphere federation framework allows participating organizations to offer whatever resources they choose, at whatever price the market will bear, under whatever federation partnering arrangements make business sense.
Federated Service Provider Peering
Within the fast-evolving world of IP networks, cross-provider federations are being established to facilitate end-to-end service interoperability.
In their drive to establish a end-to-end alternative to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), VoIP service providers (VSPs) are establishing their own federations. Federation—also called “VoIP peering”--enables VSPs to offer end-to-end “on-net” VoIP calls and other IP multimedia communications services to their own customers and to the customers of ay federated VSP. As more VSPs federate with each other—preferably in multilateral arrangements--their collective on-net customer base will reach a critical mass under which VoIP becomes a cost-effective, full-service alternative to the PSTN. The number of calls that a VSP can complete on-net is directly proportional to the number of other federated VSPs and their customers.
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in London, XConnect is the world’s largest VSP peering/federation community and operates the world’s largest international private ENUM registry. XConnect provides VSP federation services to more than 150 VSPs and 123 million unique VoIP telephone numbers worldwide. Its VSP services include address protocol interoperability, ENUM interconnect call addressing and routing services, and authentication and identity services. In addition, XConnect provides multi-protocol interoperability, VoIP call security, and Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) prevention services to VSP members.
Separately, the IETF’s Session Peering for Multimedia Interconnect (SPEERMINT) Working Group is developing standards under which VSPs will be able to flexibly federate amongst themselves. The SPEERMINT specifications leverage the basic VoIP standards: SIP, Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), and H.323. In addition, SPEERMINT is placing heavy reliance on DNS and the emerging DNS-integrated ENUM directory infrastructure to support a ubiquitous VSP federation address and policy administration environment.
Under SPEERMINT’s specifications, a federation is defined as “a group of VSPs [that] agree to receive calls from each other via SIP, agree on a set of administrative rules for such calls [such as settlement and abuse handling], and agree on specific rules for the technical details of the interconnection.” A VSP declares its membership in a federation by publishing to DNS a “domain policy” regarding the conditions under which they are willing to accept incoming communications per the rules of the federation. The specifications define the structure of these domain policies and the general approach for publishing them to DNS, using Dynamic Delegation Discovery System (DDDS) DNS records.
Under SPEERMINT’s approach, each VSP federation would identify itself by a unique URI, set membership eligibility criteria, define its internal policies and rules, and determine how to communicate those rules to member VSPs. SPEERMINT recommends but does not require that VSP federations use URLs to point to documents describing federation policies and rules.
Some of the VSP-federation policies, rules, and membership conditions that might be described in these documents include:
• Federated VSPs agree to use federation-designated ENUM infrastructure to translate existing numeric phone numbers to SIP addresses using DNS to facilitate on-net VoIP call routing;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept SIP-based calls from each other via the public Internet, as long as each call uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) over Transmission Control Protocol and presents a X.509 cert that was signed by a federation-designated public key infrastructure certificate authority;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept only those SIP-based calls from each other that were transmitted over a federation-wide virtual private network;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept all SIP-based calls from each other that were originated from within the same country;
• Federated VSPs agree to accept only those SIP-based calls from each other that were routed through a central, federated-designated SIP proxy;
• Federated VSPs agree to have revenue settlements for calls from each other administered by a federation-designated clearinghouse; and
• Federated VSPs agree to use firewalls and other perimeter security devices to block SIP calls that violate federation-administered anti-SPIT rules.
The SPEERMINT working group also points out that the same DNS-enabled federation approach may be used for peering among providers of SIP, instant messaging (IM), and other IP application services.
Though the SPEERMINT group doesn’t directly acknowledge the IPsphere Forum’s work, it’s clear that the two industry initiatives are complementary. The SPEERMINT effort defines an IP environment under which providers of a particular service—VoIP calling—may federate the policies under which they connect their users. IPsphere, by contrast, defines a larger IMS-based technical environment within which VSPs can provision and coordinate end-to-end VoIP and other services that conform to federation policies.
Likewise, the SPEERMINT and IPsphere frameworks require that end users and their devices authenticate using federated IdM protocols, at both the application layer (in the context of SOA and Web services) and network layer (in the context of IMS’ HSS). So there’s an important and growing role for the Liberty Alliance, SAML, and other federated IdM protocols in IP, IMS, SIP, VoIP, and IPTV federations.
Federation in a complex IP internetwork is a many-layered thing. In fact, federation—on many levels—is the key to convergence of diverse, pan-provider, multimedia IP services. Every new carrier, hosted application provider, and content publisher in the IMS fabric is another domain that must federate with existing providers in order to do business online.
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Back in the days I was a federation analyst. And an SOA analyst. Still am, but I've moved on.
Jim
fyi Tom Cruise says grew up wanting to kill Hitler
All:
See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090118/en_nm/us_cruise_valkyrie_korea_1
My take: This is one of those headlines that absolutely stops you in your tracks. Didn’t Tom realize that Adolf had done the job himself--and long before the infant Mr. Mapother crawled out of L. Ron Hubbard’s stork-shaped spacecraft? By the way, “Valkyrie”—good popcorn movie, though, in all frankness, do we need yet another Nazi tale on the big screen? And do we need another reason to admit that, yes, Mr. Cruise has talent, but that he carries so much personal baggage on screen that it gets in the way of our viewing pleasure? In terms of big stars of my generation (true confession: Cruise is 5 years younger than me), Tom Cruise is a bit like Madonna: so absolutely cold and calculating that every new project seems more engineered than felt. You tend to focus on their ambition more than their message. And for all his talent as a politician, Barack Obama has a bit of that quality as well. A bit too tightly wound, though he certainly knows what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. I wish him well in his upcoming new job. I voted for him. But I’m still not sure who he is.
Jim
See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090118/en_nm/us_cruise_valkyrie_korea_1
My take: This is one of those headlines that absolutely stops you in your tracks. Didn’t Tom realize that Adolf had done the job himself--and long before the infant Mr. Mapother crawled out of L. Ron Hubbard’s stork-shaped spacecraft? By the way, “Valkyrie”—good popcorn movie, though, in all frankness, do we need yet another Nazi tale on the big screen? And do we need another reason to admit that, yes, Mr. Cruise has talent, but that he carries so much personal baggage on screen that it gets in the way of our viewing pleasure? In terms of big stars of my generation (true confession: Cruise is 5 years younger than me), Tom Cruise is a bit like Madonna: so absolutely cold and calculating that every new project seems more engineered than felt. You tend to focus on their ambition more than their message. And for all his talent as a politician, Barack Obama has a bit of that quality as well. A bit too tightly wound, though he certainly knows what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. I wish him well in his upcoming new job. I voted for him. But I’m still not sure who he is.
Jim
imho SOA 2.0: Outlook Cloudy, But With Scattered Patches of Promise
All:
Ha ha. Yes, this analyst too is not averse to the usual “last wave/next wave” tropes, such as “xx 2.0” or “xx is dead.” So sue me.
Clouds are SOA 2.0. Cloud computing is to a great extent the future of SOA. However, this paradigm raise the SOA stakes while also accentuating the risks.
To the extent that organizations use governance to harness the richness of cloud environments, they will be able to supercharge their SOA initiatives while radically improving scalability and cost-effectiveness. Leveraging distributed cloud platforms, the next-generation SOA will be more fluid, flexible, and virtualized, managing ever more massive data sets and providing the agility to handle more complex mixed workloads of transactional applications, business intelligence, data mining, enterprise service bus, business process management, and other functions.
Clouds complicate the SOA governance picture, but it’s not as if many enterprises already have exemplary governance practices. In the real world, cloud computing, like SOA implementations, is often an ungovernable mess. By encouraging widespread reuse of scattered software components, SOA threatens to transform the enterprise application infrastructure into a sprawling, unmanageable hodgepodge of ad-hoc services. Without proper governance, SOA could allow anyone anywhere to deploy a new cloud service any time they wish, and anyone anywhere to invoke and orchestrate that service--and thousands of others—into ever more convoluted messaging patterns. In a governance-free environment, coordinated cloud service planning and optimization become frustratingly difficult. In addition, rogue cloud services could spring up everywhere and pass themselves off as legitimate nodes, thereby wreaking havoc on the delicate trust that underlies production SOA.
SOA governance is maturing as a discipline, while cloud computing—the new galaxy in which services will burst forth—is anything but. Unfortunately, the cloud arena may continue to evolve so fast over the next several years that it will be difficult for consensus service-governance practices to coalesce. Still, emerging cloud services can benefit from the many lessons learned by enterprise SOA governance implementers. Most important, you need a service catalog that maintains metadata about services and enables you to control development and construction of services and publish visibility and availability of services to consumers. Also, federation agreements should be set up to auto-provision service definitions between public clouds and enterprises’ Web services, REST, and other application environments.
So the outlook for strong service governance in this brave new paradigm remains cloudy, but with scattered patches of promise.
Jim
Ha ha. Yes, this analyst too is not averse to the usual “last wave/next wave” tropes, such as “xx 2.0” or “xx is dead.” So sue me.
Clouds are SOA 2.0. Cloud computing is to a great extent the future of SOA. However, this paradigm raise the SOA stakes while also accentuating the risks.
To the extent that organizations use governance to harness the richness of cloud environments, they will be able to supercharge their SOA initiatives while radically improving scalability and cost-effectiveness. Leveraging distributed cloud platforms, the next-generation SOA will be more fluid, flexible, and virtualized, managing ever more massive data sets and providing the agility to handle more complex mixed workloads of transactional applications, business intelligence, data mining, enterprise service bus, business process management, and other functions.
Clouds complicate the SOA governance picture, but it’s not as if many enterprises already have exemplary governance practices. In the real world, cloud computing, like SOA implementations, is often an ungovernable mess. By encouraging widespread reuse of scattered software components, SOA threatens to transform the enterprise application infrastructure into a sprawling, unmanageable hodgepodge of ad-hoc services. Without proper governance, SOA could allow anyone anywhere to deploy a new cloud service any time they wish, and anyone anywhere to invoke and orchestrate that service--and thousands of others—into ever more convoluted messaging patterns. In a governance-free environment, coordinated cloud service planning and optimization become frustratingly difficult. In addition, rogue cloud services could spring up everywhere and pass themselves off as legitimate nodes, thereby wreaking havoc on the delicate trust that underlies production SOA.
SOA governance is maturing as a discipline, while cloud computing—the new galaxy in which services will burst forth—is anything but. Unfortunately, the cloud arena may continue to evolve so fast over the next several years that it will be difficult for consensus service-governance practices to coalesce. Still, emerging cloud services can benefit from the many lessons learned by enterprise SOA governance implementers. Most important, you need a service catalog that maintains metadata about services and enables you to control development and construction of services and publish visibility and availability of services to consumers. Also, federation agreements should be set up to auto-provision service definitions between public clouds and enterprises’ Web services, REST, and other application environments.
So the outlook for strong service governance in this brave new paradigm remains cloudy, but with scattered patches of promise.
Jim
Friday, January 16, 2009
poems 1982
CARTOON LOGIC
Drifting dream. Sitting on a beam. Two cells on a shaft. One fore, one aft. Protean complements. Sunday supplements. Brisk and happy beyond beyond belief, I take me in and what a relief. Every room well maintained. Every splash of blue contained within the lines. Rushing, shifting. Take me deep and go on drifting.
CENTER OF PAIN
Something. I can see the whole world fall away and there nothing but this pain. This morning I could feel the sheets rustling the leaves shaking but still this pain. Tonight I can relax and dwell in gray wet cloudy and fold my pain into nothing. Nothing.
ORGANISM
How strange when the infra-red ultra-thin membrane of dream blood ruptures and spills a dread film between the seeing-eye and a world itching and twitching inflamed rejecting a donor tissue.
PRASEODYMIUM
I wOUld wOrshIp grEEn glAss, bUt drIvEn tO cOnsIdEr...cOmpOsItIOn, thE rElAtIvE EAsE wIth whIch shArp pAnEs, slAppEd Up thrOUgh tIdY frAmEs, fIltEr whItE thrOUgh flAttEnEd sAlts, pOUndEd IntO rUdE AllIAncE...I Opt OUt. YEllOw Is hOw thEsE skYlInEs fAll, pOUrEd lIke sAndY sOIl In smEArY vAlEncE.
Drifting dream. Sitting on a beam. Two cells on a shaft. One fore, one aft. Protean complements. Sunday supplements. Brisk and happy beyond beyond belief, I take me in and what a relief. Every room well maintained. Every splash of blue contained within the lines. Rushing, shifting. Take me deep and go on drifting.
CENTER OF PAIN
Something. I can see the whole world fall away and there nothing but this pain. This morning I could feel the sheets rustling the leaves shaking but still this pain. Tonight I can relax and dwell in gray wet cloudy and fold my pain into nothing. Nothing.
ORGANISM
How strange when the infra-red ultra-thin membrane of dream blood ruptures and spills a dread film between the seeing-eye and a world itching and twitching inflamed rejecting a donor tissue.
PRASEODYMIUM
I wOUld wOrshIp grEEn glAss, bUt drIvEn tO cOnsIdEr...cOmpOsItIOn, thE rElAtIvE EAsE wIth whIch shArp pAnEs, slAppEd Up thrOUgh tIdY frAmEs, fIltEr whItE thrOUgh flAttEnEd sAlts, pOUndEd IntO rUdE AllIAncE...I Opt OUt. YEllOw Is hOw thEsE skYlInEs fAll, pOUrEd lIke sAndY sOIl In smEArY vAlEncE.
poems Dedication page of "Workflow Strategies" (1997) and translation (by Marian Lakomy) for Polish-language version (IDG Books Worldwide)
AND SO IT FLOWS
Starts and fits and somehow it works. Pieces and bits and blood on the pages. Rush and push and squeeze it between times. Scream and stream and give it a name.
I TAK TO PLYNIE
Zaczynamy, dopasowujemy i jakos to dziala. Czesci i bity i krew na stronicach. Spieszymy sie, wpychamy i upychamy w terminarzu. Plakac i plynac i nadac mu imie.
Starts and fits and somehow it works. Pieces and bits and blood on the pages. Rush and push and squeeze it between times. Scream and stream and give it a name.
I TAK TO PLYNIE
Zaczynamy, dopasowujemy i jakos to dziala. Czesci i bity i krew na stronicach. Spieszymy sie, wpychamy i upychamy w terminarzu. Plakac i plynac i nadac mu imie.
poems Several OO-themed ghostly pieces I forgot I'd written, back pre-blog
ONTO ONCO
One code keeps sticking, spraying, stubborn, I go, ego, all-defying. One code won’t shut up. One code won’t shut down. One code all around. One code.
OO
Flatter deities
no more with
praise and prostration—
they know we’re low.
Pray to the odds for
elevation.
Bend inward with the
roll of dice
and
--ow—
embrace.
OOBI
The projected I
really registered that tap
on our right shoulder.
One code keeps sticking, spraying, stubborn, I go, ego, all-defying. One code won’t shut up. One code won’t shut down. One code all around. One code.
OO
Flatter deities
no more with
praise and prostration—
they know we’re low.
Pray to the odds for
elevation.
Bend inward with the
roll of dice
and
--ow—
embrace.
OOBI
The projected I
really registered that tap
on our right shoulder.
stuff on hard drive at home...needs to get posted to blog before I forget..."Language as an Object Worthy of Contemplation"
From: [self]
Sent: [eight years ago]
To: [people I knew way back when]
Subject: Language as an Object Worthy of Contemplation
All:
I highly recommend Chris Redgate's daily, syndicated, capsule newspaper column, "The Red Pencil," which focuses on the art of putting words together. Chris' 100-words-a-day ranks right up there with Doonesbury and my morning bowl of Cheerios. He/she (never been able to resolve that forename into a definite gender, and I guess it doesn't matter--anybody here seen Julia Sweeney's wonderful "It's Pat!" movie?) recently wrote about the distinction (or lack thereof) between prose and poetry, and spurred me to respond as follows:
**************************************************
Chris:
I enjoy your "Red Pencil" column, which I read in the Washington Post.
I'm writing to respond to your recent two-part column on the difference between prose and poetry. On one level, I agree that in practice there is often little difference between prose and poetry as distinct literary genres. In practice, modern poetry is often simply prose chopped up and defaced with arbitrary carriage returns, tabs, punctuation, misspellings, and obscurities. Poetry often suffers from highfalutin abstractions, precious diction, adjectival overload, lack of point or narrative, and whining, self-pitying attitudes. And poets wonder why very few people buy or care about their work.
On another level, though, we can distinguish between prosaic and poetic expression, which, taken together and interwoven well, can enliven even the most mundane writing. Prosaic expression points to objects in the world (even if that world exists only in the writer's head, as many scientific hypotheses, for example, do). Poetic expression points back at itself, focusing on language as an object worthy of contemplation in its own right (write!). Language as an object worthy of contemplation--what do I mean by that? I mean the features of language that make it noteworthy, catchy, and memorable: meter, cadence, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, tintinnabulation, imagery, word choice, etc. Language as a symbol system or an equation that we continually manipulate: grammar, syntax, etc. Language as a human artifact that is capable of conveying beauty and meaning through its very structure and sound.
The very best writing is both prose and poetry--you want to read, then re-read it, focusing on the objects that the writer is trying to depict, but also the object through which the writer depicts them. Through brevity, the best poetry encourages us to re-read. The best e-mails do too.
Jim
**************************************************
It's all art and artifice. I've spent my career trying to breathe life into technical topics of thudding complexity. Committing this sh*t to someone's memory requires stealth poetry.
Jim
Sent: [eight years ago]
To: [people I knew way back when]
Subject: Language as an Object Worthy of Contemplation
All:
I highly recommend Chris Redgate's daily, syndicated, capsule newspaper column, "The Red Pencil," which focuses on the art of putting words together. Chris' 100-words-a-day ranks right up there with Doonesbury and my morning bowl of Cheerios. He/she (never been able to resolve that forename into a definite gender, and I guess it doesn't matter--anybody here seen Julia Sweeney's wonderful "It's Pat!" movie?) recently wrote about the distinction (or lack thereof) between prose and poetry, and spurred me to respond as follows:
**************************************************
Chris:
I enjoy your "Red Pencil" column, which I read in the Washington Post.
I'm writing to respond to your recent two-part column on the difference between prose and poetry. On one level, I agree that in practice there is often little difference between prose and poetry as distinct literary genres. In practice, modern poetry is often simply prose chopped up and defaced with arbitrary carriage returns, tabs, punctuation, misspellings, and obscurities. Poetry often suffers from highfalutin abstractions, precious diction, adjectival overload, lack of point or narrative, and whining, self-pitying attitudes. And poets wonder why very few people buy or care about their work.
On another level, though, we can distinguish between prosaic and poetic expression, which, taken together and interwoven well, can enliven even the most mundane writing. Prosaic expression points to objects in the world (even if that world exists only in the writer's head, as many scientific hypotheses, for example, do). Poetic expression points back at itself, focusing on language as an object worthy of contemplation in its own right (write!). Language as an object worthy of contemplation--what do I mean by that? I mean the features of language that make it noteworthy, catchy, and memorable: meter, cadence, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, tintinnabulation, imagery, word choice, etc. Language as a symbol system or an equation that we continually manipulate: grammar, syntax, etc. Language as a human artifact that is capable of conveying beauty and meaning through its very structure and sound.
The very best writing is both prose and poetry--you want to read, then re-read it, focusing on the objects that the writer is trying to depict, but also the object through which the writer depicts them. Through brevity, the best poetry encourages us to re-read. The best e-mails do too.
Jim
**************************************************
It's all art and artifice. I've spent my career trying to breathe life into technical topics of thudding complexity. Committing this sh*t to someone's memory requires stealth poetry.
Jim
Nine Choices on the Road to BI Solution Centers
Nine Choices on the Road to BI Solution Centers
December 2008
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212201130
Forrester Research says BI Solution Centers offer a business-governed, solutions-focused edge over BI competency centers. Here are nine key considerations you'll face when building your BISC.
By Boris Evelson and James Kobielus, Forrester Research
BI is no longer just about back-office reporting. As BI solutions increasingly permeate the enterprise and span a wide range of applications, analytics-driven organizations recognize BI as a key corporate asset and a do-or-die platform. In today's turbulent and increasingly commoditized economy, enterprises must make better and faster decisions to stay competitive — and often just to keep their heads above water.
As BI grows more pervasive, complex, feature-rich, and mission-critical, it also becomes harder to implement effectively. Many information and knowledge management professionals question whether they architect, implement, and manage their BI initiatives properly. Doing so requires sound BI and performance management best practices — and an awareness of the myriad ways it can all go wrong.
Forrester's ongoing research compiles a litany of worst practices often committed, deliberately or inadvertently, by even the smartest, most experienced information and knowledge management professionals. Common deficiencies in many enterprise BI environments often manifest themselves at the application level, but the root causes of the problems go much deeper. The chief symptoms of suboptimal BI management practices include:
The lack of a single trustworthy view of all relevant information. Many organizations strive for a single unified view of disparate transactional data and commit themselves to the long-range goal of consolidating it all into an all-encompassing enterprise data warehouse (EDW). In practice, though, the goal of an uber-EDW is a moving target. EDW projects are frequently the victims of "scope creep," due to constantly changing requirements, relentless growth in the range of operational-data sources, and stubborn resource bottlenecks within IT. Insufficient focus on data quality and master data management (MDM) only adds to a lack of trust. Even data in a comprehensive EDW may be viewed as untrustworthy or, in a worst case scenario, incorrect. As a result, BI application users resort to old fashioned methods to collect and analyze data such as running their own SQL queries and bringing data into spreadsheets for analysis.
BI applications too complex and confusing to use effectively. Crafting sophisticated BI applications for power users is important, but designing them for casual business users is far trickier. Even the most user-friendly, point-and-click BI applications often require users to slog through a daunting range of user interfaces, features, reports, metrics, dimensions, and hierarchies. Also, BI is just a subset of the surfeit of productivity tools that information workers must juggle just to perform their basic responsibilities. As a result, most BI end users have barely tapped the productivity potential of the tools at their disposal and often run back to IT to help them create new reports, queries, and dashboards.
BI applications too rigid to address even minor changes. Our modern world moves at lightning speed, but BI solutions are often too rigid to keep up with the changes. One simple change to a single source data element can result in a few changes to extract, transform, load (ETL) and data cleansing jobs, which may turn into several data model changes in operational data store (ODS), data warehouse (DW), and data marts; this in turn affects dozens of metrics and measures that could be referenced in hundreds of queries, reports, and dashboards.
As these problems illustrate, the typical BI environment is far from realizing its potential as a strategic business asset. Many organizations have responded by developing BI support centers or BI competency centers, but a BI Solution Center (BISC) offers a more business- and solutions-focused advance on these concepts. This article, which is based on the Forrester Report "Implementing Your Business Intelligence Solutions Center," details nine choices you'll need to make on the road to building an effective BISC.
BI Solutions Centers Cultivate BI Best Practices
Implementing BI technology is easy (relatively) — but getting value from those technology investments is the truly hard part. Recognizing that sound BI management practices are often the missing ingredient, many companies have begun to transform their project-based BI support groups into a more strategic function: the BI solutions center. Though the BISC has great promise, it is no silver bullet. Enterprises with more successful BI implementations often implement some form of BISC practices, but there are a wide range of BISC implementation options, and not all of them are appropriate for every scenario. Why? Because there are many different approaches, organizational structures, and modus operandi for BISCs, each with its own pros and cons.
Forrester defines a BISC as:
A permanent, cross-functional organizational structure responsible for governance and processes necessary to deliver or facilitate delivery of successful BI solutions, as well as being an institutional steward, protector, and forum for BI best practices.
How does a BISC differ from such kindred concepts as the BI competency center (BICC) and BI center of excellence (BI COE)? Though it has the same core IT-centric functions (such as building OLAP cubes, deploying data warehouses, and writing ETL scripts) as a BICC or BI COE, the BISC differs in its business-led governance and solutions focus, as explained below.
The BISC, like a sharp business suit, must be cut, trimmed, and tailored to the contours of each organization. Each BISC must, at the very least, fit an organization's specific structure, people, business processes, technology, and especially the BI, data warehousing, and other analytics-relevant infrastructures.
The intersections of these four dimensions — process, people, data, and technology — create multiple BISC scenarios and approaches that information and knowledge management pros must consider when developing a BISC most relevant to support your BI efforts. Detailed below are nine scenarios and approaches you must consider when implementing your BISC.
Consideration 1: Strategic Or Operational Objectives?
Some organizations deploy BISCs that are purely strategic or advisory in nature. In those organizations BISC accepts the role of being a BI champion, providing subject matter experts, and overseeing BI standards, methodologies, and a repository of best practices. When these BISCs take on more operational duties they become responsible for tasks like the BI project management office (PMO), training, and vendor management. And in an ultimate operational manifestation of BISC, it can also carry the full spectrum of delivering BI solutions — BI solutions-as-a-service.
Consideration 2: In-house or Outsourced?
Enterprises deploying BI will need help from experienced consultants and systems integrators (SIs). This expertise is critical because BI is very much an art and will remain that for the foreseeable future, since it involves engineering a complex set of systems and data to address the changing imperatives of business organizations.
All successful, complete, scalable, "industrial strength" BI solutions require customization, application of best practices, and a significant systems integration effort. Because true best practices do not evolve from implementing two or three BI applications, internal resources with experience in dozens of successful BI implementations are difficult to find. A knowledge of best practices and lessons learned needs to be accumulated across hundreds of BI implementations — a privilege reserved for full-time systems integrators specializing in BI. As a result, most of the more successful BISC organizations include both internal and external staff.
Consideration 3: Virtual Or Physical?
Organizations have a choice of leaving their BISC staff within their lines of business (LOBs) or functional departments, or moving them to a centralized physical BISC organization. Since members within virtual BISC organizational structure have other management or hands-on responsibilities, they may lack BI focus and have to juggle conflicting priorities. Therefore, this type of a structure is typically more appropriate to BISCs that are strategic and advisory in nature. On the other hand, a physical, dedicated, and centralized organization is often more appropriate to fully operational BISCs. However, these tend to become just another "cost center" — as any centralized function carries with it the burden of process, methodology, and organizational structure. This implies bureaucracy, red tape, and a lack of flexibility. While such a structure is a must for certain IT functions, like infrastructure, security, and many others, it could be a BI showstopper. The first time IT cannot respond quickly or efficiently enough to a new requirement, a typical BI user will run back to spreadsheets to build a homegrown model, run the analysis, and get the job done. Information and knowledge management pros must determine which BISC structure — virtual or physical — would be most effective within their organizational culture.
Consideration 4: Operational or Analytical in Scope?
A BISC for some may focus on addressing the front-end access, presentation, delivery, and visualization requirements of analytic applications. Alternately, others may encompass a wider scope including data warehousing; data integration; data quality; master data management (MDM); and many other analytics-relevant infrastructures, processes, and tools.
Information and knowledge management pros can draw the scope of your BISC narrowly or broadly, and that line may depend greatly on how your company staffs, funds, and organizes these diverse IT groups. How far should a BISC go "upstream" to operational applications to draw that line? For example, is a database trigger implemented in an operational application for changed data capture (CDC) that feeds a DW part of the analytical or operational realm of your BISC's responsibilities? Is the data mart that calculates customer or product profitability and feeds these numbers to downstream operational applications an analytical or an operational data store? Such scope needs to be very well defined and managed to avoid the very real BISC "scope creep."
Consideration 5: Support IT only or All Stakeholders?
In especially large, heterogeneous, and siloed organizations, corporate culture and other realities may not make a centralized strategic or operational BISC a practical proposition. However, even in such an environment, it's still possible and often beneficial to centralize BI infrastructure (servers, DW, ETL, and BI tools) and let each individual line of business and functional department manage its own prioritization and BI application development, while leveraging the centralized BI infrastructure. Developers are the ultimate customers of these more narrowly scoped BISCs, and in several real life examples Forrester found that this is a practical limit of how much responsibility a BISC can take on without running into "turf battles." Information and knowledge management pros must determine whether their organizational culture is ready to support BISC beyond BI infrastructure in scope.
Consideration 6: Type of Funding Model?
BISC can be treated as a corporate cost center, and all departments across the enterprise can use and benefit from BISC services. The difficulty here is that this approach carries a stigma of "just another IT department/cost center." Furthermore, departments that are not yet set up to take advantage of the BISC will push back on carrying part of the cost burden. A cost allocation model based on the actual usage of BISC services can be fairer, but detailed, activity-based cost allocation models can be tricky to set up, implement, and manage.
Consideration 7: Narrow or Broad Scope?
Though a BICC-ish BISC is certainly possible, it's not preferred. Forrester recommends business leadership and business-led governance orientation, not a technology-centric focus, for the BISC. The same road map principles that apply to the best practices of implementing BI apply to the BISC: strategy first, architecture next, technology last. In its ultimate breadth of scope, BISC could encompass as many as 20 major components, roles, and responsibilities (see Figure 6 in Forrester's complete report), so it's very important to start small and increase the scope slowly.
Consideration 8: Performance Measurement Approach?
BISC stakeholders require transparent measurements of the success of the BISC program in order to support ongoing momentum and funding. BISC leaders must establish a clear set of BISC performance metrics and clearly communicate them on a periodic basis. Some BISC performance metrics are obvious and easy to calculate. Examples include number of BI applications delivered and maintained by BISC, number of BI users, number of reports in production and the usage patterns of these reports, reduced BI support staff, and reduced BI software and maintenance costs. Other metrics could be trickier to calculate and monitor such as improved information accuracy and turnaround time on BI requests.
Most leading BI products come with pre-built applications to monitor and analyze at least some of these metrics. If such out-of-the-box applications are not available from your preferred BI vendor, or if you are using multiple BI platforms, a centralized BI metrics management solution can be architected by using products from vendors such as Appfluent Technology and Teleran Technologies.
Consideration 9: Isolated or Aligned With Other Solution Centers?
No BI environment is an island from the rest of the data management infrastructure. Just as BI applications touch, depend on, and overlap with many related processes and technologies, BISCs cannot exist in isolation from other competency centers, solutions centers, or centers of excellence. Federation between the BISC and other data management competency centers is a best practice. Many such competency centers have existed in organizations for years, though they may not be recognized as distinct disciplines or organizations. Essentially, any group that defines, approves, and/or enforces standard practices for new projects or initiatives in any of these areas is a competency center.
To realize the full return on investment from BI, your organization's BISC should engage with all or most of the interdependent competency centers.
To succeed in your specific organizational environment, your BISC must have clear lines of demarcation, cooperation, and integration with all these other relevant initiatives. Failing to define a clear charter with appropriate collaboration, communication, and change management processes between complementary efforts can be a fatal pitfall in your BISC initiative.
Download the Complete Report
This article is based on the Forrester Report "Implementing Your Business Intelligence Solutions Center." The 16-page report includes charts, diagrams and seven recommendations not included in this article. Click here to download the free report.
December 2008
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212201130
Forrester Research says BI Solution Centers offer a business-governed, solutions-focused edge over BI competency centers. Here are nine key considerations you'll face when building your BISC.
By Boris Evelson and James Kobielus, Forrester Research
BI is no longer just about back-office reporting. As BI solutions increasingly permeate the enterprise and span a wide range of applications, analytics-driven organizations recognize BI as a key corporate asset and a do-or-die platform. In today's turbulent and increasingly commoditized economy, enterprises must make better and faster decisions to stay competitive — and often just to keep their heads above water.
As BI grows more pervasive, complex, feature-rich, and mission-critical, it also becomes harder to implement effectively. Many information and knowledge management professionals question whether they architect, implement, and manage their BI initiatives properly. Doing so requires sound BI and performance management best practices — and an awareness of the myriad ways it can all go wrong.
Forrester's ongoing research compiles a litany of worst practices often committed, deliberately or inadvertently, by even the smartest, most experienced information and knowledge management professionals. Common deficiencies in many enterprise BI environments often manifest themselves at the application level, but the root causes of the problems go much deeper. The chief symptoms of suboptimal BI management practices include:
The lack of a single trustworthy view of all relevant information. Many organizations strive for a single unified view of disparate transactional data and commit themselves to the long-range goal of consolidating it all into an all-encompassing enterprise data warehouse (EDW). In practice, though, the goal of an uber-EDW is a moving target. EDW projects are frequently the victims of "scope creep," due to constantly changing requirements, relentless growth in the range of operational-data sources, and stubborn resource bottlenecks within IT. Insufficient focus on data quality and master data management (MDM) only adds to a lack of trust. Even data in a comprehensive EDW may be viewed as untrustworthy or, in a worst case scenario, incorrect. As a result, BI application users resort to old fashioned methods to collect and analyze data such as running their own SQL queries and bringing data into spreadsheets for analysis.
BI applications too complex and confusing to use effectively. Crafting sophisticated BI applications for power users is important, but designing them for casual business users is far trickier. Even the most user-friendly, point-and-click BI applications often require users to slog through a daunting range of user interfaces, features, reports, metrics, dimensions, and hierarchies. Also, BI is just a subset of the surfeit of productivity tools that information workers must juggle just to perform their basic responsibilities. As a result, most BI end users have barely tapped the productivity potential of the tools at their disposal and often run back to IT to help them create new reports, queries, and dashboards.
BI applications too rigid to address even minor changes. Our modern world moves at lightning speed, but BI solutions are often too rigid to keep up with the changes. One simple change to a single source data element can result in a few changes to extract, transform, load (ETL) and data cleansing jobs, which may turn into several data model changes in operational data store (ODS), data warehouse (DW), and data marts; this in turn affects dozens of metrics and measures that could be referenced in hundreds of queries, reports, and dashboards.
As these problems illustrate, the typical BI environment is far from realizing its potential as a strategic business asset. Many organizations have responded by developing BI support centers or BI competency centers, but a BI Solution Center (BISC) offers a more business- and solutions-focused advance on these concepts. This article, which is based on the Forrester Report "Implementing Your Business Intelligence Solutions Center," details nine choices you'll need to make on the road to building an effective BISC.
BI Solutions Centers Cultivate BI Best Practices
Implementing BI technology is easy (relatively) — but getting value from those technology investments is the truly hard part. Recognizing that sound BI management practices are often the missing ingredient, many companies have begun to transform their project-based BI support groups into a more strategic function: the BI solutions center. Though the BISC has great promise, it is no silver bullet. Enterprises with more successful BI implementations often implement some form of BISC practices, but there are a wide range of BISC implementation options, and not all of them are appropriate for every scenario. Why? Because there are many different approaches, organizational structures, and modus operandi for BISCs, each with its own pros and cons.
Forrester defines a BISC as:
A permanent, cross-functional organizational structure responsible for governance and processes necessary to deliver or facilitate delivery of successful BI solutions, as well as being an institutional steward, protector, and forum for BI best practices.
How does a BISC differ from such kindred concepts as the BI competency center (BICC) and BI center of excellence (BI COE)? Though it has the same core IT-centric functions (such as building OLAP cubes, deploying data warehouses, and writing ETL scripts) as a BICC or BI COE, the BISC differs in its business-led governance and solutions focus, as explained below.
The BISC, like a sharp business suit, must be cut, trimmed, and tailored to the contours of each organization. Each BISC must, at the very least, fit an organization's specific structure, people, business processes, technology, and especially the BI, data warehousing, and other analytics-relevant infrastructures.
The intersections of these four dimensions — process, people, data, and technology — create multiple BISC scenarios and approaches that information and knowledge management pros must consider when developing a BISC most relevant to support your BI efforts. Detailed below are nine scenarios and approaches you must consider when implementing your BISC.
Consideration 1: Strategic Or Operational Objectives?
Some organizations deploy BISCs that are purely strategic or advisory in nature. In those organizations BISC accepts the role of being a BI champion, providing subject matter experts, and overseeing BI standards, methodologies, and a repository of best practices. When these BISCs take on more operational duties they become responsible for tasks like the BI project management office (PMO), training, and vendor management. And in an ultimate operational manifestation of BISC, it can also carry the full spectrum of delivering BI solutions — BI solutions-as-a-service.
Consideration 2: In-house or Outsourced?
Enterprises deploying BI will need help from experienced consultants and systems integrators (SIs). This expertise is critical because BI is very much an art and will remain that for the foreseeable future, since it involves engineering a complex set of systems and data to address the changing imperatives of business organizations.
All successful, complete, scalable, "industrial strength" BI solutions require customization, application of best practices, and a significant systems integration effort. Because true best practices do not evolve from implementing two or three BI applications, internal resources with experience in dozens of successful BI implementations are difficult to find. A knowledge of best practices and lessons learned needs to be accumulated across hundreds of BI implementations — a privilege reserved for full-time systems integrators specializing in BI. As a result, most of the more successful BISC organizations include both internal and external staff.
Consideration 3: Virtual Or Physical?
Organizations have a choice of leaving their BISC staff within their lines of business (LOBs) or functional departments, or moving them to a centralized physical BISC organization. Since members within virtual BISC organizational structure have other management or hands-on responsibilities, they may lack BI focus and have to juggle conflicting priorities. Therefore, this type of a structure is typically more appropriate to BISCs that are strategic and advisory in nature. On the other hand, a physical, dedicated, and centralized organization is often more appropriate to fully operational BISCs. However, these tend to become just another "cost center" — as any centralized function carries with it the burden of process, methodology, and organizational structure. This implies bureaucracy, red tape, and a lack of flexibility. While such a structure is a must for certain IT functions, like infrastructure, security, and many others, it could be a BI showstopper. The first time IT cannot respond quickly or efficiently enough to a new requirement, a typical BI user will run back to spreadsheets to build a homegrown model, run the analysis, and get the job done. Information and knowledge management pros must determine which BISC structure — virtual or physical — would be most effective within their organizational culture.
Consideration 4: Operational or Analytical in Scope?
A BISC for some may focus on addressing the front-end access, presentation, delivery, and visualization requirements of analytic applications. Alternately, others may encompass a wider scope including data warehousing; data integration; data quality; master data management (MDM); and many other analytics-relevant infrastructures, processes, and tools.
Information and knowledge management pros can draw the scope of your BISC narrowly or broadly, and that line may depend greatly on how your company staffs, funds, and organizes these diverse IT groups. How far should a BISC go "upstream" to operational applications to draw that line? For example, is a database trigger implemented in an operational application for changed data capture (CDC) that feeds a DW part of the analytical or operational realm of your BISC's responsibilities? Is the data mart that calculates customer or product profitability and feeds these numbers to downstream operational applications an analytical or an operational data store? Such scope needs to be very well defined and managed to avoid the very real BISC "scope creep."
Consideration 5: Support IT only or All Stakeholders?
In especially large, heterogeneous, and siloed organizations, corporate culture and other realities may not make a centralized strategic or operational BISC a practical proposition. However, even in such an environment, it's still possible and often beneficial to centralize BI infrastructure (servers, DW, ETL, and BI tools) and let each individual line of business and functional department manage its own prioritization and BI application development, while leveraging the centralized BI infrastructure. Developers are the ultimate customers of these more narrowly scoped BISCs, and in several real life examples Forrester found that this is a practical limit of how much responsibility a BISC can take on without running into "turf battles." Information and knowledge management pros must determine whether their organizational culture is ready to support BISC beyond BI infrastructure in scope.
Consideration 6: Type of Funding Model?
BISC can be treated as a corporate cost center, and all departments across the enterprise can use and benefit from BISC services. The difficulty here is that this approach carries a stigma of "just another IT department/cost center." Furthermore, departments that are not yet set up to take advantage of the BISC will push back on carrying part of the cost burden. A cost allocation model based on the actual usage of BISC services can be fairer, but detailed, activity-based cost allocation models can be tricky to set up, implement, and manage.
Consideration 7: Narrow or Broad Scope?
Though a BICC-ish BISC is certainly possible, it's not preferred. Forrester recommends business leadership and business-led governance orientation, not a technology-centric focus, for the BISC. The same road map principles that apply to the best practices of implementing BI apply to the BISC: strategy first, architecture next, technology last. In its ultimate breadth of scope, BISC could encompass as many as 20 major components, roles, and responsibilities (see Figure 6 in Forrester's complete report), so it's very important to start small and increase the scope slowly.
Consideration 8: Performance Measurement Approach?
BISC stakeholders require transparent measurements of the success of the BISC program in order to support ongoing momentum and funding. BISC leaders must establish a clear set of BISC performance metrics and clearly communicate them on a periodic basis. Some BISC performance metrics are obvious and easy to calculate. Examples include number of BI applications delivered and maintained by BISC, number of BI users, number of reports in production and the usage patterns of these reports, reduced BI support staff, and reduced BI software and maintenance costs. Other metrics could be trickier to calculate and monitor such as improved information accuracy and turnaround time on BI requests.
Most leading BI products come with pre-built applications to monitor and analyze at least some of these metrics. If such out-of-the-box applications are not available from your preferred BI vendor, or if you are using multiple BI platforms, a centralized BI metrics management solution can be architected by using products from vendors such as Appfluent Technology and Teleran Technologies.
Consideration 9: Isolated or Aligned With Other Solution Centers?
No BI environment is an island from the rest of the data management infrastructure. Just as BI applications touch, depend on, and overlap with many related processes and technologies, BISCs cannot exist in isolation from other competency centers, solutions centers, or centers of excellence. Federation between the BISC and other data management competency centers is a best practice. Many such competency centers have existed in organizations for years, though they may not be recognized as distinct disciplines or organizations. Essentially, any group that defines, approves, and/or enforces standard practices for new projects or initiatives in any of these areas is a competency center.
To realize the full return on investment from BI, your organization's BISC should engage with all or most of the interdependent competency centers.
To succeed in your specific organizational environment, your BISC must have clear lines of demarcation, cooperation, and integration with all these other relevant initiatives. Failing to define a clear charter with appropriate collaboration, communication, and change management processes between complementary efforts can be a fatal pitfall in your BISC initiative.
Download the Complete Report
This article is based on the Forrester Report "Implementing Your Business Intelligence Solutions Center." The 16-page report includes charts, diagrams and seven recommendations not included in this article. Click here to download the free report.
imho 2009 Predictions for Enterprise IT, SOA, Cloud and Business Intelligence
http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2008/12/briefingsdirect-analysts-make-2009.html
Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 35, on how analysts see cloud computing, SOA, the economy, and Obama Administration in 2009, recorded Dec. 19, 2008.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. …...
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel [Kobielus, Tony Baer, Brad Shimmin, Joe McKendrick, Dave Linthicum, Mike Meehan, JP Morgenthal].
Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
…………………….
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. ……….
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel. Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
*************************
Jim Kobielus, you're up. What are your five predictions?
Kobielus: I need to go home now. You stole all my predictions. Actually, that was great, Dana. I was taking notes, just to make sure that I don't repeat too many of your points unnecessarily, although I do want to steal everything you just said.
My five predictions for 2009 ... I'll start by listing them under a quick phrase and then I'll elaborate very quickly. I don't want to steal everybody else's thunder.
The five broad categories of prediction for 2009 are: Number one, Obama. Number two, cloud. Number three, recession. Number four, GRC -- that's governance, risk, and compliance. Then, number five, social networking.
Let me just start with [U.S. President Elect Barack] Obama. Obviously, we're going to have a new president in 2009. He'll most likely appoint a national chief technology officer or a national tech policy coordinator. Based on his appointment so far, I think Obama is going to choose a heavy hitter who has huge credibility and stature in the IT space.
We've batted around various names, and I'm not going to add more to the mix now. Whoever it is, it's going to be someone who's going to focus on SOA at a national level, in terms of how we, as a country, can take advantage of reusing agility, transformation, optimization, and all the other benefits that come from SOA properly implemented across different agencies.
So, number one, I think Obama is going to make a major change in how the government deploys IT assets and spends them.
The maturing of clouds
Number two, cloud. Dana went to town on cloud, and I am not going to say much more, beyond the fact that in 2009, clouds are going to become less of a work in progress, in terms of public clouds and private clouds, and become more of a mature reality, in terms of how enterprises acquire functionality, how they acquire applications and platforms.
I break out the cloud developments in 2009 into a long alliterative list. Clouds will start up in greater numbers. They will stratify, which means that the vendors, like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and others with their cloud offerings, will build full stacks, strata, in their cloud services that include all the appropriate layers, application components, integration services, and platforms. So, the industry will converge on a more of a reference model for cloud in 2009.
They'll also stabilize the clouds. In other words, they'll become more mature, stable and less scary for corporate IT to move applications and data to. They'll standardize, and the clouds will standardize around SOA and WOA standards. There will be more standards, interfaces, and application programming interfaces (APIs) focused on cloud computing, so you can move your applications and data from one cloud to another a bit more seamlessly than you can now with these proprietary clouds that are out there. And, there are other "S" items that I won't share here.
Number three, recession. Clearly, we are in a deep funk, and it might get a lot worse before it gets better. That's clearly hammering all IT budgets everywhere. So, as Dana said, every user and every organization is going to look for opportunities to save money on their IT budgets.
They're going to put a freeze on projects. They're going to delay or cancel upgrades. Their users, as you said very nicely, Dana, are going to dip into petty cash and go around IT to get what they need. They're going to go to cloud offerings. So, the recession will hammer the entire IT industry and all budgets.
As far as GRC, government is cracking down. If it has to bail out the financial-services industry, bail out the auto industry, and bail out other industries, the government is not going to do it with no strings attached.
Compliance, regulations, reporting requirements, the whole apparatus of GRC will be brought to bear on the industries that the government is saving and bailing out.
Then finally, social networking. Dana provided a very good discussion of how social networking will pervade everything in terms of applications and services.
The Obama campaign set the stage clearly for more WOA-style, Web 2.0, or social-networking style governance in this country and other countries. So, we'll see more uptake of social networking.
We'll see more BI become social networking, in the sense of mashup as a style of BI application, reporting, dashboards, and development. Mashups for user self-service BI development will come to the fore. It will be a huge theme in the BI space in 2009 and beyond of that.
That really plays into the whole cost control theme, which is that IT will be severely constrained in terms of budget and manpower. They're going to push more of the development work to the end user. The end user will build reports that heretofore you've relied on data modelers to build for you. Those are my five.
*************************
Gardner: We're just about out of time. Let's go quickly down our list for any last synthesis insights.
Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, thanks for joining. What's your synthesis of what you have heard?
Kobielus: My synthesis is that we are living in a very turbulent and volatile time in the industry. Things are changing on many levels simultaneously, and a lot of it will just be hammered by the recession. Approaches like cloud, social networking, and everything will be driven by the need to cut cost and to survive through fiscal austerity for an indefinite period.
Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 35, on how analysts see cloud computing, SOA, the economy, and Obama Administration in 2009, recorded Dec. 19, 2008.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. …...
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel [Kobielus, Tony Baer, Brad Shimmin, Joe McKendrick, Dave Linthicum, Mike Meehan, JP Morgenthal].
Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
…………………….
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. ……….
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel. Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
*************************
Jim Kobielus, you're up. What are your five predictions?
Kobielus: I need to go home now. You stole all my predictions. Actually, that was great, Dana. I was taking notes, just to make sure that I don't repeat too many of your points unnecessarily, although I do want to steal everything you just said.
My five predictions for 2009 ... I'll start by listing them under a quick phrase and then I'll elaborate very quickly. I don't want to steal everybody else's thunder.
The five broad categories of prediction for 2009 are: Number one, Obama. Number two, cloud. Number three, recession. Number four, GRC -- that's governance, risk, and compliance. Then, number five, social networking.
Let me just start with [U.S. President Elect Barack] Obama. Obviously, we're going to have a new president in 2009. He'll most likely appoint a national chief technology officer or a national tech policy coordinator. Based on his appointment so far, I think Obama is going to choose a heavy hitter who has huge credibility and stature in the IT space.
We've batted around various names, and I'm not going to add more to the mix now. Whoever it is, it's going to be someone who's going to focus on SOA at a national level, in terms of how we, as a country, can take advantage of reusing agility, transformation, optimization, and all the other benefits that come from SOA properly implemented across different agencies.
So, number one, I think Obama is going to make a major change in how the government deploys IT assets and spends them.
The maturing of clouds
Number two, cloud. Dana went to town on cloud, and I am not going to say much more, beyond the fact that in 2009, clouds are going to become less of a work in progress, in terms of public clouds and private clouds, and become more of a mature reality, in terms of how enterprises acquire functionality, how they acquire applications and platforms.
I break out the cloud developments in 2009 into a long alliterative list. Clouds will start up in greater numbers. They will stratify, which means that the vendors, like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and others with their cloud offerings, will build full stacks, strata, in their cloud services that include all the appropriate layers, application components, integration services, and platforms. So, the industry will converge on a more of a reference model for cloud in 2009.
They'll also stabilize the clouds. In other words, they'll become more mature, stable and less scary for corporate IT to move applications and data to. They'll standardize, and the clouds will standardize around SOA and WOA standards. There will be more standards, interfaces, and application programming interfaces (APIs) focused on cloud computing, so you can move your applications and data from one cloud to another a bit more seamlessly than you can now with these proprietary clouds that are out there. And, there are other "S" items that I won't share here.
Number three, recession. Clearly, we are in a deep funk, and it might get a lot worse before it gets better. That's clearly hammering all IT budgets everywhere. So, as Dana said, every user and every organization is going to look for opportunities to save money on their IT budgets.
They're going to put a freeze on projects. They're going to delay or cancel upgrades. Their users, as you said very nicely, Dana, are going to dip into petty cash and go around IT to get what they need. They're going to go to cloud offerings. So, the recession will hammer the entire IT industry and all budgets.
As far as GRC, government is cracking down. If it has to bail out the financial-services industry, bail out the auto industry, and bail out other industries, the government is not going to do it with no strings attached.
Compliance, regulations, reporting requirements, the whole apparatus of GRC will be brought to bear on the industries that the government is saving and bailing out.
Then finally, social networking. Dana provided a very good discussion of how social networking will pervade everything in terms of applications and services.
The Obama campaign set the stage clearly for more WOA-style, Web 2.0, or social-networking style governance in this country and other countries. So, we'll see more uptake of social networking.
We'll see more BI become social networking, in the sense of mashup as a style of BI application, reporting, dashboards, and development. Mashups for user self-service BI development will come to the fore. It will be a huge theme in the BI space in 2009 and beyond of that.
That really plays into the whole cost control theme, which is that IT will be severely constrained in terms of budget and manpower. They're going to push more of the development work to the end user. The end user will build reports that heretofore you've relied on data modelers to build for you. Those are my five.
*************************
Gardner: We're just about out of time. Let's go quickly down our list for any last synthesis insights.
Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, thanks for joining. What's your synthesis of what you have heard?
Kobielus: My synthesis is that we are living in a very turbulent and volatile time in the industry. Things are changing on many levels simultaneously, and a lot of it will just be hammered by the recession. Approaches like cloud, social networking, and everything will be driven by the need to cut cost and to survive through fiscal austerity for an indefinite period.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
imho SOA DOA? No way!
All:
In the crowded marketplace of ideas, everybody’s always trying to differentiate themselves. Declaring something “dead,” “obsolete,” “outmoded,” “tired,” “passe,” or “so last year” is such a clichéd look-at-me technique that I tend not to give too much credence. Yeah, I, like other analysts, am inclined to do it now and then, but you should interpret this sort of pronouncement as just part of the news cycle. The usual coarse or fine grains of salt.
That said, my take on this. First off, I define service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural paradigm: one that focuses on maximizing the sharing, reuse, and interoperability of corporate resources over distributed fabrics. In other words, it refers to an approach with a clear set of goals in efficiency, standardization, cost control, agility, and so forth. That paradigm and those goals/benefits are certainly not dead. Perhaps what is dead is the notion that this utopia can be realized purely over a Web services environment built purely on XML, SOAP, WSDL, WS-*, etc. Clearly, cloud computing, virtualization, Web 2.0, mashups, REST, social networking, and so forth show that a great many services—in fact, most new services—are not riding an “ESB” built on those interfaces and standards.
Just as important, life-cycle SOA governance—aka “service governance”--as a set of emerging best practices, is certainly not dead. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever, though few enterprises have mastered it throughout the service life cycle (design time, runtime, etc) and across all platforms, apps, and services. Moreover, service governance is getting much more challenging in a cloud-oriented environment, where literally EVERYTHING—from app components down through integration and hardware infrastructure (CPU, storage, etc.) is a service, or potentially. And, as more enterprise app/integration/hardware services are outsourced to public clouds, governance will get ever trickier, both in terms of negotiating service contracts and setting up the requisite public/private service-federation relationships and infrastructure.
Service governance in the cloud is a terra incognita. The cloud providers, cloud management tool providers, and their customers are all groping for a common set of approaches, and, to some degree, trying to square it all with established SOA governance best practices. But how do you wrap controls around the every atom in the billowing universe? Can we think--and tailor our governance--around that many dimensions without exploding from the sheer nebulous complexity of it all.
In every era, I’m tracking what’s being born, not what’s on its last legs. Our architectural orientation toward services is what SOA begot, and has bequeathed to this new age of the cloud.
Jim
In the crowded marketplace of ideas, everybody’s always trying to differentiate themselves. Declaring something “dead,” “obsolete,” “outmoded,” “tired,” “passe,” or “so last year” is such a clichéd look-at-me technique that I tend not to give too much credence. Yeah, I, like other analysts, am inclined to do it now and then, but you should interpret this sort of pronouncement as just part of the news cycle. The usual coarse or fine grains of salt.
That said, my take on this. First off, I define service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural paradigm: one that focuses on maximizing the sharing, reuse, and interoperability of corporate resources over distributed fabrics. In other words, it refers to an approach with a clear set of goals in efficiency, standardization, cost control, agility, and so forth. That paradigm and those goals/benefits are certainly not dead. Perhaps what is dead is the notion that this utopia can be realized purely over a Web services environment built purely on XML, SOAP, WSDL, WS-*, etc. Clearly, cloud computing, virtualization, Web 2.0, mashups, REST, social networking, and so forth show that a great many services—in fact, most new services—are not riding an “ESB” built on those interfaces and standards.
Just as important, life-cycle SOA governance—aka “service governance”--as a set of emerging best practices, is certainly not dead. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever, though few enterprises have mastered it throughout the service life cycle (design time, runtime, etc) and across all platforms, apps, and services. Moreover, service governance is getting much more challenging in a cloud-oriented environment, where literally EVERYTHING—from app components down through integration and hardware infrastructure (CPU, storage, etc.) is a service, or potentially. And, as more enterprise app/integration/hardware services are outsourced to public clouds, governance will get ever trickier, both in terms of negotiating service contracts and setting up the requisite public/private service-federation relationships and infrastructure.
Service governance in the cloud is a terra incognita. The cloud providers, cloud management tool providers, and their customers are all groping for a common set of approaches, and, to some degree, trying to square it all with established SOA governance best practices. But how do you wrap controls around the every atom in the billowing universe? Can we think--and tailor our governance--around that many dimensions without exploding from the sheer nebulous complexity of it all.
In every era, I’m tracking what’s being born, not what’s on its last legs. Our architectural orientation toward services is what SOA begot, and has bequeathed to this new age of the cloud.
Jim
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