Archive for the ‘BT’ Category

Has Microsoft got BPM? Part II

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Back at the beginning of March I asked “has Microsoft got BPM?“. At that time I hadn’t had the opportunity to get a briefing from Microsoft on its recent BPM moves, but now I have.

So – has Microsoft got BPM? Yes and no.

Microsoft is not about to become a fully-fledged BPM solution provider. Rather, Microsoft is attempting to do to BPM what it attempts to do in all the areas of enterprise software it’s played in (think DBMSs, development tools, middleware, portals, etc etc) – commoditise the core technology and make it part of an integrated software platform that’s digestible by mainstream medium-to-large enterprises. Sun wasn’t the first company to realise that “volume drives value” – it’s taken a leaf out of Microsoft’s book.

So a big part of the focus is on providing the technology foundation for BPM. Here Microsoft has a couple of formidable weapons:

  1. Office. Office is the defacto productivity suite in enterprises – and with Office 2007, is becoming the front end infrastructure for BPM scenarios in Microsoft’s world, as well as a suite of apps. It’s an environment very familiar to business people, so if those people are looking to get a BPM initiative started, Microsoft’s proposition could look pretty attractive. [If you don't believe us about Office, see this research from our partner Freeform Dynamics.]

  2. Workflow Foundation. This is a core component of .NET 3.0 (the native programming model for Longhorn Server and Vista). It provides embeddable workflow execution services for both highly structured business process automation scenarios and less structured, collaborative scenarios. It’s becoming the foundation of both BizTalk Server 2006 (which will drive structured process automation scenarios) and Sharepoint 2007 (which is more suited to unstructured, collaboration-focused processess). Workflow Foundation really is neat.

The big caveat, of course, is that all these weapons only really come into play if and when organisations buy into the current tranche of product releases – Office 2007, BizTalk 2006, Visual Studio “Orcas” and the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), and .NET 3.0.

Although all these pieces are either released or coming very soon, where customers have a significant investment in Microsoft in these kinds of areas, it’s far from certain that they will upgrade or migrate quickly. Microsoft’s success in engineering an integrated platform of software infrastructure is also a weakness, in other words – people who buy into it tend to have a lot of capabilities riding on it. That drives caution and risk aversion.

Microsoft’s BPM foundation is mainly focused on the development and deployment of processes, and although BizTalk 2006 has some BAM capabilities (through integration with SQLServer OLAP and BI functionality) Microsoft isn’t focusing primarily on providing tools for modelling and simulating, analysing or optimising processes. It’s developed a coterie of “Business Process Alliance” partners to fill in the gaps, and also to help it accelerate demand for the new versions of its key BPM foundation components. When it comes to Workflow Foundation in particular, the huge Microsoft-focused packaged application vendor (ISV) community which so effectively drove adoption of SQLServer will also be a key element of Microsoft’s strategy.

So on paper Microsoft has a good BPM story – if you’re prepared to put a lot of skin in Microsoft’s game and if you’re prepared to upgrade to the latest Microsoft infrastructure. The company isn’t yet pushing the base technologies aggressively and directly to customers, but it is priming its partners and channels and these will drive uptake.

Another interesting angle to the technology piece of this story is the recently announced BizTalk Services offering – a set of integration capabilities “in the cloud” which offer a hosted complement to on-premise BizTalk integration implementations. These services are designed to, in theory (it’s early days), make the creation of highly federated, distributed service and process networks much more simple to develop and operate. It’s a fascinating development that has some parallels with what Salesforce has been doing with the Salesforce Platform Edition, and (a little less so) with what BT is attempting to do with BT Integrate.

One last small thing though. If it’s serious about BPM, at some point Microsoft’s going to have to sort out the difference between this BPM and this BPM…

Posted in BPM, BT, Microsoft, SaaS, Salesforce, Workflow Foundation | No Comments »

Liberty is serious about clients

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

The Liberty Alliance today announced its Advanced Client specifications which are

designed to allow enterprise users and consumers to manage identity information on devices such as cameras, handhelds, laptops, printers and televisions

For those of you that are so inclined, you can read the specifications here but, in a nutshell, the Advanced Client relies on ID-WSF 2.0 (which I discussed here) to provide the following capabilities:

  • Trusted Module – protocols which allow a client (be it hardware, software or a combination of the two) that is sufficiently secure to be trusted by third-parties to participate in identity-based transactions e.g. to make identity assertions on behalf of an identity provider event if the client is disconnected from the identity provider
  • Provisioning – over-the-air provisioning of data and/or functionality to the client
  • Service Hosting/Proxying (SHPS) – facilities which allow an identity web service service hosted on the client, such as an individual’s e-commerce profile, to be accessed under the control of the individual (whether or not the client is connected)

These capabilities allow identity data to be provisioned to and stored on a client device, such as smart card or a mobile phone SIM and subsequently used in a variety of scenarios, including single sign-on and identity federation. In SSO scenarios, the client can either perform the role of an identity provider (self-asserted) or take responsibility for certain aspects of the SSO process, essentially acting as an extension of a third-party identity provider.

The Advanced Client is the third phase of Liberty’s four-phase roadmap for delivering client capabilities, following on from the Liberty Enabled Client/Proxy (which I discussed at some length here and here) and the Active Client, which provides client-based identity web services and SSO capabilities in an untrusted environment. The final phase is the Robust Client, which will add support for multi-factor authentication and mobility of Trusted Modules.

This is not just about dry specifications though. Earlier in the year at the RSA Conference BT, together with HP and Intel, demonstrated an Advanced Client proof of concept (you can download the presentation here – it’s a 10MB ZIP file!), with HP doing the provisioning and Intel providing the trusted client environment, based on its Identity Capable Platforms (ICP) technology. The proof-of-concept is based on a Wi-Fi provisioning scenario where an individual subscribes to Wi-Fi on the web and completes the BT-initiated provisioning process using credentials which have been pushed down to the ICP-based trusted Active Client.

As I have said before (and I was as guilty of this as anyone) the work of the Liberty Alliance can be perceived as focusing on server-to-server protocols for enterprise-centric federation. Its work on client-enablement, however, provides compelling evidence that this is not the case. With major telco players such as BT, Ericsson, NTT, Nokia, T-Com, Telefonica, Telenor and Vodafone on its membership roster its highly likely that its client specifications are going to see significant deployment. Their participation also explains the emphasis on over-the-air provisioning and active, trusted participation of the user which are essential for telecom services. With an increasingly mobile and disconnected workforce, this is not just a consumer play and organisations should be monitoring these developments closely.

Posted in BT, HP, Intel, Liberty, identity | No Comments »