Archive for the ‘ibm’ Category

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SaaS takes centre stage at Lotusphere

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

One year on from the launch of IBM Lotus’s first home-grown effort in the world of software-as-a-service, codenamed project “Bluehouse”, SaaS is again top of the news agenda at Lotusphere 2009, and shows up as an underlying theme across the event’s big stories.

The main headline was the launch of LotusLive, a new brand for the company’s cloud-based services, which will incorporate Bluehouse, Sametime Unyte Meetings, Sametime Unyte Events and Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, as well as a all future offerings in this space, one of which I’ll come to in a moment. In line with the new branding, each of the above products will be renamed, with the aforementioned products becoming “LotusLive Engage”, “LotusLive Meetings”, “LotusLive Events” and “LotusLive Notes” respectively.

Alongside this was more detail about last week’s announcement of IBM’s intent to acquire the assets of Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based provider of white-label, SaaS-based webmail services. Upon completion, IBM plans to offer the Outblaze technology as part of LotusLive, under the name LotusLive iNotes. In addition to adding breadth to the LotusLive portfolio which it is selling direct, IBM sees the Outblaze acquisition as providing a new business model, helping the company to develop the SaaS reseller channel through value-added services.

Other major news from Lotusphere centred on partnering activities at IBM, and again SaaS played a central role – Salesforce.com integration with LotusLive Engage and Lotus Notes, integration between the LinkedIn business social network and contacts within LotusLive Engage, and between LotusLive Engage and Skype for VoIP calls.

IBM is clearly determined to show it has a credible story in SaaS, and is working hard to deliver a portfolio which mirrors its breadth in the on-premise software space. The biggest opportunity for IBM in SaaS – particularly with the Engage offering – is clearly the SMB market, and it will be interesting to see whether it is successful here, or whether LotusLive simply becomes an extension of its established enterprise portfolio. In any case, these announcements demonstrate that it is prepared to square up to Microsoft in the battle for supremacy in the cloud.

Keep your eyes open for a new report on Collaboration-as-a-Service which we’ll be publishing within the MWD Collaboration advisory service over the next couple of weeks.

Posted in SaaS, collaboration, ibm | 1 Comment »

IBM, Business Event Processing, and CEP: behind the bag of spanners

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Earlier this week I attended an IBM press and analyst summit on the topic of “Business Event Processing”. To coincide with this, the company made some announcements on its “BEP leadership”, with over 3700 “BEP customers”. This is fairly early days in IBM’s attempts to tell a coherent story about what it’s doing in event processing, although it’s been helping customers for many years prior to the January 2008 acquisition of AptSoft (which catalysed IBM’s use of the BEP term). However the company isn’t doing itself any favours with language like this: it’s all too easy for it to come across as disingenuous, or at the very least the result of a significant amount of Vaseline being spread on a camera lens.

Why? Well, it’s a question of boundaries and definitions. Specifically, IBM defines BEP in the following way: (1) an event is “something that happens”; (2) a business event is “an event that has relevance to the business”; and (3) Business Event Processing (BEP) is “the correlation of heterogeneous events in order to achieve smarter business outcomes”.

BEP is a term which has come about primarily through IBM’s own marketing since the AptSoft acquisition. But a similar term, Complex Event Processing (CEP), preceded this by some significant time (it was popularised by David Luckham’s 2002 book The Power of Events). With a nod to the debate that still simmers about what the CEP term should really signify (is it the processing of compound/aggregated, or “complex” events – or is it application of “complex processing” to events?), IBM’s definition of BEP is very close indeed to what seems to be the pre-eminent definition of CEP. This is no accident: on a call to discuss the AptSoft acquisition, IBM’s Sandy Carter explicitly called out her interest in trying to rename the “CEP category”.

All’s fair in love and software marketing, I suppose, even when it risks leaving everyone confused (most people are still trying to get their heads around CEP). The real problem I have with this, though, that it’s not only a simple renaming that’s at work here. When IBM then goes on to talk about the event processing work it’s doing, it tells a story that’s much broader than the AptSoft technology area, and also broader than what most event-processing folks would think of when they think of CEP. Likewise when IBM refers to “3700 customers” these aren’t AptSoft customers (apart from a tiny minority of them). As well as focusing on WebSphere Business Events (the former AptSoft technology) IBM’s view of BEP encompasses event-processing capabilities that exist in Tivoli/NetCool systems and network management products, WebSphere MQ Event Broker and MQ Low Latency Messaging, a new stream-based event processing platform called InfoSphere Streams (formerly “System S“), the SolidDB in-memory database, and many other bits and pieces as well.

In short, it looks like IBM’s taking a term that only in January 2008 it used to describe a “business friendly” event processing toolset (the AptSoft technology), and is now instead applying it to any software technology that IBM offers which involves the processing of events. A cynic would say it’s got a big plumbers’ canvas toolbag marked “BEP”, and is shoving as much into it as possible.

Now the intention of this post isn’t just to bash IBM for attempting to subvert the CEP concept. The reason I don’t want to leave things here is that there’s more to what IBM’s doing than meets the eye.

As the press and analyst day unfolded, it became clear (not through the presentations from the IBM execs, tellingly, but through Q&A and one-on-one meetings) that behind the scenes, IBM is actually trying to do something pretty interesting. It’s got a big kit-bag of event-processing technologies, yes – but behind this, it’s working to put together a common event processing technology framework that will allow its individual technology components to be assembled in different combinations to support different types of business and IT requirements. So, rather than having separate event processing stovepipes in the WebSphere, InfoSphere and Tivoli software portfolios, together with assorted miscellaneous other components, it’s enabling all of these distinct efforts to cross-fertilize. One of the first outcomes of this work is the snappily-named WebSphere Business Events eXtreme Scale, which marries the former AptSoft technology (never marketed as a platform for high-volume processing) to the WebSphere eXtreme Scale platform.

With this in mind, I think it’s a bit of a shame if IBM sticks to referring to its overall event processing architecture effort as BEP. BEP, like CEP and one of my other favourites Composite Application Development, is a “how” name – it says more about a method than its outcome. Or, in other words, although it might appeal to geeks, it says nothing about why anyone would invest in it. What would work much better, in my opinion, would be for IBM to complement (or even replace) its discussions about BEP with discussions more centred around a “what” idea that is more about the business value of event processing – what all these technologies, and the framework being built, actually enable customers to achieve. If IBM hadn’t already walked away from the term, I’d suggest something like “on-demand business”… but seeing as that’s verboten these days, I’ll keep my thinking cap on. Perhaps “event-driven business”?

Putting all the vendor marketing stuff to one side, what does all this mean for enterprises? First, try and look behind the cynical BEP and CEP marketing stuff. IBM might be mis-stepping in its marketing, but you can be sure that it’s serious about building a set of technology offerings to help customers with a variety of event-processing related problems and opportunities. Second, although algorithmic trading and other capital markets applications are where most of the technology market activity in this space has been over the past year or so, try and take a broader perspective of event processing and how it might offer value. Event processing is a useful computing approach, even when the event volumes aren’t colossal, or the processing requirement isn’t near-real-time, or the processing requirement isn’t highly complex.

Lastly: watch out for a free Guest Pass report we’ll be publishing on event processing before Christmas, where we’ll attempt to unpick the different scenarios and technology requirements in play.

Posted in BEP, CEP, SOA, ibm, industry | No Comments »

ECM vendors collaborate on interoperability standard

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Yesterday EMC, IBM, and Microsoft jointly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) – a new specification designed to enable interoperability between content management repositories. The proposed standard, which was also being submitted to the open standards consortium OASIS yesterday, will create a common interface for accessing content stored in compliant repositories, simplifying the process of integrating business applications with enterprise content management (ECM) systems, particularly in a mixed environment with products from multiple ECM vendors – a situation that is common among enterprise organisations.

The core ECM focus areas for version 1.0 are collaborative content creation, and delivery of content through portals and mashups, with support for applications such as workflow/BPM, archiving, compound document management and electronic legal discovery to be built on top of the CMIS interfaces. The specification provides support for both REST- and SOAP-based interfaces.

The three primary parties in the development of the standard have been working on its development since 2006, and have since been joined by fellow competitors in the ECM space Alfresco, BEA/Oracle, OpenText and SAP.

I have to say that this is a welcome move by the ECM vendors – a standard of this kind is well overdue, and it is encouraging that so many of the leading players are on board. Clearly the implementation of such a (proposed) standard will not happen overnight – and approval of the standard by OASIS is not expected until the second half of 2009. However, we can expect the vendors involved to begin introducing CMIS-compliant code before then, especially since a key goal of the specification was to enable it to be developed as a layer that can sit on top of existing content repositories, rather than requiring them to be redeveloped from scratch (compared to the related JSR 170 standard, for example). In fact, the Alfresco website is already offering up its draft CMIS implementation for preview by the developer community.

A risk to the specification’s success is that it falls into the same trap that befell the ANSI SQL standard. This provided a standard way of accessing data repositories, but allowed vendors to include their own “tweaks” which locked people in. The CMIS vendors acknowledge that CMIS is not trying to cover everything – for example security and administration is left to the individual applications – and clearly some products will have differentiating capabilities that are not covered by the standard, increasing the risk of deviation. However, despite this risk, CMIS is a positive step for the ECM market.

It is also worth noting that the standard has much wider implications than just ECM – certainly any organisations looking to implement collaboration technologies should keep an eye on the progress of the standard, and should also challenge their collaboration software providers on their plans, as CMIS should make it much easier to manage collaboratively authored content in the same way as any other organisational content.

Posted in Alfresco, CMIS, ECM, EMC, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, ibm, standards | No Comments »

Software AG goes in an interesting direction for SOA governance

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

As part of yesterday’s release of the latest iteration of its webMethods Insight product Software AG announced an OEM partnership with Progress Software. This announcement adds the Actional runtime SOA management and monitoring technology (which Progress acquired back in January 2006) to Software AG’s existing Centrasite design-time governance capabilities (which were bolstered by the acquisition of Infravio in September 2006) and the runtime policy enforcement provided by its webMethods X-Broker and partner Layer 7’s XML Firewall.

The incorporation of runtime SOA management and monitoring functionality into Insight is a necessary evolution of Software AG-webMethods integration strategy that we commented on just over a year ago. It’s long been our position that SOA is more than a standards-based approach to software development and integration. The business value of a service-oriented initiative depends on a recognition that software services are experienced, just like their real-world analogues. The quality of that experience depends on a governance approach that extends throughout the service lifecycle, where the contracts defined when services are designed are subsequently enforced through policies once they are deployed and running – and where runtime metrics are captured to provide insight into the service level quality that is actually exeprienced. Furthermore, those metrics can be used to inform and support change management processes, so closing the SOA lifecycle loop.

Whilst the announcement doesn’t come as any great surprise, the source of the runtime management and monitoring functionality does. When Oracle confirmed it’s intention to acquire BEA, I said:

It [the acquisition] leaves some of the other bigger specialist players – TIBCO, SoftwareAG (and to a lesser extent Progress and Red Hat) in an interesting position. On the one hand they will be more attractive, particularly for SOA and BPM, to customers looking for an application-independent infrastructure offering.

Software AG has gone to a potential competitor for the mantle of best-of-breed, specialist alternative to the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. If you had told me on Friday that Software AG was going to strike an OEM deal for SOA management and monitoring I’d have put my money on AmberPoint, which has historically been the OEM of choice for the likes of BEA and TIBCO.

I am not quite sure what to make of this decision. AmberPoint doesn’t compete with Software AG directly and has established a healthy and growing customer base, as well as partnerships with some of the leading systems integrators – and a technology partnership with Software AG! Software AG’s decision comes not long after Oracle’s decision to drop AmberPoint. As we pointed out in our analysis of Oracle’s roadmap for the BEA integration, we don’t have any hard evidence for Oracle’s claims that it had received negative feedback from BEA customers but it’s something we will continue to explore. In light of the decision to go with Actional, it will be intriguing to see how the partnership evolves and how things pan out when Software AG and Progress are in a competitive situation.

This acquisition should be welcome news to Software AG customers that have invested in the company’s SOA offerings as it will save them the time and effort of plugging the runtime governance gap that existed prior to the partnership. Those embarking on a significant SOA intiative should also give Software AG careful consideration, particularly if they are not wedded to one of the mega-platform providers.

Posted in AmberPoint, BEA, Oracle, Progress, SOA, Software AG, TIBCO, governance, ibm, webMethods | 12 Comments »

A comprehensive analysis of IBM's BPM Suite

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

After months of tweaking and review, our coverage of IBM’s BPM technology offering is now live. It joins our coverage of Appian, BEA (we’re keeping an eye on this, of course, and will update it as soon as is practical), Lombardi, Software AG and TIBCO.

We’ve been working on this assessment since the autumn of 2007: the delay is mostly due to the breadth of IBM’s portfolio (the assessment report runs to 33 pages, whereas most of the others come in around 20 pages) – combined with the fact that, just as we were about to finalise the report, IBM changed its portfolio positioning, introducing the BPM Suite. Anyhow the effort has been worth it – we think the result is pretty comprehensive and definitely worth reading if you’re in the process of selecting a BPM technology vendor.

The IBM BPM assessment report is available as part of our Guest Pass library, here; the detailed comparative scoring information, which you can personalise in line with your preferences and constraints, lives in the online vendor comparison tool that’s part of our BPM continuous advisory service. Although this service isn’t free, you can get a 7-day free trial, so you can use the tool now to see how IBM stacks up in the context of your own environment and preferences – just fill in this form.

Next up is Pegasystems – the assessment process is already underway.

Posted in BPM, MWD, ibm | No Comments »

IBM's identity management becomes user-centric: HP's identity management exit strategy

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Courtesy of InternetNews on Tuesday I learned that IBM has added support for OpenID, Windows CardSpace and Eclipse’s Higgins Identity Framework to its Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (FIM) offering. As one of the enterprise identity management heavyweights, IBM’s announcement is an important endorsement of user-centric identity approaches. Such approaches are still in the formative phase of the adoption curve, particularly in the enterprise, so I see this is an investment for the future for IBM. IBM’s significant installed base should help to increase awareness, particularly for organisations supporting external user communities.

IBM’s press release provides more details on the user-centric credentials (no pun intended!) of FIM. It also discusses the product’s SOA Identity Service, which is designed to address some of the challenges associated with identity lifecycle management and audit where service-oriented approaches are applied to siloed applications with siloed security. These challenges are something I highlighted back in February 2006 and are a barrier to the realisation of the value of SOA as it moves out of project-level deployments. I see the SOA Identity Service as the more important aspect of this announcement, with SOA being a more pressing IT (and hopefully business) concern than user-centric identity.

As an aside, the InternetNews article mentions that the enterprise identity management market

is becoming increasingly competitive with offerings from HP, CA and Oracle.

Can’t fault the journalist on CA and Oracle … but HP! Earlier in the year the company announced that it was no longer going to be selling its Identity Center products to new customers: hardly a competitive force. As part of this (hopefully for its customers) graceful retreat from the market, HP announced that it has established an exclusive agreement with Novell whereby the two companies will

jointly offer migration services, HP will resell Novell identity and security management solutions and Novell will license HP Identity Center technology

When HP originally announced that it was exiting the market, it stated that it would continue to support and develop Identity Center for its existing customers so I was somewhat surprised to see it offering a migration programme. I wonder whether those customers didn’t see this as an effective way forward for what is critical infrastructure. Whilst the programme was a surprise, the partner wasn’t. Where else could HP have gone? BMC, CA or IBM: hardly, given the competition in the IT service/systems management markets (and numerous others in the case of IBM). Sun: difficult given competition in the hardware space. Oracle: would have made things difficult for HP’s SAP alliance team. Microsoft: lacks the heterogeneous environment support and breadth of functionality that HP’s customers need. So, whilst I am sure the sentiments behind Ben Horowitz’s (VP and GM, Business Technology Optimization, Software, HP) statement that HP chose Novell

because of its outstanding set of technologies, recognized market leadership and tremendous commitment to working with HP customers

are real, the company didn’t have too many others to chose from!

Posted in BMC, CA, CardSpace, Eclipse, HP, Higgins, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, ibm, identity | 4 Comments »

Just like buses …

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
… you’re waiting for an identity management acquisition and then along come three at once. This time it’s IBM which has acquired 40-person, privately-held Encentuate. If you think that Ecentuate’s size is indicative of gap-filling motivations from IBM then you’d be right. The 7-year old company is a specialist in enterprise single sign-on (ESSO), which until now has been provided through IBM’s OEM relationship with Passlogix. Clearly, owning rather than OEMing technology gives IBM greater control of its ESSO destiny – particularly as Encetuate is Java-based which should help with integration with the broader Tivoli identity management portfolio. In fact, during the announcement briefing the two companies explained how Tivoli Identity Manager is already able to manage Encentuate provisioning (although there are no production customer deployments). This is presumably the result of work that IBM Global Services did with Encentuate at the Singapore Government: the two companies weren’t technology partners.

Having said this is largely about filling gaps in the IBM identity management portfolio, Encentuate does bring more than ESSO to the IBM table. The company has done a good job of integrating with a variety of strong authentication solutions and has a rather nifty ability to take physical access tokens (door swipes and so forth) so that they can be used as second authentication factors. Encentuate also has some neat audit and compliance capabilities which IBM will undoubtedly tie into the Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager (based on the acquisition of Consul in late 2006). In addition to the technology upside, Encentuate could also help IBM in the healthcare market, where smaller players such as Imprivata and Sentillion have done quite well: there’s a good smattering of healthcare customers amongst Encentuate’s 80.

Overall a smart acquisition by IBM. I am not so sure whether IBM’s Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-on customers will be quite so happy though. The company has committed to continued support but the next iteration of the product is going to shift from Passlogix to Encentuate. IBM will make it attractive for them to move but replacing identity and security solutions is, by definition, a risky business and I am sure they will have to carefully balance the risks of moving against those associated with sticking with a product which is not going to see further development.

Posted in ibm, identity | No Comments »

Oracle proposes to buy BEA

Friday, October 12th, 2007

Oracle today confirmed

that it delivered a letter to the Board of Directors of BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) on October 9 in which Oracle proposes to acquire BEA for $17.00 per share in cash. The $17.00 per share offer is a 25% premium over yesterday’s closing price of $13.62.

This acquisition has been long-discussed so I can’t say I find the news particularly surprising, particularly with Carl Icahn recently upping his stake in the company. I think this just makes it more likely that Oracle’s proposal will be accepted.

This is primarily as a market share grab by Oracle. It does plug some gaps in the portfolio – particularly around business process management (based on BEA’s Fuego acquisition), where Oracle only has basic BPEL web services orchestration; adds some telecoms vertical market capabilities to complement Oracle’s vertical market push and the virtualisation work that BEA has done with the WebLogic Virtual Server Edition. Also, there’s the opportunity for Oracle to tap into the healthy Tuxedo base. With a significant chunk of Oracle’s profitability coming from maintenance, the revenue from BEA’s customer base will suit its business far better than it did BEA which was suffering with its inability to grow license revenues.

This is yet another example of the bigger specialist players getting squeezed out by the industry goliaths – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP – and the open source, smaller best-of-breed players. SAP’s recent acquisition of Business Objects is another example (although that did plug a few more gaps). It leaves some of the other bigger specialist players – TIBCO, SoftwareAG (and to a lesser extent Progress and Red Hat) in an interesting position. On the one hand they will be more attractive, particularly for SOA and BPM, to customers looking for an application-independent infrastructure offering. On the other, though, taking market share for those customers from BEA is one thing: taking it from Oracle quite another. Ultimately, IBM is the big beneficiary in this regard.

In summary, then, I see: the acquisition going ahead; BEA’s customers looking worried as they see themselves with an application-dependent infrastructure stack; IBM looking happy at the prospect of providing those customers with an application-independent alternative; the likes of TIBCO and Software AG pondering their options; and SAP and Microsoft carrying on in there own sweet way.

Posted in BEA, BPM, Microsoft, Oracle, Progress, Red Hat, SAP, SOA, Software AG, TIBCO, ibm | 4 Comments »

Collaborative productivity makes its mark on the desktop

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

The last couple of weeks have seen a wave of product launches and announcements at IBM Lotus, coinciding with the Lotus Collaboration Summit which took place on 18th September. A new version of Quickr is expected in the spring, along with a new product, Quickr Content Integrator, which will enable import of content from Domino libraries and teamrooms, FileNet P8, Microsoft Outlook public folders and Microsoft SharePoint sites into Quickr. Tuesday also saw the release of Lotus Forms 3.0, IBM’s XForms-based technology gained through its PureEdge acquisition in 2005.

Also announced was the release of Accelerators for WebSphere Portal – packaged portlets and connectors for integrating key IBM products into the portal, reducing implementation time (and cost). Five were shipped – Dashboard, Self-Service, Content, Collaboration, and Enterprise Software Suite. Of greatest interest to me was the Collaboration Accelerator, which provides integration for Sametime, Quickr and Connections.

Perhaps the most interesting announcement from IBM is the release of Lotus Symphony, a suite of office productivity tools which are available for free, and which are also shipped within the latest Notes release. IBM reported over 100,000 downloads during the first week of the beta availability of the Symphony software, highlighting the growing interest in alternatives to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite. Based on OASIS’ ODF (Open Document Format) standard, Lotus Symphony supports Office formats as well as Lotus Smartsuite formats, and runs on both Windows and Linux.

This news was followed last week by the announcement of Microsoft Office Live Workspace – a Microsoft-hosted SharePoint workspace which allows users to access and share documents online. Described as an extension to the desktop Office suite, it can also be accessed by other desktop suites such as OpenOffice, and will be available in beta sometime in November. Widely touted as Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Microsoft claims it is not targeted at the enterprise market, rather at small businesses and home users.

These announcements, along with those services from vendors such as Google and Zoho, highlight the emerging transition in how people want to use their desktop software – personal productivity, which so successfully established Microsoft’s stronghold on the desktop, is now giving way to collaborative productivity. It is no longer enough just to create, we now need to work with others to do this, and we are demanding that the software market catches up to support and enable this. All this activity is healthy for the desktop software market – which has been pretty stagnant for the last 10 years – and the entry into the market and buzz from players such as Google and Zoho are clearly making the giants sit up and take notice.

Posted in Microsoft, collaboration, ibm | 2 Comments »

IBM to buy Telelogic: Rational, but not inspirational

Friday, June 15th, 2007

I know in the blogosphere, waiting a few days to provide comment on an announcement like this one hardly puts me at the leading edge – but hey. Although I can’t claim to be breaking any news, there are a couple of other points about IBM’s purchase of Telelogic that I think are worth making.

As many other commentators have explained, in one respect the purchase of Telelogic takes Rational back to its roots as a tools provider to assist with the development of embedded systems. In this respect, the purchase of Telelogic is really all about IBM capturing market share and consolidating the market for engineering tools for complex systems development. This analysis was given extra weight by comments made by Danny Sabbah, the General Manager of IBM’s Rational business, when he stressed that investment in Telelogic’s tools and capabilities would absolutely continue. If IBM keeps the commitment made by Danny Sabbah, Telelogic customers can breathe a sigh of relief, and so will IBM. Embedded software developers love their tools, and many Telelogic customers will have made an explicit decision in the past not to go with Rational.

When you look at this (the biggest) part of Telelogic’s business it’s clear that this isn’t just the usual story of mature markets consolidating, however. Back in 1999 I spent more months than I care to remember on this project, which convinced me it was only a matter of time before ubiquitous broadband networking, consumer electronics and the digitisation of content would open up major new markets for tools vendors. The “pervasive computing and content” thing is starting to happen in earnest, in a variety of sectors – including automotive, healthcare, consumer electronics, retail and travel. Where these things come together, consumer-friendly (and that means high-performance, highly-reliable, bulletproof) software is appearing in more places and in more guises. This is new market opportunity, and Telelogic gives IBM the chance to grab more of it.

So far, so Rational.

But what’s been more interesting of late, to me at least, is not Rational’s heritage but it’s future direction. IBM has made it clear that Rational’s focus is shifting from being a provider of development tools to being a provider of tools to help manage the process of software delivery – and helping customers turn IT inside-out. A big gap here has been in the provision of tools that really help customers model above the level of individual systems, and the surprise to me has been that although Telelogic has these (obtained when it bought Popkin back in 2005) IBM’s early talk hasn’t put much emphasis on their value. To me this is a major missed opportunity as it’s a capability that more and more “mainstream” businesses with IT organisations are starting to realise that they need. Enterprise Architecture competency is quite thin on the ground and IBM has a chance to take a significant step forward in guiding customers here.

Assuming IBM does start to think and talk a bit more about Telelogic’s enterprise modelling tools (which would seem to make sense, you’d think) my take is that this is one area where the technology would be best served within Rational’s own product management structure rather than under Telelogic. As Rational moves its focus more towards managing the process of software development, the Telelogic assets naturally form a specialised sub-piece within the overall picture – but System Architect fits naturally alongside things like RAM, RMC, RPM, and some other stuff I can’t talk about yet.

So – I really hope we start to see more from IBM about how the more mainstream capabilities of Telelogic will be taken forward, and if/how it will start to separate those mainstream capabilities from the specialist “complex systems engineering” capabilities.

Posted in EA, Telelogic, acquisition, architecture, ibm, inside-out IT | No Comments »

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