July 29th, 2008 dan Posted in WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere News, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »
Geez, I don’t know how I missed this one. ILOG is a business rules engine that can already integrate with WebSphere Process Server so this acquisition makes sense. It’s better than the one bundled with the product and used by more companies.
Anyway, I’ll defer to the bloggers of the world who have more industry insight than I to explain this acquisitions relevance:
June 26th, 2008 dan Posted in WebSphere News No Comments »
The following is Gartners view of the Application Infrastructure and Middleware market broken down by the big boys:
|
Company |
2007 Revenue |
2007 Market Share (%) |
2006 Revenue |
2006 Share (%) |
2006-2007 Growth (%) |
| IBM |
4,090.3 |
28.9 |
3,554.5 |
28.3 |
15.1 |
| BEA Systems |
1,323.9 |
9.3 |
1,224.7 |
9.8 |
8.1 |
| Oracle |
1,202.7 |
8.5 |
1,004.9 |
8.0 |
19.7 |
| Sterling Commerce |
442.6 |
3.1 |
436.5 |
3.5 |
1.4 |
| Microsoft |
425.7 |
3.0 |
300.6 |
2.4 |
41.6 |
| Others |
6,677.3 |
47.2 |
6,021.9 |
48.0 |
10.9 |
|
Total |
14,162.5 |
100.0 |
12,543.2 |
100.0 |
12.9 |
Interesting points that I note:
Gartner also predicts strong continuing demand in the integration space:
…vendors are shifting their traditional application infrastructure and middleware products mix toward ESBs and BPMS in response to the strong demand for products that support service-oriented architecture (SOA) and process-centric applications. Thirdly, the globalization and internationalization of companies are driving B2B integration requirements and sophistication.
April 25th, 2008 dan Posted in WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »
In case you are out of the loop, ROFLCon 2008 is a day long conference out in Boston where they bring together the owners of the current internet meme phenomenons to talk about the state of internet culture.
It’s a very interesting topic and I think, relevant to understanding how you can build a community around something. IBM is talking about building a ‘Smart SOA Community’ and through ROFLCon, we can try to get an understanding of what makes something popular and even more interesting what makes a user want to contribute content.
Getting hits to a site isn’t too hard with the proper marketing campaign, but how can you inspire those visitors to use their own resources for your benefit. That’s the secret that we are seeing unfold in this domain with sites like ICanHasCheezBurger or lolcats.
Unfortunately, I think we are in the very early stages of this phenominon to be able to describe the traits in an accurate “Check the boxes off a list and win” manner. Theres a lot of very similar competitors to the cheezburger guys, yet people prefer to stick with that brand. Why is that?
Well, they all share a simplicity in their user interfaces and the ability to rapidly response and shift to the demands of the user base. They are all extremely interactive and encourage participation from their users, but they don’t demand it. They all started out extremely small with a core-following and we able to encourage word-of-mouth growth. This is likely because the element of humor allows for simple passing from person to person.
In addition, the owners themselves had a clear vision of what they were trying to accomplish and didn’t waver from that goal. They all seem to have worked in the IT industry in boring day jobs that led to the creation of the idea. They were also very passionate about their site, largely because they knew they had to be able to generate most of the content themselves.
They are also very good at providing a single purpose to their users. If you go to lolcats, you get lolcats. You don’t get overwhelmed with features that are never used. They don’t fragment their communities over a ton of options. You’ve got a few specialized tasks and that’s it.
Anyway, I thought ROFLCon was just going to be guys laughing over the latest Chuck Norris quote but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see its an interesting experiment on internet communities and includes some very good discussions on emerging topics that the Web 2.0 enterprise community will be having soon.
April 11th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Service Oriented Architecture, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News 4 Comments »
I’m going to use this post to record the discussion that generated during the Impact 2008 SOA Jam for my idea about “How IBM can foster an external community”. Now that Impact is over, I’d like to keep a copy of it’s point in time, and also allow any future readers to add comments.
Foster an external community for non-IBM practitioners
Dan Zrobok 10 Apr 2008
Abstract
As a non-IBMer who works within the product stack, I find it next to impossible to get the information that I need to make the products a success. The goal is to have IBM create a vibrant external community that is equivalent to the internal one.
April 11th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Service Oriented Architecture, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News, WebSphere Process Server 1 Comment »
I’m going to use this post to record the discussion that generated during the Impact 2008 SOA Jam for my idea about “Too ManyESBs, Skill Spread too thin”. Now that Impact is over, I’d like to keep a copy of it’s point in time, and also allow any future readers to add comments.
ESB: Too many products, Skill spread too thin
Dan Zrobok 10 Apr 2008
Abstract
If you want an ESB you can use: WAS, WPS, WESB, DataPower, Message Broker. Based on my selection, I have to find deeply skilled resources on that specific product. Is IBM spreading the community too thin?
April 11th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere News No Comments »
I guess theres generally two days where a lot of activity on a conference will occur: the start and the end. The following is a list of bloggers who have commented on Impact 2008:
April 10th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »
So today is apparently the final day of the SOA Jam at Impact 2008. Overall I saw a few overall themes in the ideas:
The one I’m most enthusiastic about is creating a community, so it was nice to see the largest proportion of ideas occur around it. I guess the ball is now in IBM’s court to begin the next steps towards resolution. I’d sure like to know (and be involved) in as much as possible but I’m going to assume these things will occur behind closed-confidential doors.
Overall, the SOA Jam turned in 73 ideas with 289 comments. We started off with 22 ideas and 70 comments, then 44 ideas and 146 comments. There was a real explosion of activity yesterday with double the usual 70 comments. I don’t know why IBM decided to end the jam a day early. I’m hoping it’s because there’s some kind of aggregation session they want to do on Friday.
As for my own ideas, “Too Many ESBs” turned in 152 views and 24 comments of it’s own. It broke down to most people agreeing with the premise and I think that ‘neilwd’ summarized the solution the best:
If we can start to build more standardized ways of engaging with technologies that fulfill common functions, that will really help companies find people from broader skill bases.
Along that line, I realized something. IBM has spent a considerable amount of time to embrace open standards on the transport level, data modeling level etc but we’ve never really seen any standard emerge on the user interface side other than the usability. Is that the result of a lack of focus, that the job is too hard to implement or what it would reduce branding opportunities amongst vendors?
Anyway I’m happy with the road this idea took during the Jam. It’s 2nd in most views and 2nd in most comments.
I’m also satisfied with my plight for an external community (8 comments, 72 views). I picked up a few email addresses of people who are also interested in the topic so I’ll try and see what I can do from that avenue. Again, unless theres some IBM buy-in though, it will be extremely difficult.
All-in-all, I feel like the Jam was just starting to gain momentum and was cut short but it remains to be seen when the doors will actually close.
April 10th, 2008 dan Posted in Best Of DZ.com, Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News 2 Comments »
Over a twitter yesterday, James Governor lamented about the lack of official web 2.0 happenings a conference where we’re all talking about mash-ups, integrating communities and mass enablement. IBM’s youTube Channel has a single 1 minute video from day one, theres a twitter account created of the name “Impact2008“* which has no activity. Heck, even IBM’s official blog hasn’t been updated past day one.
(*unknown who it was created by, but as far as I know there is no official twitter).
It would have been cool to say, allow participants to ask questions in keynote Q&A over twitter as well as the microphone. Maybe presenters could offer informal times to talk to eager listeners once the session is over. How about if IBM aggregated the Impact ‘blogosphere’ and gave us a single place to look for what people are saying about the conference? What if I’d like to try and track down Steve Mills for a two minute interview. Where is he? There’s six thousand people walking around. If I want any of those things, it’s completely dependent on my own social network to make it happen. If I don’t happen to have a person in my list then it’s left to fate and circumstance if we’ll ever meet. Once again, we need IBM to take the first steps to make this happen. It’s great that I now follow the guys from RedMonk and various people who tagged #impact2008, but it’s still just the voices of the people ‘in the dark’ (non-IBM). Without IBM, we can talk all we want about changes that are needed but there’s no buy in from the sole required enabler. The idea that IBM can show up at predetermined times on the calendar, fire-hose the community with information and then disappear are long dead.
It seems like the conference itself is actually an accurate reflection of the state of the SOA community as a whole. You’ve got a large mass of people who would do a great job collaborating with each other and networking, but no catalyst to make it happen. Instead of being energized as part of a broader community, you get isolated and bored. I think I see that effect in how the number of articles/twitters/blogs about Impact 2008 has dropped off significantly from the first day to the third. Even the #impact2008 tag has one message on it over the last 13 hours.
In the SOA Jam, about 80% of the ideas relate to social networks and how to build communities but we’re already failing on a very small scale with people in the same physical location! How can we expect to snap our fingers and create a vibrant self-sustaining community on the large if we can’t do it on the small?
April 10th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere News No Comments »
Looks like I kind of missed one of the big boys of the internet for coverage of Impact 2008. YouTube actually has a few videos posted:
Not exactly a ton of content, but given video editing is generally time consuming, I can let it slide I guess.
April 9th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »
It’s now day two of SOA Jam and it’s has been running for about 48 hours now. While the overall rate remains the same as yesterday, it feels like there’s more going on in the Jam.
As of today, we have 44 ideas and 146 comments. It look like the Jam will produce about 20 ideas and 70 comments a day. I still think this number is low for a conference with attendance this large. I wonder if IBM could have done a better job quantifying exactly what they are going to do with the ideas once the 72 hours are complete.
Also ThinkPlace itself isn’t exactly easy to understand. We have ideas in the first “Peer Review” stage. I don’t understand what exactly is required for someone to claim themselves as a catalyst in order to get to to stage 2 “Accepted by a Catalyst”. It’s even more unclear what the elusive stage 3 is as no ideas have made it that far. It’s great that IBM wants to solicit ideas from the field, it’s bad if they’re just shuffled into a database to die.
As for my own ideas, the momentum that they generated originally has fallen off. The external community idea has 6 comments, 58 views (top 15% in views) and has been accepted by a catalyst. What I’m supposed to do with it now is unknown. I’d love to have the ability to work with IBM and see what can/can’t be done in this space and I plan on maintaining contact with the catalysts (from IBM and Wells Fargo), but I’m uncertain of what real change will be brought.
The “Too many ESB product” idea originally began as “No really, theres too many ESBs, simplify them down to one” but as the comments came in I realized that it’s not the runtimes that need to be ‘immediately’ normalized but rather the tools. There’s little logical reason why mapping messages is a different tooling construct for all five products. This idea is currently languishing on page 2 with 9 comments but 90 views (2nd or 3rd most views in the Jam). But it’s still stuck in the “Peer Review” state with no catalyst. This issue isn’t quite something a non-IBMer can pick up and run with.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, head over to the Impact 2008 SOA Jam and go vote for my ideas participate in the community. The Jam ends Thursday at 10am pacific.
April 8th, 2008 dan Posted in WebSphere Community, WebSphere News 2 Comments »
From the newswire (eWeek), IBM Partners Blocked from Rational Conference.
At least one vendor, Genuitec, maker of the MyEclipse IDE (integrated development environment) has said an IBM official called its representative and told them Genuitec was not welcome at the Rational Software Development Conference this year. Another company, AccuRev, which markets software configuration management and other solutions that compete with Rational’s products, received a similar call. Both companies attended RSDC last year and exhibited in the event’s exhibit area.
Maybe this is one of the inhibitors to the creation of the external WebSphere community that I long for. If they want to say that it’s a closed-door conference for Rational, that’s fine. But why were they allowed to attend previously?
April 8th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Reviews, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »
Seeing how I’m not at Impact 2008, my impressions are going to be more geared towards what I see being said in the blogs, the twitter stream and the participation in the SOA Jam.
My first impression comes from the SOA Jam, where I think I’ve posted two pretty good ideas. The first being that we desperately need IBM to foster an external community. The other that the ESB products overlap too much, reducing the pool of skilled applicants. IBM says that 6000 people are in attendance for this conference, yet the total number of entries after day one of the Jam is 22 with 70 comments. That means that we’re jamming with 0.3% idea generation and 1.1% commenting participation rates (assuming no duplicates). I find this to be very low for a Jam that ends Thursday morning. It will be interesting to see what happens the rest of the week with the numbers. I’m not sure if there is any actual active promotion of the jam going on, or participants just don’t care.
As for my contributions, they seem to be progressing at an acceptable rate. I’ve got five comments about the external community where most are in agreement and three on the ESB. The external community is the one that I hope sinks in and takes hold. It’s low hanging fruit that IBM can leverage, whereas modifying the architecture for various products is more of a dream that I’m hoping finds roost in the head of someone who matters.
On the ESB side, I’m getting kind of what I expected: some agreement some disagreement. The disagreements usually come when someone makes the point that they are all targeted to different users. I say that at a high level, they all do the same thing. I accept that the runtimes are unique and will likely never change. That doesn’t preclude changing the tooling to be uniform.
I’m a developer, I’m already implementing systems (in WID) in an abstract way with boxes that represent functionality and lines that represent relationship. Why can’t what runtime I choose to deploy my solution to be abstracted as well?
April 8th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »
Shout out to James Taylor who has identified how to follow the tweets that are going on during the conference. I also suggest that people follow Michael Cote on Twitter, I added him to my mobile device updates yesterday afternoon and got about 40 updates so expect to feel like you are there on the front lines.
I’m extremely new to Twitter, I created an account last night: danZrobok and also added it to the column on the right. Feel free to follow along, I expect to use it a lot at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference in May.
April 7th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News 1 Comment »
Just quickie that Smart Enough Systems are also blogging Impact 2008 in depth. Very In depth. Like three articles already posted depth. Good job!
April 7th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News 3 Comments »
I’m not at Impact, so I’m a little diminished in my capacity to know who’s there, who’s blogging, what’s being talked about or exactly how many boat races Steve Mills can win in a row.
Thanks to Michael Coté who is also blogging the conference and has his recap of the first few hours of Impact.
A second big thank you to him goes out for letting me know that Dana Gardner also has a post about the first three hours of the conference.
I find both posts extremely informative and I hope they’ll continue to post through out the week. I recommend readers sign up for their RSS/Atom feeds as I doubt I’ll be able to keep up on Impact from the East Coast while the SOA Party rages on the west.
Also, if you are in attendance of Impact 2008, you can go to the session run by MTS Allstream. They are one of my clients and I had a very minor role in helping out with their slides (at one point I was going to co-present but it fell through). If you do sit in, feel free to let me know what you thought.
