IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is expanding its business event processing software portfolio by acquiring AptSoft Corporation, a privately-held software company based in Burlington, Massachusetts. Financial details were not disclosed.

(for now) ebizQ received the following:

AptSoft technology helps businesses uncover the cause-and-effect relationships among seemingly disparate business events that occur in milliseconds or throughout defined periods of time. AptSoft’s business event processing software further illustrates IBM’s commitment to pursuing the service oriented architecture (SOA) market opportunity and will complement IBM’s existing SOA software and related services offerings that span the WebSphere, Information Management and Tivoli brands as well as RFID and Web 2.0 capabilities and industry-specific solutions.

Business event processing software helps customers identify patterns and establish connections between events and then initiates a trigger when a trend emerges. The role of event processing is becoming increasingly important because it enables companies of all sizes and industries to proactively analyze and respond to minute market changes that can have significant business impact. This allows companies to seize critical business opportunities or mitigate risks before they negatively affect their ability to compete.

“We welcome AptSoft into the IBM SOA portfolio and look forward to further extending our leadership position in the business events market. Aptsoft enables customers to capture events as they happen with an intuitive user interface designed for business analysts,” said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere software. “AptSoft complements IBM’s SOA strategy and augments our business events capabilities to help our customers maximize their existing investments in SOA.”

AptSoft technology will strengthen IBM’s SOA and business process management (BPM) offerings through its simple, intuitive interface and correlation capabilities, which are designed to be easily used by business analysts and information technology (IT) professionals.

Business event processing can also be used in a variety of ways: in the massive multi-player online game industry for uncovering potentially unscrupulous activities among the tens of thousands of movements per second; by e-commerce vendors to help identify fraud and reduce abandoned shopping carts; by healthcare providers to inspire patients to make healthier lifestyle choices based on information pooled from various medical software applications; and by trading markets to uncover and compare minute changes throughout global markets to support buy/sell decisions as well as ensure the timely execution of bids. In addition, it can be used by retailers to proactively alert them about the success or failure of a product as goods move off the shelf, allowing them to make changes to pricing, inventory and marketing campaigns in real time; and by fleet management companies, to help them make instantaneous decisions on how to deal with products that are lost in transit or delayed due to unforeseen circumstances.

“As SOA continues to evolve, companies are linking event processing and BPM to gain deeper insight into the transactions and events that shape their business and industries as a whole,” said Frank Chisholm, former CEO and founder of AptSoft. “On behalf of the AptSoft team, we look forward to integrating AptSoft products with IBM’s offerings to help ensure the alignment of business and IT which will lead to greater customer success.”

AptSoft technology further extends investments IBM is making in business event processing and business process management, which include WebSphere Event Broker, WebSphere Business Monitor, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Real-Time Insight and Tivoli NetCool products.

AptSoft products will become part of the IBM Software Group WebSphere software brand.

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This January 30th, ebizQ is hosting a Webinar on BPM and SOA trends for 2008 with Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group and Derek Miers of BPM-Focus, hosted by Beth Gold-Bernstein. You can sign up for that here. Also, if this is a topic you work with, please take our SOA Strategies Survey and win a chance at a $300 Amex gift card.

I thought I would help set the stage for our Webinar by interviewing some other folks, to hear their thoughts on what's coming in 2008 in this exciting and constantly changing marketplace. Joining me in the below podcast is Michael Dortch, analyst at Aberdeen Group and ebizQ's BPM in Action blogger; Tony Baer, principle of OnStrategies and columnist; Ronan Bradley of Lustratus Research and an ebizQ blogger; and Keith Harrison-Broninski, of Role Modellers and our IT Directions blogger.

Listen to or download the entire 32:20 podcast below:

Download file

Below is the full transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

EB: Hi, this is Elizabeth Book, editor and chief of ebizQ and today I’m doing a panel podcast about the news of today. And in light of many of the BPM and SOA trends going on in 2008, we wanted to talk about just everything in general and nothing in particular. And I have with me Michael Dortch, who is an analyst at Aberdeen Group, then I also have Tony Baer, onStrategies, president, then I have Ronan Bradley, of Lustratus Research, and Keith Harrison-Broninski of IT Directions and he can tell you more about his project a little bit as well. And I’d like to open it up, say hello to everybody and thanks for being with me today. Michael, are you there?

MD: Yes, I am. Yes, I am.

EB: All right. So why don’t you start it off?

MD: Greetings everyone. For those of you unfamiliar with Aberdeen Group, all of our research is driven by surveys of users so we like to say we do fact-based research, which makes me question what other people base their research on, but that’s a subject for a different conversation.

My area of focus is in enabling technologies and information management. And in that regard, I should say from the outset, I’ve been an industry analyst for 30 years, and so my real area of focus is on where the business infrastructure and the IT infrastructure coincide. And no place else is that happening with more secunity, I guess is a good word, than in the business process management and service-oriented architecture areas.

To be brief, because I could talk about these things for hours if give half a chance. It seems to me based on the research we have conducted and are conducting, that there are a couple of trends that are making themselves evident in -- in each of these areas. In -- as far as business process management is concerned, we see users increasingly desiring to integrate diverse disparate business process management tools into an integrated process management architecture that manages process across each processes life cycle from its inception and design, and adoption through its optimization, and finally through retirement or replacement by some succeeding process.

This kind of life cycle management approach is something users seem to want more and more and it seems to be a desire driven not only by the goal of getting more business value out of their investments but because almost everything else they buy these days on the IT side seems to come with a business process management feature. And so they’d like -- they’d really like to integrate all of those things into a single architecture that can be centrally managed and aligned with business goals and policies.

From the vendor side, a key trend that we see happening and we’re going to talk a lot more about this, I imagine, in this call is consolidation and there’s a two phase consolidation. There’s consolidation and integration of different vendors offerings via support of standards or alliances and there’s consolidations of the companies themselves.

If you look at the history of other markets in this arena, you see that as user needs evolve, companies tend to come together to come up with more complete solutions and that often leads to vendor consolidation. On the service-oriented architecture side, I’m working on a survey that we’re going to field very soon about SOA performance.

It turns out that a lot of users tell us now that they gotten their -- their hands dirty and their feet wet, if you don’t mind mixing some metaphors here, with SOA. They are looking to figure out common taxonomies, and vocabularies, and terms so that when business people and technologists talk about SOA in terms of performance and business value, they want to increasingly be singing the same song, from the same page, of the same hymnal, in the same key, and that’s not really going on as much as they would like.

And on the vendor side, we see the same kinds of consolidation trends happening as I alluded to for BPM. And that’s my top line message for this discussion and I will be quiet now and turn it over to Tony.

EB: Okay. Thanks Michael. Tony Baer now.

TB: Thank you, Michael. I’m Tony Baer and I’m the principal of onStrategies. We’re a consulting firm. We’re -- I’ll like to say we tend to focus more at the ground. How do things actually work; how does big vision actually work on the ground level? And there are several -- I mean, actually kind of waking up this morning of the consolidation of the industry just kind of smacked us in the face with a couple of very fresh acquisitions.

Well, of course, Oracle and BEA agreeing in the middle of the -- in the dead of night to finally -- to meet halfway and that has some very, you know, major implications in the marketplace for middleware that supports service-oriented architecture. Also, on the BPM side, you know, I’ve been just noting over about the past six months and I think, you know, the beginning of a trend of where a lot of tools that try and focus on BPM.

And I’m talking about tools that are not necessarily say; adjuncts of major middleware platforms are -- are looking to try and do what I call dial direct. They’re trying to find ways of making process models more directly executable and there’s a -- has some fairly interesting implications with regard to the roles that, you know, business analysts and developers play. It also has some very interesting implications on basically who the lineup of vendors are, you know, in terms of who’s going to be driving the architecture to actually integrate your business processes.

There’s also hints of another subtext that’s, you know, which I mean, unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you know, a lot of people are very concerned about the economy, you know, it might be stupid to borrow a line from a past or presidential campaign. It’s kind of hard to ignore those overtones this week, and there’s been a lot of discussion through the, you know, through the blogosphere -- through, you know, with the number of my colleagues about how SOA projects will fair given the fact that at least in the US, maybe not the rest of the world, that we may be looking at a fairly significant economic downturn.

There’s been a lot of back chatter about is architecture taking a backseat. So in short, as I said this is also a discussion that can go on for hours but, you know, at elevator pitch level, those are basically the three major trends that are basically breaking out and just sort of hitting me in the face.

EB: Thanks Tony. And Ronan Bradley.

RB: Thanks. Well, my -- my talk tips for the coming year, is the first one is that we’re going to see the next phase we’ll have call "the grand unification theory of infrastructure," but the gradually the boundaries between what used to be very distinct categories began to blur together and they all become one fundamental block of -- of infrastructure. So not only BPM and SOA, obviously, merging together but we’re going to see in the next year areas such as business intelligence very much coming into the mix.

I would expect if we had one of these in 12 month’s time, we’d be throwing business intelligence in there and quite possibly also, complex event processing and architecture as well. Now, the reason for this -- this unification is really partly because there were really artificial and technically driven reasons for why they were distinct in the past but also as people move much further into having a fully integrated infrastructure, they realize that they begin to need to add in these additional high-level levels such as BPM and business intelligence and so on.

The second trend to spot, I think, in the coming year is the growing significant of bottom-up BPM where you’re going to see IT architects driving more BPM projects having already invested significantly in service-oriented architectures, now needing ways to justify and maintain that investment through ’08, which has -- has been said earlier could well be a much tighter environment in terms of investment. And that growing audience of BPM tools is certainly going to have an implication in terms of the use of those tools and also the way the vendors take the products forward.

EB: All right. Thanks very much Ronan. And Keith Harrison-Broninski, are you still there?

KHB: Okay. I think from my perspective it’s probably a little different to the others that we -- we heard on this podcast. But I should introduce myself. My background in the theory of human collaboration. And my company Role Modellers -- its vision is to introduce into the marketplace a solution to the -- the problems that are testing organizations of all kinds in this respect.

And their problems range from very large scale ones to how to streamline human activity across large organizations down to the very most micro level, which is how to deal with the volume of email that you individually as a -- as a worker receive every day. So people that tend come to me and that I talk to mostly are people who are worried about this kind of thing and that and that’s not purely a technical perspective, that is often not a technical perspective at all, it’s an administrative organizational managerial sort of perspective.

So -- and I just thought I ought to make that qualification off of my predictions for the year because I think probably I hear from a different type of person whose balance and views in some of the other people who on this call. And what I’m hearing is it’s very much what’s sort reflected by today’s news really that we -- we’ve seen of a return on of the BPM market to vendors who very much come from hardcore technical programming background like Oracle’s database and that’s on hardware and operating systems vendor.

And nor do I think the BPM marketplace has retreated from its original vision. The -- the original third wave vision for BPM was about process management of the entire organization. It was a very grand idea that you would be able to understand in a business way exactly what was going on and then drawing down from that the technical implementation.

I think we’ve seen rather of a -- a reverse in the trends in the last few years and BPM and the associated technologists and productors, SOA and BRM and CP and BAM and business intelligence and mashups and so they’re largely technical tools for use by technical people. So I think they get confused by this -- by this sea of acronyms. I think they’re starting to worry about it rather than how to access the possible return on investments of -- of such of a huge wealth of new and computing technology. And also the administration -- I see it standing up beyond what they can predict.

People are finding very hard to assess how much overhead there’s going to be to implementing all these new technologies. So in general, my predictions for the current year, and as I say these tend to be based on what I hear from the people that -- that come to me. Based on some certain market realities that are not particularly to do with IT, I mean, in particular, I think my main prediction is the rise of business versus outsourcing.

I think this is going to be a very large thing indeed. I’ve been talking recently with some outsourcing vendors and what I hear from them is that they’re scaling up their operations in all sorts of ways and I think companies all over the world are looking to outsourcing as a much bigger thing than they every have before and considering outsourcing very large chunks of their entire operations. And -- and this is affecting their attitude towards technical solutions they might be adopting and there’s three particular ways in which I think it’s affecting them.

The first is that people want to know at a very high level what processes they have. And this is process architecture and there are levels to process architecture but what you need to think about is strategic processes, tactical process, operational processes, and you need to understand how these all fit together. You just need to understand how processes fit together as you go down the managerial hierarchy of an organization; this is quite a complicated thing.

And then there’s -- some of this related to choreography but not choreography in a technical sense of -- of language like WSCDL but choreography in the sense of trying to assess how you can thaw them out] these processes to other organizations. It's how you can keep this -- what your department is going to do and because of the scaling up of business process outsourcing, I think this is becoming a much more complex and exciting field, I think, for a lot of people.

I think people see a lot of advantage to be gained from this and in -- as globalization drives costs down in every area, there’s a lot of scope of capacity for this market share, so that’s the second thing, the focus on choreography. And the third thing I see is that some people are -- are looking for ways to streamline the cost of implementing processes and this isn’t just about adopting new -- new technical techniques processes; it’s about -- it’s about the administration of processes so that’s related to some of the comments we’ve heard or -- so far today on process infrastructure, but I think it also to do with the human workers around processes and the administrative and system administration type work.

The IT operations and IT alone and frameworks like are useful but they don’t go far enough for a lot of people who are looking for higher magnitudes levels of improvements so they’re my three predictions, process architecture], a wider view of choreography and people seeking more improvements and efficiency of process administration.

EB: Okay. Thank you Keith. Wonderful. So I guess what I’d like to do now is actually potentially go back to have a conversation. I think the most present thing on my mind today, at least, probably just because I’m, you know, in charge of running a news site that has a lot of breaking news going today and that is what Tony brought up about the consolidation in the marketplace and I know also Ronan brought that up too. So do either of you want to take a stab at going a little deeper into the consolidation inside the marketplace and BPM and SOA and BI and all these tools kind of coming together to a small number of companies that are literally trying to provide one stop shop kind of solution.

TB: Sure, I’ll -- this is Tony, I’ll -- I’ll take the first shot at it. I think the obviously point I would very much agree-- I would very much agree with -- with Keith just now and, you know, everybody else about the fact that basically enterprise customers don’t really care about technology silos, they actually -- they want to get their processes automated and they need to get, you know, they need to also have a clear window on their operations and also have the ability to conduct analytics without having to go shell out into separate tools or call on separate specialists.

And I think the best example of what’s, you know, occurred today are, you know, are -- I mean, take a look at the Oracles, you know, Oracle BEA transaction. And Oracle, you know, has BI tools. Of course, it does have relationships with some external providers like Informatics but still it has BI; it’s building a BPM. Of course, BEA, you know, acquisition a couple years ago of Fuego has its own BPM stack.

And regardless of the -- the fate of -- the ultimate fate of the BEA technologies, once they are absorbed by Oracle, it’s still a clear validation that the major, you know, software platform providers are intending to provide a one stop shop experience for you so that you don’t have to go to a separate tool for analytics, a separate tool to do process management, a separate tool to do [0:15:14].

I mean the fact is, you know, for instance, look BAM, Business Activity Monitoring and business intelligence, they’re really two faces of the same coin just one tends to be a little more real-time than other and; therefore, why should real-time analysis be any different from the type of, you know, traditional BI analysis that was -- that was sort of a look back at historical trends.

Why should it be different? We have the technology, we have the virtualization, we have change data capture, we have all these pieces and we have an architecture, SOA, that it allows us to essentially abstract all this so why not put all those pieces together. On the other hand, though, I will take a little bit of a decent to all of that; I think there is still a major tug of war going on.

I agree that BPM vendors recently have lost some of the initiative to the platform folks more just for a brute power play standpoint in terms that the platform folks are just amassing all these assets. But the BPM folks are [0:16:05] trying to fight back and you actually have some fairly big names that are trying to craft some alternative strategies, I mean, SAP, Microsoft are each looking at BPM strategies that are going to try and make models directly executable.

And they’re -- in a way they’re -- what they’re to say is you don’t need all the same middleware to do this, you don’t need the co-generation, you don’t have to do all that. Well, I don’t think it’s ever going to be as simple as all that but I do feel that it’s just symptomatic of the fact that there’s still going to be a battle ongoing between the business people and the IT people as to who controls the business processes and who controls the integration automation of them. So I would sort of -- I don’t want to say that any of this is a done deal, I think there is still some trip valves that are still going to go forward.

RB: I think I’d just like add to that that one of the -- the sort of the big trends in -- in the software industry in towards consolidation and -- and related to that is downward price pressure particular in the infrastructure software and that’s partly driven by globalization and also by a better procurement practices and also consolidation among the traditional buyers of infrastructure look at financial services, you know, constant and continuing consolidation.

So that’s really driving the vendors towards the big vendors trying to build larger and larger packages that they can sell at high levels in the organization. In particular, to try and jump that hurdle away from the IT side into really being able to sell a solution into the business side and I think a lot of the acquisitions around business intelligence or BPM is really feeding into that, trying to provide something that they believe that they can go into the executor suite and sell a solution which will make sense to them rather than relying on -- on what is infrastructure concepts such as even with -- with SOA.

I think the -- the other -- the other side of that is that what we’re really getting is almost an analogist to the -- the gain [0:17:52] situation where we have, you know, Microsoft and -- and [0:17:54] we’re bashing each other heads in to get an even more powerful gain [0:17:58] in the course. What -- what I wasn’t really doing was solving the problems that the majority of the market wants solved and then in came Nintendo and took the show.

But I think there’s certainly an opportunity as we see the Oracles and the IBMs just pile the money into providing these -- these mega platforms, there’s opportunities for other vendors to -- to steal the match with. Now, as -- as it’s just been said, with SAP and Microsoft potentially coming in with something that is actually doing something different, not simply that they’re going to have three truckloads of software arriving at your front door and, you know, 400 consultants to give you even more complicated solutions but actually provide something that is going to take a different angle on -- on the same problem and not just use brute force.

MD: Liz -- Liz can I jump in here?

EB: Yeah, sure Michael, go ahead.

MD: You know, I -- I have to vehemently agree with what was just said. I mean, having -- having been doing this for longer than I care to admit, 30 years like I said earlier. You know in the -- in the early days of infrastructure management, there was separate infrastructure management tool for every single darn thing. And then there was talk of building these gigantic frameworks that would integrate everything and no one could figure out how to afford them, how to make them work or how to use them effectively.

And over time, some balance has been struck between individual tools managing individual parts of the infrastructure and additional tools used to consolidate and concatenate the input and output from those [0:19:22] into actionable information people can actually understand. And this is, I think, where the BPM/SOA consolidation conundrum is headed and -- and I -- I agree that there is an opportunity for an SAP or Microsoft or even perhaps a company we haven’t seen yet to come along and bring a new vision of how you consolidate all of this stuff together and turn disparate [0:19:48] data points into actionable information business people can understand and use.

But the -- the key challenge, I think, one of the key underlying challenges and I think Keith hinted at this a bit is who is going to own the process by which processes are defined, agreed upon, modeled, structured, all of that stuff. Is it going to be IT? I hope not, and I think not, but possibly in some organization. And is it going to be business people? Well, perhaps they -- but then you run into the challenge that I’m seeing users talk about sort of quietly or at the bar at the end of the conference there or whatever.

Whose modeling tools are you using, and whose models do you want to make directly executable, and how do you distinguish amongst the various characteristics of the models and the modeling tools being used? And frankly, one of the reasons I’m a big fan of solutions like -- like Role Modellers is that the approach focuses on people and what they do and not on technologies and what they can do.

And I think you’re going to see at the end of the day if the traditional vendors don’t deliver solutions that convince the CFO and the line of business people that those solutions are crafted to map to what people actually do and need to do, then users are eventually going to throw their hands up in the air and they’re going to say, I’m going to wait for the people who already make the software my people use, Hello Microsoft, to deliver features that wrap all this abstraction behind interfaces users already use and are familiar with. And I worry that if we don’t see the other vendors come out with solutions that address those needs that we’re basically going to see all this stuff disappear behind a cloud of Windows software or its equivalent.

EB: Yeah, so was Keith trying to get in there?

KHB: Yes, thank you for that Michael. I think that -- that’s a terrific contribution to this and Mike, I agree very much indeed. I think we’ve seen that -- a kind of continuous swinging to and fro over the last ten, 15 years between the mighty powers that be in the software industry and decentralizing force of the internet. And -- and we’re seeing a significant stage in that battle at the moment with industry titans like Oracle and some who themselves are major contributors to the open source movement.

At the same time, what their commercial interest is as it’s always been to get people to spend large amounts of money on very large products. And I hear all the time from business people who are deeply, deeply suspicious of this approach. They don’t see reason why they should trust it when they -- especially people who’ve been around a while, they’ve seen it all before and they’ve been through ERP installations and the AI installations and -- and they have the same promises and almost the words often from the same people, people who look almost the same.

And they don’t see why they sure believe it this time now either. They -- there’s always been massive consolidation and integration and streamlining promised and it’s always a big [0:23:02] solution. And even at these days, it looks slightly different in this -- and there’s more standards -I mean, more standards than themselves don’t make people feel more comfortable. If anything, they make them feel slightly more confused. So I think you hit the nail on the head.

Things are going back to a very business focused, a very quite hardnosed attitude of what business are saying. I need to see demonstrable benefits and I don’t want to spend any money at all on things if I don’t have to. And the -- the rise of outsourcing that I eluded before, I think is driving that even more because if you’re not in the end going to be responsible for a process, why should you implement it.

And until you know you’re going to own that process, you’re not going to want to spend any money on it. So you people are thinking it’s much more sensible to start by working out what we’ve going to do, what partners are going to do and get quite a long way down the line with thinking about that and looking at management advantages from process orientation in the wider and the non-technical sense before investing in -- in any more large infrastructure project.

And on that subject, I just have one more thing. I know I [0:24:02] on a bit but I’m try and make it quick. I think the other thing people are very concerned about is individual productivity enhancement because people are aware that these days with some of the work being commoditized, they’re losing a lot [0:24:16] advantage through inefficient use of individual time, individual worker’s time and especially if they have real means of even seeing that let alone even managing it. So I think this is a -- a focus area that people are very concerned about.

They -- they see it in their own emailing inboxes swelling out of control every day but they’re not seeing any solutions from the big players about their [0:24:35] that makes them very concerned as well and gives them yet another reason to distrust very large frameworks.

EB: That actually leads me Keith to another question I wanted to ask the group so thank you very much for the segue. And that is about in recent days there’s been a lot of heralding of diminishing IT budgets not having enough space for these large investments such as SOA. And I know Tony blogged about this on his onStrategies blog pretty recently. Tony would you be -- would you be interested in saying a couple of things about that and then kind of updating the group on what’s been going on in the blogosphere on the subject?

TB: Well, I’ve been kind of tapping into like all the stuff that’s been going on around me so I may be in the eye of the hurricane here.

EB: Yeah, yeah.

TB: Please don’t shoot the messenger (here's the article). But I mean, it -- it’s obviously when -- when you hit a downturn, I mean, we’re all wondering what -- how’s this going to impact us. And in this case, we talk about basically transitions like SOA. You know, it’s a pretty obviously question. We’re, you know, we’re about to at least here in the states we’re about hit a down cycle. How’s that going to impact things? And I’ve gotten a lot of -- actually, this -- this all was kicked initially with a posting from -- from Brenda Michelson over at the SOA Consortium where basically we’re most the -- we’re sort of an informal poll of members where, you know, that -- well, most of them expect to continue their -- their project -- their projects to continue in the coming year.

And then I started to get some, you know, posts from my, you know, my colleague Ron Schmelzer over at ZapThink who was saying, you know, he’s very concerned about the fact that the Europeans seem to be a lot more proactive on SOA architecture than -- than the Americans are. And besides the fact that, you know, the economy over in Europe is not like it is here. I mean, like it -- I don’t know if things are booming in Europe but they’re not hitting the floor like they are here, they don’t have the same economic pressures that we have so I’ve been hearing a lot of this lately.

My take on this is that, okay, just looking at the US, I think the analogy is the -- or the comparison is the 1990 IT recession rather than the 2001 IT recession. And the reason that even though you did have some expansion in the ‘80s, I mean, it was a pretty big expansion for the time. It was nothing compared to what we went through with both the Y2K and dot-com bubbles. So this -- so on this go round, IT is a lot more downsized, it’s a lot less fat to lop off. So my sense is that on one hand just from a general standpoint, I don’t think the contraction is going to be as let’s say catastrophic if you want to use that term as it was in the post-911 days.

On the other hand, what -- what does say for initiatives like SOA which are transformations issues, it’s not -- I mean, it’s not something you do as a tactical project unless you’re doing let’s say a pilot. Well, the conventional wisdom and what the experience has been, you know, here at least in the side is that when you’re IT dollars are, you know, your budgets go down, that longer term projects tend to get deferred, but I’m not -- I don’t think they’re going to get canceled. I mean you take a look at the 1990 recession.

Well, at that time we were going through -- starting to go through another transformation basically downsizing from the mainframe, which -- well, they call it “downsizing the client server” and also eventually to the 4GL RAD tools that made the client side of client server very popular. That didn’t kill that innovation. Instead of client server hitting its peak in 1992, it happened around 1994, 1995 and I think the same thing is going happen with SOA here. The current -- the downturn in the US which is likely to happen whether you call it recession or not is not going to kill SOA projects or BPM projects but it may -- put it is going to stretch them out.

EB: Absolutely. Anyone else want to jump in on this topic?

MD: You know at Aberdeen Group, our surveys constantly asked people about where their budget are going, are their budgets going up or down in various arenas. And up until this past year, it seemed that the survey respondents have been predicting increased spending in a number of key areas but I wonder if 2008 isn’t going to be a year in which we see the brakes put on some of that.

I’m not convinced you’re going to see a lot of companies all of a sudden making draconian cuts in their budgets but I am convinced that you’re going to see investments be placed under a lot more scrutiny and this is going to amplify the need for those who are advocating investments in things like BPM, SOA or any of these other let’s call them “IT enabled” or IT empowered supposed solutions”. They’re going to have to make pretty strong business cases about every investment they’re going to make in 2008 and beyond.

And frankly, being a user advocate and one of these people who believes that you shouldn’t spend money on stuff that doesn’t deliver business benefits; that can only be a good thing even though it may be disruptive to the plans of some people who are trying to move forward in these arenas. I think stepping back and asking fundamental questions like, why are we doing this and where is the business benefit can only be a salutary exercise for everybody who engages in it. As I like to remind people when I give presentations, we call this industry “information technology” for a reason. Information comes first. Technology is what’s supposed to enable access to and leverage up the information; it’s not supposed to be the lead dog in the race.

RB: I certainly agree with -- with that in terms I think what -- what would happen in the SOA context is it’ll be increasing focus on, you know, what people some people guerrilla SOA or pragmatic or incremental SOA.

And I think having -- coming back to a point earlier on that was made, that a lot of those projects -- the SOA projects are going to be more and more focused on how we enable things like outsourcing and learning the ropes around SOA through real projects rather than through too many initiatives. And I think while that kind of disadvantage in terms of a long-term rollout, I think there are many advantages in terms of companies that’s less likely to over invest than look back and say, well, we really go no benefit if it’s very tightly line to business project. I think that’s going to help.

I think the -- in the terms of -- of BPM, I think it may well help the traditional BPM projects. I don’t think it’s going to help the vendors providing the convergence between BPM and -- and SOA because I think primarily what they’re doing is they’re taking BPM products that were really designed to stand alone and try to just graft them into an existing stack sometimes with very minimal actual technical changes to make that an effective merger.

And I think the third thing that’s going to happen after the slowdown is also the growth and importance around open source. As we’ve seen before, open source for very obvious reasons becomes more attractive -- attractive in terms of the IT community because reduced cost and also -- where there’s reduced cost, there’s less pressure on -- on headcount reduction, frankly; and therefore, in the case of both SOA and BPM this may well aid the -- the open source companies that are trying to develop and promote those projects.

EB: Okay. Thanks very much. That sounds like a good ending point. Actually, thanks very much Ronan Bradley and to all the panelists today. We had Tony Baer of onStrategies, Michael Dortch of Aberdeen Group, and Keith Harrison-Broninski of IT Directions and Role Modellers and also Ronan Bradley, of course, with Lustratus Research. So thanks really to all you for really incisive, interesting comments today and I hope this will be part of our continuing series in 2008 doing panels and discussions on the new of the days and topics that are of interest to all of us. Thanks for being with us today.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to a podcast presented by Elizabeth Book, editor and chief of ebizQ. For comments or questions, please send an email to Editor@ebizQ.net or visit Elizabeth’s blog at ebizQ.net/blogs.

[End of Audio]

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From David Mitchell, Senior VP of IT Research at Ovum:

“This deal has gone through various phases of public posturing, with executives from both BEA and Oracle making statements on what would or would not be acceptable commercial terms. In reality it was always likely that the bid would go ahead and that negotiations would take place behind the scenes – unless, of course, the much speculated white knight bid from another industry giant emerged. The price paid is “on the full side” and represents a good return for the BEA stock holders.”

“The middleware market is one of the most significant markets within the technology industry, with competitors like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and BEA vying with numerous niche technology providers. It is also a market that has been consolidating and will to continue to consolidate yet further. It is a hot market, with strong growth and lots of interesting dynamics - new entrants, new technologies, integration with legacy, evolving standards, etc…. Oracle has already amassed a range of middleware products from organic development and through other acquisitions, assembling these into Fusion Middleware. BEA products are likely to form a part of this domain, with its standards-based architecture allowing this to happen.”

“Oracle has been successful in three elements of its enormous acquisition spree and we expect these to continue into the BEA acquisition. Firstly, it has a very solid structural integration programme that ensures that as little distraction to business operations as possible is experienced. This sees the main elements of integration completed with 30-90 days. Key within this area is the integration of the sales and go-to-market teams, to ensure that little loss of sales traction is found. This has ensured that Oracle has been able to cross-sell and up-sell within their account base with some notable level of success. Recent strong revenue figures give evidence for this trait. Second, Oracle has brought together its various products into a relatively coherent architectural vision around Fusion, both for applications and for the underlying technology. Thirdly, it has re-assured customers about existing investments through guarantees over the longevity and support of existing products.”

“We expect Oracle to focus on these three themes. We also expect that Oracle’s appetite is still not satiated, although the volume of medium to large scale targets on the market is now reducing. Expect the next moves to be in the industry specific applications category.”

Ovum's primary activity is providing value-added advisory services and consulting to retain and project clients. The company acts as a well-respected and trusted source of industry data, knowledge and expertise on the commercial impact of technology, regulatory and market changes. Ovum engages in continuous research and industry analysis to determine market dynamics in its specialist sectors.

Ovum has developed long-standing relationships with many of its corporate clients, which include major international blue-chip companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, BT, Cable & Wireless, Cisco Systems, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Telstra and Vodafone.

Ovum is part of the Datamonitor Group, which is wholly owned by Informa plc.

Posted by elizabeth in M&A | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the day has finally arrives. The deal is done. Ding, dong, the witch is dead (?) Rome has fallen. Goliath has slain David (or whatever).

Oracle today announced that the beast had fallen to the previously hostile takeover situation and is buying BEA for $8.5 billion, or $19 per share in cash. ZdNet has a good blog about it here.

I will compile other news about this as it happens. For now, here is the release from ebizQ.

Posted by elizabeth in M&A | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Big, big news today. Dennis Byron's analysis is right here, don't miss it.

I'll do my best to get up some more items on this. In the meantime, here's the raw news:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration.

ebizQ received the following:

The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

With millions of global deployments including Facebook, Google, Nokia, Baidu and China Mobile, MySQL will bring synergies to Sun that will change the landscape of the software industry by driving new adoption of MySQL's open source database in more traditional applications and enterprises. The integration with Sun will greatly extend the commercial appeal of MySQL's offerings and improve its value proposition with the addition of Sun's global services organization. MySQL will also gain new distribution through Sun's channels including its OEM relationships with Intel, IBM and Dell.

"Today's acquisition reaffirms Sun's position at the center of the global Web economy. Supporting our overall growth plan, acquiring MySQL amplifies our investments in the technologies demanded by those driving extreme growth and efficiency, from Internet media titans to the world's largest traditional enterprises," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, Sun Microsystems. "MySQL's employees and culture, along with its near ubiquity across the Web, make it an ideal fit with Sun's open approach to network innovation. And most importantly, this announcement boosts our investments into the communities at the heart of innovation on the Internet and of enterprises that rely on technology as a competitive weapon."

MySQL's open source database is widely deployed across all major operating systems, hardware vendors, geographies, industries and application types. The complementary product line-ups will extend MySQL's database reach and are expected to bring new markets for Sun's systems, virtualization, middleware and storage platforms.

"The combination of MySQL and Sun represents an enormous opportunity for users and organizations of all sizes seeking innovation, growth and choice," said Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL. "Sun's culture and business model complements MySQL's own by sharing the same ideals that we have had since our foundation -- software freedom, online innovation and community and partner participation. We are tremendously excited to work with Sun and the millions of members of the MySQL open source ecosystem to continue to deliver the best database for powering the modern Web economy."

MySQL's open source database is the "M" in LAMP - the software platform comprised of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl often viewed as the foundation of the Internet. Sun is committed to enhancing and optimizing the LAMP stack on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows along with OpenSolaris and MAC OS X. The database from MySQL, OpenSolaris and GlassFish, together with Sun's Java platform and NetBeans communities, will create a powerful Web application platform across a wide range of customers shifting their applications to the Web.

More than 100 million copies of MySQL's high-performance open source database software have been downloaded and distributed and an additional 50,000 copies are downloaded daily. This broad penetration coupled with MySQL's strength in Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS), enterprise, telecom and the OEM embedded market make it an important fit for Sun. With MySQL, Sun will have the ability to deepen its existing customer relationships and create new opportunities with companies seeking the flexibility and ease-of-use of open source systems.

Following completion of the proposed transaction, MySQL will be integrated into Sun's Software, Sales and Service organizations and the company's CEO, Marten Mickos, will be joining Sun's senior executive leadership team. In the interim, a joint team with representatives from both companies will develop integration plans that build upon the technical, product and cultural synergies and the best business and product development practices of both companies. MySQL is headquartered in Cupertino, CA and Uppsala, Sweden and has 400 employees in 25 countries.

As part of the transaction, Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assume approximately $200 million in options. The transaction is expected to close in late Q3 or early Q4 of Sun's fiscal 2008. Completion of the transaction is subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions. The deal is expected to be accretive to FY10 operating income on a GAAP basis.

Posted by elizabeth in Open Source | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Folks, it looks like Boomi is working to build a better mousetrap. But don't take MY word for it!

“With a significant customer base to build on and all the right partnerships in place, it's no surprise that the Boomi On Demand beta has been a success so far,” said Dennis Callaghan, Analyst with The 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, in his report. He continued in the report, “Boomi On Demand has the potential to redefine SOA from the customer's perspective.” This comment appeared in an independent report, titled “Boomi shifts to on-demand model for SaaS/on-premise integration,” published on November 7, 2007.

And from Dave:

David Linthicum, an analyst at ZapThink, stated, “Boomi solves SaaS integration by deploying an integration solution on the same platform, the Internet. This solution provides enterprises looking to find SaaS integration solutions with a better and more cost-effective alternative to traditional enterprise integration solutions. The use of integration technology over the Internet just makes sense as many IT resources move from inside to outside of the firewall.”

Boomi's full bell-and-whistles press release, available here, takes aim and fires at "traditional enterprise integration software" as we know it. I quote:

As the acceptance and popularity of SaaS applications has continued to rise dramatically, traditional enterprise integration software has become the Achilles heel of the SaaS industry. Traditional integration software products are inconsistent with the values of SaaS in terms of cost, complexity and time to implement. Boomi On Demand offers the first complete integration solution delivered in an on-demand model, breaking the barrier to SaaS adoption for companies of all sizes and marking the end of the software approach to integration.

These are some pretty strong statements. Any thoughts or comments?

Posted by elizabeth in SaaS | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a really interesting blog entry, Jim Sinur (formerly of Gartner, and now with Global 360), said that while BPM can survive well managing human-only activities without SOA, SOA really cannot exist without BPM. "As more rules and processes are leveraged as reusable components, they take on a SOA flavor," he said.

According to Jim:

BPM enhances the very essence of Service, but services can also be processes. It is a strange relationship and certainly a codependent one, indeed. This is why there is BPM in my SOA, and SOA in my BPM.

Posted by elizabeth in SOA and Web Services | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reading this article by Simon Burns from vnunet, I was astonished by how Asia's service oriented architecture (SOA) market could more than double to $2.2bn by 2010.

"Awareness [of SOA] has increased substantially in the past year, and we are now seeing this translate into healthier adoption levels across Asia," said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, a senior analyst at Springboard Research.

"SOA continues to gain traction in the market as more companies are implementing SOA or planning to do so."

The article also indicates that almost half of companies involved in mergers and acquisitions deploy SOA.

Read the full article here.

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