I recently spoke to Ram Gupta, the new president of Cast Iron. Gupta is very bullish about the future of application appliances. In fact, he came out of retirement to take the helm of Cast Iron. Gupta was previously an EVP at PeopleSoft, and said while there he spoke to hundreds of CIOs who all said integration was their number one pain point.

Gupta says that out of $100 billion being spent on integration each year (his calculated number) 80% go to people, and most integrations are point-to-point. He states that the problem is most integration middleware solutions are too complex. Cast Iron is trying to commoditize the integration market with the integration router, similar to the way Cisco commoditized the networking market with the router (does anyone remember writing to network protocol stacks?).

The Cast Iron integration router is positioned as a fast an easy way to connect two applications. Gupta believes simple point-to-point integrations represent 70-80% of the market. Cast Iron plans to make it even easier to connect applications by providing application specific routers, for example, a SalesForce specific router, with all the data mappings already done. The goal is to make it possible to integrate an application in one day. The concept of “packaged integrations” is not new. CrossWorlds attempted to do the same thing in the early days of integration. SeeBeyond followed and offered its own application-to-application specific solutions. None of these early attempts were particularly successful.

I concede there is a real and urgent need for simple solutions to simple problems. Integration routers will have broad appeal to different size companies. Large organizations will adopt them as part of their integration arsenal for fast tactical solutions. Mid-sized companies and branch offices may find it solves many but perhaps not all of the integration requirements. It is extremely suitable for small companies and satellite offices that have no IT staffs. I do in fact believe there is a significant potential market for integration appliances. However, Cast Iron is not alone in this market. Cisco is introducing Application Oriented Networking (AON). Gupta insists that Cisco is not a competitor, but I remain unconvinced.

Despite the fact that it is clear Ram Gupta believes he’s about to ride another rocket of company growth, I'm afraid I need to burst his bubble and significantly deflate his estimate of potential market share. I do not believe that 70-80% of integration technology investment will be spent on routers. Composite applications and SOA, business process optimization, and business activity monitoring with predictive capabilities are the leading edge capabilities many companies are seeking. These capabilities are beyond the purview of application routers, are far more strategic to the organization, and have a much higher ROI potential. I believe these are the areas in which companies need to be investing most heavily.

Where is your company investing IT dollars?

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sun recently announced their Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) (http://www.ebizq.net/news/6716.html). This announcement represents the first Sun offering of the SeeBeyond technology.

There are 4 different suites: the Sun Java B2B Suite, the Sun Java ESB Suite, the Sun Java Application Platform Suite, and the Sun Java Web Infrastructure Suite. The Web Infrastructure Suite is comprised of market leading Web and identity infrastructure products.

In fact, Sun’s innovations in this platform have more to do with the way they are selling it than the technology itself. The platform is being offered as a subscription service. The pricing model is based on the number of employees in an enterprise and is priced at $50 per suite, per employee per year, or $100 for the entire platform. . The software can be hosted by a partner or the company can take the software under subscription and install it in the data center. Many companies use partners to run the data center. The strategy of creating suites suitable for particular business initiatives, and making the software easy to acquire, is a competitive advantage, compared with purchasing complex technology and having to spend a great deal of time and money installing and integrating it. The idea is making ownership easy – kind of like buying a condo, and not having to shovel your own snow, or integrate the integration software technologies.

The other remarkable part of this announcement is the fact that Sun was able to integrate the SeeBeyond software and come out with the offering so quickly. In the past, Sun’s software acquisitions have been – well – less than successful. In fact, many industry watchers were wondering whether SeeBeyond was ever going to see the light of day beyond the Sun acquisition. But this move makes a lot of sense. As SOA is gaining momentum, organizations are moving towards composite application development and creating new business solutions from a combination of new and existing components. The new functionality is created on the application server platform, and the existing components can be integrated using integration technology. Integration is an integral part of composite application deployment.

In fact, previous to the Sun acquisition, SeeBeyond was positioning itself as a composite application platform. Now that Sun, IBM, BEA, and Oracle offer platforms that combine application development with integration, will the independent integration vendors be able to compete effectively as platforms for composite application development? What types of technologies are you looking at for your composite application initiatives?

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (2)

Gartner was very successful in propelling BAM to the top of the hype curve when it introduced the term in 2004. Back then, the Gartner prediction was that by 2004, BAM will be one of the four top initiatives driving IT investment. While we are certainly not in the troth of disappointment, at this point, we are still in the early stages of the evolution of the BAM market. This past summer, ebizQ conducted an online survey in which 34 percent of the respondents indicated they are now developing a BAM plan or strategy, 29 percent said they have no current plans, 21 percent reported that they are in an early pilot or test phase, and less than 20 percent said they had already rolled out solutions.

Some interesting findings came out of this survey and the research that followed when we put together the ebizQ BAM Market Segmentation. http://www.ebizq.net/trainingcenter/products/150.html

First, we discovered that the definition of BAM is in the eyes of the vendor marketing their BAM product. BAM products differ widely in functionality. They can be dashboards displaying key performance indicators, or focus on event detection and correlation, or pattern matching and predictive behavior, or drilling down into business intelligence and analytics. A BAM product may include one or more of these capabilities. The BAM solutions are being offered by integration, BPM, BI, pure play, and systems management vendors. As you would expect, each type of vendor tends to view BAM from their world viewpoint.

While the ebizQ surveys indicated there is a clear and present need for the type of information and visibility BAM solutions provide decision makers, there certainly is no agreement in the industry on what exactly a BAM product is. Has the BAM buzzword captured the imaginations of your decision makers yet? Is this a must have in your organization? How do you define BAM?

Ultimately, I think it will provide business value when organizations use it as part of a business performance optimization initiative. But business performance management, sometimes called corporate performance management, is a combination technology, methodology, and best practices. BAM technology is only part of the solution - but one with great potential to provide real business value.

Posted by bethgb in Industry Trends | Permalink | Comments (0)