Business Tech

It's been said that information technology is a fashion industry--that we just keep following the latest hype and fads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year referred to cloud computing this way.

Ellison loves this dig, and he uses it least once every technology generation. He's not alone. I, however, disagree with the entire curmudgeon corps' "It's just hype!" attitude.

While it's true that we in IT have our fashions, just like any field of human endeavor, we're generally pretty practical. It's hard to see either IT's executives or its technicians as highly subject to the whims of style or flights of fancy. The truth is closer to the notion that we're an evolving industry--one constantly struggling to find better ways.

It's not easy to grapple with the fantastic, relentless progress afforded by Moore's Law (on the supply side), nor the constant demand for more capacity, capability, and integration (on the demand side).

In a few short decades, IT has undergone a massive shift from an engineering-oriented support role to driving the beating heart of the global economy. IT is now central to large swaths of all human activity.

As new technologies and strategies come online--whether network computing, open source, agile development, service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, virtualization, or whatever--we seek to employ them to improve our outcomes.

There's always a bit of experimentation and a bit of hype involved in the early days. Indeed, without that willingness to "try it out" and a strong shot of enthusiasm on the side, we wouldn't be advancing as well as we are. That's not just hype you're hearing; it's also the will to progress. And for the most part, the recipe works.

Most of the major new approaches touted over the past few decades have become workaday parts of the IT landscape. Most apps, for example, are now "client-server" in design. Linux and other open-source engines run much of the Internet. SOA is how enterprise IT is designed.

The same Web services that Ellison derided years ago now underpin much of e-commerce, as well as high-interactivity Web 2.0 services such as Google Maps. And virtualization and orchestration--frequently discounted at the top of this decade--are now fundamentally changing how data centers are operated.

Indeed, when one of these previously experimental, previously hyped approaches recede from view, it's usually not because they've failed but because they've succeeded so well that we don't need to talk about them anymore. They've been burned into the way we do IT.

Each wave of technology builds on the last, incorporating its best parts, weeding out what didn't work, and often re-emphasizing themes that had appeared years before but weren't quite workable at that time--though often using different names. The utility computing, grid, and application service providers of years past, for example, have become the software as a service (SaaS, or more generally, ITaaS) and cloud computing of today.

So when something new comes your way--a new approach, a new strategy, a new way of looking at or doing IT--by all means, be skeptical. Try it out in careful, measured ways. But do try it out--and have enthusiasm for those new things. That's how we advance.

As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.

The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series or AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol).

Contest participants register up to five Twitter handles and code the function that each would perform in a program. When the contest challenge is issued on November 12, participants will have to use at least 10 of the pre-designated Twitter handles (other than their own) as endpoints to perform functions on data sets located at unique URLs. All messages will work through a series of automated public Twitter replies.

This is somewhere between an application server, a social game, the "telephone game" and service-oriented architecture (SOA) where Twitter plays the role of the enterprise service bus and the Twitter API is the broker between data sources. SOA relies on services exposing their functionality other applications and services can read to understand how to utilize those services. In this case, Twitter can be used as an application server in the cloud. (Take that buzzword bingo players.)

The funny thing is that as absurd and comical as this sounded when the Engine Yard guys told me about it, I've started to think about this as a way to possibly achieve a real technological breakthrough. And while I don't think that Twitter will be the "cloud bus," I do think that there is a lot to be learned from applying this type of constraint to a data flow process.

Engine Yard VP of marketing Michael Mullany told me that the contest shows how developers can leverage a relatively straightforward platform in innovative ways. But it's also another example of an interesting marketing effort to use Twitter as the vehicle for one's own benefit. Also, in true open source fashion, developers wind up building new applications based on code written by their peers.

Let's hope Twitter can handle the attention and developers are not greeted by the ever-lurking fail whale. You can check out the contest and learn more details at Engineyard.com

Oracle on Tuesday announced plans to acquire applications management software maker ClearApp.

The acquisition, which is expected to close by the end of the year, aims to enhance Oracle's lineup of Enterprise Manager products. ClearApp's technology is designed to allow customers to manage applications built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) platforms.

ClearApp's software aims to provide a greater view into a company's business services spread across all related application components.

"As customers deploy more SOA-based applications, the task of effectively managing them becomes paramount," Leng Leng Tan, Oracle's vice president of applications and systems management, said in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

There's plenty of technological innovation headed to the enterprise in the coming years, but don't expect any new game changers on the order of Internet or ERP, according to a new report.

Instead, existing technologies like service-oriented architectures and mobile will combine with component business applications and social networking to form what Forrester Research analyst Bobby Cameron calls "IT everywhere."

Information technology is at the beginning of a "new 16-year cycle of innovation and growth that follows the previous cycle of networked computing for enterprise applications and the Internet," Cameron writes in the report, which debuted on Wednesday.

Cameron identifies several technologies that are already in place but will gather steam in the coming years, such as X Internet--the explosion in RFID and other devices--SOA, business-process management, and mobile.

There will be some new acronyms joining the technology mix: dynamic business applications (and architectures) (DBA) that build on SOA and are far more flexible and easier to adapt than older technologies; master data management (MDM), which seeks to improve the quality of data that businesses use; and information workplace (IW), the notion of delivering information through available technologies.

So which vendors will deliver these technologies? Forrester predicts that while specialty players will have a role, the driving forces will place some familiar names at the "hubs" of the evolving IT ecosystem: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

IBM announced Monday that it plans to acquire business rules management software maker ILOG in a deal valued at $340 million.

Under the deal, IBM will merge ILOG into its WebSphere brand, in a move to expand its middleware software footprint. Middleware is a layer of software that helps servers running databases and Web site software talk with servers running applications.

By combining its business process management (BPM), business optimization, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) software with ILOG's business rules management technologies, IBM is aiming to provide customers with the ability to gather up all relevant information spread throughout their organization in real-time to make faster business decisions.

"Companies across all industries are looking for technologies to help them manage their processes with more flexibility so they can keep up with changing business conditions," Tom Rosamilia, IBM WebSphere general manager, said in a statement. "ILOG's software allows businesses to more effectively manage and automate the decision making process."

With its ILOG acquisition, IBM is reaching for a vendor that its competitor SAP uses and one in which SAP, at least in the late 1990s, had a 5 percent stake.

Last year, SAP accounted for 3 percent of ILOG's total revenue, making it the largest customer for the French company, according to ILOG's 2007 proxy statement.

Big Blue has no plans to cut off that relationship and tell ILOG customers which software vendor they will now have to use, said an IBM spokesman.