Software, Interrupted

Microsoft's weak results this quarter have led the company to its first-ever major workforce reduction.

Layoffs are never a good thing, especially for a bellwether tech company like Microsoft. And generally, when a company grows beyond 10,000 employees (let alone 100,000), there are always staff reductions that can be made that have minimal effect on the overall revenues.

But the crux of Microsoft's problem wasn't people; it was the insistence that Windows Vista was better than XP, and the long-term denial of customer and analyst comments illustrating the fact that Vista was not great.

"Windows Vista didn't do well. Based on our data, a lot of clients are skipping Windows Vista," said Neil McDonald, an analyst at Gartner. Indeed, nearly every other major analyst firm found a similar lack of Vista adoption, with Forrester Research likening the (operating system) to the failed New Coke.

Microsoft did too little, too late, during the entire Vista launch and its continuing debacle to make customers want the new operating system and to allay the concerns of the analyst community. Vista's biggest problem is still Windows XP, and Microsoft kept its head in the sand for way too long.

Link: CNET coverage of Microsoft layoffs

Gartner analyst Tom Bittman is predicting "that the future of corporate IT is in private clouds, essentially flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon, yet built and managed internally for each business's users."

While it's true that most enterprises can't replicate the economies of scale that Google and Microsoft have, most companies do have spare computing capacity that can be used as part of an internal cloud.

I've written many times about the need for a virtualized layer--one that separates the platforms and the applications. Gartner agrees and calls this concept a "meta operating system."

Specifically, the meta operating system is "a virtualization layer between applications and distributed computing resources ... that utilizes distributed computing resources to perform scheduling, loading, initiating, supervising applications and error handling."

Bittman also stated that "within five years, a huge percentage of small businesses will get most of their computing resources from external cloud providers," which I would agree with--especially considering that anything that runs on the Internet (e.g., hosted e-mail) in what were formerly known as application service providers are now considered cloud providers.

Clouds will clearly be important and will be clearly be split between internal and external sources. However, the market needs to catch up a bit more both in terms of understanding the use cases and the economic models.

Web-oriented architecture (WOA), a descriptive term for a subset of service- oriented architecture (SOA), has recently arisen as the next buzz-phrase to help further confuse the IT architect.

WOA is simply a way of implementing SOA by creating services that are RESTful resources, allowing any service or data to be accessed with a URI. (REST, by the way, stands for representational state transfer. And URI is short for uniform resource identifier.)

For many scenarios, this method dramatically simplifies things over the traditional WS-* approach. WOA resources are stateless and self-descriptive. Additionally, building SOA across intra-enterprise and in-the-cloud services becomes much easier with WOA.

As defined by Gartner's Nick Gall (thanks to Rob Eamon for the pointer):
Long version: WOA is an architectural style that is a substyle of SOA based on the architecture of the www with the following additional constraints: globally linked, decentralized, and uniform intermediary processing of application state via self-describing messages.

Shorthand version: WOA = SOA + WWW + REST

To be clear, the WOA approach is not ideal for every scenario. As with any architectural style, there are trade-offs. Any application that requires a real-time, event-based action or response, for example, can't be easily built in the WOA way (at least without crippling the system with constant polling). For the enterprise architecture with any level of complexity, no one approach will fit all needs.

Add in the inevitable enterprise mix of legacy applications, existing investments in SOAP-style SOA, and point-to-point integration infrastructure, and it becomes clear that the true pure-play WOA will be all but nonexistent.

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In a new trend somewhere between direct customer contact and the public facing comments lies Twitter.

I'll start with the obvious joke that 140 characters, or roughly 2 sentences is typically the value that you get from analysts. However, my experience over the last year or so is that the analysts that I've worked with (both paid and unpaid) have been extremely helpful.

The Top 10 Analyst Twitter-ers via Technobabble:
1 Forrester - Jeremiah Owyang
2 Redmonk - James Governor
3 Message - Stowe Boyd
4 Hurwitz & Assoc. - Robin Bloor
5 Greenmonk - Tom Raftery
6 Redmonk - Steve O'Grady
7 Redmonk - Michael Cote
8 Forrester - Event Handle
9 Jupiter Research - Michael Gartenberg
10 The451 - Raven Zachary

Here are seven of the specific security issues Gartner says customers should raise with vendors before selecting a cloud vendor.

1. Privileged user access
2. Regulatory compliance
3. Data location
4. Data segregation
5. Recovery
6. Investigative support
7. Long-term viability

Full article on Infoworld.

UPDATED ON MAY 5, 2008 AT 8:30PM TO FIX BROKEN LINK

I think it's a great thing to see the big analyst firms recognize open source products and companies as key players in today's software world. The fact that Gartner has named MuleSource as a "Cool Vendor in SOA Governance" obviously speaks to the quality of the software, but also to the fact that the analysts who have typically been less open source focused (versus say, Red Monk) are realizing the massive impact that we are having on the market.

According to Gartner, "The cost, complexity and potential vendor lock-in of closed-source technology from infrastructure platform vendors have pushed the desire for open-source technologies past operating systems, application servers and enterprise service buses."

If you read into the Gartner quote, they are now also setting themselves up to be able to talk about open source applications and other infrastructure components. The times sure are changing.

Mule Galaxy is available for download and is licensed under the GPL v2.

Disclosure: I work for MuleSource.

When Gartner analyst Robert Desisto wrote this week on the idea that SaaS companies are going to adopt tons of open source I was thrilled. And yet some of the blogosphere seemed to think that meant they wouldn't pay for support and services offered by open source vendors.

Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.

From an open source vendor perspective, I can tell you that the interest we are seeing from SaaS companies is tremendous. In my case Mule offers the integration/abstraction layer for SaaS to bridge internal applications and data structures (and really if a SaaS architecture is not service-oriented the vendors are going to have serious problems) and Galaxy provides the governance and lifecycle to manage the services. (Disclosure: I am CEO of MuleSource)

But that's just one example--If you consider that Adobe is using Alfresco as part of its online PDF product or that MySQL powers a great many SaaS applications and that both of these companies make money as open source providers I think it shows there is a great opportunity.

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