IBM decided to close 2009 with a bang by acquiring Lombardi, a privately held provider of business process management (BPM) software. Big Blue racked up a number of acquisitions this year including: data discovery software firm Exeros, database security firm Guardium, security provider Ounce Labs, and analytics provider SPSS.
Lombardi marks IBM's 90th acquisition since 2003. That's a lot of companies to digest.
With Lombardi, IBM strengthens its presence in BPM by effectively capturing the customers it doesn't already have. IBM currently has more than 5,000 BPM customers in about 30 countries and growing.
According to Lombardi CEO Rod Favaron, the company has about 300 enterprise-level customers with a high percentage shared with IBM. Lombardi has a shockingly impressive customer list, including Allianz Group, Aflac, Barlays Global Investors, Dell, FETAC, Ford Motor, Hasbro, ING Direct, Intel, Maritz Travel, National, Bank of Canada, National Institute of Health, Safety-Kleen, T-Mobile, UCLH, and several governmental agencies.
It's generally been a quiet year for technology merger and acquisition deals with the 2009 value total for tech M&A activity reaching $142 billion, according to recent data from technology investment research firm The 451 Group. To provide context, the second quarter of 2008 alone saw $173 billion in tech M&A deals. The median deal size in 2009 was $40 million, contrasted with a median of $43 million in 2008 and $100 million in 2007.
From January to November 2009 there were only 31 technology transactions valued at $1 billion or more, and The 451 Group reports that all of the high-multiple deals took place in the second half of 2009, resulting in M&A spending running 50 percent higher than in the first two quarters. Notable deals include Dell's purchase of Perot Systems and Cisco Systems' pair of $3 billion acquisitions in October.
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One of the cloud-related trends that developers have been paying attention to lately is the idea of "NoSQL," a set of operational-data technologies based on nonrelational technology.
These technologies do not replace the relational database but rather add a new tool to the developer toolbox. Business intelligence database technologies such as Aster Data, Greenplum, Neteeza, and Vertica do not completely replace the traditional relational database but rather use nonrelational databases to augment the software.
RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady wrote recently that NoSQL "adoption was inevitable because, just as in every other walk of life, there are different tools for different jobs in the technology world." NoSQL may not be exactly the right moniker, but the companies and developers behind these tools have legitimate substantiating points as to why the approach is right.
According to Dwight Merriman, CEO of 10gen (the commercial team behind the open-source MongoDB project), we'll see NoSQL complement existing applications for the foreseeable future.
The broad range of NoSQL tools that include projects like Cassandra, CouchDB, Hadoop, Memcached, and MongoDB bring to bear a number of technical advantages--even if no one tool does everything.
Horizontal scalability
Horizontal scalability, readily achievable for NoSQL solutions, fits incredibly well with cloud computing and general trends in computer architecture--toward more CPU cores rather than faster ones.
Performance
In some cases, the simplification of design of these solutions, as well as lack of normalization of the data, yields better performance. This often results in the developer not coding around the database.
Ease of assembly
Some NoSQL solutions facilitate easier software development. Mapping object data to JSON, a JavaScript data interchange format, is far less complex. The "schemaless" nature of many of these products is an excellent fit with agile development methodologies.
The typical software system of moderate complexity has many real and conceptual internal data stores. No one technology will be the right solution for all problems.
Forward-looking organizations should look at which technologies are appropriate for different data subsystems and begin to evaluate NoSQL technologies for appropriate projects.
Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, and analyst firm RedMonk have released survey results that show usage patterns for the Ubuntu server product.
The survey, completed by nearly 7,000 respondents, shows that Ubuntu Server Edition is being used for most enterprise tasks, such as Web sites, files, databases, and mail servers, and is considered "mission-critical" by most respondents.
This is an interesting set of results, even if they are biased, considering that Ubuntu has largely been known for its desktop grace and focus on developing a better Linux user experience. But the enterprise is where all the money is, and this survey shows that Ubuntu is well-positioned to garner not only a large user base but also a large revenue base.
Which competitors should be concerned? Not so much Red Hat, considering that it, too, has a massive user base and enterprise presence, but definitely Novell, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, all which have seen their data center market share change over the last few years.
If Ubuntu continues on this trajectory and maintains the "high quality that's free until you need help" business model, it will be extremely difficult for anyone to defend against the data center encroachment.
And some interesting survey result snippets on the hip topics:
Virtualization:
The two most popular open-source technologies, KVM and Xen, are increasingly prominent across all business sizes, which tells an interesting tale, in terms of enterprise usage. The quick rise of KVM is important, as it indicates that Ubuntu made the right choice to select it as our maintained technology. Ubuntu was the first distribution to make KVM the default fully maintained and supported technology, with (Ubuntu version) 8.04 LTS.The cloud:
Many users think the cloud is ready; they believe Ubuntu would be a good platform for it, but not that many have decided to deploy it yet. That's not surprising, given the maturity levels of the technologies available in the market currently. We believe in Ubuntu as a platform for innovation, and we will be looking at ways of delivering cloud (services) into businesses simply and securely on Ubuntu Server Edition, along with explaining how it can provide real value to companies as an infrastructure model.
One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.
I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.
Most open source vendors have tweaked their business models to include some kind of additional value only available as part of a subscription. This has brought various cries of derision suggesting that the code is no longer good as the community doesn't get to do QA, along with welcoming arms from investors and developers who want to monetize the code.
... Read moreJust as Sun announced the latest rev of JavaFX, AT&T announced that they would drop Java-based phones, favoring Symbian.
Tom Krazit reported earlier today on the news, quoting Roger Smith, director of next-generation services at AT&T who said "Java has not been a success," Smith said. "It's not because Java is bad, but we didn't manage it effectively."
The basic premise of the argument against Java is that it became fragmented with every manufacturer using its own version and defeating much of the purpose of Java as a platform to begin with.
And as mobile phones have started to become more and more like mobile computers, the software on those phones needs to become more and more sophisticated to run intriguing applications, Smith said. Java doesn't reach down far enough into the lower levels of the phone to exploit hardware in the manner that full-fledged operating systems do, he said.
I find it a bit curious that Smith felt that Java wasn't capable of exploiting the full hardware functionality. That sounds like more of a development issue then it does a functional requirement. Arguably the operating system should be abstracted to the point where Java can do what developers need it to.
As Stephen Shankland wrote about JavaFX today:
JavaFX also comes with a slick feature, the ability to move running applications out of the browser and onto the desktop--and back, if desired. Essentially, they can change their nature and abilities according to where they're housed. And the same application also can run on JavaFX Mobile, holding the promise for programmers that they won't have to endlessly rewrite the same applications for different media.
JavaFX looks to be very powerful as witnessed in the video below by Redmonk analyst Michael Cote. But the question is one of relevance. It's not clear that developers are terribly interested in JavaFX to begin with and the dream of monetizing mobile phones is clearly out the window with the largest wireless carrier.
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
Twitter largely reminds me of when people started to register their own names for domains, turning the Internet into a giant customized license plate. It's somewhere between self-expression and mental onanism.
I use it to track several news sites but following other "people" often makes me feel weird. Most of the content seems like therapy for those who don't spend enough time with others. From a technology perspective, I find it really interesting and useful to an extent. But is this online stream of consciousness a marketing tool?
There are some great users like the guys from RedMonk (monkchips, cote, sogrady), who have gotten so used to Twittering everything that it's like having them in the room. And their content is interesting and funny. It's a great branding tool for them and theoretically should be for others as well.
Personally, I use Twitter (daveofdoom) to entertain my other idiot friends, and I forced our marketing team (mulejockey) to do it too as an experiment. It's definitely not a replacement for a blog even if you can communicate anything with just 140 characters.
Over on Mashable, Andy Beal outlines "5 Twitter Tactics for Building a Stellar Brand":
1. Start conversations with notable peers
2. Share valuable industry news
3. Build your blog audience
4. Stay connected at conferences and trade shows
5. Monitor your Twitter reputation
Conversation or crap? You decide.
I didn't pay much attention to VirtualBox when Sun Microsystems first acquired Innotek, but RedMonk's Michael Coté just posted an interview and demo of the software, and it's very cool.
In a few clicks, you can see VirtualBox create a Vista instance and run it on the Mac. There are many options for virtualization at this point, but I would expect Sun to make this its weapon of choice (versus Xen), since it owns it and can tweak it for Solaris.
On the Mac, I'm not sure it's any better than Parallels, but it is open-source, which should be very appealing for many users.
VirtualBox is a free download available under the General Public License, or GPL.
I had planned to interview Cote this afternoon after he moderated a few panels at MuleCon but somehow he got lost in the crowd. So, I've decided to make it all up and entertain myself.
Q: Being that you do most of you work in the Bay Area, why do you live in Austin?
A: I had flown blimps for a number of years and I was based down in Sunnyvale at Moffett Field. I had been training for the next manned shuttle launch to the moon but then Iceland pulled the funding that they had allotted to the program. (Note: while not a native Icelander, Cote spent his early years on a fishing boat in the Atlantic.)
After the moon trip got cancelled I got a gig flying the blimp for the University of Texas football team and ended up in Austin. As all of our RedMonk work is virtual and collaborative and I fly a blimp I can get anywhere slowly but efficiently.
Q: Do you own any teeth that are not your own?
A: I own one of Ben Franklin's molars that I took as payment for a blimp flight from Dallas to Orlando. The client was a crazed oil-baron who looked like the Texan on the Simpsons. His grandfather won the tooth in a bet and passed it on from father to son to grandson. I wear it around my neck at all times in order to keep the peace between the Tories and Whigs.
Q: What's with the beard?
A: A vast majority of great men have always rocked beards. It's a sign of virility and dynamism. If you are on the town you'll always see the bearded guys with the lovely ladies. For that matter, bearded ladies always have the hunky guys.
Q: If you had to choose a favorite pastry, what would it be?
A: First, let me state that its hard to beat a muffin-top. However, my weapon of choice would be a fresh-baked croissant with butter and jam. Excessive? Maybe, but we RedMonk guys live life on the edge.
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