Forrester’s Jean-Pierre Garbani wrote a short report last month about the current offering and future plans of Oracle’s IT management group (where I work).
As the report points out, Oracle’s IT management products don’t always enjoy a level of industry attention commensurate with the value they deliver. This report will hopefully help fix this.
Forrester: “Oracle Focuses On Business Value”.
One of the most repetitive tasks when I was evangelizing WSDM was to explain the difference between the MUWS and MOWS specifications (the sum of which composes the entire WSDM body of work). MUWS (management using web services) describes how to use Web services to expose manageability capabilities of potentially any resource (a server, an application, a toaster…). MOWS (management of web services) defines a monitoring and control model for resources that are Web services themselves (so you can measure the number of messages received for example).
I ended up sounding like a cow when I was presenting. A retarded cow even, since my French accent forced me to say it slowly so people could hear the difference.
In retrospect, we should not have tried to tackle both in the same group. And not just because my dignity was bruised. It was a distraction inside the working group, and a source of confusion outside of it. We should have focused on MUWS (as WS-Management did) and possibly created a protocol-independent monitoring/control model for Web services separately. Something that, BTW, is still missing today.
I am being reminded of this MUWS vs. MOWS state of affair these days, when the topics of SaaS and IT management meet, often under the term “SaaS management”. By that, some people mean “delivering IT management as a hosted service, rather than running the management software in the same datacenter as the application”. Other mean “managing, using an on-premise deployment of the management software, a business application that is being delivered as a service (e.g. Oracle CRM On Demand), along with other local IT resources”. The latter is what I was talking about in this post. And sometimes it’s both at the same time (the business application is delivered as a service along with a hosted management console for status/issues/requests…). Not to mention the extra dimension of providing IT management to the administrators in charge of running a multi-tenant application in a SaaS scenario (instead of meeting the needs of their customer’s administrators).
All of these scenarios are valid. So far, we don’t have good names for them. And the MUWS/MOWS experience shows that good names matter. IMaaS (IT Management as a Service) and MoSaaS (Management of Software as a Service) won’t cut it.
[UPDATED 2008/6/23: This seems to be an example of MoSaaS (or rather MoIaaS) delivered through IMaaS. I am subjecting you to such an awful-sounding sentence as a way drive home the need for better names. The real value of course will come when these capabilities are delivered alongside (and integrated with) all your IT management capabilities. John has a nice analysis that lets some air out of the fluff.]
Another BMC acquisition today: ITM Software. Their software suite is designed to help drive IT decisions from the point of view of their business impact.
This is important, of course, for all the reasons that BMC, HP, Oracle and others have been explaining for a while (how often have you heard the word “alignment” over the last three years, compared to the previous thirty?). It’s becoming even more important now, as the options for IT sourcing (from the traditional “give it all to Unisys”, to SaaS, to running your own apps in a utility computing environment…) are multiplicating. Choosing between Intel and AMD CPUs in your datacenter is a technical decision, but choosing between an on-premise application, a SaaS application and running your application on EC2 is driven by business considerations of cost, risks, control, flexibility, etc. And it’s not just a one-time decision, it’s the day to day management that follows these decisions.
I don’t know much about the current ITM offering, but it was never clear to me how much they could deliver as a narrow layer, separate from the heavy-duty IT management stack (I can see how they would deliver financial and project management tools, but what about *really* linking day to day IT administration decisions to the business impact). Being part of BMC, presumably allowing deeper integration into real IT management operations, seems to make sense.
I just wish they didn’t make it sound so easy: “BMC’s purchase of ITM Software creates a unique, integrated solution that provides customers with a single comprehensive view into…”. So just signing the check creates the integration? Now I am going to get calls from our execs asking why it takes so much work to integrate acquired products, if BMC can do it the same day they sign the deal…
While I am at it, here is the press release that HP put out to list the announcements at their Software Universe conference this week. I notice that it’s all about new versions of ex-Mercury products. No OpenView, Peregrine or Opsware content, as far as I can tell. Without looking at it in more details I don’t know how different these new versions really are. What appears pretty new is the SaaS offering (also based on Mercury products) at the end of the press release. On the nitpicking side, can anyone tell me what these “static configuration management databases” are that are “unable to support the real-time needs of today’s complex technology environments”? I can see how a “static” database would be hard-pressed to help, but I haven’t noticed any vendor selling read-only config stores.
[UPDATED 2008/6/18: More details about the HP announcement at InfoWorld. Including quotes from my ex-boss Ramin. Congrats on getting UCMDB 7.5 out of the door!]
I just found out that I completly missed some interesting information about Oslo-related efforts at Microsoft. Back in February, Mary-Jo Foley reported on a new modeling language (code-name “D”, apparently) that is part of this initiative. And more recently she reported that David Chappell gave a presentation about Oslo (and more generally Microsoft’s SOA plans) at TechEd. He reportedly said that we should expect a new “schema language” (which Mary-Jo thinks is “D”). What I want to know is what its relationship is with SML/SDM and SCA.
Mary-Jo might not know about SCA and SML but I know that David does. He wrote this white paper about SCA and an article arguing that “Microsoft Should Not Support SCA” (based on an a questionable assessment that SCA is only about portability). He and I also had a little back-and-forth about SCA, SML and Microsoft in the comments section of his post. Unfortunately, David hasn’t blogged about Microsoft’s SOA strategy for a while for us non-TechEd people.
In addition to Mary-Jo’s report, the only information I was about to quickly dig out about David’s presentation is this blog post on Microsoft’s Israel site. Looks like David gave the same presentation at TechEd Israel 2008. Anyone who understands Hebrew cares to translate the blog? Fortunately there is a two-minutes video (also available here) in which we can hear David talk (in English). During the second of the two minutes you’ll hear and see something that could come straight out of a SCA presentation…
For some reason, David’s TechEd Israel presentation doesn’t seem to be listed here and TechEd online tells me that “Featured videos are unavailable at this time”. That’s both for IT Professionals and Developers. But of course they forced me to install Silverlight before telling me that.
The e-TEST suite (previously from Empirix) has turned into a set of Oracle products for application testing (sorry, application quality management). Ever since the announcement of the deal, a couple of months ago, Oracle sales reps have received many unsolicited requests for that product, validating its good reputation in the market. If you have spent any time around sales reps, you know that for them to tell their customers that for the time being they should purchase from Empirix was about as pleasant as for Hillary Clinton to endorse Barack Obama. Fortunately, this awkward period is over. Not only can people buy the products from Oracle, all the technical support (even for people who bought from Empirix) is now provided by Oracle.
I probably don’t need to say it (since the products were created by an independent company) but just to be clear nothing in these products require the target Web applications to use Oracle infrastructure (e.g. DB, Middleware) or to be otherwise managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager. They will work happily with your Ruby-on-Rails application hosted on RedHat or your .NET Web application.
And it’s not just for HTML-driven, user-facing applications: XML-producing web services can also be tested that way.
Anyone interested in application manageability and/or management integration should read about Jean-Francois Denise’s prototype for RESTful Access to JMX Instrumentation. Not (at least for now) as something to make use of, but to force us to think pragmatically about the pros and cons of the WS-* stack when used for management integration.
The interesting question is: which of these two interfaces (the WS-Management-based interface being standardized or the HTTP-centric interface that Jean-Francois prototyped) makes it easier to write a cross-platform management application such as the poker-cheating demo at JavaOne 2008?
Some may say that he cheated in that demo by using the Microsoft-provided WinRM implementation of WS-Management on the VBScript side. Without it, it would have clearly been a lot harder to implement the WS-Management based protocol in VBScript than the REST approach. True, but that’s the exact point of standards, that they allow such libraries to be made available to assist implementers. The question is whether such a library is available for your platform/language, how good and interoperable that library is (it could actually hinder rather than help) and what is the cost to the project of depending on it. Which is why the question is hard to answer in absolute. I suspect that, even with WinRM, the simple use case demonstrated at JavaOne would have been easier to implement using straight HTTP but that things change quickly when you run into more demanding use cases (e.g. event notification with filters, sequencing of large responses into an enumeration…). Which is why I still think that the sweetspot would be a simplified WS-Management specification (freed of the WS-Addressing crud for example) that makes it easy (almost as easy as the HTTP-based interface) to implement simple use cases (like a GET) by hand but is still SOAP-based, which lets it seamlessly enter library-driven territory when more advanced features are added (e.g. WS-Security, WS-Enumeration…). Rather than the current situation in which there is a protocol-level disconnect between the HTTP interface (easy to implement by hand) and the WS-Management interface (for which manually implementation is a cruel - and hopefully unusual - punishment).
So, Jean-Francois, where is this JMX-REST work going now?
While you’re on Jean-Francois’ blog, another must-read is his account of the use of Wiseman and Metro in the WS Connector for JMX Agent RI.
As a side note (that runs all the way to the end of this post), Jean-Francois’ blog is a perfect illustration of the kind of blogs I like to subscribe to. He doesn’t feel the need to post all the time. But when he does (only four entries so far this year, three of them “must read”), he provides a lot of insight on a topic he really understands. That’s the magic of RSS/Atom. There is zero cost to me in keeping his feed in my reader (it doesn’t even appear until he posts something). The opposite of what used to be conventional knowledge (that you need to post often to “keep your readers engaged” as the HP guidelines for bloggers used to say). Leaving the technology aside (there is nothing to RSS/Atom technologically other than the fact that they happen to be agreed upon formats), my biggest hope for these specifications is that they promote that more thoughtful (and occasional) style of web publishing. In my grumpy days (are there others?), a “I can’t believe United lost my luggage again” or “look at the nice flowers in my backyard” post is an almost-automatic cause for unsubscribing (the “no country for old IT guys” series gets a free pass though).
And Jean-Francois even manages to repress his Frenchness enough to not take snipes at people just for the fun of it. Another thing I need to learn from him. For example, look at this paragraph from the post that describes his use of Wiseman and Metro:
“The JAX-WS Endpoint we developed is a Provider<SOAPMessage>. Simply annotating with @WebService was not possible. WS-Addressing makes intensive use of SOAP headers to convey part of the protocol information. To access to such headers, we need full access to the SOAP Message. After some redesigning of the existing code we extracted a WSManAgent Class that is accessible from a JAX-WS Endpoint or a Servlet.”
In one paragraph he describes how to do something that IBM has been claiming for years can’t be done (implement WS-Management on top of JAX-WS). And he doesn’t even rub it in. Is he a saint? Good think I am here to do the dirty work for him.
BTW, did anyone notice the irony that this diatribe (which, by now, is taking as much space as the original topic of the post) is an example of the kind of text that I am glad Jean-Francois doesn’t post? You can take the man out of standards, but you can’t take the double standard out of the man.
[UPDATED 2008/6/3: Jean-Francois now has a second post to continue his exploration of marrying the Zen philosophy with the JMX technology.]
The Public Review Ballot for JSR #262 that took place in the Executive Committee for SE/EE has closed. I am not familiar enough with the JCP process to know exactly what this milestone represents. But the results are interesting in any case.
The vote narrowly passed with 6 yes, 5 no and 1 abstain.
The overiding concern listed by the “no” voters (and several of the “yes” voters) is the fact that JSR262 uses WS-Management (a DMTF standard) which itself makes use of specifications that have been submitted to W3C but are not currently in the process of standardization (WS-Transfer, WS-Eventing, WS-Enumeration). And that it uses an older version of a now-standard specification (WS-Addressing).
SAP makes the most insightful comment: that this is not really a JCP problem but a DMTF problem. Hopefully the DMTF (and Microsoft, since it controls the fate of the specifications in question) will step up to the plate on this. This is likely to happen. Even if the DMTF and Microsoft didn’t care about making the JCP happy (but they do, don’t they?), they will run into similar issues if/when they push WS-Management towards ANSI/ISO standardization.
Next to this “non-standard dependencies” issue, there is only one technical issue mentioned. As you guessed, it’s IBM whining about the lack of a WSDL to feed their tools. This is becoming so repetitive that I may eventually stop making fun of it (but don’t hold your breath, I am not known for being very good at ending long-running jokes). It is pretty ironic to hear IBM claim that without that WSDL you can’t implement the spec on JAX-WS when you know that the wiseman reference implementation by Sun and HP is based on JAX-WS…
Apparently Coté’s upstairs neighbors were having a party last night and he could not sleep. That’s good for us because as a result he bookmarked a long list IT systems management stories. Several of those picked my interest:
I missed this good review of Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) by eWeek’s Cameron Sturdevant that came out almost two months ago. It is “good” in the sense that it is well researched and well written but it is also “good” in the sense that it is a very positive review. The only drawback listed is the price of some of the features. But you have to evaluate these numbers in comparison to productivity gains of your IT management staff. Or, even more compellingly, in comparison to the cost of business disruption that can result from insufficient management insight into the applications.
I got to this review through this very nice blog post in which my colleague Chung Wu (a director of product management for OEM) describes step by step the key role that OEM plays in effectively managing Oracle technologies and in allowing a smooth and controlled evolution of the deployed portfolio.
Spring’s Rod Johnson writes today about the future he sees for Java Bloatware (his unkind term for Java EE middleware). Of course, as Mr. Spring, he is far from neutral. Of course he is focusing on a certain class of applications (web-centered, mostly greenfield, which is a huge - and sexy - segment, but not in any way the only kind of applications). Of course he underestimates how established technology that works remains used long after it may have ceased to be the optimal solution for new developments. But even taking all that into account, he makes some good points about the proliferation of rarely-used capabilities in Java EE and the associated cost. Most of those points are well understood and are driving the more modular approach taken by Java EE 6. As well as the adoption of OSGi (see here and here for BEA’s example). In addition, as Rod mentions, the JCP now has to share the playground with other framework standardization efforts like SCA.
The most interesting part of Rod’s post from my perspective, is this prediction:
“The market will need to address the gap between Tomcat and WebLogic/WebSphere. Currently an important part of the market is neglected. The majority of Java web applications are most at home on Tomcat. A minority actually want some of the more esoteric functionality of a full-blown application server, such as JCA, or specialized capabilities such as distributed transaction management. But a larger minority need some of the operational and management features of those products, but are not interested in the esoteric APIs and the bloat they bring along with them. As more and more end user companies look to phase out legacy application servers in favor of better suited technologies, there will inevitably be a response to market demand, with products that hit the sweet spot and bridge this gap.”
Right on. This is the second time in a week that we see an acknowledgment of the importance of application manageability coming from SpringSource. Whether this mid-point demand will be met from the top down by a more modular Java EE stack or from the bottom up by building on top of Tomcat (or some non-Java HTTP server) remains to be seen. The two aren’t exclusive either.
I expect that the hosted application frameworks like the recently announced Google App Engine will also aim at that “more than Tomcat, less than J2EE” sweetspot. But the cost/benefit formula of a more full-featured (or “bloated” if you prefer Rod’s terminology) environment might turn out to be different in a “hosted framework” situation.
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