TUCON: Jayshree Ullal

Although not on the schedule, next up was Jayshree Ullal, SVP of the data centre, switching and security technology group at Cisco. Virtualization is definitely the key phrase of the day, because she’s soon talking about network virtualization.

She talked about the type of process that HP is going through now: data centres having moved from centralized to de-centralized in years past are now moving being re-centralized. Although Mark Hurd spoke about the ramifications on servers and data centres, Ullal spoke about the impact on the networks: if you re-centralize, it’s obviously going to have network implications. At the same time, the type of applications passing data over the open internet requires new functionality with respect to security, protocol gateways and other areas. She went on to show the network layers involved in a data centre that are served by Cisco and TIBCO together, with some low-level messaging functionality being provided in the Cisco devices themselves, and other more complex transformation and orchestration functionality being served by TIBCO products, and how this combination of front-end and back-end processing can improve high-volume applications such as online trading.

Ullal’s vision is “any application, any content, any location”, which requires robust network virtualization, application and service virtualization, and device mobility. When you think about it, although she’s talking more about providing this sort of functionality for large corporations, it also has a huge impact on web-based “Office 2.0” applications as well, where individuals and small businesses are virtualizing their data centres by outsourcing the entire thing to hosted services of various types. So if you use Google Apps for your domain email, Mozy for your data backup, or access Facebook on your Blackberry, you’re also a supporter of her vision.

Disclosure: I own a few paltry shares of Cisco, and I would be very happy if you’d all buy a ton of their products so that I can retire early.

TUCON: Mark Hurd

After a quick visit from Bill Schlough, SVP and CIO of the San Francisco Giants, to talk about our visit to the big game tonight (who knew that the Giants even had a CIO? Or that they’re a TIBCO customer?), Mark Hurd of HP gave the opening keynote for today. He spent a lot of time talking about their own internal IT and how it supports their operations. They have a huge scale of operations, and their IT needs to support that: they ship 3 printers and 2 PCs each second, and a server every 10-11 seconds, across 179 countries. They have 800 million customer interactions per year. And they have one big constraint in their internal IT implementations: they have to eat their own dogfood. They’re in the process of moving from 87 data centres down to 3, reducing the number of applications, servers and data marts significantly as well, all to try and make their IT less expensive and provide a more efficient supply chain. It sounds like TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix is forming a pretty important part of HP’s IT consolidation strategy, since service virtualization is pretty important when reducing the number of servers.

As I sit here typing this post on my HP laptop — my 3rd one in a row, the older 2 of which are still in use because they just refuse to die — and with a printer back at my office that is just the latest in a long line of HP printer, I certainly agree that they know how to make hardware right. I’ve even had some reasonable experiences with their maintenance, when I had to send a laptop back to have a failed part replaced, although I’ve found their telephone support to be mostly frustrating and useless.

It’s interesting to hear Hurd’s perspective, since HP is a TIBCO customer, but is also a significant partner: they’re TIBCO’s preferred development platform, and also integrate TIBCO solutions for customers through their own services group.

TUCON: Me and Tim Stephenson

In the last session of the day, hence the only thing standing between the attendees and the bar, Tim and I gave a talk on business process modelling. My portion of the talk, which was not at all TIBCO-specific, talked about modelling for the masses; I’ll publish it here when I get a chance. Tim followed on with information about the new release of Business Studio, and how it’s used for process modelling. Tim and I met via email about a month ago when we were getting this all set up, and on Sunday we finally had a chance to meet face-to-face. In spite of our short time together, we’re pretty aligned on most of the issues, so had some pretty good synergy in our talk.

I feel sorry for Tim, as I do for anyone who presents after me, since I tend to get really carried away with what I’m talking about, and I went over my 20-minute allotment of our 40-minute presentation. 10 minutes over. I had a great time, however. 🙂

Tim went into many of the details of process modelling in the TIBCO Business Studio environment, and showed some particular BPMN examples that can be tricky to understand, such as gateways and events. It looks like they’ve done some nice work of creating process fragments — design patterns for portions of a process — that can be easily inserted in at any point in a process to save time. He also discussed their concept modeller for business domain modelling, allowing you to create an enterprise common object model using formal UML notation. He also had to shore up the damage that I did by slamming the lack of round-tripping by most BPA and BPM vendors.

That’s it for today; we’re all off for drinks at the evening reception, then I have dinner with some of the product marketing team which will give me a chance to pump them for information about what’s coming up.

Tomorrow promises to be interesting — the BPM track is packed with winners, so I’ll be stuck in this same room with the crappy wifi all day, but promise to emerge occasionally and publish what I’ve written.

TUCON: Mark Elder and Venkat Swaminathan

I played hooky for a couple of sessions to go over my presentation for later today; as I mentioned earlier, TIBCO’s product base is broader than my interests, so where a couple of natural dead spots during the schedule for me.

Just before my presentation with Tim Stephenson, I sat in on Mark Elder and Venkat Swaminathan, both from TIBCO, talking about BAM. Since this room (which is also where I present next) has crappy wifi reception, publication will be delayed until after I present, since it might be considered a bit cavalier to dash out between presentations just to post.

They spent some amount of time at the beginning explaining what BAM is and why you need it; I’ll assume that most of you already know that stuff.

The interesting part (for me) are the specifics about TIBO’s BAM product, iProcess Insight, which is a plug-in to the BusinessFactor framework to provide BAM capability for monitoring iProcess process flows. Like most of the other BAM products that I’ve seen, it allows the definition of industry-specific KPIs in the business processes, then provides real-time monitoring of those KPIs with drill-downs from the aggregate statistics to the details. You can also use BusinessFactor to integrate external data sources, like a customer database. There’s not shared process models between the BPM execution environment and BAM, since the first step is to download process definitions from the iProcess Engine to create a project; changes to the iProcess model require the model to be re-downloaded to the iProcess Insight project and the project manually updated to suit the updated process model. With all the round-tripping problems that we have already with process modelling in one environment and execution in another, I would have favoured a shared model approach.

Once you have your project defined, the BAM runtime sends information over to the process engine about what to monitor, and the engine sends back the relevant events to be aggregated, analyzed and presented within iProcess insight.

You can define different dashboards for different parts of the process, with different KPIs visible in each dashboard. There are some standard dashboard views, but it’s pretty configurable/customizable for views such as balanced scorecards or even geographical overlays.

Looking at the components of iProcess Insight, there’s a wizard interface to initially create a BusinessFactor project that will become your BAM dashboard, a process monitor for the start/end of procedures, a step monitor for the start/end of steps and their deadlines, a resource monitor for user/group metrics, and a supervisor capsule to allow someone with the appropriate credentials to change a specific process instance.

We then looked at a comparison between iProcess Insight and iProcess Analytics: basically, Insight is near-real-time, event-driven operational BAM, whereas Analytics is historical analysis and reporting based on batch statistics export from the process engine. Many BPM vendors (especially the more mature ones) end up with this same split of functionality, since they tend to have first built the analytics years ago when they built the process execution engine, then OEM’d or bought a BAM engine and strapped it on the side within the last year or two.

Based on the audience questions, and some earlier observations, I’m starting to get the idea that TIBCO’s “user” base is pretty technical, with not much representation from the business side of organizations. Given that many of their products are development and low-level integration tools, this isn’t surprising overall, but I expected a few more non-geeks in the BPM sessions. If this is any indication of who’s using TIBCO within customer organizations, TIBCO needs to focus more on the business side of their customers to really play in the BPM space.

TUCON: Simon Hayward

I’m in my first breakout session of the day, State of BPM – Trends and Drivers for Success: A Leading Analyst Perspective by Gartner, and although the schedule shifted slightly to accommodate overtime speakers in the breakout session, the speaker decided to just go ahead and start anyway so I have no idea who I’m listening to. He’s certainly familiar, I’m sure that I’ve seen him at a Gartner event before, but with the recent departure of Jim Sinur (and, I have heard, Michael Melenovsky), I’m not sure who’s pushing BPM at Gartner these days besides Janelle Hill, and this guy at the front of the room is definitely not her. If I can get some wifi in here, I’ll look up my coverage of the Gartner events and that will likely jog my memory. Oh, wait, I think it’s Simon Hayward, who I referred to previously as the Energizer Bunny of BPM for his high-energy flying tour of BPM at Gartner. Given that Hayward usually does high-profile keynotes, it’s interesting that he’s here doing one of five simultaneous breakout sessions — Gartner’s obviously a little thin on BPM resources these days.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen so many Gartner presentations now that this sort of state of the union address looks pretty rehashed to me. Gartner’s business process maturity model takes a starring role, as it has for the last several months; I first saw it in a webinar that I hosted with Appian and Jim Sinur last October, when it was still labelled “the road to BPM” instead of BPMM. He went on to talk about the value of BPM to enterprises, and moving from a functionally-driven to a process-driven organization, also seen in that October webinar and many other places.

His six critical success factors for a BPM project (or for that matter, any IT project):

  • Strategic alignment
  • Culture and leadership
  • People
  • Governance
  • Methods
  • Information Technology

In moving from implicit processes within applications to explicit processes in a cloud above the infrastructure, he sees three paths: BPM suites, process-aware middleware (he puts TIBCO in this category), and process orchestration in composite applications.

Then, the now-ubiquitous gear diagram of BPMS, with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the middle, surrounded by the 10 necessary features and functions required to play in this market. He moved quickly through a number of other subjects, such as how BPM and SOA are orthogonal dimensions when implementing processes (nice characterization), and the complementary relationship between BPM, BI and BAM. He finished up with a slide that I’ve seen many times about assigning responsibilities between IT and business, still valid although I think that some of the responsibilities are shifting more than is indicated here.

I realize that Gartner is a draw at a conference like this, but I’m hoping to see a little more innovative material out of them soon.

TUCON: Tom Laffey and Matt Quinn

Last in the morning’s general session was Tom Laffey, TIBCO’s EVP of products and technologies, and Matt Quinn, VP of product management and strategy. Like Ranadivé’s talk earlier, they’re talking about enterprise virtualization: positioning messaging, for example, as virtualizing the network layer, and BPM as enterprise process virtualization. I’m not completely clear if virtualization is just the current analyst-created buzzword in this context.

Laffey and Quinn tag-teamed quite a bit during the talk, so I won’t attribute specific comments to either. TIBCO products cover a much broader spectrum that I do, so I’ll focus just on the comments about BPM and SOA.

TIBCO’s been doing messaging and ESB for a long time, and some amount of the SOA talk is about incremental feature improvements such as easier use of adapters. Apparently, Quinn made a prediction some months ago that SOA would grow so fast that it would swallow up BPM, so that BPM would just be a subset of SOA. Now, he believes (and most of us from the BPM side agree 🙂 ) that BPM and SOA are separate but extremely synergistic practices/technologies, and both need to developed to a position of strength. To quote Ismael Ghalimi, BPM is SOA’s killer application, and SOA is BPM’s enabling infrastructure, a phrase that I’ve included in my presentation later today; like Ismael, I see BPM as a key consumer of what’s produced via SOA, but they’re not the same thing.

They touched on the new release of Business Studio, with its support for BPMN, XPDL and BPEL as well as UML for some types of data modelling. There’s some new intelligent workforce management features, and some advanced user interface creation functionality using intelligent forms, which I think ties in with their General Interface AJAX toolkit.

Laffey just defined “mashup” as a browser-based event bus, which is an interesting viewpoint, and likely one that resonates better with this audience than the trendier descriptions.

They discussed other functionality, including business rules management, dynamic virtual information spaces (the ability to tap into a real-time event message stream and extract just what you want), and the analytics that will be added with the acquisition of Spotfire. By the way, we now appear to be calling analytics “business insight”, which lets us keep the old BI acronym without the stigma of the business intelligence latency legacy. 🙂

They finished up with a 2-year roadmap of product releases, which I won’t reproduce here because I’d hate to have to embarrass them later, and some discussion of changes to their engineering and product development processes.

TUCON: Diane Schueneman

Next in the morning’s general session was Merrill Lynch‘s Head of Global Infrastructure, Diane Schueneman. She focussed on change and complexity, and how to manage that while maintaining a client focus. Like all the financial institutions that I work with, this comes down to four types of change: disintermediation, competition (especially when there is ambiguity over whether another firm is a competitor or customer), innovation and regulation. This all creates a huge amount of complexity; many companies try to address this by adding more complexity, which leads to client expectations that are rarely met. With more than 9 million transactions processed per day, Merrill Lynch needs to have a better way to handle client expectations, which they’ve done by moving from a product silo focus to a client focus, where the service is organized from the client’s point of view.

She described how they did this:

  • 70% of IT spending on innovation, 30% on maintenance (the industry average is more like the opposite)
  • Straight=through processing, with a goal of 99% of transactions processed without human intervention
  • Application availability 99.95%
  • Global sourcing to reduce costs
  • Focus on getting client satisfaction into the top 3 within the industry
  • Use of e-channels

Schueneman was very complimentary of the Spotfire acquisition announced earlier, since they use predictive analytics heavily within Merrill Lynch and see the value: they can actually predict most fraud before it ever happens based on patterns in the data.

An interesting piece of trivia from Schueneman: during the 3 days following 9/11 when all planes in the US were grounded, not a single cheque was cleared in the country because the paper cheques were all sitting on planes. This resulted in the development new legislation that allowed for electronic scanning and clearing of cheques at the point of origin. Now if only we could clear a US cheque in Canada in less than 30 days.

Kicking off TUCON: Vivek Ranadivé

Although I kicked off TUCON in an Irish pub down the road two nights ago with some jet-lagged TIBCO folks, it really started last night with the opening reception in the solutions showcase. The reception was packed, and it turns out that there’s over 1100 people here, which is pretty amazing for a user conference.

There’s the usual flurry of press releases from TIBCO and their partners, such as announcing version 2.0 of Business Studio with full BPMN 1.0 support, although I’ll wait until after my joint presentation with Tim Stephenson, the engineering manager for Business Studio, later today to see all the details of the new version. This morning, they also announced that they’re acquiring Spotfire, an analytics firm.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a user conference of this size — probably the last one is FileNet’s about two years ago, prior to the assimilation — and I’d forgotten about the light and music show in the opening sessions. These companies spend a lot of money to create choreographed video and music shows, always with fog effects, that don’t add a lot of value, although this one did have a cute sequence of two jugglers intended to make a point about collaboration. It was mercifully short.

After a brief intro, we moved into the first general session with TIBCO CEO’s Vivek Ranadivé, who will be throwing out the first ball at the Giants game that we’re all attending tomorrow night. He started with the paradox of how the cost of implementing IT keeps going up when the cost of CPU, storage, memory and network are all declining: it’s all about too much customization. This is an interesting echo of the discussions yesterday at the New Software Industry conference about how product companies now make more than half of their revenue from services: that’s one excellent explanation for why IT costs keep going up.

Ranadivé showed a vision of what will be happening in the next ten years: SOA, BPM, predictive business and AJAX, although that’s not really that much of a prediction as opposed to projecting well-entrenched trends. For the large corporations represented in the audience, however, it probably looks like futuristic magic.

He was then joined briefly by Christopher Ahlberg, the CEO of Spotfire, to talk about what they do and why it’s a great fit (naturally) to be acquired by TICBO.

…

Disclosure: TIBCO is a client, and they paid my travel expenses to be at this conference.

The New Software Industry: Craig Mundie

Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft, gave today’s lunch address; this post is out of order because I was not about to whip out my laptop and displace the best conference lunch that I have ever had — grilled Kobe beef over salad greens in a lemon fennel vinaigrette with baby pear tomatoes, spiced candied walnuts, Point Reyes blue cheese and a puff pastry triangle with balsamic reduction, followed by a marquise au chocolat of dark truffle chocolate, garnished with whole hazelnuts, a chocolate leaf and fresh raspberries — so I took notes in an actual paper notebook. Microsoft did host us in their well-appointed conference facilities and provided the afore-mentioned lunch, so they deserve the time to chat us up during lunch.

Mundie, who interpreted all the morning’s discussions about services to the narrowly focussed SaaS definition, discussed how there are opportunities to complement internal enterprise applications with services that are in the cloud.

He spent quite a bit of time discussing processor speed increases, based on the premise that we’ve reached a fundamental limit to processor speeds at around 3GHz (since increases without spontaneous combustion have been achieved in the past by lowering voltages, which just can’t be lowered any further), and how multi-core processors is what will cause the next way of processor speed increases. The result of this, however, is that machines that already are operating at far below capacity will have even more idle cycles. He discussed the idea of “fully productive computing” to absorb the idle cycles by such speculative execution activities as anticipating and preloading the next most likely applications that the user will run — a discussion that turned into a brief ad for Microsoft Vista.

In response to a question about the local platform as a “solution” for privacy concerns, he spoke about how providing notice of information gathering, and choice as to how that information is used, alleviates most of the concerns about privacy in a hosted environment.

That’s it for my coverage of the New Software Industry conference. All the presentations will be available online in about a week, and within a few weeks all of the video recorded during the sessions will be on Google Video.

I’ve already attended the opening reception for TUCON, and I’ll be full on with blogging about that tomorrow, except when I’m presenting late in the day.

The New Software Industry: Jim Morris and Bob Glushko

Jim Morris of CMU West and Bob Glushko of UC Berkeley summarized the day in a final session, and although it’s coming up on 6pm and I’m eager to get back on the 101 up to San Francisco to get to the TUCON reception, I’ve been fascinated by today’s conference and not about to leave early. As Morris pointed out, this was originally a two-day conference crammed into one day.

Glushko gave us the phrases that stuck with him from the sessions today:

  • No-man’s land as a zone on a graph of business models
  • Sweet and sour spots for business models
  • Impact and complexity of the product-service mix
  • Service systems, and how they’re embedded in social and economic systems
  • The “nifty nine”, being the nine SaaS public companies that have achieved (collectively) $1.4B in revenues
  • Data lock-in as the dirty secret of the open source
  • Open source as a lever for putting pressure on your competitor’s business model
  • Emerging architecture, which he considered to be the oxymoron of the day
  • The tension between front stage and back stage design
  • Collective action in the software industry

Morris chimed in with his favourite, the one that I liked as well, where in World of Warcraft you can tell if someone has a Master’s in Dragon Slaying, and how good they are at it, whereas the software industry in general, and the open source community in particular, has no equivalent (but should).

Morris pointed out that Google and Amazon are gathering a huge amount of information about us, and we’re giving it to them for free; at some point, they’re going to leverage this information at some point in the future and make a huge amount of money from it — not by violating the privacy of an individual’s data, but through the aggregate analysis of that data.

At the end of it all, it’s clear to me that this conference is pretty focussed on the new software industry in the valley, or at most, the new software industry in the U.S. It’s true, there’s been a disproportionate amount of software innovation done within 50 miles of where I’m sitting right now, but I think that’s changing, and future “new software industry” conferences will need to be more inclusive of the global software industry, rather than see it as an external factor.