President and COO of Sun Federal Bill Vass' Weblog

Sunday Aug 10, 2008

Open Source SOA and Middleware in the Federal Government

Middleware has been a passion of mine as long as I have been involved in IT. I even once wrote my own Object Request Broker back in the early 90's. It's always hard for people to completely understand middleware because it's the software "glue" or "plumbing" that holds everything together. Like the plumbing pipes, it's not something you see every day, but you know how important it is if it's not working

So much of the technology and methodology in IT (as in many things in life) run in cycles. Distributed computing, remote procedure calls, virtualization, and cloud computing have been around since the 70's. IT tends to run in cycles of centralized and decentralized processing depending on network bandwidth and interface demands.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) are both examples of another evolution of the cycles that occur around distributed computing and composite applications. Many IT organizations are in the process of deploying or planning SOA environments.

Any distributed computing environment has many advantages as well as many challenges that need to be addressed. To help organizations deal with end-to-end SOA deployments, we have created a complete Open Source SOA solution. This solution focuses on using SOA to address many of the business problems CIOs in large organizations are dealing with. It focuses not on the SOA technology, but instead on how SOA can increase the flexibility of legacy applications, reduce overall cost, provide composite information to end users faster, reduce deployment times, and aid in application consolidation, while still avoiding expensive proprietary lock in (it's all open source).

You can also see that Gartner provides very positive ratings on this open source SOA middleware suite.

Recently, Ashesh Badani and I got together and recorded a that goes over in detail the evolution of distributed computing to the current state of SOA (it's always important to know the background), as well as how SOA is being used in the Federal Government, and some of the technical and business challenges involved. If you are looking at SOA or in the process of deploying a SOA environment, please take the time to listen in.

Posted at 07:01PM Aug 10, 2008 by BVass in General | Permalink

Tuesday Oct 16, 2007

The Truth (or Lies) About Webinars...OR, What happened to the HP Way?

Many of you watch, participate in and gather information through watching Webinars. Many Webinars are even co-branded by several well-known IT and public sector magazines with respected editors as moderators.

However, the truth is that while publications may be putting their names on the line with their sponsors, the publications are not performing the due diligence or fact checking that would be done for any story posted on their web site or published in their print versions.

Many of you probably know, but I wanted to remind you, that most of the Webinars you see are nothing but glorified advertisements...one-sided discussions funded by the company whose logo is usually part of the Webinar title and whose executives are the major participants.

Yet, even advertisements should be held to certain minimal standards. The most minimal standard being – telling the truth. Recently, HP purchased and produced a Webinar with eWEEK that focused on Solaris to Linux – The Path of Painless Migration.

Now, I fully understand all good marketing strategies “spin” messages and highlight your company’s positives while focusing on your competitors’ negatives. Many times the positive aspects about a competitor are omitted. However, competitor characteristics should not be misrepresented.

The recent HP Webinar stated that Sun’s Solaris operating system is not open sourced. Someone might want to tell the more than 11 million people who have downloaded the Open Solaris operating system or the more than 60 thousand members of our Open Solaris Project.

The HP Webinar also stated that shipments of Sun’s SPARC servers were declining and cited a 2005 IDC report. Yet, wouldn’t you think you would quote the 2006-07 IDC report, which is already available? The current report states that SPARC shipments are actually increasing. But, I guess HP doesn’t want the facts to get in the way.

These inaccuracies are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other untruths, including the notion that Solaris is more expensive than HP, were propagated in the HP Webinar, so I would like to call on my friendly counterparts at HP to contact me and discuss it in depth.

The truth is, for the same hardware, at the same support level (two socket X86 server for three years), HP is $1059.84 and Open Source Solaris is $599.00. I don't know what kind of math HP is using, but the last time I checked, $599.00 was less than $1,059.84. Maybe HP is starting to have trouble with their calculators, or maybe it's just that Reverse Polish Notation.

I also call on publications, as the wall between advertising and editorial becomes more porous, to protect their reputations by performing more thorough reviews of their branded Webinar content – especially when their reporters are moderators!!

As a company that invests in Webinars, I welcome similar scrutiny of our Webinar content by our publication partners. At Sun, we have one requirement for all written, verbal and video content -- claims are backed by facts.

I’d like to talk to our competitors to advise them on how to launch such an initiative.

Now to dispel some other myths about Solaris, take a look at Jim Laurent's blog.

Posted at 08:36AM Oct 16, 2007 by BVass in General | Permalink

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