Special Features:
IBM MOLDS INTEGRATION SUITE TO
SUPPORT E-BUSINESS STRATEGY
By William Fellows for the451.com
WebSphere Integration is the latest IBM product group to step up with a
portfolio makeover and positioning designed specifically to support chairman
Sam Palmisano's call for the company to enable its customers to become on
demand e-businesses.
Five integration product activities now house technology from IBM's
Holosofx
and CrossWorlds acquisitions, plus MQ Series and other home-grown code. Paraic
Sweeney, vice president of marketing for the WebSphere business integration
group, says the contribution it makes is key to enabling Palmisano's vision.
After all, he defined an on-demand e-business as an enterprise with business
processes – integrated across the company as well as with key suppliers,
partners and customers – that can respond with speed to any customer demand,
market opportunity or external threat.
IMPACT ASSESSMENT
The message
IBM spent last year extending its portfolio with acquisitions. It has now
assembled and packaged them to support the company's strategy of delivering
on-demand e-businesses, with integration as a key enabling element.
Competitive landscape
Looming consolidation in the integration market leaves IBM positioned well
against independents. The long-term threat, however, is clearly from
Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and BEA.
The451 assessment
The latest release of the WebSphere Business Integration suite will force
BEA
and Oracle to step up to the plate with their own product strategies, as
integration around the application server becomes increasingly pivotal. IBM's
clearly getting on well with the integration of its acquired technologies in
the space and competitors won't for much longer be able to point to a
collection of stove pipe components. Mandatory changes are driving a services
opportunity around integration which is why IBM is now knee deep in this
sector.
Technology
The latest release of the WebSphere Business Integration suite
includes tighter integration of the Holosofx and CrossWorlds acquisitions and
a more prominent role for IBM's Eclipse development tools. A guiding principle
is that once the system is built, doing business process modeling,
implementing it, measuring its success and comparing and adjusting it can all
be done without the need for a Java programmer. IBM spent 2002 extending the
integration suite with acquired technology. 2003 is all about delivering
against this on-demand vision.
There are five elements to the suite: modeling, integration, connection,
monitoring and management.
The WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) Modeler 4.2.3 includes the
Holosofx
technology and combines WBI Workbench and Workbench Server. Workbench
documents business processes and enables users to define, model, run and test
models before implementation. Workbench Server acts as the repository for
models, policies and business rules. WebSphere InterChange Server can be
launched with the modeler and visa versa.
The WBI Server is now at release 4.2. It uses CrossWorlds technology and
includes InterChange Server, business integration tools and MQ Workflow. It's
been integrated with the WBI modeler and monitor, supports 50 application
adapters that IBM offers to its own and to third-party applications, includes
17 new RosettaNet partner interface processes, adds a new WBI adapter for Web
servers, has two new service provider business process templates for the telco
industry, and provides a new general purpose synchronization business process
template.
Monitor 4.2.3, newly integrated with the WebSphere portal, screens business
activity. The suite uses dashboards to enable users to see what's going on
within processes on a real-time basis. It displays data from events produced
by WebSphere MQ Workflow and InterChange Server.
The management element provides a feedback loop for what-if comparisons as
well as links to Tivoli.
IBM is enforcing the use of its open source Eclipse framework as the means
to
provide a consistent user interface to WBI. It also provides a common
architecture for developers. In addition to the prepackaged 50 adapters it has
already created, IBM will be working with other ISVs and business partners to
stimulate the development of more adapters.
Strategy
The difference between what the newly integrated suite can offer and stovepipe
application-to-application integration is the ability to promulgate events
across all applications in the supply chain in real time. Sweeney says it also
enables companies to better integrate and consolidate applications that may
have been brought in as a result of M&A activity. Ultimately, the ability to
respond more quickly to requirements also reduces time to market and means
users can be more responsive to new demands. New business processes can also
be modeled, tested and adjusted before being implemented.
Specifically, it means that new business processes can be better aligned
with
IT operations – a key concern for CIOs focused on achieving better operational
efficiency and getting the best use out of expensive ERP and CRM systems.
Moreover, there's now a real requirement for this class of integration,
Sweeney argues – and it's not just B2B-driven. For example, the banking
industry's migration to an IP version of the Swift transaction mechanism means
users need to realign applications to take advantage of it – and also to plug
in new processes. The regulatory climate is also forcing change – the US Hippa
requirements (for health insurance portability), for example, call for changes
in healthcare and insurance industry practices. And in consumer packaged
goods, large retailers are stipulating the ways in which suppliers must
interact with them and their applications. So users need multiple connections
both inside and outside of their organizations.
IBM claims to have added 560 new integration customers in 2002. Sweeney
says
that the size of the WBI sales force has been tripled to 500 and that the
company will typically work with a systems integrator (often IGS) on an
engagement.
IBM is offering WBI starter packs for certain applications, such as Siebel.
This enables the user to connect Siebel with other enterprise applications.
With a couple of CPU licenses and a couple of business processes, it starts at
$150,000. The WBI server itself costs $125,000. Users can buy packs of
adapters and choose which application to run the system against at deployment
time. It says engagements run from $100,000 to $5m.
WBI hasn't experienced any slowdown in the need for integration services,
especially as many elements are now mandatory. In future releases, IBM will
drop the use of Holosofx or CrossWorlds branding. Its other acquisition in
this space, Metamerge, has been turned over to the Tivoli group and will
underpin its identity management offering.
Competition
Sweeney says the market clearly can't sustain the 40 or 50
integration companies out there now, including Vitria, SeeBeyond, Tibco and
Mercator. He expects consolidation to happen in short order. The financial
viability of many is already in question. The market will go the same way as
databases or applications servers – the many will consolidate down to a
handful.
Sweeny argues that as J2EE emerges as the dominant underlying platform, so
those companies that don't support J2EE to the same degree that IBM does will
be first to suffer.
Microsoft's BizTalk is simply not enterprise-ready, Sweeney says. Oracle
has
a
strategy to move beyond its core database practice but doesn't appear to have
the culture to achieve it. BEA, meanwhile, has talked a lot about the
integration requirement but hasn't yet done anything about addressing it. SAP
is a threat because it supports its own integration model and is offering to
integrate a user's other applications as part of its activity. Sun's recent
Orion software announcement, IBM says, is simply a statement of intent, not a
product announcement, with no detail on what products will be delivered, when
or at what price point.
One item to note is that IBM's WBI is still running on CrossWorlds
InterChange
Server, not natively on the WebSphere app server – but the goal is to move
over eventually. In this sense, IBM is still open to BEA's charges of having
an unfinished software stack.
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