Mike C Sees

Wondering what the newly announced WebSphere Content Discovery Server is and where it came from?

Line56.com writes that it evolved from the acquisition of iPhrase. Tony Frasier of IBM says that 40 percent of the legacy iPhrase base was in financial services, definitely an information overload vertical. “Search is an issue in any information-rich environment. The tax implications of dissolving a retirement account differ based on whether you’re in California or Ohio,” says Frasier, by way of example. “You have to take the context of the user into account.”

“Search is a huge issue in retail — if you can’t find just what you want, you won’t buy it — but not a lot of companies have nailed it. A case in point is IKEA, which had a very shoddy search system until Line56 called attention to it and prompted the company to adjust its technology.

This is what iPhrase’s technology takes into account. “You have to be smart about limiting the search,” explains Frasier. iPhrase is always looking to limit the search by assessing the customer’s location, what products they own, and other relevant data culled not just from a customer relationship management (CRM) repository but from whichever system in which it may reside.

Users have a certain degree of flexibility because they can tap into iPhrase’s contextual search interface from within a CRM application or from within the IBM WebSphere Portal.

Joe McKendrick’s piece on commoditization of software, based on a conversation with Gluecode founder Winston Damarillo, seemed hopelessly optimistic to me at first read.

“Thanks too open-source and Web services/SOA, Damarillo says, ’software is going to commoditized, much like hardware has commoditized a decade ago.’ Over time, Damarillo added, traditional applications will be supplanted by commoditized, loosely coupled components available on a moment’s notice. ‘Enterprises can no longer afford to wait for a vendor’s version cycles,’ he said.

“‘Eighty percent of the software that needs to be written has already been done collaboratively,’ Damarillo pointed out. ‘If you apply software standardization, along with global collaborative development, you’re going to have all the modular building blocks you need for any application you need, available for free.’”

Yeah right. Sounds like someone with something to sell. If it wasn’t that Joe’s bio places him as a web services analyst at Evans Data Corp, I’d have just x’d off.

Instead, I’m looking for a take away: the holy grail is to save custom app development and maintenance bucks by building apps out of simpler components that are decoupled from each other. No doubt that “web services” over a “message bus” are the latest-greatest technologies to enable that approach.

IF some of those components are open-source or commercially standardized parts, and IF that makes them cheaper in total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), and IF it’s easy enough to hook them together to build a solution, and IF the functionality, performance and reliability of the end solution is still adequate, then we have a win. Note that in decoupling components across a bus, we still need to deliver rich functionality to our business customers. Most business apps I work with rely on customization of components to add critical business value. That customization and the strictures it imposes on the underlying components may still add up to something akin to today’s costs and timelines. In which case, we’ve only replaced the plumbing without improving the cost/benefit picture.

Let’s pursue the details a bit, through an example. Suppose a wiki is a widely used component for community knowledge management (KM). Do you buy a team room from IBM Lotus or Microsoft? Or do you download a wiki from sourceforge and invest a couple of developers in supporting it in-house as a reusable asset that you can shape to your needs. Most customers I know are still buying Sharepoint or Notes rather than participating in open-source KM projects.

IDC has published their annual Server Tracker report, and CNET pulls out some highlights:

• “The overall server market grew 4.4 percent to $51.3 billion from 2004 to 2005″ and “much of the growth took place in lower-end servers costing $25,000 or less”
• “Blade server revenue grew 84 percent from $1.15 billion in 2004 to $2.11 billion in 2005. Meanwhile, blades themselves got more powerful and their average price rose from $3,750 to $4,200″
• IBM had more than 40% of the blade market, and HP almost 35%.
• “Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers” — the first time Windows tops the Unix category.
• “Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM’s mainframe operating system, z/OS” — note IDC separates Linux and Unix numbers.
• in the Unix segment, “IBM secured the top spot in 2005, with 31.8 percent of the market to Hewlett-Packard’s 29.8 percent and Sun’s 26.2 percent.”
• “IBM led the overall market in 2005 in terms of revenue, with $16.9 billion in sales and 32.9 percent share, IDC said. But IBM’s growth was slower than the overall market, and the company lost 0.3 percentage points of share.”
• “Two major server companies that grew faster than the overall market:
• HP (#2), with 8.9 percent growth to $14.2 billion
• Dell (#3), with 13.3 percent growth to $5.3 billion.”
• Sun (#4) revenue shrank 4.9 percent to $4.9 billion — hopes to rebound in 2006 with “new “Galaxy” line of x86 servers and UltraSparc T1 “Niagara”-based servers“
• “Sun is trying to restore Unix fortunes as well by making Solaris an open-source project and bringing it to x86 servers.”  That faces an uphill battle for open-source mindshare with Fedora Core - version 4 was released in June 2005.

If you have data in lots of places, it’s a challenge to synchronize files and directories bidirectionally, right?  Check out these links:

• Unison
• Data Transport Between Different Machines
• Synching Files Between Remote PCs
• SourceForge.net: Tsync: (Transparent) Synchronization

The eMarketer reports on research into why 37% of US households still choose dial-up over broadband.  Whatever the reason, if you’re designing a site for universal (US) access, be thoughtful of your page rendering times.  This portion of the market is apparently satisified with email, IM and simple Web browsing.  So think about offering a simple or low-graphics page format, at least as an option.  [eMarketer, Yankee Group, Ipsos Public Affairs]

“IBM/Lotus plans to infuse its entire collaborative software lineup with social networking technology such as blogs, wikis and syndication feeds.

“These things are not replacements for what we already have,” says Duncan Mewherter, development manager for blogs, wikis and feeds at IBM Research. Instead, he describes them as a light layer of collaboration.

  More…

Looking at InfoCentral as a possible solution for my church’s database, I notice that their initial implementation used PHP and mySQL but that development of that version has ceased: “the existing PHP code is not worth overhauling.” They “feel that the modern, lightweight use of Java is the best tool for the task at hand,” so they are “switching to Java, employing the lightweight J2EE framework, Spring, and the persistence layer, Hibernate.” Sounds like they decided a major re-write was in order, and that PHP as a language was not up to their needs. I wonder if they considered the object-oriented extensions of PHP v5?

This Spring framework is interesting… “A central focus of Spring is to allow for reusable business and data access objects that are not tied to specific J2EE services. Such objects can be reused across J2EE environments (web or EJB), standalone applications, test environments, etc….” So they have a lightweight container for assembling POJOs, with transaction management and JDBC abstractions, and an MVC web application framework.

Related Reading

• Introduction to the Spring Framework

Do you have a weblog? Like to journal online? Share pictures or bookmarks online with friends and family, for example, using Flickr or Del.icio.us?

What kind of privacy can you possibly retain? Is it possible to keep your activities anonymous?

  More…

IBM has open-sourced the basic web site editing capabilities of WebSphere Studio Site Developer, for use with Eclipse Release 3.0 SDK, EMF 2.0.0 SDK, GEF 3.0.0 SDK, JEM SDK Jave Edit Model SDK (shared with VE), XSD 2.0.0 SDK, 1.4.2 JRE. [Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project Development]

This is full of good common sense. Or maybe it’s not as common as it should be? “‘With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the most popular Internet search engine, ‘has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users,’ said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who taught a graduate seminar on Google this semester. ‘A few years ago, you would have talked to a trusted friend about arthritis or where to send your kids to college or where to go on vacation. Now we turn to Google.’” [NY Times]