Friday, October 1, 2010

Leo Apotheker needs to target HP's forgotten businesses

This guest blog post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

By Tony Baer

Ever since its humble beginnings in the Palo Alto garage, HP has always been kind of a geeky company – in spite of Carly Fiorina’s superficial attempts to prod HP toward a vision thing during her aborted tenure. Yet HP keeps talking about getting back to that spiritual garage.

Software has long been the forgotten business of HP. Although – surprisingly – the software business was resuscitated under Mark Hurd’s reign (revenues have more than doubled as of a few years ago), software remains almost a rounding error in HP’s overall revenue pie.

Yes, Hurd gave the software business modest support. Mercury Interactive was acquired under his watch, giving the business a degree of critical mass when combined with the legacy OpenView business.

But during Hurd’s era, there were much bigger fish to fry beyond all the internal cost cutting for which Wall Street cheered, but insiders jeered. Converged Infrastructure has been the mantra, reminding us one and all that HP was still very much a hardware company. The message remains loud and clear with HP’s recent 3PAR acquisition at a heavily inflated $2.3 billion which was concluded in spite of the interim leadership vacuum.

The dilemma that HP faces is that, yes, it is the world’s largest hardware company (they call it technology), but the bulk of that is from personal systems. Ink, anybody?

Needs to compete

The converged infrastructure strategy was a play at the CTO’s office. Yet HP is a large enough company that it needs to compete in the leagues of IBM and Oracle, and for that it needs to get meetings with the CEO. Ergo, the rumors of feelers made to IBM Software’s Steve Mills, and the successful offer to Leo Apotheker, and agreement for Ray Lane as non-executive chairman.

Our initial reaction was one of disappointment; others have felt similarly. But Dennis Howlett feels that Apotheker is the right choice “to set a calm tone” that there won’t be a massive a debilitating reorg in the short term.

Under Apotheker’s watch, SAP stagnated, hit by the stillborn Business ByDesign and the hike in maintenance fees that, for the moment, made Oracle look warmer and fuzzier. Of course, you can’t blame all of SAP’s issues on Apotheker; the company was in a natural lull cycle as it was seeking a new direction in a mature ERP market.

The problem with SAP is that, defensive acquisition of Business Objects notwithstanding, the company has always been limited by a “not invented here” syndrome that has tended to blind the company to obvious opportunities – such as inexplicably letting strategic partner IDS Scheer slip away to Software AG. Apotheker’s shortcoming was not providing the strong leadership needed to jolt SAP out of its inertia.

So it’s not just a question of whether HP can digest another acquisition; it’s an issue of whether HP can strategically focus in two different directions that ultimately might come together, but not for a while.

Instead, Apotheker’s – and Ray Lane’s for that matter – value proposition is that they know the side of the enterprise business applications market that HP doesn’t. That’s the key to this transition.

The next question becomes acquisitions. HP has a lot on its plate already. It took at least 18 months for HP to digest the $14 billion acquisition of EDS, providing a critical mass IT services and data center outsourcing business. It is still digesting nearly $7 billion of subsequent acquisitions of 3Com, 3PAR, and Palm to make its converged infrastructure strategy real.

HP might be able to get backing to make new acquisitions, but the dilemma is that Converged Infrastructure is a stretch in the opposite direction from business software. So it’s not just a question of whether HP can digest another acquisition; it’s an issue of whether HP can strategically focus in two different directions that ultimately might come together, but not for a while.

So let’s speculate about software acquisitions.

SAP, the most logical candidate, is, in a narrow sense, relatively “affordable” given that its stock is roughly about 10 – 15 percent off its 2007 high. But SAP would be obviously the most challenging given the scale; it would be difficult enough for HP to digest SAP under normal circumstances, but with all the converged infrastructure stuff on its plate, it’s back to the question of how can you be in two places at once. Infor is a smaller company, but as it is also a polyglot of many smaller enterprise software firms, would present HP additional integration headaches that it doesn’t need.

Little choice

HP may have little choice but to make a play for SAP if IBM or Microsoft were unexpectedly to actively bid. Otherwise, its best bet is to revive the relationship, which would give both HP and SAP the time to acclimate. But in a rapidly consolidating technology market, who has the luxury of time these days?

Salesforce.com would make a logical stab as it would reinforce HP Enterprise Services’ (formerly EDS) outsourcing and BPO business. It would be far easier for HP to get its arms around this business. The drawback is that Salesforce.com would not be very extensible as an application set, as it uses a proprietary stored procedures database architecture. That would make it difficult to integrate with other prospective ERP SaaS acquisitions, which would otherwise be the next logical step to growing the business software footprint.

Can HP afford to converge itself in another direction? Can it afford not to?

Informatica is often brought up – if HP is to salvage its Neoview and Knightsbridge BI business, it would need a data integration engine to help bolster it. Better yet, buy Teradata, which is one of the biggest resellers of Informatica PowerCenter – that would give HP far more credible presence in the analytics space. Then it will have to ward off Oracle – which has an even more pressing need for Informatica to fill out the data integration piece in its Fusion middleware stack – for Informatica. But with Teradata, there would at least be a real anchor for the Informatica business.

HP has to decide what kind of company it needs to be, as Tom Kucharvy summarized well a few weeks back. Can HP afford to converge itself in another direction? Can it afford not to? Leo Apotheker has a heck of a listening tour ahead of him.

This guest blog post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

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Financial services firms look to cloud, grid, and cluster to allay fears over data explosion, says survey

Look for a sharp uptick in cloud computing from financial services firms over the next two years, along with similar increases in cluster and grid technologies. This increased interest comes from a concern over the current data explosion and the firms' lack of scalable environments, insufficient capacity to run complex analytics, and contention for computing resources.

These findings come from a recent survey conducted by Wall Street & Technology in conjunction with Platform Computing, SAS, and the TABB Group. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Completed in July, the survey found noteworthy differences in the challenges being faced by both buy- and sell-side firms, with sell-side institutions more likely to report a lack of a scalable environment, insufficient capacity to run complex analytics, and contention for computing resources as significant challenges.

According to the survey, data proliferation and the need to better manage it are at the root of many of the challenges being faced by financial institutions of all sizes. Two-thirds (66 percent) of buy-side firms and more than half (56 percent) of sell-side firms are grappling with siloed data sources. The silo problem is being exacerbated by organizational constraints, including policies prohibiting data sharing and access, network bandwidth issues and input/output (I/O) bottlenecks.

Too much data

Ever-increasing data growth is also cause for concern, with firms reporting that they are dealing with too much market data. Sixty-six percent of respondents didn't think their analytics infrastructures would be able to keep pace with demand over time.

Both buy- and sell-side firms plan to increase their focus on liquidity and counterparty risk in the next 12 months. Counterparty risk management was ranked as the highest priority for the sell side (45 percent) with liquidity risk following at 43 percent. Liquidity risk and counterparty risk scored high for the buy side with 36 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

Data proliferation and the need to better manage it are at the root of many of the challenges being faced by financial institutions of all sizes.



The financial institutions plan to turn to a combination of technologies including cloud computing and grid technologies. Within the next two years, 51 percent of all respondents are considering or likely to invest in cluster technology, 53 percent are considering or likely to buy grid technology, and 57 percent are considering or likely to purchase cloud technology.

The report, “The State of Business Analytics in Financial Services: Examining Current Preparedness for Future Demands,” is available for download at http://www.grid-analytics.wallstreetandtech.com. (Registration required.) Wall Street & Technology, in conjunction with the survey sponsors, will host a webinar to discuss in-depth key findings of the survey on October 7 at 12 pm ET/9 am PT. For more information, visit: http://tinyurl.com/2ulcesm.

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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Automated governance: Cloud computing's lynchpin for success or failure

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a transcript or download a copy. Get a copy of Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software. Learn more about governance risks. Sponsor: WebLayers.

Management and governance are the arbiters of success or failure when we look across a cloud services ecosystem and the full lifecycle of those applications. That's why governance is so important in the budding era of cloud computing.

As cloud-delivered services become the coin of the productivity realm, how those services are managed as they are developed, deployed, and used -- across a services lifecycle -- increasingly determines their true value.

And yet governance is still too often fractured, poorly extended across the development-and-deployment continuum, and often not able to satisfy the new complexity inherent in cloud models.

One key bellwether for future service environments and for defining the role and requirements for automated cloud governance is in applications development, which due to the popularity of platform as a service (PaaS) is already largely a services ecosystem.

Here to help us explain why baked-in visibility across services creation and deployment is essential please join Jeff Papows, President and CEO of WebLayers and the author of Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software, and John McDonald, CEO of CloudOne Corp. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
McDonald: Cloud, from a technology perspective, is more about some very sophisticated tools that are used to virtualize the workloads and the data and move them live from one bank of servers to another, and from one whole data center to another, without the user really being aware of it. But, fundamentally, cloud computing is about getting access to a data center that’s my data center on-demand.

Fundamentally, the easiest way to remember it is that cloud is to hardware as software as a service (SaaS) is to software. Basically, for CloudOne, we're providing IBM Rational Development tools both through cloud computing and SaaS.

... There's a myth that development is something that we ought to be tooling up for, like providing power to a building or water service. In reality, that’s not how it works at all.

The money that you save by doing that is the reason you can open any trade magazine and the first seven pages are all going to be about cloud.



There are people who come and go with different roles throughout the development process. The front-end business analysts play a big role in gathering requirements. Then, quite often, architects take over and design the application software or whatever we are building from those requirements. Then, the people doing the coding, developers, take over. That rolls into testing and that rolls into deployment. And, as this lifecycle moves through, these roles wax and wane.

But the traditional model of getting development tools doesn’t really work that way at all. You usually buy all of the tools that you will ever need up front, usually with a large purchase, put them on servers, and let them sit there, until the people who are going to use them and log in and use them. But, while they are sitting there, taking up space and your capital expense budget, and not being used, that’s waste.

The cloud model allows you to spin up and spin down the appropriate amount of software and hardware to support the realities of the software development lifecycle. The money that you save by doing that is the reason you can open any trade magazine and the first seven pages are all going to be about cloud.

It's allowing customers of CloudOne and IBM Rational to use that money in new, creative, interesting ways to provide tools they couldn't afford before, to start pilots of different, more sophisticated technologies that they wouldn't have been able to gather the resources to do before. So, it's not only a cost-savings statement, it's also ease of use, ease of start-up, and an ability to get more for your dollar from the development process. That's a pretty cool thing all the way around.

Papows: A lot of about what’s going on in cloud computing it’s not a particularly new thing. What we used to think of was hosting or outsourcing. What’s happening now is the world is becoming more mobile, as 20 percent of our IT capacity is focused on new application development.

We have to get more creative and more distributed about the talent that contributes to those critical application development and projects. ... Design time governance is the next logical thing in that continuum, so that all of the inherent risk mitigation associated with governance and then IT contacts can be applied to application development in a hybrid model that’s both geographically and organizationally distributed.

When you try to add some linear structure and predictability to those hybrid models, the constant that can provide some order and some efficiency is not purely technology-based. It's not just the virtualization, the added virtual machine capacity, or even the middleware to include companies like WebLayers or tools like Rational. It's the process that goes along with it. One of the really important things about design-time governance is the review process.

Governance is a big part of the technology toolset that institutionalizes that review process and adds that order to what otherwise can quickly become a bit chaotic.

McDonald: The challenge of tools in the old days was that they were largely created during a time where all the people and the development project were sitting on the same floor with each other in a bunch of cubes in offices.

The cloud allows us to create a dedicated new data center that sits on the Internet and is accessible to all, wherever they are, and in whatever time zone they are working, and whatever relationship they have to my company.



As the challenges of development have caused companies to look at outsourcing and off-shoring, but even more simplistically the merger of my bank and your bank. Then we have groups of developers in two different cities, or we bought a packaged application, and the best skill to help us integrate it is actually from a third-party partner which is in a completely different city or country. Those tools have shown their weaknesses, even in just getting your hands on them.

How do I punch a hole through the firewall to give you a way to check in your code problems? The cloud allows us to create a dedicated new data center that sits on the Internet and is accessible to all, wherever they are, and in whatever time zone they are working, and whatever relationship they have to my company.

That frees things up to be collaborative across company boundaries. But with that freedom comes a great challenge in unifying a process across all of those different people, and getting a collaborative engine to work across all those people.

It’s almost a requirement to keep the wheels on the bus and to have some degree of ability to manage the process in the compliance with regulations and the information about how decisions were made in such distributed ways that they are traceable and reviewable. It’s really not possible to achieve such a distributed development environment without that governance guidance.

Papows: We're dealing with some challenges for the first time that require out-of-the-box thinking. I talk about this in "Glitch." We have reached a point where there a trillion connected devices on the Internet as the February of this year. There are a billion embedded transistors for every human being on the planet.

We have reached a point where there a trillion connected devices on the Internet as the February of this year. There are a billion embedded transistors for every human being on the planet.



You’ve read about or heard about or experienced first hand the disasters that can happen in production environments, where you have some market-facing application, where service is lost, where there is even brand damage or economic consequences.

... Everybody intellectually buys into governance, but nobody individually wants to be governed. Unless you automate it, unless you provide the right stack of tools and codify the best practices and libraries that can be reusable, it simply won’t happen. People are people, and without the automation to make it natural, unnatural things get applied some percentage of the time, and governance can’t work that way.

McDonald: Developers view themselves quite often as artists. They may not articulate it that way, but they often see themselves as artists and their palette is code.

As such, they immediately rankle at any notion that, as artists, they should be governed. Yet, as we’ve already established, that guidance for them around the processes, methods, regulations, and so on is absolutely critical for success, really in any size organization, but beyond the pale in a distributed development environment. So, how do you deal with that issue?

Well, you embed it into their entire environment from the very first stage. In most companies, this is trying to decide what projects we should undertake, which in lot of companies is a mainly over-glorified email argument.

Governance must be process-friendly

Governance has to be embedded at every step of that way, gently nudging, and sometimes shuttling all these players back into the right line, when it comes to ensuring that the result of their effort is compliant with whatever it is that I needed to be compliant to.

In short, you’ve got to make it be a part of and embedded into every stage of the development process, so that it largely disappears, and becomes something that becomes such a natural extension of the tool so that you don’t have anyone along the way realizing that they are being governed

WebLayers was the very first partner that we reached out to say, "Can you go down this journey with us together, as we begin developing these workbenches, these integrated toolsets, and delivering them through the cloud on-demand?" We already know and see that embedding governance in every layer is something we have to be able to do out of the gate.

The team at WebLayers was phenomenal in responding to that request and we were able to take several based instances of various Rational tools, embed into them WebLayers technology, and based on how the cloud works, archive those, put them up in our library to be able to be pulled down off-the-shelf, cloned, and made an instance of for the various customers that we have coming to our pipeline who want to experience this technology in what we are doing.

Better safe than sorry

... The avoidance of things going badly is unfortunately very difficult to measure. That is something that everyone who attempts to do a cloud-delivered development environment and does the right thing by embedding in it the right governance guidance should know coming out of the gate. The best thing that’s going to happen is you are not going to have a catastrophe.

That said, one of the neat things about having a common workbench, and having the kinds of reporting in metrics that it can measure, meaning the IBM Jazz, along with the WebLayers technology, is that I can get a very detailed view of what’s going on in my software factory at every turn of the crank and where things are coming off the rails a little bit.

Papows: There's an age-old expression that you're so close to the forest you can't see the trees. Well, I think in the IT business we’re sometime so deeply embedded in the bark we can't see anything.

We've been developing, expanding, deploying, and reinventing on a massive scale so rapidly for the last 30 years that we've reached a breaking point where, as I said earlier, between the complexity curves, between the lack of elasticity and human capital, between the explosion and the amount of mobile computing devices and their propensity for accessing all of this back-end infrastructure and applications, where something fundamentally has to change. It's a problem on a scale that can't be overwhelmed by simply throwing more bodies at it.

Creative solutions

Secondly, in the current economy, very few CIOs have elastic budgets. We have to do as an industry what we've done from the very beginning, which is to automate, innovate, and find creative solutions to combat the convergence of all of those digital elements to what would otherwise be a perfect storm.

There there is simply no barrier for anyone to give this a try.



So SaaS, cloud computing, automated governance, forms of artificial intelligence, Rational tooling, consistent workbench methodologies, all of these things are the instruments of getting ourselves out of the corner that we have otherwise painted ourselves in.

I don't want to seem like an alarmist or try to paint too big a storm cloud on the horizon, but this is simply not something that's going to happen or be resolved in a business-as-usual usual fashion.

That, in fact, is where companies like CloudOne are able to expand and leap productivity equations for companies in certain segments of the market. That's where automation, whether it's Rational, WebLayers, or another piece of technology, has got to be part of the recipe of getting off this limb before we saw it off behind us.

McDonald: If you have any inclination at all to see what it is that Jeff and I are telling you, give it a whirl, because it's very simple.

That's one of the coolest things of all about this whole model, in my mind. There there is simply no barrier for anyone to give this a try. In the old model, if you wanted to give the technology a try, you had better start with your calculator. And you had better get the names and addresses of your board of directors, because you're going there eventually to get the capital approval and so on to even get a pilot project started in many cases with some of these very sophisticated tools.

This is just not the case anymore. With the CloudOne environment you can sign on this afternoon with a web-based form to get a instance of let's say, Team Concert set up for you with WebLayers technology embedded in it, in about 20 minutes from when you push "submit," and it's absolutely free for the first model. From there, you grow only as you need them, user-by-user. It's really quite simple to give this concept a try and it's really very easy.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a transcript or download a copy. Get a copy of Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software. Learn more about governance risks. Sponsor: WebLayers.

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Friday, September 24, 2010

Demise of enterprise IT departments: A pending crisis point

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink.

By Ronald Schmelzer

In ZapThink’s deep conversations with CIOs and other IT decision makers, we find that there’s broad agreement on the multitude of forces conspiring to change every aspect of the way the enterprise does IT.

Yet at the same time, everybody’s in denial that these changes will happen to them. For us as outsiders, it certainly looks like many enterprise IT decision-makers acknowledge that the world is changing -- but deny that they are part of that same world.

Of course, such executives simply have their head in the sand. If change is to occur, it will happen to the vast majority of enterprises, not just the minority.

This realization drives the Crisis Points of the ZapThink 2020 vision. However, ZapThink is not advocating that organizations should adopt any of the crisis points. Rather we are observing that these crises are coming, whether or not companies are ready for them.

In particular, we believe that companies will reach a crisis point as they seek to outsource IT. However, we aren’t advocating that companies outsource all their IT efforts. Rather, we are observing that siren call of offloading IT assets in the form of cloud computing and outsourcing is a significant trend that is leading to a crisis point.

And without a strong rudder, many companies will indeed be dashed on the rocks. This ZapFlash blog post provides greater detail on this particular crisis point: The pending demise of the enterprise IT department, or what we’ve called in previous ZapFlashes the Collapse of Enterprise IT.

Outsourcing and cloud computing:
Different parts of same story


Part of the reason for the visceral response to our Crisis Points ZapFlash is that there’s inherent fear when talking about outsourcing IT functions. Part of the fear comes from the fact that many people confuse outsourcing with offshoring.

Outsourcing is the purchasing of a service from an outside vendor to replace the performance of the task within the organization’s internal operations. Offshoring, on the other hand, is the movement of labor from a region of high cost (such as the United States) to one of comparatively lower cost (such as India).

People fear the latter because it means subcontracting existing work to other people, thus displacing jobs at home. However, the former has been going on for hundreds of years. Indeed, many companies exist solely because they are completing tasks that their customers would rather not undertake themselves.

Almost six years ago, we talked about how service oriented architecture (SOA) and outsourcing go hand in hand, for the simple reason that SOA requires organizations to think about their resources, processes, and capabilities in ways that are loosely coupled from the specifics of their implementation, location, and consumption. Indeed, the more companies implement SOA, the more they can outsource processes that are not strategic or competitive for the organization.

But it’s a mistake to assume the collapse of the enterprise IT department is due entirely to outsourcing the functions of IT to third parties.



Furthermore, the more companies outsource their functions, the more they are motivated to implement SOA to facilitate the consumption of the outsourced capabilities. So, therefore it should be no surprise that the combination of SOA and a challenging economic environment has motivated many companies to see outsourcing as a legitimate strategy for their IT organizations, regardless of whether they move to offshoring.

But it’s a mistake to assume the collapse of the enterprise IT department is due entirely to outsourcing the functions of IT to third parties. Outsourcing is a part of the story, but so is cloud computing. In much the same way that third-party firms can offload parts of IT in the outsourcing model, cloud computing offers the ability to offload other aspects of the IT department. Cloud computing provides both technological and economic benefits for distributing and offloading resources, functions, processes, and even data onto location-independent infrastructures.

While many enterprises are currently pursuing a private model for cloud computing, there are far too many economic benefits of the public model to ignore. Most likely, we will see hybrid cloud approaches, where organizations keep certain mission-critical features behind the firewall on the corporate premises while they shift the rest are to lower cost, more agile, and less costly third-party locations. The net result of this shift is continued erosion of the scope of responsibility for internal IT organizations.

The holistic perspective of the five supertrends

The demise of enterprise IT crisis point emerges from the fact that companies will rush into this vision of outsourced IT without thinking through first the dramatic impact that this transition will have throughout their organization.

For such organizations, the value of our ZapThink 2020 vision is that it pulls together multiple trends and delineates the interrelationships among them. One of the most closely related trends to the demise of the IT organization is the increased formality and dependence on governance, as organizations pull together the business side of governance (GRC, or governance, risk, and compliance), with the technology side of governance (IT governance, and to an increasing extent, SOA governance). Over time, CIOs become CGOs (Chief Governance Officers), as their focus shifts away from technology.

As the enterprise owns fewer and fewer of the organization’s IT assets, the role and responsibility of enterprise IT practitioners will be less about the mechanics of getting systems to work, integrating them with each other, and operating them, and more about the management of the one resource that remains constant: information. After all, IT is information technology, not computer or systems technology.

If you can successfully tackle these questions with a coherent, holistic strategy, then you have defused the risk inherent to movement to outsourcing and/or cloud computing.



With this perspective, it’s essential to view the shift to outsourcing and cloud computing holistically with all the other changes happening in the enterprise IT environment.

For example, the move to democratization of technology means that non-IT practitioners will be utilizing and creating IT capabilities and assets without the control of the IT organization. How will IT practitioners manage the sole enterprise IT asset (information) given that they cannot manage the systems in which that asset flows? As organizations realize the global cubicle vision of IT, how will enterprise IT practitioners and architects enable distributed information without losing GRC visibility?

As systems become increasingly interconnected with deep interoperability despite their increasing distributed nature, how can enterprise IT practitioners make sure the systems as a whole continue to provide value and avoid chaotic disruptions despite the fact that the organization doesn’t own or operate them? As organizations move to more iterative, agile forms of complex systems engineering where new capabilities emerge from compositions of existing ones, how will movements to cloud computing and outsourcing help or hurt those efforts?

If you can successfully tackle these questions with a coherent, holistic strategy, then you have defused the risk inherent to movement to outsourcing and/or cloud computing. On the other hand, if you rush into cloud computing and outsourcing strategies without thinking through all the issues we’ve discussed in this ZapFlash, you’ll be sunk before you know it.

The ZapThink take

Just like the Sirens calling to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, the call of outsourcing and cloud computing will lead many enterprise IT ships to wreck on the rocks unless they can lash themselves to the masts of a holistic perspective of where the industry as a whole is heading. More importantly, the broad shifts in the industry that ZapThink’s 2020 vision of enterprise IT illuminates compels companies to think more broadly about their constant enterprise IT asset: information.

If it no longer matters where your IT is physically located and whether or not you actually own or operate the IT systems you depend on, then what IT department do you really need and what are they really doing? The answer: less hands-on technology and more governance, a sea change that represents the demise of the enterprise IT organization. Whether or not this transition develops into a full-blown crisis is entirely up to you.

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink.


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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Sonoa becomes Apigee, offers new and rebranded API management and analysis product lines

Sonoa Systems, a provider of application programming interface (API) solutions, has changed its name this week to Apigee.

While Sonoa originally offered a free API tools and management platform, Apigee now offers three product lines for enterprises, developers, and API providers of all sizes. The company now serves more than 7,000 developers and some 140 enterprises with API management services. [Disclosure: Sonoa Systems is a past sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“By unifying the company under one brand and launching our premium line, we can better serve the full spectrum of companies and developers using APIs to power their apps, mobile and multichannel strategies and business partnerships,” said Chet Kapoor, CEO, Apigee.

The traffic on the traffic has been brisk. Currently, 2,500 GB of data per month and 25k messages are processed per second on Apigee Tech, says the firm.

As I heard more about the role of APIs and how managing and defining that traffic and use patterns -- both incoming and outgoing -- I was reminded too of the Big Data analysis value so many companies are building out.

What if you were to be able to analysis real-time data with real-time API activities? This may not be for everyone, but many mobile, e-commerce and service providers -- and a boat load of web-focused start-ups -- could develop some super insights.

Joining the analysis from APIs, systems logs, and data could be a killer business intelligence benefit. It might also spur new revenue by selling that analysis if you happen to find yourself at the juncture of APIs and data and either business or consumer behavior. Viva la real time analytics at scale!

Among the new and rebranded Apigee products:
  • Apigee Premium: Announced on Wednesday, Apigee Premium provides advanced features on top of the Apigee Free platform, including unlimited API traffic, advanced rate limiting and analytics, and developer key provisioning. Visit https://app.apigee.com/sign_up to sign up for the preview.

  • Apigee Free: A free tools platform launched last year for developers and providers to learn, test, and debug APIs, get analytics on API performance and usage, and apply basic rate-limits to protect their services.

  • Apigee Enterprise: An industrial-grade API platform for enterprises using APIs to fuel their mobile, multichannel, application and cloud strategies. Previously Sonoa Systems’ core product ServiceNet, Apigee Enterprise provides API visibility, control, management and security.
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