IBM Eye

There’s a nice discussion over at slashdot spurred by the defection of Don Ferguson, the man behind WebSphere, to Microsoft. The discussion can be summed up by the following:

1. what kind of person leaves IBM to go to the evil empire?
2. IBM management is out of touch and IBM is a sinking ship (I know that you only hear the squeaky wheel, but the level of ire still concerns me - though I stand by the prediction that 2007 will be a great year for IBM)
3. Websphere is terrible and clunky
4. The last few versions of Websphere have been nice (though it’s a framework.. not really an app)

I thought these comments were noteworthy:

Aa pro-WebSphere Poster

Let me tell you two things:

1) Big companies needs big support. Who will guarantee their servers will be up’n'running 24×7? Who will pay the fines if a failure stops the big company from operating for, say, 3 hours? That’s the IBM’s market. IBM is big enough (and have people enough) to support this kind of
company.

2) In my experience as a Java developer, I can say WebSphere is one of the fastest application servers in the market. Even faster when running in real servers (not that cheap toys [serverpronto.com]). JBoss (opensource) is really good, but isn’t enough for some companies. The difference between JBoss and WebSphere is that JBoss is made for developers (it’s easy to install/configure) and WebSphere is made for performance. It’s not a trivial task to install/configure, but once configured, it is fast as hell

Do you need middleware

Well.. ..I am not going to shill for IBM, because really, I’ve worked with the hairy mess that is WebSphere, and it’s like everything from IBM - a lifestyle choice. You don’t just recommend it like you would Zope or FoR.

But in the end you buy software in this class for a few key reasons:

1. Ability to interface directly with many platforms. (see #2)

2. The ability to write software that runs on many platforms. And I don’t mean Linux or Windows when I say platforms, I mean like mainframe, mini, datacenter, server, etc.

3. The ability to write really big systems.

When I mean really big, I am saying, you know like supporting an e-commerce website with 80,000 http request per second. They are rare, but they are out there. Although the core of the product is IBM HTTP Server, which is a fork of Apache, the key is in the tuning.

Here is the test I recommend when people ask me about it: can you run a query against your live database to determine orders/transactions placed today?

If you can, than don’t worry about Websphere or middleware at all. You are fine. Your site or app is still “small” (not a pejorative).
If you can’t, than it means you probably have a big system. And maybe you need middleware.

Jeremiah Owyang via his blog web-strategist has a nice post about Podcasting at IBM. The corporate podcasting push is really an arm of the IBM blogging program. What I found most interesting about the post is where Owyang talks about the benefits of blogging for the corporation:

Corporate Benefits:

• Though leadership: Folks will publish information that they are domain experts at.
• Knowledge Sharing: Employees are sharing tips, tricks, and other helpful information using a variety of mediums.
• SEO Domination: Search Engine Marketing power for topics they discuss.
• Brand Lift: Even non-technology podcasts and blogs help to show the ‘human’ side of a mass company
• It’s fun, encourages collaboration, and inexpensive.

Another benefit for the corporation is that IBM is able to take advantage of employee talent without incurring additional cost. IBM is able to endorse and benefit from something that would happen whether or not they chose to get involved. One thing I had never thought about was SEO benefits. Having the corporate backing and links from IBM proper jumpstarts a new blog to semi-prominence far more quickly than the blog could on its own. This got me thinking. If IBM or any corporate supporter derives such benefits, what are the benefits to the individual corporate blogger?
(more…)

ServerWatch reports on the launch of The Green Grid, a nonprofit organization co-funded by AMD, HP, Sun Microsystems, and IBM:

The Green Grid (TGG), endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the non-profit Alliance to Save Energy, is designed to help IT departments wrestle with the problem of heat, cooling energy consumption, and costs by serving as an interactive resource of best practices… One goal of the TGG might be to help spur the creation of a energy savings certification for data centers along the lines of the EPA’s Energy Star program.

Full article: The Green Grid to Deliver Energy-Saving Tips

CNet reports that, in contrast to Oracle’s apparent desire to add a Linux distribution to its portfolio, IBM prefers to have at least two independent Linux distributors serving corporate customers. From the article:

“Our view is that one of the great things about Linux is that you don’t have to own it to have the freedom of movement and have whatever stacks you need,” said Scott Handy, vice president of Linux and open source at IBM.

Handy was responding to comments made by Oracle CEO Ellison to the Financial Times, where he said that he wanted Oracle to control a “full stack” of software, including the Linux operating system.

If Oracle did try to buy a Linux distributor, such as Red Hat or Novell, Handy said “we’d stick to our strategy of having two or more independent distributors and have to wait and see what happens.”

Full article: IBM to Oracle: You can’t buy open source

IBM has announced another Eclipse based open source project - this one a development toolkit for building voice based applications. The Voice Tools Project will allow web developers to use popular browser tools to build, test and run new voice applications.

According to the IBM press release, “the new speech application programming interface (API) software has been recently developed as part of the Eclipse Foundation’s Voice Tools Project to speed the adoption of VoiceXML applications for phones, handheld devices, cars and the Web.

Read the full press release: IBM Continues to Enhance Tools Available to Open Source Community to Spur Innovation of Voice Applications

IBM, Novell and Parity Communications are contributing code to a new open source project called “Higgins”, which aims to provide “user-centric” identity management. The concept is to provide people with greater control over their personal online identity information - enabling individuals to actively manage and control their details, such as bank account, telephone and credit card numbers, or medical and employment records - rather than institutions managing that information as they do today.

The Higgins project is being managed through the Eclipse foundation, with IBM and other vendors contributing software to kickstart the project. IBM plans to incorporate Higgins technology within its Tivoli identity management software.

Read the full press release: Open Source Initiative to Give People More Control Over Their Personal Online Information

IBM in the community: Volunteers get IBM help on demand

To some corporations, reaching out to the community may involve an annual blood drive or a crusade for 100 percent involvement in charity donations. But IBM, long a champion for on demand for its clients, has focused that philosophy on improving its community service.

On Demand Community, a dedicated portion of the company’s intranet, aggregates both information and resources for volunteers. Since it launched in November 2003, more than 64,000 IBM employees and retirees have registered and logged 2.7 million hours of volunteer time.

Announcement from IBM introducing initiatives for improved patent quality.

IBM Leads in U.S. Patents for Thirteenth Consecutive Year

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today released its annual list of the top patentees. With 2,941, IBM earned more U.S. patents than any other company for the thirteenth consecutive year.

IBM also announced an initiative it is undertaking with the USPTO, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), members of the open source software community and academia that is focused on improving U.S. patent quality. The unprecedented partnership between these parties to improve patent quality will help accelerate innovation in the United States.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger (as usual), has some excellent insight into this effort: Improving Patent Quality as a Community

Patents are intended to encourage the disclosure of inventions to the public by granting the inventor exclusive rights to benefit from his or her invention for a limited period. This helps promote innovation, because an idea or invention can have many potential benefits beyond those originally imagined by its creator. In an increasingly collaborative, interconnected global economy, there is a compelling and growing societal interest in bringing new intellectual property to the marketplace as soon as possible and maximizing the overall amount and quality of innovation.

However, if the quality of the invention covered in patents is low — that is to say, neither significant nor new — then such patents actually undermine the common good, thwart the very innovation they were intended to foster and, collectively may seriously erode trust in our IP laws and institutions. That is why significantly improving the quality of patents is such a high priority for us all, and why improving patent quality is the focus of the initiatives we are announcing this week.

Bob Sutor also comments on the news, and provides links to some articles and blog entries about the press release, some of which also offer interesting analysis of the announcment: New patent initiative to increase quality, certainty.

Now that OS/2 has officially been withdrawn from sale, and support for the product has also ended - there have been calls to make OS/2 open source for the community to continue development of it for themselves.

osViews.com: The future of OS/2 - Open source or not?:

Back in April of this year, OS/2 website OS2 World started a petition. It’s aim was to get IBM to release OS/2 as an open source piece of software, so that existing users could continue to use and develop it, should they wish. In November, after nearly twelve thousand signatures had been collected, the petition was sent to IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano.

Now, while I have a soft spot for OS/2 and would love to see it live on, I’m not sure if it could be open sourced, even if IBM wanted it so.

Think of the history of OS/2 - it was the child of an unhappy marriage between IBM and Microsoft. After the split, Microsoft took their bat and ball and created Windows, IBM continued to develop OS/2. I don’t know for sure, but I’d take a guess that there is still a lot of proprietary code (possibly even stuff originally developed by Microsoft) in OS/2 - which would make it problematic at best to attempt to open it to the wider community.

I’m happy to be proven wrong here - but I’m not holding my breath!

Look at the trouble IBM is having over Linux because of SCO - they certainly want to be careful not to open themselves to more litigation uneccessarily.

With all the noise about Microsoft’s Office Open XML document formats and the standardisation process through ECMA, there has been a lot of debate about the whole standardisation process. Some people are suggesting that ECMA aren’t really adding any value to the standards process with an effective rubber-stamping of Microsoft’s proposals.

IBM recently voted against the creation of an ECMA technical committee to standardise the formats.

CNet News.com: IBM says “Nay” to Microsoft ECMA committee

IBM voted against the proposal because of its concerns over proprietary extensions to the Office XML formats and questions over intellectual property rights, according to the IBM spokesman. IBM has not yet decided whether it will participate in the technical committee.

Novell, which, like IBM, is backing the rival OpenDocument productivity application standard, had previously indicated that it would participate in the ECMA technical committee.