Technology solutions group Candle has announced a series of
packaged services and tools to help customers design and build an
application infrastructure using IBM's WebSphere middleware,
including its WebSphere Application Server and MQ products.
Candle has offered tools and services for IBM middleware customers
for some time but recently acknowledged that its offerings had
become fragmented.
Responding to the slow economy, which has led customers to attempt
more focused projects with faster returns, the company came up with
the series of modular, fixed-price offerings announced today.
"We recognised we had a very fragmented approach and at the
beginning of the year we realised we needed to draw those assets
together and package them," said David Caddis, vice-president of
Candle's application infrastructure management group.
The result of the company's rethink is PathWAI, which comprises
seven packages of services and tools that range in starting price
from $17,000 (£10,827) to about $100,000. They include modules for
designing a WebSphere infrastructure, validating the design through
pilot projects, pre-production testing and tuning, and ongoing
management and monitoring.
PathWAI aims to help companies spend as little as possible on
rolling out their initial applications, but also allows for later
additions to the system.
Departments typically do not want to foot the bill for an
infrastructure that will be used eventually to support all of a
company's applications, so helping customers build in a modular
fashion was a priority, Caddis said.
One analyst predicted PathWAI would be especially popular among
IBM's customers.
"I think it's a nice offering because Candle does have a depth of
expertise in WebSphere," said Audrey Rasmussen, vice-president and
analyst with research group Enterprise Management Associates.
"When you create a custom solution for a customer you have to work
out a lot of the bugs, but when you offer solutions like this to a
lot of customers, then the bugs become fewer and in the long run
you get more reliable code."
IBM is the largest customer for Candle's WebSphere tools. Caddis
said he was not afraid of competition from IBM Global Services
because that group tends to deal with much larger projects.
"A $100,000 services engagement is probably not something that's
very effective for IBM to go after, their typical engagement is
much larger," he said.
"We're not a systems integrator," he added. "The value we try to
deliver is the domain expertise that can give customers a degree of
self-sufficiency. We aren't there to do $5m service engagements,
we're there to get them past the pain points."
Candle claims to have completed some 2,000 WebSphere
implementations over the years. About 80% of those were built
around WebSphere MQ, 15% around WebSphere MQ Integrator and 5%
around WebSphere Application Server, according to Caddis.
The seven PathWAI modules announced are: Architecture for
WebSphere, Development for WebSphere, Deployment for WebSphere,
Monitor for WebSphere Application Server, Dashboard for WebSphere
Infrastructure, Monitor for WebSphere MQ and Dashboard for
WebSphere MQ.