With its acquisition of long-time business partner,
Candle, IBM believes it is taking an important step in moving its
collection of On Demand strategies forward.
Company officials believe Candle's assortment of systems
management and monitoring capabilities for mainframes and
distributed platforms, including Windows and Linux, can strengthen
its competitive stance against archrival Computer Associates
International.
Architect of the deal Steve Mills, senior vice-president and
group executive for IBM's Software Group, talked about the deal and
the impact on a number of IBM's technical strategies that are
connected to its On Demand initiative.
What does the Candle acquisition give you that you could
not build yourself?
"There is always the, 'we could build it ourselves'. We have
lots of programmers and lots of capability, but life is short. When
you look at make versus buy, you look at the capabilities a company
has created, its customer set, its skills set, and so if the price
is right, an acquisition can be a very leveragable thing to do.
"This is number 33 for me over the past decade so we have done
this over and over again in our software business and we found we
can get incredible leverage out of them. Candle is an 800-person
company so it does not have the market reach we do. Besides
mainframe technologies it now has an extensive collection of
distributed monitoring technologies for Websphere, web servers, and
MQSeries. So we can get a lot of leverage out of that."
What is the most immediate benefit to your On Demand set
of strategies?
"One of the biggest customer pain points is systems management
and systems monitoring. When you start to get higher availability,
you need to monitor what is taking place, and you want to take
corrective action. These things are becoming more real time, more
on the fly correction all the time. So you need a lot of monitoring
tools and mechanisms that essentially bring back all that
information so you can then take action on it.
"Candle adds a lot of that capability, but we will continue to
develop and invent more instrumentation that gives us more
information about what is happening inside of these products. The
idea here is, if you have enough information, then you can take
corrective information on the fly. If I know more accurately what
is wrong with an engine, then maybe I can take corrective action to
make that engine run right again."
Does this acquisition help you further with your renewed
focus on business intelligence?
"Not directly. This is more in the systems management
administration and tuning space. Databases have to be tuned too, so
the tuning part of putting up a datawarehouse is an important
aspect of that. We will clearly get benefit in our database
initiatives, but this is not a front-and-centre thing for databases
from a technology standpoint."
And your content management strategies benefit here by
association with databases?
"If you draw an imaginary line, at the bottom you have all the
infrastructure, instrumentation and management, on top of that you
have all the run-time services that have to be instrumented and
managed. This [deal] gives us more stuff at the bottom.
"I would not want to state that this is explicitly targeted at
content management or BI, but more anything that runs databases,
transaction monitors, apps servers, and operating systems. All that
stuff that is the run-time layer, you have to instrument it,
monitor it, analyse the data, and then those patterns become the
basis on which you script on-the-fly remediation. The environment
then becomes more self-correcting and then the vision of On Demand
becomes more fulfilled. The world is built a brick at a time."
Does this signal a greater emphasis on your mainframe
software strategy?
"We have been investing pretty heavily in mainframe tools and
this clearly adds to that. One of the big appeals for us here was
to add additional mainframe systems management function. But it is
important to recognise that there is a lot more to Candle than just
the mainframes pieces."
What is Candle's level of expertise with
Linux?
"I would characterise Candle's level of expertise with Linux as
more subsystems than Unix operating systems-based. If you looked
at its expertise you would say it is very deep in MVS skills and
deep in mainframe subsystems. In the workstation area, it is very
deep in the subsystem arena, but not necessarily as deep in the
operating systems arena.
"Now it has to have skills to build these products, so it is
merely a statement of what sorts of things does it monitor. It is
not about monitoring the Unix OS, it is about monitoring everything
running on the Unix operating system. Now are these things
extendable beyond where they are? Absolutely. I buy companies where
I can see the extensibility of the technology they have. We think
we can take this portfolio a lot further.
What is one example of where you can take this portfolio
one step further?
"We could do a better job with Candle around workflow monitoring
and business activity monitoring. We can put more automation into
the correction capabilities. It has been mostly focused on how to
monitor and surface information as opposed to how do you script out
corrective action on the fly to do system fixes. So more tie-ins
with the things we are doing at the services level area and in the
provisioning area."
Does the acquisition affect the strategy you have in
place with Rational Systems?
"No, because this is very much in the systems management space.
There will be times when some of these tools will get used by
developers. As they build an application, they might want to use
some of these tools for monitoring and testing up front.
"So there are some things that overlap into the systems
management space but they are complimentary because these are
things Rational has not invested in. For instance, we are getting
synergy today between Tivoli and Rational. This [Candle deal] is
helping fill in monitoring holes that existed in the Rational
portfolio."
So Tivioli will manage the integration of Candle's
products into IBM's overall strategy?
"Right. This will be under Robert LeBlanc. LeBlanc's mission is
systems management, and that is the part of the portfolio he
manages and drives and that is where this technology fits in
best."
How long before all things are smoothly melded with
IBM's stuff? Six months, 12 months, longer?
"We tend to move on things like this very fast. Once we get
government approval and close it, we will immediately align the
resources and will integrate right away."
Are you anticipating layoffs at Candle?
"As far as I am concerned we are in midst of adding developers,
sales people, and marketing people. Those are all critical skills
to us and so we intend to make full use of the resources that are
there. As always you have to go through the general administrative
staffs and look at what is required and see who is needed in those
areas. But it has great development skills and strong customer
relationships. So we plan to keep all that.
What is the overlap of Candle's 3,000 customer base with
IBM's?
"Its whole business is around monitoring things that IBM makes,
so it is 100% aligned with us in terms of customer set. What is
incremental here is, it does not touch all the IBM customers so
with a market reach across 160 countries and with IBM's
relationships on a global basis, we believe we can take the Candle
portfolio and sell a lot more of it among a lot more customers
around the world."
Fred
O'Connor writes for Infoworld (US online)