IBM is the 500lb gorilla in the middleware room. The firm's
sheer size, along with its experience in applications, operational
systems and legacy application integration, makes it a formidable
force in this space.
Big Blue has considerable experience, developing a range of
legacy products that originated in the mainframe era, so it already
has a rich heritage in managing application integration in
high-volume, mission-critical environments. Its
CICS transaction
manager has been shipping since the late 1960s.
These days, everything to do with middleware at IBM revolves
around its
WebSphere
brand. Introduced in 1998 as little more than an application
server, it has expanded rapidly over the past 10 years to encompass
more or less all parts of the middleware stack, from application
server through to business process modelling. Some legacy products
have been absorbed into WebSphere (MQ Series became Websphere
MQ).
"The detail has changed, in terms of the support for newer
versions of JEE and new support for OSGi technology. There are also
now some higher-end versions of the application server that can be
deployed over stupidly big dynamic servers. That is the detail, but
at the high level, the story is still about WebSphere, Java and
JEE," says Neil Ward-Dutton, research director at analyst MWD
Advisors.
Recently, however, we have seen a new openness in IBM when it
comes to support for other language frameworks, particularly in the
area of scripting for web applications. The company launched a
community-driven web development project, based around its Project
Zero development environment, enabling other languages to be run
atop a Java virtual machine (JVM). PHP applications are compiled to
Java bytecode and then executed. This makes it possible to run PHP
applications such as SugarCRM on the WebSphere platform. The system
is not perfect - there were complaints about not being able to use
key PHP implementations early on - but it is a step in the right
direction.
While maintaining its strong relationship with developers, the
company has dramatically increased its focus on technology that it
can sell to CIOs. "Middleware becomes commoditised at the IT
department level, but what does that have to do with driving
business outcome?" asks IBM's SOA evangelist Gary Gomersall.
The company has therefore striven to expand beyond the
infrastructural elements that used to form the core of the
middleware market.
Business process management is the point at which modern CIOs
get interested in middleware, and so the firm has developed
products such as WebSphere Process Server to support this
market.
It has acquired a string of companies to help bolster its
presence here. The most recent one was French company
Ilog, which featured a business rules engine to help formalise
complex rules around business processes. "We want as much as we can
to externalise all of these runtime behaviours out of the IT code,
out of the business process code, and into sets of policies," says
Gomersall.
The company has also been focusing on the
service oriented architecture (SOA) development paradigm since
the concept of web services was introduced. Not only has it
partnered with Microsoft on the WS-* series of web services formats
for application integration, but it has evolved its product set
from the hub and spoke enterprise application integration model
that was popular in the late 1990s.
IBM has made efforts to engage the CIO community by structuring
the SOA product and service offerings into Smart SOA, a set of
guiding principles for SOA design and deployment. This is a savvy
move, bolstering the firm's marketing by helping to explain the
hows and whys of this complex topic to confused customers.
Now, WebSphere underpins the IBM reference architecture, which
breaks down into six core service categories, revolving around an
enterprise service bus: interaction, process, information, partner
services, business application services, and access services.
IBM is also better positioned financially to sell these products
than some others. With almost eight times the revenue of Sun, the
company has a bigger marketing budget to push home what is an
undeniably complex software message. It has also mirrored Sun's
approach on intellectual property to a certain extent by taking the
open source route, shipping a community edition of the Websphere
Application Server in 2005.
IBM has proven its ability to execute in the middleware market
over the past 10 years, and has built Websphere into a solid and
comprehensive stack.
Timeline
1998: IBM launches WebSphere
2002: Buys process automation and integration firm
Crossworlds.
Buys business process modelling and monitoring firm
Holosofx.
2004: Buys Trigo, an information integration company.
Buys problem determination and performance monitoring firm
Cyanea.
2005: Buys Gluecode, which offers an open source application
server.
Buys DataPower, which sells appliances for XML, security and
integration.
2006: Buys composite business service delivery firm Webify.
2008: Buys complex event processing company Apsoft.
Buys Ilog.
Customer references
Canadian aerospace and transportation manufacturing company
Bombardier already used IBM middleware in its operations, but found
that its web presence was fragmented across different parts of the
company. It chose IBM's WebSphere Portal and associated products to
tie its web-based offerings together for customers, including
exposing Lotus Notes documents on the web.
The New York Power Authority used IBM WebSphere Message Broker.
Process Server and Adaptor for SAP Software to tie together four
disparate back-end billing systems. The firm used Big Blue's Smart
SOA approach to integrate the systems with its back-end SAP
system.
Neil Ward-Dutton on IBM's strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths:
Strong technology for difficult problems in the largest
companies.
Has brought in a number of very strong technologies in recent
acquisition spree.
Weaknesses:
Still has a huge portfolio of products and has to continue to
work to improve product integration, manageability and ease of
use.