Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 20 April 2009
Proposed Oracle Acquisition of Sun: IBM Stole the Thunder
The purchase of Sun by Oracle for $7.4 billion has far less industry buzz and excitement than the rumored acquisition of Sun by IBM.
IBM stole the thunder and the impending acquisition of Sun became an imminent and expected event. While hardware overlap existed in the IBM deal, IBM would have provided a much needed home for Sun’s software assets. Software giant Oracle lacks a hardware portfolio, so the key Oracle / Sun overlaps are far fewer except for the $1 billion acquisition of MySQL by Sun in 2008. Given Oracle’s tendency to be proprietary in its markets, ownership of MySQL by Oracle would be perceived as a great risk in the open source community. (Register or Login to Read More)
The publication of the Open Cloud Manifesto is positive. The Cloud, driven by virtualization, is surfacing at the right time in the market and can advance computing in this generation.
The concept of “openness” is necessary for innovation to thrive. Publishing an open view with multiple and varied participants is an example of global lifecycle transformation where organizations work together across boundaries.
IBM, one of the key supporters of the Open Cloud Manifesto, has a long history of advancing collaboration around new technologies. In the 90’s, IBM attempted collaboration by creating consortium style companies such as Taligent and Kaleida. In the early part of this century, IBM was the leader of what has transformed in to Eclipse.org. This appears to be IBM’s attempt to get agreement on the Cloud at various levels.
It is clear that each organization in support of the Open Cloud Manifesto has an agenda based upon the Cloud. Agreement and discussion among a critical mass is a positive step to advancing Cloud technology.
The purchase of Sun Microsystems by IBM would be a win for IBM.
Sun has been in a holding pattern since the dot com implosion. And, while Sun positioned themselves as “the dot in the dot com”, that was the last innovation we have seen come from Sun.
Sun, while it once had very competitive hardware, had no idea how to productize and implement effective software products. Sun works on the assumption that all software must lead to Sun server sales – definitely a flawed idea that was proven wrong numerous times. Sun also was never able to quite grasp the idea of high volume and low margin sales. Sun continued on in its technology efforts like it was 1988.
IBM has clearly demonstrated that it is more than capable of:
Being a hardware company
Running an effective and profitable professional services business
Managing a growing and diverse software portfolio
Delighting and maintaining its customer base
IBM has also managed many acquisitions and always seems to find something in an acquisition worthy of continuing on with the IBM brand.
The potential of a Sun acquisition by IBM makes sense. IBM is a world class business organization and will be able to make business sense out of Sun’s academic assets.
VMLogix and Citrix are partnering to deliver a complete virtualization solution for the application lifecycle. Citrix Essentials customers will have the advantage of using virtualization technology at every juncture of its IT organization; from the server to production and the entire application lifecycle including development and testing. This partnership represents a new and visionary method of applying virtualization technology throughout multiple stages of the IT organization in a hypervisor neutral environment.
Each year we enter into uncertain territory because of existing and previously untested market conditions, however predicting the future, or at least having an understanding of what could happen, is largely predicated on understanding the past and observing the present.
As the saying goes, history repeats itself. In 2009, expect to see some stunning developments that are reminiscent of the past as well as out of the box thinking by vendors to continue to thrive in new and different market conditions...
We started the year with the New England Patriots posting an undefeated regular season record of 16 – 0. It appeared to be conclusive; the Patriots would win the Super Bowl – not so fast – the wild card New York Giants made an unpredictable and disruptive move by narrowly defeating the favored Patriots. It was inevitable that the Patriots lose at some point in the season, it just happened to be the last and most important game.
In July, the greatest sporting event, the Tour de France departed with no defending champion for the second consecutive year! Team Astana, with two of the three podium finishers of the 2007 race appeared to have very good odds of gaining one of the top three spots again. Surprise! Team Astana was banned and Team CSC with Carlos Sastre and company rode to an unpredictable and disruptive victory. It was inevitable that the Tour de France could not escape controversy.
Disruption and unpredictability seem to be the prevailing themes for 2008. In a year when radical and unexpected occurrences were commonplace, should technology be any different? Let’s take a look at the big issues that may have shocked us, but in reality, were inevitable...
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 17 November 2008
Following the economic downturn of 2000 to 2003, the Fortune 500 companies that pursued short-term cost-cutting strategies such as outsourcing and rollbacks in quality assurance found themselves ill prepared for future opportunities. New research suggests that those enterprise organizations that continue to invest in critical IT areas such as software development, virtualization, and core lifecycle solutions will be better positioned for the next cycle of growth and expansion.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 21 July 2008
Major transformations of the enterprise IT organizations are underway. For competitive and successful enterprises, IT is an integral part of the business and is treated as such. Factors such as globalization, time-to-market and convergence are the driving forces to bring IT organizations back from the fringe of existence.
Here we examine the trends, emerging technology needs, and processes that are facilitating this necessary and timely transformation.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Thursday, 17 July 2008
The global lifecycle transformation is an interconnected ecosystem of people, processes and technology within an enterprise and across its partners, suppliers, providers and customers. In this paradigm, the enterprise IT organization becomes a strategic business partner focused on delivering value. The transformation shatters barriers, facilitates collaboration and takes the risk out of software development to produce predictable reliable results for an optimized business outcome.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 16 June 2008
The launch of ReplayDIRECTOR is an example of the power of virtualization permeating the application lifecycle in multiple phases. ReplayDIRECTOR provides an innovative solution using game changing technology.
Software is more complex than ever. Multi-threaded applications are being developed to take advantage of new hardware with multi-core environments. Using technology such as dynamic analysis will allow developers to predictably identify the most egregious errors such as race conditions and deadlocks.
Black Duck Software has been revolutionizing the world of software intellectual property since its founding in 2002. Koders is the first acquisition by Black Duck and is indicative of the market demand to grow and expand the footprint of the products and services offered by Black Duck.
The release of Coverity Prevent with race condition defect detection capabilities is indicative of the transformation that is occurring in development environments. As market conditions drive adoption of multi-core processors, true multi-threaded applications will become the norm. Being able to detect race condition and other concurrency defects early in the development phase is tremendously productive and delivers significant cost savings.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 25 June 2007
The HP acquisition of SPI Dynamics is a long awaited first indication that signals HP may actually understand the importance of the application testing business acquired via Mercury. This is an important acknowledgement of the testing customer base by HP, a base previously overlooked in HP’s plans for the former Mercury.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Wednesday, 20 June 2007
The acquisition of Telelogic further enhances IBM’s view of the application lifecycle. The Telelogic acquisition takes IBM well beyond the traditional enterprise lifecycle and places them squarely into the emerging and strategic systems or embedded software market.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Tuesday, 19 June 2007
The IBM acquisition of Watchfire Corporation makes IBM the first core application lifecycle vendor to demonstrate its willingness and commitment to solve the problem of application security. This is a win/win acquisition for customers as well as the application security market. This acquisition cements the role of application security and compliance in the well defined lifecycle.
The publication of the VMware whitepaper “Microsoft Virtualization Licensing and Distribution Terms” is a seminal moment in the 21st century computing industry. With the publication of this whitepaper, VMware is no longer just an interesting technology player; they are a bona fide catalyst to challenge Microsoft’s entrenched franchise business of the operating system.
Applications and their associated management are becoming more difficult yet more business critical. As enterprises watch the rise of complex distributed applications and teams, it is clear a solution to assist managing a constantly changing world must emerge. Virtualization technology is rapidly being deployed to assist these complexity demands. Virtualized environments solve a variety of problems yet introduce others.
Application security is an issue practitioners have chosen to defer to the operations group. The rationale is multi-faceted and includes issues such as: lack of skills, lack of time, and lack of support by upper management. In this Market Commentary, we examine the six truisms that must occur to make the practice of application security a reality.
The market has been aflutter with fanfare over the fifth birthday of Eclipse. Most of what has been reported has been on the positive side. However, to really accurately think about the future, the past must be considered. In this “Market Commentary”, we will examine two fundamental Eclipse questions:
What has the impact of Eclipse, both the technology and the foundation, been on the industry?
Today’s IT model is flawed – the organization and management structure has not evolved to meet the demands of the 21st century. The enterprise IT organization of the future must be more focused on the business and satisfying the customer rather than tactical projects and the most recent technology. By 2010, enterprise IT organizations will have finally figured out what the model should look like to take advantage of a global environment where collaboration is essential. In this vokeStream Future Watch, we identify some of the issues enterprise IT management and organizations must be aware of and address to satisfy their business customers. Moving the model from a decidedly silo based organization to one that is customer focused for the 21st century is the ultimate goal for enterprise IT organizations to achieve.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Sunday, 08 February 2009
As the application lifecycle evolves, components that drive efficiency and quality become more crucial. Organizations building centers of excellence (CoE) around performance testing find that the CoE centralizes resources and utilizes the full capabilities of today’s robust automation products. One of the main benefits is that organizations are able to consistently produce better performing applications.
In a survey focused on rationales for building a performance CoE, the associated ROI, and success factors, we tested the hypothesis that more mature organizations have built more effective CoEs, are contributing to overall customer satisfaction, and are meeting or exceeding the goals of organizational service level agreements (SLAs).
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Wednesday, 13 August 2008
The business analyst role is gaining visibility and momentum, and driving competitive differentiation in the lifecycle market. From April through July 2008, voke conducted an independent survey of unique individuals in the emerging requirements definition segment of the application lifecycle market. The Market Snapshot survey set out to identify the state of the business analyst market segment based on roles, processes, and market readiness of technology.
How Virtualization is Enabling Self-Service to Transform the Global Lifecycle
Banks have ATMs; grocery stores have self checkout; airlines have self check-in. All of these self-service approaches provide convenience for customers and deliver ROI for the companies that offer them. Self-service has appeared within the corporate environment as well. Many companies are offering self-service access to computing resources to their business constituents. This increases the ability to provide infrastructure and services more efficiently and use resources in more strategic ways to benefit the business.
Cutting edge IT services are now available through a self-service model thanks to virtualization. Virtualization lets companies pool IT resources and provide them as needed throughout the entire global lifecycle.
Join analyst Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke Inc., for this informative session where you will learn about self-service IT and:
Key components to the global lifecycle transformation
Current issues hindering the implementation of the global lifecycle and how to overcome them
Best practices and innovative technologies available for the enterprise
Learn how virtualization is enabling self-service to transform the global lifecycle!
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 21 July 2008
The application lifecycle is an integral part of today’s business. Regardless of core competencies, all organizations are driven by software that is created and customized to deliver a competitive advantage. The application lifecycle is now a strategic part of business.
This document examines the evolution of the application lifecycle and the importance of the core vendors in providing a sound foundation upon which to continue to build and define the application lifecycle.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 21 July 2008
The application lifecycle is an integral part of today’s business. Regardless of core competencies, all organizations are driven by software. Software that is created and customized to deliver a competitive advantage. The application lifecycle is now a strategic part of business.
This document is an overview of the evolution of the application lifecycle and the importance of the core vendors in providing a sound foundation upon which to continue to build and define the application lifecycle.
Multi-Core Quality webinar presentation slides presented by Theresa Lanowitz. Theresa will discuss the increasing trend toward multi-core environments and the critical need for implementing effective tools and processes early in the development lifecycle.
Software Production Management is a critical component in the creation and delivery of quality software and is a key ingredient in the ever evolving application lifecycle. Highly optimized organizations are experiencing tremendous return on investment (ROI) by recognizing and treating Software Production Management as a critical component of the application lifecycle. In this Market Snapshot, we will examine the organization and how it benefits from Software Production Management, use models and the state of technology in the Software Production Management market.
Presentation slides from the joint Borland/VMware webcast with Theresa Lanowitz from voke talking about what it takes to test and deliver applications that hit their mark using virtualization. And why getting the most out of virtualization depends on how seamlessly it can be integrated with your software testing processes.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Wednesday, 26 September 2007
Service providers and network equipment manufacturers are adding automation to their pre-production testing process for a combination of reasons: improved test coverage, accelerated time-to-market for products or services, reduced capital and operational expense, optimized equipment use, reduced training time, greater test collaboration, reduced test backlog, and reuse. All of these automation drivers are intertwined and focus on delivering better quality to the customer. This Market Snapshot will focus on the need for test automation of networks and connected devices, identify a path to automation adoption and provide an overview of where the market is with respect to the right processes, technical skills and technology.
Presentation slides from the informative webinar focused on the application lifecycle 2.0: Begin With The End In Mind.
This webinar features a strategic and visionary perspective of application lifecycle 2.0 and its ongoing evolution in the enterprise. Gain insight on how to transform your enterprise application lifecycle to deliver more cohesive communication and consistent results, identify events that impact a global business and enable a customer focus.
Presentation slides from SQC Software & Systems Quality Conferences in DĂĽsseldorf, Germany.
This keynote presentation focuses on the changes every Quality Assurance organization is experiencing and how to manage the transition in becoming a model organization for the 21st century.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Virtualization is poised to become the defining technology of the 21st century. Virtual lab automation, a new use for virtualization in the application development and quality assurance organizations has made inroads to the pre-deployment side of the application lifecycle equation. In this Market SnapshotTM, we will examine the organization and its metamorphosis as virtual lab automation becomes more pervasive. We will also define the value and benefits of Virtual lab automation.
Get first hand the latest industry study on the tangible benefits of adopting Virtual Lab Automation. Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke Inc. will elaborate on the findings from a recent field study.
Learn how your peers are:
Tackling infrastructure and process challenges associated with supporting the development and testing of complex applications and systems
Making the decision to adopt Virtual Lab Automation
Benefiting from the results of virtualizing and automating the test lab
Make no mistake, the application lifecycle market is real, in turmoil, and critical to the success of every enterprise - globally. Without the products and solutions being offered in the application lifecycle market, enterprise IT organizations are relegated to technology controlling their destiny. The practice of allowing technology to control the destiny of business is fraught with peril. True focus on the application lifecycle and its integrated roles, responsibilities, and technology will continue to evolve and support the business. The application lifecycle ecosystem catalogs and analyzes the software suppliers in the market. Use this document as a way to evaluate potential partners for your own application lifecycle ecosystem. This document is virtual and updates are triggered by market events. Suppliers to the ecosystem will be added on a regular basis. Version 1.5 continues to build out the Application Lifecycle Continuum with Empirix placed in the “Contender” position.
Every market is an ecosystem comprised of people, processes, and technology. The network equipment testing market is growing in complexity. To effectively manage this complexity, the market is focused on reducing time-to-market and testing costs while increasing efficiency and product quality. The network equipment testing market is poised to breakthrough in terms of commercially available technology to assist the people and processes. In this Market Snapshot, we examine the people, processes, and technology of the network equipment testing market.
The message of "it's more than tools"has been prevalent for quite some time.Most enterprises and softwaresuppliers, however, remained steadfastin their focus on technology. In an erawhere expenditure, return oninvestment and customer satisfactionare paramount, a much greaterimportance is now being placed onoverall IT lifecycle management (ITLM).In this Executive Brief, we examine whyITLM should be a guiding principal forenterprise IT, and offer practical adviceon ITLM strategy and adoption.
Make no mistake, the application lifecycle market is real, in turmoil, and critical to the success of every enterprise - globally. Without the products and solutions being offered in the application lifecycle market, enterprise IT organizations are relegated to technology controlling their destiny. The practice of allowing technology to control the destiny of business is fraught with peril. True focus on the application lifecycle and its integrated roles, responsibilities, and technology will continue to evolve and support the business. The application lifecycle ecosystem catalogs and analyzes the software suppliers in the market. Use this document as a way to evaluate potential partners for your own application lifecycle ecosystem. This document is virtual and updates are triggered by market events. Suppliers to the ecosystem will be added on a regular basis.
2008 was a tough year for IT, and 2009-2010 appear to be more of the same: Budget cuts, a focus on conserving cash and doing more with less. At the same time, technology has not stood still: innovative technologies that have the potential to deliver strategic value, such as application virtualization and replay debugging, are still being developed, and are entering the mainstream. What can we learn from previous economic downturns with regards to making technology investments in such a climate?
Join Theresa Lanowitz, analyst from voke, and Jonathan Lindo, CEO and Founder of Replay Solutions for a podcast discussion of current challenges in today's application problem resolution processes and suggestions for how application development teams can dramatically shorten the process of fixing defects to speed time-to-market. This session will give practical guidance on how your application team can:
Make incremental investments that have immediate ROI through the elimination of manual work
Save money and increase efficiency by eliminating complex processes needed to reproduce defects
Improve productivity with better collaboration between geographically disperse teams
Increase application quality by fixing those hard to find or elusive defects
Replay Solutions provides application problem resolution products that dramatically shorten the process of fixing defects to speed time-to-market. ReplayDIRECTOR functions like a DVR for enterprise applications - recording all inputs and events affecting your application while it is running, then replaying those steps to execute the code in exactly the same way and reproduce the error without needing to reproduce the environment the defect occurred in.
In this requirements.net exclusive podcast, Theresa discusses a rather unconventional report (titled: Fortune 500 Spending Required for IT Cost Savings”) which looks at the economy and smart moves for IT.
In this report, the voke research team makes some very interesting reminders about the fall out of the dot-com bubble bursting, and the lesson’s from IT’s reaction in 2001 and 2002.
The voke research teams make some important recommendations which tie directly to Business Analyst empowerment and investments in requirements definition as a critical element to surviving the IT downtown.
The Podcast is 40 minutes of a fact-based, fresh dialog on efficient outsourcing, IT virtualization, lifecycle management, and the importance of the BA and requirements.
IBM's acquisition this week of DataMirror would seem to put Big Blue square in the middle of the real-time world. Listen as voke principal analyst Theresa Lanowitz and SD Times editor-in-chief David Rubinstein discuss the acquisition and what it might mean for enterprise development organizations on this edition of "Week in Review."
Dave Rubinstein chats with voke principal analyst Theresa Lanowitz about this week's Tech-Ed and next week's IBM Rational Conference on this edition of "Week in Review."
SD Times chats with voke principal analyst Theresa Lanowitz about Microsoft's Silverlight and VMware's new playback capability on this edition of "Week in Review."
The big news today was the Citrix acquisition of open source virtualization company XenSource. I have commented many times in the past year about the future I think virtualization has and how it will be one of the defining technologies of the 21st century.
So, here is my philosophy on the acquisition….one if you are inclined to be a geek and another if you fancy yourself more of a business person. Either way, the net / net of this is virtualization is real and coming to an enterprise near you...
Retro is in – all hail to the 80’s! But in software?
I was fortunate to be in attendance as Microsoft kicked off its 15th annual TechEd conference in Orlando, FL with a “Back to the Future” spoof complete with an authentic DeLorean , a remarkably well preserved Christopher Lloyd and Microsoft's Bob Muglia transformed to Michael J. Fox complete with an authentic 80’s wardrobe and hair.
I had the pleasure and honor of participating in the inaugural podcast of “SD Times The Week In Review” with SD Times Editor-in-Chief David Rubinstein...
David Cassidy and puka shells, Donny Osmond and purple socks, or chocolate and peanut butter. OK, I am dating myself, but there are just some things that do go together. I spent the past 2 weeks realizing there is some truth to this concept, even in technology.
On April 25, 2007 I was honored to deliver the keynote address at the SQS Software Quality Conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. This is a major event in the software quality world, with attendees coming from around the European Union to hear about quality and exchange ideas with others. While preparing the content for my keynote, I had several conversations with SQS CEO, Rudolf van Megen. Mr. van Megen has a unique outlook on the quality market and its future direction. During our conversations he told me of the big push in the German market, specifically, to using offshore providers...
Along with 7,000 others, I am attending VMWare’s third annual conference! Let me reiterate that number – seven thousand attendees at a conference in its third year!
VMWare is the new cool! The company is so cool they are not only creating industry changing technology, they are also helping in the global movement to conserve energy! ...
At Microsoft Tech Ed, I had an informative conversation with Jason Beaudreau, Director of IT for Altair Global Relocation. When I first met Jason, I had no idea who or what Altair Global Relocation was. I figured they moved people around, but really did not think a relocation company would be a poster enterprise for technology. Think again! ...
At Tech Ed, the Microsoft spokespeople were certain to stress that the company was moving from supporting the developer to supporting development. This may seem like a big case of over analyzing semantics and word parsing. Trust me, this is a major statement...
I first encountered Trolltech about four years ago and have been intrigued since. After you get over the odd name and being reminded of Peer Gynt and the Three Billy Goats Gruff legends, you realize the company has some interesting technology that will go a long way in helping with device software optimization (DSO). You also realize that Trolltech is a company of and for developers – after all, if trolls are exposed to sunlight they turn to stone. And, we all know that real developers prefer to work their magic in the wee hours of the night and avoid those harmful ultra-violet rays at all cost...
The 2006 Wind River Worldwide User Conference concluded today. This conference was edgy. From the ultra-hip urban graphics on everything from signage to hotel room keys to a Phil Gordon hosted poker tournament, Wind River is shaking up a staid and conservative industry...
