Perceptive Information Strategies

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems continues to reshape the competitive landscape in the software and IT industry. Perhaps nowhere else is this more apparent than in the long-running battle between Oracle and IBM. By packaging together database software and systems in Exadata – especially with storage and server technology from Sun, which was already an arch IBM competitor – Oracle has ignited a “stack” war with Big Blue. Pick up the Financial Times or other business press, and you are likely to see one of Oracle’s trademark no-frills advertisements claiming Exadata’s benchmark performance superiority to IBM database systems.

IBM has hardly taken Oracle’s jabs lightly; for example, it has responded recently with benchmark results that assert lower overall database system costs compared with Oracle/Sun systems. I’m not going to write about benchmark wars here, but I will say that as stacks turn into pre-configured appliances, apples-to-apples comparisons of price and performance get tougher. It is important to examine closely the specifics of what the marketed benchmark results are reporting: in other words, whether the price-performance numbers account for all software and hardware costs, just hardware or whatever. This is especially true for organizations evaluating database appliances that offer pre-configured systems that integrate software, storage and server technology.

My focus here is on how IBM, with its recent software and systems announcements to support its “smarter systems for a smarter planet” strategy, is aimed at changing the basis of competition. To be sure, IBM has been traveling in this direction for a lot longer than just since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. However, at the launch event (April 7, IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose), you could feel the temperature in the room rise whenever Oracle came up. IBM needed to respond to Oracle, but there’s a lot more going on than a battle of database machines.

The April announcements brought technology substance to IBM’s long-running campaign to educate the market about why “the planet” needs to be smarter. In short, the context IBM has been articulating is that public and private organizations in all industries are growing increasingly dependent on the flow of data for everything they do. This includes the data tsunami arriving in the form of sensor data, online clicks and comments, surveillance and more. If they wish to improve processes, performance, customer service, market intelligence and innovation, they need to use data effectively and be “smarter.” This must happen with all information activities, including analytics and transaction processing.

The significance from a technology perspective is that software and systems can’t be part of the problem. Organizations need technology that does not simply add to the headaches of poorly integrated information silos, no “end-to-end” view of performance and prohibitive costs for scalability and speed. It’s not good enough just to deliver a souped-up database machine; the technology must offer something more, so that the organization can become smarter, not dumber.

Each of the announced systems (preconfigured for x86, Unix/Linux and System Z platforms) has distinctive features; those based on the POWER7 processor were the most impressive. However, the unifying theme for all was workload optimization. Arvind Krishna, general manager for Information Management in the IBM Software Group contrasted “closed” appliances with IBM’s workload optimized systems, which he said are designed to take on additional capabilities and flex to the workload demand so that the system remains efficient, cost-effective and scalable. IBM Research’s Bijan Davari, IBM Fellow and vice president for Next Generation Computing touted IBM’s workload optimization leadership “spanning decades,” particularly in mainframes, and described ongoing research. IBM demonstrated how the DB2 pureScale Application systems optimize workloads for transaction-intensive systems, and the Smart Analytics systems do so for BI and analytics.

Pardon me for using political consultant James Carville’s ugly phrase, but to have smarter systems, it’s the workload, stupid. Organizations must understand their current and anticipated workload, and then choose the technology platform (or external service) appropriately. They must ensure that the systems they choose enable continuous analysis, management and optimization of workloads from the end-to-end, user experience perspective, so that as demand intensifies and more data flows through, performance does not suffer and costs don’t skyrocket. Move over, speeds and feeds: workload is what matters.

As I kick off this blog from my hotel room in Las Vegas, there are few clouds in the sky. The morning sun radiates through the desert dust kicked up by the activities of a million people. The pale yellow sky sits above the tall wings of the casinos and the dark, flat shadows they cast on the shorter buildings below them. Thus, without any physical clouds drifting by to offer themselves as models, I’ll have to use my imagination to think virtually…which, of course, makes perfect sense.

“In the cloud” has become a term of art tossed about perhaps a little too easily by vendors, VC-backed start-ups, IT information strategists and lately journalists in the non-IT, mainstream business media. In a sense, the idea is to connect the unknowing with the all knowing: Users and/or developers can execute whatever they need to do – on mobile, laptop or other devices – while up there on some cloud the necessary computing power, scalable software and expert professionals respond without users or developers having to know how it’s getting done.

The business arrangement may remind the grizzled veterans among us of timesharing, but keep in mind that this is 2009, not 1969. Today, few have even heard of green screens. Users expect rich interfaces and some ability to personalize and customize the services; and to succeed, the computing environment in the cloud can’t waste any of its precious resources. Providers of the cloud computing services will have less and less tolerance for sloppy software that doesn’t use resources efficiently. At the same time, we will surely see a spike in demand for tools that enable real-time performance monitoring, analysis and response to problems inside and outside the clouds.

In other words, most of today’s systems can’t just be put inside a mass of water vapor or frozen crystals (thanks, Wikipedia) and called “cloud computing.” And there’s more to cloud computing that simply “pay as you go” models, aka software as a service (SaaS). For this reason, cloud computing could spur innovation even beyond the important developments centered on virtualization. To satisfy users’ demands, database architectures, for example, may have to make more creative use of memory-based and near-line storage as well as search or other programs that are different from the query style of SQL. As well, organizations will have to devote greater attention to business rules, policies and governance issues related to information sharing, privacy and quality.

Cloud computing is changing the vendor landscape. We now have “coopetition” arrangements between the likes of Amazon and IBM, with the latter recently announcing that DB2 works in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. IBM’s recent announcements from its Blue Cloud Initiative focused on Tivoli for managing data centers set up as “private” clouds; John Foley of InformationWeek offers a nice analysis here. Other vendors big and small are adjusting their strategies based on how strongly they believe the market will be for cloud computing and where they can take advantage: in other words, the marketing pieces are still in motion at Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and elsewhere.

Many bloggers have referenced the useful analysis recently published by researchers in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I recommend reading this document, even though it won’t be the final word on this still-developing phenomenon. I will be using my vantage point in this blog to explore and examine where the clouds are going, particularly as they relate to information management, business intelligence, analytics and policy directions for information governance. Yes, even on a cloudless day in Las Vegas.