Workflow drives IBM’s vision

AS IBM’S DIRECTOR of marketing for WebSphere software, Scott Hebner sees workflow as a key to developing Web services and Big Blue’s strategy for making integration a core component of the development environment. Hebner met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, News Editor Mark Jones, Editor at Large Ed Scannell, Lead Analyst Jon Udell, Technical Director Tom Yager, and Senior Editor Tom Sullivan to discuss the Web services infrastructure, the Eclipse initiative, and the standards process.

InfoWorld: Oracle recently joined the Eclipse initiative — what movement do you foresee around the standards process?

InfoWorld: What about Sun?

Hebner: [Sun is] not really in the software space. We see them in the context of hardware and Solaris kinds of deals, but outside the Solaris server environment, we don’t see them that often. The competitors for WebSphere these days are largely Microsoft, BEA, and Oracle, and then you have SAP in there and you’ve got Plumtree and you’ve got portal providers. A partner can support only so many infrastructures, so the question for the partners is [which vendors] are going to be the top two, three, maybe four, and I think Sun is getting close to being at that cut point. I know they’re trying to re-energize their software business, and I think it’s part of the reason why you see them being a bit more aggressive with the open standards over the last couple of years with Linux [and] some of the Web services things. I think they’re incrementally opening up J2EE and the whole Java community process.

InfoWorld: What other changes do you see happening around the infrastructure?

Hebner: [In addition to] the market driving a consolidation, the other thing that’s happening is this notion [of] the network becoming a utility. People are used to the gas and electricity and telecommunications utility pay-as-you-go [notion]. The IT industry is a very young industry [and] the network [is] the evolution of an open-standards infrastructure. A time will come where it’s just there [and] no one owns it, no one pays for it, it’s just a facilitator for the real added value. You have a good example of this with e-mail. … The other thing that is happening on the vendor side is that more and more vendors like IBM and the others are saying “We can’t continue to build everything ourselves.” Therefore, just for pure business profitability and stockholder value they’re saying “I think we need to partner more, we need to leverage all this open technology and move up the stack.” I know as a fact a lot of the Eclipse partners are saying “We can’t continue to build all this stuff, so let’s just adopt Eclipse and we’ll build on top of it and we’ll get support from the community that’s supporting it.”

At the same time, all the pieces are starting to come together — it’s not about Java over here and Linux and Web services and grid — it’s [coming] together as an infrastructure or a platform for the network. You’re seeing a lot of vendors rapidly moving up that value stack. We’re doing it [with] Domino — Lotus announced that future versions of Domino are going to be based on this open-standards infrastructure or Java 2EE and Eclipse and it’s for the same very reason: Why keep building the guts onto covers themselves when they can adopt an open standard? [It’s] a byproduct [of] the customer demand [for] this utility notion: paying as you go vs. just buying everything and building it out. [Customers] want the infrastructure to be more consolidated. They don’t want to be the integrator of their infrastructure, they want increasingly to buy and adopt an open infrastructure. [Plus] just the pure cost — how long can [Sun] continue to afford to drive this Java community process? That cannot be a cheap.

InfoWorld: Isn’t there a dichotomy between the revenue stream of IBM Global Services and your participation in the Web services standards community? If you make Web services simple, is IGS still going to be a revenue model?

Hebner: I don’t see any connection at all with IGS, per se. I think the overriding trend is pure cost statement and skill statement and having a common infrastructure to build across. At the higher level it’s all about integration. Every single one of the larger customers I’ve met with this year [was] integrating their business operations. You can’t integrate business operations in a heterogeneous environment that’s built out over 30, 40 years without doing some modernization and doing some normalization of the APIs. Therefore, Web services make natural sense for them as an integration and modernization mechanism. How the enterprises leverage partner services is increasingly being based on Web services. … It’s when you get into things like the Web services transaction coordination and workflow capabilities and security model that it starts to become something that a real business would rely on.

InfoWorld: Where does IBM stand on the duel between WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) standard that Sun has put out and BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)? Are you going to play hardball with those guys?

Hebner: The market will determine [the outcome]. Just like there [are] multiple versions of HTML and there [are] multiple dialects of XML, the market’s going to choose the right model. The WSCI stuff, from what I understand, was somewhat deficient. It didn’t have the coordination support [and] it didn’t have the transaction support. But [if you] bring together the world of Microsoft with XDocs, XLang, and what we were doing with the WSFL [Web Services Flow Language], then have BEA and a bunch of others involved in it through the Web services and operability profile work that’s going on — we think [that] is the right approach. When you build network-based applications, by definition you’re integrating capability in a network. And the more you can coordinate the transactions across them in a dynamic fashion, the more powerful the business integration can be. You can’t do that without workflow [support]; it’s all about workflow within a transactional context. We think these app servers are by definition going to become workflow engines. It’s just a matter of evolution. Just like the app server has to be based on open standards, there’s going to need to be a standard for how you flow behavior and transactions across multiple elements of the network. If [there isn’t], the whole network model collapses. The question is, which one of those standards is going to be adopted and how is it going to evolve?

We [are] in the early stages of having a real Web services infrastructure. Right now people are using Web services to expose a business service for someone else to integrate with. But when you start getting into integrating business operations across multiple business processes, that’s where those things become a little bit more complex, because now you have to flow the behavior of the transaction integrity and the compensation patterns to actually back things out based on different scenarios. Then you have to have a security model hooked in there and all. … I think what’s going to happen with the workflow stuff is [an] evolutionary step from the existing standards of SOAP and WSDL. Right now we essentially have two choices. [We] have WSCI and BPEL, both of which will undergo changes and will probably come together at some point. That’s what the standards bodies which Sun and IBM and Microsoft and everyone’s a part of will help determine. I would not argue that WSCI and BPEL are that different, but WSCI doesn’t have the notion of the other two standards, Web services transaction, and Web services coordination. WSCI doesn’t have a transaction coordination or the transaction API. I think that’s part of the reason why BEA was intrigued with BPEL.

InfoWorld: A year from now, what are grid services going to look like? Is workflow the real driver of IBM’s grid vision?

Hebner: If you look at our beta program for [WebSphere] Version 5, almost half of them are for the enterprise vs. just a core app server. We’re positioning the enterprise as being the next-generation app server. It’s sort of like what Windows NT was to Windows. It’s the next level of capability beyond the core J2EE stack, and it’s things like the advanced transactional coordination of adaptors and it’s workflow and it’s not so much grid but the precursor to grid where you have more dynamic and sophisticated failover and clustering. The edge of network stuff is in there. As you go through time, things like Allegro — [which is] the code name [for] one of the technologies that we’ve talked about recently — will do a provisioning and auditing of Web services and create a security model for access. Those sorts of things naturally grow into this.

InfoWorld: How does autonomic fit into that vision?

Hebner: [Autonomic has] four core value propositions. One is the built-to-integrate notion that the app servers inherently will be about integrating things, whether they be EJBs in a network of servlets or even higher level abstract applications that you want to integrate in. The second is the integrated development model, which is all about development productivity, the fact that we have all the integrated server support so it’s more productive. The third is the agility and the productivity of the administration. This is where you start to get some of the self-protecting, self-administering [capabilities]. It’s not the nirvana of the whole thing is intelligent and has its own brain, but incrementally it’s become smarter, it’s being able to protect itself better, it’s being able to configure itself better. There [are] some new features and functions that are coming out with all that. The fourth one is what we call intelligent, end-to-end optimization of the applications. That’s where you get into the performance and reliability, the advanced clustering, the failover support, the edge of network.

InfoWorld: What’s your take on Microsoft’s licensing message?

Hebner: The first thing we realized when we started doing our research more than a year ago is that almost 70 percent of these mid-market customers get their solutions [at least] in part through a partner. We started talking to [partners] about features and functions, and very quickly it became clear to us that what [they] are really concerned about [is] pricing, particularly in the Microsoft model. Not only was the pricing expensive for them to be a solution pass-through, but it was very complex and inflexible. If you’re dealing with a portal it’s different than their Biz Talk, which is different than their Windows 2000 Server. Also we started getting advised that there was concern about Microsoft competing with partners. So we started to realize that the partners [are] the lens into the customers in this market. We’ve tried to simplify the pricing model, we tried to price it to the market, to what the customers and the partners need. And it turns out that what we believe to be the right price point is anywhere from 30 [percent] to 70 percent or 90 percent — depending on how you configure it — cheaper than Microsoft. What’s really a problem with Microsoft’s model is it’s so complex: per user, per server, the CAL [Client Access License] definitions.

InfoWorld: There are some innovations for WebSphere Express targeted at midsize businesses that enterprise businesses want too. Will these policies be pushed up the stack so they apply to customers of all sizes?

Hebner: It’s all componentized and we can customize it. So things like the automated installation and autonomic [capabilities] become more powerful as you go up the stack. What Microsoft has done is they have this software assurance program, but that only applies to [businesses with] 250 or more PCs, so it’s not exactly the mid-market. They do simplify things a little bit more when you get into that space, particularly with the per-user CALs vs. the per-server. But in the mid-market it’s still very complex. I spent a lot of time [with] my team just understanding the licensing for Windows 2000 Server, but when you start to [consider] the [pricing for] Biz Talk is per CPU, and then [with] their SharePoint portals there [are] so many caveats and definitions — from a pricing model they’re all different, and so it’s just a great [deal] of complexity. We have a cost-of-ownership value proposition we think that’s going to be strong.

InfoWorld: What happens if Sun walks into this dialogue and says, “Thanks IBM for establishing the price structure and we’re going to give away the software stack.” Are you vulnerable to that strategy?

Hebner: Not really, because customers are willing to pay for the support that comes along with it. If they were to truly give it away, it’s going to cost them a lot of money. Their tools are really oriented towards professional developers, so they have to deal with that challenge too. They would have to build a lot into the Sun ONE [Open Net Environment]. Even that lower level configuration is still just a raw J2EE server. It doesn’t have the one-click or five-click install configuration. There are APIs for administration where you can actually do silent install and configuration under the covers. They would have to build that all in there. In [my] early days at IBM we had a lot of products that weren’t doing too well, and what tends to happen when is you start to try to give them away. In the case of the mid-market, the value’s the partners because they deliver the solutions. So to give it away is not going to really help that situation. We started giving away OS2 and people didn’t stop investing in the partners who were supporting Windows.