IONA – latoga labs

Closed Source Buys Open Source V2.0

August 11, 2009 Leave a Comment

In case you didn’t notice from the change of tone in my tweets, I have been on vacation with the family for the past week. Enjoying the scenic grandeur (and at times solitude) of the Pacific Northwest and taking a ton of photos with my new camera (1388 photos to be exact…and 5 movies…).

Today, I had the joy of the first day back on the job and dealing with the flood of emails, followups, and catching ups that is the price we pay for taking some time off and not reading emails. Like that wasn’t enough, today VMware (my employer) had to go an announce that we were acquiring SpringSource (and add a few more items to my list to completely dissolve that post-vacation glow! 🙂 ).

After a day dealing with my inbox and urgent items, I had to take some time out of the evening photo processing to read the Steve Herrod and Rod Johnson blog posts on the acquisition. And provide a bit of a different viewpoint on this acquisition…fresh from vacation and not knowing anything more about this acquisition than what has been publicly stated by others (so safe from saying anything other than my opinion – see disclosures in the About latoga labs in the sidebar).

I’ve Been Through This Before

I’m not talking about my employer acquiring a company. I’m talking about a closed source Company acquiring essentially an Open Source company. Before joining VMware I used to work for IONA Technologies (sound familiar….think CORBA…Yes! That IONA!). I was there when IONA bought LogicBlaze. What made this acquisition interesting (especially for me…being part of the enterprise sales team at IONA) was that we went from having 1 closed source product (ESB) to three products (all ESBs) which competed with each other. And I was only allowed to sell one of them.

Executing a successful merger is not easy even when the companies are very well matched. But it becomes even more difficult when they have conflicting core values (and revenue models) like closed source code development and open source code development. In my most recent experience, the Iona/LogicBlaze merger didn’t work as well as it could have because the two sides of the house competed against each other and management turned a blind eye to it while they tried to figure out a revenue strategy post merger. Funniest thing is that a lot of the core value propositions we were discussing with clients at IONA in that Enterprise sales team that I was part of, still hold true today. Back then virtualization was a huge hidden value savings that I couldn’t tap into. Not any more…

Regardless of the synergies that two companies can provide each other technology wise, there is not as much focus traditionally placed on the social aspect of merging two companies. It is that social aspect (like the social aspect of introducing any new technology in a company) that will drive the speed and revenue value of the acquisition. Having been through this before in a rather painful way, it is important to mention this fact.

Why VMware + SpringSource Makes Sense

The good news is that this conflicting personality issue shouldn’t be a problem with the VMware/SpringSource merger. First, there is no competing technologies between the two vendors. SpringSource allows VMware to access the higher level parts of IT (Applications and App Developers) while also working together to enable the Cloud Vision of vSphere.

Second, based upon what Rod Johnson indicated in his blog post, he will be heading up SpringSource as a separate unit within VMware following the VMware BU organization. This should mean that SpringSource will get to work as they have been to support their existing community and customers in that classic open source way while working together with the other VMware BUs to add bigger picture value through the combination of SpringSource technologies with VMware’s.

Paul Maritz has indicated in the past the need to move up the value stack of IT and has used the term framework more than once during the vSphere launch. The ability to leverage the virtualization foundation of vSphere with vApp and abstract away the applications from the operating systems with SpringSource’s various build-run-manage products not only provides a much more open application development environment to compete with Google and Amazon, but also provides an solid migration path for Enterprises to move to the Private Cloud with all their web based Java applications. Image a world where Java App developers have the ability to integrate via the spring framework right into the virtualization based cloud where their apps will be tested/QA’d/run. Regardless of weather…er…I mean whether…that cloud is an internal cloud or an external cloud.

I see some very clear and interesting developments on the horizon from this acquisition which I’ll try to disclose my opinion on in the future. And, as is can be the case when you put a lot of very smart people together with solid management, I’m sure we’ll see some surprises as well. From the looks of my LinkedIn network, I’ll also be re-united with some old colleagues as well!

Tomorrow will be an interesting day of conversations with my global clients to hear their take on things!

IONA’s Johnny CORBA

April 20, 2007 Leave a Comment

(Disclosure: I currently work for IONA)

I’ve haven’t posted for a while due to a hectic week of travel and training classes and then a week long vacation (minus laptop of course). So, I thought I would get back into the swing of things by sharing this video. It’s a spoof video that a few creative IONA-ites put together for our 2007 Sales Kick-Off. There are a lot of references to CORBA, so the more you know about CORBA the funner this gets. Also, keep in mind that IONA was started out of Dublin, Ireland.

Enjoy!

Why IONA Bought C24

March 12, 2007 Leave a Comment

(Disclaimer: I am currently employed by IONA as a Senior Solutions Consultant. See general disclaimer to the right.)

This past week, IONA announced the acquisition of C24 Technologies out of the United Kingdom. IONA has had a reseller agreement with C24 Technologies for quite some time that matched the strengths of our two companies for the greater benefit of mostly our financial services clients. This acquisition is a great example of complimentary products and people joining forces to provide truly differentiated value.

I have been working with the C24 IO tool (re-branded by IONA as Artix IO) for the past seven months at various Fortune 100 financial firms. IO (Integration Objects) is a data mapping and translation tool that enables model driven data management. Not only does IO come preconfigured with in depth knowledge of standard financial industry message formats, but it provides a graphical data mapping tool for building data translation models, it can convert these models into transformation rules, and generate optimized java code based upon the data mapping models. IO also has the ability to provide constraints to message validations that go beyond what’s available today with XML schemas or XPATH; and these constraints can be applied to any message format. Data models generated with IO currently process trillions of dollars of financial transactions daily around the globe.

Side Box: John Davies, co-founder and CTO for C24, enjoys showing prospective clients how IO can handle the intricacies of complex message schemes like SWIFT, FpML, and ISO 20022 and then providing the test schemas to the client to have them try the same test with the other data mapping tools they are evaluating…he hasn’t come across an instance yet where the other tools didn’t fall over on some part of the schema’s intricacies. After spending over two decades in the financial services industry dealing with these complex message formats, John and the C24 team has ensured that IO can handle the complicated formats that enable electronic banking in today’s world. (John also did an interview with TheServerSide.com on the acquisition.)

To provide some contextual background, IONA’s Artix family of distributed SOA infrastructure products enable true distributes service integration and has been in use for years within both the Financial Services and Telecommunications markets. The entire concept of SOA is about service enabling functionality within your enterprise and making that functionality available to anyone who needs to access it. Any point in your enterprise could directly consume a service within the enterprise to leverage its functionality. Enabling this type of efficient point to point connectivity using standards based message formats and transports is the genesis of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) concept. That concept seems to have gotten diluted over the past few years during the conversion of existing applications server stacks into essentially ESB Hubs that all service consumption must pass through. Artix is a truly distributed technology that embraces this ESB concept. (For further discussion on the Stacks versus Distributed concept, see William Henry’s Gravity of the Hubs postings).

By hosting the model generated Java code from IO within the Artix runtime on the distributed services within an enterprise, Financial Service clients gain the combined benefit of efficient distributed services with robust model driven data mapping for financial message formats. This allows a firm to choose the best way to service enable an application based upon the unique technical, business, or political architecture of their organization. And they can do it in the incremental value driven approach that has become the new standard within the maturing technology industry over the past five years.

I am very excited about the joining of IONA and C24. I foresee some exciting case studies coming in the future as we continue to work with our large financial services clients on Artix and IO based solutions; and as the combined team continues to expand IO’s preconfigured message format understanding beyond financial services.