IBM Plans Web Meeting Service; Takes Aim at WebEx
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IBM plans to offer Web-conferencing as  a hosted Internet service, seeking to reach small and  medium-sized business customers while taking on more  established rivals in the market, the company said on Tuesday.
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InfoWorld - Hoping to speed acceptance of its service-oriented architecture initiative, IBM at last has rolled out a new service to help corporate users shape their projects to better fit their business goals.
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A new feature in WebEx&#39;s latest Web conferencing service has reporters and PowerPoint victims of all stripe a little nervous. The service being announced Monday, WebEx Sales Center, includes an Attention Indicator
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Discuss your addiction to Big Iron here... IBM aims to leverage social networking by building an online meeting place for users of its System z mainframes. It says the Web-based portal, called Destination z, gives customers a place to discuss and debate mainframe usage, exchange ideas and seek technical advice.â¦
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has launched a new version of its WebSphere application server software, adding autonomic troubleshooting capabilities and other new features designed to improve performance in the middleware platform.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft plans to offer a few more details Tuesday on the upcoming version of its hosted Web conferencing offering, Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007. The updated software will have a new user interface and allow users to share media files. In addition, users will be able to participate in conferences over either VOIP (voice over IP Internet Protocol) or regular telephones. In Live Meeting 2005, the meeting presenter could choose to either let participants call in using landline phones or listen only via Internet audio. Live Meeting 2007 users conducting training events will also have access to expanded testing and grading functions. The updated service will hit the market in the third quarter, around the same time that theÂ Office Communications Server 2007, with its Web conferencing capabilities, will also become widely available. That's a bit behind schedule. Last year, Microsoft said it was hoping to ship these products in the second quarter of 2007. When the products are both out, users of Live Meeting and the Office Communications Server can participate in the same conference. Both types of users will see the same Web interface and have the same experience, said Roger Muff, director of marketing for Microsoft's unified communications group. "The fact that we're making Web conferencing available... through a server as well as Live Meeting is a good example of software plus services in action," he said. Customers choose the service or the server-based offerings for different reasons, he said. An IT manager might decide to use Live Meeting because it's a service that includes support. "IT pros are spread ever more thin," he noted. Because Live Meeting is hosted and includes support, it's one less service an IT professional has to manage. Other companies may choose the Communications Server because they'd prefer to keep sensitive company documents internal within the corporate firewall, rather than out on the Internet. Enterprises may instead choose Live Meeting for the opposite reason--because keeping documents on an Internet-based service may satisfy certain regulations around publicly sharing documents, he said. In addition, meeting size may determine which product a company wants. Live Meeting can support thousands of participants while Communications Server supports hundreds.
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IBM Tuesday will announce an expansion of its services for companies seeking help with radio frequency identification technology. Over the past several months, IBM has developed RFID services
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will enter the event-driven architecture space Monday with a product geared for SOA in Java environments. This unveiling of BEA WebLogic Event Server will be coupled with an upgrade to the company's real-time server. Together, they can be used as part of a solution for high-speed, high-volume transaction environments or XTP (extreme transaction processing). Event Server is a Java application server for handling large volumes of streaming data. It meets needs for predictable response times and complex event processing, the company said. High volumes of events are handled with the speed expected in C and C++ environments but with the lower total cost of ownership enabled by Java, according to BEA. With Event Server, information is aggregated from distributed systems in real time. Rules are applied to discern patterns and trends, giving users the ability to respond to opportunities and threats posed by seemingly unrelated events. "What people are trying to do is drive data to knowledge," said Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic Products at BEA. "As we come out of the gate, we're going to provide 50,000 complex events per second," putting the product on par with C and C++ offerings, he said. The product serves as an infrastructure for SOA aspects by enabling high-performance computing without modification of current or planned SOA infrastructure, BEA said. When used with BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and the new BEA WebLogic Realtime Time 2.0 product, Event Server can work in XTP environments. Part of the company's microService Architecture for SOA, Event Server supports simple Java programming, or "plain old Java objects," and the Spring Framework as well as event processing language. A public beta for WebLogic Event Server begins on May 29 with general availability planned for this summer. BEA's entrance into the event-processing market is another sign that the market is going mainstream, said analyst Roy Schulte, vice president of Application Strategy and Governance at Gartner. "Oracle and Tibco are also already active in this market, and IBM, Microsoft, and SAP are expected to expand their event-processing offerings during the next 18 months," Schulte said. "The product is potentially applicable anywhere there are high-volume event streams and a need to detect threats or opportunities quickly [with sub-second latency]," Schulte said. "Until recently, this kind of scenario was only found in niche applications, such as financial trading, telco, and network management. During the past several years, however, many new types of stream processing applications have emerged in such areas as customer experience management, credit card security and fraud detection, transportation operations, and compliance." BEA also is announcing WebLogic Real Time 2.0, which provides guaranteed microsecond pause times for standard Java applications. Guaranteed worst-case pause times of 10 milliseconds are offered with average pause times in the sub-millisecond range. Previously, the product offered a 30-millisecond worst case. "The neat thing about WebLogic Real Time is it gives real-time, predictable behavior to an application without having to rewrite the application, so it's automatically inherited," Churchward said. Real Time 2.0 features a latency analyzer tool providing developers with the ability to analyze sources of latency in applications. General availability for Real Time 2.0 is slated for this summer.
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IBM is moving forward with its Jazz application lifecycle management platform Monday, expanding access to the Jazz.net community and touting Project Bluegrass, which seeks a virtual world for developer collaboration.The company also is readying a second beta release of the first Jazz product, called IBM Rational Concert Express."The first thing we're doing is we're opening up the Jazz.net community to everyone," and allowing them to participate in the evolution of Jazz, said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM. Previously, the year-old Jazz.net community was open only to IBM Rational customers, academics and partners.Allowing greater access to Jazz.net boosts exposure, noted Liz Barnett, principal analyst at EZinsight. "They're going to expose the technology to a much wider audience, certainly [to] many people who are not IBM tool customers," she said.Jazz represents IBM's approach to enabling better collaboration in software development projects that can be distributed across the globe."The Jazz technology is designed to help people work together more [effectively] and collaborate in the development and delivery of software," said Hebner. What is different about Jazz is it provides real-time collaborative technology to manage under the covers all information pertaining to the health of a software development project.Unlike previous ALM products, Jazz offerings will adapt to the way that users want to use them instead of users having to adapt to the products, Hebner said. Featured in Jazz products is a central repository to store information about different software development projects.With Bluegrass, IBM is attempting to bring the visual, collaborative nature of virtual worlds to software development. Hebner cited the Second Life 3D online environment as offering the kind of functionality IBM wants to bring to ALM with Bluegrass.Developers could work together while viewing interactive representations of ideas and data. Avatars, or graphical representations of participants, would be used as well. Geared toward new, younger workers used to Web 2.0-style communications, Bluegrass is a research effort that may result in products from IBM or other companies.Bluegrass will be demonstrated at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla. next week. Bluegrass also is available on the IBM Codestation kiosk in Second Life.IBM Rational Team Concert Express is intended for smaller development teams looking to use agile development techniques and collaborate across the globe, Hebner said.The product should appeal to the agile community, Barnett said. "It's a lightweight toolset, and it's really easy just to pick up and use and extend on your own," said Barnett.With the second beta, IBM has added capabilities for team collaboration and gauging project health; Web dashboards are featured. Also, users also can leverage a broader set of underlying infrastructure, including Oracle databases, Lotus Sametime communications software, and Apache servers.?The first beta arrived last summer; general release of Team Concert Express is planned for later this year.At the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Team Concert Express has been used to develop a tool called Emergent Expertise Locator, which recommends members for development teams based on an examination of how files have changed hands and who has participated."Essentially, the tool's looking at the story of how changes have been committed to the code base," said Gail Murphy, computer science professor at the university.?Over time, key IBM Rational products, including the ClearCase software configuration management system, ClearQuest for software change management, and Build Forge for build and release management, will incorporate Jazz technology. This will enable participation in a more collaborative real-time ALM platform, Hebner said. These upgrades will begin to arrive later in 2008.
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IBM Wednesday introduced a significant overhaul to its WebSphere J2EE application server, with new support for standards-based messaging protocols, better management features and enhancements to improve availability of applications, according to an IBM
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IBM introduced three tools aimed at helping corporate IT operations and business users take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies.
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Initially, the interoperability will be limited to exchanging text messages, but IBM wants to expand and deepen it to include other types of communications that have become common in IM services, like voice and video chats, file sharing and Web conferencing.
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Several Web 2.0 tools unveiled by IBM have advanced the growing options for business-based social networking and data mashups.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is working on a project to enable agile development of Web 2.0 applications, but the effort has drawn criticism because it is not an open source endeavor. Called Project Zero, it offers an environment for building applications based on popular Web technologies. Included is a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Also featured are APIs for developing REST-style (Representational State Transfer) services and capabilities for mashups and rich Web interfaces. REST and Atom form the basis of the service invocation model while JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and XML provide for data interchange. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is the model for a rich client in Zero. Extensive scripting is supported. "The name Zero is a reminder of the project's aspirations: Zero unnecessary overhead and complexity. Zero barriers to success. Zero of what you don't need," the Project Zero Web site states. "Project Zero is designed to enable faster, more productive development and deployment of Web applications and Web-based services. It sets out to allow developers to spend more time writing actual code instead of complex configuration files," according to the site. A goal of Project Zero is enabling development of Web 2.0-type applications, featuring user-contributed content. "IBM's Project Zero can be thought of as something of an application server for Groovy and PHP code bases," says Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk. "I think that from a technology standpoint Project Zero is a good step in the right direction," says analyst Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research. "REST-based Web services and dynamic languages like PHP and JavaScript are gaining increased momentum in the market because they make it simpler to build and consume services." The project's Web site features an online community and infrastructure used to develop Zero. Rather than leveraging open source, Zero follows what IBM calls "a community-driven commercial development process," in which contributions in the form of feedback are welcomed. IBM sees benefits of this format as being centered on real-time communication with users.Â  An IBM official defended the company's stance. "There are currently no plans to release Project Zero under an open source license. While the community-driven commercial development process shares many of the benefits of open source projects, Project Zero is a commercial endeavor, and write access is restricted to IBM-approved committers," says Jason McGee, the IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for the project, in a statement released by the company. But he emphasized that IBM is in open source's corner. "IBM remains committed to open source. Project Zero follows a commercial software development effort, in much the same way as other commercial offerings from IBM. [The] fact that Project Zero is based on a number of open source technologies and that it represents such a significant investment on top of these technologies speaks to IBM's commitment," McGee says. IBM's strategy has fomented objections in places such as TheServerSide online community. Analysts also were displeased. "Of note also is the development model, which while borrowing its transparency from open source, imposes significant restrictions on consumption and deployment. While this is an improvement on traditional closed-source development practices, it is not in fact open source and will suffer when compared to it," O'Grady says. "I have to wonder what the motivation is for an external party to contribute code to this particular project when there is no guarantee that they would be able to use it long-term due to the restricted licensing terms," says Hammond. Product plans for Project Zero depend upon community feedback and alignment with product development efforts, an IBM representative said. In time, there will be a facility to share reusable components, such as widgets and services, developed as part of the project, IBM said.
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Daniel Crook points out the next meeting of the New York PHP Group where Dan Gisolfi will be talking about some of the latest things that IBM has been up to in the mashup arena.   Centered around the concept of "situational applications," IBM's work with mashups targets a growing trend in Web site development. [...] IT specialists should embrace the model as a foothold for PHP in the enterprise.   Some of Dan's presentation is outlined as well - a demo of IBM's Mashup Starter Kit, a look at best practices, and talk on the collaboration of IBM with Zend and ProgrammableWeb. If you're wanting to attend, be sure you RSVP as soon as possible (before the 21st @ 3pm) to reserve your spot.
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IBM's global services organization is adding "health check" services to its repertoire of technical services for SOA deployments, looking to assist users dealing with issues resulting from poor planning or partnerships with inexperienced or so-called proprietary IT vendors.The company also is offering its "identity-aware ESB," which is an enterprise service bus that combines existing IBM products to provide identity management capabilities.Health-check services and software will be offered in two workshops to be held at customer sites, featuring specialized diagnostics and triage capabilities to help identify potentially unhealthy areas and recommend cures for problem areas."We try to bring a real breadth of capability from the best practices that we've learned into these workshops," said Marie Wieck, vice president of middleware services at IBM.With some clients, IBM has had to perform somewhat of a rescue mission after clients have done an initial application and then had problems with scalability or performance, Wieck said.Workshops, which are priced in the $50,000 range or less, include IBM SOA Applications and Services and Healthcheck Workshop and Infrastructure Healthcheck Workshop for SOA. Both are 2.5-day engagements intended for midmarket and large enterprises.The applications and services workshop is intended to provide assurance that an SOA can expand beyond pilot projects. Factors such as application reuse and service use will be assessed, as will identification of rogue services as part of a governance policy. Security also will be checked for service controls and identity management.The infrastructure workshop features an assessment of infrastructure supporting applications and services layers in an SOA. Elements examined include infrastructure flexibility, the ability to adapt to spikes in demand, and verifying SOA configurations for connectivity. A service management review ensures that services are being monitored.IBM's identity-aware ESB combines WebSphere ESB products with Tivoli security and identity management software to help ensure that access to information, services, and applications is protected. Auditing of identity and access activity is enabled."Identity management is very critical so that you can ensure that only the right people get access to these services," Wieck said.An analyst briefed on IBM's efforts lauded both the SOA and ESB programs."Customers who have started with a SOA need checkpoints to have an outside source assess what they are doing and how it compares to best practices," said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz &amp; Associates. "Companies are investing a lot of money, resources, and political capital on SOA, and management wants to make sure they are on track and doing the right thing."Governance is a huge issue for customers in regards to SOA implementation. This is especially true since SOA is as much a business strategy as it is a technology strategy," Hurwitz said."In terms of ID-aware ESB ? clearly security and identity management are huge issues for companies because of governance issues related to security," she said.IBM offers information about its SOA programs at its Web site.Also on Monday, IBM is announcing an initiative to help business partners increase revenues and better serve customers. Grow Your Business (GYB) with IBM Software provides cross-brand sales scenarios across the IBM software group's product portfolio.The GYB tool recommends scenarios that utilize business partners' existing areas of expertise. Partners through the initiative can analyze software products, get descriptions of business value, and determine return on investment via an online tool. Information is aggregated into one place.An online guide to marketing and sales materials also is highlighted.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM released SOA productsÂ for integrating software applications and improving business processes, and said more customers are starting to understand the SOA concept. IBM is encouraging businesses to create discrete, "loosely coupled" processes that can be monitored individually and fine tuned for better performance. Building such an architecture can be complex and requires services from IBM, but the result should be a more nimble and competitive business, according to IBM. The first new offering is a set of software packages to help companies in specific industries -- initially health care, insurance, banking, and telecommunications -- automate processes using an SOA, or services-oriented architecture. The term refers to a way of designing IT systems so that services, such as an insurance claim approval, can be reused or modified more easily. The packages come with prebuilt templates for processes and standards common to each of the four industries. The health-care package, for example, ensures that SOA applications comply with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for managing health-care data. The offerings stem fromÂ IBM's acquisition last year of Webify Solutions, which focused on the health-care and insurance industries. IBM updated those packages and created others for the two new industries, said Manoj Saxena, a vice president with IBM Global Business Services and formerly Webify's CEO. It has also translated the products into several languages. The packages, each known as a WebSphere Business Services Fabric, start from $300,000 for an unlimited number of processors and end users, IBM said. The company also released an update to WebSphere Business Monitor, which tracks the performance of business processes. "For example, if I'm an insurance company I might have a goal to process claims about chipped windshields in two hours. This tool shows me how long I am taking, and I can see that the problem is originating from my processing center in Prague, or wherever." The previous version looked primarily at people-based processes, while the update looks at content-based processes and also gives a geographic view through a connection into the Google Maps Web service. IBM's Lotus division has employed Google Maps before, but this is the first time it has been included with a WebSphere product. Pricing for WebSphere Monitor starts at $88,500 for 100 "processor value units," an IBM pricing plan that takes processor type into account. Explaining the benefits of SOA to a CEO can be a tough sell, although Saxena said IT people understand the idea a lot better than 18 months ago, and sales cycles are shorter. "It used to be very education-heavy," he said. Business people want to see where the value is in SOA. "It's a bit like where we were with the Internet in 1995," he said. "People put up Web pages and pretty catalogues but business people didn't really see the value of it until you put a shopping cart around it. We're at the same stage with SOA. We're past the project-level discussion and now it's a question of how to take it to the business level." Regulatory compliance concerns also inhibit SOA adoption. "They are quickly realizing there's this notion of rogue services, with people publishing services all over the place that people can use." Information industries like finance and insurance are moving more quickly to SOA than physical goods industries such as manufacturing. Information industries tend to use more home-grown software and less packaged software from the likes of SAPÂ and Oracle, Saxena said. Those packages aren't necessarily less flexible but customers tend to be tied to the vendors' release cycles, which affects the timing of new projects, he said. Europe has caught up considerably to the U.S. in its SOA adoption, according to Saxena. IBM also introduced services to help customers figure out where they can get the most value from integrating processes, how far along the road they are today and what tools and services they can use. IBM encourages customers to begin with small projects, and typical engagements are four to six months, Saxena said. IBM sees five levels of SOA readiness from "ad hoc" through "aware" to "world class." He estimated that most Fortune 1000 companies are between levels one and two, although a company may be more advanced in a particular area like IT systems. Wednesday's releases are the first of several SOA announcements IBM will make in the coming weeks, targeting companies at different stages of SOA development.