To encourage more ecommerce, the IBM-Ariba deal matches B2B buyers and sellers via LotusLive collaboration and social networking services, all through cloud delivery models.
Apple and Oracle may be unstoppable in their burgeoning power to dominate the collection of profits across vast and essential markets for decades.
The crux of the problem is that although Rational has omitted the term Development from its annual confab, it still speaks the language of a development tools company.
The broad affection for the term "cloud computing" and all that sticks to that nowadays will mean broad affection too for desktop as a service. Desktone has its sights set on helping service providers ramp up DaaS offerings, but enterprises will be in this one too. Citrix, VMware and Microsoft will make sure they allow enterprises to do DaaS as well as the cloud providers.
IBM has been building a formidable information management arsenal, applying it widely within its global accounts and a new factor as a value-add to its many other software and infrastructure offerings. The meta data approach also requires hardware and storage, not to mention professional services. IBM knows getting your information act together leads to SOA (both kinds) efficiencies and advantages. And -- looking outward -- as Big Blue ramps up its Blue Cloud initiatives, content access and management across domains and organizational boundaries takes on a whole new depth and imperative.
I'd like to see a way for .NET developers to get such a Visual Studio-as-a-service (or open source Mono thing equivalent) up on Amazon EC2, to then force Microsoft Live to follow suit. Who needs tools licenses anymore then?
When you look at just the difference in style between conventional Web service and RESTful, there is a little bit of an irony. Conventional Web services were touted as a simpler alternative to an earlier incarnation of SOA, which was CORBA. This reflects a growing maturity in the field. As we started getting a little more experience working with some of those Web-services technology, we realized that maybe we didn't always need those complicated SOAP headers. So, why not dispense with that, because most of our needs right now are for simple things like fetching data.
There will be those Web 2.0 purists who will smirk at the way IBM is bringing these functions to the market. But consider that enterprises do more integrated collaboration via Notes/Domino than just about any other system. And, importantly, it's a lot easier to bring Web 2.0 functionality into an existing enterprise IT icon, than to bring a Web 2.0 functionality into the enterprise all on its barely surviving start-up greenfield own.
So like the days when Unix was the infrastructure law in the core corporate datacenter (and Windows was only hype-ware there), we may be back to a period where the major transitions have little to do with Microsoft's rate cards. Microsoft will be at an ongoing disadvantage in the commercial-OSS transitional disruption march across back-end servers as long as it has no OSS strategy (other than FUD). And that FUD strategy has just come up wanting.
The acquisition is one of a long string of smaller, often private companies that IBM has been buying to fill out its data lifecycle offerings. As we've said before, getting your data act together is an essential aspect of being able to move to SOA. This purchase seems to buttress that approach.