With its Rational User Software Developer Conference just two weeks away, IBM still managed to pump out 5444 words (count ‘em) of news announcements this Tuesday to coincide with its Pulse Service Management event being held in Orlando from 18 to 22 May.

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Image: courtesy of Morguefile.com

Within this smorgasbord of press morsels was news of updates to IBM’s eco-friendly Project Big Green, which was announced in May 2007. The latest improvements ("Software for a Greener World") are directed at server-based technologies and according to IBM are designed to help monitor corporate energy consumption and control carbon emissions by using Tivoli software products in the data centre.

"While most people think of energy conservation from a hardware perspective, increasingly it is actually software that is providing more options to go green across the entire organisation,” said Al Zollar, general manager, Tivoli Software, IBM.

Fanfare please…

When you’re as big as Big Blue, you don’t just “announce”, “launch” and “roll out” news – steady now, IBM has “declared a new era” for IT industrialisation. I’m jealous, can I declare a new era sometime please? Enough silliness – this news is concerned with how, much like the assembly line and automation that transformed the automobile and telecommunications industries over the past century, IT operations are ripe for industrialisation.

In Zollars words: The industrialisation of IT operations includes a process of continuous innovation that uses automation and best practices to link together the phases of designing, delivering and managing IT systems.

Right that’s the starter (sorry, Entrée) and first course out of the way – onto main course.

IBM also used the Pulse Conference to announce new service management offerings (in the form of both new software and new services) designed to help (and this is an IBM favourite) business and IT processes to support overall business goals while creating a greater view of the assets and applications that support those goals.

IBM Tivoli Software’s Zollar was there again saying, "Just like Henry Ford did with the manufacture of automobiles in the early 19th Century, the goal of IBM Service Management is to industrialise services by streamlining workflows and processes to provide repeatable, scalable and consistent high-quality results."

There was also Tivoli process automation platform news, change and configuration management database news, fresh security product announcements, enterprise asset management and service request technologies to talk about – and heck, I didn’t even go to the show. However, I will be at the Rational User Software Developer Conference from 1 to 5 June and I hope my show blog and news reports will make good reading.

So there you have it – well, there you have about 444 words instead of 5444. If you’re keen on finding the other 5000, you know where they are.

Just as ‘Whatever happened to the likely lads’? was the colour sequel to the original 1960s BBC sitcom – so it seems some technology companies can successfully reinvent themselves and ride the economic boom and bust cycles for the long term.

Prime candidate for surviving what are often popularly described as ‘disruptive technology waves’ is of course Intel. Andy Grove had a term for this; he referred to ‘strategic inflexion points’ in technological development in his book Only the Paranoid Survive. (NB: I’ve read it, it really is quite a good book).

As we all know by now, Grove re-positioned the company’s manufacturing focus by orchestrating the firm's pivotal shift from memory chips to microprocessors during the 1980s. He understood that large shifts in market dynamics can happen and that if you can pre-empt them, you can also be instrumental in their development to benefit your own commercial advantage.

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So anyway, here’s the point of my blog. Every year (since 2004) I get invited to attend Sybase’s developer symposium, the nautically titled TechWave. On more than one occasion I’ve been chatting to my developer journo peers in London just before heading stateside and heard the comment, “Oh really – whatever happened to Sybase?”

These comments are of course usually levied as a casual jibe with a touch of friendly rivalry designed to make me stop and think – are they jealous I got that trip or do they really think I’m flying 11 hours for nothing? After all, you get the same stick for going to Microsoft PDC and I’m sorry, but that is a good event. But aside from that, taking it as a given that Sybase is as guilty as the next vendor of marketing hype – it’s probably quite unfair and may in fact mask a deeper truth.

Back in the nineties, the company looked to be going the same way as Informix (in terms of database companies limping along) but managed to keep its head above water largely by repositioning its product portfolio and making a series of good acquisitions. I was at an Embarcadero dinner some time back and the UK chief kept harping on about ‘robustness’ until I challenged him on the point and used Sybase’s acquisition of Afaria as an example of database stability (and therefore ‘robustness’ I suppose) – and he didn’t have an answer for me.

The financial reports show that Sybase is a billion dollar entity. So why are they so quiet? They sell a huge amount to the defence sector, so maybe they have to be.

They also sell big chunks of kit to the financial markets – and I saw a story this week about the launch of a new “offering” called RAP – The Trading Edition. (Next wait for RAP – The Movie… and RAP – The Theme-Park Ride presumably!) This is a market analytics platform that, “Lets capital markets firms make better trading, risk and portfolio decisions with less risk through timelier, more comprehensive market insight,” – it says here.

Enough of that, you can read up on it on the web if you’re interested – I thought the wider issue of corporate reinvention in the IT industry was of more interest.

With the government discussing plans to build a huge database to log every e-mail, text message and phone call we make – database development for defence could just be about to witness a massive upswing, you might even call it a strategic inflexion point if you really wanted to.

The still-nascent virtualisation market appears to be building additional layers on an almost daily basis at the moment with key players rolling out new products in a drive to ensure that momentum is upheld.

VMware’s latest enhancements to its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure product were announced late this Monday. The company says that the new offering works with Sun Microsystems’ Sun Ray software
and virtual display clients to create a desktop virtualisation environment that can replace traditional PCs with virtual machines that are managed and centralised in a single data centre.

According to VMware, this style of virtualisation deployment is especially effective over wide area networks (WANs), which might include remote users, enterprise branch offices or offshore developers. The solution utilises Sun’s Appliance Link Protocol (ALP), a bitmap-based display technology designed to work with virtual desktops over networks with high latency.

Happy to go on the record and talk about their deployment of this virtualisation package is the University of Maryland. Located close to the US capital and the National Security Agency headquarters, the university is a major public research body which serves more than 36,000 students and employs more than 12,000 staff.

According to a statement from VMware, the University’s facilities management function, which supports over 400 desktops, selected VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Sun Ray Software and virtual display clients to ‘improve’ desktop manageability, lower IT costs and develop desktop accessibility.

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“As a major research university, it’s critical that our students, faculty and staff get access to the applications they need, when they need them,” said Jim Maloney, network operations manager for the University of Maryland. “This joint solution has helped us significantly reduce the time we spend managing our growing desktop infrastructure as well as cut down on energy costs through virtualisation.”

VMware says that the combination of Sun Ray Software and virtual display clients to a VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure deployment provides the added benefits of using a client that has no operating system and so reduces the chance of malware attacks.

As part of a VMware and Sun OEM agreement covering this technology, Sun has stated that it will take on the role of providing frontline support for this joint solution.

If everybody had a mobile – across the USA… OK, I’ll stop there. Actually, I’m not much of a Beach Boys fan. But betwixt a number of US-based events as I am, I think I’m more acutely aware of the ability to keep online on the go. I actually found myself in ‘Best Buy’ last night sizing up the Asus against the 10 and 11 inch screen rivals from Sony, Acer etc… yes, I know, I’m waiting for the Atom-powered Asus too.

Anyway, the need to stay connected (and follow Bristol City’s inexorable rise to the Premiership playoffs of course) has never been higher for many of us – and in many cases this means web on mobile. I did a research piece on Africa late last year and spoke to an excellent chap from the GSM association called Gabriel Solomon – he asserted that for many people in the poorer nations, a mobile device would be all the computing power they would see for the foreseeable future.

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But the web on a small screen (a handheld I mean) is a pain isn’t it? Web 2.0-powered collaboration software is even encroaching on this space with the likes of IBM and RIM partnering up for all they’re worth.

Apparently, eMarketer (nope, I’ve never heard of them either – a web market research and trend analysis outfit by all accounts) forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012. No major surprise then to see this kind of info sitting close to reports that this year more people in the world will have a mobile device than a landline telephone.

IBM's Institute for Business Value predicts one billion mobile web users by 2011 and a significant shift in the way the majority of people will interact with the web over the next decade.

Big deal, I hate mobiles, small device form factor web search sucks and anyway, I’m a database administrator and I sit at a high-end workstation or desktop machine for 80 per cent of my working life – I hear you say.

As I’ve said before, the trends point to suggest that if you are a developer – you are therefore a mobile developer. All applications migrate in some form to the mobile device. Deference and respect to my pal Neil Roodyn in Australia for writing that in a piece he worked on with me once.

So, you don’t do mobile. Maybe not yet, but soon maybe? Big Blue is stoking up the fires that drive its WebSphere portal and its latest dashboard software, according to IBM, allows you to build web sites and single screen dashboard views for pumping data out to various apps and processes for mobile devices.

Completing the circle here is the fact that this type of technology is designed to appeal. It has the potential draw you in even if you don’t think you’ll enjoy using it. If it’s web 2.0-powered collaboration software personalised to your individual BlackBerry – chances are, you might find it handy.

Or as the Germans might say: mein handy ist handlich!

With Sun pushing JavaFX Desktop 1.0 out into the Rich Internet Application space last week (and Microsoft’s Silverlight & Adobe’s AIR already out there), the blending of the web with the desktop has never been such a hot topic. It’s no big surprise then to see a whole barrel of publicity surrounding cross-platform application frameworks being talked about.

This is the kind of technology that is purported to enable developers to create applications that blend content from the web itself into native desktop and mobile applications. The goal being, ideally, to create a consistent user experience across Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems (and on mobile devices too) so that we all stay happy.

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As wary as we should all be of any company claiming to hold the ‘de facto standard’ in any field (is Bud really the “King” of beers I wonder?), the company grabbing more than their fare share of headlines in this space is Trolltech with its cutely named “Qt” product.

Trolltech says that it is striving to provide a common framework to deliver applications and services across both desktops and devices. The company’s recent 4.4 release now also embraces devices running Windows Embedded CE. This means that cross-platform in this sense now embodies devices from smartphones and barcode readers to consumer products like set-top boxes and digital picture frames.

The analysts seem to be behind this. “The market is continually creating a higher bar for deploying increasingly graphically rich applications on a multitude of different devices,” said Al Hilwa, program director at IDC. “Giving developers a single platform for development across desktop operating systems and embedded platforms can help speed the timely process of taking code from desktop to desktop, desktop to embedded, or embedded to embedded.”

An interesting (I hope) final point is that Qt 4.4 is available under Trolltech’s standard dual-licensing approach and for developers creating open source applications, it is available under the GPL (both version 2 and 3).