Revenge of Tongue Twisters

I am in Helsinki, Finland today and I have to say I am struggling with the local language a little bit. Google offers a Finnish version of Blogger only and so I am not 100% sure if Tämän blogitekstin luokkatunnisteet is the same as tags selection or what Ohjausnäkymä actually means.

But then I went to a local bar and I saw a name of a Czech beer written on the black board: Velkopopovicky Kozel! I really wonder how the local people manage to order one...

Czech Air Flight 0104

I am glad I did not take this flight on my way to the US last week.

European success at last (.fm)

Look here if you want to see a successful European startup...

Lovely stuff

No more Skoda jokes please...

Three reasons why HP should join NetBeans

1) Competition is good and with the upcoming 6.0 release it is clear that NetBeans is a viable competitor to Eclipse (maybe the only real long term competitor). Support from HP would give NetBeans project more credibility and this open source software would become less dependent on Sun Microsystems.

2) HP Software is focused on the lifecycle approach to automation of IT processes (a.k.a. BTO) and a Java IDE would make the application and service development and testing stages of the lifecycle more developer friendly. NetBeans extensions for quality, SOA, diagnostics and other parts of HP software would fit nicely into this picture.

3) It would make me happy to see the NetBeans and Systinet teams to work together. And I understand that this is not a real reason but it would feel really good...

Who is the Powersoft of the SOA era?

Dennis Byron asks "Who is the Powersoft of the SOA era?" here. Many companies claim that their tool is the PowerBuilder for SOA (BEA WebLogic Workshop, Above All Studio and others). And VCs would love to find and fund the next Powersoft. This means that Powersoft remains an iconic company 13 years after it disappeared. And since I worked with and for Powersoft since 1992 I feel I should write here my version of how Powersoft Corporation became the leader of client/server tools market:

Right time, right place

There were three megatrends happening at the same time in the early nineties:

• PC with MS Windows 3.1,
• Local Area Networks,
• SQL Databases

and Powersoft happened to be right in the middle of these three trends. Several other companies were building c/s development tools at the same time but only Powersoft got it right. It may sound strange from today’s perspective but while the competitive products supported MS Windows as only one of the client operating systems PowerBuilder supported Windows natively. And as the result it was visibly more user friendly.

Technology

The key component of PowerBuilder was an object called DataWindow. DataWindow allowed developers to generate screens and reports quickly without deep understanding of SQL. But the fact that the finished application had to be deployed on every single client machine quickly became a management nightmare - so called "DLL Hell". Powersoft tried to solve some of the problems with the server-side version of PowerBuilder but it was a proprietary solution and the EJB standard did not appear until 1997.

DataWindow was also able to search systables of SQL databases for simple metadata. It was fairly trivial but it worked really well in demo applications. The demo presenter was able to connect to the target database and to build a simple form in the matter of minutes. To the audience that was used to COBOL programming it was “indistinguishable from magic”.

Business model

The biggest weakness of Powersoft was its business model. The company was selling development licenses of PowerBuilder and there were not enough developers in the world to sustain the initial sales growth. And PowerBuilder based application did not generate any runtime revenues at all. Database vendors have much sounder business model - Oracle and Sybase can give away development tools as a loss leader and charge for the deployment of their database. And so it was only a matter of time before one of these companies would acquire Powersoft:

In a surprise announcement officially released at 7:30 a.m., EST, on November 14, 1994, Sybase revealed its plans to acquire Powersoft in an exchange-of-stock deal. With a cash equivalent valuation of approximately $945 million.

Decline

The initial focus on MS Windows that helped the company so much initially became a liability by 1995 when Netscape went public and application developers started to move to the web. There was an attempt to build a Netscape DataWindow plug-in but it was obvious that Powersoft days are over. Only 10 months after Sybase spent over $900M! Some of the people behind PowerBuilder tried to repeat the success at SilverStream. I happened to be one of the early investors in SilverStream but I did not like what I saw and I decided to build NetBeans instead.

Conclusion

I don’t believe there will be a Powersoft of SOA era - company worth a billion dollar based on $3,000 development tool. And the main reason may be the need for standardization that makes the differentiation much more difficult these days. But who wouldn't want to build the next Powersoft?

Q&A: SOA and BPM

I will be speaking in London on Tuesday about SOA @ HP to a group of 20+ European journalists and I am getting ready for some potential questions. One of the questions in my Q&A document is this one: What is the relationship between SOA and BPM?

I've heard this question many times before and every big SOA vendor has the same answer:

1. SOA creates a set of services (ESB, network, fabric...) and these services are orchestrated by some clever BPM tool.
2. BPM is for business people, SOA is for techies.

I absolutely disagree and this is why I was happy to read these two posts from Steve Jones yesterday. Here is a quote: "for most Services the concept of "Goals" will be more useful than the concept of "Process" ". It really brought back the memories of Radovan's controversial business process blogging in 2003 and 2004.

So I know how I want to answer the BPM question on Tuesday and I can move on to the next potential question: What is HP's acquisition strategy in the SOA area? Hmmm, I don't think I will be blogging about this one...