NEWS&ANALYSIS

ERIC LUNDQUIST: UP FRONT

Staying the courseor not

MEETING PERFORMANCE STANDARDS SOMETIMES MEANS CHANGE
in the business of helping companies manage Consistency. In 1996, their servers, ranging from 500 to 20,000 or IBMs then chairman and more. The more heterogeneous those boxes CEO, Lou Gerstner, set become, and the faster that server farms about codifying the rules built on standard architectures can grow, the and the borders between greater the need for products such as Opsdirect sales and sales wares to manage those systems. through the partner chanWhat happened to Loudclouds original nel. Today, except for some plan? A bad market always beats a good team, relatively minor modificaHorowitz told me. He added that a big comtions, those rules still exist, according to pany shift has to be driven from the top, by a Donn Atkins, general manager of IBMs CEO willing to stop, change direction and lead Global Business Partners. the charge to a better revenue opportunity. Ten years is an eternity in the technology Opsware is not in the hot Google-type pack, but industry, and not stepping on too many toes it now offers a solid service that lots of enterduring a period of industry consolidation, prise companies require. When a big change is channel conflict and strategic shifts is quite needed, dont make little course corrections. an accomplishment. IBMs partner strategy Consistent change. Remember those is very self-governing, Atkins told me over independent application server companies? lunch last week. While there are many conNetDynamics, Kiva, WebLogic and several sultants out there championing change as the others found a technology niche in delivering order of the day, I think there is also a lot to applications to the then-emerging Web and be said for consistency. were soon swallowed up in acquisitions. The relationship between a third-party What those products did in proprietary forsales channel and a technology vendor is only mats is now morphing as good as the trust that into an architecture built can be established. The WHEN A BIG CHANGE IS around standards. only way to establish NEEDED, DONT MAKE LITTLE One of those compatrust is to lay out a plan nies now emerging, for what you are going COURSE CORRECTIONS. ActiveGrid (in San to do and then do it. Francisco, of course), has its roots in the IBM, often viewed as the home of the blueapplication server space. Peter Yared, suit direct-sales force, has been a consistent founder and CEO of ActiveGrid, was the force in growing the channel. By mapping chief technology officer of NetDynamics and out a plan, IBM also stayed away from constayed for several years with Sun after that flicts with channel partners by staying away company acquired NetDynamics. So what is from developing applications and not scoopActiveGrid doing? Think about an applicaing clients away from their partners once tion server built around LAMP (Linux, those clients sales mushroom. Why do busiApache, MySQL and the Pas in PHP, Perl ness consultants always champion change or Pythonof your choice). We saw an when sometimes it is consistency that counts opportunity by adding a lot of enterprise and the most? service-oriented features on top of the LAMP Change. But what do you do when you stack, Yared said in a phone conversation. need to make a big change? In 2002, LoudThe consistent idea of an application server cloud changed its name to Opsware. Loudthat can scale and run at the enterprise level cloud had everything going for it, including a marquee founder name in Marc Andreessen, is merged with the ability to change the underlying technology as standards evolve. first-rate funding sources and an IPO that Perhaps it is at that intersection of consisraised $150 million. The only thing it didnt tency and change where the best new ideas have was customers for its managed hosting evolve. business. Last week, I caught up with Ben Horowitz, president and CEO of Opsware, which will Editor in Chief Eric Lundquist can be reached at probably see $60 million in revenues this year eric_lundquist@ziffdavis.com. 8 eW E E K n DECEMBER 12, 2005

BUSINESS BRIEFS
Intalio acquires FiveSight
INTALIO LAST WEEK ANNOUNCED THE

acquisition of FiveSight Technologies, provider of an open-source implementation of Business Process Execution Language 2.0. Intalio, which calls itself an open-source BPMS (business process management system) company, acquired FiveSight for an undisclosed amount. The pair have a history of working together. BPEL, an OASIS standard, extends the Web services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. Intalio integrated FiveSight technology in its BPMS 4.0, available now through an early-adopter program and generally available in the first quarter of next year, officials said.

SAP buys data integration developer

SAP QUIETLY ACQUIRED A SMALL DATA

integration software developer, Callixa, whose technology SAP will use as a core component of its NetWeaver platform, officials said. Callixas technology centers around helping customers with the overall data challenge, said an SAP spokesperson. The challenge is to get a unified cleanse of data, and in the same way you have to go out and look for data in a number of places. This enables users to get access to data in a number of places. The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, brings to SAP distributed query processing technology that lets developers write queries to disparate data sources and have a unified response returned. The subsequent data is used, in a broad sense, in business intelligence, reporting and analytics applicationsan area SAP and its competitors are targeting.
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