While he was in Austin, I asked Damon Edwards to give us an overview of how DTO Solutions has been doing – including Run Deck – and the continuing evolution of DevOps.

If you want to see the luggage we talk about in the opening, here’s a quick picture.

Overview

Demo

Disclosure: SmartBear sponsored this video.

Recently, ServiceNow has been integrating “social” into its service desk and IT Management suite. This means having chat among IT staff and end-users, activity streams that fold together the usual updates with tickets and parts of IT pitching in their state. On-top of this ServiceNow is evolving the UI to track the metaphors you’d expect from a web app.

ServiceNow’s Rob Phillips gives us a quick overview of all this in the interview above, and then a quick demo of the features in action below:

Be sure to put the viewer in HD mode if you’d like finer detail.

For more on the recent ServiceNow Knowledge11 conference, see my trip report.

Transcript – Overview

Michael Coté: Hello everybody! Here we are in lovely San Diego at the ServiceNow Knowledge11 Conference, the User Conference for ServiceNow.com. And as always, this is Michael Coté with RedMonk. And to go over some of the newer stuff in ServiceNow, I have a guest with me.

Do you want to introduce yourself?

Rob Phillips: Sure! I’m Rob Phillips. I’m the Director of Solution Strategy at ServiceNow.

Michael Coté: And we’re just coming out of the keynote that you guys had this morning with the great pantsless IT guy as I remember. There was an excellent cartoon kind of — it was a nice way of portraying the evolution of IT.

Rob Phillips: Yeah.

Michael Coté: And along those lines, I mean there’s kind of two clusters of things that you guys went over in the keynote and have been talking about and we’re going talk about. And the first one is this idea of Social IT, if you will, and the second is, you guys have, kind of unlike a lot of enterprise application vendors, you’re sort of spending a lot of time on the UI, and improving the end-user experience, rather than necessarily worrying about the stakeholders and the managers and everything.

We’re going to take a look at a demo of some of this stuff. But before that, I just wanted to get a sense of what those two areas are from you. So why don’t we start with the more abstract idea of Social IT? What exactly is Social IT to you guys?

Rob Phillips: Well, I mean, so we’re seeing the adoption of social behavior with technology all over the world, I mean, we saw the stat this morning; there’s 6.8 billion people in the world and there’s five plus billion mobile subscriptions out there today. So the adoption of mobile technologies and social technologies is ramping. And we think that there is a very obvious transition of that type of interaction from the consumer space into the corporate space, which has really been a driver for us.

So starting to leverage more small pieces of information, readily available, Twitterfall types of data in the context of IT management can be very, very relevant for managing systems, or having individuals collaborate with one another, and perhaps help themselves rather than having to go seek an individual IT person to resolve issues.

Michael Coté: It sounds like part of what you’re saying is — there’s these wacky consumer technologies like Twitter and Facebook and all these things, and you’re almost talking about getting a real-time feed –

Rob Phillips: Yes.

Michael Coté: — if you will, of stuff happening in IT and kind of putting it in front of various IT staff.

Rob Phillips: That’s right. And it’s being proved that wacky is probably not the right term, it’s mainstream, right. So I mean Facebook is the third largest country in the world. So I don’t think these are outliers any longer, this is the way people communicate today.

Michael Coté: When you’re looking at these non-wacky things, if you will —

Rob Phillips: Right.

Michael Coté: — from the consumer world, I mean, what — there’s numerous technologies or practices or whatever you want to call that you can kind of pluck from that consumer space. And for you guys, what are sort of the top things that you’re trying to repurpose for a business enterprise setting in ServiceNow?

Rob Phillips: I think from day one, the inception of our company in 2004, we were very inspired by what we saw in consumer space. And this talks about the user interface area. When you look at, in those days, My Google or My Yahoo! or, iGoogle or the Gmail application that was just coming out, we see a tremendous simplification of the interface, so it’s very easy to use and yet ,still offers a lot of power and flexibility in the back-end tool. And we’ve seen more and more of that inspiration throughout the years with tools like Mint.com certainly in a lot of the social interfaces.

So it’s interesting the trend has really been this consumerization in the enterprise. Employees go home at night and they use all these tools, they use Amazon to shop, and then they come to work, and the company presents to them a piece of Soviet era technology with hundreds of fields on the screen, it’s unusable, and so truly, the users are revolting. They’re simply not using the tools that have been presented to them; they’re going around the process. We talked this morning about Shadow IT, because the tools were so inflexible and unusable, they’re just going outside of the corporation to get the help they need.

So for us, simplicity is a driving force; we’re always trying to bring the inspiration from the consumer space into the enterprise interface.

Michael Coté: I guess one thing I come across is the sort of overwhelming –like you’re going to point this fire hose of information at me. One thing is like if had a, Twitter like feed hooked up to my service desk, like how do I stop from being buried by all the stuff that’s going to happen? Or like you had a demo this morning of live chat –

Rob Phillips: Right.

Michael Coté: — and if there’s 50 people trying to live chat with me at once, like how do I deal with that?

Rob Phillips: Yeah, so I think there are different notions. There is a skill associated with some of this. From a chat perspective, we’re going to give you the ability to route chats based on a variety of methods so that as you’re managing a queue, generally you have a team of individuals that manage your queue, and so as new chats come in, you can pick those out of the queue at will, or route them to different groups based on the context.

As a consumer of the information, we see this heavily in Twitter today; yeah, if you’ve ever pointed your browser directly at the true open Twitter feed, there’s — I mean, I can’t remember the numbers; a million tweets per thirty seconds or something are appearing there. So obviously, you can’t consume that knowledge.

So it really comes down to being able to segment the information; generally we do this by following people. And so in our system you can follow someone you’re interested in hearing what they have to say. But because we’re built on the ServiceNow platform that does all this other IT management, I can also follow documents, I could follow an incident. If I saw that something was broken and I want to understand when it’s resolved, I can simply follow that incident to see when it’s fixed.

I can follow business services. If I commonly use an application like SAP, maybe I want to follow that to see when planned outages are going to occur.

So it’s being selective around the types of people and pieces of data that you follow.

Michael Coté: It sounds like, I mean there’s a traditional routing and rules engine behind any service testing that’s trying to get the need of a user, of a user of IT to the right person, and also, to some extent, load balance the people who are replying to them correctly. But there’s also the; I don’t know, the notion of like; I don’t even know what to call it, but sort of over time you build up this big filter of stuff that you follow and unfollow that you’re interested in.

Rob Phillips: Right. So I think it’s that, and then, but then democratizing the information and giving the broad user base the ability to go and search the entire data store at will, they can do that through keywords, or like Twitter, we use hash tags. So the ability to find that data very, very rapidly, I think will be tremendously appealing to the audience.

Michael Coté: The other group of things that you guys are doing, I guess later this summer, if I remember, is – there were some nice demonstrations in the keynote this morning; there’s a lot of UI or UX or Usability improvements.

Rob Phillips: Right, right.

Michael Coté: And it was kind of fun being in the large tent with all the people because they were getting very excited about what seemed like, to an outsider, very basic things that you’re changing arount.

Rob Phillips: Agreed. Yeah.

Michael Coté: But it is, I guess with business software, you don’t always have those basic UI things necessarily. And all of that said — can you give us just an overview before we see the demo of what these UI changes are oriented around?

Rob Phillips: One thing that certainly has changed from even just a few years ago when we started writing the software to today, is that the screen resolution has dramatically increased. I mean, I think I just looked at a new iMac desktop recently and the native resolution was something like 2500-2600 pixels. Just a few years ago, it was 10.4.

So, and many of our customers who manage high volumes of tickets have perhaps two of those monitors sitting on their desk. So we wanted to take the opportunity to use some of the screen real estate more effectively, so I’ll show you some examples of how we can split the data, multiple panes within our software.

Additionally, over the years, we’ve continued to broaden horizontally the application set that we offer. So as a subscriber to ServiceNow, you may have initially signed up for our service to do something tactical like incident management or change management. But over the years, we’ve actually broadened the offering, and our customers have access to all this, be it cost management, or project management, or IT governance.

So what’s occurred is that the navigation of the system has gotten a bit unwieldy. There’s a lot of accordion type menus all over the place –

Michael Coté: A lot of trees of stuff.

Rob Phillips: A lot of trees of stuff. And so what we found is that most individual users have four or five or ten things they frequently click on, much like in a browser you have bookmarks.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

Rob Phillips: And so we wanted to create a UI that allows you to drag bookmarks or favorites to a quickly accessible interface, just simplifying the number of clicks to navigate.

Michael Coté: One thing I wanted to clarify is, these bookmarks that you mentioned, they’re sort of saving the state of the screen and also where you are in the application; sort of like a filter of things you’re looking at.

Rob Phillips: Sure! That’s right. Yeah.

Michael Coté: Okay. Well, great! Well, I mean, with that overview, let’s check out a demo of what this stuff actually looks like.

Rob Phillips: Okay. Sounds good!

Transcript – Demo

Michael Coté: All right! Well, here’s a quick demo of the Social IT stuff in ServiceNow.com and also the user interface improvements that will be coming later this summer.

Rob Phillips: So here I’m actually looking at more of a customer front-end or an end-user interface that allows them to interact with the IT department. And from here, a pretty familiar type of scenario –So I can simply chat with the helpdesk. So if I have an issue, I can tell them, hey, SAP looks like it’s down. I will get a response back from the system automatically with, thanks for submitting, you’re currently at this position in the queue and it’s going to take about this long to get to you; that’s all dynamically calculated.

On the other side of the fence, a technician would be monitoring their chat desktop. And so here I can see I’ve got a queue of chat requests coming in, and I can simply answer this chat request and communicate with the user. So I can ask questions like which client are using, is it the Web or is it the desktop, and capture information that’s needed to assess, hey, is this just a, maybe a question the user has or is this truly some type of issue or incident as we would call it in ITIL that needs to be resolved.

If it’s the latter, then right from the chat, I can go ahead and create an incident record in ServiceNow’s incident application. That link is posted back to end-user, and I can click out to this incident.

So now as a technician, continue resolving the issue. So I might go ahead and do some triaging here, figure out what the root of the problem is. And perhaps we realize that truly this SAP system is down, so this is a critical incident. And I can also see all the chat activity here.

Michael Coté: So the chat is linked to this ticket.

Rob Phillips: Yeah, so all the context is now included in this single incident document, and so I’ll go ahead and just save those updates.

What we commonly find at this point in big organizations is that someone goes and spins up a bridge phone number, right, and a half-dozen or a dozen people dial into this conference call and they’re communicating about resolving this priority one incident. But it’s challenging because as someone joins the call late, now we have to reiterate what was already said, and so we spend a lot of time bringing up individuals with the status.

Instead, why don’t we just create a chat room? So right from the context of the incident, I can create a new room, I can automatically invite people that are perhaps from the group I’ve assigned to resolve the issue or select individuals out of the user list, and create this room. They’ll get emails inviting them to the room or I can just post them this URL. And then the room here will allow us to all join into a cohesive conversation; I could scroll up, scroll down as updates are made to the resolution of the incident.

Michael Coté: And this is all – you’re in full-screen mode here, but this is also in a Web browser essentially, right?

Rob Phillips: Yeah. We are entirely browser-capable, we’re agnostic to — I’m using Chrome on a Mac –we don’t care what browser you use, there is no plug-ins or any kind of controls that need to be brought in. I think everybody gets chat; it’s a natural progression for the helpdesk and the service desk to have this capability at their fingertips.

Another application here that is very social in nature is this concept of what we call live feed. And this is very much lifted from a Facebook type of interface, from Twitter types of Twitterfalls for information. And so here you can see in fact, some folks who are just finished up the keynote as you said, some folks took some pictures of that keynote as it was occurring. So very collaborative, I can –

Michael Coté: So might take a picture of the SAP server that’s down.

Rob Phillips: Yeah, that would be sad. Someone might do that, hopefully smoke wasn’t rolling out of it. And just like social applications, I’m sure everyone has used before, I can participate in this conversation dynamically. I can like something, I can tag it so that I can quickly search for information later, I can obviously reply to the post here. We rolled this out internally at ServiceNow a couple of months ago, and to be honest, I was astounded at the adoption we saw throughout our company.

We’re still a small company today but growing extremely fast. And so the ability for our global employees to communicate and ask questions and have access to information as they’re ramping up in the company feed has just been stunning to me. It’s also amazing to see just by putting this into a social opt-in kind of flow, how interactive people become. If someone asked you a question on email, you probably ignore it.

Michael Coté: Right.

Rob Phillips: Something about the rewarding aspect of participating in this kind of feed is compelling.

Michael Coté: And internally, I mean, we kind of can get a sense from looking at the screen. But what are the types of things people are using this feed for? I mean, like what shows up on this a lot?

Rob Phillips: All right! I think that’s going to be interesting to see over time, I see sort of two divides. There are some organizations like ours where we’re truly using this as a corporate collaboration tool. So there are systems like Yammer for example, it’s very much a Facebook within the corporate firewall, and I think we would be a great solution in that space.

Additionally, I have organizations that focus very specifically on IT. So really maybe IT are the only folks that are exchanging information here, great way for them to communicate collaboratively. And as you see here, the incident that I just created about SAP being out, automatically posted to the wall to alert anyone in the audience that hey, this system is down; we already know about it, you don’t need to call us. And as I said, I can just follow this document, so that I’ll see updates to its resolution.

So it becomes another kind of communication mechanism rather than having to use email as the only way to speak to the audience.

Michael Coté: All right! It’s sort of a virtual way to do management by walking around essentially.

Rob Phillips: Right.

Michael Coté: Sort of seeing what’s happening.

Rob Phillips: Right.

Michael Coté: — with all your robots posting to it, and then your actual people.

Rob Phillips: Yeah, any type of document can post. So if a business service, for example, is going to be upgraded or had a planned outage, I can have that post to the wall as well. So it’s exciting for us as we’ve just recently released this technology to see the adoption and how people use it within the enterprise.

And then just lastly, I would focus maybe a little bit on the UI enhancements that we’ve been making. So here is an example of a typical screen in ServiceNow. You’ve got this huge queue of records of data, and we provide you some nice little features where you can hover these records to get a snapshot without having to leave the list context. But with huge resolutions, you just, you have a lot of wasted space, so we introduce the notion of a split. So now you can split the pane and get more real estate, I can navigate still through this list, move these sliders around, I can do this vertically as well.

Michael Coté: All right!

Rob Phillips: And then again, it’s all about real estate, you can collapse the header. We had this navigator out here previously, and as I mentioned, this thing just starts to get a bit unwieldy as you get more and more links. And so I can now come in and say, I do change management, I want to have, at a single click, a report or an overview available to me. I can just click anywhere and drag that to this left pane that we just introduced. We’re much inspired by the RockMelt browser or Asana. So now I can click on this and drill out to that detail.

Michael Coté: Yeah, you can like save your setup if you will.

Rob Phillips: Yeah, and — virtually anything can be dragged out to this pane including filters and reports, live feed is a great example. And not only can they drive the main browser area here, but I can do something called a fly-out which allows me to leave the context in the background untouched and yet have access to data that’s relevant. For example, if I’m very frequently working on that critical incident, I can just fly that out, make updates to it, click off of it, and continue doing the rest of my work.

Michael Coté: You’ve somehow managed to create nice looking dashboards without saying the word dashboard.

Rob Phillips: Yeah, right, right. And then the nav just goes away. We’re going to be completing some development on more of these panels or edges throughout the application set. So we’ll have an edge on the right-hand side of the browser which has all of your chat contacts and your buddy lists.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

Rob Phillips: So we think this is a very compelling way to have your workspace front and center, and all of the cursory information that you need a single-click way.

Michael Coté: So also learning from the consumer space, so that there are very sort of little buttons on the edge of those things that other people can contribute or is there sort of plug-ins that people might be able to add or –?

Rob Phillips: Yeah, you can create, so for example, this navigation — really anything you see in the application is editable. So if you wanted to create new types of documents that you then post here, that absolutely could be extended.

Michael Coté: Yeah, so you can allow the ServiceNow community to kind of come up with fun little widgets.

Rob Phillips: Yeah.

Michael Coté: All right! Well, that as a nice quick demo of the new stuff that you guys have there. It’s great! Thanks for spending all this time.

Rob Phillips: All right! Thank you very much.

Disclosure: ServiceNow is a client and sponsored this video.

With the rise in popularity of Jenkins/Hudson, I’ve been wondering what happened with Cruise Control, the break-through project that helped bring continuous integration to programming. Charles Lowell of The Frontside tells us his theory.

In addition to viewing the video above, you can download it directly or subscribe to the make all podcast feed to get it automatically downloaded.

Transcript

As usual with these un-sponsored episodes, I haven’t spent time to clean up the transcript. If you see us saying something crazy, check the original audio first.

Michael Coté: So Charles, Jenkins very popularly used to be called Hudson.

Charles Lowell: Great!

Michael Coté: And yet there was CruiseControl. Why — I don’t want to say failed, but why — how did Jenkins, how was the space created that Jenkins took over from CruiseControl?

Charles Lowell: Well, let me start by answering the question with two words or talk two words but with one sentence, and then go on to expound for, I think, but you got your answer already. I think this thing just works when you like install it. You can download Jenkins and you’re up and running in about thirty seconds, whereas CruiseControl never was that. It was always a pain in the ass to get up and configure and blah, blah, blah and, I mean, I lost track of it.

But certainly while I was at ThoughtWorks, it started out as an ENDscript and a con job, right, and kind of snowballed from there and it was never kind of brought around from project to project and there was kind of good contributions from each place but it wasn’t ever — at least in my experience, a coherent project so much as an idea. And there were bunch of implementations on that idea.

And the thing is this, because it was for the people, it owned it, and in this case I’m thinking ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorkers, it pretty much worked on –

Michael Coté: Quite a lot of extra –

Charles Lowell: I mean pretty much work but they were familiar with that. So setting it up on — at the beginning of each project wasn’t a lot of overhead in a grand scheme of things. It’s a couple three days or something, but you’ve done it a bunch and — so there’s no need to invest and package it so that it’s — so that it’s –

Michael Coté: So it wasn’t sort of like a product.

Charles Lowell: — that’s; yeah, it was never a product. I mean there was trend — it was, like you said, they were rumblings now making into a product, but I think that it was definitely more of an idea, and a very successful idea that was thought.

Michael Coté: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was — if I remember, it was, if I may use the word, it was kind of revolutionary in that sense, it was like oh, continuous integration.

Charles Lowell: Right.

Michael Coté: Huh.

Charles Lowell: Right. And so I guess that’s –

Michael Coté: And it just never evolved beyond that.

Charles Lowell: It never evolved into –

Michael Coté: — beyond a collection of scripts, as we would say, in the IT management world. There’s this distinction between, you’d get a bunch of products to monitor things, and it’s just a bunch of scripts. And then at some point, those scripts turn into a product.

Charles Lowell: Right.

Michael Coté: And I guess CruiseControl was sort of a downloadable thing that you could get up and running, but what you’re saying is it just didn’t get polished as well as later on, and then Hudson, then later we name Jenkins came in, and sort of polished this up.

Charles Lowell: And up and without having anything to build or anything knowing how to build it, you just –

Michael Coté: And there’s lots of other continuous integration tools out there, but that’s the one that you prefer.

Charles Lowell: It’s very — it’s pretty much to me just; can I use another buzzword “Zero Configuration”?

Michael Coté: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Charles Lowell: You don’t have to configure a database.

Michael Coté: Did you know that?

Charles Lowell: — no dependencies; in the simplest case, there’s no dependencies, no configurations.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I think — did you know that Apple’s Bonjour thing was supposed to be called Zeroconf I think. But I think someone had a trademark on it so they couldn’t call it that.

Charles Lowell: Oh, is that what it is?

Michael Coté: — or something like that.

Charles Lowell: I thought Bonjour was Apple’s implementation of Zeroconf.

Michael Coté: Who knows.

Charles Lowell: Who knows.

Michael Coté: Bonjour!

Charles Lowell: Good evening!

Michael Coté: Well, thanks for the history lesson, Charles.

Charles Lowell: Yeah.

Who’d have thought you’d hear about server-side JavaScript programming in the context of ITIL and service desk? That’s exactly what we get in this interview with John Roberts of ServiceNow. We discuss how they built the Knowledge11 portal on-top of the ServiceNow stack. You can use your imagination to see how this might map to other PaaS development on service-now.com.

For a wrap-up of the Knowledge11 conference, check out my trip-report.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Hello everybody! Here we are in lovely San Diego at the Knowledge11 ServiceNow User Conference. And as always this is Michael Coté with RedMonk. And I’ve got a guest with myself. Do you want to introduce yourself?

John Roberts: Sure! I’m John Roberts. I’m a developer with ServiceNow. I’ve been with the company for almost four years now. I started the first couple of years in professional services and now I’m in the development team.

Michael Coté: So around this, around this conference, you guys came up with the Knowledge Conference Portal.

John Roberts: Yes.

Michael Coté: Usually for a conference, you have things that list the sessions and things like that, but can you give us a sense of what the Knowledge Conference Portal is, what purpose it’s serving for the conference here?

John Roberts: Sure! First of all, a little bit of background. Last year, Knowledge 10 Conference, our CMS platform was kind of the bigger announcements or the new features, the CMS plug-in allows us to build customized user interface and not have to settle with the interface that we give you by default. So people have used it to style their own instance to look like their corporate website and things like that.

Michael Coté: All right.

John Roberts: So in Knowledge10, we were announcing that platform and so we really wanted to showcase it, and we thought what better way to showcase it than make our Knowledge Conference Portal built on top of our CMS platform.

What makes a platform so nice to build on top of, I want to add a new table, I want Knowledge Conference agenda records; I want meet an expert records. The platform itself makes it very easy to build this platform up into an application. So we didn’t have a conference management application, but we knew the data types we wanted; and just like a customer would in their own instance when they want to have a custom application for their business, we just decided what does a data structure look like? Let’s build a table to house all the session information, what are the schedules, who is running it? And then the same thing with the expert; what is a simple data structure? We need an expert, we need a time, and we need an attendee to be able to book it.

So in all of that we leverage the same technology that our customers have access to, to build out custom applications very easily. And then again we use the CMS platform to just present that in a prettier format.

Michael Coté: If I was building some other thing on top of the ServiceNow platform — I don’t know, arranging who can take out the golf carts that they have in this lovely resort here or something, scheduling a resource like a golf cart…

So it sounds like from the way you’re describing it, I don’t know if this is the only way, but a way to start is that you basically define the data model if you will – the tables.

John Roberts: Yeah, what information do you need? What do you want to store? would be the first thing? Once you understand what do you want to capture for information, it’s very easy for our admins to — customer admins even — to build that table structure. You don’t have to understand a lot about database models, you don’t have to understand database language; all through our user interface, you can define, I need a table name and I want these field names on it.

Michael Coté: Right.

John Roberts: And then you just start filling out the forms just like you would with any other record in the system. So it’s relatively easy to build out that data structure.

So then the next step would be, like you mentioned, what do we want to do with that data. And there is a number of ways we have automation we can build onto the backend of the system, and then we have user-facing automation. I need a button on this form to do something; I pull up a golf cart and I want to book it. I’ve built a button to mark it as reserved, something like that.

Michael Coté: And then that might be a field in the table row that’s like –

John Roberts: Yeah, is it booked or not.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Charlie cart is reserved or whatever.

John Roberts: Yes.

Michael Coté: I don’t know what the name of the carts here. Is there actual like programming that you’re doing, like code that you’re writing, or is it more wiring things together or what is –

John Roberts: It’s a little bit of everything. So in the simplest case, if you want a very simple application, you can perform some of this functionality or the logic that drives changing the data structure with really no scripting. We have things like UI Actions and UI Policies that make it easy to define logical changes through the user interface without having to script too much.

But most people that’s simple model really doesn’t do a lot for them, so we have a variety of ways where people can script changes to the data structure. So we have both. We support server-side and Web-based client-side scripting to manipulate the data.

Michael Coté: And then what’s the language you guys use for that?

John Roberts: It’s JavaScript.

Michael Coté: So you run JavaScript on the server and the client side?

John Roberts: Yes.

Michael Coté: Oh, yeah, yeah. Now that makes sense; I mean there’s — with things node.js and things like that, like there is this crazy renewed enthusiasm for JavaScript on the server side. I remember I evaluated the Netscape something or another that ran JavaScript on the server side, and people said that was madness, back in the late 90’s or whatever.

But it’s fun to see. What I like about that model is, if you can get over the fact that it’s JavaScript which for older folks this is sort of like shocking, I guess. It’s like people wearing short-pants or something…

John Roberts: Yeah.

Michael Coté: But it does seem like you can have like one language on both sides, which is sort of crazy to think about.

John Roberts: Right.

Michael Coté: It’s sort of like the UI wins over the backend almost.

John Roberts: Yes.

Michael Coté: Is there like an IDE that people have or like where does it actually take place?

John Roberts: It actually takes place right inside the application, right inside of the normal user environment that the end-users are performing their function in. The admins have a slightly different view and access to more of the behind-the-scenes records, the configuration records.

So once an admin logs in, if they wanted to define say server-side scripting actions, they would use a business rule typically that processes that logic against one or more records. So through a business rule form, they would have access to a script field. And in there they would just write their script; it’s not an IDE interface, it’s right in the application.

We do have some support for which objects are available and that’s one of the areas we’re improving right now to make that — the script fields a little more intelligent so maybe we have some context where we could do some type ahead, and what methods are available on a certain object. So we’re trying to make that a little bit smarter.

Michael Coté: Continuing part of the portal that you built, so I imagine the agenda then there was some mixture of retrieving those events through some service from the database.

John Roberts: Right.

Michael Coté: And then doing some JavaScript and HTML and stuff to render it. I mean just basically render the table.

John Roberts: Yes. That’s exactly it. So we’ve got the CMS that allows us to write an HTML front-end that doesn’t look like our application, the standard application. We’ve got the agenda sessions sitting on the backend database, and through our normal interface, we can certainly display that list of sessions. It just doesn’t look as pretty in a CMS; we wanted to really make it look like an HTML website, not a list within our application.

Michael Coté: Right.

John Roberts: So what we basically did in this case, we had to do some customization, some of it’s a little more advanced and something we call a UI page, where we leverage XML files using Jelly language that allows us to render data on the backend, configuration, and output that into HTML format.

Michael Coté: So generalizing this is a little bit, it seems like this is basically the way that you would customize anything in ServiceNow. You’re using similar ‘patterns’ is the wrong word, a similar approach, if you will.

John Roberts: Absolutely, yeah, it is. One of the other areas that’s kind of interesting still in the Knowledge Conference Portal is our automatic provision of instances, which is pretty interesting. So all of the lab sessions that we have, we give all the attendees their dedicated instance that they play with, so people aren’t stepping non each other’s code. And we provision that through our own Run Book Automation which we also launched last year a little bit, more formally this year we’re really getting heavily into it.

We’re also leveraging the Amazon EC2 Web services to run these instances. We just didn’t have the server spaces to spin up a thousand instances for every attendee.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

John Roberts: So why not leverage the cloud that’s already has that type of capacity. So also through that the Conference Portal, users can go in and say, I want to attend the scripting lab, and within 5-7 minutes, we send them an email back that we just provisioned your own instance right on the cloud for you that you can start to use.

Michael Coté: Right, so you kind of built up for a little application within the portal?

John Roberts: Yes.

Michael Coté: I guess to mix a bunch of words together, people are requesting that, and then are you actually linking some sort of JavaScript calling out to Run Book stuff or like what — I’m interested in what the chain is there because this might be one of the only instances where JavaScript is used for anything remotely related to IT management?

John Roberts: We’re pretty much using JavaScript to control all of the IT service management, anything in the application.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

John Roberts: But in the case of our Run Book Automation and the instance provisioning, it’s actually quite a complex workflow that we’re running through. I saw the map of it and there is a lot of steps, communications with Amazon cloud — I want to make this request, I want to copy this master, and give me information back on what’s the URL that I can actually connect this to.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

John Roberts: So there is an awful lot of logic behind the scenes that our Run Book Automation team has been very busy setting up. And we’re happy with the performance, the 5-7 minutes.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Roberts: And if you ask anybody else, how fast can they get their application running, dedicated for me just for the day to play, and seven minutes is pretty impressive.

Michael Coté: There’s another thing that I noticed that’s in the portal — you’ve pulled in — you guys call it Live or Live Stream. It’s basically a stream, if you will, and it’s kind of a mixture of an idea of an activity stream and a Twitter stream and all these things together. You guys have that in the portal as well, you have an instance of it in the portal.

And I’m curious — it’s another good example of how you — no one uses the term “mashup” anymore — but you’re mashing up these various things from the ServiceNow platform. So can you go over how you integrated that into their portal?

John Roberts: Sure! One of the new features we just added was social IT services, so we have a chat feature that’s built in the system now and we also have this live feature, so Live Feed is what we’re calling it. And basically it’s kind of like a Facebook, Yammer social environment that’s dedicated to the instance; so probably more along the lines of Yammer which is protected, private to the corporation.

So we have that in the application now that we’re shipping in the next release. So we wanted to really showcase that this year in the Knowledge Portal. So we have that available through the portal, and any of the attendees that are registered can go ahead and have a communication, they can create their own, essentially chat groups; it’s really not a chat, but a live feed type group that they can house their messages in and have these discussions.

And the other thing we wanted to do was just to try to trigger more activity, was to pull in tweets from Twitter that have certain tags, like our #Know11, our tag for the conference. We wanted to display those in the Knowledge Portal in Live, so we built an integration from external services such as Twitter to Love Feed so we can display those.

Michael Coté: Oh the sucker stuff in there.

John Roberts: Yeah, yeah. I think the term somebody calling was ‘tweetsucker’ which I kind of like.

Michael Coté: Well, great! Well I appreciate you spending all that time to go over that. I think it’s always nice to — when there is a — to use the general term, when there is a platform available to be programmed, it’s good to have some pretty good — some reference examples.

John Roberts: Sure! Yeah.

Michael Coté: Otherwise you’re just like, oh, I can do any thing you want, and that’s really not helpful.

John Right: Yeah, it doesn’t get you very far.

Michael Coté: Definitely! So I appreciate it.

John Roberts: Yeah, I appreciate the time too!

Disclosure: ServiceNow is a client and sponsored this video.

While at the IBM Impact Unconference, I talked with Andy Piper about WebSphere MQ and the range of products around queues. We discuss where queues are used, who’s using them, and what IBM is looking to do in the future.

You can also download the video directly, or subscribe to the RedMonk Media feed to get this and other videos downloaded automatically for you.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! Here we are at Impact 2011, the IBM WebSphere Conference. We are actually in a sub-conference,. We’re at the Unconference that the Impact Unconference — is that the official title of it, the Impact Unconference?

Andy Piper: Yeah, it’s that. Yeah, absolutely, Unconference.

Michael Coté: And as always, this is Michael Coté of RedMonk and I’ve got a guest with myself. You want to introduce yourself?

Andy Piper: Sure, I am Andy Piper. I work in Hursley Laboratory which is in the UK. I think my job title at the moment, because it kind of moves around a bit — well, it’s WebSphere Messaging Community Lead.

Michael Coté: All right. Basically, that’s MQ, it’s queue stuff, right?

Andy Piper: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Coté: What falls under WebSphere Messaging?

Andy Piper: So this stuff — that stuff is originally invented and developed from Hursley which is where I sit. So yeah, whatever we’ve we got. We’ve got WebSphere MQ, which is queue stuff. We’ve got a family of products around that. So we’ve got the WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition which enables you to move files over MQ.

We’ve got WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging for very high-speed messaging. We’ve got WebSphere MQ Telemetry which is about mobile and sensor networks. I am going to miss something, WebSphere MQ Advanced Message Security which is for encrypting messages and we’ve got the Message Broker, which is our Enterprise Service Bus.

Michael Coté: There’s this resurgence of queues in architectures. I am not even going to say enterprise architectures, because what’s interesting is that all sorts of architectures for software, they are sort of rediscovering, I guess, using a queue or to put it another way, having an event-driven architecture, a bus or something like that.

Andy Piper: And in fact by doing so, you can actually start to parallelize workload and that’s an amazing thought. Yeah, absolutely, the idea of feeding some work to a process over a period of time and not having to have it instantly respond, but knowing that it will be done.

Michael Coté: Having it be asynchronous, I guess.

Andy Piper: Yeah, and that word, again, we’ve been talking about in last couple of days. I’ve been a consultant and often people hear the word asynchronous, and they go, that sounds slow. It’s like no, it’s just the difference between what we are doing, having an immediate conversation and an immediate response or may get a very false response, but it’s not time dependent. That’s what it means; asynchronous is something that’s not time dependent.

Michael Coté: I feel like at some point asynchronous programming fell out of use. I don’t know if it fell out of favor, but it kind of — I guess, maybe it all came down to web applications which is a very synchronous sort of bus. A request comes in and — I am drawing a line here — a request completes, like you expect the client to be waiting.

Andy Piper: Well, it does, I mean that’s right. It basically times out and actually, the request will time out.

Michael Coté: Right, and then Ajax came along and A being Asynchronous if I remember and I guess that kind of started to change things around a little bit. So what exactly is a queue, like how does a queue operate?

Andy Piper: So I think if a queue as a bucket into which I can throw something and then take it back or something else, somebody else can take it out every now and then when they need it. So what queuing and Message Queue, MQ, lets us do is to say, here is a bunch of data I am creating and I am just going to put it over there and I may come and get it back later myself as a process or actually another process may take it from there.

It’s just a place to put pieces of work or pieces of data. The important thing to note is it’s not a database. It’s not somewhere you are shoving data to store; you are putting it there temporarily until somebody comes along and takes it away and does something else with it.

Michael Coté: And so does that imply that it’s sort of not searchable if you will?

Andy Piper: It’s not searchable in the same way as a database. What we can do is we can do things like assign a load of unique IDs and actually that’s exactly how message queuing works is that every message has a unique ID and we can go and find that ID and get it from a pile. That’s the extent to which it’s searchable, but you are not expecting to, do you like a full text.

Michael Coté: A bunch of queries.

Andy Piper: Yeah, full text index on a bunch of data.

Michael Coté: So why don’t you just use like a shared directory, I mean that would kind of the — that’s a bucket, right?

Andy Piper: It’s a bucket, which is very secure and stable and assured. So the goal is to say, let’s take away the needs to give stuff to a file system which could crash or become corrupt. So let’s give it to a thing which would put it into this queue for us and give it back to or just give it to something else.

And by the way, that queue may not be local to me; it may be over a network somewhere. So yes, you could put it in a shared directory in the sense of a network drive. But then, of course, you need the same file system technology.

Michael Coté: What we are getting at, correct me if I am wrong, is that if you use a directory then you are depending on the file system and the storage as part of your architecture rather than depending on a higher abstraction depending on its service.

Andy Piper: That’s right, exactly. And one of the — I’ll try not to do the chest-beating sales pitch. That’s not what I am here for at all

But one of the things about MQ and one of the reasons why it has been very widely adopted over the last 10, 15 years is because it does run on a large variety of platforms. It has provided the same API. You are not having to think, okay, I am on Windows now so I need to use the .NET API to get to my file system. I am on a Mac; I need to use C or Objective-C to get to my file system. It’s a totally different way of approach. It’s the same API on any platform that MQ exists.

You have got the ability, as I mentioned, to choose to send data over a network to some other queue. So it’s a parsing mechanism.

Michael Coté: And then inherent in networking, I mean, once you bring some network thing, there is security gets involved and actually, giving access.

Andy Piper: Security, SSL channels and things like that. So what we have in MQ is a concept of a channel between two queue managers who own all of the queues on that system. And then between them we have a channel and we can encrypt that tunnel using SSL.

So yeah, you have security. You have the ability — and this is another important aspect of MQ — is assurance. You want to just rely on the fact that you have something reliable moving the data for you.

Michael Coté: And in the case of MQ and maybe queues in general, is that assurance the same thing as sort of transactional integrity in a database or is it more assurance that your stuff won’t disappear or is it both?

Andy Piper: Yes.

Michael Coté: And what I mean by that is, in database terms, like a transactional thing, is that there will never be two states of the data that you are accessing.

Andy Piper: Yeah, absolutely! And there is another aspect, of course, which is, when you are talking about databases, you talk about two-phase commits and all that kind of stuff and the ability to say, I want to do these operations, and either the whole set of operations commits or fails. And actually I might want to do that with two databases and a file system.

Michael Coté: Right, like transferring money between two accounts is a classic example.

Andy Piper: Exactly! So MQ is very commonly used in those kinds of scenarios to say, I need to get this message from this queue, update those two database tables belonging to two different systems, and put this message to this queue, and do all of that within a transaction. So that’s what our Message Broker and our MQ technology does for you.

But yeah, you are absolutely right; the assurance is, I am giving my stuff to some other process to look after for me and I want to make sure that it arrives.

So when I get told locally by the queue manager that it’s got my data and put it and the put has succeeded, then I can rely on the assurance that my MQ network will get that data somewhere else, once and once only. That’s another important concept here. You are not getting duplication; otherwise, you might end up doing the same operation twice.

And then if something crashes, if my local queue manager or remote queue manager crashes and we have put that message in what we call a persistent state, because we can do things in memory as well, in being non-persistent, that we could recover to a known state, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andy Piper: Yeah, you don’t want to lose work, especially if you are updating bank accounts.

Michael Coté: You must know better than I do how old MQ is, but it has definitely been — it’s one of the older IBM software products?

Andy Piper: Yeah, it used to be called MQSeries, it’s about 15 years, I think, now.

Michael Coté: Right, right. So to give you the chance to not so much to be a salesman, but kind of say what that gets you, like the differentiation that MQ has, I mean, what is it about MQ that makes it something beyond, like an open-source ESB that you might get or an open-source queue?

Andy Piper: First of all, it gives you stability of function. So we have been around for a long time and actually the upgradeability has been really good as well. So you take different versions of MQ and they can talk to one another.

Michael Coté: So there is sort of cross-platform interoperability and you mentioned that earlier.

Andy Piper: Exactly, cross-platform and upgradeability. So that’s the first thing.

Michael Coté: Longevity of the technology.

Andy Piper: In terms of feature, we also are constantly working to improve performance. You’ve got the high performing system if you need one, if you need to tune it that way. You have got things like clustering which do let you distribute work over a number of different systems and actually it’s one of the things that we come back to around this rediscovery of the idea of queuing.

Did you hear that news about Twitter rewriting their search engine?

Michael Coté: Oh, right, right.

Andy Piper: And I was reading that they have actually now got a thing which dispatches your query to one of several engines so they can suddenly workload balance all these queries that are coming into their search engine. That’s what clustering does for you.

You can start to move work around really easily. You have got — oh gosh, you have got loads of things, security. You have got emergence of this new family of products in the last two or three years; the File Transfer, the Advanced Message Security, the Telemetry, these have all been added on to MQ, because the vision for MQ from an IBM perspective is universal messaging.

So the idea is that data — your data, anytime, anywhere, if you like over whatever is the appropriate quality of service to give you at the point that you are at. Are you in your transactional datacenter or are you in your mobile device? How fast do you need to go? How reliable does it need to be? How secure does it need to be?

Michael Coté: So you sort of customize the footprint or the profile down to the endpoint.

Andy Piper: In a way, and that’s particularly what Telemetry is actually. Telemetry is absolutely for smaller devices customized to the network capabilities available, that kind of thing.

Michael Coté: One thing I am always curious about with middleware — and I use that phrase tentatively here — is, would you say when some organization is using MQ, is it more of a middleware component in their software stack or is it a system that they are running? Does that distinction make sense?

Andy Piper: Yeah. Okay. So I would say it’s a middleware component really.

Michael Coté: Right. So it’s kind of — it’s not a service, it’s not a universal sort of service?

Andy Piper: No, I mean, services would usually themselves use MQ or run on MQ. So you program your service, your application may use MQ to do its interface to the world.

If you think about an application, we were talking about this in the IBM Conference this morning actually, and a guy was asking about files and how do I move away from the file driven batch to SOA services. And actually, people are always going to be sending files in some form or another. So you might be able to reduce the number of files coming in, but you are probably not going to eliminate them.

Michael Coté: Yeah, because files are just so comfortable.

Andy Piper: Well, they are, they are. And everybody has Notepad and we can just hack away. But more to the point –

Michael Coté: That’s how I submit my batch jobs, Notepad.

Andy Piper: Nice! But it’s just another interface. If you think of a program that takes input — and you mentioned shared directories –maybe, it could be reading files, it could be reading from queues, it could be receiving HTTP calls, it could be coming over a TCP. You’ve got a range of different ways. So you can see files and queues as different interfaces to your services.

Coming back to your question, therefore, I would say queuing is a component, if you like, middleware component, a feature, a capability of your system.

Michael Coté: Right. So it’s not something bigger than the applications that use it that you kind of integrate with. It’s more, you pull it in as part of your application.

Andy Piper: Yeah, I mean, one of the ways that people often talk about it is as plumbing. It’s the pipe work that goes underneath your house.

Michael Coté: Right, right. Having taken a kind of technology first approach, so I think a lot of people, including myself, until I was beaten over the head with it, like to hear things like batch job and jobs and queues, and frankly, it’s sort of like, I have no idea how that stuff is used, like what the business applications of that are.

And then like you are saying, people ask like, we have got these files transferred to us and what do we do with that? And it would be great to hear sort of like what — I am always hesitating because I want to come up with something that doesn’t sound like a stupid business term, but like what business services are queues being used for?

Andy Piper: I mean every one. I have been a consultant and I have worked with retail and finance and government and every system can conceptually use them and many companies and organizations and industries do use them.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I mean the need to transfer data between point A and point B or point A and points B, C, D, E, and F or whatever, every application needs that. But it seems like there is a certain class of applications that use queues a lot more than others. Like a lot of financial applications use queues to basically synchronize payments or transfers between accounts — things like that.

There are things that I think if you are writing this kind of application, you probably use a queue just without thinking about it. Whereas, as you were saying, someone like Twitter is not going to be using MQ.

Andy Piper: I mean, the other thing is — so web services. Web services are great. I know you guys of RedMonk are really big fans of the web services and all their XML stuff.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

Andy Piper: So HTTP is great as a transport for web services, except it’s synchronous. So if the other end isn’t listening or isn’t available or is too busy, then your call will time out and you will have to handle that.

So hey, what a great idea! If that guy is too busy because it’s got loads of incoming requests, then why not instead of having HTTP code, put a queue there. So you can do things like web services over JMS. So your calling application that’s invoking the service can just do that by sending a message somewhere. It doesn’t have to be synchronous. And then it can wait and come back later. So you have got things like the WS-Addressing Standard which lets you say, call me back on this address later when you are done.

Michael Coté: Right. And I am imagining, correct me if I am wrong, but situations like retail data might be nice for that. If you have like hundreds of stores that need to, for whatever reason, send their current inventory needs to someplace.

Andy Piper: Well, I mean that kind of thing is also trickle feed. The idea of trickle feed is kind of very powerful in retail, that you just want to — as people buy stuff, come through Best Buy and are going through transactions at the register, then those just maybe get fired or –

Michael Coté: So it’s a lot more real time than like 24-hour batches.

Andy Piper: It can be real time, absolutely. You don’t have to have all of those transactions batched up in the store and then overnight FTP them to home. You could just start to literally feed them.

If you go in the Apple Store, they will say, do you want me to send an email to you? And magically, they email it to you and yet, you can also go online and see what you have purchased.

Michael Coté: So there is probably a queue involved in there somewhere.

Andy Piper: Who knows?

Michael Coté: I guess kind of the last question, so I mean, MQ is like 15 years old. I mean what are you guys thinking about doing in the next five years or whatever? I mean, like something that’s as old as MQ, at some point –

Andy Piper: Stop calling it old. It’s not old.

Michael Coté: Something that’s mature.

Andy Piper: It’s rich and mature, right? It’s very capable.

Michael Coté: There you go. Well said! Like there is always this question of –

Andy Piper: Let me grab my blue hat and blue collar.

Michael Coté: That’s right. There is always this question of, is there anything left to do?

Andy Piper: And there is, and there is.

Michael Coté: What are the things that are left to do in the queuing space?

Andy Piper: So there are emerging models and emerging programming patterns and ways of accessing data. So I mentioned our Telemetry protocol which is very optimized for IBM’s Smarter Planet story, the whole Smarter Planet. Let’s make use of this instrumented plantet we have built and start to receive data from those centers onto our data backbone, which is MQ.

Michael Coté: To trickle in perhaps as you were saying.

Andy Piper: Yeah, trickle in maybe or maybe you need to actually do kind of two-way communication. So that’s a nice and interesting model.

There are also things like some of the newer web push models, and I can’t talk to you much about specific plans, but we are very aware of things like the ability to push data to web browsers through new technologies.

Michael Coté: The sort of new endpoints that emerge that you want to integrate with.

Andy Piper: Right, absolutely. Mobile is obviously huge and it’s about not abandoning the existing data backbone customers, because they are absolutely core, but to extend the ability to interact with the queuing fabric from new programming models, new languages, and new protocols potentially.

So yeah, you can see Telemetry as an example of one of those, the ability to plug into your existing MQ infrastructure with a specialized protocol for the lightweight networks.

Michael Coté: Right, right, right.

Andy Piper: That’s where all of the cool stuff is happening. And also, some of the data encryption around compliance situations that people find themselves in, we have been looking at that. I mean, you have just got to look at the releases over the last few years that we have been doing and that’s where they are geared.

Usability is always important as well; the ability to more effectively manage things in a nice usable way. I think it’s a great product from a usability perspective anyway, but there’re always nicer things you can tweak.

Michael Coté: Well, great! Well, thanks for taking all this time to go over MQ stuff.

Andy Piper: You’re welcome.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

While at MIX11 this year, I talked with Microsoft’s Ziad Ismail about Internet Explorer and how Microsoft is making it into not just a web application, but an application development stack. A large part of this is doing what Microsoft calls “native HTML5,” meaning taking advantage of the machine the browser is running on from operating systems (Windows) to hardware (like GPUs).

We go over the announcements of the conference, like the available of IE10 as a preview. And, there’s plenty of HTML5 talk as well.

What I like about Ziad’s comments is that you can tell Microsoft is looking at IE + Windows as an application development stack: they’re hoping that, yes, you make web applications with it, but that you start to think about post-web UI and functionality you can layer in. It’s similar to RIA talk we had sometime ago, but is something beyond that.

There’s more over at Beautyoftheweb.com.

Also, there’s some bonus content below, going over an example of “native HTML5″ and, for me, the interesting idea of instrumenting your web applications to start getting huge amounts of feedback on how people are using your apps:

In addition to watching the videos above, you can subscribe to the RedMonk Media feed to get them, and other RedMonk videos and podcasts, downloaded automatically for you. Feel free to download each video directly as well: the main interview and the extra content on examples and analytics.

Transcript – Getting the browser out of the way…

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! Here we are in lovely Las Vegas at the Microsoft MIX 2011 Conference in the Mandalay Bay. And as always, this is Michael Coté with RedMonk, and I have got a guest with me. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Ziad Ismail: Sure. Thanks Michael. My name is Ziad Ismail. I am the Director of Product Management for Internet Explorer.

Michael Coté: The first day of MIX was, I am trying to replay it through my mind, but it was pretty much all about IE, to a large extent. There were some CMS things and other stuff, but you guys opened out talking a lot about IE, IE 9 and IE 10 coming up, and I wonder if you could kind of give a recap of what you talked about in the Internet Explorer area here?

Ziad Ismail: Sure. So there were two things that we talked about. The first one was the availability of IE 10. IE 10 comes just four weeks after we announced IE 9 at SXSW.

IE 10 is really just a continuation of the bets and the path we set out with IE 9, which is a bet on standards and HTML5 and other web standards and focusing on really driving performance forward to enable a completely new class of web experiences.

The second thing is we laid out our vision for Native HTML5. The idea behind Native HTML5 is, what web developers want to do is they want to use web standards, because you are developing across a broader and broader set of different platforms, different form factors, but they also want the kind of performance and experience they get from native applications.

So bringing together the best of those two things; standards plus all the performance, plus all the experience, that’s what we are trying to do with IE 9, with Windows 7, and that’s the path we are going down with IE 10, and essentially really raising the bar on what the web can do.

Michael Coté: Can you explain what you mean by Native HTML5, I mean, what’s the native part?

Ziad Ismail: The native part is really focusing on taking full advantage of the hardware and operating system that you have already bought. If you think about where we were with IE 9 just a year ago, one thing we found is that most websites only used about 10% of the power that was available on the PC.

You look at the GPU and think about how much games have changed in the past ten years, so there are all these capabilities. Those things we made available to the browser, and new types of really rich experiences are now possible in the browser because of those kind of bets.

Native HTML5 is just taking that even one step deeper and completely optimizing how we build the browser to take full advantage of the operating system and the hardware, and specifically for us that means making a huge bet on IE 9 with Windows 7 today and going forward it will be IE 10.

Performance is one side of the coin; the other side of the coin is about the experience and how the application and how the thing you are building on the web actually looks and feels on your computer.

The work we have been doing with IE 9 actually lets you take websites and pin them to your taskbar and now they look and feel like native applications.

And it’s not just a bookmark; it’s now what you would expect from an application which drives notification. So if you get a new email and you have pinned Hotmail, it tells you, hey, you have got a new email and you can jump back into that application. If you are running Facebook and you get some new messages, you get a notification. If you are on eBay and you get a bid, same kind of things happen.

Native is partially the performance side. The other part of the coin and what developers want to do is not have their experiences necessarily restricted by the browser box itself.

Like think about the browser box; it was created in 1993, like the first browser, whatever, we are still living with it. It’s still like, I want to go to a website, hey, I fire up the browser, I type in the URL, I go there.

There is no real need for it to be that way. Like if I know that I love ESPN or Facebook, why do I need to take a completely different path to get there than I would do if I had a Facebook application or an ESPN application?

And so the web just becomes a lot more interesting when you put the focus on the websites themselves and you let the browser only be there if it actually needs to be there.

If you think about it, like the web technologies and the websites are what’s really, really interesting. The browser itself, like unless it’s actually adding value to the experience, it doesn’t really need to appear, it doesn’t really need to show up.

So although we are excited about the progress we are making with IE 9 and we love the browser, where it doesn’t make sense, we don’t really care if the user sees that it’s an IE browser. The thing we are focused on is, as a Windows user are you getting an amazing web experience, and if that means the browser kind of fades into the background where it makes sense, like we will push that.

Michael Coté: The phrase HTML5 has meant a lot of things over the past, I don’t know, maybe two years, I am bad with the timeline of it, but it has probably gone through at least three or four different meanings to people, as the spec and all of the sub-specs evolve.

And I am curious, I mean, we talked about what the native part of the Native HTML5 is. When the IE team is working on implementing HTML5, another tenuous phrase as it were, like what are you thinking about, what is HTML5 in that sense, I mean, kind of both in the sense of the features that you are providing and how you are tracking the spec?

Ziad Ismail: It’s probably one of the most problematic terms that we are dealing with at this point as we are trying to teach developers about what we are doing with IE 9 and kind of get people excited about what’s coming next.

HTML5 is, at its core, it’s two different things. One is, it’s a specific specification. It’s driven by the W3C. There is a working group. This specification is going to hit last call in May and W3C has said they are targeting a recommendation, which is the same thing as a standard, by 2014. So that’s the actual document that’s being written.

HTML5 is also used as a simplified term for the broader web platform that allows users to do the next generation of exciting stuff on the web, and that’s everything from the HTML5 spec itself, CSS, it’s things like WebSockets, it’s things like IndexDB, it’s DOM, it’s JavaScript, which isn’t even part of the W3C. So it’s an umbrella term for about 50 or so different specifications.

So it causes a tremendous amount of confusion, and some people have tried to change back the terminology. I know W3C was trying to push Open Web Platform at some point. It’s not clear that it’s actually going to be possible to change it.

Michael Coté: Right, it’s sort of one of the horses are out of the barn kind of problems.

Ziad Ismail: It has so much momentum. It’s being used constantly, and from a communication standpoint, certainly when you try to explain things to broader consumers, if you are not saying what everybody else is saying and you are saying Open Web Platform rather than HTML5, people may not really understand what you mean, because HTML5, the umbrella term, has some values, has some positive associations which are already out there.

Michael Coté: Historically it’s highly analogous to AJAX which –

Ziad Ismail: Or Web 2.0.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, all of these terms started out as sort of meaning the next big thing, or the evolution of — in the case of AJAX, the evolution of web applications, and then Web 2.0 kind of the evolution of what you do with web applications.

Ziad Ismail: And then everybody wants to use them rather than inventing something new, because there are a bunch of positive associations in reusing those words, and so the meaning gets stretched and at some point it doesn’t quite mean what it meant originally and nobody really knows what it means, but it’s still going to be used.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you are right that it is — I always feel a little upset when I hear the phrase and I use the phrase HTML5, but at this point I think I just need to get over it. It means a loosely definable collection of stuff, and to your point, like when you say people understand what you are talking about, if they can’t precisely say what it is.

Ziad Ismail: Right, I agree.

Michael Coté: It just means like the new way of developing web applications essentially.

Ziad Ismail: I should say the thing that gets — I think the thing that gets messy for me is not when people use the HTML5 word as a meaning for the broader web platform, it’s when they start confusing which one they actually mean.

And people say things like, hey, HTML5 is not going to be ready until 2022, or HTML5 is not going to be ready until 2014. Well, which one are you referring to actually? Are you referring to the spec, or are you saying actually don’t use any technologies in this broader web platform? Are you saying JavaScript and CSS will all be ready at some magical date on January 1st or if it’s Christmas day or whatever it is, that’s when it gets really messy, because it just causes tremendous amount of confusion.

And people that are excited about the next web platform don’t really understand what’s going on and they say, well, maybe I should just hold off a bit until I do know what’s going on.

Michael Coté: Do some more of that AJAX stuff.

Ziad Ismail: Right, and build another Web 2.0 site.

Michael Coté: One of the challenges I think in browser innovation or web application has always been balancing the need for using an exciting new piece of functionality or spec that’s out there and also balancing that against the stability of it being done and released.

I mean, that’s really playing out in the HTML5 space quite a bit now, where there is — I mean, to use the old analogy, the work that you guys and other browsers are doing is kind of like changing the wings on an airplane while its flying. There is a lot of figuring out how you start using the spec, or if you use it too early or if you are too late.

So first off, in doing the work and looking at how users are using it, how do you see people balancing out or dealing with all of that in-flight specification that’s going on?

Ziad Ismail: So it’s something we spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about. We looked at the experience we had with IE 6 and kind of the challenges that we are running into, web developers are running into, companies are running into, with trying to get that thing out of the market.

There is a true benefit in experimenting and prototyping with early specifications, like it needs to happen. The big question is, what’s the right format for doing that? Is the right format for doing in the browser itself or do you find some other vehicle for doing that experimentation?

The reason you need to do it is, if you don’t do it, you are just writing a piece of paper, the specification, and you have no idea how this thing is actually going to perform once you take it into the real world and write the code. So implementation is critical.

So where we came out was, we need a stable web platform. Like if we don’t have a stable web platform people are going to keep saying, hey, when is this thing going to be ready? My site broke, how am I going to deal with it?

That platform is IE 9, that platform will be IE 10. HTML5 Labs is a place where we are going to prototype. We are going to do things that are bleeding edge. You don’t actually want them in the browser.

We recently announced that we are going to build media capture API, which is a very early draft of a specification, and we are going to do that inside HTML5 Labs.

And as those things graduate we will move them into the browser. But by keeping this clean separation, we are able to actually get the best of both worlds. Like advance the web standards process and make sure that people can build on the web standards platform today with confidence, things don’t break, and it actually works.

Michael Coté: Internet Explorer is one of the more historied web browsers out there, and one of the things I like about the approach that you are going over there is, you guys have learned from the past.

Ziad Ismail: It’s a great point. I mean, you have to choose; do you want the IE 6 type experience to happen again, where we have a bunch of specs that get locked in and we have to deal with them, not only in enterprise, which has been the past, but now the same thing is playing out in phones that aren’t getting upgraded, it’s going to happen in TVs, and the web is moving to all these other places, like do you want the IE 6 experience?

And people are saying, hey, I really have issues with IE 6, and I understand why people have issues with IE 6. I feel the pain. We want to get rid of it as much as anyone.

But at the same time, some of those people would say, I really, really have issues with IE 6. Same people would say, hey, why aren’t you putting WebSockets into your browser? Well, guess what, we put WebSockets into the browser. We put this out there. We can put caveats around it and say, hey, please don’t use WebSockets. Once it’s in the browser, it lands in an enterprise, it’s going to get into phones, it’s going to get into — all the new appliances that are coming out, things like TVs, and it will get locked in there, and browsers aren’t going to get updated. We are going to have to write to WebSockets version 75 for the next ten years.

Michael Coté: That’s another thing that I have noticed about IE is that the process has gotten more open, if you will. I mean, you definitely — like you talked about IE 10 during this, which is in the future compared to IE 9, but you guys are a lot more open about inviting people into the process of the browser evolution, which I think is — that’s what you want if you depend on a platform.

Ziad Ismail: Yeah, absolutely! And it has been invaluable to us to actually get the feedback. I mentioned the partner side and actually having sites tell us, hey, I am developing this experience, like is this actually working for you or not, like tremendously valuable feedback.

We also have the Microsoft Connect program, where anybody can submit a bug and say, hey, here is something I am discovering.

The whole point of the Platform Previews is, we can put stuff into the Platform Previews that looks like something that’s going to get into IE 10 and something we really want to get into IE 10, and then we have a period of time to get feedback, stabilize it, work with the W3C to make sure there is actually a test suite. So we don’t only say that we have implemented it, there is actually some standards based way of measuring whether we are interoperable with the spec or not.

Michael Coté: Now, the other thing that you guys are doing is, is you are basically building out test suites to test compatibility and performance of various HTML5 things, and that’s another nice openness of the platform that I think you guys are doing. So can you just kind of quickly go over what those test suites are?

Ziad Ismail: Yes. So there are lots of interesting things happening within the standards bodies like the — the things that are going on in ECMA, the things that are going on in W3C. But in parallel to the actual standards process, which is what a lot of people focus on, like the specs themselves, what’s being developed within these standards groups are test suites.

So if you got to Test 262 for example; Test 262 is the test suite for ECMAScript 5. What’s interesting about that is, it’s 10,000 tests just for ECMAScript 5, JavaScript, it’s 10,000 test cases. And you can run your browser, like run IE 10 Platform Preview 1, run Chrome, run Safari, and you can actually say, does my browser measure up to the specification itself?

Like anybody can say that, hey, we are HTML5, whatever that means, we are betting on HTML 5, we are going to invest in HTML5. Ultimately, things like the test suite tell you whether you are just saying it or whether you are actually doing the hard work to make it happen.

Michael Coté: It tells you how HTML5 you are, to what degree.

Ziad Ismail: Yes, because supporting a standard is not a yes or no, it’s really like how well are you doing it. And so the way I think about it is, there are millions and millions of developers out there. You can either fix the problem once, at the browser level, or you can push that problem out and millions and millions of developers have to deal with it every single day.

Michael Coté: As far as the testing.

Ziad Ismail: As far as testing, yeah. I built something. Hey, it’s acting a little bit unpredictably in browser A compared to browser B. I am not sure what to do. The right model is, build the test suite, you test your browser against it, and now when a developer builds, much less of their code is going to be code that’s used to test all the anomalies.

Michael Coté: To experiment with what’s available.

Ziad Ismail: Right, it’s going to be more like productive code, real productive code.

We heard from a customer recently that, as they were looking at HTML5 and deepening their bets on the web, they did an analysis of how much of their code was actually productive code that was doing something meaningful as opposed to handling special cases? You look at CSS Gradients, it’s handled in a completely different way across every single browser.

It turned out that about 20-30% of their code was productive code. Everything else was, okay, guess what, I am trying to do this functionality and it’s different in every single browser, or it’s similar but it acts a little bit different in each browser and that difference actually matters to me.

Michael Coté: It’s a bunch of if else and glue code all the way down, right, just tons of it?

Ziad Ismail: Absolutely! So you think about — this I think is one of the most interesting developments in interoperability, actually getting the test suites in there, and you compare the 10,000 test cases and just this one test suite for one standard to some of the tests that people are citing.

You look at something like Acid3. Like Acid3 is interesting, but Acid3 tests a very wide range of specs, like 10-20 specs with a 100 or so test cases. Like a very small five to ten tests per standard.

The issue with that is, we can pass Acid3. Every browser in the world can pass Acid3. But we may not be interoperable at all. We are interoperable at the 1% level; on 99% of the spec we are completely different.

And so when we talk about interoperability, like the real value is shifting that mix of productive code to go from 20-30% to something much, much bigger. And W3C and ECMA, they are leading the way and Microsoft together with other browser vendors are supporting them in building out these test suites.

Michael Coté: I appreciate you taking all this time to go over IE stuff. I was especially interested to talk with you about it, because I feel like, as I was kind of mentioning earlier, you guys have built a new platform, if you will, to develop applications on, beyond just a browser that web application service, and there’s really a lot more functionality. There’s a lot more to the parts assembled, I guess is what I am saying, than just a portal that you are viewing some HTML through.

Ziad Ismail: Yeah.

Michael Coté: So it was good to get that overview from you, definitely! Well, thanks.

Ziad Ismail: Great to be here! Thank you.

Transcript – IE web app examples…

Michael Coté: Can you speak to at least one sort of other example of like what a Native HTML5 application is that someone could poke at at the moment?

Ziad Ismail: A couple of ones that are interesting is, we worked with hi5. hi5 is one of the largest social networks in Asia, and the specific angle that they are focused on is social gaming. So they have games like ‘Millionaire City’ and other things, that lots of people play, and they are socialing, kind of do them with your friends.

The interesting thing about what they have done is, not only can you pin hi5 itself, and so you get information on, hey, when your friends’ birthdays are happening or when your friends are playing a game, it kind of pulls you into that experience.

The other thing they have done is the games themselves within hi5 are pinnable. So if I love ‘Millionaire City’, I pin ‘Millionaire City’, and I have played ‘Millionaire City’ a little bit. So when it tells you, hey, your pizza restaurant is ready for the next pizza delivery, there is a little pop-up that pops up and tells you.

And no matter what you are doing on your computer, if you have said, hey, this is an application that’s important to me, I want to know what’s going on, those notifications are visible and they pull you back into the experience.

The thing we have also done with hi5 is, we don’t just want to focus on the technology side and say, here’s a bunch of interesting cool technology and scenarios. We want to understand what’s actually working for them, what’s not working.

And so we worked with them to do a bunch of instrumentation to see, okay, what happens with a user if they pin a site? How does their behavior change? How do they become more engaged? Is it actually paying off?

So what we have seen in some of the sites that have done the instrumentation is, pin site users end up spending about 50% more time on the sites than users that are going through the web.

And the reason for that is really simple, because you have faster access to things you care about. It’s now like one click away to jump into the application you want. And you have things like notifications which tell you, hey, something happened in the game, in the auction, it kind of pulls you right back in.

We also learned a bunch of things from these partnerships and we made some changes to how pin sites work, specifically one of the things was improving discoverability.

So hi5 can now tell their users, hey, I noticed you on IE 9, drag this image or drag this text and pin it to your taskbar and it pins directly, and each site can kind of promote it in a way that makes sense for them.

Michael Coté: You mentioned instrumenting the applications. I am curious to hear a little bit more about how that works out.

Ziad Ismail: So this was something that we really pushed with IE 9, like we had the starting philosophy which was, our focus is on putting sites at the center.

The idea was simple, which is, the thing that users really care about are the sites themselves, not the browser, and that permeated how we built the experience and kind of the browser fades in the background, but also permeated how we worked with actual sites.

So we went out to them and said, look, we don’t just want to sell you this feature. We want to make sure this actually works for you. And if it doesn’t work, like let’s learn from it, and let’s learn from it together.

Because if this thing performs really well for hi5, like that’s great for them, but it’s also great for IE 9, because then they have an incentive to tell their customers, hey, this may be a great browser because it lets you have a better hi5 experience, and it also turns out that we get these sites to tell their users to use IE 9.

You are able to tell when a user accesses your site through a pin site experience or if they access it directly through a URL. So you are able to tell on the –

Michael Coté: Sort of part of the headers or something. Somehow you know when the connections come through those two venues.

Ziad Ismail: Right. So you have this information and so you can parse it out, whatever your analytic software is, if it’s Omniture or whatever you may have in the backend. And so there’s a lot of work we have been doing on understanding how that pattern changes, understanding how discoverability happens. What’s the best way to tell your customers that, hey, it seems like you are visiting hi5 a lot or it seems like you are visiting eBay a lot, maybe you should pin our site, like what’s the right moment and how do you make that thing happen.

So there’s a lot of work we have been doing there to figure out what actually works, and we have been sharing some of that on our blog.

Yeah, it’s just a really interesting part of developing the browser, which is talking about the features and the technology itself, but also focusing on what’s actually working for sites and using their analytics to inform how we continue to develop our product.

Michael Coté: I feel like as a developer, whether you are a web developer or I don’t know, probably even writing system codes somewhere, that the kind of further away you get from the actual user, the harder it is to make good software. And having that instrumentation and that analytics at least helps you get a little more intimate with the user and kind of figure out what it is they are doing and how you can make their experience better.

And nowadays it’s really exciting with any — stuff over the web is like this, but increasingly with what would be called cloud computing that, by it being a web application or a SAS or whatever, you can actually track that stuff. I don’t know, I feel like it’s a huge opportunity people should be taking advantage of.

Ziad Ismail: Yeah, analytics are amazing. It allows you to actually line up incentives and say, hey, what we are trying to do with IE 10 is make websites more successful. Great, let’s figure out how we measure that and see if we are actually being successful, and we can have people do it. So it’s not just pushing out features, it’s actually saying, okay, your goal is to find sites, understand what works, what doesn’t work, and work with them.

So analytics I think are just a beautiful tool to align features, websites, and ultimately the experience that users have.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client and sponsored this video.

You’ve probably heard that IBM launched two new, public cloud offerings recently, Enterprise and Enterprise+. These offerings are oriented around the requirements IBM is getting from larger companies – they’re hoping to match the feature sets to existing work-loads and application types.

While at the IBM Cloud Forum where IBM announced these offerings, I sat down with IBM’s Jan Jackman and CohesiveFT’s Craig Heimark to talk about these offerings. Jan tells us about the two Smart Clouds and the types of work-loads people are using cloud for; Craig goes over how CohesiveFT partners with IBM to secure these work-loads and help manage the stacks.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well hello everybody, here we are in lovely San Franscisco at the IBM Cloud Forum, and I’ve got two guests with me to talk about something that IBM came out with today which is pretty exciting with all the cloud discussion that’s been going on. And that’s sort of two types of Smart Cloud, if you will. Do you guys want to introduce yourselves?

Jan Jackman: Sure, I’m Jan Jackman and I lead our global cloud services as part of IBM Global Technology Service division within IBM.

Michael Coté: And yourself?

Craig Heimark: And I’m Craig Heimark, I’m one of the Founders of CohesiveFT, we’re one of the cloud partners of IBM.

Michael Coté: Like I was saying, you guys came out with two Smart Cloud offerings today, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, and I’m wondering if you could just give us an overview of what those offerings are?

Jan Jackman: Sure. What we see in the marketplace is that most of our Enterprise customers have a variety of workloads or applications that they need to run in the cloud environment and move to the cloud environment. And there are different characteristics that are required based on security, based on the type of workload whether it’s bursty type of workload that runs within days or weeks or if it’s a long running production application that may run months or years.

And so what we introduced today is the Enterprise platform which deals with the multi-tenant bursty type of workload, so workloads that would be like the development and test environment or even applications that may run for a short period of time, that could leverage as cloud and the associated service level agreements with that type of a workload.

The Enterprise Plus really looks at a fully managed environment. So as clients move from doing a development and test, and then they want to move the app into a production level environment that has higher security needs, higher SLA, higher isolation of different workloads, then we have the continuity of the platforms to be able to move from one environment to the other. So if you take Dev/Test as a use case and take Application Lifecycle Management, what you see is the need to be able move between different cloud environments.

So you may do development and test, development on a private cloud behind your firewall, you may want to for reasons of economics do performance testing or stimulations on cloud to take advantage of the burst capability of the infrastructure and then you may want to move it into a production environment. So what we see in order to implement these type of workloads with this example, it takes a number of a capabilities from IBM and also capabilities from our partners.

Michael Coté: One of the things that I am starting to like about the Enterprise and the Enterprise Plus offerings were, your guys just take on what the enterprising cloud is, if you will, it’s exactly that you’re getting into that different workloads or applications or different stuff to really abstract that, if you will, then your running on the cloud, sort of demands different handling in the cloud, and at some point you need to get above the level of — we’re achieving all this cloud goodiness with standardization and things like that. But above that there is still a sort of, we don’t want to all have the same application, I guess, or we don’t all have the same application that we could use.

Jan Jackman: Right, or the applications have different characteristics from a security or availablity –

Michael Coté: Right, right. And to that end, how is CohesiveFT helping manage all those different workloads in the cloud?

Craig Heimark: Well instead of the technical term stuff or even more specific workloads, we tend to use the word application topologies.

Michael Coté: Right.

Craig Heimark: Because, the real unit of work at the enterprise level is actually the application topology, so typically a cluster of three to ten servers working together that provide some business functionality. And from the get-go we were aimed at making these application topologies portable between different underlying virtualized infrastructures.

So we targeted virtualization as a platform, but knew there were going to be many different flavors of virtualization, so VMware, ESX behind the firewall. IBM’s KVM format and their public cloud, Amazon’s AMI format; and our technologies, what we do is we provide, we call it Secure Cloud Containers. And these containers abstract away, the differences between these different production platforms. And underlining those secure cloud containers are three technologies. There is one that deals with different image types, the different image types that are needed on the different platforms.

Another one which deals with the virtual networking, so the ability to maintain a consistent address space and a consistent network space, between your data center and IBM’s Cloud or Amazon’s Cloud or whomever.

Michael Coté: And is that your — the VPN stuff that you guys came out with?

Craig Heimark: Yeah, that’s called VPN Cubed. It was called VPN Cubed; it’s not a VPN alone, because that’s about securing the tunnel between your data center and the cloud. It’s actually a complete overlay network, so think about it as switches and routers, a complete networking infrastructure done in software. So you can run it on the top of hardware that you don’t own and is not dedicated to you. What that allows you to do is it allows you to treat IBM’s cloud as a node on hour LAN. And the third technology that underlies our Secure Cloud Containers, is called Context Cubed, and that is topology management, so portable topology management, to maintain those relationships between the servers and the clusters that you’re moving back and forth.

Michael Coté: Thinking about moving workloads around a lot, like what are the — in the hare and now what are the things that you are finding people having success with moving the workloads around, what are those bursty things that they are using?

Jan Jackman: So, typical web applications that you see — we will say there are commerce applications, that needs compute power over a period of time for a quick set of transactions that are happening. We’re seeing examples of these cases that are even more traditional legacy capability. We have an insurance company that’s doing a reinsurance application, has a set of analytics that they do, algorithms that they run in order to comply with the regulators and so they are able to run that one week a month, make sure that they comply to the risk levels of the regulators require in their industry and then it goes dormant for the next three weeks.

And so this is a workload that’s run for a period of time, goes down and so it’s very efficient to run in the Smart Cloud enterprise environment. And we start to look at Enterprise Plus and sort of needing to manage all the way up through the application. And so if you take certain processes, let’s take SAP as an example. There are certain processes that are repeated as you deploy and update in your SAP environment. These processes are perfectly suited for the cloud, but they typically will need to be run and managed in a fully managed environment.

Michael Coté: It makes me think of another area that I think both of you could address and that’s — there’s a whole lot of IT that’s existed before cloud. I know a lot of you know cloud forward people might not be happy about that or acknowledge it. So you’ve got that legacy IT and then you got all the new IT that’s going on and you described something very interesting there as far as I guess to use another technical term, kind of decomposing an SAP application into the various services that you have, and then figuring out, to use a highly technical term, how you can cloudize those different services or you can’t. And I wonder, between the two enterprise clouds, how much of that decomposing of the existing IT you guys are finding useful for people to do?

Jan Jackman: I’d say we’re at the beginning of this journey, so we’re learning, and seeing the use cases that are applicable for both. As we go and we look at our client environments and look at what they’re running today, what we’re finding is that probably 15%, 20% of what they run today, that is applicable to move to cloud and get the benefits of cloud. So it’s not going to solve for highly customized enterprise apps, you’re not going to be able to move those and get the benefit of cloud.

But as we talked about with the SAP, there are certain processes that are very applicable to cloud. And so what we see is that as SOA applications are being written, as mobility, as the driver to be able to have more service oriented architectures, to be able to deploy on these new device and mobility attributes, that there are going to be more and more workloads that are very relevant for our cloud environment.

So while you can start today, the growth of what we see that would apply in these two scenarios is going to continue to be a larger more important part of the enterprise. And most of our clouds are there from a cost perspective, where can I take cost out and apply this with some of the applications that I’m running, because if I lower my cost I can do more new things as I migrate forward in a new IT environment.

Michael Coté: You can free up resources.

Jan Jackman: Right, and so what essentially — you know cloud is a new way to deliver and consume IT. It’s not new technology. It’s really a new delivery methodology, and using the economics of scale, which is important, it allows you to leverage infrastructure in new ways to get much higher utilization.

But more importantly, as you think about new business value, you’re able to create new businesses that were not possible before, because you didn’t have instant access to the IT to be able launch new services quickly.

Michael Coté: I think CohesiveFT, you know, since — not necessarily all of it, a lot what you guys do is securing parts of the applications that are moving on or providing the scaffolding needed, if you will. Like how would you answer that same question of the types of applications, whether they are legacy or new that you guys are seeing moving into the cloud?

Craig Heimark: The short answer is the cloud really is the new platform for production. So over time as the tools and things develop, I think what we’ll do is see most of the kinds of use cases moving to the cloud. Your earlier question about, well what use cases are there that can only be done in the cloud, are the kinds of very bursty types of applications and the cyclicality of seasonality or for example the parallelization that is needed to do massive Monte Carlo simulations or something like that.

So, those kinds of things really, practically can’t be done any place except the cloud today. But I think we got to look at the cloud as the next generation IT platform. We’re seeing compelling evidence about the cost savings that get realized by moving to the cloud. I think more important than any of that actually is the speed and the agility that the cloud enables. And what we see is a typical corporate takes 90 days to requisition stage and deploy a visible circuit. Using our Elastic Server Coud, you can do the same thing in 15 minutes virtually. And I actually, I’m a former business guy that moved over to IT, because IT was a constraint, and I think what you’ll see is that over time the cloud infrastructure and the types of tools that go on it are going to eliminate that as de-constraint to changing your business process. So enterprises that don’t move in this direction are going to be at the risk of having much longer cycle time in changing their business processes.

Michael Coté: The conversation of cloud giving you agility, or I’ve enjoyed that recently because agility has been a word of something that we all want in IT forever. And I feel like, it’s sort of hasn’t been well defined with a credible technological basis, whereas when — in the cloud you can say well agility means doing things faster and therefore being able to do them more, so you’re not sort of stuck into an old plan if you will, and I think a lot of cloud technologies have demonstrated that, you can actually achieve that.

It’s not just sort of like an aspirational promise that we all want to get towards, but it’s something that has been demonstrated to actually work. So people are interested in this stuff, you know, for as many tangible benefits as the Smart Cloud and other clouds seem to offer, where do they go to start getting it, like what’s the — like where can they go get this off the shelf?

Jan Jackman: Right. Well, if you look at our Smart Cloud enterprise, you can go on the web today, you can sign up for it and test it out, right, it’s available on the web. You can access it, provision servers, and go and be able to test out these tools. Now, most of the enterprise customers really are looking for help for a roadmap, how do I apply it correctly, because if you just jump into this, you might be thinking workloads to your get in a value.

So we have a set of consulting services and capabilities that really help enterprise customers take a look at the application environments they have, look at the workloads that are relevant for cloud, and help them build a roadmap to be enabled to leverage and start simple, to get familiar with the cloud, over concerns with security differences or where the management, the overall management of their data, sits, and then be able to progress down the roadmap.

Craig Heimark: If you’re using the cloud for a test environment, it’s unlikely that the particular image type of that cloud is actually identical to the stuff you’re running behind your firewall, so you described this as a burgeoning technology — that’s exactly right. So do your scalable testing in the cloud, and then if you want to run it yet behind your firewall using our technology you can import it back and then overrun, translate it automatically instead of doing another manual migration.

Michael Coté: I appreciate you guys taking all this time to go over this, it’s fun to see IBM having more cloud stuff, for as much cloud conversation as IBM and also CohesiveFT gets involved in it. it’s always good to see the equivalent of SKUs out there, actual, uh, products. With that great, simple name.

Jan Jackman: It’s always exciting when we see customers benefit from it.

Michael Coté: Oh sure.

Jan Jackman: So, certainly our goal is to make sure that there is business value for our clients.

Michael Coté: Absolutely. Well, thanks again.

Jan Jackman: All right, thank you.

Craig Heimark: Thank you.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this podcast.

Drinking and partying your brains out at SXSW is an easy enough task, but how do you come to this massive conference to do business? I pulled aside Alcatel-Lucent’s Mike Maney to hear how his team makes sure to fit into “the vibe” of the conference and get business value out of it, as well as have plenty of fun, as you’ll see.

The highlights:

• Alcatel-Lucent setup the #ElevenAPI lounge and was able to host the Angry Birds folks there with several announcements and, as you’ll see in the background, live-action Angry Birds playing.
• This year, there’s a lot more good conversation, good business conversations with folks big (like Johnson and Johnson, NBC, JC Penny’s) and small.
• People like that it’s not vey corporate in here. It facilities conversation.
• Measuring: tacking hash-tags and measuring interest from people in conversations. (Also, there’s some things like driving seven hours just to play Angry Birds that you can’t really measure).
• If you didn’t have a lounge: look for sessions that interest you, check out the planned networking opportunities, or just walking down the street and meeting people.
• For a large company, you have to be a little looser and casual to fit into “the vibe.”
• The effect: We’ve had lines out the door every day with people hanging out, and getting cool folks making the lounge a base.
• How far ahead of time do you start planning for SXSW? Mike’s team started for 2012 during the 2011 SXSW.
• Problems: Bigger parties with long lines, people who are just hanging out vs. working, but, really, “we haven’t had a lot of bad experience here.”

Transcript

As usual with these un-sponsored episodes, I haven’t spent time to clean up the transcript. If you see us saying something crazy, check the original audio first. There are time-codes where there were transcription problems.

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! Here we are at the Alcatel-Lucent Angry Birds’ Lounge at South by Southwest. We have a returning guest here, this time visually, to talk about how the South by Southwest is going. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Mike Maney: Sure! Hi Michael! I am Mike Maney. I am the Head of Influencer Management at Alcatel-Lucent.

Michael Coté: And as you can see, you are very into the Angry Birds.

Mike Maney: I am into the Angry Birds, yes. They are good people.

Michael Coté: So what I wanted to ask you is, I guess people can predict that things are going well by your willingness to put on this awesome suit. But last time we talked we were just kind of talking about the sort of PR and Influencer Management tools and things like that.

So I thought you would be a good person having this Lounge here to kind of go over, has this South by Southwest thing been worth it? Like how is it fitting in to the thing you do for Alcatel?

Mike Maney: So it’s our second year back, and it’s kind of nice when we get a lot of returning folks back to the Lounge. It’s the ELEVEN API Lounge, because it does go up past 10 to 11, that’s sort of what we are doing here. It has been really good.

I think one of the changes that we have seen this year is that we have really seen a lot of good conversation with people, like real business. We have had folks like Johnson & Johnson, NBC, JCPenney’s, folks that are from the enterprise world coming in to talk about APIs and development and non-enterprise stuff.

Michael Coté: And do you get a good audience for that?

Mike Maney: Yes, you get a really good audience for that. I think they are drawn in by a lot of the excitement that we do and the fact that what we do is not very corporate in here. Not very corporate at all. And they just come on in. They have a really good time and it facilitates conversation, which is really what the networking of South by Southwest is all about.

Michael Coté: So I mean, is that the kind of thing that you can measure somehow, or is it sort of like, you just like, hey, trust me, people are coming in and they like this stuff?

Mike Maney: I would like to say that it’s a little bit of the gut feel, and trust me, we know when it’s going well, but for my corporate marketing folks, yeah, I will find a way to measure it somehow.

Michael Coté: Right. Yeah, it’s seems like Twitter is probably a nice way to do that, right?

Mike Maney: We hashtag it with ELEVEN API, so we are measuring volume that way and taking a look at the content of the conversations that are happening there. We are also just sort of gauging interest from comments from folks that we are having interactions with.

Michael Coté: So outside of the Lounge area, which we will get back to, like –

Mike Maney: Wait, there is a place outside of here?

Michael Coté: What about the rest of the conference, have you gotten a feel for what — so like with the rest of the conference, like what — and having been here two years, what do you think of — if someone didn’t have a Lounge going on, what would be kind of the way you would interact with the rest of the conference?

Mike Maney: Well, I do what a lot of the tips say. So I go and I look for the sessions that interest me and I make that list. I try and get to them, and I know they didn’t blow up on day one, and I would do what — South by Southwest’s probably best act is the networking opportunities with peers, with people that you don’t know, walking down the street and seeing somebody with a Gluecon shirt last night, and being able to introduce them to Eric Norlin, being able to do stuff like that.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I notice that in the schedule they actually have a lot of like meetups for different types of categories, which is — I haven’t been to one of those, but it seems nice.

Mike Maney: I tried to get to the Photo one, didn’t make it. But for a large corporation, there are some that I think will do it right, some that won’t, and you have to really be a little bit looser and have the ability to not take yourself as seriously, to be part of the vibe that is South by, and part of what it’s about and embrace it.

I think we have done that here coming back for the second year. We have got Angry Birds in the Lounge, which has been — we have had lines outside the door every single day. What time is it now? It’s 11:30. We have been going since 10, 10:30 today, with lines outside the door.

People playing live action Angry Birds. We have got RCR Wireless broadcasting live. We have had the guys from the Yobongo in here. I mean, I would venture to say we have had the two hottest companies at South by Southwest hanging out and making the Alcatel-Lucent Lounge their home base; the Yobongo and Angry Birds.

Michael Coté: For people who don’t know Alcatel-Lucent very well, I mean, can you kind of explain how those — how that kind of fits into your business? Like why do you want to have this stuff running around with each other?

Mike Maney: Well, we want to have it running around with each other because a lot of people, you are right, they don’t know who we are, they don’t know what we do, but they use our stuff everyday without knowing.

Alcatel-Lucent sits at the very heart and core of all of the networks that all these games, all of these apps, everything runs on. All these devices connect to some sort of Alcatel-Lucent innovation and technology. We just want to be able to have people understand this is the company that’s helping to make that possible.

Michael Coté: Yeah, Cisco does a lot of moving bits around, but you guys do a lot of moving bits and voice and switches, like all the gear.

Mike Maney: Exactly! Exactly! We do all of that stuff that nobody every sees and is really vitally important. It’s really tough work and it’s fun.

Michael Coté: So a couple more little operational questions. So how far ahead of time do you start planning for South by Southwest?

Mike Maney: Oh, we started last Thursday. I mean, this year we actually just started today for next year. So we had a meeting this morning and we are already planning and booking stuff for next year. Thinking about what we can do differently, how we can make it even better, how we can make it a little more interactive, and shift stuff around to keep it fresh.

Michael Coté: Right. So I mean, there has been a lot of positive things you have been seeing, but what are some things that you would like to see work out better or that just flat out don’t work when you are coming here?

Mike Maney: That’s a really good question. I think some of the bigger parties with the lines, that’s always a challenge. People that are here for just hanging out at the parties versus the actual networking, that will always be a challenge, again, embracing the culture of it.

We really have not had a whole lot of — we really haven’t had a whole lot of bad experience here, it has worked out really, really well. We just look for incremental ways to make it that much better.

Michael Coté: Right, right, right. Okay. Well, great! Well, I think unless there is any other sort of like tips or trip report experiences you want to relate to us, I think that was pretty good.

Mike Maney: Thanks a lot, Michael.

Michael Coté: Yeah. We will talk to everyone next time.

Mike Maney: Yeah. Bye.

To catch up on this, I talked with IBM’s Phil Fritz and then CJ Paul for an overview and then demo:

Overview

There’s also another overview video Phil did from IBM.

Demo

Overview Transcript

Michael Coté: Hello everybody! Here we are in Austin, Texas, at the IBM Austin Campus, which is always nice to visit. And we have a, I don’t know, two or three time returning guest here to go over some new exciting stuff in Tivoli land. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Phil Fritz: Thanks Michael. I am Phil Fritz. I am a Product Manager at Tivoli, and my area is our Tivoli Live Software-as-a-Service portfolio.

Michael Coté: In the Tivoli Live portfolio about — it was actually just about a year ago that we filmed the little overview that we did about the Tivoli Live, the first release that came out with. And basically, it had some monitoring and recording and things along those areas.

And you guys are coming — you have come out with the new — it’s always interesting picking in a SaaS how you phrase this stuff, but you have come out with a new product in the SaaS?

Phil Fritz: Yeah, a new offering, a new service.

Michael Coté: Yeah, a new part of it. So why don’t you tell us about the new service that’s in Tivoli Live?

Phil Fritz: Yeah. It was about a year ago we came out with our first one, and this is a continuation of that strategy. We are going to add more of our portfolio in a Software-as-a-Service delivery. So we are announcing Tivoli Live – service manager as our new service offering.

It complements our monitoring offering and it consists essentially of our Core Service Desk, Service Catalog, Change Management Database, Change Management, Configuration Management Processes, and Release Management Processes, and not only that, but you also get Asset Management.

So it’s a very large part of our automation stack, what we like to call a process automation stack, that takes us all the way from problem, incident, change, and into IT Asset Management, and we are very excited about it, because it’s an ideal solution to deliver in a SaaS model.

Michael Coté: I am always a bit beguiled by the name service manager, because I expected this to be like a help desk, but it sounds like there is actually a tremendously more, it’s not just tickets that you are moving in and out of it.

Phil Fritz: And this matches what we see from a lot of our customers is, we see a lot of mature processes around problem and incident management, but we also see a lot of challenges in moving beyond that, and sort of affecting service management, ITIL processes, and getting that moved beyond just simple problem and incident management. And what helps a lot with that is having a core data model, so that all of the processes can share the data.

Change Management Database is an important part of that data model. So that when you do put problems in the system, that those surface up as changes and you are dealing with the same assets, same configuration items throughout those processes.

And not only that, but when you also add in things like IT assets; my laptop is broken and I have that serial number on that laptop, that’s data you want available across all these different processes, and the lifecycle management of those assets as well.

So we find that these are all interrelated and it’s best to have a solution that can take advantage of that data.

Michael Coté: Looking at what you are doing with service manager, like how — if someone is an existing sort of a Tivoli user, like how is this going to fit into what they have already? I mean it’s not — it doesn’t — I can’t imagine that — obviously this does not move all their stuff to the cloud or something, it’s just moving part of the workflow or something.

So can you kind of speak to how the usage scenario of using service manager would fit in with managing all your additional IT and things like that, what does it end up looking like?

Phil Fritz: There’s actually lots of different ways you can consume this capability, because the Tivoli portfolio is pretty big, as you know. And so we generally either tend to have tools that focus on automating tasks of a particular silo, like Database Management tools and Server Management tools and things like that, or we have processes that span across those different silos to be able to affect changes.

So typically if you are a Tivoli user, but you are only using some of the domain specific tools, the SaaS capability, as well as our product, doesn’t really matter which way you consume it, provides that overlay, that ability to tie in all those different silos of expertise and have them flow in a consistent process, either when you are releasing or making changes to the environment. So that’s one scenario in which it can fit.

So folks that may have looked at that, implementing ITIL best practices or ITIL processes to cut across their domains, SaaS may be less of an intimidating model by which to consume these capabilities in-house, because now you can focus on the process integration as opposed to getting the infrastructure all set up and talking.

The second scenario is, what if you already have a service desk; service desk is a pretty mature part of the market, so by and large, most people have some kind of ticketing system? Well, the neat part about this is, because it’s based on the same software, for our existing Tivoli customers, if they want to, for example, take their service desk to the next level and add an Asset Management, it’s a fairly seamless experience across the two. In fact, we hope that the experience we deliver to the end users or let’s say the asset manager user that has to go and integrate their asset system of the tickets, they may not even know or care that for different parts of the applications, some of it’s being hosted in-house, some of it’s being hosted over at IBL.

So that’s the kind of experience we want to be able to deliver that way. Customers that want to explore adding more capabilities can do so in a step-wise fashion without a lot of incremental investments to go along the way, you can just kind of scale it up.

Michael Coté: What are the tie-ins to on-premising, like you were getting into the sort of configuration management and things like that, like does it sort of scan your local network, or how do you get that view? How do you cross the firewall?

Phil Fritz: Right, right. We have built a lot of simplified interfaces to enable very quick startup for a lot of our customer. So what is new in the SaaS version is we have created some interfaces to allow uploading of CSV or Excel file. So if you have got set of users or you have got a set of other information you want to upload quickly into SaaS version, we have that capability.

Obviously over time, all of the integrations that we have built into the product we will make available through the SaaS model. There is an option for VPN; if you want to enable a VPN, sort of enable other types of traffic to talk back to our SaaS, our SaaS deliverable.

And as just like other products, as time goes by, we will be adding more and more capabilities and functions along those lines to support that.

Michael Coté: And like you said, you have — everyone has a service desk and there is plenty of on-premise things, and everyone has service management stuff as well, or many people do, and so when you guys decided to go after providing all of the service management stuff as a SaaS, like what caused you to want to do that? What’s the motivation?

Phil Fritz: First and foremost, customers are asking for it. So we want to — we are hearing our customers say, hey, is there a way I can consume some of this capability with some of the upfront investments I need to make? So certainly, that’s the main motivation for delivering this type of capability.

And from just a pure looking at the market, it allows IBM to reach into other parts of the market, general business, or mid market that may have always had a requirement for this type of capability, but it has always been a bigger challenge for these small organizations to be able to pick that up.

So that’s very exciting for us to be able to service this market using this model. We don’t have to dump things down. We don’t have to remove functionality to access it. We are actually leveraging our cloud, which — there is another motivation there is, this adds more content to our own cloud, we like to drink our own champagne. We have this great platform that why wouldn’t we take advantage of this platform to deliver these core capabilities.

So obviously part of it is our customers are asking for it, part of it is us wanting to address new markets.

It’s also great to do a trial, to try before you buy. Even if the customer is not necessarily looking at SaaS as a long-term solution, this is a great way, like I said earlier, hey, I want to try this other new function, here is a quick way of getting it integrated, getting it in the hands of our users, giving direct feedback to us, so this kind of helps perpetuate a better feedback cycle for us.

Michael Coté: Yeah. And that’s one of the interesting things I have seen in I guess the enterprise software area of SaaS is, it’s a lot less onerous to just try something out. I mean, usually in an on-premise environment, you have got to get some boxes and provision things and set up access, whereas when things are offered as a SaaS, it’s, at least at the demo area, the demo stage, it’s easy to just get a sense of what it would be like, which is — that’s kind of refreshing.

Phil Fritz: It is. And a lot of our enterprise customers want more than just a demo. They want to do a proof, show me, and show me how it works, and this is a great way to deliver that proof.

Michael Coté: Well, great! Well, thanks for taking all that time to tell us about the new offering.

Is there like a website you can go to, to check it out, speaking of being able to take it out for a spin, like what’s the — is there a URL or anything?

Phil Fritz: Yeah. So on the 7th we will have a URL out there. I believe it will be TLSM.TivoliLive.com, but if you just Google Tivoli Live, we will have a splash page with the user IDs and all that kind of fun stuff and you can go try it out yourself.

Michael Coté: Well, that sounds great! Well, thanks again!

Phil Fritz: Thanks!

Demo Transcript

Michael Cot̩: Well, we are going to check out a demo of Tivoli Live Рservice manager, and to do that we have another guest to go through the demo for us. You want to introduce yourself real quickly.

CJ Paul: Yes. Hi! My name is CJ Paul. I am the Product Architect for this family of products.

What you are seeing here is the Log in screen. One of the things I want to point out right up front is that, this product is enabled for multiple languages. So right on the Login screen itself there are options for different languages that the user can choose to use the system in.

So as you click through the different languages, not only does the prompts change, but all of the information and the help that is provided by the product also changes.

We will go into the tool right now with the User ID of an end user, and here you see the end user logging in to a Self-Service portal. And in this particular portal they have information presented to them about any particular outages that are coming up. They have some options on the screen that lets them create tickets for any issues that they may be facing.

And in addition to that, we also have a Service Catalog that allows them to proactively request new services from the organization.

So here I am going to take you to the Service Catalog. We have lots of different Offerings that the user could navigate through in different ways.

Michael Coté: And are these sort of out of the box things that you guys provide or scenarios people have added in?

CJ Paul: We provide a large number of Offerings defined out of the box, with some fulfillment workflows behind them. And then the tool itself is actually quite configurable, so that it’s easy for users to add in new Offerings.

Michael Coté: Oh, right, okay.

CJ Paul: And they don’t have to write code, they can just go in and configure the tool to do that.

So just to give you a feel for one of these Offerings, I can click on the Office Move Request.

One thing you will notice here is, the Offerings here can cover both your traditional IT kinds of requests, like being able to request new IT resources or reset passwords, create accounts, as well as doing facilities request.

So a simple example here is, if you wanted to submit a request to move an office, it prompts you for the regular kinds of information that you can then fill up and just submit the Order Now! button.

Michael Coté: And then on the backend, I mean for something like this, does it sort of involve the Facilities Manager and people in addition to IT staff?

CJ Paul: Yes, it does. We have different fulfillment workflows. Each of these Offerings can have their own unique fulfillment workflow that can route the request to the appropriate people, whether they are IT or Facilities.

Then, once the request is submitted, the status of the request can be seen here in the My Requests View, as both Graphical as well as List oriented. So you can see different requests that have been submitted and who actually it’s queued up for.

In this particular case, the user had submitted a service request that resulted in an incident that is queued up for the Service Desk Analyst, and they have also submitted the Office Move Request that is actually queued up for the Enduser Manager.

Michael Coté: Oh, right, right. So it’s kind of like tracking your package as it moves through the process?

CJ Paul: As it moves through the process, right. So this is the perspective for an end user. Let me now Sign Out of this tool and show you how it looks from the perspective of a Service Desk Analyst.

The Service Desk Analyst receives the incidents that are reported by the end users and it shows up on his queue. Again, he has the ability to look at the incoming incidents in different ways, either Graphical or in a List way, and then he can claim the incident ticket and then start working on it, assessing what went wrong, and then assigning the work to different people.

Michael Coté: And this guy is apparently a productivity genius, because he only has like a few tickets, huh?

CJ Paul: That’s right. Let me now Sign Out of the Service Desk Analyst View and show you the perspective of a Change Manager, which is another one of the user types that we support on this product.

Michael Coté: So this might be sort of a level above that Analyst version or someone monitoring the various processes, kind of taking a — they are trying to monitor everyone taking care of tickets and see how that’s working out.

CJ Paul: Yes, that’s one class of person. And other scenarios where, in response to the incident that was created, they might figure out that to fix the root cause, the underlying problem, they have to actually go deploy a patch to a application that is running.

Michael Coté: Right, right, right.

CJ Paul: And now you can look at the considerations around deploying the patch. When you deploy the patch, what are the business services that are going to be impacted if there is an outage.

Michael Coté: Right, right.

CJ Paul: So this tool provides you both textual as well as graphical feedback. One of the things you will notice here that is unique and differentiating is that, in the industry, most of the Service Desk Tools are essentially just ticketing systems. What we have done here is to take that a level further, to then do additional analytics that take the information in the CMDB, look at the relationships, and then we run rule-based impact assessments, to then show the user what the impacts would be.

Michael Coté: Oh, right. So you can do sort of, what’s the word I am looking for you, you can do sort of — forecasting is the wrong word, but you can kind of — you can do sort of simulations to see what might happen if you deploy a change?

CJ Paul: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Hopefully, helping you avoid breaking things when you make changes.

CJ Paul: Absolutely, yeah. The system actually can Calculate Impacts and show you the results in the Topology View. It can also work off of Historical data. So it combines the knowledge that you gain from different perspectives.

So I am going to switch here so we can take a look at this particular change. And in this particular case, you see that there is an update being made to the WebSphere Application Server, and in the Topology View below, it shows you the particular CIs that are going to be impacted, and the ones that are not going to be impacted.

Michael Coté: Oh, right. And that’s bringing in the Asset Management and other — the Inventory Management that you guys have.

CJ Paul: Yes. So as part of Change Management we can also ensure that if new changes or new software is deployed that we check out the appropriate software licenses before the software is deployed in the environment.

And then for the Change Manager as well as for the rest of the IT staff, we provide real-time visual feedback on the status of the work that is being performed.

So for example, if they wanted to get an understanding of what tasks are complete and what tasks are pending and what tasks are late. In this particular case, you will see that there was a patch being deployed to WebSphere and some of the tasks are complete, there is a particular task that is in progress, and then some other tasks are actually running a little bit behind.

Michael Coté: Oh, right, right. I mean, I assume kind of what’s happened here is, someone has requested some sort of change and the Change Manager, a team came together and charted out, here is what we need to do.

CJ Paul: Exactly!

Michael Coté: These are the steps to deploy that change.

CJ Paul: Yeah.

Michael Coté: And then as a manager they have come in and they can kind of see the, as we would say in the agile world, sort of a radiator of kind of what’s — how things are moving on, and you can actually get a sense of what’s happening and the state of things.

CJ Paul: In real-time, as it progresses.

Michael Coté: Right.

CJ Paul: So hopefully this has given you a quick feel for some of the capabilities of the tool.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Definitely! Well, I appreciate you taking all the time to walk us through that.

CJ Paul: Thank you.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored these videos.