Who'll buy BMC?

With the Facebook share launch turning into a bit of a fiasco, high tech company shares may not look like such a good deal at the moment. But taking the long view, is BMC Software ripe for picking?

As you know, BMC sells software that runs on mainframes. And, like everyone else, its moving into the cloud space. And it would be a pretty big organization for anyone to acquire. Bloomberg (the business and financial experts) reckon that it would be the eighth-largest US software acquisition on record. Bloomberg also suggest that the last similar-sized acquisition occurred before the 2008 crash.

If you were going to spend your money, perhaps a better choice would be to snap up a suffering Hewlett Packard, who this week layed off 27,000 people, and who’s profits slid 31 percent.

But for many investors, getting a foothold in the cloud space provides more opportunities going forward than buying into current technologies where sales are perhaps more stagnant.

So, who might be discussing a takeover of BMC? We can discount HP. But whatabout Dell? This year, Dell has acquired Make Technologies (a provider of application modernization software and services), Clerity Solutions (a provider of application modernization and legacy system re-hosting solutions and software), Wyse Technology (a leader in thin client computing devices and software), SonicWALL (a provider of network security, content security, Web and e-mail security, secure remote access, and business continuity solutions), and AppAssure (who do back-up software). Dell definitely appears to be moving into the enterprise software space – while still retaining its hardware base.

Cisco has also been acquisitive this year, getting its hands on Truviso (who supply scalable, real-time network data analysis and reporting software), ClearAccess (suppliers of TR-069-based software to service providers for the provisioning and management of residential and mobile devices), NDS Group (a provider of video software and content security solutions that enable service providers and media companies to securely deliver and monetize new video entertainment experiences), and Lightwire (who develop advanced optical interconnect technology for high-speed networking applications).

And then there’s always Oracle, who, this year, have acquired ClearTrial (a cloud-based clinical trial operations and analytics product) and Taleo (talent management software). They might feel that acquiring BMC protects them from rivals.

Or maybe someone will buy BMC and sell off the mainframe software that we’re familiar with and retain and develop the cloud stuff as a way of making money in the future.

SAP has only recently spent $4.3 billion on cloud computing firm Ariba. Perhaps they would like to get their hands on that part of BMC.

It will be interesting to see whether organizations are willing to risk such large sums of money that an acquisition of BMC Technologies would require in these straightened times. Or maybe asset stripping is the only way forward?

We’ll be keeping an eye on the news.

Making it look nice for CICS users

Let’s look at an archetypal MVS site. Kenny wrote most of the original Assembler and quite a bit of the COBOL code that drove the business all those years ago. He was a big man and a real hippie. He even came to work in his sandals and decorated his office with album covers. He thought that writing comments in code was just a waste of time. Doug, who took over from Kenny was an absolute troglodyte. Whereas Kenny was fun to go for a drink with – and boy could he drink – Doug was forever under the floor connecting high speed back-up technology that no-one else really understood. He was great because he’d help everyone with code problems, but he seldom turned up to meetings or understood the concept of budgets. But everything worked like a dream and the company made money.

Nowadays we’ve got Ross heading up software on our z/OS CICS system. He does attend meetings – lots of them. He’s on the committee at a local user group and he’s given presentations at SHARE. He’s even got a wife and children! The problem is that much of the code that Ross looks after is quite old and doesn’t have many comments. There was an effort in 1999 to document everything, but it’s now out-of-date since the SOA (Services-Oriented Architecture) project.

The trouble at many sites is that their Ross is kept very busy at the mainframe end of his CICS system and thinks that the bit of AJAX on the Web browser front-end is enough to keep the end users happy. The truth is, end users are never happy! So what if someone at a conference told Ross there was an easy way (well, perhaps not easy, but fairly straightforward certainly) to make the end user experience of his CICS applications look like it was written in 2012 and not 1912!?!? Do you think Ross would be interested?

Before we look at what this amazing solution might be, let’s briefly look at Web design. Back in 1999, a Web site was pretty much made up of static pages. Someone wrote the pages in HTML and, over time, people updated the information on those pages. Then we had PHP and MySQL. This provided a database that users could update as necessary, and the PHP pages pulled out the latest information. They still looked like static pages, but they were easier to update. Then, we had JavaScript that gave us programming capabilities and all the flexibility that goes with that. Then we had JQuery, which was JavaScript with all the hard work already done for us. You’ve seen Web sites with JQuery-like effects – the ability to click on a thumbnail image and see it large in the middle of the page while much of the rest of the screen is covered with a semi-transparent layer. An example would be clicking on a photo in Facebook.

So let’s tell Ross about the Dojo Toolkit from the Dojo Foundation. Now at Version 1.7, the Web site at http://dojotoolkit.org/ says: “Dojo saves you time and scales with your development process, using web standards as its platform. It’s the toolkit experienced developers turn to for building high quality desktop and mobile web applications.” Now, suppose there was some way to plug that into CICS. So while Ross was looking after the CICS applications, Dojo was making sure that the end users had a good experience.

The Virtual CICS user group (www.fundi.com/virtualcics/) heard from Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited, earlier this month. He gave a talk entitled: “Utilizing the Dojo Toolkit for Web browser-driven applications from CICS”, which really got to grips with how CICS and the Dojo Toolkit could be integrated. The base functionality of the Dojo Toolkit is made available to a Web page by including a link to dojo.js. This includes plenty of features like CSS-based queries, event handling, animations, AJAX, class-based programming, and a package system that makes getting access to the rest of Dojo very easy.

There are additional stable (but optional) components for advanced animations, I/O, data, drag-and-drop, and much more with Dojo Core. Dijit is Dojo’s theme-able, accessible, easy-to-customize UI library. Dijit requires Dojo Base and various Dojo Core modules to use. It allows for the creation of widgets. For the more adventurous, there’s DojoX, which contains a number of sub-projects based on the Dojo Base. Each project has a varying states of maturity – from very stable and robust to alpha.

Stephen’s company recognized a need to control the Dojo Toolkit that was being used by their PlexSpy application status monitor product. And they decided that if it was an issue for them, it was most likely an issue for others. So they created a generic server solution that could be used by anyone with CICS on z/OS. As a consequence, the Dojo Toolkit has been taken into the mainframe environment and is served from CICS out of PDSs. This brings the strengths of the mainframe to sites using the Dojo Toolkit – providing the control over it that those sites needed.

Ross can now put his feet up at home with his family knowing that his end users are happy with their working environment. And the code Kenny and Doug wrote is still doing its job for another generation.

How’s business?

Since 2008, the world seems to have lurched its way from one financial crisis to the next. In the UK they’re talking about double dip recession. In Spain, things look difficult. And in Greece, things look impossible! So how are the big mainframe companies weathering the storm? Are we looking at an extinction-level event? Are the big players (the metaphorically dominant dinosaurs) going to be replaced by smaller companies (the metaphorical mammals)?

For people who like this kind of thing, there are meant to have been five mass extinctions in the Earth’s history. There’s the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event (about 65.5 million years ago) when about 75% of species became extinct, seeing the end of the dinosaurs, and mammals and birds becoming the dominant land vertebrates.

There’s also the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event (205 million years ago). The Permian–Triassic extinction event (251 million years ago), which is referred to as the ‘Great Dying’. The Late Devonian extinction was about 375–360 million years ago. And the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event was 450–440 million years ago.

BMC Software’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings fell 42%. On the dowside there was an increase in operating expenses, while on the up side they saw slightly improved revenue. It seems that cloud services bookings totalled $100 million for the year – 10% ahead of analysts’ projections. The company closed its acquisition of Numara Software, which added to revenue in the fourth quarter, and gave BMC additional IT management tools and distribution to mid-sized companies. BMC also has 25% more sales people than it had a year ago. Looking at the bottom line: for the quarter ended 31 March, BMC Software reported a profit of $70.7 million, or 43 cents a share, down from $122.5 million, or 67 cents a share, a year earlier.

CA Technologies’ fourth-quarter earnings increased from last year, helped mainly by lower income tax payments. Revenues for the quarter rose 5 percent from last year, but were mostly offset by increased product development and general expenses. Its fourth-quarter net income was $211 million or $0.45 per share, compared to $188 million or $0.37 per share last year. Its net income jumped by 12%.

IBM recently reported flat revenues as its hardware business struggled in the first quarter of 2012. Revenues increased by just 0.3 percent to $24.7billion from the same period last year, although profits increased by 7.1 per cent to $3bn. IBM’s figures for each of its major divisions were generally positive, especially its cloud services, which saw revenue double, however its hardware business suffered a 6.7 percent decline in revenue to $3.7billion. IBM has raised its 2012 full-year earnings per share forecast to at least $15.00.

I couldn’t find any figures for Progress|DataDirect.

So, it seems financially to be a bit mixed rather than anywhere near an extinction for the big beasts of the mainframe software world. There may be a number of small mammals running around their feet, but these metaphorical dinosaurs are far from fighting for their very existence. It’s always worth remembering that dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrate for around 135 million years. Mainframes have only been with us since the 1960s They’ve still got quite a long way to go!
 

If it's May it must be Madness

For the fourth year in a row, CA Technologies is hosting its free virtual trade show. As always, there are educational presentations to help mainframe users get more value from their existing products, and improve their technical skills. You can find out more and register by going to ca.com/mainframe/may. Last year’s event drew 5,000 registrants from 59 countries; and connected partners, industry experts, and colleagues via virtual booths and online chats.

MMM12 includes presentations by CA Technologies and leading industry experts including Julie Craig, research director, application management, Enterprise Management Associates; Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners, International LLC; Joe Clabby, president, Clabby Analytics; Craig Mullins, president, Mullins Consulting; Stu Henderson, president, The Henderson Group; and DB2 expert Sheryl Larson, president of Sheryl M Larson, Inc.

There’s also keynote speakers including: CA’s Dayton Semerjian; Dr Howard Rubin, President and CEO of Rubin Worldwide; Julie Craig, CA’s research director; Jon Toigo, CEO Toigo Partners; and Karen Sleeth, Senior Principal CA Labs.

From 1 to 31 May, CA claims it’s “the largest mainframe-focused event of its kind. Every weekday in May brings new insights, tools, and strategies to help you understand and maximize the strength and relevance of 21st century mainframe solutions. There are more than 100+ valuable sessions, demos, papers, and other valuable tools available over every business day in May, so you won’t want to miss a thing! From application development and performance, to databases and storage, to Linux on System z, MMM 2012 has your area covered!”

You may recall that Arcati’s Mark Lillycrop and I were involved in a Networking Lounge conversation during last year’s mainframe madness.

The great thing about this event is that you don’t need to leave your desk. There’s no travel costs, hotel costs, meals, replacement staff costs etc. You just log-in from your laptop.

The same applies to the Virtual CICS user group meeting on Tuesday 8 May. At 10:30am CDT, Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited, will be discussing “Utilizing the Dojo Toolkit for Web browser-driven applications from CICS”.

Modern Web applications need a user interface that gives a positive experience, is functionally effective, and pleasing on the eye. Creating such user interfaces can be quite difficult using the browser’s native Javascript language. Javascript libraries such as the Dojo Toolkit facilitate the creation and delivery of modern Web applications. CICS on z/OS is fully capable of servicing the needs of Web applications. This presentation discusses how the Dojo Toolkit can be exploited by CICS Web applications. Reference is made to the business issues encountered when deciding to use the Dojo Toolkit in a software solution that already uses the CICS Web interface.

If you want to register for the presentation, you need to go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/624487633. If you want to find out more go to  http://www.fundi.com/virtualcics/. Or if you’re an IMS specialist go to http://www.fundi.com/virtualims/ to find out about future IMS-related presentations.

Online events like CA’s May Mainframe Madness and virtual user group meetings like the Virtual CICS user group this coming week save attendees time while delivering the information they’d get from physically attending an event. And for their organization, the savings are huge – which is why we’re seeing more events of this type, and why they are so successful.

Extending the range

I last looked at extending wireless networks in “Wireless working” in October 2006 and “Extending a small network” in January 2007. So it’s about time I had a look at what’s currently available. Here at iTech-Ed Ltd, we got our hands on the Netgear Universal Wifi Range Extender – WN3000RP.

We’ve been using wifi to connect various laptops to the printer and to the router for a few years now and it has worked successfully. We also have high-speed broadband and everything is working well. But nowadays we also have smartphones and tablets that want to be on the wifi, and we could have a whole range of games boxes and other devices that would be naturally located at the limit of where our wifi reaches – or perhaps even just beyond. The answer to that problem is a device like Netgear’s range extender.

It looks like a big plug that would go into any socket, but it also has two small antennae that stick up on either side. Having said that, when it’s plugged into the socket, it can be quite unobtrusive – depending on where the socket is placed. There’s a picture of the device here.

Setting up the device is fairly straightforward. We found a socket on the wall that was close to the fringe of the current router’s wireless coverage and we plugged it in and turned on the power using the button on the side of the device. The instructions say that we could have set up the device using WPS (Wifi Protected Set-up), but we didn’t have that facility. We used the wireless connection manager facility on a laptop to ‘see’ the NETGEAR_EXT wireless network. This is the SSID (Service Set Identifier) the plug was sending out. The next stage was to launch Firefox (in our case, but any browser would do) and try to connect to a Web page. This automatically re-directed the browser to www.mywifiext.net. This is the set-up page for the device. We simply ran through the required set-up and saved our answers. The effect was to reboot the device. The next stage was to go back to the wireless connection manager and look for wireless networks. From where we were located, we could just see the original network from the router, and we could see the new one from the Range Extender. This second one now had the same name as our original router’s with “_EXT” on the end of it. We made sure that the laptop would connect to this new wireless device automatically and treated it as a ‘home’ (ie safe) network.

There are lights on the front of the Extender that indicate when it’s powered on; when there’s a connection between it and the router; and when there’s a connection to a PC. It also comes with an Ethernet port, if you need it.

It really didn’t take very long and the instructions were very clear about what to do. Our first test was to move the laptop we’d set everything up on into distant corners of the building. It could still see the new network (whereas before, it couldn’t it couldn’t see the old one). We then tried a smartphones, which easily found the new network. And then tried an iPad. It, again, could now get signal in the furthest corners of two different rooms. But having signal is one thing, having a decent speed is something else again. We used our standard network test – which is to connect to the BBC iPlayer and see whether we can watch a TV programme without it needing to buffer. We found a recent edition of Horizon and tucked ourselves away into a corner. The good news is that the reception was great. We watched about five minutes worth and there was no buffering – and we assumed that if we watched longer it would be the same. Now, there are all sorts of factors that can affect speed, and I’m not saying that HD TV would work as well or streaming a blu-ray DVD. But for our kind of usage. It passed the test with flying colours.

I liked the speed and ease of the installation. There was no CD required and I didn’t have to connect to the device with an Ethernet cable. I simply used the wireless connection manager. If anyone wanted to use this at home to send a signal to distant rooms, I have no doubt that most people would be able to follow the instructions with ease. But there are plenty of smaller offices that have thick walls, or long distances between the router and their furthest reaches that could benefit from such a device.

If you’re looking for a range extender, then the Netgear Universal Wifi Range Extender WN3000RP is a good place to start.

Cloud wars

There was a time when mainframers simply claimed that they’d been using the cloud computing paradigm all along. Then IBM came up with SmartCloud, its vision for cloud computing, offering SmartCloud services and SmartCloud solutions. Last week saw the announcement of the PureSystems private cloud packages. But for non-mainframe users or non-IBM technology users, the clouds are getting darker!

Now, I’ve been using a Pogoplug as cloud resource for a couple of years now. Next to my router, I have a small Pogoplug box. And attached to that box are a number of big memory sticks with files that I want available wherever I am. I can upload and download the files to any computer and I have the app on my phone and tablet – it’s all very convenient.

But for people who don’t have a Pogoplug, there’s been Microsoft’s Skydrive offering online storage space to (originally) people with an MSN account. It’s handy to keep a copy of your files in the cloud and then access them when you go somewhere else. It also allows file sharing. But you may get irritated by the need to download Silverlight.

And that’s the area where Dropbox is such a success. It allows users to share folders with other people and those folders can contain very large documents. Dropbox, in many ways ,became the de facto standard – everyone had heard of Dropbox. And now, BitTorrent lhas aunched Share, which is its equivalent – and is perhaps aimed at younger people who might be more familiar with using BitTorrent offerings.

The problem with Dropbox and the other similar providers is that any self-respecting IT department is going to have to stop its staff using them. Now sharing a photo of my new grandson is one thing, sharing a business-sensitive policy document on the cloud is something else. Who knows what organizations at some time in the future may have access to those cloud-based files? Internal IT security can no more allow staff to use cloud solutions for sharing files than it can allow staff to carry around unencrypted memory sticks.

There are some sites where you can upload your files anonymously, although you get a slow connection. You can open a free account, which gets you a slightly faster connection, or there’s the paid for service with the fastest connection. Once a file is uploaded, you get a URL that you can share, and then people can download your file. Examples include FileDropper (up to 5GB), FileFactory (upload up to 50 2GB files), FileServe (up to 500GB with an account), and HotFile (you pay when your files are downloaded).

Some organizations have limits on the size of files that can be sent as attachments or received as attachments. That’s why some of these other Web cloud hosts have sprung up. People like: Bigupload (up to 50MB), Box.net (1GB of storage, but the maximum file size is 25MB), Crocko (up to 1GB), DriveHQ (1GB ), Humyo (10GB), Kontainer file storage (50MB), MediaFire (up to 100MB, MegaSWF (Flash SWF files up to 10MB), RapidShare (up to 200MB), ShareBase (up to 200MB), Sigmirror (5GB of free storage), TzFiles (2GB), and uploaded.to (250MB file size maximum).

And there are many other hosting sites that I haven’t mentioned. And many that charge varying amounts for storage.

Up to now, Google, has offered Google Docs as a cloud solution. You could create your Word files and, assuming you had the Google Docs plug-in, store a copy in the cloud. Or you could just create documents using Google Docs and share them.

But now, it appears that Google is going to launch Google Drive – 5GB of free storage available to all users. Users will get a Google Drive icon on their desktop and use it as a virtual drive. And 5GB is quite a lot of storage – although arch-rival Amazon’s Cloud Drive offers exactly the same free.

Bitcasa, which is still in beta, is offering free storage while it’s in beta and paid for unlimited storage afterwards.

With the growth in cloud storage, more IT departments will have to get involved in making sure that there is some way that business-related data can be kept secure in the cloud. And with Google joining the growing cloud space race, end users are going expect cloud storage to be available to them.

Storage and expertise – the PureSystems box

On Wednesday 11 April, IBM introduced to the world the PureSystems family of data centre infrastructure products. The idea behind them is that they will simplify the management, automation, and running of enterprise applications on a range of virtualization technologies.

This new line of integrated systems has the ability to automatically handle everyday tasks such as configuration and updates, which reduced the amount of time needed to get applications up and running and also reduces the management overhead. Therefore, IT staff are freed up to get on with other work. Users gain the expertise of 125 independent software vendors (such as VMware, SugarCRM, Infor, and Juniper Networks) who developed what IBM calls “patterns of expertise” that automate many common IT and industry tasks such as deployment, configuration, and upgrading of applications onto the appliances. “For example, a customer relationship management program that used to take three days to deploy can now be deployed in under one hour”, claims IBM. In addition, companies can scale their operations very quickly, allowing them to go from a small number of computer systems in one site to service on the cloud, with systems that can be accessed around the world.

IBM proudly described its PureSystems family as one of the most significant announcements of the last 20 years, and said it is the result of $2bn research and development spend over many years.

The announcement might be viewed as a way for IBM to match competitors Oracle, HP, and Cisco Systems, who have all been promoting converged infrastructure – integrating server, storage, networking, and other technologies into a single managed architecture. As a sweetener, IBM says it will buy back servers, ie those sourced from HP and Oracle, from clients who migrate to PureSystems.

As mentioned above, each PureSystems package combines servers, storage, networking and virtualization technologies into a single appliance, with additional services from IBM. The PureSystems initially come in two versions – PureFlex System (which is a basic infrastructure platform for self-service private clouds), and PureApplication System (which includes IBM’s WebSphere middleware and DB2 database and can be used for Web and database applications). The systems support the Hyper-V, KVM, Power-V, and ESX hypervisors from Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM and VMware, respectively, and are based on either Intel or IBM Power processors. Storage is provided by IBM’s Storwize V7000 appliances, and networking can be a choice of either Brocade, Cisco, or Juniper kit.

IBM has included a cloud self-service and provisioning interface in the PureSystems, based on the same technology used in IBM’s public SmartCloud services, giving customers a ready-to-go cloud computing system in a box, they said.

Customers are able to define the PureFlex configuration, while the PureApplication System is available in four configurations ranging from 96 CPU cores and 1.5TB of memory, up to 608 cores and 9.7TB of memory.

IT departments will be pleased to know that IBM is offering a single support hotline for the entire system, whether an issue is with the hardware or software, while there is also just a single procurement process for the entire system.

“You can order just one box with one pin number, and it has on it all you need to get an out-of-box experience straight away with the software, the middleware, the hardware, storage, the network fabric”, claimed Graham Spittle, chief technology officer for IBM in Europe.

There is also just a single management console, according to IBM, although they can also integrate with IBM’s Tivoli platform for customers who’ve standardized on that for management.

Pricing for the PureSystem family starts at about $100,000.