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IDN Expert Voices: IBM Craig Hayman - Websphere GM

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: IBM, Craig Hayman, Cloud, Middleware, Websphere, BPM, Middleware, CIO Results,

IBM  Exec Says Convergence of Middleware,
BPM, Cloud Will Accelerate CIO Business Results 

Transcript below>

In today’s economy, CIOs are facing reduced CapEx, OpEx and even staff. 
Despite those pressures on resources they are also being asked to generate more business benefits from those technology projects that do get the green light. Resources.  IBM General Manager for WebSphere Application and Integration Middleware describes how Big Blue is helping CIOs cope with this ‘gap’ between their wish list and their resources. 

So, how do CIOs balance risk/reward for projects, or even more importantly, how do CIOs make sure the projects they fund will deliver the goods?

In this Expert Voices, Hayman shares some insights on how IBM envisions how the ESB/SOA/BPM/Cloud convergence will create a much more intelligent enterprise infrastructure, where:

• How SOA and BPM combined are solving many of the old problems with business process re-engineering (BPR), to deliver both IT and business leaders what they need.
• How BPM and Cloud are converging to lower the cost and technical skills required to get started with optimizing business processes
• How SOA and Cloud are creating new opportunities to optimize throughout the software lifecycle, so that business needs can be met anywhere along a project’s timeline – not just at the start.

Interview time: Approx 14 minutes

Interview Transcript

McCarthy:		This is Vance McCarthy, Program Director for Integration Developer News again with another of our series of expert voices, talking about CoP issues and SOA and enterprise architecture, and today I’m very pleased to be joined by Craig Hayman, General Manager, WebSphere, of the IBM Software Group.  Craig, thanks for taking the time.
Hayman:		Hey, Vance, thanks very much for having me.
McCarthy:		Craig spends practically hello again all of his day talking with CFOs, CIOs, CEOs, and architects looking at the issues having to do with application and integration middleware and how those technologies can bring better business value. In 2010, Craig, it seems that IT is under two kinds of stresses. They need to provide quicker results for business, and they need to do it with fewer people and even less budget. Is IBM, and particularly you, as a top executive for WebSphere, seeing that same thing?
Hayman:		I would say that’s a fair view of what’s going on in the market, that from the customers that I talk to all over the world – in fact that’s exactly what they’re saying. They’re constrained on capital. They’re constrained on operational expense. You know, there was a little bit of flurry at the end of 2009 as some of those customers were looking to leverage whatever little capital or operational expense they had remaining in their budgets, but mostly their spending is down year to year. Their own businesses are trying to show higher profit, and, of course, you show high profit by generating high revenue, which is tough to do in a down economy, or you reduce your expense. And so that’s what they’re doing, but they haven’t slowed down in what they desire. They desire to bring about more agility for those businesses. That means allowing them to react to the market. There’s a view that as the world’s economy turns and as the economies come back on line, they very much wanna be in a position to take advantage as customers and consumers return, and so that is putting more stress. So if you imagine they have the stress from reduced capital, reduced operational expense, and the stress from this desire to affect a change for higher profit, the IT teams are trying to understand what the business leaders are trying to do and then show that they are able to help them in that endeavor. We ran a survey, and we found that the line of business desire to bring about change to their organization, but the gap of their ability to do something about that has worsened. In fact, it got three times worse in last 12 months, and that is – you could look at that as a problem, or if you’re in IT, you could look at that as an opportunity.
McCarthy:		This whole topic of IT and business alignment has almost taken on a life of it’s own.  It’s seems like every time I pick up a newsletter or I go to a session that that’s either the headline message or it’s the subhead message, and I wonder if we can put some specifics around that as far as IBM’s concerned.  Certainly, you made a lot of news with the BPM acquisition of Lombardi.  Tell us how IBM sees how BPM is an example in context with WebSphere – could offer more bang for the buck, so to speak, to that IT person looking to really capture a business value.
Hayman:		Let me talk about that from a couple of points of view.  A decade ago, we would talk about IT stepping up to solve a business problem through application development.  You read everywhere about these projects, and you talk about – often, the words would be written about the size of the projects.  This is a $10 million project.  This is a $5 million project.  This is a $100 million project.  They rarely actually talked about what the business benefit that they were gonna bring about, and what we’ve seen is an evolution, based on my earlier comments here, of wanting to talk more specifically about the business value that these projects will bring about. One area that’s really white hot right now is business process management.  And this is an acumen, which is about automating business processes that sit within an organization, understanding business processes that you have, understanding which ones of those, if you were to improve, would you improve, increase your either bottom line or top line growth, and then doing something and affecting a change to those business processes, to do something better. Who hasn’t waited in a department store, and you want a shirt of a certain size, and they don’t have it in stock, and as they call around all the different stores, as you’re sitting there, you yourself are probably – I know I am – is I’m optimizing that business process.  I’m thinking why can’t they put a system in place that would do this so they didn’t have to call everybody?  Well, that’s a business process that can be automated.  A simple case – we’ve helped a company do that – bring about a system to bring about change.  That result – they can improve that process, and they can bring higher profit to that business.
McCarthy:		What’s interesting is that it’s a WebSphere person describing this and not purely a business process or an executive.  Is it fair to say that IBM is not sacrificing or setting aside any of its focus on SOA or enterprise architecture aspects to bring these business benefits?  Talk about perhaps how SOA and BPM are blending together to make infrastructure smarter and maybe more agile.
Hayman:		Let me talk about that from a couple of points of view.  A decade ago, we would talk about IT stepping up to solve a business problem through application development.  You read everywhere about these projects, and you talk about – often, the words wI think this is a journey that is just begun.  I think the pattern of service-oriented architecture, SOA, is now relatively well understood.  The premise of reasonable services, of connecting disparate systems together in some meaningful way rather than rip and replacing and putting in some siloed application – I think that’s a relatively well-understood pattern. Then when you come to the business processes – Lord knows, we spent the last two decades where there’s been all these business process re-engineering initiatives that didn’t stick.  And so when we looked at those, and we understood why did – when companies have tried to change their business processes before, why did they fail?  And what we found out was that they were unable to make the new system, the new business processes, stick to their existing operational systems.  I mean, it’s a design constraint. In computing, we’re used to working around constraints.  In automating the business processes inside a business, there’s a constraint of how do you use your existing systems.  You wouldn’t throw out all of your trucks if you’re a trucking company, all of your ships in you’re a shipping company, and the same way you don’t do that with your IT system.  So the magic here of BPM and SOA is SOA helps the business processes stick to the IT environment.  Given that the pattern is now well understood, it really is very, very meaningful and this is one of the things – I think why business process management is so hot is because the trick of sticking it to an operational environment that runs around service oriented architecture is new, and that’s yielding very quick time-to-value for customers. We have some examples here.  In Sweden, the toll system, the flow of vehicles coming into and out of the city and allowing that toll system to be dynamic – this has reduced traffic by 20 percent.  It’s reduced the wait times by 25 percent.  It’s cut emissions by over 10 percent.   In the Netherlands, they have a railway system.  They saved about €20 million by using business rules to determine departure and arrival times and forecasting passenger traffic to assign trains more accurately.  We have all stood on the train – the platform – and said you know what?  There are so many people here.  Why don’t they know how to send a few more trains at this time because, of course, this is a rush hour or this is the holiday season?  Well, now in the Netherlands, they’re able to do that by making the automation of the business process, the optimization of the business process, stick to their operational system.  In this case, these are real trains.
McCarthy:		So Craig, that’s a really good use case of how WebSphere and BPM are blendingtogether to make this happen. Maybe paint a picture from the WebSphere portfolio of technologies how IBM is empowering the IT professional to feel like he’s actually making that kind of a contribution, for example, getting that train to run morerapidly. Is there a direct connectbetween what he’s doing and seeing that business result?
Hayman:		Yeah. Let me use a vernacular that is probably familiar to most engineers – is around patterns. We – if you recall when Java first came on the scene, people would write Java programs in all sorts ofrandom ways, and over time, it turned into that people understood the patterns, Java patterns. In fact, there was a book on it from the Gang of Four on Java patterns. Well, similarly, we’re seeing these patterns of SOA, of agility, and I would say many programmers are coding them, but over time, there has become products to help people do that.  An example would be an enterprise service bus, an ESB, to do the transformation and mediation from one end point to another.  Well, now people have – you know, configuring in an ESB, whereas before they perhaps would have been coding that entirely themselves.
McCarthy:		So, Craig, that’s a really important point.  One step further – are there tools or – I know we’ve heard about industry frameworks in IBM that make it a lot easier for the IT community to become almost the SWAT team that helps business really solve problems quickly.
Hayman:		There’s a few things I’ve learned.  One is how to help the business and IT teams have a conversation about a meaningful business process that’s meaningful to them.  So if you’re in retail, this would be about improving – increasing the sales per square foot.  If you’re in telecommunications, this would be increasing the average revenue or profit per user.  If you’re in health care, this would be reducing the time to service a client, and the list goes on.  So we said how can we accelerate that and make that much easier than it is today?  And today, quite frankly, you’d have to procure a set of tools.  You’d have to bring in a set of consultants.  It takes awhile.  So we created a Cloud offering.   It’s called BPM BlueWorks, www.bpmblueworks.com.  It’s free.  It costs nothing.  And a company can come in, and you can bring a team of people within your organization, and you can start off with a prepackaged view based on your industry.  There’s over 2000 different assets there from different industries around strategy, capability maps, process maps, that you can use to stimulate that conversation and then you can create – it’s private to you, your derivative of that, your portion of that or your strategy maps, if you’re familiar with like a mind map, those types of things.  And then when you’re done, you save it as a PowerPoint, save it as a PDF, email it around, and move on with your life.     Frankly, it’s a quick way of getting started.  Of course, we’d love that if you now say I’d like to turn that into an operational system, we’d love to help with that, but there’s no need to do that.  Just one example, we got over 2000 different customers using BPM BlueWorks today, and this thing is only six months old.
McCarthy:		Wow, that’s very powerful.  In fact, it has not escaped the attention of many of our readers here at Integration Developer News that Jerry Cuomo, founding father of WebSphere, is heavily involved in Cloud.  Maybe share a little bit of what the significance of that is to you and your vision of how WebSphere and even SOA and ESB is played into Cloud.
Hayman:		Yeah, Cloud is a very hot area right now, and it reminds me of some of the fashions that go through the computing industry.  It’s sort of like what’s the latest Brittney Spears here in the computer industry.  So what Jerry Cuomo is doing is finding ways to use the Cloud to do something meaningful, like I talked about BPM BlueWorks.  It does something meaningful. We’re also doing things like making WebSphere available for free for developers – in fact, making available under Amazon EC2, so you don’t even need a machine to get going with WebSphere.  You don’t even need a license.  You just boot it up, and off you go inside Amazon EC2.  We’ve created an appliance that will dispense virtual images out into a VMware environment.  If you have a virtual environment, it will dispense out prebuilt applications, WebSphere applications, or environments out to a virtual environment. This is to solve the problem that we heard from our customers.  They said you know what, I know what a GooglePlex is.  I know what a KicksPlex is.  I want a JavaPlex.  I want my own operational environment to be like a cloud.  I don’t want to use the product Cloud.  I want my own private cloud, and so this appliance – it’s called WebSphere Cloud Burst – is one offering that helps customers do that.
McCarthy:		It does seem as though IBM WebSphere, through your and others executives focus, is really going to help new aware professionals and integration architects become much more responsive and agile to business requirements, not just for the business, but for even helping justify IT expenses – going back to our first question.  And just kind of leave us with some note of optimism on how we can expect IBM to empower that IT person to become much more of a business superhero.
Hayman:		Yeah, we’re very excited about the future, and WebSphere itself.  We have grown up here in the last ten years.  We do it in a way where we innovate in an open way using open standards and then deliver products that implement those standards.  And this bridge between business and IT, empowering the line of business user, it’s been talked about for many years, but it’s really starting to happen now. I think some of the things I touched on here – you see the level of our investment, of our intent with acquisitions of ILOG, of Lombardi, some of the customers I’ve talked about.  You see that we’re very passionate about the future and, frankly, passionate about back to solving this line of business problem.
McCarthy:		Craig Hayman, General Manager, WebSphere, IBM, thank you very much for taking so much time and walking us through not just your visions for 2010, but how customers are coping with the IT business problems they face and getting hopefully to the other side.
Hayman:		Thanks very much, Vance.

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