Analysis of Orchestration Space
I know it isn't traditional to post your competitive analysis - but
I'm not very traditional. Here is a copy of my internal analysis of
the orchestration space (from an OpenStorm perspective).
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Don,
You were asking about competition. Here's a breakdown:
High-end EAI: (SeeBeyond, Tibco, Vitria, WebMethods.)
Big 3 (IBM, BEA, MS)
BPEL Pure Plays (Collaxa, FiveSight, Vergil, Choreology)
Web Service Networks with BPEL (GrandCentral)
Workflow (Dralasoft, Reactor)
Pure play BPM (Lombardi, Fuego, Savvion, Intalio)
JMS and ESB providers (SpiritSoft, Sonic, Fiorrano)
Web Service platform providers (Systinet, CapeClear)
The fact is... orchestration is a sweet spot and people are looking at
it from many different angles. Here's my take on how it might play
out:
High-end EAI - These guys are having a hard time competing on cost and
putting together a message that doesn't bastardize their current
high-end revenue stream. They will likely take a 'wait and see'
attitude towards orchestration, putting out an offering, but not
really marketing it. It is likely that they will spread some FUD about
orchestration, saying it is slow or lacks functionality and that their
proprietary offerings are more 'seasoned'. Ultimately they will have
to play in the game or will become outdated.
The Big 3 (IBM, MS, BEA) have a different story to tell. Their story
is "Orchestration is great, but it is only a small piece of the
puzzle". They won't try to have the best orchestration offering, just
one that integrates into their stack the best. IBM shops will want
IBM, MS shops will want MS... These guys will get a significant piece
of the pie; they always do - people buy here for peace of mind. BEA
may have a bigger challenge; their offering lacks substance and BEA
doesn't have the clout that MS or IBM have.
BPEL pure plays - perhaps a more interesting category. Collaxa came
out with an early lead but then went on to put out 14 or so betas and
still haven't knocked it out of the park. Vergil, Choreology and
FiveSight are all still a bit early - mostly in stealth. Thus too
early to tell. Expect to see these guys either partner, strategic
partner or drop into a niche market.
Web Service Networks - A couple of months ago Grand Central announced
that their web services network would support BPEL. Although I'm not
sure, it appears as though they rolled their own implementation of
BPEL - which would be odd for an infrastructure provider. The
implementation had a significant number of non-standardized extensions
which I believe they needed to more fully support their existing
network. Maintaining a BPEL engine is a bitch - in the long run, I
would expect GC to OEM an engine from somewhere else - unless they are
getting out of the ASP market all together.
Workflow - Workflow and Web Service Orchestration may seem like a
similar problem, but in reality they are very, very different. Some of
the vendors that claim features similar (but different) will likely
confuse uneducated buyers -but the customers that we want will know
the difference.
Pure Play BPM - These guys have had every opportunity to break up
their monolithic architectures into a component-ized (or service
oriented) architecture. As far as I know, none of them have made
significant progress down this path. Intalio seems to get it but
doesn't seem to be delivering the message. If these guys start
delivering a "SO-BPM" story (Service Oriented BPM), watch out - they
could be real contenders (of course, they will have to have product to
back it up).
JMS / ESB - Here there are two categories 1. Sonic, 2. Everyone else -
The fact is, Sonic is a marketing machine. I tip my hat to them. These
guys not only could sell ice to Eskimos - they do! In the short term,
I think they will be the single biggest threat. However, they have
some baggage they bring with them (JMS is commoditized, ESB will
eventually be a joke) All of the other ESB vendors will have to
compete based on product features/functionality/price (think bake-offs
against Sonic).
Web Service Platforms - Oddly, there are really only 2 platform
providers left (Cape Clear and Systinet). Both of the players will
need to get an orchestration offering. Their issue will be to knock
orchestration out of the park - otherwise they will have to lead with
their less expensive and commoditized SOAP stacks - and then try to
upsell to a more expensive offering.
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If you believe in the 'web services programming model', 'service
oriented integration' or 'pervasive integration' then it is only a
matter of time before you realize that orchestration is the flagship
of this rather complex offering. Protocol offerings should be built
into the operating system (and will be). Queues are commoditized...
and making 'web service enabled queues' takes about a day of
engineering effort. The 80-20 rule on transformation makes out of the
box, pipelined XSL offerings attractive. However, debugging a
distributed, service oriented, message based, declarative policy
based, multi-platform, asynchronous, concurrent, cross-enterprise
process is.... "hard". The issue around orchestration will quickly
turn to 'total cost of ownership' - the vendor that wins will be the
one that allows the enterprise to reduce the cost of maintaining
production instances (keeping the service network up, debugging
issues, resolving performance problems, maintaining version, etc.) The
offerings will have to go beyond orchestration and into 'composite
distributed applications'. The expectations that will be placed on our
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