IBM was in celebratory mood last month as it entertained 4,000 software developers at its DeveloperWorks Live event in San Francisco.

Over the past five years the company has emerged as a huge force in multi-platform enterprise software. The DB2 data management line and WebSphere ebusiness infrastructure portfolio continue to grow rapidly, and its Lotus and Tivoli brands are established leaders in communications and systems management.

However, while these sub-brands have largely grown independently so far, the San Francisco event pointed to a new direction that will bring the software groups more closely together.

IBM is planning extensive cross-pollination of its software lines with, for example, DB2 becoming the data store used in Lotus, Tivoli and WebSphere products, and other products donating modular elements to sister lines wherever it makes sense.

An example of this new spirit of integration was the DeveloperWorks Live event itself, which brought together individual developer events for all software brands.

The same integration approach is being applied to customer conferences, with long-running user shows such as Lotusphere and Tivoli World being phased out in favour of broader IBM events.

This tying together of resources can be seen positively or negatively. For customers and developers who favour a one-stop shop where a single supplier can provide an entire portfolio, it may well be attractive and lead to cost savings and time-to-market efficiencies.

For others, it may suggest a return to the bad old days of closed systems and lock-in to a single supplier.

Modular approach

The increasingly modular approach to IBM software was the overriding theme that covered a series of announcements concerning individual brands and key development projects related to Linux and grid computing.

Big Blue's software renaissance is typified by its surging performance in database management systems. Since the mid-1990s when it was aimed squarely at IBM hardware buyers, DB2 has re-emerged as a true multi-platform database that is the only realistic alternative to Oracle for many enterprises.

The most recent figures from Gartner Dataquest even suggest that DB2 has surpassed Oracle in terms of overall database revenues, although Oracle remains a distant leader on Unix.

IBM stated at DeveloperWorks that a public beta test release of the next version of DB2 is imminent, and a full commercial release is due later this year.

The release will have "some form of XQuery support", according to Jeff Jones, DB2 marketing director, referring to a protocol that could well become the standard way to discover unstructured documents saved as XML files.

DB2 developments

IBM also plans to include more self-healing features. Effectively, this involves software agents that let DB2 automatically protect against crashes and performance hits by monitoring system behaviour patterns. Tivoli technology may be used here.

Further in the future, Jones said that IBM is confident that the InfiniBand I/O architecture will be well suited to DB2. Early tests suggest that the performance of DB2 on InfiniBand, which acts as an I/O fabric on clustered servers, will be excellent.

This is in part because of DB2's support for a shared-nothing architecture, where each node in a cluster has independent storage, processing and memory resources. "InfiniBand suits a shared-nothing architecture," explained Jones.

Tivoli evolution

Meanwhile, IBM's Tivoli systems management business is continuing to evolve from being a supplier of back-office management platforms to being a provider of core decision-support systems.

Robert LeBlanc, Tivoli's general manager, is considering acquisitions as a means to help this process. Although it has acquired several companies, Tivoli has recently turned more to partnerships than acquisitions to plug holes in its offerings.

For example, the firm partnered VeriSign for public key infrastructure security and certificate management, and joined forces with Magnum Technologies to provide network performance monitoring.

"We look at the market and take a realistic view of acquisitions," said LeBlanc. "They can be at a product or technology level. Security and storage are certainly huge growth areas."

LeBlanc wants to make Tivoli as much a tool for business managers as network and IT managers, so that it offers business insight and return-on-investment calculations rather than merely gauging numbers and keeping systems up.

"People want to be able to talk to the business unit in business terms, so we put in a feature called Service Level Advisor, for example," he said.

"[The process is] still in its infancy but it's starting to take systems management away from being a black box or boiler-room type of activity. If we succeed, companies won't lose operational skills but people will be free to solve real business problems and take cost out of the system."

Lotus and the Domino effect

Lotus is moving its communication and collaboration software platforms, Notes and Domino, to a component model where elements such as messaging, scheduling, workflow, chat, application sharing and online meetings are split into modules so that they can be more widely used.

In theory, this will give other IBM applications, and applications from other vendors, easier access to these tools, for example from web browsers or from within operating systems.

The move towards modularisation, dubbed NextGen, will only take place after one more release of the platforms, due this year. With online learning and collaboration becoming more central to organisations, Lotus appears to be well placed to serve enterprise IT needs.

However, past attempts at modularisation have not always been successful at Lotus. For example, before it was acquired by IBM, Lotus scrapped attempts to make cc:Mail the email engine in Notes, and aborted plans to offer a set of Java productivity applets, codenamed Kona and launched as eSuite.

WebSphere progress

WebSphere is continuing its progress from web server to the centre of all IBM's ebusiness infrastructure offerings.

IBM detailed a number of additions to WebSphere, including software integration technologies from the recent CrossWorlds Software acquisition; upgraded event broker and message queuing tools, and Tivoli capabilities built in for back up, access management, performance viewing and transaction monitoring. Version 5.0 of the WebSphere Application Server has just been made available.

On the Linux front, IBM continues to be the leader in dragging the open source technology into the enterprise data centre. Although last year's equivalent IBM show featured a great deal more Linux content, the 2002 event revealed that Linux remains central to IBM's platform efforts.

Although it gained little attention at the time, IBM made one significant Linux announcement at DeveloperWorks. It said that later this summer it will begin offering Linux-based hardware/software application bundles.

Pre-loading in this way is especially useful on Linux, which is known for being hard to install and deploy. In the past, these problems may have deterred many mainstream businesses which would otherwise have been attracted by the open source cost model.

"We see this as the next big wave for Linux," said Richard Michos, vice president of Linux servers for IBM.

Grid computing

Over the past year, IBM has made much of its plans for harnessing diverse computing resources across the internet, a concept it calls grid computing.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technology strategy, said that, although the technology is in its infancy, he is cheered by the interest both inside and outside the company.

"One of the ways I figure out whether an area is really hot or just press release is whether it attracts our top people to work on it, and this is as strong an interest as I've ever seen," he said.

The biggest challenge facing the grid model remains security in general and identity management in particular.

"Even within the enterprise, when you start sharing files and applications you want to make sure that only people who are authorised get them, and nobody else," Wladawsky-Berger said.

"Think of a car designer and partners all working with each other on a design. If you're working with both Audi and BMW, you don't want to get them confused or you're in trouble."

SUMMARY:

• IBM last month attracted 4,000 software developers to its DeveloperWorks Live event in San Francisco.
• Over the past five years, IBM has emerged as a huge force in multi-platform enterprise software.
• The DB2 data management line and WebSphere ebusiness infrastructure portfolio are growing rapidly.
• Lotus and Tivoli are leaders in communications and systems management respectively.
• IBM intends to use elements of each program to support others, for example using DB2 as a data store in WebSphere.