Father of WebSphere Leaves IBM For Microsoft

jg21 writes ".NET Developer's Journal is reporting that Don Ferguson, the 'Father of WebSphere,' has left IBM to join Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie's office. Ozzie, whose efforts to rebuild Microsoft have been discussed previously on Slashdot, is gaining a man who while at Blue championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development — a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being."

A good thing

[acidrain]

I for one am happy to see the smart people spread around evenly, not just going to google. Competition between smart people encourages innovation, and like it or not, given their market share, having a few smart people sucked into M$ from time to time will reduce global suffering due to technology. Wonder how it feels to have quitting your job will end up on slashdot!?! I don't know how many people *at my last job* noticed when I quit.

Not Surprised

[LouisJBouchard]

I for one am not surprised by this action. I have heard for a while that morale at IBM is at an all time low and this is the result. I wonder how much other good talent has left IBM that we do not know about.

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

[abigor]

So based upon a Slashdot summary, your informed opinion is that IBM is better off without the architect of one of the most successful app server platforms ever? Do you even know what WebSphere is?

Re:Not Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Development at IBM is highly decentralized, just the opposite of Microsoft. So I don't know that it makes sense to talk about morale at IBM as a whole... there are many large sites for R&D, consulting, manufacturing, etc. around the US and the world.

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

[AKAImBatman]

If he takes his nebulous EJB spec with him, I'm all for it. Sun really should have cleaned that thing up before releasing it to the world. It's great in theory, but in practice almost no one implements the damn standard correctly! (Or at least, in a useful fashion.)

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

[Anonymous Coward]

I do. I use it every day. All 2gb of ram and 3ghz+ it requires to run painfully- which is better than the alternative of not running at all. (Yes, I do realize the difference between the IDE WSAD and the server WAS).

Oh yes, Websphere. How could we survive without Websphere? Are there any other Java application servers out there? Oh God, where could they be [wikipedia.org]? To give it some credit, Websphere isn't really bad when compared to the competition. It's just outrageously expensive compared to them for what you get. The IDE is outdated out the door compared to Eclipse. The server is HIDEOUSLY expensive compared to JBoss or, what most companies really need, Tomcat. You can easily employ a whole department for the license costs of a proper cluster. Neverminding the fact that you need just as many people whether you use Websphere or whatever.

Companies are abandoning Websphere left and right because Websphere 6.0 is a giant egg that costs far too much when compared to every other alternative. I'd say the man left because he realized if he stayed he'd be lucky to work 90 hour weeks for the next two years overhauling the platform just to keep his current salary.

Websphere's not so bad. It's just not worth the money. Not anymore at least.

Tip: If you think you need Websphere for your particular application give me $100,000 plus your salary and I'll show you how you can do it without.

WebSphere is not all it's cracked up to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done a fair amount of work with WebSphere. Just because it's prevalent in terms of its usage, it does not mean that it's a good solution for the problems at hand.

Like many enterprise-grade tools today, it's extremely over-designed. The buffet of buzzwords in the summary is complete correct, and shows the mindset behind the WebSphere Application Server. The only reason it is so popular is because IBM has powerful marketing and sales forces. They'll convince your CIO, CTO and other managers that you just have to use their products, hardware, and of course their support services.

It's not surprising that they push such over-designed solutions. The larger the system, the more powerful hardware it needs to run on ($$$ in IBM's pocket), and of course the easier it breaks (again, $$$ in IBM's pocket). A lot of the WebSphere systems I've worked with could have been reimplemented in Python instead of Java, run on several decent Linux servers, while using PostgreSQL as the database backend. Independent Python consultants could easily provide sufficient support, often quicker and far cheaper than what you'd get from IBM. And competent Python professionals are quite plentiful in any fair-sized city.

Re:Not Surprised

[Heir Of The Mess]

there are a lot of good smart people here (at IBM)

I've noticed in recent years that there are a lot of smart people moving to Microsoft, and yet I can't help feeling that they seem to have a slight problem harnessing all that talent. I mean while Vista is a step in the right direction, it feels like it needs a little more work, and the new GUI API needs more stuff added to it. With all that talent they should be able to deliver something really astounding. With vista I was expecting a database to be part of the O/S, and have transactional operations so an install can be rolled back on failure by just simply not commiting the transaction. I was hoping that legacy apps would be sandboxed but wrapped so that they thought they were running with admin rights, instead there's this rights escalation dialog that pops up continuously.

What happens in big companies that holds people back? Too much micro-management? Too many meetings? Too much design by committee? Too much political infighting? Too much empire building and idea protecting?

What's happening at IBM? What could fix it?

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

[Anonymous Coward]

So based upon a Slashdot summary, your informed opinion is that IBM is better off without the architect of one of the most successful app server platforms ever?

Was he the architect of websphere? Also I'm not sure what "architecture" there is in websphere anyway. Its like saying Office is "architect"

Re:Not Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

well, IBM's run by a sales weenie.... which is ok if thats really what you need, but it means that you put 100's of sales people on planes to make sales this quarter, instead of putting a few engineers on planes to make sure you have product ready next year. products slip, and next year you have to put 200 sales people on planes to keep customers happy.

When I got to IBM I was kind of shocked by how free they were with funds (fridge full of soda), now typically you can't spend anything in 3rd and 4th quarter without a 4th or 5th line approval (for non-IBMers thats a boss of a boss of a boss of a boss) even if you were told you had the money in january. its basically wall street style quarter by quarter mismanagement caused by perenial overly optimistic growth estimates... a mania of spending in the begining of the year, followed by stifiling belt tightening in Q3 and Q4 when we discover that revenues didn't grow 20% this year (despite our samuel L jackson inspired "salesman on a plane" strategy) and we need to pare down expenses. you just learn to not try to do much in the last part of the year..

echoing a different post there seems to be a disconnect between IBM corporate and the folks on the ground (someone told me once that armonk wants to behave more like a conglomerate that leeches 20% off the top of the divisions without doing any real investment or management) there seemes to be total confusion between levels of upper management. (perhaps because of uncomfortable pressure to outsource which diminishes US and EU managerial power bases, in favor of management chains in india) I don't think upper management really understands that you can't do things smarter by adding people in volume. but it seems like the outsourcing push always continues. its unfortunate that its being done so covertly, frank discussions with technical minded folk might really help them avoid alot of the potential landmines they seem headed for.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what WebSphere is? Today, it's actually little more than another IBM brand, a marketing device. You have WebSphere, Rational, Tivoli, and perhaps a few more. All products seem to be labeled that way. MQ is WebSphere. WebSphere is almost anything. Having worked with the stuff (in particular MQ, WAS, WPS) for some years now, I have become rather weary of it. But then, Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is crap. And the remaining 10% may just be crap too.

In my opinion, moving a designer of bloatware to MS is a good thing for everyone but MS. It won't do IBM much good, IBM is certainly capable of foot-shooting without him.

-

Re:Fix to meet Slashdot reporting standards

[xoyoyo]

yes, because this guy is guaranteed to bring their enterprise software strategy to its knees. he's a technological obfuscator and goldbricker of the highest order. websphere is horrible horrible horrible, especially at any layer of its archirtecture where it actually has anything to do with the web, SOA is just a fancy consultant-fee-boosting acronym describing the kind of good practise the rest of us have been doing for years, except now the management consultants can sell us it back at twice the price.

well done microsoft, you have finally provided the evidence that you genuinely know about nothing beyond toy disk operating systems and corporate extortion.

IBM continues to flounder

[gelfling]

Whomever they can't replace in India, China and Brazil they cut loose onto bullshit projects that go nowhere because of 99 layers of management and a 'save our way to prosperity' mentality. Senior people at IBM are treated like Gods, comparatively speaking. The minions are denied training, travel, education, pay raises, bonuses while benefits get worse every year. First and second line managers are turned over like flapjacks so that the people who actually do the work have 2, 3, 4 managers a year and then if they're lucky they won't stumble into a department that's being 'reorganized' out of existence forcing them to find another job or quit. Meanwhile, the aristocrats lavish literally hundreds of millions of dollars on themselves while they send out epistles that a) extol the workers greatness and b) warn them to work harder for less for the sake of the firm.

I can only imagine that if a senior guy leaves IBM for greener pastures they must have already decided, for no obvious reason at all to either kill all that person's products and projects, or, some palace infighting has left them holding their own ass.

I sold all my IBM and MS stock last week because it finally went up and it was clearly time to bail before they fuck it up again. And this observer's opinion is that IBM may be broken up and spun off in the near future and MS may split into several different companies as well. Because neither of them can get out of their own way.

Re:A servlet container

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you really don't have a clue do you ? Let's break this down a bit.....WebSphere is an "application server". This, in it's simplest form, is a "server" that lets you run "applications". In a broad sense PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc could all be considered application servers (apples, oranges, etc....but all fruit). Like many other similar platforms, WebSphere uses a repackaged version of Apache HTTP server to server HTTP requests. This represents about 0.01% of what companies buy WebSphere for.

The key functionality of WebSphere is to allow developers to build large web-accessible applications in Java. This does not mean applets. In fact, WebSphere has nothing to do with applets. It's about using Java on the server side to deliver web apps. WebSphere follows (or trails, depending on your point of view) the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) spec from Sun. As such, it performs the same function as BEA WebLogic, RedHat JBoss, Apache Jeronimo, Sun Glassfish, etc. This does include a servlet container, similar to Apache Tomcat, but also includes the infamous "EJB container" which has capabilities beyond that of the servlet container along with hard to understand API's and that have launched a million blog entries by bitter Java programmers.

So, if there's so many Java app servers then why does anyone pay so much money for WebSphere ? Well, IBM has a crap-load of products that build on WebSphere to integrate to all manner of 'legacy systems'. If you're a big company that has millions if not billions of dollars tied up in such 'legacy systems' then this is a really good thing. The fact that said legacy systems probably came from IBM in the first place makes the CIO feel better about buying WebSphere.....plus companies like this are risk-averse and want that corporate support that IBM is (arguably) known for when they inevitably screw things up.

Anyways, I hope that provides a tiny insight into what the heck people are talking about here. WebSphere is much more than a 'web server', comparing it to Apache will not impress the CIO you bump into in the elevator, and it has absolutely nothing to do with applets.

Re:What is websphere?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a little bit more than you state. WebSphere Application Server is the IBM workhorse for their web enabled applications. It's built into hundreds of IBM apps. There are several flavors Express, Base, Network Deployment, Process Server, but looking at the network deployment version, It's a full J2EE compliant application server containing:
- Apache web server
- Caching proxy (including content based routing and dynamic caching of servlets)
- Servlet container
- EJB container (+ JNDI + IIOP)
- Web Service Support
- Service Integration Bus (internal EJB)
- Support for JMS
- Clustering (session failover)
- Central administration of many servers and applications in a "cell" topology
- Strong Security (LDAP and others)
- JMX
- Java Connector Architecture connectivity to backends (databases, enterprise applications like SAP and Siebel, Mainframe connectivity to CICS and IMS, and many others).
- strong integration with other products like Tivoli Access Manager for front end security integration, and other Tivoli management products for monitoring (end to end transaction tracking through the application server - actually cool)

It serves as the base for WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Process Server (BPEL engine for running business processes)
Development can be done with Rational Application Developer (based on Eclipse) with a full WAS as unit test environment.

It's quite a potent thingie; check out:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/cgi-bin/searchsite.cgi ?query=websphere+AND+application+AND+server&Search Order=4 [ibm.com]