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By Peter Longini
 It takes a whole village to shape server software. At least so it would seem from the experience of the industry leader in managing a host of interdependent stakeholders, each of whom has a rightful claim on the outcome of this complex and highly collaborative development process. But that level of intense interaction and partnership wasn’t always necessary. Here’s why:
Deep down in the heart of any computer, big or small, lies its operating system. It is the set of instructions which controls the functions of the computer’s components and serves as the technical platform the on which all of its practical, user-facing applications are built. For stand-alone, first-generation computers, the combination of an operating system and user applications are the critical software components needed to make them work.
But in the highly networked, globally-distributed computing environment which has evolved over the past two decades, a third layer of technology has emerged. Sandwiched between the operating system and the user’s application, this middleware allows different operating systems, unrelated databases, and separate software applications – often housed in data centers thousands of miles apart – to play nicely with one another.
It is a huge business – with annual sales in the billions of dollars. Its customers are typically the Chief Information Officers of major organizations which span the full range of industries and economic sectors. What these diverse entities share in common is that their computing requirements and resources have become more widely distributed and more remotely connected than ever before.
Different Strokes
At the same time, however, distinctly different sets of standards have evolved within most of those individual industry segments. Healthcare, to no one’s surprise, has different needs than banking. Military requirements are not the same as those of retailers. And so on. As a result, the technology for making systems interoperable has become more complex, more diverse, and more specialized.
IBM, as the pioneer of business computing and still among the top software companies in the world, saw the transition as a major opportunity. Lonne Jaffe, a Harvard-educated veteran of IBM for the past ten years, is responsible for tailoring its middleware to fit, and sometimes to help form, the standards for the company’s Public Sector industry segment – that group of customers which includes government, healthcare, life sciences and education. It includes three different industry frameworks: the Health Integration Framework for the healthcare and life sciences industries, the Network Centric Operations Framework for defense and intelligence agencies, and the recently announced Government Industry Framework for civilian government.
“By working with customers and partners in a given industry, as well as within our own services organization – which happens to be the largest consulting company in the world – IBM harvests the work that’s being done in hundreds of engagements, using industry standards,” Jaffe explained. “This effort helps us to turn our middleware products into something much more relevant to a specific industry. And it makes our products more useable by a different customer set; instead of just going to technologists, the products can be more easily consumed by line-of-business people, because they already contain this industry-specific content.
“For example, WebSphere Message Broker, for transactional messaging, Cognos, for analytics, and Tivoli Access Manager, for security, are all the world’s market leaders in their respective product categories, although they're not industry specific,” he said.
“However, when we add a HL7 standards compliant healthcare industry-specific adapter to WebSphere Message Broker, our business partners don’t have to worry about investing in HL7 connectivity for their applications. When we pre-integrate the powerful middleware products and the industry-specific extensions to create a software platform like the industry frameworks, customers and partners don't need to do that integration work themselves. When IBM partners like Cúram Software, which builds market-leading government social services applications, or Carefx, which makes a powerful clinical portal application for hospitals, develop their systems on our frameworks, they can focus their resources on the application-level content that they’re building.”
Of course, if you’re a software developer or a systems integrator or high-end customer, you don’t have to buy that sort of adapter from IBM or anyone else for that matter; you can build it yourself. But do you really want to? “If you use a generic middleware product that doesn’t have industry capability, it’s certainly possible to write an HL7 interface that would work with most of those systems,” Jaffe acknowledged. “But it’s a lot of work. And it’s not really high-value work for most of the application vendors in the healthcare software space who are more interested in building out their own product functionality, as opposed to working on lower-level infrastructure-type capabilities.”
The Global Village
Creating robust, reliable, industry-specific extensions for middleware requires a huge collective effort. “Frameworks, by necessity, need to be built out in collaboration with customers, with business partners and with our services organization,” Jaffe noted. "Our business partnerships fall into several different categories. One includes companies which may already have developed a key technology that rounds out the functionality of the overall framework platform – one that gives the framework a capability it otherwise wouldn’t have.
Another type of partner includes developers of turnkey commercial package applications who essentially use the framework and its industry-specific extension as a software platform. Then there are integrators, the class of partner which uses the framework to accelerate custom projects for specific customer deployments, or as a platform to build out assets for use in consulting engagements, decreasing the risk and time-to-value for projects. Of course, IBM’s own services organization is the most important consumer of these software industry frameworks. The frameworks are used by IBM Global Business Services in engagements across the world, and as software platforms for the development of services assets, decreasing the risk and time-to-value of consulting projects.
“The process tends to involve very close collaboration with partners and customers and industry standards bodies to understand the requirements for industry specific extensions,” Jaffe said. “Some of it involves deep technical architects working with the industry standard bodies to understand what industry-specific extensions are needed and how they would have to get built. Sometimes it involves building frameworks in the field with customers, and then working with the IBM product teams to enhance IBM software products using these industry-specific extensions.
Doing so has a distinct advantage: it makes it much more likely that the industry-specific extensions will be precisely what’s needed and what the market will actually accept. “Errors can come in when a company looks at an industry and says ‘we think this is a big opportunity, we’re going to build something industry-specific, spend six months to a year developing it internally, and then release it to the market and hope it’s what everybody needs.’
“Of course it’s possible to do an internal development exercise and get it all right. But that certainly increases the risk of getting it wrong, especially in an industry context,” he said. “So the collaborative nature of building these out, which is integral to the framework process, is really very valuable.”
Preserving The Ecosystem
“Managing the business partner ecosystem is one of the most important things you need to do to make an initiative like this succeed,” he said. “Without a vibrant a partner ecosystem, you end up building a platform that’s looking for an application. It was something the industry learned long ago when creating operating systems; that one of the most important success factors is to make sure there are applications available to run on it. The same is true for middleware. So one of our major focus areas is cultivating the business partner community to build out onto the framework itself.
“Another is collaborative activity with customers. With the frameworks, ideally the customer doesn’t just view us as a vendor, but as a long-term partner in building out these capabilities. Finding customers that see the value in that type of relationship is key to the initial stages of success. Our Network Centric Operations Framework was developed by IBM technical leaders working side-by-side with technical leaders at the Finnish Defence Forces and other IBM defense customers. The IBM Healthcare Accelerator for WebSphere Portal, a key technology component of the Health Integration Framework, was developed in close collaboration with Duke Medicine, another important IBM customer.
“Because IBM’s industry frameworks are built with our customers and partners and incorporate industry-specific extensions and best practices, our customers and partners can address their needs faster and more cost effectively.”
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