The Bloor Perspective: Website confidence, the open source war and IT's in the dog house

Hand-cuffed systems managers
The internet provides systems managers with a real problem. Once a transaction metaphorically leaps over the firewall, there is no saying what might happen to it. No single individual has full control over the end-to-end activity and that leaves plenty of opportunity for buck passing as service providers look to protect their own backsides.

Service managers are somewhat restricted in their capabilities. Unless they are able to develop very strong working partnerships with all of the interim service providers (and they are nearly always using more than they think), the only point where management is possible outside the firewall is on the client. In general, this means that it is possible to measure availability and to keep track of the end-to-end response times. However, when the going gets tough, there is no way to find out where in the internet 'cloud' things are going wrong.

Then we stumbled across Site Confidence - a very low cost service that tells you all sorts of things about your web site that you probably didn't want to know. You tell it which URLs to look at and it carries out a 'mystery shopper' exercise on them for you. The kind of analysis that it provides is quite scary - it will tell you about pages that take too long to load and give a pretty good indication of the cause. For example, it will identify pages with overly large graphics that slow them down and show a breakdown of which components take the most time.

More importantly, perhaps, Site Confidence can tell you when your site has been unavailable and can break down the route taken by the data into its individual network hops and measure the time taken to pass through each step. This will tell you which part of the Internet has been holding up your data and is responsible for all the phone calls arriving at your help desk.

While Site Confidence has put together an interesting collection of services at very reasonable prices, this is just an example of the information that is available outside the firewall if you take the time and effort to collect it. That leap over the firewall doesn't have to be into the dark and diagnosis of problems in ebusiness applications is a real possibility.

Wrestling the penguin
Microsoft's Mobile Internet Toolkit is a development suite that enables programmers to produce software for connecting servers with mobile devices over the internet. The toolkit forms an integral part of Microsoft's strategy to move their dominance from the desktop to the internet and especially into the world of mobile computing. However, it comes with one pressing fillip. It cannot be used in conjunction with 'potentially viral software'. That's open source software to you and I - something Microsoft is keen to steer its users away from.

While it would never admit it, one of the main threats to Microsoft's strategy is the open source movement and especially the Linux operating system. The whole strategy of Microsoft has for many years been based on a very closed software environment with use of source code strictly controlled and the well publicised embedding of the Microsoft Explorer browser within the Windows-based operating systems. Like many companies Microsoft has built its fortunes on its intellectual property and, naturally, the company is keen to protect it. Therefore the whole concept of sharing and openness, promoted on a global scale, by the open source model is completely at odds with Microsoft corporate thinking.

As Microsoft delivers the products within its .Net strategy it may be getting nervous about its move to Internet and this is being demonstrated in the recent comments and releases. After all, isn't this the company that originally dismissed the whole idea of the World Wide Web?

The viral and cancer references that Microsoft has spouted recently regarding the open source movement are excessive. The licensing agreement could simply have stated "open source". The references used imply negativity - accusations that can certainly not be justly leveled against the open source movement. Linux has certainly given Gates et al a scare, if this isn't true then why all the noise and bluster? Competition is good and for far too long Microsoft became more and more of a monopoly in the world of software. Then the penguins came along and while the long-term commercial viability of Linux as an enterprise platform has yet to be proved they have revitalised the industry.

The only thing that is for sure is that this will be a long and bloody war of many battles.

Facing the hard times
A quick look at the headlines shows that techies are being laid off in their thousands with the jobs market awash with CVs jumping at every opportunity. It is noticeable that the big lay-offs are occurring within businesses that are most strongly related to sales of IT products and services. Cap Gemini is the latest casualty with 3,000 job losses expected. This follows similar announcements from BT, Lucent, Nortel and numerous dot-com strugglers. In this respect, it is a different kind of slowdown. IT industries are usually winners where there is an economic downturn as businesses look to technology investments to reduce human costs and improve efficiency. This time around, the investment is not coming in and the IT businesses don't have the imagination to find their way out of trouble.

Let's face it, the IT industry hasn't done a great deal over the years to endear itself to the corporate world. It has been extremely lucky to find businesses coming back and buying more products despite the fact that a very high proportion of projects fail or cost way more than their original budgets. It is also despite the fact that most software products are poorly engineered and regularly fail. In fact, it is amazing to think that a whole new sub-industry has developed to help businesses deal with the failures of their applications and systems.

Ultimately, we should not be surprised that the world has lost confidence in the IT industry. The events of the dot-com revolution started it all off. People saw all of the hype, all of the money and no product. It was all of the bad things of IT placed on public display and now we have all been tarred with the same brush. A veil of cynicism and mistrust masks all of the good things that IT has achieved over the years. It is up to the individual businesses to find the resources to prove that they can deliver the good things that they have promised over the years and to encourage investment. What is certain is that, if you have an IT budget to spend, there are some pretty good deals to be had right now.