Back into networking for IBM

IBM, as a network vendor, has been riding a power roller coaster. It has gone from being the most powerful vendor to a big power loser and now back again as a big power gainer. It all began in 1976, when IBM introduced SNA and ushered in the first age of networking. For over 15 years, IBM used SNA to dominate the mainframe-based IT industry. "Open" was a word that did not exist within its vocabulary. Its proprietary innovation continued into network management, with NetView in 1986, and then shortly thereafter with access services within the IBM Global Network (IGN).

But then the IT industry changed, and customers got smarter. IP began to replace SNA and distributed computing was all the rage. IBM fought rather than joined the trend. It engineered IEEE 802.2 Token Ring for the LAN and ATM/OSI for the WAN, missing opportunity after opportunity to become a leader in the second age of networking. That legacy mentality finally ended in 1995 with IBM's commitment to open computing and networking. It purchased the multivendor management company Tivoli in 1996 and became a powerful bigot for open standards and the Internet. IBM then began to offload the past by selling the IGN to AT&T in 1998 and the Network Hardware Division to Cisco in 1999. This allowed a focus on creating a new IBM. In doing so, it began to internally redefine the term "networking."

IBM's strategy was right on the mark. IP is ubiquitous, and the Internet is a primary vehicle for commerce, consumer entertainment and personal/corporate communications. Ethernet is becoming the dominant form of connectivity for computers, storage and more. Networking has shifted to the last frontier - the applications layer. Business, not technology, is the driving force in the third age of corporate networking.

IBM is in the forefront of almost every area of product and service delivery in this new age. It leads the assault on business componentization through its Professional Services organization. It has helped create the link between business processes and technology using a services-oriented architecture (SOA). IBM has recognized its core competencies and focused its powerful corporate resources on research, services, software, computers and storage with its on-demand strategy.

Within that strategy we find the new age routers, switches, caches, gateways, security, management and so forth. These new network entities are not packet-based but message-based. They are all contained in software and firmware as SOA services, not hardware infrastructure, and are implemented using an open reference architecture and industry standards. IBM's market differentiation in an open world is in using IBM research for "special sauce" within its software products and problem-solving intelligence for services.

IBM has been using an aggressive acquisition strategy coupled with organic development and partner programs to fill in numerous missing product and services slots in its SOA. The net result is filling out its SOA strategy with New Age network services:

• User access and interaction services contain network portal and collaboration mechanisms.
• Application services are based on open Web services to affect application interoperability and routing.
• Information management services contain static and dynamic caching, metadirectory search and routing, and networked database federation.
• Business process services are based on activity choreography and policy.
• Virtualization services normalize the application and user view of compute, storage and network resources regardless of physical location or technology constraint.
• Service-level management uses workload assignment and balancing, orchestration for configuration, security monitoring and policy, net/systems management of faults and autonomic availability activity.

These services are tied together through an Enterprise Service Bus, distributed software that performs brokerage, gateway, routing and switching functions for the delivery and interoperability of multivendor SOA services and applications. Just as the Tivoli acquisition in 1996 matured into an entire SOA Management Services product suite, so has the 2003 acquisition of Rational Software matured into the development portion of IBM's SOA strategy. Using the current IBM SOA product portfolio makes it possible to:

• Model and simulate a corporate business process, and identify the required links to other internal or external business processes.
• Create process-management service-level agreements (SLA) and governance requirements; identify existing and new IT application and information resources required to implement that business process; and model and simulate the IT applications required to implement the business process.
• Generate the SLAs and policies required for optimum and secure operations.
• Create needed IT applications using standardized software components; monitor the testing of the process and the applications; and deploy the applications.
• Manage the process and application performance, security and compute/storage/network resources against business policy in an almost automated manner.

The definition of networking within the corporate environment has forever changed in 2005. The latest arguments are not about speeds and feeds but about where application intelligence should reside - within the classical definition of a network or at the edges within the domain of IT and corporate business managers.