From the Editors: Battlestar Midori
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By SD Times News Team
August 1, 2008 —
We are delighted to hear that Microsoft Research is hard at work on a new operating system. Known as Midori, the new OS is a radical departure from the more-is-better Windows platform. If Midori appears in the form described in technical documents we’ve acquired, it will be exactly what many IT managers have been hoping for.
Windows is simply unprepared for a dangerous, tightly interconnected world. The original Windows New Technology code base came from a day when the only enterprise networks were slow LANs with few resources beyond shared printers. Today’s personal computers live in an entirely different world, with faster processors, tremendous quantities of memory, sophisticated applications, overlapping APIs, managed and unmanaged code, SOAs—and a very dangerous Internet.
While Windows Vista presents a safer, more secure environment than its predecessors, only the most die-hard Microsoft apologists would argue that its incredible complexity represents the pinnacle of desktop operating system technology.
In the past, Microsoft has always made each version of Windows bigger, not smaller. The planned successor to Windows Vista, code-named Windows 7, continues that evolution. But just as the giant dinosaurs were eventually replaced by small mammals, so too we can hope that today’s overblown Windows platform will be replaced by a smaller, faster, leaner desktop OS that’s optimized for tomorrow’s computing challenges.
It’s too soon to speak about the evolutionary path from Windows to Midori (or something like Midori). There are many technical challenges that Microsoft still has to overcome. Customers and partners may balk at anything that affects compatibility with legacy hardware or software. Yet we have no doubt that this is the right direction for Microsoft to pursue. Indeed, in March 2006, SD Times editorial director, Alan Zeichick, called upon Microsoft to develop an operating system along similar lines to Midori (see “Break With the Past,”).
As the saying goes in Silicon Valley, if you don’t eat your own children, then some else will. An operating system like Midori will displace Windows some day. It’s in Microsoft’s best interest to make sure that they deliver Midori—before someone else does.
IBM’s savvy Ilog deal
IBM is getting great reviews for its recent move to acquire business rules software maker Ilog for US$338 million. Although SAP made another rules company acquisition last year, Ilog is the big fish in the market that IBM is reeling in.
Business rules software is a relatively new market, so perhaps a primer is in order.
Business process management (BPM) is a generic term for the procedures a business establishes to serve its customers. When a customer buys something, a purchase order goes to the warehouse and a product is delivered. It’s also become a technology term for BPM software offered by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and the other usual suspects.
Business rules management (BRM) software, on the other hand, works within a BPM—or SOA—environment to enable an organization to automate rules decisions. Someone writes the business rules and then executes them using a business rules engine. The beauty of BRM is that when the rules change, the application doesn’t need to be rewritten.
If a bank changes the rules for lending money because the market has turned, those changes in underwriting criteria can be adjusted automatically.
As IT systems are called on to do more for businesses, companies turn to suppliers like IBM for a BRM solution, and the company either has to build a solution or, as IBM is doing, buy one. Look for more acquisition activity and consolidation in this space; the Ilog deal is certainly not the last word in this increasingly important market.
Related Search Term(s): BRM, Windows, IBM, Ilog, Microsoft
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