Two New iSeries ISVs Target Large Accounts

by Mary Lou Roberts

According to Joyce Bordash, IBM's director of iSeries ecosystem development, more than 244 new ISVs have been lured to the platform since the beginning of 2005, even without a strong push by IBM to grow the ISV base, which, she maintains, numbered 2,608 companies last year. "This year, our Innovation Initiative is really all about enablement and taking our current set of ISVs and helping to strengthen their applications. The fact that we got new ISVs out of that was wonderful, but there really wasn't a concerted effort on our part, nor was it one that we invested in heavily." That's on the table for 2006, she says.

Nevertheless, new iSeries ISVs are popping up, and their profiles are interesting. Bordash maintains that IBM hasn't really taken a hard look at the segmentation of those new ISVs, which I find somewhat difficult to imagine. Nevertheless, when I asked for the opportunity to interview some of these new ISVs, the two ISVs IBM suggested I talk to were interesting in that they both target very large companies as customers. I don't mean large SMBs; I mean multi-national, Fortune 1,000-sized companies.

Of course, one cannot read much into a sampling of two. But it is interesting to see the ways in which some non-traditional ISVs are taking a fresh look at the iSeries.

Valid Technologies offers a biometric user authentication solution that can be integrated into other applications running on any platform. Biometric authentication using fingerprints, voice prints, and retina scans, is a hot topic as the use of traditional passwords are increasingly viewed as passé. Industry analysts all predict huge growth in this market as the cost of biometric authentication decreases and end users recognize the huge costs associated with help desks that are spending a large percentage of their resources addressing forgotten and lost passwords and resets.

In fact, there's still a significant entry cost associated with an initial implementation of biometric authentication, which is why, at the moment, only large companies and/or those with significant demands for high levels of security are jumping in. For the time being, this is a solution whose most promising prospects are large companies.

So why bring out a biometric authentication solution that runs only on the iSeries? Greg Faust, ValidTech's president and CEO, previously worked for an advertising agency on the IBM account when Big Blue introduced the AS/400 in 1988. He later worked in other industries and then returned to the software world a few years ago. "When we started this new company about 18 months ago, we evaluated the platforms very carefully, and my experience with the iSeries led me to say that it has all the characteristics we need. But I was concerned that IBM really hadn't pushed the iSeries in the last few years, and that was a mitigating factor. That has now gone away and IBM is supporting the iSeries with all guns blazing. But we really selected the iSeries because it really is the most secure transaction processing machine on the planet, and that's what user authentication is all about: to secure transactions."

ValidTech's solution, Valid Secure System Authentication (VSSA), is what it calls an authentication engine, and it runs only on the iSeries under i5/OS--not on a Linux or AIX logical partition on an iSeries. However, the applications that are being enabled with a call for authentication can be running on virtually any platform anywhere. The sensors that come with the solution are made by American Power Conversion with chips made by Authentec.

ValidTech's target prospects include the big players in industries like financial services and healthcare-both market segments that are heavily subject to a rash of compliance mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, and Basil II. Will the fact that VSSA runs only under i5/OS be a hindrance in targeting large companies that tend to be mainframe users?

No, says Faust, who explains that virtually all of the Fortune 1,000-class companies have an OS/400 server somewhere in their organization. "And if they don't, if they want to create a really secure architecture, they probably want to have their central authentication and compliance engine on the most secure platform. If it's not a platform they currently embrace, the iSeries is a maintenance-free and low-cost platform to put it on. For $30,000 or $40,000, an organization can put in an i5 if they dedicate it solely to our solution. They can authenticate a couple of thousand users with that and have it as their compliance engine. It would really be more secure than other platforms, just from an access point of view."

Faust acknowledges that VSSA is not for sites with 10 to 20 users. "It gets to be expensive, because you're talking several hundred dollars for a seat. When you get to 1,000 users, you're talking less than $50 per seat, so there are great economies of scale in the whole operation. It's designed for enterprise applications. But the reality is that in financial services and healthcare, most people already have an iSeries. So we already have 250,000 points worldwide of low-hanging fruit that we can go after. Frankly, we haven't run into any resistance from anyone who's hung up about the platform."

But will all of those old boxes sitting out there be able to run VSSA? "It can even be an old Model 170," says Faust, "but I'd like to have it running on a more modern machine. It is a requirement to have i5/OS V5R3. There are a lot of things that IBM has done in the last couple of revisions that make the operating system more secure, and we have leveraged some of those things natively. Aside from that, it can be any old box."

Faust has no big concerns, either, about approaching people who are not familiar with the iSeries and who may have a Windows mindset. This won't be a problem, he says, if the salesperson does his/her job. "If the customer's concern is secure authentication, you sure don't want to be doing it on a non-secure platform, and the iSeries doesn't add very much to the overall cost of the solution. Further, it's maintenance free and giving them a much more secure environment. I don't see where you can go wrong."

ValidTech is off and running in developing partnerships with other ISVs who target large enterprise customers. In fact, Faust notes that Analytical Science Corporation just built an entire time and attendance solution around its VSSA and launched it last week. And they are actively working on finalizing agreements with other business partners who want to incorporate the calls for VSSA into their applications.

For several reasons, IBM must salivate at having leading-edge solutions like ValidTech's that run on the iSeries and target large companies. First, there's the built-in opportunity to rejuvenate those old iSeries boxes and get them back on the "active" list. Second, solutions like this tend to drive sales of lots of other services as well, building the ecosystem. As Faust explains, "With the typical install of VSSA, the cost of our solution is probably going to be 20 percent to 30 percent of what the customer is actually going to spend. That customer is going to buy implementation services from the business partner. They're gong to get consulting services from the business partner or IBM Global Services. They're going to get consulting or IBM to structure their network properly. And they're going to have service-oriented architecture and WebSphere integration consultancy fees. If we come out with 30 cents on the dollar for implementing VSSA, we're happy--and everyone else is happy, too."

Another ISV new to the iSeries is Provenir, a provider of an enterprise-wide, lifecycle-wide framework that lets customers create customized systems from a common architecture. This ISV offers a good example of a non-OS/400, non-RPG solution being drawn to the platform.

With Provenir's software, users can develop, test, and deploy business processes that can include the integration of data from internal or external sources; develop business rules and strategies; and deploy scorecards in a variety of complex forms, pushing data out to any report generation system.

At the current time, Provenir focuses on the financial services industry, but that may soon change, says Sharon O'Connor-Clarke, vice president of offering management, stressing that the platform could be very useful to companies in other industries as well, including insurance, telecom, and retail. "Because it's virtually a whiteboard, the customer can have the configuration any way they want it. The customer really drives what the product looks and feels like."

Provenir's vice president of architecture development, Brett Norton, describes the product as a sort of "5GL application development language--something that doesn't require a computer science background to build out basic business rules and business logic. We're really put a lot of effort into making the product 100 percent visual."

Provenir has been in business since 1992, and with its software, the company maintains platform independence. A test of whether or not it would run on the iSeries was triggered recently by a sales effort to close a major, multinational financial institution in Asia. In order to win the business, Provenir had to certify that its product did, indeed, run on the iSeries--the platform of choice for that customer. "That's when we approached the Innovation Center," Norton says. "We took advantage for a little over a week to install the software and we went through a high-level test, and we were able to do this without making any code changes to our software at all. That's a testament to Java and to the implementation of Java on the iSeries. The certification went very smoothly. We came away in a week and a half and were able to tell that very large company that we didn't have any problems at all running on the iSeries."

The iSeries is a great fit for Provenir, O'Connor-Clarke maintains. "What resonated with us about the iSeries was hearing some of the IBM folks talk about integration and consolidation on the platform. And that's really what Provenir is all about: deploying in multiple different decision engines across the business. We enable our customers to bring information together and consolidate it."

Provenir is not a solution for small- or even medium-size businesses, however. "We're probably looking at banks in the $10 billion range and up," says Norton. The typical implementation of Provenir is going to be on an i5 570, with multiple other i5 570s at regional locations throughout the world. That central i5 570 probably needs four processor cores and a lot of main memory, and it will be divided into several partitions. "The iSeries virtualization technology is absolutely ideal," he says. "We're built on a technology called a message bus that's all about componitizing parts of the workflow that an application will need to go through to acquire all the data that it needs to make a decision. So we take advantage of the virtualization technology to put our decision engine in one partition, our application server in another, with our message bus running vertically throughout the i5 570."

Norton maintains that the attraction of securing the mega-bank in Asia as a customer was only a part of the decision to certify their solution on the iSeries. "We also have clients running on the pSeries as well, and the capability of managing the partitions from a pSeries, xSeries, and iSeries all from a single hardware management console is particularly attractive. That way you don't have to get into the religious wars about which one is better--and I'm really trying to stay away from that. So it's a natural evolution to round out our hardware implementation strategy with the iSeries. The iSeries has as part of its software stack both Websphere and DB2, which is one of the databases that we end up supporting and integrating with the most. So it's a no-brainer to use the iSeries and recommend it to our customers."

Provenir is bullish on its potential in the large iSeries user market. Historically and to date, its customer base has been split about one-third each for Windows, AIX, and Solaris, with a smattering of mainframes. Norton expects, however, that by this time next year, the company will be looking at a much more significant iSeries presence. "I would not be surprised to see it one-quarter each with iSeries, Solaris, Windows, and AIX. We can't rule out Windows yet."

Norton is most enthusiastic about the iSeries technology. "I have a little equation I preach," he says. "Message bus + virtualization = on-demand computing. The iSeries is one of the truest forms of virtualization that I've seen."

No, these two new ISVs are not your daddy's iSeries ISV. They don't fit the profile of that hale and hearty application software vendor offering RPG business applications that are still chugging away around the world. They aren't tools vendors making life easier for green-screen RPG programmers struggling to maintain legacy systems. They just might, however, represent one of the new faces that IBM is struggling to paint on the i5--not only to move boxes, but to build the ecosystem for services as well, both within and outside IBM. And that's good for all of us.

Mary Lou Roberts, a 35-year veteran of the information systems industry, is a new contributor to IT Jungle. In addition to her work as a reporter in the iSeries space, she has spent her career as a marketing and communications professional working exclusively with information technology publications and companies. She can be reached at WriterNewf@aol.com.