Friday Rant: Emptoris Echos -- Cloudy With a Chance of Software
At Empower this week, Emptoris unveiled what at first may seem to the disinterested, non-tech focused procurement reader, its own answer to Ariba's cloud: Echos. The Echos name is an abbreviation for Emptoris Cloud Hosting Operating System. Yet Echos, as currently positioned, is anything but a "Commerce Cloud" of the type Ariba champions. Rather, what it really amounts to is a more tightly configured, controlled and streamlined architecture stack and installation/upgrade program designed to make installing and deploying enterprise software that much easier. I'm not sure if it has as much to do with the cloud as we've come to think of Amazon and other true virtualization services -- aside from the new "burst" capability to gain additional capacity when needed -- but it doesn't seem like fluffy marketing. Nor do I think that many in the audience at Empower truly got the nuances of it.
Before offering a few words of analysis looking at Echos, let's first examine what it is. In Emptoris' words, Echos "is a cloud-based delivery system built to streamline the deployment and management of Emptoris solutions. With Emptoris Echos, companies can install and run Emptoris solutions behind the firewall within minutes. The solution removes the technical challenges associated with on-premise application hosting with pre-configured, turn-key installations and upgrades. As a result, Emptoris Echos significantly reduces total cost of ownership of strategic supply and enterprise contract management solutions."
So in essence, if you read between the lines, Echos really feels like the "anti-cloud" solution because it gives installed software a new lease on enterprise life. But dig a bit deeper. The flexibility inherent within an architecture that simplifies deployment in behind-the-firewall, hosted or hybrid modes while also delivering the ability to rapidly scale-up CPU and general computing/network capacity with burst capabilities in a similar way to the Amazon cloud -- e.g., in this case for very large sourcing events with tens of thousands of line items and three or four constraints in an advanced optimization scenario -- is actually, at least in part, a true cloud infrastructure model based upon the more technical definition, even if Emptoris is taking a bit of marketing license by wrapping all of its architecture now under the cloud moniker.
I agree with you that all of this is terribly confusing when simplified. In fact, I can't believe I just wrote that last sentence in the prior paragraph. But I do think if you read it over a few times that at least some of it will become clearer (it did to me). You see, the problem here is that every vendor under the spend management sun has its own definition of what the heck the cloud is. What Echos is feels more like an architecture or infrastructure model than marketing lingo. But Emptoris may not be that far off (on some levels) from a technical "cloud" definition standpoint regarding at least part of what Echos can deliver in either hosted or a hybrid installed/hosted approach. Still, I say the weather forecast here is pretty easy to predict: cloudy with a chance of software. Enterprise software, to be exact.
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Let me see if I can paraphrase this technological marvel, "You don't have to have your people install our software, because you can run it on my machine."
Technology is amazing, isn't it.
Nice article, thank you for covering the topic. You are correct that this is not market-ware and that it is an important offering by Emptoris.
This is an infrastructure project that substantially enhances the deployment capabilities for Emptoris customers. The use of a private cloud, i.e. a farm of servers on which hypervisors allow the deployment of virtual machines (VMs), is only one aspect of EchOS.
The important point to note is the following. The private cloud, that will be used to run an EchOS deployed instance of Emptoris software, can be on Emptoris premises (similar to Ariba's vision) or (unlike Ariba's "handcuffed" cloud option) in some other cloud infrastructure, say, on the customer's premises. So, there is a clear and significant difference in the deployment capabilities and options that the two vendors offer.
Above all, EchOS is a metadata definition layer that stems from the new enterprise architecture of Emptoris, which is the basis of v9. It glues together a truly distributed system as one whole unit.
That's what makes possible to, for example, begin operating an instance of v9 in one cloud (say in the Emptoris hosting facilities) and with a few clicks (matter of speech ... your mileage will vary for a large system) get the same instance working behind-the-firewall, or vice versa.
For the behind-the-firewall cases, Emptoris will probably ship a small web application which you can fire up on any machine (e.g., your laptop) and an OVF package (if you don't know what this is, you can look it up in Wikipedia).
@TheGodfather: Don't ... struggle with technology, keep your day job :)
Cheers.
I've got code older than you (well intended humor, don't take it personally)