Friday, May 16, 2008

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The Lighter Side

Simplexity: Mission Critical Complexity

IBM today announced a series of new initiatives to augment the complexity of enterprise infrastructure. "We've declared war on closed proprietary complexity in the Enterprise," said IBM spokesman Arthur Ritus. "We examined tens of thousands of customer installations and determined the number one source of complexity. It was IBM." Recognizing this as a unique opportunity to lead the industry, IBM has made it a top corporate priority to deliver mission critical complexity to large customers. "We invented mainframe complexity back in the 1960s with OS/360, so of course we're going to continue to continue to develop new more advanced complexity for today's environment." Ritus criticized Microsoft's .NET approach for being a proprietary system. "Sure, .NET is a start. But it's not nearly complicated enough. We believe it's time to leave behind the era of closed complexity to enter into a new realm of open systems complexity on a global distributed scale."

IBM's new Global Grid Complexity initiative is one of the new emerging sources of complexity. "We believe that by implementing grid computing on a massive scale, we can be the number one supplier of complexity world wide," Ritus said. "Not only will development be more complex, but deployment and management will be nearly impossible."

IBM has also expanded the focus of its WebSphere Application Complication architecture to deal directly with the need for software complexity. The WebSphere platform now includes the WebSphere Event Broker, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Studio, WebSphere Half Bath, WebSphere Buzzword Factory, WebSphere Jiggsaw Generator, and WebSphere Pig Latin Control System. "We will be integrating all of our software technologies into the WebSphere family," said IBM spokesman Shelby Rightmate. "First we'll rename them and then once customers get the hang of it, we'll change all of the APIs and tools. That should keep everyone busy through the market downturn."

IBM calls this approach "Simplexity." It's the idea of making things appear to be simple, when in fact they are becoming increasingly complicated. "How the heck do you think we've been managing to grow our consulting revenues?" Rightmate asked.

About the author

Nate Orenstam is a Java programmer working on J2EE infrastructure for SOAP-based multi-tier distributed computing architectures.