Phurnace Blog

What Makes a Good Customer

Robert Reeves — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:48:53 +0100

At Phurnace, we take great pride in our customer service. Since day one, we have created processes and employed systems to help us reach our goal of 100% Customer Satisfaction. A world class product like Phurnace Deliver is only as good as our customers� ability to implement our solution. To that end, we utilize Salesforce.com�s Customer Portal and provide our customers the ability to directly contact our engineers. We are so confident with our solution, that every single one of our custome [...]

New EMA Report Out on Phurnace

Daniel Nelson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:44:22 +0100

Check out this new report on Phurnace, the cloud, and automation by Julie Craig of EMA (Enterprise Management Associates).

A few of the key points made in the brief include:

The key to Cloud success is going to be your management tooling. Doesn�t matter how fast you can spin up images if it still takes you three weeks to deploy your application.
Infrastructure independence is key: your strategy for the Cloud has to take into account bridging the gap from the Cloud to on- [...]

Phurnace: We Burn Stuff Up and Help You With Your Deployments

Jessica Gass — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:32:25 +0100

This video is the first of a series we will be doing on Phurnace and other cool stuff that relates to us. At the end of each episode we plan to burn something up. Do you have a great idea of something to burn? Leave me a comment here and we will try to get it into a video.

Thoughts on the IBM Portal Excellence Conference

Daniel Nelson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0100

I and a few other folks from Phurnace attended the Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego this week. Some quick thoughts from the show: Insurance and Banking seemed to be the biggest verticals represented at the show. There were quite a few folks there that weren’t current Portal customers, but were considering migrating from another platform to WebSphere Portal. The most common reason they gave was nervousness about all the recent consolidation in the Portal space (i.e., Oracle acqu [...]

Cloud foundries and deployment � 451 Group Report

Daniel Nelson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0100

Yesterday, the leading tech analyst, The 451 Group, published a report on Phurnace. They talk quite a bit about how Phurnace is starting to look like a “cloud foundry”. It is a great report that gives their insights after they were briefed on some of our upcoming product enhancements (Phurnace 4.0 and cloud targeted products).

One of the most interesting lines in the report is this: “It is not yet clear how clouds will be used in the enterprise, but it is likely [...]

Going to the IBM Portal Excellence Conference?

Jessica Gass — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0100

We are gearing up for a great show next week at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego. If you are headed to the show, please stop by our session on Monday from 4:30 - 5:30PM PT in the Marina 5 Ballroom and/or visit us at Booth 13.

Also, we put together a quick video of the Greatest Moments in Software History. Have a look!

Phurnace Loves StreamStep

Robert Reeves — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:27:22 +0100

Today I had lunch with Duane Tharp from StreamStep. Duane is a software technology leader and has had great success with NetSuite, BetweenMarkets (acquired by Inovis) and mValent (acquired by Oracle), which he cofounded with his current cofounder, Clyde Logue.

StreamStep automates and optimizes all aspects of release management. But, it�s not just limited to pushing code out the door. They can also help you with server management. Basically, if you�re using an Excel spreadsheet and hacked tog [...]

Market Observations Report by Ptak, Noel & Associates

Jessica Gass — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:58:43 +0100

Here is a link to a new write up by leading data center automation analyst Bill Keyworth of Ptak Noel & Associates. It is their observations on our product and market opportunity. They specifically highlight our architectural choice to build an abstracted data model to replace complex (and hard to maintain) deployment scripts.

A Few Phurnace Updates

Jessica Gass — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:20:40 +0100

We launched a press release today about our latest customer win & largest healthcare customer. Have a look!

Also, Phurnace is presenting during IBM's Cloud Computing for Developers virtual workshop this Thursday, October 1. We will be speaking during the Lotus on AWS: Partner Solutions Show and Tell session from 4:00PM ET - 5:30PM ET. We hope you will join us!

WebSphere VE � All the Cool Kids Are Using It, So Should You

Daniel Nelson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:00:00 +0100

I love talking to customers. It makes product planning so much easier if all you do is listen to them and give them what they want. And from the looks of things, most all of our large WebSphere customers are planning to or have already moved to WebSphere Virtual Enterprise (VE).

Quick synopsis of VE (or the product-formerly-known-as OO or XD; IBM has played around with the name more than Prince). Virtual Enterprise allows WebSphere clusters to dynamically allocate resources to ap [...]

Some New IBM WebSphere Deployment Features

Alexander Bibighaus — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:00:00 +0100

Phurnace just released some new and powerful features for the management of IBM WebSphere and WebSphere Portals. In the Portal area, our product, Phurnace Deliver, can manage the auto-deployment and on-going configuration management for all of the pieces of a Portal instance (portlets, themes, skins, content, etc.) and the understandings of the interdependencies between them. This makes changing and managing Portals substantially easier than it is without Phurnace.

Brand new ca [...]

EMC Buys FastScale � What Does It Mean?

Daniel Nelson — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:19:34 +0100

Alright, I keep getting asked this so here are my thoughts, in bullet form. Take them for what you will:

First, this is what FastScale provides, in a nutshell: on demand, they would examine an application and strip out all the superfluous fluff in it to make it streamlined and easier to manage/deploy, etc. Cool stuff. But, no, not what Phurnace does.
This is a good move for EMC. It adds to their system management suite, and FastScale provides them a compelling differenti [...]

IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009

Jessica Gass — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:00:00 +0100

We are gearing up for our next tradeshow, the IBM Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego, Oct 12 - 14, 2009. We attended a ton of great sessions last year and chatted with some really cool Portal admins at our booth. This year we have a booth and our CTO, Robert Reeves, will be doing a live demo of Phurnace WebSphere Portal® Deliver™ during our technical session. Check the website in the next few weeks for the details. This is a must attend event for any Portal admin. See you t [...]

Spring has Sprung

Robert Reeves — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:00:00 +0100

There is a lot of discussion in the market right now on the Spring Framework and development language because of the recent VMware acquisition of SpringSource. First, for those of you not that familiar with Spring, it is a lightweight J2EE application platform and integration model. Spring also helps reduce the complexities involved when developing J2EE applications. For example, in the J2EE EJB model, Spring only requires you to create your Domain Module using Java Beans freeing your from [...]

Cloud Thunder (as in noise) Continues

Daniel Nelson — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:00:00 +0100

We are in the middle of a two week industry analyst tour right now and we completed some really good briefings last week. Lots of discussion on the need to provide rapid ROI, the need to show immediate cost savings to IT departments, how to leverage the desire in companies to use even more automation and of course, the Cloud. Phurnace is in a very good place related to the hottest trends in IT. Automation, a shift to an application centric mind-set in IT, cost reduction, a [...]

Cost of Configuration Errors � Research Sheds Light on the Facts

Jessica Gass — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:26:18 +0100

According to a new survey by research and consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates, manual configuration errors are wreaking havoc across IT organizations, not only impacting developer and staff productivity, but also causing significant delays in the roll out of customer-facing web applications. These errors are resulting in application downtime costing companies as much as $72,000 per hour.

Key findings of the research titled: The Sources of Web Application Downtime:

Google Mail Feed Utility

Wesley Willard — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:00:00 +0100

At this year's No Fluff Just Stuff conference, presenter Matthew McCullough,
the managing partner of Ambient Ideas, LLC, gave an interesting talk on Open Source Debugging Tools, which touched on usage of freely-available tools such as cURL. cURL is a command-line tool which
supports file transfer operations for a variety of protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, SCP, etc.)
and can be used for a variety of useful tasks, such as retrieving the real source page of a web site:

curl -i -H [...]

IT Savings? Remember Management 101. People, Process, Technology

Larry Warnock — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:00:00 +0100

Every recent issue of every IT publication has discussed ways to reduce spending. Especially in this tough economy, but quite frankly, this should be a constant priority for IT management. We are hosting a webinar on this very topic. Forrester analyst, Evelyn Hubbert, will be our guest speaker. Please join us. She has experience from across a wide range of industries and talks each week with some of the most innovative IT leaders around. [...]

BMC BladeLogic Heuristics � An Interesting Use Case

Daniel Nelson — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:00:00 +0100

At the beginning of March this year, I got to spend a couple of days at the BMC Lexington campus prototyping our BladeLogic integration with some of their product, architecture, and development folks. Other than the four feet of snow, it was a great experience meeting the guys there as well as seeing what Phurnace can do with a product like BladeLogic. Together we can do lots of neat things that today just aren�t possible with either product alone. Recently one of our customers brought up [...]

AIX for the Linux Inclined

Pete Pickerill — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:00:00 +0100

In our quest to better support AIX 5L V5.3 as both a server and client platform for Phurnace Deliver, we recently got a new piece of hardware, an IBM Power 520 Express. I am the one that usually sets up any new hardware, so the job of installing and configuring AIX fell to me. I soon found that AIX is a completely different animal than Linux. The majority of my previous *nix experience has been with Red Hat. Those of you with more Unix or AIX experience than I are probably laughing at my [...]