01 May 2008 Features

 

Keeping track

David Bannister

Enigmatec has evolved from arcane technology to sophisticated operational management says its chief technology officer, Duncan Johnston-Watt.

At the turn of the century, history will note, the dot.com bubble burst, and the shine came of the world-wide web as internet-based technologies lost a lot of their appeal for businesses looking to capitalise on their IT investments.

Nevertheless, much of the work done then, and some of the investments made by venture capitalists, took root and are now showing dividends in some surprising areas. While most of the buzz around Web 2.0 is about its mobile, multi-media, on-demand, personal/community aspects, the intellectual disciplines that underpin all that are also leading to formalised structures that can be applied to the modelling and management of complex organisations and their interactions with others.

One who has made that journey is Duncan Johnston-Watt, chief technology officer at Enigmatic, a specialist in IT automation.

The company was formed in April 2001, at which time its primary activities were what he now calls “some pretty far-out initiatives” around the concept of the semantic web, derived from Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas of how the web would develop.

“Web 2.0 today is more about creating services, while we were more about creating intelligence – it was less about data and more about reasoning, and particularly machine-to machine interaction, so that you would have services acting on your behalf,” says Johnston-Watt. “The example Tim Berners-Lee gives is that you might be given a prescription by a doctor, go into a pharmacy but before it is dispensed background checks are being performed to make sure that you’re not allergic or anything like that.”

This interaction of different systems stems in part from his pre-Enigmatec role as managing director at Reuters’ Instinet fixed income technology division. During that time, he was involved in the development of, along with Sun Microsystems and Compaq, what became known as the Mprism.net collaborative, incorporating Java tool technologies, Reuters’ Instinet electronic brokerage bond trading service, and Reuters news and market data for trading via a Compaq iPAQ mobile device.

The products and services stemming from this showed how services can be delivered across an array of devices and networks via an intelligent server infrastructure.

At that time, Reuters was investing heavily in internet start-ups through what it called its Greenhouse Fund, and through that Johnson-Watt and his colleagues were introduced to Sir Herman Hauser’s Amadeus Capital Partners, which provided seed capital for Enigmatec.

“When we were doing mPrism, the thing we didn’t really have a handle on was the underlying middleware, which shaped our subsequent thinking in the early brainstorming with Amadeus, and led to the development of the notion of process-oriented middleware, which is, by and large, still the core of what we do, but it is what we do with it that has changed radically over the past six years or so.”

Over time, the Enigmatic founders went in different directions. “A lot of the work that one of my co-founders, Steve Ross-Talbot, is still doing is really looking at how you talk about complex, multi-party transactions and model that successfully,” says Johnston-Watt.

Ross-Talbot went on to be one of the founders of HatTrick Software, established in 2004 to deliver applications based on the Web Services Choreography Description Language. HatTrick also supports the Pi4Technologies Foundation to sponsor academic research into the development and enhancement of the WS-CDL standard. (See Banking Technology, February 2007.)

Enigmatic has taken some of those ideas and gone in a different direction. “I’d be the first to admit that I’m less purist,” he says. “The underlying pi-calculus is still a very important aspect of what we do, but along with semantic web and autonomic computing, it’s one of the things I don’t talk about much these days – I still think about them, but I’ve learnt that you have to package things up very precisely if you want people to understand what value this is going to bring to their business.”

This has led the company to focus on the area of Run Book Automation. RBA is defined by Wikipedia as “the ability to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows that support system and network operational processes. A run book process can cross all management disciplines and interact with all types of infrastructure elements, such as applications, databases and hardware.”

Johnston-Watt characterises it as operational process management, as opposed to business process management.

“These days, I’m afraid, mostly it’s about saving money: if I apply this technology to managing my infrastructure so it is better aligned to my business, is that going to save me money or cost me money? If the answer is saving money, they’re interested. If you can then look beyond that and say that not only are you helping to consolidate – and it goes back to business process re-engineering, although that has a bad name – the idea of consolidating, optimising and managing the run book processes has value. You can work out very precisely the savings on the operational aspects of that.”

This approach, he contends, addresses the old chestnut of aligning IT and business requirements. “It is more than just orchestrating routine processes; it is the automation of more complex scenarios involving what it takes to run a business effectively, and what it takes to make sure you can serve that up. It is all about quality of service, and always has been – but it’s looking at a set of services and applications within an enterprise,” he says.

Duncan Johnston-Watt has over 12 years experience developing technology for the financial services industry, specialising in the development of large-scale systems including the global FX and money markets data delivery infrastructure for BNP and the fixed income analytics infrastructure at UBS.

In April 1998 he joined Instinet, then a Reuters subsidiary, where he led the development of a new fixed income brokerage platform launched in March 2000 and became managing director, Fixed Income Technology in May 2000. At Instinet he pioneered the use of Java enterprise technologies in financial services. In recognition of this work, he was nominated for a Computerworld Smithsonian Award in April 2000. He holds an MSc in Computation from Oxford University.