Last week, I attended the ONS (Offshore North Sea) 2010 conference, one of the world’s largest energy conferences, with more than 49,000 participants, in Stavanger, Norway. The conference theme was “energy for more people,” an important goal, not only to keep pace with the growth of the world’s population (expected to hit 9-plus billion people by 2050) but to fight poverty and increase living standards around the globe. However, soon after the opening ceremony by King Harald V, it became very clear from the first panel discussion that the path forward to achieve this goal has many facets and that the leaders of the world, including politicians, academics, business people, and other authorities, are far from reaching consensus on the right path today.

Conventional Energy Resources

Global energy demand will increase by ~45% within the next 20 years (according to the International Energy Agency), but what will the distribution of energy resources look like by 2030? Most scenarios predict that fossil fuels will continue to be the primary energy source, with oil and gas making up 65% of the total demand. To no one’s surprise, most of the presentations and exhibitions at ONS 2010 were therefore dedicated to the future of fossil fuels that can be combined into the following themes to satisfy the energy demand of tomorrow:

• Unlocking new oil and gas reserves in the world. The concept seems to be straightforward: Overcome technical and political hurdles and drill deeper, faster, and more efficiently to carry exploration into new territories such as the Arctic or ultra-deep sea.

Every year, I get hundreds of inquiries about CRM business process project strategy and technology selection: “How many solutions should we look at? What criteria should we use to evaluate the vendors? How much do the solutions cost? Who should lead the implementation project? How long will it take to deploy the solution? How likely are we to achieve the business results we are targeting? What pitfalls do we have to watch out for?”

I just published a report based on a survey of 99 companies that provides answers to many of these questions. Here are some of the highlights:

• Customer service is the top priority. The most commonly used functionalities in CRM suites are customer service (67%) and sales force automation (66%) modules. Half of the companies are currently using marketing (56%) and customer data management (53%) modules; 35% are using customer analytics.
• Flexibility, business fit, and process workflow are critical. More than half (53%) include the “flexibility and adaptability” of the application as one of the top three criteria in choosing a CRM solution. Forty-eight percent include “fit with business requirements” in their top three purchase criteria. Also important are: architecture alignment (31%), business process workflow (29%), fast deployment (26%), and scalability of application (26%).
• CRM solution costs are not trivial. Thirty-six percent reported that they spent less than $250,000 on CRM software licenses, but 23% said they spent more than $1 million.

As much fun as the juicy details of the Oracle-Google lawsuit are, the meaning of the suit for enterprise application development managers is, well, philosophical. Aside from sweating over the legal status of your Android phone (if you own one), the lawsuit won’t create drama for your shop. But the long-term implications are serious. Henceforth, Java will be a marching band rather than a jazz collective. Oracle’s action will reduce the independent innovation that has made Java what it is, causing developers to seek new ideas from sources outside of Java. Your Java strategy, as a result, will get more complicated.

A little background: Since the late ’90s, the primary source of Java innovation has been open source projects that either fix Java limitations or provide low-cost alternatives to vendor products. But Java’s position as a wellspring of innovation has been declining in recent years as many Web developers shifted their attention to dynamic languages, pure Web protocols, XML programming, and other new ideas. This trend has been particularly pronounced in the client tier for Web applications, where alternative rich Internet application technologies including Ajax frameworks like Dojo and container-based platforms like Adobe Flash/Flex have replaced client-side Java. Java virtual machines are a foundation of these efforts, but the enterprise and mobile Java platforms are not.

In choosing Java’s future course, Oracle had two philosophies to choose from.

On July 27, 2010, Parallax Capital Partners announced that it was acquiring Daptiv, a SaaS PPM vendor. Forrester customers who are current Daptiv customers or are considering Daptiv as a PPM vendor should not be deterred. As a $20 million vendor, Daptiv provided a strong work group for project portfolio management, performing well at the departmental or divisional level, but had limited capabilities in areas that were attractive to enterprisewide implementations, including functionality (i.e., resource management and financial project management) and ability to scale development or support - a typical problem for smaller vendors. Prior to the acquisition, the company had started down the path toward enterprise viability, but the vendor was still seen as best suited to small to medium-sized standalone implementations.

Acquisition by capital investment firms can mean prepping a company for sale, but with Parallax operating Daptiv as a wholly owned subsidiary, Daptiv’s future looks much more positive. Having Parallax’s backing, the vendor will now be able to:

• Increase R&D funding to further develop the connectors for ERP integration as well as extend connectors to other demand management or portfolio management tools.
• Provide resource management functionality that supports forecasting and capacity management.
• Increase support capabilities for larger, more complex implementations in order to compete at the enterprise level.
• Extend its Daptiv platform to encompass more work-related data and reporting. 
• Provide increased financial modeling at the portfolio level and project actual capture for financial reporting.