Join Forrester’s Tweet Jam On Cloud Computing: September 15 At 11 AM EDT

Holger Kisker

Have questions about cloud computing and the top challenges and opportunities it presents to vendors and users? Then join us for an interactive Tweet Jam on Twitter about the future of cloud computing on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EDT (17:00 – 18:00 CEST) using the Twitter hashtag #cloudjam. Joining me (@hkisker) will be my analyst colleagues Mike Cansfield (@mikecansfield), Pascal Matzke (@pascalmatzke), Thomas Mendel (@drthomasmendel), and Stefan Ried (@stefanried). We’ll share the results of our recent research on the long term future of cloud computing and discuss how it will change the way tech vendors engage with customers.

 

Looking through the current industry hype around the cloud, Forrester believes cloud computing is a sustainable, long-term IT paradigm. Underpinned by both technology and economic disruptions, we think the cloud will fundamentally change the way technology providers engage with business customers and individual users. However, many customers are suffering from "cloud confusion" as vendors' marketing stretches cloud across a wide variety of capabilities.

To help, we recently developed a new taxonomy of the cloud computing markets (see graphic) to give vendors and customers clear definitions and labels for cloud capabilities. With this segmentation in hand, cloud vendors and users can better discuss the challenges and benefits of cloud computing today and in the future.

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Energy For More People

Holger Kisker

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.
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Not All In-Memory Analytics Tools Are Created Equal

Boris Evelson

I get many questions from clients interested in evaluating different in-memory technologies. My first advice is not to mix apples and oranges and clearly understand the differences between in-memory indexes, in-memory OLAP, in-memory ROLAP, in-memory spreadsheets, and other approaches. See more details in my recent blog entry "I forget: what's in-memory?" to understand the differences. Then once you zero in on a particular segment, you can indeed do an apples-to-apples comparison. Let's say we pick the category of in-memory associative indexes, which would include Microsoft PowerPivot, QlikTech, and TIBCO Spotfire. We also sometimes run across Advizor Solutions, but typically in smaller clients (and we do not include them in The Forrester Wave™ process). I recommend a three-step approach to compare these four tools:

  1. First, compare all of the commodity features of the vendors and tools like data integration and portal integration, operational features like administration, security, and others. You can leverage the detailed evaluation behind our slightly outdated 2008 BI Forrester Wave, if you are in a hurry, or you can wait for another month or so and the 2010 update will be published (it's in the last stages of editing at this point). Or if you are a Forrester IT client — not a vendor — client, send me a note and I'll share a draft preview with you.
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Six Benchmarks To Help Scope Your CRM Project

William Band

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.
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Top 12 Evaluation Criteria For CRM Professional Services Selection

William Band

I get a lot of inquiries asking me to name the best CRM professional services providers (PSPs). Business and IT managers worry about the cost and risk of failure when engaging consultants and systems integrators to improve the performance of their mission-critical customer-facing business processes.

Organizations entrust PSPs with important tasks – not just "screwing in software.” In a survey of 119 companies I did a few years ago: nearly 28% used PSPs to help develop their strategic vision for CRM, 42% used PSPs for defining business objectives for CRM, 44% for aligning business processes with the CRM strategy, and 56% to define the conceptual design for CRM technology solutions. PSPs were used by 60% of enterprises to establish detailed design requirements and by 64% to implement CRM solutions.

However, there are huge risks to working productively with CRM consulting or systems integration providers. In the same study, I found that four out of 10 would not recommend their CRM PSP to others after the work was completed.

I recommend that you use 12 evaluation criteria to increase your odds of success. How well does your CRM PSP stack up against these standards?

  1. Demonstrable knowledge of the technical characteristics of CRM applications. This is the most important of the 12 criteria. Business and IT executives expect their PSP to bring an expert understanding of the specific CRM applications and related technologies to the projects they are engaged to support.
  2. Demonstrable knowledge of the requirements of the industry. Organizations expect their CRM PSP to have a deep knowledge of the business challenges in their industry and insight into unique sector characteristics and to be familiar with industry jargon and culture.
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App Development Managers Should Care About Oracle’s Suit Against Google

John R. Rymer

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.

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Results Of The Forrester Wave™: Open Source Business Intelligence (BI), Q3 2010

Boris Evelson

Open source software (OSS) and business intelligence (BI) are two related market segments where Forrester sees continually increasing interest and adoption levels. BI specifically continues to be one of the top priorities on everyone's mind. The main reason? Enterprises that do not squeeze the last ounce of information out of their data stores and applications, and do not focus on getting strategic, tactical, and operational insight into their customers, products, and operations, risk falling behind competition. And when it comes to open source, 2009 could best be described as "the year IT professionals realized that open source runs their business." The reason is simple: Over the past few years, we've seen that developers adopt open source products tactically without the explicit approval of their managers. This has shown up in numerous surveys where the actual adoption of open source ranks higher than what IT managers report. Well no longer: Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2009 shows that management has caught on to the fact that developers increasingly use open source to run key parts of their IT infrastructure. And management has grown increasingly comfortable with it. In fact, throughout 2009, most client inquiries Forrester received regarding open source were focused on how to move from tactical adoption to strategic exploitation.

Yet, when you put the 2 and 2 together (OSS and BI), you mostly get a mixed market, where one unfortunately has to compare apples to oranges. Why? Before plunging into a tool evaluation and selection process, ask yourself the following questions, and make sure you are doing a like-to-like comparison:

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Daptiv Acquired By Parallax Capital Partners = Faster Maturation Of PPM SaaS, But Does It Signal The Next Wave Of Consolidation?

Margo Visitacion

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.

 

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The Banking Backbone Is Dead. Long Live The Banking Backbone

Jost Hoppermann

I just returned from a business visit to India, and on the long way back, I had the time to sort out some observations and ideas on the future of the banking backbone that I had discussed with bankers as well as banking platform vendor execs over the past few weeks. But let me start from the beginning.

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Adobe Seizes The Day

Stephen Powers

Adobe has gotten into the content management business, with its announcement earlier today of its intent to acquire Day software for $240 million. Day —with its WCM, DAM, and collaboration offerings — has had a good deal of buzz over the last year or so. Why? Mostly due to a renewed marketing push, demo-friendly products, and occasional uncertainty around competitors due to acquisitions (Interwoven, Vignette) . Day was one of the few remaining independent WCM vendors with enterprise credentials and was ripe for the picking, particularly given the strength of its WCM product. Adobe, of course, brings its document, creative authoring, and rich Internet application development tools to the table.

With the Day deal and last year’s Omniture acquisition, Adobe continues to assemble components of the online customer engagement ecosystem that we wrote about earlier this year. What’s interesting is which vendors are approaching this ecosystem — from the standpoint of ECM (IBM, Oracle/Stellent, Open Text/Vignette), marketing software (Alterian/MediaSurface),  enterprise search (Autonomy/Interwoven), and now creativity software/interactive Web applications (Adobe).

So, what does this deal mean for content and collaboration pros?

  • Short term, there shouldn’t be a whole lot to worry about for either set of customers. Adobe and Day’s offerings generally don’t have much overlap , but rather are complementary. So there should be no worries about certain products being discontinued in favor of others.
  • Day and Adobe customers will have the opportunity to source more components of the online customer engagement ecosystem from a single vendor and potentially take advantage of possible integrations to come down the road.
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