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ATOS To Buy SIS

Posted by Lutz Peichert on December 16, 2010

  • 340 Recommendations

Rumors became official on Tuesday: Siemens succeeded in finding a viable partner to buy its IT Solutions and Services (SIS) business. For all of us following the market in the past it wasn’t a surprise that ATOS ORIGIN is paying €850 million to take over Siemens’ IT business. This sum is a mixture of shares, bonds and cash, which will make Siemens a prime shareholder of ATOS for at least for a five-year period. In return ATOS will provide Siemens with Managed Services and System Integration worth €5.5 billion over a period of 7 years.

Question: What does this mean?

In the short run, even though this transaction will make ATOS the biggest European-headquartered IT service provider (with an expected combined revenue of approximately €8.7 billion in 2010 growing to an expected €10 billion in 2013) the direct impact for the IT user market will be minor. The mentioned outsourcing contract effectively represents one of the largest deals globally, but the impact on clients will be minimal as SIS delivers a significant amount of services to Siemens today. Second, ATOS ORIGIN is currently running a major restructuring program called TOP. And those projects combined with an acquisition of the mentioned size will be a challenge — at least. Thus meaning that ATOS ORIGIN’s focus will either be to finish the TOP program and then integrate SIS or extend TOP to include SIS. Either way the new organization will need some time to form — and so will the market impact.

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As Application Rationalization Grows Hotter In 2011 - Vendors Will Play Catch-Up

Posted by Phil Murphy on December 15, 2010

In his report on the top technology trends to watch in 2011 to 2013, my colleague Gene Leganza called out application portfolio management (APM) as one of a number of "planning and analysis tools to manage the future." Forrester clients seem to agree with Gene; in fact they aren't even waiting until 2011 - their interest has been building steadily throughout the second half of 2010.

One case in point: thousands of unique client hits in Q3 alone on a new report entitled Assessing Your Applications - Metrics That Matter Drive Better Rationalization Decisions. I noted similar levels of interest in the companion workbook, Forrester's Application Scoring Workbook, in Q3. Together they indicate that clients have a strong interest in educating themselves on how to streamline and rationalize their application portfolios.

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Finally Settling Into The World Of Storage

Posted by Vanessa Alvarez on December 15, 2010

  • 246 Recommendations

I recently joined the Forrester Infrastructure and Operations team, and I'm excited to be working the team to further explore the changing world of storage.  I know... many said "Storage? How boring." But in fact, there have been some very exciting changes in storage that have emerged as the result of many other transformations happening in the IT environment, that directly or indirectly impact storage. Some of the larger changes include:

Converged infrastructure: Emerging solutions that tie networking, storage and compute together have impacted the way storage further interacts and integrates with the other components of this stack. As Andre Kindness (@andrekindness) addresses in his doc here, the convergence occurring in the network are impacting the way storage considerations must be made and deployed going forward.

Cloud: Although much hyped, cloud computing is real and happening. There's no need to delve deeper for now, my colleague James Staten (@staten7) covers this topic extensively and can find his blog here. Many components of this model have evolved, yet cloud storage in its infancy. Use cases are still limited, as Andrew Reichman (@reichmanIT) points out in his August doc. However, I do see the market evolving quickly, as enterprises begin to get more comfortable and realistic about their expectations. 

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The Evolving Successes Of CRM - Part 2 Of 3

Posted by Kate Leggett on December 15, 2010

MyCustomer.com recently asked me what my thoughts were about CRM — why initial CRM projects failed, what has changed to make deployments successful, and what the future holds for CRM. Here is the second part of my answers, as well as a link to the published article.

 

Question: What has improved/changed to make CRM implementations more successful now?

Answer: My flip answer is that we’ve all grown up. Our technology has matured, we now have best practice processes to scope, implement, and deploy CRM systems, and we understand the organizational commitment and achieve the ROI that CRM has been promising us for the last decade.

A more factual answer is that CRM systems are now feature-rich, with best practice and industry-specific workflows built into them. This means that customers can choose to adopt these best practices without needing many man-months of customization work. The CRM architecture has evolved to make them immensely scalable, more easily integratable with other IT systems, as well as easily changeable to keep in step with changing business needs (think about all the mergers and acquisitions that have happened in the past several years, and the IT changes that have had to quickly happen to preserve the customer experience). There are also SaaS solutions available to achieve a rapid time-to-value, and we see a significant uptick in SaaS CRM adoption. Vendors and system integrators have a proven track record of deploying, tuning, and optimizing CRM projects to achieve quantifiable ROI, and this knowledge can be easily leveraged.

 

Question: What typically characterized a CRM project 10 years ago? And what do you believe typically characterizes a CRM project today?

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Dell Wraps Up Compellent, Refocuses Their Storage Ambitions On The Midrange

Posted by Andrew Reichman on December 15, 2010

  • 253 Recommendations

This week saw one of the last remaining independent storage vendors (Compellent) get swallowed by one of the IT infrastructure mega-vendors (Dell) in an ongoing drive for comprehensive solution sets.  We’ve seen a great deal of industry consolidation in storage, as vendors want to offer broad solution sets to buyers that want a single throat to choke, more financial stability than little guys can offer, and better integration of solutions. 

In the best of breed world, standing up an application environment generally meant figuring out how to make products from 5 to 10 different vendors work together; doing integration testing on the customer's floor as if such a solution had never been attempted before.  The integrated mega-vendor approach aims to smooth out the connections between server, storage, OS, virtualization, SAN, LAN, NIC, HBA, facilities, and the process and professional services aspects that go into a successful IT environment.  In the end, all this integration by pure infrastructure players may not be able to compete with the application vendors who are increasingly moving towards proprietary hardware stacks built around their apps (Oracle/Sun) or advanced control of infrastructure solutions from partners that are designed to closely integrate with the apps (VMware, Microsoft).  In the end, the app vendors have a theoretical advantage as they own the stickiest piece of the IT puzzle and therefore have closer access to the context of application data that can be used to make decisions about tiering, archiving and data classifications that infrastructure vendors of all stripes have struggled with.  In practice though, the infrastructure vendors have a huge lead in terms of user relationships for hardware purchasing, and more mature capabilities for performance, data protection and integrated management tools.

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Business Technology 2020 – Questions And Answers

Posted by Alex Cullen on December 14, 2010

What will business and technology be like in 2020 – and what’s IT’s place in this new world? This is the subject of a teleconference that James Staten and I held for our clients yesterday and also the subject of an upcoming Forrester report.

In this teleconference, we painted a picture of the impact of business-ready, self-service technology, a tech-savvy and self-sufficient workforce, and a business world in which today’s emerging economies dwarf the established ones, bringing a billion new consumers with a radically different view of products and services, as well as in which surging resource costs – especially energy costs – crush today’s global business models. 

In the past, when new waves of technology swept into our businesses – everything from the 1980s’ PCs to today’s empowered technologies – the reaction was the swinging pendulum of “decentralized/embedded IT” followed by “centralized/industrialized IT.” These tired old reactions won’t work in the world 2020. Instead, businesses must move to a model we call Empowered BT.

Empowered BT empowers business to pursue opportunities at the edge and the grassroots – but to balance this empowerment with enterprise concerns. Key to this balance is the interplay between four new “meta roles” – visionaries, consultants, integrators, and sustainability experts – combined with a new operating model based on guidelines, mentoring, and inspection. Also key is IT changing from a mindset in which it needs to control technology to one in which it embraces business ownership of technology decisions.

The teleconference chat window was busy as James and I presented our research. Here are the questions we weren’t able to answer due to time.

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Deutsche Bank Implements TCS BaNCS For Its International Subsidiaries

Posted by Jost Hoppermann on December 14, 2010

  • 326 Recommendations

For some time there have been rumors about Deutsche Banking having selected TCS BaNCS for some or all of its international subsidiaries. Today, both Deutsche Bankand Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)published a press release announcing that Deutsche Bank will implement TCS BaNCS Core Banking as its new core banking platform for Global Transaction Banking (GTB). The first international subsidiary, which is located in Abu Dhabi, went live three days ago. I discussed the deal with N. Ganapathy Subramaniam (NGS), the president of TCS Financial Solutions.

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What Matters When Assessing Your EA Program?

Posted by Henry Peyret on December 14, 2010

EA teams like to know how mature their EA practice is. There are a lot of EA maturity models out there. You will find some of these assessments and maturity models discussed in a 2009 Forrester report. Many EA teams share the idea that there is a single “ultimate EA model” and that EA leaders should strive to move up the ladder to this ultimate model. It’s like a video game – you try to get to the next level. 

For the past three months, the EA team’s Researcher Tim DeGennaro has been looking at these models and Forrester’s research on EA best practices to create a framework for assessing EA programs. This looked deceptively simple: Develop criteria based on the best practices we see in leading EA organizations, create an objective scale to rate an organization’s progress, offer reporting to illuminate next steps, and wrap it in an easy-to-use assessment package. What we’ve found so far is not only that avoiding the effects of subjectivity and lack of context is impossible but also that many assessment styles disagree on the most crucial aspect: What exactly is EA supposed to be aiming for?

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Join Forrester’s TweetJam On Advanced Analytics: December 15 At 12 pm US Eastern Time

Posted by Holger Kisker on December 13, 2010

  • 328 Recommendations

Are you interested in business intelligence, wonder about the future of the analytics market or have a question on advanced analytics technologies?

Then join the Forrester analysts Rob Karel, Boris Evelson, Clay Richardson, Gene Leganza, Noel Yuhanna, Leslie Owens, Suresh Vittal, William Frascarelli, David Frankland, Joe Stanhope, Zach Hofer-Shall, Henry Peyret and myself for an interactive TweetJam on Twitter about the state of advanced analytics on Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 from 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT (18:00 – 19:00 CET) using the Twitter hashtag #dmjam. We’ll share the results of our recent research on the analytics market space and discuss how it will change with new technologies entering the scene and maturing over time.

Business intelligence is the fastest growing software market today as companies are driving business results based on deeper insights and better planning, and advanced analytics is the spearhead of BI technologies that can untap new dimensions of business performance. But what exactly is ‘advanced’ analytics, what technologies are available and how to efficiently use them?

Much more detailed information can be found in the blog of Forrester analyst James Kobielus who will lead us through the discussion during the TweetJam. Above you see an overview graphic listing the different elements of advanced analytics today, taken from his blog.

Here are some of the questions we want to debate during our TweetJam discussion:

  • What exactly is and isn’t advanced analytics?
  • What are the chief business applications of advanced analytics?
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The Right Target State Architecture For Banking Platform Transformation

Posted by Jost Hoppermann on December 13, 2010

  • 303 Recommendations

Our Q3 2010 Global Financial Services Architecture Online Survey shows that 79% of the surveyed financial services firms are either already working on transforming their application landscape or plan to start this effort by 2012 at the latest. The need for greater business agility and flexibility, new business capabilities, and improved ability to cope with changing markets, offer more differentiation, and increase market share are key drivers for a large share of these financial services firms.

Coping with these drivers requires a large amount of architectural flexibility; therefore, architectural flexibility needs to be an integral element of any decision in favor of or against a given architecture or off-the-shelf banking platform within a transformation initiative. Consequently, it does not come as a surprise that 43% of the surveyed firms expect that more than one-third of their business applications will leverage service-oriented architecture and use business services in the next 18 to 24 months and an additional 19% think that more than half of their applications will utilize business services within that time frame.

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