Forrester Blogs › Category: MDM

Nimbus Acquisition Positions Tibco To Finally Empower Business Stakeholders

Posted by Clay Richardson on August 30, 2011

  • 440 Recommendations

Today, Tibco Software — best known for its SOA integration, complex event processing, and business process management suite — announced its acquisition of Nimbus Partners, a privately held business process analysis vendor based in the United Kingdom. Nimbus Partners is smaller and less well known than the other more mature and full-featured BPA solutions, such as those from ARIS, Provision, and Mega.  Nimbus, which employs more than 100 people, sold process discovery and authoring tools along with its homegrown methodology for quickly capturing and managing detailed information on business processes. Nimbus’ features and ease of use appealed mostly to process architects, process analysts, and business stakeholders that wanted an environment more robust than Microsoft Visio but not as technical — or requiring as much training — as other BPA environments. 

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What Does Google's Acquisition Of Motorola Mobility Mean To I&O Professionals?

Posted by Christian Kane on August 15, 2011

  • 277 Recommendations

Google sent shock waves through the mobile world this morning as it announced a planned acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in cash. The initial commentary has largely focused around Motorola’s patent portfolio, how this will affect the other Android manufacturers, and what Google will do with the rest of Moto’s hardware business which my colleague John McCarthy summed up nicely in his blog post.

So what kind of an impact does this have on infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals? For the most part, not much of one.  I&O professionals are working to make their organizations platform-agnostic by deploying mobile device management (MDM) solutions. For them, Android is only one in an increasingly crowded space of platforms including iOS, Blackberry, and Windows 7 Mobile. 

Still, there is one interesting implication in this deal that I&O pros should take note of — Google gets 3LM. Back in February Motorola Mobility acquired 3LM, a startup including former Google employees who worked on Android, which specializes in enterprise security and management software. Rumors had already been flying that some of the 3LM functionality like storage encryption and anti-malware would be included in the next version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich). With 3LM now a part of Google, firms might finally management and security capabilities I&O and security pros have been asking for in Android.

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How Complete Are Your BI And Data Management Strategies?

Posted by Rob Karel on August 5, 2011

  • 395 Recommendations

Data management and BI professionals often feel pressure from senior management to propose and start implementing master data management (MDM), data quality, data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), analytics or other data management strategies quickly, without time to perform the necessary due diligence.  These “fire drill” strategy sessions may arise as a reaction to a compelling event like a compliance or regulatory action, the need to support better management planning and decision-making during economic struggles, or even by the arrival of a new senior executive (e.g., CEO, CIO, CFO, COO, CMO) looking to make their mark on the organization by driving this strategy. 

Unfortunately the program drivers on the hook to deliver these catch-up strategy planning initiatives tend to disregard many best practices in the process.   Can you blame them? Many of them have been the organizational evangelists that have fought for months – or even years – to get sponsorship and investment to deliver these solutions. When that support finally arrives, they’d be crazy to turn it away just because the timelines are a bit aggressive, right?   Well yes, they should push back if the solution they’re building will not:

  • Deliver a clear ROI to deliver clear business value with a line of sight to how the capabilities will improve efficiencies, reduce cost, reduce risk, increase revenue, or strategically differentiate your organization.  Think that executive sponsor will have your back if you can’t prove the value? Think again.
  • Scale and offer the flexibility and agility to support the next set of incremental requirements or users that will inevitably come along.
  • Guarantee end user adoption and acceptance of the new solution that will likely introduce new processes, technologies, and/or organizational changes.
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