WCM: The Real Differentiator

By Stephen Powers

I recently attended Vignette’s annual analyst day, which turned out to be pretty enlightening, although perhaps not for the reasons I would have originally thought. For those of you who are unfamiliar with analyst days: vendors regularly hold what - to put it inelegantly - are essentially dog-and-pony shows that give their executives the opportunity to communicate their vision, their strategy, and their roadmaps to the analyst community. The buzzword du jour for WCM vendors is "customer experience," and Vignette's management team dutifully spoke about how their products can help companies create rich, contextual online experiences using Vignette's new recommendation engine, video offering, and community products. Vignette also included as part of its analyst day schedule two customer panels, where customers spoke about their experiences with Vignette and participated in Q&A with the audience. In analyst-speak, these customer panels were the real differentiators for Vignette's analyst day.

While WCM vendors are busy announcing all kinds of bells and whistles, the fact is that the true functionality differentiators among the top WCM vendors are few and far between. These days, most of the WCM vendors are hopping on the customer experience bandwagon, and they are adjusting functionality and messaging accordingly. And they truly need to.

But functionality aside, what is really compelling is when a high-visibility, high-volume content provider like Fox News participates in a customer panel, and stands up and praises a vendor (Vignette, in this case), talking about how valuable their products are in creating those customer experiences and how those products have helped them become more competitive in the marketplace. Others on the panel had similar success stories. Another customer, when asked about what made his company stay with Vignette, didn't answer functionality, but simply stated, "It's the people." Vignette has had its well-publicized share of issues with customers who moved from V6 to V7, but I recently spoke with another customer who went through that upgrade, and she stated that she never considered bringing in another vendor, because she was happy with the customer service and support people she had regular contact with.

There is no subsistute for positive word-of-mouth generated by customers speaking publicly about their success stories and about their satisfaction with the vendor's employees; that's more effective than anything marketing can come up with. It seems like Vignette may be starting to make some progress in this area. It's certainly worth keeping your ear to the ground for stories like this about the WCM vendors you may be considering.

Microsoft Unchains Content For The Blind With DAISY XML Word Add-In

By Sheri McLeish

Microsoft's release this week of the free Word add-in for DAISY XML is great news for blind consumers, as it opens the door for easy conversion of Word documents to digital "talking books." Forget about the criticism that was leveled at Microsoft that its foray into disability-related technology was in part fueled by self-interest to gain ISO approval for its Office Open XML standard (which it finally did receive April 1). Today, only a fraction of published works have been made available for the 180 million blind or visually impaired people worldwide. Microsoft's efforts will help not only writers and publishers make their work more accessible, but be a boon for businesses, schools, governments, and other agencies that can now convert their Word docs to talking books.

The "Save as DAISY XML" add-in was created through an open source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd., and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium. DAISY provides a framework to create a talking book format. With increased regulations to make content accessible — it's a requirement in the US for school textbook publishers to provide copies of books in DAISY format, for example — the Word add-in is a welcome complement other text-to-speech technologies. The challenge for earlier technologies to convert text-to-voice was providing a navigation capability similar to how a sighted person might scan a document, by title, chapter, or skipping around to points of interest. DAISY-formatted content provides a reading experience that most closely approximates how sighted people read print. The free tool creates a "Save as Daisy" option within Word 2007 and 2003. The files can then be "read" aloud by speech synthesizers, paired with audio narration, and used to create electronic Braille.

Microsoft isn't alone in trying to make the printed word more accessible to the blind. Adobe has a Read Out Loud feature for PDF. Both approaches use the hierarchical organization of structured documents to deliver voice translated content. But Microsoft's approach takes advantage its new Office Open XML format, and through this add-in is aggressively embracing accessibility. The competing Open Document Format (ODF) doesn't support the same accessibility demands, and these are the things that matter to a business when evaluating standards and file formats.

And for those at Microsoft involved with the DAISY XML add-in for Word, it really isn't just about standards: Microsoft Word's product manager Reed Shaffner has said, "Working in this area is by far the most rewarding part of my job — It's not like service packs and Word aren't fun .... it's just that thought of making technology usable for more people really makes me happy." Now, thanks to Microsoft's efforts to make the DAISY XML add-in widely available, a whole lot of other folks are going to be made happy too.

Analytic Databases Power BI Boom

By James Kobielus

Analytic databases are the principal engines driving business intelligence (BI), delivering operational data into reports, dashboards, and ad-hoc queries.

Essential as they may be, analytic databases have been largely overlooked in the BI industry’s recent consolidation spree. Sitting at the core of data warehouses (DWs) everywhere, these data stores have been treated as mere plumbing rather than as differentiating platform components. Instead, most recent BI mergers have been driven by vendors’ desire to beef up their financial analytic applications, or add more sophisticated visualization, search, and other access-oriented features to their BI platforms.

Though often taken for granted, analytic databases will almost certainly become a key BI solution differentiator over the next several years. With the trend toward commoditization of core BI features, more vendors will distinguish their offerings through the speed, scalability, throughput, and mixed-workload support that only a well-tuned analytic database can provide. Every self-respecting BI vendor will boast that their analytic database can handle more concurrent users, process more complex multidimensional queries, load bulk data more rapidly, execute more compute-intensive transforms, and manage more massive data sets than the competition. Just as important, they’ll brag that they can do all this more cheaply than the next guy.

In an increasingly commoditized BI market, analytic price-performance is becoming the principal buying criterion. This trend is fueling the industry’s growing focus on analytic appliances, which are also called BI appliances or data warehousing (DW) appliances. Indeed, most of the leading BI vendors--SAP/Business Objects, IBM/Cognos, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAS Institute--provide their own analytic appliances now, or are developing appliance-based offerings on their own or with partners. Though these vendors will continue to deliver BI/DW solutions as packaged software offerings, they all see the appeal of appliances as turnkey solutions for many customer requirements. Midmarket customers, in particular, are taking a keen interest in appliances, which provide them with quick-deployment pre-optimized solutions and thereby relieve the burden on their limited technical staffs.

As analytic appliances become central to enterprises’ BI strategies, DW appliances will evolve into full-fledged BI platforms in their own right. Appliance vendors such as Teradata, HP, Netezza, Greenplum, DATAllegro, Dataupia, and ParAccel will expand their ability to run “in-database analytics” and other applications developed in-house, or by partners and customers. Appliance vendors will outdo each other in tuning database features--such as indexing, partitioning, in-memory caching, compression, cubing, tokenization, and query-plan optimization--that are geared for managing myriad analytic workloads. And every appliance vendor will beef up their hardware’s scalability through massively parallel processing, clustering, workload management, and other ongoing enhancements.

In addition, every vendor of column-oriented databases--which are exquisitely well-suited to data-intensive query processing--will soon either realign its go-to-market strategy around appliances or get out of the analytics market altogether. The performance advantages of a hardware-optimized column-oriented database over software-only rivals will be too pronounced for the latter to hold onto their market share. And though most appliance vendors currently eschew column-oriented approaches, preferring to tweak traditional row-oriented RDBMSs for multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP), many will explore this alternative technique in order to eke out further performance improvements.

The growing demand for cheap analytic horsepower will also foster the development of subscription-based DW services, also known as “DW 2.0,” “Database 2.0,” “cloud databases,” and “on-demand databases.” Though not the first entrant in this new arena, Microsoft is the most prominent, having recently rolled out a limited beta of its hosted SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), which is slated for full production release in 2009. Under SSDS, Microsoft hosts a subset of SQL Server’s relational database management system (RDBMS) functionality in support of analytics as well as transactional applications. Though it has not yet specifically optimized SSDS for analytics, Microsoft has stated that it plans to evolve the service in that direction.

As it becomes available from many service providers, DW 2.0 will offer an ever-expanding supply of cheap, plentiful analytic horsepower. Over the coming decade, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers will begin to offer feature-complete, subscription-based BI/DW services for high-performance, high-volume, complex analytics. These clouds will leverage the full virtualized, distributed, scalable, grid-computing fabric that Microsoft, Google, and other SaaS behemoths can bring to bear on data mining, performance optimization, and other compute- and data-intensive tasks.

Over time, we’ll come to take DW 2.0 for granted. We’ll call it up on demand, a utility for processing any and all decision-support tasks, large or small, throughout the business world or in our daily lives.

Tips From A Successful Virtual Conference

by Erica Driver.

Last week, I delivered a presentation about the recent report Web3D: The Next Major Internet Wave at the vBusiness Expo in Second Life. I'll share some of my experiences and observations, as I'm sure that during the coming year many of you will be invited to present at or attend virtual conferences and meetings -- if you haven't already. These tips may prove helpful.

• Virtual-only is a lot easier than mixed reality meetings. The vBusiness Expo took place only in Second Life, meaning that everyone at the event -- speakers, staff, and participants -- were there virtually. We didn't have to worrry about streaming video of speakers or panelists from a physical room into the virtual meeting room, or displaying the virtual meeting up on the wall in a physical presentation hall.
• Carefully select your voice technology. For this presentation we used Skype, not the built-in Second Life voice feature, and not the telephone. I know I'm a dufus but even a dufus should be able to use this stuff, right? I always have trouble with Second Life voice -- whether it's the quality of the sound, my ability to mute myself, being clear about who can hear me, or the ability of everybody in a group to hear and speak when they want to. I had a far superior experience with Skype. The conference emcee and I connected to each other a few minutes before showtime and we were good to go. Even though the hardware mute button on my brand new headset doesn't work (grr), I could use the Skype software mute function with no problem. Sound throughout the event was loud and clear with no apparent delay.
• The "physical" space for the virtual meeting makes a difference. This conference was put on by a company called Clever Zebra, which also built the virtual space where the conference was held. They made a few really smart moves to make navigating the virtual environment easier for presenters and attendees alike. Prior to my presentation, the Clever Zebra folks gave me a "landmark" (think of it as the Second Life equivalent of a Web page URL) to a meeting spot in the presentation hall (see Figure below). Literally, X marks the spot -- see the gray intersecting lines on the floor? You can't get easier than that. Also: rather than attendees having to figure out how to get their avatars seated, they just had to click on a huge billboard that said, "Welcome! Click me for a seat!"

• Plenty of support staff were around to help during the event. I couldn't get the virtual laptop on the virtual podium to move from one slide to the next (because I didn't join the speakers group -- doh!) so the emcee jumped in immediately and advanced the slides for me. Clever Zebra staff kept track of time and communicated with the audience via local text chat when there were delays, or to solicit questions. Volunteers wore red virtual shirts and kept an eye out for stragglers and helped people in the audience get seated.

You Don't Have The Skills To Move Your People Off Of Microsoft Office

By Kyle McNabb.

Yep, you read it right. Face it, you can't move off of Microsoft Office. Why? You know more about different technology alternatives to Microsoft Office than you know how your own people work -- and not just with Office, but how they work. And I understand why, technology is tangible -- you can see Google Apps in action, you can play with Zoho, and you can see how IBM's Symphony product integrates with Notes. But, understanding how a remote account representative, or how a research engineer actually works with technology is difficult. What questions do you ask? How should you ask them? And should you just focus on what they do at work? What about how they use technology (some of which you gave them, namely Microsoft Office) at home?

Plus, workers are changing, and the lines between how we use technology at home and at work have all but vanished. And while those of us in North America - even Western Europe -- find ourselves using Microsoft technology at both work and home, information workers in China, India, and other developing areas may not. Some vendors see this as an opportunity. Desktop productivity as a service vendor Zoho recently established a partnership with China's largest online distributor with hopes of tackling this growing market. And others will follow -- including Microsoft with their own brand of online services. People in these developing areas, plus many in North America and Western Europe, will use these alternatives to Office outside of work. Eventually, thanks to Technology Populism trends, they'll bring them into work on their own. But how do you find out what they use and if they'll bring it into the enterprise?

You want to move your people (even just some of them) off of Microsoft Office? You want to embrace the changing way information workers work? You better learn how to segment your people based on role, the type of work they do, where they work, how they work, AND understand how they use technology both at work and at home. Without this knowledge, Microsoft's in the driver's seat. At least ride shotgun by understanding how your people work.

Having this knowledge does work. I've seen good examples of enterprises moving at least some people off of Microsoft Office and onto an alternative (such as Sun StarOffice or even a 'cloud' based alternative). They've been able to do so because they understood how these, granted small, populations of people worked. In most of these cases the enterprise has only moved non-information workers (such as line workers, or people in retail locations) to Microsoft Office alternatives. Why? They tend to be easier to identify and segment from the varying groups of information workers that exist in any enterprise. Moving higher cost information workers, such as financial analysts, may be very difficult, but it may not be impossible if you know how they work.

While we now have more choice in desktop productivity software, the reality is you don't have a simple either/or choice regarding Microsoft Office. Instead, really taking advantage of this choice in the enterprise requires a different skill set -- and you don't have it. You better build it, and fast.

Teradata Goes Appliance, Officially

By James Kobielus.

Teradata has taken the big plunge. Yesterday, as long rumored, it launched the first commercial solutions in its broad portfolio to be explicitly positioned as data warehousing (DW) appliances. Specifically, it announced the new Teradata 550P, Teradata 2500, and Teradata 5550 platforms, which join the established Teradata 5500 platform in the vendor's market-leading enterprise data warehousing (EDW) solution family.

Previously, Teradata had been keeping its distance from marketing its solutions as appliances. Over the past several years, that buzzphrase has been popularized by pure-plays such as Netezza, Greenplum, and others to describe simple, low-cost, quick-deploy alternatives to the more expensive, complex solutions offered by Teradata and others. To some industry observers, the phrase bears a stigma, connoting feature- and capacity-limited hardware/software combos that are not ready for full EDW deployment.

One might argue that this is all semantic hair-splitting, and that the recent announcements are nothing fundamentally new for Teradata or for its customers. After all, Teradata effectively established the DW appliance market a quarter-century ago when it rolled out the first in a long line of preconfigured, preoptimized solutions that combine CPUs, storage, software, and database to address the most demanding analytical and decision support requirements.

But, in fact, yesterday's Teradata announcement is significant on several levels: for the vendor itself, for the market as a whole, and for the DW/BI professionals who make up its core customer base.

For Teradata, the most strategically significant of the new appliance products is the 2500, which it is marketing as a entry-level EDW and analytical "sandbox" data-mart. The Teradata 2500 is priced and positioned for midmarket prospects who have turned to rival appliances rather than plunk down the megabucks needed for a high-end Teradata 5500 EDW platform. Even some of Teradata's existing accounts have occasionally deployed, say, a Netezza here or a Greenplum there as a cost-effective OLAP accelerator for data marts in an environment anchored by the venerable Teradata 5500.

For the DW market as a whole, Teradata has effectively validated the appliance as the dominant go-to-market, packaging, pricing, and deployment model for full-fledged EDWs. In that respect, Teradata is simply following the leads set by EDW stalwarts IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, HP, and SAP in their earlier, more aggressive forays into this new territory.

Just as important, Teradata has essentially revamped its entire product portfolio as a family of DW appliances. With yesterday's announcement, it has launched a tiered, appliance-based EDW product family that addresses a wide range of enterprise customer segments and price-points. Even its established 5500 platform may be regarded as a high-end appliance in Teradata's new go-to-market strategy. The family ranges from a single-node SMP departmental DW or analytic sandbox (the 550P, at $67K per usable TB, maxing out at 6TB), to the entry-level EDW (the 2500, at $125K per usable TB, maxing out at 146TB over a 24-node MPP shared-nothing deployment), to the high-end 5500 and 5550 (each $200-250K per usable TB, with former scaling up to 1 petabyte, and the latter up to 4 petabytes, over 1,024-node MPP shared-nothing deployments).

No one should think that Teradata is merely dabbling in the DW appliance market. Though positioned for entry-level midmarket requirements, the new 2500 platform is nothing less than a full Teradata-powered EDW in a box. Indeed, all of the vendor's new solutions incorporate the same mature, robust set of EDW technologies (i.e., Teradata 12 analytic database, query optimization, fast loading, workload management, parallel processing, real-time, data modeling, etc.) at the heart of the 5500 (though each of the new models differs slightly in such matters as range of operating systems, interconnects, processor cores, and high-availability features supported).

Of course, Teradata competitors are already scoffing at the 2500, pointing out that it's far more expensive on a per-usable-TB basis (the DW appliance industry's lowest common denominator) than feature- and capacity-comparable solutions from Netezza, Greenplum, DATAllegro, Dataupia, ParAccel, and others. It's even more expensive than IBM's InfoSphere Warehouse midmarket-focused C-class appliances.

Clearly, Teradata is still very much a high-end EDW vendor. In this regard, its closest direct rival in the DW appliance market is IBM, in terms of these vendors' ability to provide full-featured "EDW appliances" for various price-points, with a clear migration/upgrade path from entry-level to high-end offerings. Of course, IBM can one-up Teradata by providing, in its InfoSphere Warehouse editions, access to data integration, quality, governance, and metadata solutions (through the IBM Information Server suite) and also BI tools (from its own Cognos or SAP/Business Objects). But Teradata can respond by pointing to the broad range of ETL, BI, data mining, and other partner solutions that integrate out of the box with its EDW appliances.

For DW/BI professionals, the significance of Teradata's recent announcements is clearcut. Existing users of Teradata 5500 who are looking to offload some OLAP, reporting, and departmental data mart requirements to a more cost-effective platform should explore the 2500 (and the 550P for an analytical sandbox for development and data mining). Midmarket customers who have heretofore excluded Teradata from their DW appliance short lists should give it a fresh look.

Teradata's entry into the appliance market provides information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals with new DW choices, and is definitely not a "Netezza-killer." Users who have invested in competing solutions need not worry that their vendors will soon be pushing up the daisies just because Teradata has gotten serious on appliances. Teradata's offerings have their pros and cons, and are not necessarily a "slam dunk" sale to its established EDW customers. And the vendor will undoubtedly face intensified challenges both from the pure-plays and from established EDW rivals.

As noted above, Teradata's new low-end appliances are still considerably more expensive on a per-usable-TB basis than most of the competition. Also, Teradata's DW appliances don't include bundled ETL and BI software, which customers will still need to acquire from other vendors. Apples-to-apples (or, should we say, appliances-to-appliances) comparisons are still tricky in a market space as complex as this.

Nevertheless, Teradata's appliances do have the advantage of enabling smooth migration of data, data models, table strucures, views, queries, load jobs, applications, and other artifacts to its higher-end EDW platforms as customers’ requirements push into petabyte territory. Likewise, customers' DBAs, system administrators, and application developers will be able to leverage their existing skills across new Teradata appliance-based platforms.

That's a scalability, life-cycle cost-control, and investment-protection advantage that the pure-play DW appliance vendors cannot yet match, here in mid-2008, though many of them are in the process of scaling their product architectures into the petabyte range.

Teradata's entry into this arena signals that appliance-based EDW deployment is well on the way to becoming a best practice for information and knowledge management professionals. It is now possible to build a complete EDW from these high-performance building blocks.

Informatica Enters Identity Resolution Market -- Is MDM Next?

by Rob Karel.

Informatica today announced its planned acquisition of Identity Systems, a software company offering advanced entity resolution and matching capabilities, with a specialization in cross-language matching.

Informatica acquires Identity Systems from Nokia for approximately $85 million. Nokia purchased Identity Systems as part of its acquisition of Intellisync in early 2006 and Identity Systems has operated as a wholly-owned — and more important — autonomous — subsidiary of Nokia ever since. Not surprisingly, Nokia didn't see identity resolution and matching as part of its core mobile phone strategy and I expect the folks at Identity Systems will be happy with this change of ownership.

Informatica now enters the high end identity resolution marketplace and aside from powerful technology, Identity Systems brings to the table a strong presence in Europe and Asia, as well as a large government/public sector install base (e.g., think threat management). Informatica's primary competitor in the identity resolution space is a familiar adversary – IBM. IBM's Entity Analytics Solutions is based on technology IBM acquired from SRD in 2005 and Language Analysis Systems in 2006. Similar to their competition in the data integration arena, I would expect IBM to continue to grow their entity analytics business within enterprises with a large IBM hardware and software footprint, while Informatica will continue to do well in best of breed technology environments.

While the identity resolution/entity analytics capabilities offered by Identity Systems are certainly interesting, I'm even more intrigued by the potential impact this acquisition can have on the master data management (MDM) market.  Among other OEM's, Identity Systems technology is the core matching engine for a number of MDM vendors competing in this space including D&B's Purisma, Oracle, and Siperian. In my view, high volume, high confidence, highly configurable matching is critical to delivering a credible MDM solution. Informatica will wisely incorporate the easily embeddable Identity Systems' technology into its Informatica Data Quality offering. This will significantly enhance that product's matching capabilities by adding a hybrid of high power probabilistic matching and deterministic matching to Informatica's deterministic matching engine.

So does this mean that Informatica is entering the MDM market? According to Informatica, the answer is no. I certainly agree with that decision since Informatica is still lacking a number of other key capabilities expected of an MDM solution such as industry data and process models.  But does that mean Informatica won't enter the MDM market at some point soon? Don't bet on it.

If I were Siperian, I would be very interested in being acquired by Informatica. This acquisition would of course reduce the risk of Informatica voiding Siperian's OEM agreement with Identity Systems. But more importantly, it would provide Siperian with access to Informatica's exponentially larger global install base and would finally provide them with a sales force big enough to compete effectively with MDM's big 3 of IBM, Oracle, and SAP.  For Informatica, this acquisition would effectively fill in all the missing pieces it would require to enter the operational MDM market with significant credibility.

Now if I were Oracle, I would ask why I didn't snatch up this relatively inexpensive company first and embed these capabilities permanently into my planned MDM fusion strategy. The coopetition between Oracle and Informatica has been fairly amicable, but that could change very quickly if Informatica voids Identity System's OEM agreement with Oracle and enters the MDM market with a competing solution.

Stay tuned — this could get interesting.

BI Products And Services Continue To Converge

By Boris Evelson.

Ever since I was an investment banker at JPMorgan supporting their Software M&A team, I was predicting that the future of products and services in enterprise applications is inseparable. Significant portion of our team M&A advice to product vendors was to beef up their services portfolios and vice versa. These were my thoughts then, that are still very valid today:

• CXO engagement. It's much easier to approach a C-level executive during a strategy initiative, which traditionally is the realm of strategic advisory and management consulting firms. The earlier you get your foot in the door with a CXO, the higher are the chances he/she will also consider your products. Hence, ability to influence downstream decisions for procuring products and services decreases in the latter phases of any initiative.
• Successful execution. Strong PMO (Project Management Office) capabilities such as methodology, certifications, track record, etc and ultimately successful product/project delivery are key to application vendor success.
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA). Large enterprise IT, convinced that no single off-the-shelf solution suite is ever good enough for them, are seriously considering component (services) based architectures, which is causing vendors to move into dynamic (or otherwise known as composite) apps middleware and services to prevent marginalization.

All of the above, plus the notion that Business intelligence (BI) is still very much an art, less so a science (see our latest "It’s Time To Reinvent Your BI Strategy" and "Strong Partners Are Key To Successful BI Initiatives" research reports), is causing vendors with significant BI product portfolio to lead the trend. Most notable relevant transactions were the acquisition of PwC Consulting by IBM and Knightsbridge by HP. These acquisitions allowed IBM and HP to take their rightful place alongside with Accenture, CGEY, Deloitte, Bearing Point and others as generic, vendor neutral management consultants with strong BI capabilities.

The trend is far from over. Now that SAP, Oracle and Microsoft moved into big time, stack independent, heterogeneous BI products, it most probably won't be long before they acquire a large management consulting firm with strong BI capabilities, or one of hundreds boutique BI consultancies that are out there and are doing extremely well. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft desperately need these management consulting capabilities to continue to compete effectively with IBM. If they don't, IBM will always have that one advantage and strong differentiation.

An interesting indication that EMC may finally start thinking seriously about BI (as we've been predicting for the past year, see our blogs), is EMC's recently announced intention to acquire small, but notable UK based management consultancy with significant BI capabilities -- Conchango. In addition to all of the reasons outlined above, this makes a whole lot of sense –- after all, storage is a significant component of any BI environment, but is probably the most commoditized one. Storage and server companies like EMC and Sun need to move up the stack, into apps and services, which EMC is doing with Conchango and Sun with MySQL. I am expecting more BI related moves from EMC and SUN.

This is nothing but the good news for our enterprise IT I&KM workers. It's another –- one of many –- proof points that BI market is far from being consolidated and anywhere close to being commoditized. There are still plenty of large and small players, plenty of competition and room for innovation –- which is always good for the ultimate buyers of these products.

Is Salesforce.com The Key To The Cloud Kingdom?

by Rob Koplowitz.

Today Google and Salesforce.com announced another step in their ongoing flirtatious relationship. Salesforce.com will now bundle Google business applications into its on-line CRM offering. Salesforce will also begin to distribute Google applications backed by Salesforce support. It's always interesting when these two make an announcement for two reasons: First, they are both 100% committed to cloud computing and they think about the future of the industry in very similar terms. Second, it is fundamentally interesting to conjecture about the potential of a Salesforce acquisition. Note the rumor mill cranking up on this topic a few weeks ago when Oracle arranged for a $2B line of credit.

Now, Marc Benioff has stated early, often and loudly that Saleforce.com is not an acquisition target and has every intention of becoming the next major software infrastructure vendor. Fair enough. Salesforce.com has done all the right things to do just that. They've invested heavily in an infrastructure and built a reputation that represents a significant barrier to entry to anyone that wants to horn in on their territory. Salesforce.com has a significant history of securely and reliably delivering mission critical enterprise applications in the cloud. Raise your hand if you can make that claim. Not a lot of hands.

That said, there are folks gunning for this emerging opportunity. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP all have on-line CRM offerings. IBM and Microsoft are moving into on-line collaboration. These are not necessarily folks you want coming after you. The disruption that can and will be caused by cloud computing is a potential source of risk and opportunity for every major player in the industry.

So, if cloud computing becomes the norm for more and more types of users, data and processes what are the characteristics that will define the winners? In a recent document,we defined some of them and rated Google and others. It's interesting to revisit Google and Saleforce as a single offering:

• Data Center Efficiency and Reliability — Google did extremely well. They run applications incredibly efficiently. They would do better with Salesforce's expertise in enterprise reliability.
• Applications Designed For Multi-tenancy — Google did very well. Salesforce.com would make the offer even better because of the nuances associated with enterprise requirements.
• Enterprise Experience — Google scored on the middle of the scale. When it comes to the cloud, no one does this better than Salesforce.
• Efficient Go-To-Market Channels — Google scored in the middle of the scale. The big players still have major leverage points. Saleforce.com helps and Google has the ability to completely redefine the go-to-market model.
• Application Functionality — Google scored in the middle again. That said, Google is delivering new functionality at a torrid pace and Saleforce.com has lots to bring to the table.
• Adjacent Market Leverage — Google didn't score well. They took a big step forward today by moving to integrate their productivity, content and collaboration offerings with a major player in CRM that already has a footprint in the enterprise. Still not as strong as the existing infrastructure players, but a step in the right direction.

Here's the bottom line. It looks like a sea change is coming and Salesforce.com is sitting smack in the middle of it. The big players are moving quickly and aggressively which could  ultimately spoil the best laid plans and aspirations of Salesforce.com. They like to squeeze little guys with good technology and markets. The problem here is that an acquisition of Saleforce.com by any of the major players represents a huge threat to all of the other players. So, squeezing could end up driving them and their assets into the hands of the enemy.

Podcasts From Forrester

by Claire Schooley.

We're doing podcasts at Forrester now, and I'm the internal resource for how to get them done. Here's what we've learned so far:

Post new podcasts on a regular basis. Decide on a schedule — twice a week, every week, every two weeks and stick to it. Listeners look forward to new material on a consistent basis. Consistency helps you gain and maintain an audience.

Name your podcast. Consider a contest to identify a good name. At Forrester we are still working on a name. Any ideas? In the meantime, you can name the podcast after your company like we have — Forrester Podcasts.

Identify upbeat music. Start and end each podcast with three-to-five seconds of music. Use the same music each time to give your podcast an identity, like NPR's All Things Considered. Do you have in-house musicians who might enjoy creating your theme music?

Keep podcasts short. Six-to-twelve minute podcasts are ideal. If the topic takes longer, break it into two or more podcasts and let listeners know this podcast is the first of a two- or three-part series.

Plan a podcast format that fits the topic. Vary the format depending on the topic and the presenter but keep the music and podcast name consistent. Here are some formats we've tried:

• A hosted podcast — a host identifies the topic, introduces the presenter, sums up the presentation (only a couple of sentences), and closes the podcast with an invitation for listeners to respond in a blog.


• A hosted Q&A podcast — a host introduces the topic and engages the presenter in Q&A. with three or four planned questions. The host’s role is critical in keeping an easy, natural interaction.


• A host/presenter format — the presenter acts as both host and presenter and does a one-person show.

Provide opportunity for listener interaction. Podcast are Web 2.0 technology and listeners want to interact. These podcasts need to be connected to a blog so listeners can make a comment or ask a question. We at Forrester believe this is a great way to interact with our clients. We will continue to learn as we develop these podcasts and make them available on our Website. If you have feedback or ideas for podcasts, please send your thoughts along.