Lags And Crashes Plague Forrester Second Life Experiment

by Erica Driver.

Yesterday a small group of Forrester analysts and research associates held a team meeting in Second Life to try to figure out whether meeting this way is a viable alternative to the usual teleconference.  Teleconferences are terrible. While we're talking and listening, there's not much to look at but our computer screens (which are constantly blinking at us with new emails and IMs and reminders of all the tasks we haven't completed yet) so inevitably we end up multi-tasking. And in teams that have been around for a while people know each others' voices but not so for new teams. So when people on the call forget to introduce themselves before they say something, the first few words are lost while listeners try to figure out who's talking, and then the next few words lost while you try to recreate the first few words.

While we had some fun yesterday trying on free T-shirts, teleporting to otherworldly locations, and taking some carnival rides, the sentiment of most of the participants was that Second Life isn't really ready for prime time team meetings. If it was tough for us it will be tough for other information workers. Here's why:

• We were plagued with performance problems. One of the islands we visited was a large technology company's innovation area. We were booted out, one after the other. Some of us got a message saying the simulation we were visiting had closed down. Second Life hung. We had to restart — which can take five to ten minutes. Sometimes we experienced lags while trying to make our avatars walk or fly or teleport. Some of this was probably due to problems with the Second Life grid or specific simulations we were visiting. But it's a fact: for the optimal experience in Second Life you need lots of processing power and a high-powered video card. The standard issue Dell Latitude D620 we use at Forrester doesn't really cut it.
• The learning curve is high. Walking, flying, teleporting, searching for and traveling to locations, text chatting at the same time we were trying to move around — all this was new for most of us. We met on a free conference room island called Place To Meet, which is hosted by Crowne Plaza Hotels. To get there, some of us clicked on a Second Life URL in the Outlook meeting and went directly to the meeting room. Others searched for "Place To Meet" within Second Life and landed in the main reception area of the Crowne Plaza Hotels island. It took a while for people to find each other and the group to convene. We practiced teleporting by visiting well-known islands and while we got better at it after the third or fourth try, it was pretty frustrating overall, for many of us.
• Privacy — what'as that? If your organization or one of the participants in your in-world meeting doesn't have a private space in Second Life, your meeting — including VoIP conversations and text chats — is wide out in the open. Any avatar that happens to be walking or flying by can overhear what you are saying or read what you are typing. For our meeting yesterday, we never got any indication from Crowne Plaza Hotels whether the meeting room we had reserved would be closed down to the public during the time reserved it. We got the feeling that anybody could have wandered in off the grid. It's kind of like trying to talk business while standing in a crowded subway train. It just doesn't work.
• Without microphones and headset, the experience is disjointed. Most of us involved in this meeting didn't have microphones and headsets. We were dialed into an 800 number on the phone. So our avatars weren't connected with our voice conversations and the whole thing was kind of disjointed. After a while we put our phones on mute and tried to communicate using text chat, but that didn't work out too well either  — we were too busy trying to figure out how to move our avatars to type text into the chat window.

But you know what? I'm going to keep on trying. I've talked with enough other people who have been able to use virtual worlds to replicate the experience of working physically alongside others, to allow people to work with and share digital 3D models of physical or theoretical objects, and to make remote training and counseling more realistic by incorporating non-verbal communication into same-time, different-place interactions. I believe in my gut that give it 3 years and the 3D Internet will be just as important to business and work as the Web is today.

And I'm going on more than faith. Tech companies like Cisco, IBM, Intel, and others are spending millions on virtual world technology. I have had two meetings with outside parties in Second Life within the past couple months and have another internal meeting scheduled there for next week. I can't make it to IBM’s Lotusphere conference in person this January because I have a conflict, but I'll join the Second Life version of the event from my hotel room in Canada. Stay tuned for more research from Forrester on this area — including an upcoming report called "Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds," co-authored with Paul Jackson.

RM Market Poised To Grow, But There Are Short-Term Inhibitors

by Barry Murphy.

While market drivers like compliance, eDiscovery, and risk management get a lot of press (and point to great opportunity for records management), the fact is that many organizations are not ready for full-blown RM programs. Why? Mostly due to organizational immaturity — not correctly aligning roles, responsibilities, and budget ownership (for more on this, click here). But there is also the problem of mutliple repositories containing records; organizations struggle with the question of moving records to a central repository or investigating federated RM.

Today, most organizations approach retention by content repository – in most cases, email is addressed first, along with other important systems of record, like imaging. Because it’s easier to start with the simple retention capabilities of an email archive, organizations can put off larger RM decisions until their email implementation is complete and they have digested the learnings involved. So, that has been something of a growth inhibitor for RM in the short-term. It won’t be long, however, until RM moves into the infrastructure level and gets deployed at that level – policy management across the ECM infrastructure instead of RM being an app on top of infrastructure. So, in the longer term, expect to see a greater uptake in RM.

We're interested in hearing from you about RM efforts. Is federated RM working?  Are you drowning in too much retained information? Are eDiscovery costs growing out of control?  Send me an email at bmurphy@forrester.com and we can talk through the issues.

Facebook & Alfresco Help Signal The End Of Today's Definition Of ECM

by Kyle McNabb.

Alfresco recently announced integration with Facebook. The news works well for Alfresco, which continues to demonstrate a bit more edge thinking in the world of ECM than their commercial counterparts IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Open Text. Facebook's not making a big deal out of it, which should be expected considering their exploring what it means to deliver applications to businesses at this point.

Last October we published research entitled 'The Top Five Technology Trends That Affect Your Enterprise Content Management Strategy.' One of the most important trends we singled out was a trend we refer to as Tech Populism — or how the technology we use at work continues to find its way into the home (Outlook calendars and Microsoft Office for example), and, more interestingly, the technology we use at home — or our own personal technology — continues to find its way into work (Facebook, LinkedIn, and iPods for example). Many of us will increasingly use online social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn to help us get our jobs done. And sometimes getting our jobs done will require we work with, collaborate on, and access content (e.g. documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and rich media assets). Alfresco's tapping into this trend, hoping to beat some of their commercial ECM peers to the punch, and be in front of the early enterprise adopters of Facebook that need a little ECM help.

But Facebook isn't going to be your answer for all things ECM. Instead, you should look at this as a sign of things to come. Content, and content repositories for that matter, will be wherever people work. And your organization's not going to be able to stop every employee from using online social networks like Facebook if it helps the employee get their job done. But how should you think about this trend?

ECM's still valid...

Look, you still have a ton of unmanaged and underutilized content in your organization. Transactional business processes need content to be more efficient — e.g. accounts payable, new account opening in Financial Services, claims processing, and license renewals in local governments. And we're just starting to tap into the persuasive power of content as organizations try to use content, across multiple channels (not just the Web site) to improve the customer experience. And there's a mountain of content stuck on network file shares that need to be put to use to help improve how information workers get their jobs done more effectively. My contention: You can't put this content to use if you don't manage it. You need to manage this content to ensure you've got a single source of the truth, that you have the right content ready for use, and that you know where to get it. And from there you can use metadata to help drive it into the way a transactional business processes (supported by business process management technology), business people (supported by collaboration technology, including Web 2.0), and your customers (supported by marketing platforms, CRM, and ecommerce technology) work with your organization. That's why we asked ECM suite vendors what BPM, collaboration, integration, and document output management technology they have to offer in addition to their core ECM suite in our recent ECM Wave evaluation — it's about helping put managed content to use.

...but ECM's definition is changing quickly thanks to more pervasive content usage

The usage of online social networks plus the pervasive use of Microsoft SharePoint document libraries and Lotus Quickr document repositories will soon put an end to the notion that content has to be in a repository to be managed and secure. Face it, without an ability to dictate what technology their employees use to get their jobs done, organizations have to shift their ECM focus from repositories to figuring out how to extend the security and management of content beyond the repository, and onto the content asset. You'll soon have to work on answering questions of 'How do we make sure our people can work in Facebook, but not take contracts in there that may put us at risk?' Or what about 'How can we let our engineers work in Second Life, but make sure they don't bring in sensitive designs that may get lost or stolen in this unsecured environment?' ECM has to do more than just provide the repository, it has to provide some of the answers for how do you effectively manage the asset, regardless of where it lives.

The future's about policy management, just not today's policy management

Tomorrow, in order to facilitate the way people and business processes work with content, repositories will still be in existence — hey, not all content's going to be useful or needed in a social network. But organizations, and information & knowledge management professionals, will want a way to define and enforce how this information gets managed, how it gets retained, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, how it will be used, regardless of where it physically lives — Facebook, Microsoft SharePoint, or on my dreaded C: drive (I can never find anything on it). We asked ECM vendors what rights management technology they have in our ECM Suites Wave to help understand what they're doing to help you answer these important questions. Frankly, I don't think today's rights management really addresses the concerns highlighted above, but it is a start. And maybe thanks to Alfresco working with Facebook, we'll see rights management evolve into what it needs to be. Stay tuned...

At The Risk Of Repeating Myself — BI Market Continues To Consolidate

by Boris Evelson.

I remember my days as a PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant in the late 90's and early 2000, when the company was awash in HP acquisition rumors and then later discussions of the failed transaction. IBM beat HP and picked up a gem — PwC in these days was hard to beat in many areas, especially in business intelligence management consulting offerings. HP then went on an picked up a much smaller BI boutique Knightsbridge. Now that IBM is acquiring Cognos, will HP follow the same fate and acquire smaller Information Builders, Microstrategy or Actuate? There's also still SAS that would give HP a complete BI stack, but as we know acquiring the world's largest privately held company can be a financial and cultural fit nightmare (plus a rumored $20B or more than 10x revenues price tag is hard for anyone to swallow). That's why I thought that HP's potential acquisition of Cognos + Informatica + Teradata could've given HP best of breed components in all areas of BI stack. But just like with PwC, HP will now have to pursue smaller, more niche BI opportunities.

Back to IBM. Well, not so fast. Back to IBM and SAP. In my opinion, IBM/COGN and SAP/BOBJ deals are defensive moves since both companies have been telling us for years that they prefer to grow their BI portfolios organically, with smaller tuck-in acquisition. However, organic growth is not happening fast enough, and giving in to sideway pressures from Oracle (with two top of the line BI products from Siebel and Hyperion) and upward pressures from Microsoft (after Proclarity acquisition and with significant Performance Point market momentum), IBM and SAP had no choice but to react.

Many questions arise from IBM/COGN announcement today, but the main one that puzzles me is will IBM completely deviate from their strategy of not being in the "apps game", and now compete head to head with Oracle, SAP and Microsoft on BPS (Business Performance Solutions)? What's next, an ERP acquisition of Lawson or Infor? Or a CRM acquisition of Salesforce.com playing on IBM's latest Information On Demand strategy? Please watch blog from my colleague Paul Hamerman on these implications and likely scenarios.

Other, more obvious questions are:

• What happens to IBM and Cognos reliance on partner network, such as IBM's strong relationship with Business Objects and Cognos' relationship with Informatica? I am sure "politically correct" answers from both companies will be "status quo", but I don't think that'll cut it for IBM sales force pitching to the same accounts and for the same opportunities as Business Objects and Informatica. There sure to be changes and realignments. One specific relationship surely to be straigned and potentially reevaluated is recently announced IBM/Business Objects partnership to bundle BO XI limited edition product with all DB2 installations.
• What is the roadmap of integrating 100% overlap in IBM'ss Alphablox, DB2 Cubing Services, Cognos' Powerplay and recently acquired Applix from the OLAP engine, OLAP functionality point of view? Long term, Powerplay is a likely potential looser here, since given the real time and operational nature of BI these days, building batch aggregates is no longer the best OLAP solution.
• Will Cognos be a key component in IBMs intent to "highly optimize" enterprises? Absolutely yes. IBM is likely to pour significant $s and resources into making its overall BI (including Cognos) offering "process-centric" — a key component in our opinion to ultimately optimized enterprises.

Bad news for Cognos and all other quickly disappearing BI pureplay vendor customers is that all new BI behemoths — IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft — will now be forced to spend more time on product integration, potentially pulling resources away from and reducing priorities of new functionality development. Watch remaining smaller pureplays (SAS, Microstrategy, Information Builders, Actuate) and Tier 2 BI vendors (Panorama, QlikTech, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Logixml, Inforsense and many others) jump on that opportunity. Good news: the BI market is VERY hot, given that BI (= effectiveness, better insight into information and more better informed decision making) is the latest frontier of competitiveness — all BI vendors, large and small, are likely to continue to pour billions of dollars into better, faster, more scalable, more intuitive products.

What is the most likely next major acquisition? Probably Informatica is next to go. HP should lead in that deal, but Forrester expects that Oracle will make the move. The primary rationale for Oracle acquiring Informatica would be a strategic blocking move against their main nemesis, SAP, since SAP customers rely heavily on Informatica for data integration and data quality (SAP now OEMs Informatica).  In addition, although Oracle has existing ETL products with Oracle Warehouse Builder and Oracle Data Integrator (from the Sunopsis acquisition last year) they do not have a single offering that can effectively support the data integration and data quality needs across its application, middleware, and database portfolio.    While introducing some redundancy for sure, Informatica would help Oracle fast track that goal.

Microsoft Shakes Up The Enterprise Search Market – With FREE Search Server Express 2008

by Ken Poore.

Microsoft today put itself squarely into the enterprise search market by introducing Microsoft Search Server Express 2008. You can download the release candidate from its website and give it a try if you have a Windows 2003 Server with some free space on it. It's free today, and it will be free when it goes to general release in the first quarter of 2008. Don't be fooled by its cost; this is a capable product that will get the attention of anyone considering or in the midst of a search deployment. Search Server will disrupt the strategies of clients and vendors within the already confusing search landscape. It is better than 'good enough' on many fronts, including its connectivity into Documentum and FileNet content repositories — also free — and its unified administration interface. For more insights, take a look at Forrester’s view on the release.

Microsoft has its partner network at the ready, with more connectivity into other business systems like Cognos, Business Objects, SAS and others, and its partners offer opportunities to create vertical solutions around Search Server. Though the solutions will be light-weight compared to full-bore salvos from Autonomy, FAST, and Endeca, they will cost a fraction and be up and running in far less time.

Search Server Express should comfortably index and search 400,000-500,000 documents on a reasonably sized server, and capacity and performance can be scaled in a multi-server deployment using the licensed version of Search Server 2008. Many businesses and smaller sub-units with a larger enterprise will find Search Server Express quite adequate to drop-in to address a wide variety of uses, including an immediate knee-jerk 'We need search and we need it now!' mandate, as well as the needs of a project-centric search tool, or as a search box on an Intranet site.

Microsoft is flooding the market with a tool that will fit well within many businesses, and it will cast a threatening shadow over vendors that make specialized SharePoint search solutions. Google should take note, too; the market that they claimed with their search appliances just got very crowded.

Will Second Life Anonymity Be A Deal Breaker For Business?

by Erica Driver.

Second Life is an anonymous virtual world — most people cannot identify themselves with avatars that use their real names. I say most people because I suppose there is a chance your name in real life could be Baklava Lacava and you could have picked this combination for your avatar. Oops, no you couldn’t – Rob Koplowitz picked that one a long time ago. Anyway, users in Second Life (called “residents”) choose a first name and a last name from a list of options ranging from realistic to fantastic. For a long time I’ve been thinking that because Second Life is an anonymous world it will be doomed to be no more than experimental grounds for use at work. But yesterday I had a phone interview followed by an in-world tour from Claus Nehmzow, a partner at PA Consulting, a 3,000-person consulting company headquartered in London. My thoughts after talking with Claus:

Anonymity is actually useful in some cases. If you think about it, it is anonymity that helped the Web grow to what it is today. People can search for and consume whatever material they want to in the comfort of their own homes or offices. They don’t have to go to a bookstore or library or retail store and don’t have to interact with other people. You can look at a Web page at the same time other people are, and none of you knows the others are there. This can be useful when, for example, doing confidential research for a client or obtaining healthcare information about sensitive subjects.

Claus Nehmzow gave a great example of the value of an anonymous virtual world environment within his own company. The company held a brainstorming meeting in Second Life in which everyone knew the CEO was there but no one knew which avatar was his, and the CEO didn’t know which of his employees was there or who each avatar represented. Participants felt able to be open about business issues in a way that they ordinarily wouldn’t, and the meeting was extremely productive.

But usually anonymity is problematic. With anonymity and no built-in reputation system, people are not held accountable for their actions. An example of a built-in reputation system is eBay’s – though with eBay’s reputation system it has become very hard for people to be honest and leave negative (or even neutral!) feedback when a transaction experience has been suboptimal. Anonymity can lead to what I call “armored car syndrome.” When we are in the protection of our one-ton hunks of metal we sometimes behave in ways we might not if we were standing on a sidewalk next to the annoying person who’s driving slowly in the fast lane in front of us. The same is true online. Sometimes people communicate and treat each other in ways in the online world that they wouldn’t in person.

But it goes beyond human psychology and social graces. Business leaders legitimately have serious concerns about employees participating in anonymous social environments like virtual worlds. What if a competitor is posing as an employee in an internal meeting? What if an employee engages in industrial espionage or uses the virtual world as a forum for reselling customers’ credit card numbers? What if one employee is found to be harassing another in a virtual world while they are working on a company project, and the company gets sued? For some uses of virtual world technology, there’s no question that an anonymous platform simply will not work. Peoples’ avatars will have to be blatantly tied to their real identities.

Anonymity is on a continuum –- it’s not black and white. An important thing to remember is that we went through something similar with email. Today, we tend to trust that when we email someone who's given us their email address it is that person who responds. We trust that when we receive an email from firstname.lastname(at)company.com, or when we look someone up in LinkedIn or Facebook, we are connecting with who we thought we were. Sure, email spoofing still happens, and phishing and identity theft are huge concerns. (See the November 20, 2006 report “Build Your Privacy Program: Online Interactions.”) But during the next 3 years or so, people will learn to trust avatars in virtual worlds the same way we trust email addresses.

And Second Life, for one, is making moves in the right direction. Second Life has partnered with a company called Aristotle, which provides an identity verification service called Integrity. Second Life is making identity verification a voluntary option for residents. Integrity works by verifying standard issue driver’s licenses or other government-issued ID of citizens of 157 countries. Aristotle claims that more than 50 million consumers have utilized Integrity to verify their identity when transacting with global Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, and merchants.