Travel Benefits Challenged By Environmental Damage

By Claire Schooley

An article in January 25, 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education really caused me to sit back and reflect. The author, a university professor, questions the contradiction of conference travel thousands of miles away to hear or give presentations in light of global warming, with air travel one of the greatest polluters. Academics as well as business people travel all the time. In many cases it's critical for executives to gather for multiple-day meetings that address an issue or for academics to conduct research and interact with colleagues. But these are often the exceptions. People travel all the time to one-day meetings or even two-to-three-hour events and then turn around and come home. In fact I fall into this category. Recently I traveled from California to Amsterdam to deliver a half-hour speech, have Q&A, and do a five-minute Website video. At the after-party, I had an opportunity to meet and make connections and learn lots. It was great! I loved it! And that's why people travel. . . as social animals we like the face-to-face interaction, the new environment, or the invigorating atmosphere of a new culture. But is that always enough reason (as the author states) to "put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than do 110,000 Chadians or 11,000 Indians in an entire year?" But patterns are hard to change, especially when we like and get additional value from traveling. After the speech I didn't turn around and come home but traveled on to Belgium and Germany (by fast train) to see friends and deepen those cross-cultural human bonds that are so important in our challenging world today.

Travel alternatives do exist . . . one is videoconferencing. I've written about the life-like experience of Telepresence where one sees colleagues thousands of miles away in life size with amazing clarity. Also today's High Definition videoconferencing is far different from past videoconferencing experiences with audio and video out-of synch or a technical crew needed to get the session started and to monitor quality during the event. And the cost today is certainly far less than the cost of trips across the ocean. The bigger question is "Will we make the change?" With all the evidence of how air travel puts large amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, etc. into the atmosphere, I think we will have to select carefully when travel is necessary or when a videoconferencing experience is the better fit.

Blended Real Life / Second Life Meeting Shows Promise

By Erica Driver

Last night I delivered a presentation on getting real work done in virtual worlds at a meeting of the Serious Second Life Group in Boulder, which meets at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado. The purpose of the meeting: discuss the viability of virtual worlds for entrepreneurial activities and getting work done. How's this for blended: I sat in a classroom on the university campus along with about 15 other people (academics, students, and business people). Those of us who had laptops, and many others who were not with us in the room at Boulder, had avatars logged into the virtual representation of the meeting in Second Life. A few laptops projected their screens onto large displays on the classroom wall (see Figure 1). We had a video camera set up in the classroom, which was streaming into the Second Life virtual meeting room (see Figure 2 — in the still snapshot on the virtual wall, taken from the video stream, that’s me on the left wearing a black sweater with a white stripe on the sleeve). My PowerPoint slides were also uploaded into Second Life, where they were projected onto another virtual wall. We had a microphone and speakers set up in the classroom and some participants with laptops wore their own headsets and mikes.

Figure 1: Second Life meeting projected onto displays in real-world meeting room

Overall, a blended physical / virtual world meeting has lots of promise. As technology evolves, we've seen tools to help people involved in virtual meetings (meetings for which not all participants are in the same physical location) become more engaged (and therefore effective). It started out with just a telephone. Then we started back-channeling with some or all participants via instant messaging while talking on the phone. Then we added application sharing, desktop sharing, and Web conferencing, so we can all view the same material. Add video on top of this, and you get a pretty interactive meeting. (I blogged about this in early December after using Microsoft RoundTable for a meeting.) Now, a 3D virtual world experience takes interactivity and immersion to a new level. While the technology is still clunky, it has enormous potential.

·         Participants get control over their experience. People could choose whether or not to view the streaming video from the classroom and whether or not to use voice. They could text chat if they wanted to, or just sit and listen. They could choose where to sit, stand, or hover, and could control their "camera" view — zooming in on whatever they wanted to see most.

·         Wait — who's who? The people who use Second Life and the avatars that represent those people do not share the same names and do not look alike. While this is not necessarily a dire deal breaker for business usage (I wrote about this in a blog post in December, 2007) it raises some challenges. Until Second Life users ("residents") get used to each other's avatar's names and appearance, there can be a lot of confusion about who's who. Throughout the meeting last night I tried to match up the people in the classroom with me with the avatars in Second Life, to no avail. At the end of the meeting, introductions included things you wouldn’t expect, like "That was me with the dragon on my shoulder." I could get used to — even enjoy — peoples' avatars looking unusual. But for real work to get done, virtual world participants must be able to display their real life names above their avatars. And meeting hosts must be able to exclude from meeting locations any avatar that doesn't have a real-life name displayed.

·         Communication was tough and back channeling was rampant. We had voice conversations — sometimes more than one at a time — going on in the classroom. But people listening via Second Life voice over IP could only hear speakers who had mikes or were sitting near the in-room microphone. People had to remember to mute their mikes when they weren't speaking. And we got some screechy audio feedback and some pretty bad delays. People were chatting via group text chat and private instant message. With so many conversations going on, lots of communication was lost.

·         The biggest technical problem: Second Life voice functionality. I have never been able to get Second Life voice working right, regardless of which microphone I'm using or what physical location I'm in (and therefore what network bandwidth I have). I thought maybe it was the fault of my laptop, which wasn't designed for this purpose. But last night we had problems with voice throughout the entire meeting. Sometimes we were plagued with horrible static. Other times the speaker's voice would cut in and out. It can't be blamed on network bandwidth on the university's end — the classroom had 10mpbs wireless connectivity.

·         Spatialized voice is great — but takes some getting used to. In Second Life you hear the voices of avatars closest to you the loudest. If an avatar is standing to your right you hear their voice in your right speaker. If your avatar is standing too far away from the speaker's avatar you can't hear them at all. This is why during voice presentations in Second Life you will see avatars crowded around the speaker — it's the only way to hear. This crowding raises an important etiquette issue — the "physics" in Second Life allow you to bump into other people and literally shove them. Last night I found myself text chatting "sorry" more than once.

Figure 2: Streaming video from the physical meeting in the Second Life virtual meeting room

Data Warehousing Appliances: Growing Bigger Than A Breadbox, Softer Than The Bread

By James Kobielus

Now for my core coverage area — data warehousing (DW) — and the topic of my first Forrester research report, coming soon. (Everybody note: Boris Evelson is our lead BI analyst. But given that BI and DW are joined at the hip, I had to put in my two cents on the intersections of these (and other related topics — I also cover CEP for Forrester as it impacts information and knowledge management professionals).

The DW appliance wars are upon us. This can be seen in vendors' eagerness to slap the appliance label on a growing range of hardware-integrated solutions, most of which are much bigger than a breadbox, and also far more complex and costly — though, ostensibly, less so than the software-centric solutions they hope to supplant. Every vendor claims that its appliances are true "plug-and-play" solutions, though few customers are so naïve as to imagine that a complex IT solution can be as easy to install and setup as, say, a toaster-oven. In addition, vendors and industry observers are proliferating rival definitions of what constitutes a true appliance.

Depending on which vendor's religion you subscribe to, an appliance may come closer to one or the other end of the following solution spectrum:

• Simple DW appliances: Some DW appliances are simple "black boxes" that are designed and optimized for a single function or transaction type. Simple appliances, often packaged as blades or stand-alone assemblies, allow little if any modification or customization by the user.

• Complex DW appliances: Most DW appliances fall into this category. This sort of appliance is a complex assemblage of processing, input/output, storage, and other components integrated across one or more racks in an enterprise data center. Often, a complex appliance consists of one or more modular blades, which may or may not be able to stand alone.

Of course, there are plenty of opportunities for vendors to stretch the concept of an appliance to the breaking point. Unfortunately, one of the core features that most people associate with appliances — their physical tangibility — is starting to fall by the wayside. Increasingly, vendors are exploring the nouveau notion of the "virtual appliance." This refers to the concept of a self-contained software package that can be deployed rapidly to diverse operating and hardware platforms through virtualization technologies such as VMWare and Xen. It's not clear how these "virtual appliances" differ from existing development paradigms, such as Java, that also promise the ability to "write once run anywhere."

The DW appliance concept is softening along the human dimension as well. To further stretch the concept, more and more appliance vendors incorporate prepackaged professional services into their concept of an appliance. Some vendors are stressing global services as a core feature of their appliance offerings. According to this approach, the appliance is a broader solution package that includes services to help customers install, set up, maintain, and optimize the pre-configured hardware/software assembly.

CIOs, enterprise architects, and other professionals must wade through this welter of confusing, overlapping definitions to compare and contrast appliances against each other — and against the standard "software + servers + storage" DW deployment model.

A high-level guideline for DW practitioners: Use the same core criteria to evaluate DW appliances as you apply to traditional DW solutions: price-performance, functionality, flexibility, scalability, manageability, integration, and extensibility. Try not to invest any magic value in some solution simply due to the fact that the vendor has brought it to market under the "appliance" label.

Information Workplace Platform Implications Of Oracle/BEA Acquisition

By Matt Brown, Erica Driver, Mike Gilpin, Kyle McNabb, Rob Koplowitz, and Colin Teubner

We’ve been getting lots of questions about what the Oracle/BEA acquisition means in the Information Workplace platforms market. Here’s our take:

Oracle has made assurances to BEA customers

Oracle has assured us that they will be very mindful of protecting the interests of existing BEA customers, just as they have been for customers of Peoplesoft and Siebel – and we find their assurances credible. It’s not in Oracle’s interest to aggravate these customers, and in many cases BEA customers are already Oracle customers, anyway.

There are six main areas of synergy we’ve identified:

1. Oracle and BEA have a lot of common customers, so there will be great channel efficiency to be had.
2. High-end middleware
3. Oracle benefits from BEA’s strengths in the telecom, brokerage, and government sectors
4. BEA has some product footprint on Microsoft.NET, if Oracle should choose to exploit that capability.
5. BEA is a leader in the growth of Information-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions, and the combination with Oracle (which also has some strong and complementary capabilities there, due in part to its acquisition of Tangosol last year) has the opportunity to drive adoption and innovation in the IaaS area.
6. Great partner-channel synergy – it will give Oracle more products to push through its large partner channel – a win-win for Oracle and its partners.

Yet with so many technology overlaps, something’s got to give

An Information Workplace platform delivers a core set of increasingly unified services that allows IT to roll out next-generation digital work environments that are seamless, contextual, individualized, visual, multimodal, social, and quick to create and modify. The core building blocks of an Information Workplace platform are content, collaboration and communication (including Social Computing tools), portal, and office productivity, as well as a new entrant: business intelligence for the masses.

Through its Business Interaction Division, BEA delivers portal, enterprise Social Computing, and BPM software products. The company has positioned this division as the corollary to IBM’s Lotus division.

• To date, BEA has not really promoted an Information Workplace vision and its portfolio is missing key IW platform building blocks like content and office productivity. It’s also missing secondary elements like business intelligence, learning, and information rights management, choosing instead to integrate with other vendors’ products in some of these areas — especially content and office productivity.
• As a result, when BEA is on the list of incumbent vendors in customers’ Information Workplace vendor evaluations, the vendor is usually not viewed as strategic. The effect: customers sometimes put plans in place to replace BEA’s portal and collaboration software with software from vendors they view as more strategically aligned.
• Oracle and BEA share customers at a company level. But the actual stakeholders who buy products from each are quite different and complementary. Plumtree had roughly 2,000 customers at the time of the acquisition by BEA. Many of these customers were, and still are, people interested in intranets, communities, collaboration, and document sharing. Witness the stories of Caterpillar Equipment, Halliburton, and others who used Plumtree to create extensive collaborative networks and communities.  Conversely, Oracle's portal 10g has been far more attractive to the composite applications, app dev, and business intelligence crowds.

• Some of the products in BEA’s portfolio (e.g., AquaLogic User Interaction Portal) may have staying power due to their existing installed base, but risk not being seen as strategic by Oracle or its customers. One possible outcome is that Oracle keeps and supports the AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) customer base as a way to get farther into the Information Workplace platforms market. Another possible outcome is that Oracle keeps some of BEA’s offerings but ends up selling them primarily into the Oracle customer base. In this latter case, the products in the current BEA portfolio will likely fade from view as Information Workplace platform options.

Portal

·         Judging from the energy Oracle is putting behind WebCenter as a front-end to its Fusion applications strategy, Oracle WebCenter may be the ultimate winner in the portal and composite applications category (over the BEA products). Oracle already seems to be focusing most of its R&D investment in WebCenter over its existing Oracle Portal 10g product.  Despite Oracle’s willingness to support it, WebLogic Portal will likely be the most severe casualty of this acquisition since Oracle will have a difficult time selling multiple portals for composite application delivery.  BEA’s ALUI Portal product is another story, however. A repackaging and re-branding of the Plumtree portal product, ALUI Portal has an enormous market presence for corporate intranets and extranets that’s likely to be seen as attractive to an Oracle that’s been far more competitive in the apps business.

Collaboration and Social Computing

·         We suspect that the AquaLogic Pages, Ensemble and Pathways products will be melded with Oracle WebCenter, which is Oracle’s focus for many Web 2.0 technologies. Oracle will likely absorb the best from the BEA stack and the best from WebCenter into future versions of the WebCenter offering.

·         Likewise, the BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration provides project-centric collaboration (shared tasks, calendars, events, announcements, documents), document sharing, wikis, blogs and situational applications. We suspect that this product may be supplanted by similar functionality Oracle provides (and plans to provide in future releases) in Oracle Collaboration Suite and also in WebCenter, which is tied tightly with the Fusion middleware strategy and is core to Oracle’s technology strategy.

Business process management

·         Oracle’s stack has been designed to be as open as possible. The company will likely pick and choose the best parts of each company’s middleware stack to be part of Fusion middleware, and stop selling the rest while continuing to support it. Specifically in terms of AquaLogic BPM (formerly Fuego), Oracle might keep this product as a separate human-centric engine from its BPEL-based main process engine.

What the acquisition means for Oracle customers

• The acquisition provides Oracle and its customers with a much more credible set of application platform capabilities at the high end of the market. Forrester has seen dramatically increased levels of interest, starting last year and continuing into 2008, in middleware to enable high-end application workloads in the financial services, telecommunications, and government sectors – right where BEA already has a strong presence.
• It brings another set of important human resources into the Oracle fold. BEA has always been a powerhouse of strong engineering talent and innovation, and has recently continued that trend in the enterprise service bus (ESB) and Information-as-a-Service markets. Oracle and its customers will get much richer capabilities, and acceleration of Oracle’s ability to offer more capabilities in the future, as a result of this deal.
• It also brings to Oracle customers some useful technology assets like the JRockit JVM, support for real-time Java, a strong portfolio of Eclipse-based developer tools (and also tools for BPM and other complementary areas), and strong Information-as-a-Service technology (BEA’s AquaLogic Data Services Platform is a leader in the market).
• Oracle’s Service Delivery Platform is weaker and newer than BEA’s equivalent capabilities for telcos, and so telcos may conclude they should move to BEA’s product – which would bring some migration costs. Oracle certainly won’t force them down this road, though.
• Similarly, BEA’s Event Server appears stronger than Oracle’s equivalent capabilities. But it’s not as well established in the market, being very new, so Oracle could rebrand it and merge it into its own event-driven software stack. There is some risk of disruption to advanced customers working with this high-end technology, although those risks are likely small since both products (Oracle’s and BEA’s) are so new.

What the acquisition means for BEA customers

·         In the short term, it is bit of a non-issue because Oracle does a remarkable job of supporting legacy acquisition technology.

• Cost pressures could mount from one of two sources: costs associated with migration from BEA to Oracle products, or the cost of Oracle’s “Lifetime Support” fees which may or may not be higher than what the customers have been paying to BEA for support.

BI's New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond

By James Kobielus

Business intelligence (BI) remains one of the most vital and innovative sectors of the data management arena. The past year saw BI achieve a new degree of importance in the solution portfolios of users everywhere. In fact, BI has begun to play into a much broader range of enterprise IT planning and deployment decisions than ever before. What follows are the most important trends that will continue to transform the BI industry, and add a new degree of complexity into decisions confronting CIOs, enterprise architects, and information and knowledge management professionals:

• BI becoming SOA’s crown jewel: The past year has seen a rash of headline-grabbing M&A deals in the BI arena, with Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, SAP’s deal for Business Objects, and IBM’s pending takeover of Cognos—not to mention acquisitions of smaller BI and corporate performance management (CPM) application vendors by most of those firms. It’s far too easy to misinterpret these recent events as just more of the same M&A-stoked empire-building that we’ve come to expect from large IT solution vendors. What’s driving this recent industry consolidation—which is sure to continue in 2008--is growing vendor recognition that BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution portfolio. Though Oracle and SAP (and, to a lesser degree, IBM) already had decent BI wares in their respective SOA portfolios, none of them were on any enterprise’s short list of name-brand BI solution providers—until, that is, each of them decided to grab a leading BI pure-play. SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features.
• BI evolving into tailored business analytics: CPM—sometimes called “business analytics”—is rapidly becoming a key competitive front in the BI wars. Increasingly, BI/CPM vendors are offering tailored solutions for a dizzying range of horizontal business requirements and vertical industries. Vendors’ continued profitability also hinges on their ability to provide the professional services necessary to create, customize, and support business analytics for each vertical industry’s and specific customer’s unique requirements. Without a doubt, we’ll see further verticalization of product and service offerings by CPM vendors in 2008, which will provide a necessary hedge against the inevitable creep of commoditization into such horizontal analytics segments as financial, human resources, sales and marketing, and supply chain management.
• BI going truly real-time through complex event processing: Complex event processing (CEP) promises business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams. However, CEP has heretofore been conspicuously missing from the mainstream BI arena, necessitating stovepipe CEP implementations that are only loosely integrated with enterprises’ existing visualization, reporting, dashboarding, information modeling, metadata, and other BI infrastructure components. That will change big-time in 2008, as most leading BI vendors start to partner with CEP pure-plays, or acquire them outright, in order to strengthen their support for real-time event-driven applications. Indeed, we expect IBM to ramp up its CEP/BI integration now that it is acquiring both CEP pure-play AptSoft and BI/CPM vendor Cognos. AptSoft will also figure into IBM’s business process management (BPM) portfolio in support of closed-loop BI and business activity monitoring (BAM). We also expect to see SAP/Business Objects, Oracle/Hyperion, SAS Institute, Microsoft, Information Builders, and MicroStrategy venture into the CEP arena in the coming year. Likewise, it’s very likely that the newly independent Teradata, which has taken the lead in real-time data warehousing (DW), will snatch up a CEP vendor to build out its real-time BI portfolio.
• BI bundling with DW appliances: Appliances have even begun to take up permanent residence at the heart of the enterprise data center: in the DW and BI infrastructures. Increasingly, vendors are focusing on integrating, packaging, and pricing their DW/BI products as pre-configured, modular appliances for quick deployment. These appliances consist of processing, storage, and software components that have been prepackaged, preconfigured, and pre-optimized for core DW/BI functions such as multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) queries, bulk data loading, and online archiving. The past year saw a growing range of DW vendors—including such DBMS powerhouses as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft—reorient their DW/BI go-to-market strategies around the appliance model. In turn, leading BI vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos made a big push into the appliance arena. In 2008 and beyond, more and more DW vendors will pre-integrate BI solutions—their own and/or those of their partners—into their appliances. Increasingly, DW/BI appliances will be tailored, packaged, and priced for many market segments and deployment scenarios.
• BI goes collaborative: Collective intelligence is an organization’s most precious asset. Traditionally, the BI industry has offered little to directly address one of the most critical components of group IQ: the collaboration environment. Instead, most BI applications focus on delivering targeted reports, analytics, dashboards, multidimensional visualization, and other key data to individual end users in isolation, rather than to larger business teams. In the past year, though, the BI industry has begun to roll out more collaboration features in their products—such as Microsoft with their new Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 solution--or, at the very least, to begin talking about new collaboration features to expect in the coming year. In 2008 and beyond, we expect to see the BI, collaboration, and knowledge management segments converge. Likewise, we expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs, wikis, and social networking revolutionize the BI experience. Many BI vendors now realize that decision support environments should allow users to access intelligence wherever it may reside, be it in data warehouses or in the heads of remote colleagues.

Going forward, Forrester will increasingly focus on the cross-synthesis of BI with all of these solution areas. We will provide best practices, methodologies, and tools to help customers sort through the myriad issues.

Hewlett Packard To Buy Exstream Software: DOM Is Getting Its Due

By Craig Le Clair

In October of last year, I published "Give DOM its Due" and argued that for years, document output management (DOM) had been pegged as a back-office operation that produces customer statements and bills. And that now, customer experience demands will thrust DOM into a major software category supporting the growing and diverse content that enterprises must assemble and deliver to customers. A few weeks ago EMC purchased Document Sciences. And now on January 22, HP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Exstream Software, a privately-held provider of document creation and publishing software for print, mail and online channels. HP expects to close on this transaction in the second quarter of HP's 2008 fiscal year.

Exstream continues to be a leading choice for the high-volume segment of the DOM structured market and will greatly strengthen HPs document automation capability. Initially targeting service providers — a tough crowd — Exstream followed an object-oriented development model to allow re-use of document components, which was quickly adopted by service providers to provide similar applications to many customers. Today's focus is heavily in the interactive and on-demand DOM segments with strong direct sales. While revenue numbers were not available, Exstream has 300plus employees.

In an analyst briefing on the acquisition today, HP was clear that Variable Data Publishing (VDP), referring to the combination of specific customer data to a structured output format,  is not just printing but a complete publishing infrastructure for capture, retaining, securing and extending digital content creation for the on line, mobile and the interactive environment - although there was little mention of the acquisition in the context of HP's well-publicized Print 2.0 initiative. HP intends to incorporate not only structured and unstructured information into future output applications, but also rich media such as audio and video.

Exstream fills a gap in HP's document automation capability which largely consisted of HP Output Server with roots in print infrastructure output management, and derived from the Dazel product. Exstream moves well up the value chain providing complete output creation and management with the ability to add value to the customer through TransPromo and highly personalized communications. As part of the Web Services and Software business unit within the Imaging and Printing Group, it will become an integral part of the overall IPG SW strategy and help link capabilities across HP's Technical Solutions Group and the office solutions area.

Yet, HP will have challenges and opportunities with this acquisition. They must carefully navigate very productive hardware channels, providing a more complete solution, but not directly competing with service bureau HW customers. They are also wading into the high-volume AFP and transaction printing market, traditionally not a sweet spot. And they must continue Exstream's support for non-HP hardware platforms, and to fully leverage the combination, they must train a sales force more accustomed to hardware then complex document automation sales like correspondence management.

Yet the pros far outweigh the cons for this combination. HP has greatly extended its capabilites at a time when DOM — particulalry for interactive applications — is heating up. Exstream customers get stronger worldwide sales and support and deeper R&D pockets. HP is to be commended for showing vision in the document output space and yes — helping give DOM its Due.

Early Web Cam Experiences Can Detract From, Rather Than Add To, Videoconferences

By Erica Driver with Henry Dewing

In early December I blogged about my first experience using the Microsoft RoundTable video conferencing solution for a multi-hour meeting in which I was a remote participant. That meeting was a one-way video and Web conferencing experience . I didn’t have a Web cam at my desk. I could see the participants in the main conference room but they couldn’t see me. My takeaways after this meeting were that I could concentrate better than I had been able to in similar meetings where I didn’t have the video stream from the conference room; I felt connected to the others even though we weren’t together in the same room; and non-verbal communication had been preserved. I was so excited about my experience that I went out and purchased a Web cam, thinking that two-way video would enrich my remote meetings even further.

A few weeks later I had another multi-hour conference call during which we used Microsoft RoundTable and Live Meeting. I hooked up my shiny new Logitech Web cam and it all went downhill from therer. Being a newbie with Web cam-based video conferencing, I found that having a camera on my end felt highly unnatural and significantly detracted from, rather than added to, my experience in the meeting. Here’s why, and what my colleague Henry Dewing, who covers video conferencing for technology product management and marketing professionals, has to say about it:

·         I spent too much mental energy paying attention to whether – and how – other participants could see me. Maybe this is due to being a Web cam newbie, but I wasted way too many brain cycles making sure that the participants in the main conference room could see me okay and that I was communicating with them visually. I could see my own video stream in a little corner of my screen, which was very distracting. I tried to regularly look up at my Web cam to anyone who was looking at my video stream that I was listening and interested -- which took my eyes off the materials we were discussing and my keyboard where I was taking notes and focused my attention on the 2-inch black sphere of my camera. And I had to remember to close the privacy shade on my camera while I was eating lunch (which didn’t synchronize with the others’ lunch break due to a 3-hour time difference). Henry’s recommendations: if you are a remote participant using a Web cam, turn off your view of your own video stream.  And remember that the views you have of those in the main conference room are not always head on and that is okay because it is normal in a meeting – the same is true for others’ view of you. Also, practice a bit with your Web cam beforehand so that you don’t choose poor camera angles, weak lighting, or sub-optimal audio configurations.

·         When presenting, I didn’t have the benefit of seeing my slides or the audience. I had a harder time presenting my material than I otherwise would have because while I was talking I wasn’t looking at either the other participants or my slides – I was looking at a camera. My memory stinks so I found this to be quite hard. Even though the camera was just above the top of my laptop screen, when I glanced at my keyboard or computer screen, the other participants saw me with my head down.

·         Eye contact was impossible. In order to appear to the other participants like I was making eye contact with them I had to look into my camera. This might be second nature for a fashion model or movie star but it sure wasn’t for me. And when I was looking into the camera, I couldn’t look at the video images of the other participants on my screen – so I couldn’t even get the illusion of approximated eye contact, which was distracting.

·         The technology didn’t work seamlessly. Another remote participant had trouble viewing the video stream from my Web cam as well as the video streams from the conference room at the same time. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. And at one point in the meeting I could see via the little panoramic image of the conference room that my video image had mysteriously blown up to way bigger than life size – my face was taking up the whole projected screen in the main conference room. The on-site team was able to fix it in a few seconds, but it was a little bit disconcerting. Henry’s recommendation: make sure you set up all the network stuff ahead of time. Get the Web conference, audio bridge, and video conferencing devices all synched up so communication is seamless.

I’ll try it again – this was just my first attempt – but probably not for important, multi-hour meetings with clients where I have to simultaneously view presentation materials, participate in a multi-party voice conversation, take notes on my computer, and perhaps view a video stream coming out of the main conference room. At the very least, I’ll turn off the ability to view my own video stream. Both users like me and — according to Henry — vendors that offer technologies for video conferencing are on the steep end of the learning curve and that that may inhibit usability for the short term.

Millenials — Ignore Them At Your Peril

By Connie Moore

I am a political news junkie. I came by it honestly because my family always discussed political events at suppertime, I was a student activist in high school and college, I majored in political science and history, and now I'm somewhat involved in local politics where I live. So I guess it's no surprise that my eyes and ears have been glued to CNN, The Washington Post, The Economist and just about every weekly news and business magazine I can get my hands on during this political primary season.

And how about that campaign???? For me, the democratic race has been amazing. At first, the debates were all about Iraq. But after the surprising Iowa caucuses, the discussion completely changed. Literally overnight — it's a totally different campaign season now. If you are a political junkie like me, you have to ask "Why? What happened?" Here's the short answer: The Millenials struck.

The Millenials, also known as Generation Y, were born between 1980 and 2000, and are about 43 million strong in the US (as compared to the 70 million Baby Boomers). Interestingly, the Millenials have been turning out in droves for Barack Obama, helping shift the discussion from Iraq and other topics to the need for change. Now, all the politicians, including the Republications, have picked up this change mantra. In fact, Business Week just ran a cover story called "The Economics Driving The Youth Vote" that examined why the Millenials want and even need change so badly. The magazine cover actually tells the story when it says "The Facebook generation worries about jobs, health insurance, student loans, and credit-card debt. Now it's forcing candidates to pay attention."

"Forcing" is a good way to describe it. Even before every blasted TV reporter in America started saying it, I noticed that Hillary Clinton was flanked by baby boomers, including her husband and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, when giving her election night speech after the Iowa caucuses. In marked contrast, Barack Obama was surrounded by college kids and twenty-somethings during his victory speech that same night. Right away, everything started to pivot; all the politicians now talk endlessly (and mindlessly) about change and Hillary made sure she was surrounded by a younger crowd at the New Hampshire victory speech — even if it was older women voters who put her over the top.

What does any of this have to do with technology and business?

Here's the answer: the same Millenials hankering for change in the political environment are your new employees and colleagues. They are the future managers and executives at your company. And you will need these Millenials to fill senior positions, even faster than you may realize because large droves of boomers will retire or start working part-time in the very near future.

What do Millenials expect in the work environment?

Well, I'm guessing on this one, but I think Millenials will not tolerate the way most software applications work. If you take a hard look at some of the enterprise software apps we use every day in business, they are shockingly bad from a user experience perspective. Most boomers just soldier through these hard to use screens and get the job done using this awful software; I'm thinking Millenials won't. They'll go work somewhere else, or do something different. They'll be able to have their pick of jobs because 43 million workers can't fill the shoes of 70 million aging employees. Think about it: Millenials have grown up with a remote control in one hand and a mouse in another, and they expect a more TV/multimedia-like or computer game experience from software apps. I believe they will clamor for change, and systems will need to be designed differently to meet their expectations.

We also know definitively from our research that they learn differently. Millenials won't like to attend classroom training, and they won't even like taking online courses. Instead, Millenials want to learn on the job and have the systems teach them when help is needed. Claire Schooley has written extensively about the informal learning approaches needed to support Millenial expectations.

They'll also be socially connected while on the job. Who knows what software companies will emerge or get bought in this space over the next five years, but no matter what the vendors are named, the Millenials will use all sorts of mashups and social networks and collaboration/knowledge management software to stay connected and create/share their ideas. That means we need to start now developing new policies about content creation and intellectual property protection, identify trusted sources of information outside the company, and figure out the best way to herd the new social computing applications "cats" that keep popping up all the time without shutting down innovation in the workplace.

I think its time to start experimenting with virtual worlds — like Second Life. After all, the Millenials have grown up with MTV, and are much more right brained, visual thinkers than prior generations. Plus, if any of you are parents of tweens, you know that Webkinz have spawned a whole generation of children who think virtual worlds are a typical, normal experience rather than something unusual. This isn't to anoint Second Life the winner of the barely started virtual world race. In fact, I think Second Life's role in the virtual world/3D internet is somewhat equivalent to AOL when the internet was born, and that Second Life probably isn't the long term answer. Erica Driver and I believe that within the next five years, the internet as we know it will go 3D and virtual worlds and visual interfaces will be the norm when we sit down to work at computers and collaborate with others. In the meantime, Second Life and other products are great ways to get hands-on experience creating new business tools like those that Millenials expect and even demand.

That's it for now — gotta run. Wolf Blitzer's latest analysis of the South Carolina primary is about to air.  I'm headed to the Situation Room.

Everything That Happens In The Enterprise Software Market Affects BI

  By Jim Kobielus and Boris Evelson

It may not be immediately obvious, but today's confirmation of the Oracle/BEA acquisition and announcement of the Sun/MySQL merger do affect the BI market and have significant implications for BI vendors and BI professionals. One look at all of the components needed to create robust, scalable, effective and efficient, "industrial strength" BI solution, and it becomes painfully clear that just about every segment of enterprise software and applications significantly affects BI segment. Sun/MySQL implications are clear, Oracle/BEA are less so, but let's explore them:

Sun / MySQL

• Even though we do not hear of many large enterprise grade data warehouses run on MySQL, Forrester's survey showed that the use of MySQL in enterprises increased from 17% in 2006 to 29% in 2007 (number of enterprises using MySQL in production). It is only logical to assume that Sun will be a significant contributor to MySQL features to enhance its enterprise scalability and robustness.
• This transaction is also another confirmation of the continued success, small but steady, of Open Source BI products such as Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Ingress. Another usage of Open Source model, successfully demonstrated by a major BI vendor, Actuate, is to use open source components as a viral marketing strategy, followed up with selling a commercialized software license.
• After this transaction, watch for increasing number of BI vendors announce tighter integration with MySQL, and watch for Oracle to step up marketing of its own established open-source DBMS offerings.
• Indeed, expect Oracle to tout the fact that it is the leading provider of DBMSs for the open source market. In February 2006, Oracle acquired Sleepycat Software, adding that firm's Berkeley DB embedded open-source DBMS (the most widely used open source database in the world) to its product portfolio. Then in September 2006, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Berkeley DB Release 4.5. The product has been enhanced to support multi-version DBMS concurrency and change control; accelerated replication of DBMS instances during development; and the ability to upgrade the DBMS without taking down the entire system.
• This acquisition makes great strategic sense for Sun. The vendor has significantly ramped up its presence in the data warehousing (DW) appliance market recently, mostly through partnerships with vendors such as Greenplum and ParAccel. Most DW appliances run on open-source DBMSs—for example, Greenplum incorporates a massively parallel distribution of the open-source PostgreSQL DBMS. By acquiring its own open-source DBMS vendor, Sun is clearly positioning itself to potentially roll out Sun-branded DW appliances that incorporate and are optimized for MySQL. In its strategic repositioning of its software offerings to the open-source model, it was just a matter of time before Sun made a play for a well-established database vendor. Now, we wouldn't be surprised to see Sun acquire any of the open-source BI players named above, plus perhaps an open-source ETL vendor such as Talend.

Oracle/BEA implications for BI are less clear, but potentially much more significant.

• For the last few years vendors have talked about "pervasive" BI — moving BI from the realm of executives and power analysts to the masses. One approach to making BI more pervasive is to enable universal BI access via Office applications, desktop widgets, mobile. However, easier access to inherently complex applications is only a partial answer.
• BI has traditionally great at answering questions like "what happened", "why it happened" and maybe even "what is going to happen", but it fell short of the next step which is helping us decide "what do I do about it now" and "how do I do it". The latter is the realm of process and rules applications such as BPM (Business Process Management) and BRE (Business Rules Engines). Process-centric BI, or process embedded BI, where dashboards and reports are no longer separate applications, but rather components of a larger process/workflow, has a very significant advantage — it is context aware. In other words, if a dashboard pops up at the right place and time in the process, it does not come up blank, it comes up prepopulated with metrics and attributes, since it knows where it was in the process and what questions you are probably going to ask it. This can potentially solve one of the biggest BI challenges: enabling casual BI users navigate complex BI environments.
• Once Oracle resolves significant BEA product overlaps (which, together with the recent Hyperion acquisition may be a serious distraction) it will end up with a very strong BPM / BRE platform putting it front and center of the process centric BI race. The following products, either overlapping or complementary, will contribute to Oracle's strength in this BI segment: business process management — Oracle BPEL Process Manager and BEA AquaLogic BPM will need to converge, business process modeling and business rules will come from the Oracle side in the form of its BPA Suite and Business Rules
• Other obvious benefits for the enterprise IT users include Oracle and BEA  complementary strengths and emphases that promise considerable synergies for their BI customers. Oracle has solution depth and breadth in packaged applications, database management systems (DBMS), data warehousing (DW), extract transform load (ETL), and business performance solutions (BPS). BEA, in turn, has considerable depth in emerging areas such as complex event processing (CEP), enterprise information integration (EII), data federation, and the Web 2.0 "mashup" style of composite application development.

Bottom line: 2008 will continue to be a very exciting, rarely boring, year for BI. No matter how much the market consolidates (I am looking for more BI-related transactions from HP, Sun, Teradata, EMC, Actuate, SAS, Microstrategy and Information Builders) the market is FAR from getting commoditized. I still count over 300 vendors directly or tangentally related to BI, there's not a single week that a new startup with an exciting product comes across my desk, and I can count at least a dozen areas in BI that are still unexplored and unaddressed by large vendors.

Laserfiche At The Aquarium

By Craig Le Clair

The Laserfiche user conference held its main event at the Long Beach, California aquarium. I will try to refrain from making obvious jokes about this. I did make every effort to avoid walking past the fish tanks and lagoons with my Halibut dinner (the shark lagoon is pretty good). The Mayor of Long Beach gave Nien-Ling an award celebrating 20 years in business. Nien-Ling Wacker is the founder and chief inspiration for the company. I will credit her with defining the SMB market for ECM. The governor also gave an award, although the Terminator could not make the event.

Despite a name that combines two obsolete technologies, Laserfiche continues to grow. This year 600 customers, 200 VARs and 200 employees pushed this event to the 1000 people milestone. 

Laserfiche takes a "less is more" philosophy and still focuses on eliminating file cabinets, being easy to use, and most importantly — affordable. This year version 8 is out and emphasizes a records management module and stronger workflow as well as embraces a more open approach. The key to their success seems to be responsive support and taking care of the little things that help ECM adoption, such as synchronizing CD volumes or a simple integration with the Goldmine contact management system. Their "code library" has hundreds of these utilities that handle often overlooked but critical tasks.

Nien-Ling Wacker referred to the big players coming into the market as "boys" with LaserFiche being "adults."  Several case studies were presented where some of those "boys" implemented overly complex systems at great expense only to be thrown out for a system that did not require teams of consultants.

Laserfiche has grown revenues consistently and has been profitable now for years. I spoke with many of their customers and one thing is constant: They are trying to buy solutions that solve basic records management and paper-related problems. And most care little about who is buying who — and even less about whether an ECM provider is part of a big company positioning for infrastructure or a medium size pure play emphasizing applications and vertical markets. These buyers are focused on the thousands of business processes that need help managing content, migrating from paper to electronic, and applying higher levels of automation. There is plenty to do for everyone and firms that focus on what customers need will continue to prosper.