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.

The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) — Defined, Refined, Evolving With The Times

By James Kobielus

If you're an analyst, one of the nice things about having a blog is that you can provide out-of-band commentary on, or elaboration of, points raised in your formally published reports. That way, you don't need to clutter up the body or endnotes of the published reports with digressive — albeit important — discussions.

This present post elaborates on the discussion of enterprise data warehouses (EDW) in my latest research report: "Appliance Power: Crunching Data Warehousing Workloads Faster And Cheaper Than Ever." As I was writing this document, it occurred to me that a formal, nuanced definition of EDW was important — but not within the proper scope of that particular report.

In that report, I implicitly defined EDW not in its own right, but in contrast to the notion of a DW appliance. In other words, I implicitly contrasted a "custom-built" DW (i.e., EDW) with a pre-configured/pre-optimized DW (i.e., appliance-based DW). In the context of that particular report, that EDW definition worked well, helping me clearly spell out the value-added that appliance-based packaging brings to the DW arena.

But there's a risk here — that the reader will think I'm arguing that EDWs and DW appliances are two distinct, mutually exclusive species that can never overlap. Far from it. Fundamentally, I regard DW appliances as an alternate deployment model for building EDWs, subject-specific data marts, operational data stores (ODSs), real-time DWs, or any other server-side analytic repository. I call your attention to the following key excerpt:

"Appliances are rapidly scaling and maturing into enterprise-grade DW platforms. Though they still primarily address tactical data mart requirements, DW appliances from established pure plays such as DATAllegro, Dataupia, Greenplum, and Netezza are rapidly surmounting the scalability curve. Increasingly, enterprises are offloading more and more of their analytics processing to robust DW appliances, paving the way for these solutions to someday address high-end enterprise DW (EDW) requirements." Notice the qualifier "someday" in that last sentence. If you read through the entire document, you'll notice the following critical observations in "What It Means":

"Given the immaturity of the DW appliance market, the burden of proof is still on vendors to show that these pre-integrated offerings can scale in capacity and broaden in scope to support users' most demanding ETL, OLAP, BI, and other requirements" and "No DW appliance pure play can offer a commercial platform as scalable — in database capacity, mixed-workload support, concurrent usage, and fast data loading — or as flexible in deployment, optimization, and administration features as DW market leader Teradata, which has long had an appliance-like value proposition though it has never chosen to set sail under that marketing banner." All of this demands that I define EDW more crisply. Here now is that formal EDW definition, which forms the conceptual backbone of my evolving coverage of DW solutions and best practices:

EDW refers to the infrastructure, tooling, and deployment flexibility that enable a DW platform to support the evolving business analytic requirements of large, complex, dynamic enterprises for performance scaling, multi-domain and multi-entity scoping, high availability, user-driven extensibility, application and middleware integration, and life-cycle data governance. That said, it's clear that some DW appliance vendors — most notably IBM — already provide EDW-grade solution portfolios. Likewise, Teradata, though it keeps its distance from the "appliance" label, also clearly fits that description. So does Oracle, with its growing range of partner-sold "Oracle Optimized Warehouse" appliances. HP, with Neoview, also fits that description. The DW appliance pure-plays — e.g., Netezza, Greenplum, DATAllegro, Dataupia — are rapidly evolving in that direction, and I certainly won't draw a line and say that their solutions won't attain "EDW-grade" status in the next 1-2 years. I think they will.

But the high bar of "EDW-grade" continues to evolve, and it remains to be seen which of the current DW appliance vendors — big and small, declared and reluctant — will keep up with the times. The concept of an EDW, as an intermediary persistence layer in the business-analytics fabric, is evolving to encompass several growing enterprise requirements:

• Real-time DW (the subject of the current report I'm working on for Q2 delivery)
• Federation of DWs (the subject of a report for Q3 delivery)
• Convergence of structured and unstructured data in the DW (the subject of a report for delivery in Q4)

Fundamentally, then, an EDW is a data-services platform that is extensible and sturdy enough to run the business on and feed all your BI and analytic applications from. If an appliance-based solution delivers those benefits, then it can be considered EDW-grade.

Planning Can Generate Serendipitous Interactions In Virtual Worlds

By Erica Driver

At the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York City this week I had quite a few conversations about how using virtual worlds in the enterprise can increase serendipitous interactions among people. What's all the fuss about serendipitous interactions, you might ask? Unexpected, unplanned conversations with people you wouldn't normally talk with can lead to discovery of new relationships, increased bonding and sense of belonging, discussions that lead to business problem solutions, and all kinds of new ideas and innovations. (For more thoughts on this see the Forrester blog posts Virtual Offices For All: Return Of The Serendipitous Interaction and Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor.)

During gatherings held in the virtual world (“in-world” gatherings, in virtual world parlance) people may be engaging in activities together and also interacting via group or one-on-one voice chat, local area  or group text chat, and instant message. Multiple conversations are flowing at any given moment. High tech companies like Cisco, IBM, and Linden Lab are already using virtual worlds for internal activities like meetings, collaboration, and training, and have been benefiting from an increase in serendipitous interactions among people by:

• Gathering around an in-world video screen to watch broadcast events. You might gather to watch breaking world news, an important political speech, or a press conference about a major industry event -– just as you would in the real world around TV screens in common areas or lobbies. In the virtual world, people physically located anywhere in the real world can get together at the same virtual video screen, watching the event together and communicating with each other all the while about what the event means -- or about anything.
• Holding in-world idea jam sessions. Many companies don't host regular jam sessions (brainstorming or idea generation sessions) and those that do are bound by geographical and space limitations. People fly in from all around the company to attend the sessions, and once the meeting disbands people go back to their regular old jobs. By holding jam sessions in-world and taking advantage of the capabilities of the 3D interactive world to record sessions, express positions and opinions, and communicate complex ideas, anyone can participate in an engaging jam session regardless of where they are physically located. And these conversations can be more frequent and even productive in the virtual world than in the physical world because there is no need to travel, jam sessions can be persistent, entire sessions can be recorded, and people can enter and leave ongoing jam sessions as they have time.
• Reclaiming the dead time before distributed meetings start. Unlike physical single-location meetings, when people gather together and chat outside the meeting room or around the coffee while they're waiting for the session to start, teleconferences offer little to no opportunity for people to interact with each other before the call begins. Like me, you probably couldn't even begin to estimate the number of teleconferences you dialed in for and listened to horrible elevator music while you waited for the host to arrive. You may have no idea who else is there listening to the same hold music, separated from you by just a few switches and settings — it could be someone who has already solved a business problem similar to one you are facing but you'd never know it unless it happened to come up in conversation. You may establish a back channel via IM with one or a few participants. But this doesn’t come even remotely close to the opportunities for serendipitous interaction possible when people get together in person in the physical world or the virtual world.
• Hosting in-world company parties. Organizations often hold office holiday or seasonal parties for people who are local, and bonding and unplanned conversations happen there. But these interactions are closed off to people who are based in other geographies. I heard some great ideas at the conference for bringing people together for a fun virtual party. Like holding a winter holiday party in the virtual world, during which you hold a virtual snowman-building contest and go ice skating, downhill skiing, or on a hot air balloon ride together. How about a mixed-reality event, where on the wall in the physical party room is projected the part of the party going on in the virtual world, and in the virtual world is a streaming audio and video projection of the part of the party going on in the real world. People can text chat back and forth between the physical party and the virtual party using computers set up in the physical party room. For more thoughts on mixed reality events see the Forrester blog posts Good Practices For Mixed-Reality Meetings and Blended Real Life / Second Life Meeting Shows Promise.
• Guide each other on tours of cool places you've discovered in the virtual world. Second Life, as a virtual world featuring user-generated content, is filled with extraordinary creations but sometimes they are hard to find, and they are often discovered through word of mouth. Sharing these discoveries with others and experiencing them together can spark creativity and generate ideas in a very engaging way. "Imagine the possibilities if we did something like this?" is probably something you'll hear at some point when you go on a Cool Places tour. Make sure people get invited who don't normally work together -- you never know what people will discover through the shared experience.

Open Source Community Will Drive Virtual World Standards And Interoperability

By Erica Driver

I’m at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York City, participating in the enterprise track – a series of panel discussions about topics like enterprise apps for virtual worlds, virtual worlds for information and knowledge management professionals (I was fortunate to be able to moderate that panel – which ran over by more than 30 minutes due to a hopping Q&A session), open source virtual worlds, and virtual worlds and corporate security. I’ve also had lots of conversations with other attendees during breaks. Over and over I kept hearing participants in the enterprise track asking questions about standards and interoperability with regard to everything from servers to clients (we like the term “engagers,” which is more active than terms like “browser” or “viewer”) to avatars and other 3D content to entire virtual worlds. Lots of people have been posing direct challenges to vendors and representatives of open source projects. I’ve seen a really big difference in the responses to these questions from heavy open source proponents vs. those of other vendors.

• The open source players are all about open standards and virtual world interoperablity. OpenSim and realXtend are two open source projects working feverishly toward an interoperable Web3D. For a good write-up of realXtend’s efforts see the Ugotrade.com blog posts “realXtend’s Vision For Open Worlds: Interview With Juha Hulkko” and “Evolution of OpenSim: RealXtend Joins OpenSim.” Qwaq and Sun Microsystems sell products that are based on open source technologies. All of these vendors and projects are taking aggressive steps toward standards, with a strong focus on virtual world interoperability.
• Other vendors are showing signs of digging their heels in. I heard representatives from vendors like Linden Lab, Multiverse, and Proton Media address concerns about lack of standards and interoperability with comments like: “There is insufficient market demand for it yet. We are waiting for specific paying customers to tell us they want integration between our offering and specific other offerings” or “There is no reason to take an avatar created in one virtual world into another virtual world – in fact that’s laughable” or “We are at too early a stage in this market to focus on standards. We don’t know yet which standards will prevail.”

I’m more convinced than ever that it’s the open source community — especially if it gets help from influential vendors like IBM and Sun — that will lead the way toward standards and interoperability in Web3D. For more thoughts about this keep an eye out for the upcoming Forrester report “Web3D: The Next Major Internet Wave.”