Microsoft Crashing The Party: Announces Intent To Support ODF And Join Standards Boards

By Sheri McLeish

Wow. Microsoft opened up today, taking a nearly 180-degree turn to announce its intent to support ODF, PDF, and XPS. Overall, this is a great, positive move. While unexpected, it's not surprising. Microsoft has been moving towards more open standards, like with its recent DAISY XML initiative. But it's also a no-brainer. Sticking exclusively with its competing Open XML was divisive, complicating IT's efforts to leverage the benefits that open source XML provides.

But before we get too warm and fuzzy about this change of heart, remember: It's only an announcement of intent. The relationships with the OASIS Technical Committee and the ISO/IEC are not official and confirmed. The success of this strategy will only be realized if there are no hard feelings, and Microsoft doesn't try to bully into the committees' efforts. I suspect that Microsoft will be welcomed aboard, however. Certainly because the resources will be welcomed, but also because these organizations would be hard-pressed to deny Microsoft a seat at the table without looking divisive themselves.

There are three major components to today's announcement:

1. 2007 Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 will add support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. Support for these standards will be enhanced by the inclusion of ODF 1.0 and 1.1 under the Open Specification Promise.

2. Microsoft has previously expressed its commitment to supporting the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members (IS 29500). In the next version of Office, codenamed O14, Microsoft will update the support it provides for IS29500, the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members.

3. To ensure its products support the ongoing evolution of Open XML and ODF, Microsoft said it will take an active role in the development of both Open XML and ODF formats and in the SC34 working group designed to improve interoperability between the two. Microsoft said it also intends to join the OASIS Technical Committee for ODF that is currently developing ODF 1.2.

The impact of these initiatives will take years to be realized, and it remains to be seen if Microsoft can play nice and not try to overextend its influence. If it works, however, the open source XML party will be in full swing.

Alterian Goes Into The WCM Business

By Stephen Powers

A UK-based marketing software company, Alterian, has moved to acquire Mediasurface, maker of both installed and hosted Web content management (WCM) products. Given the state of the WCM market, an acquisition like this is not completely unexpected, since marketers increasingly have a say (if not the final say) in WCM purchasing decisions and strategies. And enterprise content management (ECM) remains disconnected from the other technologies that those marketers need to use in order to manage multichannel campaigns. My colleague, Craig Le Clair, and I are planning to publish some research that tackles this issue - how enterprises need to support their marketing teams through a combination of integrated ECM and marketing processes. We'll also be speaking on that topic at Forrester's IT Forum this week (OK - that was a blatant plug, but you have to admit the timing worked out pretty well).

Alterian's move is an interesting one, and helps move them towards an overall product suite that can better serve marketers. It certainly will make Alterian's competition think about the advantages of having some content management capabilities, and there are several pure play WCM vendors out there that are ripe for the picking. Stay tuned.

WCM: The Real Differentiator

By Stephen Powers

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

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

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

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

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

By Sheri McLeish

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

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

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

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

Analytic Databases Power BI Boom

By James Kobielus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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