The Dark Horse Moves Forward In The SaaS Collaboration Race

By Rob Koplowitz

Today, Cisco announced its intent to acquire PostPath, a provider of email solutions. Interesting news. As parts of the collaboration stack become increasingly commoditized, the lure of moving the functionality up to the cloud and letting someone else take on the day to day responsibility becomes increasingly attractive. Cisco is at the center of this trend with its WebEx brand. Web conferencing has yet to gain widespread adoption in the corporate data center. It's almost as if the market just decided that as cool as web conferencing may be, I don't want to bother with installing servers and running them. Let someone else do that.

Is broad based collaboration the next big app to move to the cloud? Could be. Microsoft thinks so. They have moved quickly and decisively into cloud based collaboration, first with the acquisition of WebEx's chief competitor, PlaceWare (now LiveMeeting), and more recently with their announcement of Microsoft On-line Services. Google thinks so, too. They have been morphing their consumer collaboration offerings like G-Mail and Google Apps into business ready offerings for the last couple of years. IBM, too, with their evolving vision for Project Bluehouse and its focus on enterprise ready social computing in the cloud.

Taking on the enterprise email market is gutsy for Cisco. Many have tried. The role call of companies that have shown sustained, significant success is short: IBM, Microsoft, Novell. Tough crowd. Then again, Cisco is a very tough competitor, too. And they bring some assets. WebEx is a very strong, well-respected brand that has great relevance to knowledge workers. They have mind share. Certainly Cisco has the resources to make this happen. They can build the data centers, write the code, make additional acquisitions as needed. And if email is moving to the cloud, it could be just the disruption that could drive a new competitor like Cisco into the thick of the race.

Then again, email is really hard. It may well be the most mission-critical application running in many enterprises. The three that have been successful have invested heavily for a really long time to establish their positions as trusted providers. Cisco will need to earn a position among them. Of course, the cloud changes a lot, but not everything. If you want to be my email provider, you need to prove I can bet this part of business on you. All of the vendors shooting for the cloud will need to do this.

Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Google: The first big hurdle? Prove you can make email work in the cloud with a few big happy enterprise customers. Whoever clears that hurdle gets to stay in the race. And it could prove to be an interesting race.

Trip Report On iPhone Vs. BlackBerry: Part 1, Typing

By Ted Schadler

Let me begin by saying that I believe it's time for Information & Knowledge Management (I&KM) professionals to get into the enterprise smartphone debate. After all, the killer application for smartphones is email, calendars, and contacts -- all collaboration apps. And the future of collaboration is pervasive -- anytime, anywhere, any device. Your information workers need them. You should help define the strategy.

So here we go with Part 1 of a multipart blog post on my experience with these two devices.

I recently took a two-week family vacation to Oregon and funky Northern California. Nothing like eating Humboldt Fog cheese on the beach in the Humboldt fog. The four of us camped some and stayed in some lovely B&Bs. As badly as I wanted to be off the grid, I decided that it was best to have a cell phone to take care of essentials.

So it was a prime opportunity to compare a two-year old BlackBerry Pearl against an iPhone 3G to see which one best handled the common collaboration issues that come up on a vacation: email, directions, schedule, contacts, and "rapid research." Oh yeah, both devices use AT&T's network.

I have some particular attitudes towards my cell phone.

• First, it has to fit into my pocket.
• Second, I don't suffer lousy interfaces; if it doesn't work the first time, I usually give up.
• Third, it's a phone first.
• Fourth, it's a collaboration and content device second.
• Fifth, the Mobile Internet has to compete with real Internet experiences.
• Sixth, the battery has to last all day.

I have long experience with the BlackBerry, but have only recently acquired the iPhone. I've mastered the BlackBerry Pearl's SureType keyboard, with only the occasional email gaff from word substituation. But I had struggled to enter text on the iPhone. Notice the past tense.

First, the nitty gritty on using the BlackBerry Pearl with SureType while on vacation. I love the size, weight, and battery life of this device. It slips into my pocket with barely a ripple. The keys click and the rollerball rolls. All good. Typing with SureType is sometimes a pain, but usually not. But on vacation, typed a lot of URLs, street addresses, and email names of people not in my contact list. SureType falls down there, but the full QWERTY keyboard avaiable on the Curve or Bold would have been fine. And there's always Multitap.

What's more important, of course, is that I get my corporate email, contacts, and calendar on my BlackBerry, often before I get it on my desktop. For a corporate guy like me, that's key. On my way back home to Boston, I waded through 400 corporate emails on my BlackBerry and dealt with 370 of them. Not bad!

But on this trip, I was avoiding the corporate email and instead using my Gmail account. And here the BlackBerry falls short. Gmail on the BlackBerry has the clunky though functional feel of many BlackBerry apps. It works, sure, but using it reminds me of my days as a UNIX administrator: powerful command line apps but little pleasure in wielding them.

How about the iPhone? As I mentioned, I had struggled to type on the iPhone. But no longer. In fact, after two weeks, I'm convinced that the iPhone is as good as the BlackBerry for typing. Here are some tips:

• Get used to keeping the iPhone in the normal vertical position for typing. That way you'll get used to the key positions. If you switch between the horizontal and vertical positions, then you have to master two key positions.
• Trust the word substitutions that the iPhone suggests. They are at least as accurate as the SureType suggestions.
• Finally, arch your thumbs a bit so you touch the screen with the tips of of your thumbs. This improves the thumbing accuracy quite a bit. That took some getting used to.

With these new skills, I found I could type URLs, street addresses, emails, and text messages more easily on the iPhone than on my SureType BlackBerry. And Gmail on the iPhone was a joy to use. The scrolling is a pleasure, the fonts and overall look make it (almost) a pleasure to read that "no vacancy" email, and the typing works just fine. Now, if I can just get my corporate email, calendar, and contacts on the iPhone . . .

Disagree? Please let me know.

In subsequent trip report posts, I'll explore maps, the browser, the New York Times reader (as an example of content formatted for a mobile Internet device), and AT&T's network.

Database Virtualization Could Induce I&KM Vertigo

By James Kobielus

Databases are evolving faster than ever. Long regarded as an essential but slightly boring centerpiece of the enterprise information management infrastructure, the database is becoming more fluid and adaptive in architecture in order to keep pace with an online world that's becoming virtualized at every level.

In many ways, the database as we know it is disappearing into a virtualization fabric of its own. In this emerging paradigm, data will not physically reside anywhere in particular. Instead, it will be transparently persisted, in a growing range of physical and logical formats, to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources; and delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications. Forrester's ongoing research into the growing market for in-memory distributed-caching middleware shows that this trend is accelerating.

As database revolutions pick up speed, information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals are likely to get a bit dizzy trying to keep their perspective and sort through competing approaches. When and where should you implement in-memory vs. on-disk data-persistence approaches? When should you go with row-based vs. column-oriented vs. inverted indexing vs. other physical storage models? When does it make sense to implement any of competing vendor-specific OLAP variants--old and new -- for logical modeling (MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP, DOLAP, D'oh!LAP, SchmoLAP, etc.)? When should you federate your databases behind an on-demand semantic virtualization middleware layer vs. consolidate it all in an enterprise data warehouse? When should you buy into one vendor’s analytic-database religion (be it columnar or whatever?) and when should you remain strictly storage-layer-agnostic?

One of the chief trends driving database virtualization is users' need for more robust middleware fabric in support of real-time BI. In order to ensure guaranteed subsecond latency for BI, the infrastructure must incorporate a policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching memory grid from end-to-end. However, the convergence of real-time business-intelligence approaches onto a unified, in-memory, distributed-caching infrastructure may take more than a decade to come to fruition because of the immaturity of the technology; lack of multivendor standards; and spotty, fragmented implementation of its enabling technologies among today's BI/DW vendors.

Nevertheless, all signs point to this trend's inevitability--most notably, Microsoft's recent announcement that it is developing its own information fabric platform, codenamed "Project Velocity," to beef up its real-time analytic and transactional computing capabilities. Bear in mind that no BI/DW vendor has clearly spelled out its approach for supporting the full range of physical and logical data-persistence models across its real-time information fabrics. But it's quite clear that the industry is moving toward a new paradigm wherein the optimal data-persistence model will be provisioned automatically to each node based on its deployment role (including EDW, ODS, staging, data mart)-- and in which data will be written to whatever blend of virtualized memory and disk best suits applications' real-time requirements.

It would be ridiculous to imagine this evolution will take place overnight. Even if solution vendors suddenly converged on a common information-fabric framework -- which is highly doubtful -- I&KM managers have too much invested in their enterprises' current data environments to justify migrating them to a virtualized architecture overnight.

Excel As A BI Tool? Not So Fast!

By Boris Evelson

Ever since our latest BI Wave was published a couple of weeks ago, I keep hearing comments about why we have not included evaluation of Excel as a BI tool. For example, Rajan Chandras, one of the contributing editors to the Intelligent Enterprise, poses really good arguments in his recent blog on why, when and how Excel can and should be used as a BI tool. Excellent question, everyone!

• As I wrote in my very first report when I joined Forrester, Ouch! Get Ready - Spreadsheets Are Here To Stay For Business Intelligence: "Spreadsheets - the most widely used business intelligence (BI) tool - are a permanent fixture in enterprises because no other analytical application outperforms them in flexibility, ease of use, and ubiquity."
• Furthermore, I consider Excel a major component of BI Workspaces: BI Without Borders.
• And last, but not least, we do place a heavy emphasis on Excel as a delivery vehicle or UI for all BI environments in our Wave.

However, having said all that, if we had included Excel as a standalone BI tool, not just a BI UI, it would have scored rather poorly since Excel still relies on the underlying BI/DBMS infrastructure for such critical BI components for large, complex enterprise BI as:

• Access to non-ODBC/JDBC databases
• Real time or operational BI, as in BAM or CEP
• Tight integration with data integration components such as ETL, CDC, Data Quality
• OLAP beyond Excel Pivot Tables (no ability to handle complex hierarchies and dimensions)
• Unstructured content BI beyond simple text parsing
• Integration with MDM
• Production / Operational reports with pixel perfect positioning of multiple report bands or panels
• Scheduling of reports to be run in the background and report dissemination via multiple channels
• VLDB features, or running reports on data sets larger than Excel spreadsheet limitations; ability to optimize SQL

So, yes, I vote for Excel as a BI UI, or Excel as a lightweight, departmental or SMB BI solution. But stand-alone Excel cannot be one and only BI tool to fulfill complex and broad BI requirements in large enterprises.