Elegant Solutions Are In

By Craig Le Clair

OK. So this is really a little bragging about my son Justin. But I hope to make a broader point as well. In the last few days Justin has become a bit of an internet star. His name is all over the Web having invented a popular game for the X-Box. Somehow -- and I haven’t tried it yet, having no X-box -– you put the controller on your neck which gives you a massage and through adjustments (see console below), you can adjust the strength. It’s unclear to me how he is fitting this development amidst his study load at Vanderbilt – but I take solace in the fact that he is at least applying his EE education.

If everyone in the world had access to an Xbox, masseurs and masseuses worldwide would be out of job and out of pocket-- all because of a community game released on Xbox Live called "Rumble Massage." The game enables users to use the rumble functions of the Xbox 360 controller as a massage tool, while utilizing the console as an interface with which to change the settings.

The thing which most caught my attention in this game is its ingenuity. By finding such a non-obvious use for the community games market, developer Justin Le Clair could have opened the floodgates for games such as these. Toothbox 360, anyone? At 200 MS points, a small investment on the marketplace could bring you BIG returns come February 14th.

This simple game was an immediate hit. It used parts and equipment already owned. It is the type of product we need in a sustainable and economically challenged time. Maybe we should look around the house and find new and innovative uses for things we have. I agree with Barack –- that we will never apologize for our way of life -- but we are way to susceptible to that new thing we must have.

Justin had spent most of the summer building his first X-box game, "TorinoX." Somewhat typical -- intergalactic battles, lots of shooting and exploding. It required very advanced coding and graphic manipulation –- but sell it did not. It may be we should all look for simple elegant solutions that just work.

What’s the Fastest, Most Scalable Data Warehouse Platform? Well, If You Must Ask.....

By James Kobielus

Welcome to the life of a data warehousing (DW) industry analyst. I’m often asked by Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professionals to address the perennial issues of which commercial DW solution is fastest or most scalable. Vendors ask me too, of course, in the process of their attempting to suss out rivals’ limitations and identify their own competitive advantages.

It’s always difficult for me to provide I&KM pros and their vendors with simple answers to such queries. Benchmarking is the blackest of black arts in the DW arena. It’s intensely sensitive to myriad variables, many of may not be entirely transparent to all parties involved in the evaluation. It’s intensely political, because the answer to that question can influence millions of dollars of investments in DW solutions. And it’s a slippery slope of overqualified assertions that may leave no one confident that they’re making the right decisions. Yes, I’m as geeky as the next analyst, but I myself feel queasy when a sentence coming out of my mouth starts to run on with an unending string of conditional clauses.

If we offer any value-add in the DW arena’s commentary cloud, industry analysts can at least clarify the complexities. Here is how I frame the benchmarking issues that should drive I&KM pros’ discussions with DW vendors:

• Vendor DW performance-boost claims (10x, 20x, 30x, 40x, 50x, etc.) are extremely sensitive to myriad implementation factors. No two DW vendors provide performance numbers that are based on the same precise configuration. Also, vendors vary so widely in their DW architectural approaches, that each vendor can claim that no rival could provide a comparable configuration to its own. For the purpose of comparing vendor scalability for the recently completed Forrester Wave on Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms (to be published imminently), I broke out the approaches into several broad implementation profiles. Each of those profiles (which you’ll have to wait for the published Wave to see) may be implemented in myriad ways by vendors and users. And each specific configuration of hardware, software, and network interconnect of each of those profiles may be optimized to run specific workloads very efficiently--and be very suboptimal for others.
• Vendor DW apples-to-apples benchmarks depend on comparing configurations that are processing comparable workloads. No two DW vendors, it seems, bases their benchmarks on the same specific set of query and loading tests. Also, no two vendors’ benchmarks incorporating the exact same set of parameters in their benchmark tests -- in other words, the same query characteristics, same input record counts, same database sizes, same table sizes, same return-set sizes, same number of columns selected, same frequency distribution of values per column, same number of table joins, same source-table indexing method, same mixture of relational data and flat/text files in loads from source, same mixture of ad-hoc vs. predictable queries, same use of materialized views and client caches, and so forth.
• Vendor DW benchmark comparisons should cover the full range of performance criteria that actually matter in DW and BI deployments. No two DW vendors report benchmarks on the full range of performance metrics relative to users. Most offer basic metrics on query and load performance. But they often fail to include any measurements of other important DW performance criteria, such as concurrent access, concurrent query, continuous loading, data replication, and backup and restore. In addition, they often fail to provide any benchmarks that address various mixed workloads of diverse query, ETL, in-database analytics, and other jobs that execute in the DW.
• Different vendors’ DW benchmarks should use the same metrics for each criterion. Unfortunately, no two vendors in the DW market use the same benchmarking framework or metrics. Some report numbers framed in proprietary benchmarking frameworks that may be maddeningly opaque--and impossible to compare directly with competitors. Some report TPC/H, but often only when it puts them in a favorable light, whereas others avoid that benchmark on principle (with merit: it barely addresses the full range of transactions managed by a real-live DW). Others report “TPC/H-like” queries (whatever that means). Still others publish no benchmarks at all, as if they were trade secrets and not something that I&KM pros absolutely need to know when evaluating commercial alternatives. Sadly, most DW vendors tends to make vague assertions about “linear scalability,” “10-200x performance advantage [against the competition], and “[x number of] queries per [hour/minute/sec] in [lab, customer production, or proof of concept].” Imagine sorting through these assertions for a living--which is what I do constantly.
• DW benchmark tests should be performed and/or vouched for by reliable, unbiased, third parties--i.e,. those not employed by or receiving compensation by the vendors in question. If there were any such third parties, I’d be aware of them. Know any? Yes, there are many DW and DBMS benchmarking consultants, but they all make their living by selling their services to solution providers. I hesitate to recommend any such benchmark numbers to anybody who seeks a truly neutral third-party.
• DW solution price-performance comparisons require that you base your analysis on an equivalently configured/capacity solution stack--i.e., hardware, software--for each vendor and also the full lifetime total cost of ownership for each vendor/solution. That’s a black art in its own right. Later this year, I’ll be doing a study that provides a methodology for estimating return on investment for DW appliance solutions.

As an entirely separate issue, it does no good, competitively, for a DW vendor to assert performance enhancements that are only relative to a prior configuration of a prior version of its own product or technology. The customer has no easy assurance that the vendor is comparing its current solutions against a well-configured/engineered example of the prior solution. The vendor’s assertion of order-of-magnitude improvement over a prior version of its own product may be impressive, but only as a statement of how much they’ve improved its own technology, not how it fares against the competition. And such “past-self-comparisons” can easily backfire on the vendor, as customers and competitors may use it to insinuate that there were significant flaws or limitations in your legacy products.

Here’s my bottom-line advice to all DW vendors on positioning your performance assertions. Frame them in the context of the architectural advantages of your specific DW technical approach. Publish your full benchmark numbers with test configurations, scenarios, and cases explicitly spelled out. To the extent that you can aggregate 100s of terabytes of data, serve thousands of concurrent users and queries, process complex mixtures of queries, joins, and aggregations, ensure sub second ingest-to-query latencies, and support continuous, high-volume, multiterabyte batch data loading, call all of that out in your benchmarks. To the extent that any or all of that is in your roadmap, call that out, too.

Here’s my bottom-line advice to I&KM pros: Don’t expect easy answers. Think critically about all vendor-reported DW benchmarks. And recognize that no one DW platform can possibly be configured optimally for all requirements, transactions, and applications.

If there were any such DW platforms, I’d be aware of them. Know any?

Google Tests An Offline Email Client

by Ted Schadler

This has been long rumored by Google Apps watchers, but we get confirmation today: Google is testing an offline email client. This is a Google Gmail Labs feature, which means that it's really test code for the brave. In fact, the Gmail Labs site helpfully warns that "there's an escape hatch" if a feature breaks.

That said, this is a big deal for Google. (Caveat: I haven't tested it yet, so I'll have to report back once I do). Here's what it means:

• WIM #1: Google is accelerating its push into the enterprise. No IKM professional can in good conscience switch to an online-only email solution for the majority of their iWorkers. But if Google offers and supports an offline email and calendar client, then that objection will be off the table, and more firms should consider Google Apps, at least for their occasional users. (Other legitimate concerns to switching to Google Apps will remain, of course, including a disruptive shift in experience and the lack of good integration with Microsoft Office and SharePoint.)
• WIM #2: Cloud doesn't mean no client software. Instead, it means richer experiences with more client software. This is already IBM Lotus's client strategy. According to Lotus VP of Development, Alistair Rennie, Lotus offers a steady progression of functionality that begins with an open browser, extends to browser plug-ins, and culminates in installed software. With this move, Google demonstrates that it understands this strategy: Services + User Experience Software.
• WIM #3: Gmail Labs is a place to monitor for the future of email. Google has permission to experiment publicly. It's a "this road is officially closed, proceed at your own risk" strategy. Gmail Labs has a lot of odd stuff on it, but it also has a collection of intriguing features. Today, for example, I found an "Email Addict" blocker that forces a person to take a break and an "Add any Gadget by URL" feature that makes it easier to add gadgets to the left navigation bar.

Comments, suggestion, improvement? Please comment.

Autonomy Picks Up Interwoven — Implications For eDiscovery

By Brian W. Hill

Autonomy’s recent announcement that it plans to acquire Interwoven will strengthen its traction in the broader eDiscovery landscape. With the purchase, Autonomy picks up a range of assets, but a key component of the $775 million purchase focuses on new opportunities to mitigate legal and regulatory risk and capitalize on the surging eDiscovery market.

Along with other markets, M&A activities in this segment slowed in Q4 2008, but vendors continued to announce a steady stream of partnerships (e.g., Open Text - Recommind and CaseCentral - CommVault) and significant internally developed offerings. Selected acquisitions in this market include:  

Autonomy’s acquisition supports a growing consolidation trend in the eDiscovery vendor community. Today no single vendor provides “end-to-end” or fully comprehensive enterprise eDiscovery support. Instead information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals must grapple with a highly fragmented market with a large number of vendors who provide support for some subset of the steps outlined in the electronic discovery reference model (EDRM).

This fragmentation causes headaches, but during 2009 these burdens will decrease as vendors digest additional acquisitions, put more emphasis on partnerships, expand their portfolios, and address interoperability through standards and industry working groups. New vendor entrants to the eDiscovery market, however, will slow this consolidation. Overall, Forrester expects that M&A activity in this segment will increase during 2009 as vendors with deep pockets acquire firms with demonstrated eDiscovery strengths in offerings or human capital. As this consolidation continues, enterprises should cautiously monitor engagements with point providers.

My initial take on Autonomy’s acquisition will ultimately be positive for enterprises focused on eDiscovery. Here’s why:

• Autonomy obtains a stronger and broader portfolio for mitigating legal risk. It’s important to point out that effective alignment between the information management phase and other steps outlined in the EDRM remains out of reach for most enterprises To illustrate, in a recently completed survey we found that nearly two-thirds of respondents rated “synchronizing eDiscovery, records management, and archiving efforts” as “very challenging” or “challenging.” With a more comprehensive portfolio, Autonomy now will have the potential to help enterprises execute more effectively throughout the eDiscovery process.

• Autonomy gets a good pool of legal experts. Interwoven brings a wealth of human capital with backgrounds in the intersection of legal and IT – this will be key in accelerating sales in the white-hot eDiscovery market.

• Autonomy acquires a solid installed base opportunity helping to penetrate key verticals more effectively. Claiming over 1,300 law firm customers, Interwoven has historical traction in the legal market. This customer set will clearly help Autonomy continue its strong eDiscovery focus. Also, Forrester expects a significant increase in litigation in the financial services segment over the next 12 months. Autonomy anticipates that Interwoven’s Global Capital Markets group will help it capitalize on compliance opportunities in derivatives management inside major banks.

In the near- and mid-term, Autonomy will need to focus on product delivery and plans and enterprises should closely monitor execution. Here’s why:

• Autonomy and Interwoven have existing product overlap in two key areas for mitigating legal risk – records management and legal review platforms. I had an opportunity to ask these vendors last week about rationalization plans and it’s clear that this isn’t hammered out yet.

• Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) plans could introduce big bumps. In the near term, Autonomy plans to put the IDOL engine underneath Interwoven applications. This approach has strong potential, but focus on product quality and execution will be critical. Customer feedback based on comparable efforts with Autonomy’s previously acquired ZANTAZ portfolio suggests work still remains. When faced with litigation and court demands, I&KM professionals understandably have very little patience with any perceptions of poor product quality or poor customer support.

• Combining dynamic Web content and retention management holds promise, but may be very difficult to develop successfully. Although Forrester’s inquiries demonstrate limited but building interest in retention policies for dynamic as well as static Web content, enterprises report that vendor solutions available today fall short. As one of the stated goals of the acquisition, Autonomy intends to deliver retention management solutions for dynamic Web content to meet the need for this early stage market. It may find that putting vast amounts of dynamic Web content (individual, variable views) under retention policies at a granular level to be a tough technological hurdle.

Autonomy will continue to be a major force in the eDiscovery market. Acquiring Interwoven will bolster its prospects for delivering effective solutions provided that Autonomy can successfully integrate product portfolio, overcome corporate cultural differences, and align sales channels. Current customers and enterprises considering prospective eDiscovery solutions stand to benefit but should ensure that they understand how the pieces fit together, document commitments, and continue to review Autonomy’s execution.

What do you think the acquisition means for the eDiscovery market? Please write me at bhill@forrester.com.

Free And Freer: Lotus Symphony Could Be Your Unsung Hero, But Only If You Hear About It

By Sheri McLeish

Everyone knows that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Or is it? With its free productivity tools suite Symphony, IBM/Lotus is looking to shake things up a bit, putting even greater pressure on Microsoft's Office margin and besting Google and Zoho as the lowest-cost alternative.
 
So far, enterprise customers have been reluctant to move away from Office due to concerns about supporting a new or multiple environments, document formats, user acceptance, and proof of savings after change management costs are figured in. But with the lure of free or much lower-cost alternatives available, CIOs are reexamining these investments in a suddenly interesting market given the economic climate. With its Open Office-based Symphony, Lotus provides a robust tool set that is enterprise-ready. To make the point, 40,000 of IBM's information workers recently made the jump off Office onto Symphony 1.2, and all of the conference materials for last week's Lotusphere09 event were produced using the tools. It all worked and looked great. But these workers were already on Notes, and what works for IBM doesn't necessarily work for the masses.
 
Lotus' biggest challenge now may be its image and marketing. Other than the loyal Lotus aficionados who turned out en force at the brand's premier customer event in Orlando -- the roughly 4,000 in attendance was up 2% from last year -- most IT folks are not up to speed with Lotus' latest offerings to ease internal and external collaboration like lotuslive.com, which was announced last week. Symphony fits into IBM ECM and the Lotus collaboration strategy nicely by providing the classic tools for creating, sharing, and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations along with some nifty innovations. But if you're not an IBM Notes shop -- and according to Forrester data, the overwhelming majority of enterprises are on Exchange -- you might not know about it.
 
The other tack, which has found traction for Google, is to work on the consumer market. IBM has never courted the consumer market well, or necessarily even tried. But when you have a product as good as Symphony is today, gaining mindshare in the consumer market creates awareness from the bottom up. Google Docs is a popular choice for many students not just because it's free, but because it meets their needs and has a great affinity with Google Mail and Calendar. When clients ask us about alternatives to Office, Google is the first one they mention. But in many cases, Google's limited functionality isn't viable enterprise wide. Until IBM puts some money into marketing Symphony -- to consumers as well as enterprises, it will struggle to break into non-Lotus shops. And that's too bad, because for those really looking to reduce Microsoft licensing costs without trading off functionality, Symphony sounds pretty good.

Knowledge Matters. (Just Ask Circuit City).

By Connie Moore

You've probably seen them by now--the guys standing by the roadside waving big signs that exclaim "Going Out Of Business!" and promise savings of 50-70% on electronics and appliances. That's right, Circuit City is now the latest victim of the recession of 2008-2009. 

Or is it?

Do you remember back in March 2007 when Circuit City committed one of the biggest public relations blunders ever done by a major corporation?  At that time, the company was feeling some financial and competitive stress, so it decided to layoff 3,400 of its highest paid sales staff and replace them with lower paid workers. Rather cynically, the company said that experienced workers could reapply for their jobs if they were interested in working at the lower salary.

Laying off workers--or making them redundant as the Brits call it--is nothing new.  Companies do it whenever product demand slackens, inventories mount and expenses threaten profitability.  But what Circuit City did was more brash than that.  It decided to take the most experienced sales people who interacted with customers on a daily basis and replace them with newbies who didn't know much of anything about how things worked.  That meant customers got the short shrift as inexperienced staff tried to ramp up the learning curve as quickly as possible.

I remember at the time saying to my husband that I would no longer shop at Circuit City. And I was true to that promise; I never shopped there again. Heck, I never even went in the store again. I thought that decision back in 2007 was a loser all the way around--the customers were hurt, experienced employees were hurt, the company was hurt and nobody came out a winner.  The company was banking on the hope that whatever hits they took in sales revenue would be made up by lower payroll costs.

I haven't  done an in-depth analysis of why Circuit City is closing its doors.  But I'm sure it has a lot to do with reduced consumer spending.  And yet, I think the seeds of the company's demise were planted when it decided that employee knowledge and know-how, plus experience and insight were less valuable than cheaper workers.

Why do I bring this up?  It's layoff season now, and many folks in IT, and in information and knowledge management specifically, will be asked to rank employees and target individuals for layoffs.  It's a tough reality in these economic times.  When that happens, keep in mind that knowledge really does have value, it has meaning on the balance sheet even if you have a hard time measuring it.  And be very careful about getting rid of experienced workers . . . it may come back to haunt you.

Autonomy Acquires Interwoven — What It Means For Search

By Leslie Owens

Big news in the information management world today – Autonomy announced it will acquire Interwoven for $775 million.

Since 2005, Autonomy has acquired technology for search (Verity), archiving (ZANTAZ), and records management (Meridio). With Interwoven, Autonomy gains a technology foothold where it was previously weakest -- at the point where digital content gets created, captured, and managed. Yet knowing Autonomy, it’s likely after Interwoven’s solid customer base in several niche market segments: law firms and customer-facing media, entertainment, and commerce Web sites. All of these Interwoven customers had better prepare for a knock on the door from Autonomy reps prepared to sell them on the virtues of extracting “meaning” from their digital information (using Autonomy IDOL, of course).

Enterprise search and enterprise content management are two sides of a coin. Both are necessary to create, manage, store, find and analyze information. Yet information workers still generate an enormous amount of content in word processing applications and distribute it via email. Content created in this way is difficult to manage and control as well as difficult to find. The high price Microsoft paid for FAST Search and Transfer last year was based in part on the expected value of combining the two sides of the coin — to tightly integrate search and classification capabilities at the point where content is created and accessed. Autonomy brings more sophisticated — and much needed — archiving and records management capabilities to this picture.

That said, enterprise search used to be the “Switzerland” of information management tools — a neutral mechanism to connect to and pull from a smorgasbord of databases and content silos. Autonomy has built hundreds of connectors to content sources and has existing partnerships with other ECM vendors. But now that two of the top search vendors are aligned with specific content management vendors, there is a risk that the future will not be so cooperative. I’m concerned that the vertically integrated search platforms that Autonomy and Microsoft are building will be more closed than open, more unilateral than multilateral. If the former, customers will struggle to build the connectors they need or may be pressured to consolidate their content management choice with their search choice.

Finally, it will be hard for any information access vendor to meet the diverse retrieval requirements that arise at each stage of the content lifecycle, on spaces as different as corporate websites, intranets and extranets. eDiscovery-oriented search requires expansive recall, for example, whereas worker productivity search requires high levels of precision. For this reason, Forrester expects that the managers of Autonomy’s different product lines will need to negotiate the search and classification improvements to be developed for IDOL’s next release. Can IDOL’s conceptual, “meaning-based” approach to retrieval accommodate the distinct needs of all of its product lines and markets? In addition, Autonomy customers (and prospects!) cite ongoing difficulty working with its sales force. Autonomy leadership must address this last issue if it is to absorb and cross-sell Interwoven effectively and continue to grow in a tough economic climate.

What do you think this merger means for the search market? Please leave your comments here, or write to me at lowens@forrester.com.

Strategy board game image courtesy of hellolapomme

It's Time To Put Aside Childish Things As Microsoft Announces Layoffs

By Rob Koplowitz

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama told us it's "..time to put aside childish things." A country that once showed greatness through youthful exuberance is being asked to show greatness through measured maturity. It's a moment of realization. And a time of challenge.

Microsoft has announced that it intends to lay off up to 5000 employees over the next 18 months. For those of us who have chosen this industry as our career home, layoffs are nothing new. We live in a cyclical world and nowhere is the cycle more evident than in the computer industry, where companies are constantly appearing out of nowhere, growing, shrinking, acquiring and being acquired.

But this is different. This is the latest sign of a sea change in our industry. The best and brightest minds in the industry saw this coming. Steve Jobs saw it when he turned Apple Computer into Apple and turned tech into "tech fashion." Larry Ellison saw it when he began to acquire players that would make Oracle an indispensable piece of corporate infrastructure and at the same time established a more predictable maintenance revenue stream to Oracle.

And now Microsoft joins the crowd. Microsoft was always the company that did things a bit differently. They created an insular community up in Redmond. They nurtured a unique corporate culture. They have always been fierce competitors, but at the same time they were fiercely loyal to their employees. When others looked to cut costs by reductions in workforce, Microsoft resisted. Now, that luxury is gone.

Certainly, the economy is a driver. But, there is something else going on. Why is this downward cycle different than those of the past? Because this time, the downturn is hitting an undeniably mature industry. When Microsoft was young and growth opportunities were everywhere, they could afford to make lots of bets and hope that a couple paid off big. Now that the market is mature and the next multi-billion dollar opportunity is so much harder to identify, even Microsoft needs to act accordingly.

Microsoft will continue to be a (the?) major force in our industry. They will continue to make lots of money for their stockholders. They will now just need to do it the way it's done in mature industries everywhere. We will all miss our childhood and move forward.

To Wave Or Not To Wave - That Is The Question

By Boris Evelson

Many years ago as I started researching and analyzing the differences between major BI vendors, one criterion that I always used was whether these vendors ate their own dog food. In other words, did a vendor executive team use the same solutions for data collection, building metrics and dashboards to run their own companies that they also tried to sell to their clients? Those who did tended to score higher in my evaluations.

The same guiding principle is applicable to Forrester: you have to eat your own dog food in order to convince the clients to buy your products and services. Hence, our methodologies, such as Forrester Waves are completely open and transparent (thank you, Doug Henschen, for recognizing this in your recent blog), and we encourage our clients to challenge us on every point made in our Waves.

I do get lots of requests to explain the way I rate this or that vendor in my latest BI Wave. While I will typically try to support and explain the way I scored each vendor, I also encourage our clients to just download our Wave spreadsheet evaluation matrix and put in their own scores. No matter how objective and transparent a Forrester analyst tries to be, there’s always a small element of a personal subjective opinion built into every evaluation. But a) that opinion is fully presented and described in detail in the Wave spreadsheet matrix, and b) clients that disagree with the rating are free to just change scores and weights in the model and come up with their own vendor ratings. In fact, in addition to just using our Waves for their primary purpose, there are several other ways Wave models can be utilized:

• Customizing a Wave. Put in your own weights and scores and come up with a customized rating that is specific to your enterprise requirements, culture, priorities and standards.
• Creating a Wave of Waves. If one is looking beyond just one product capability from a certain vendor, our clients typically combine results from our, say, BI, ETL, CRM, database, etc Waves to come up with the overall evaluation of the vendor product portfolio. After normalizing the scores from multiple Waves (a relatively painless process) one can fairly effortlessly come up with vendor ratings across multiple product lines.
• Comparing apples to apples. Certain market sub segments have their own individual challenges, and that’s why some analysts choose to do multiple Waves for a single market segment. For example, I felt that the differences in corporate and product strategy between closed source and open source BI vendors were significant enough to warrant evaluating them in two different Waves.  However, while some of the criteria around open source projects vs. corporate strategy were obviously quite different, we kept almost all of the current product offering criteria exactly the same across both Waves. This means that with just a bit of a criteria mapping exercise (a trivial task) one can compare product capabilities of closed source and open source BI vendors.
• Evaluating vendors not covered in our Waves. The benefit of having an open and transparent methodology also carries a cost: Waves take a lot of effort (at least 2 resources for 4-6 months) to execute. That’s the main reason we often include fewer vendors in our Waves than we’d like to. However, there’s nothing stopping our clients from using the Wave model to do their own evaluations. For example, my upcoming report “BI Belt Tightening In Tough Economic Times” will have a review of over 10 BI SaaS and over 20 small BI vendors. While we are not planning to do a more formal Wave based evaluation of most of these vendors in the near future, I encourage our clients to use the latest BI Wave model to build their own evaluations. With all of the evaluation criteria pre-built and battle tested, it should save anyone a major part of the evaluation effort.

Research reports are great to kick start an IT initiative, but our clients also need so called “last mile” or “2nd phase” decision aids and accelerators. Recognizing this need we will continue to come up with more of such evaluation and selection decision tools for our clients. One example is our recently published Business Intelligence Data Architecture Decision Tool, which, unlike our Waves that are used to guide you through a vendor selection process, can be used to make vendor neutral analytical data architecture decision. In addition to BI, we plan to leverage this new decision tool for other enterprise architecture segments.

Forrester Podcasts for Information Management Professionals

by Matt Brown

At Forrester, we're always looking for new ways to engage with our readers. Most often, our written research into workplace trends and technologies is the catalyst for this engagement. But we're also coming to realize that the way Information Management professionals consume research is changing.

For better or worse, you have more devices, more tools for connecting with others, more information, and less time to sort through it all. As a result, we're now offering Forrester podcasts for information management professionals via this blog and iTunes. While an admittedly traditional analyst like myself still considers Forrester’s rich data and reports to be the "gold standard" of our research investments, we're committed to helping clients fit their use of research into their busy schedules. To this end:

• We're podcasting on a mix of topics. Most recently, Claire Schooley hosted a series of team podcasts on everything from Leslie Owens’  must read books and blogs for information management professionals to Boris Evelson's advice on "BI Belt Tightening in a Tough Economic Climate." You can expect to see us produce podcasts on practical how-to’s as well as Forrester’s perspectives on must-read sources that we believe will have a lasting impact on your career success as an Information Management professional.

• We'll continue to try a variety of formats and topics. We've learned that not all formats or information management topics work well in a podcast. So expect to see us include interviews, debates, and briefing-style market updates in the mix. Rest assured, there will be no shortage of strong opinions. As always, your reactions to what’s most useful is always welcome.

• Expect more to come. Recent podcasts like Rob Koplowitz’s insights on taking a long-term view of collaboration strategy planning are just the beginning. We'll be highlighting some of the latest podcasts each quarter via this blog. For no-hassle feeds, consider subscribing via iTunes here or via our podcast feed here. This will give you the latest advice and insights from the entire Forrester Information Management team.

Let us know your thoughts on the podcasts. We'll be following feedback closely for ways to make them more effective and useful for you.