FatWire Plucks Castaway Interwoven And Vignette Customers From Leaky Dinghy In The North Atlantic

By Tim Walters, Ph.D

Not quite, but that’s the general tone of the “rescue program” recently announced by Web content management (WCM) vendor FatWire. Following the acquisition of Interwoven by Autonomy, and the announced acquisition of Vignette by Open Text, FatWire is offering Vignette and Interwoven customers the opportunity to switch to their Content Server solution at no cost.

Naturally, there are some provisos. First, although license fees are waived, the maintenance and support payment (typically 15-20% of the original license fee) that has gone to Interwoven or Vignette is now paid to FatWire. (Bad luck, I guess, if you’ve just made the annual payment to the other vendor.) Second, you’re also supposed to sign up to employ (and license) content migration tools and services from FatWire partners Vamosa or Kapow Technologies. (Vamosa has jointly agreed to waive the initial license fee for their migration solution.) Third, this limited time offer expires on September 30, 2009. (But try calling on October 1 and see if they refuse to answer the phone.)

FatWire acknowledges that the program does not by itself constitute a compelling financial argument to switch. But they hope that by removing the license fee hurdle, they might entice some disaffected Interwoven or Vignette customers.

That target audience could be huge. In our recent survey on WCM adoption, 7% said they are “very unsatisfied” with their current WCM solution and a further 25% are “unsatisfied.” Since Interwoven and Vignette together claim about 2000 customers, and if we assume the (dis)satisfaction rates apply equally across the board, that’s (theoretically) 640 unsatisfied customers that should be stamping out HELP in the sand to signal passing aircraft. But before FatWire staffs up their HAZMAT trucks they might want to tend to the (equally speculative) 160 unsatisfied users of their own products.

Despite the high dissatisfaction rates for WCM, announcing a “rescue program”is a touch too dramatic, and one has to hope that the rhetoric doesn’t escalate. What’s next: “SDL Tridion vows to free customers held hostage by FatWire’s TeamUp splinter group”?

Why the theatrics? Here are two potential benefits for FatWire:

1. It makes some noise. FatWire is the only privately held company in Forrester’s 2009 WCM Wave report. A publicly traded vendor would get plenty of coverage for announcing a boring “customer transition effort.” FatWire has to propose a rescue program that tosses a “lifeline” to customers who are, evidently, trapped in a cave without “a path forward.”
2. It smokes out the prospects. The real challenge with a competitive replacement program is finding the WCM program owner at the target companies. By announcing a putative financial incentive, FatWire might hope some targets will identify themselves.

Finally, think about the effect of this announcement on those FatWire prospects who are not current Interwoven or Vignette customers. If, say, a major airline that’s currently using SDL Tridion asked to be “rescued” on the same terms, is FatWire going to turn them down? If a current prospect with a pen posed over a fat six-figure deal catches wind that FatWire is giving away licenses, aren’t they going to want some of that too?

In short, the announcement could have been simply, “The Deal Desk Is Open.” It’s a buyer’s market. FatWire is being a little more obvious than others in acknowledging that vendors have lost pricing power, at least for higher end solutions. As the street hawkers said during a recent visit to Rome: “Half price! Half price! . . . How much have you got?” If you can scrape together a little cash, it’s a great time to buy WCM.

And if your chosen solution later leads you into the wilderness, you can always count on a competing vendor to rescue you.

Calculating The Fully Loaded Costs Of Corporate Email: It's Bigger Than You Think

by Ted Schadler

Since colleague Chris Voce and I published a pair of reports on corporate email in the cloud (one on the infrastructure and operations and one on the cost of running email on-premises or in the cloud), we have had dozens of discussions with our clients accompanied by detailed cost analyses of the true cost of running email on-premises versus running it in the cloud.

While the cloud-based cost of email is pretty transparent (many providers, including Microsoft and Google, publish their per-user per-month costs), the cost of running email on-premises is often a big mystery to everyone, including most CIOs. The big challenge is that the costs are spread throughout the budget: some in the hardware budget, some in the software budget, some in the storage budget, some in the cost of capital budget, some in the staffing budgets, and so on.

After dozens of these discussions and after a survey of 53 information & knowledge management professionals to ask about the cost of email, it is abundantly clear that few firms know their true cost of running email on-premises. And this matters if you're considering a move to cloud-based email.

But it an accurate calculation of on-premises email also matters if you are contemplating upgrading your email to a more current version that might support cheaper storage, higher automation, or reduced email database size due to eliminating redundant copies of attachments. You can compare your current costs against the fully loaded costs of the new system with its higher efficiencies.

So we spent four months building and vetting a detailed cost model to help our clients and the industry at large understand how to calculate their cost of running email on-premises. Here's a clue: It's more than you think.

    

When you factor in servers, storage, server software, software maintanence, hardware and software administration, power, archiving, message filtering, mobile costs, even financing, you find out that the cost of email for 15,000-person organizations can be as high as $40 per user per month, and even for a normal information worker without mobile email, it can cost more than $27 per user per month. Of course, you can and should segment your workforce into different tiers — for example, mobile executives, information workers, and occasional users — and provision them with different size mailboxes, email clients, and mobile email.

 

With all of that as input, you can calculate the fully loaded cost of email for each workforce segment.

   

The same data, presented as a table looks like this:

  

Of course, the prices come down for larger organizations and not everybody needs all these services. And sure, we can talk about higher automation levels, cheaper storage, more efficient message filtering, and the lots more, but at the end of the day, you have to factor in all the costs of running email on-premises if you are going to make a decision about upgrading or moving email to the cloud.

Have other thoughts? Want to discuss them? Please comment.

Sun Learning Exchange: Indeed, What If Work Meant Community?

by Ted Schadler

In early June, Sun Microsystems announced the Sun Learning Exchange. This is a commercial offering that borrows directly from Sun's own experiments, experience, and expositions on learning. We've written about this in a Forrester report: Tap The Potential Of "YouTube For The Enterprise," and now it's available to others.

Sun's CTO of Learning, Charles Beckham, has tapped his experience as a Java entrepreneur (he was part of the team that built one of the first J2EE application servers, NetDynamics) and bent it to the challenges of on-the-job learning. In an interview with Charles last fall, we came away convinced that his just-enough, wisdom of the crowds, power of video approach to learning was important.

Three things anchor the Sun Learning Exchange:

1. The power of all employee-generated media, including video, audio, and blogs.
2. A learning platform that is minimally invasive and maximally open to social contribution.
3. A metric on social contributions to drive participation.

It's too early to tell how compelling and successful this will be for customers; after all, Sun is officially a company in transition and it's not yet clear what lies ahead for the group. (Though we believe that Oracle could easily adapt these concepts and platform to its new Beehive messaging and collaboration platform and use it to attract new customers to that offering.)

What does this mean for Information & Knowledge Management professionals?

• What it means (WIM) #1. Learning has officially entered the social software lexicon. Social software is not just for collaboration anymore. It's now also for employees mentoring each other, bringing customers and partners into the environment, and learning on the fly.
• WIM #2. Social software has gained another entry point into the organization: HR. Learning has long been the bailiwick of HR, not IT. But with the technology-enablement of learning that's been going on now for years with Web conferencing and training software, social software is yet another reason for these two groups to get even closer together.
• WIM #3: Sun Microsystems cum Oracle deserves a closer look for collaboration innovation. We have been impressed with Oracle Beehive — it's well integrated, fabulously priced, and easy to forklift into place. (It's also still in early versions, and missing some pieces of the collaboration platform, including an easy workflow tool kit.)

Disagree? Have thoughts or experiences to share? Please comment.

Great News For The Process World—A Sea Change Is Coming

By Connie Moore

I've been working in the Business Process Management field for long time. How long? How's this—I remember when there wasn't any BPM—it was all just workflow. Plus, I remember when there wasn't any continuous improvement or Agile vs. Waterfall, it was just big bang Business Process Reengineering.

I've also been working in the content management and collaboration space for a long time. How long? I remember when people who tracked document imaging (me included) didn't know what document management was. And I remember when Lotus Notes and Groupwise defined the collaboration space, and nobody thought for two seconds about Microsoft.

Why do I ramble on through technology's memory lane? It's because I want to set the stage for what I'm about to write.

For years I've been talking about the need to marry structured processes with ad hoc processes. More than that, I've said we need to look at work from the worker's perspective, and tackle all the work that the person does. Instead of carving off the structured process and automating just that, and then leaving all that other work for the information worker to figure out how it gets done, I've argued that we should look at work holistically.  We should very deliberately add that chaotic, messy ad hoc world of work to our structured processes, and stop relying on information workers to mentally and physically (through cut and paste) integrate all their collaboration tools with structured processes. After all, haven't you heard the complaints about information overload from stressed-out workers?  Yep, me too—and we could do a lot to make that headache disappear by giving workers a highly contextual workplace that is powered by BPM.

But I've been a voice crying in the wilderness. I'm not kidding.  Whenever I would talk about collaboration with BPM vendors, they would somehow think I was talking about straight through processes between companies. That's collaboration, right???  And whenever I would talk about BPM with content and collaboration vendors, they would look at me blankly and mumble something about using simple workflow for approving documents.  It felt like two disconnected worlds that desperately needed to find each other.

In the past three months, I've noticed a huge sea change.

• It first hit me when I visited Salesforce.com in April.  One of the major, high-buzz topics of conversation that day was about integrating Facebook and Twitter with Salesforce's application.  The very fact that an application vendor was taking integration with Web 2.0 tools so seriously was an eye-opener.  Things were definitely heating up on the integrating collaboration with structured processes frontline.

• Then, I went to SAP's SAPPHIRE conference. The same thing happened. SAP showed applications that integrated information-rich visual data from Business Objects with its structured processes. Admittedly, this was more of a BI focus than a collaboration focus, but still, it marked the convergence of structured processes with more people-designed, visual information.

• Today, I attended the Workflow Management Coalition's Process.gov event and got firsthand validation that organizations have really started to integrate the structured and ad hoc worlds. Michael Ruiz from Deloitte demonstrated an application for the US Navy that supports Marine Domain Awareness.Situational awareness is the key concept behind this app. By integrating BPM with chat, e-mail, workflow, context sensitive collaboration, mobile messaging, picture messaging, wikis and data, the Navy can provide a highly contextual world for military analysts that automates every aspect of the job. It was an amazing demonstration of how process becomes more powerful when married with all the other people-oriented tools information workers use every day. 

I think a sea change is coming in the process world. Yes, straight through processes have their place.  And yes, BPM tackles many back office, transactional processes that don't have a heavy or even moderate collaboration angle.  But there's a huge world of work out there that involves e-mail and BI reports and documents—and we will truly put a dent in productivity time sinks if we can somehow get our arms around the entire world of work—not just that part that involves swim lanes, role activity diagrams and BPMN. Let's go work!

Podcast: The Use Of Text Analytics To Mine Unstructured Content

Our latest featured podcast is Leslie Owens's "The Use Of Text Analytics To Mine Unstructured Content."

In this podcast, Leslie sheds light on the tools and resources available to analyze and classify “unstructured text,” such as emails or survey documents. These tools could yield solutions to business problems as an add-on for business intelligence tools, or for customer relationship management.

We look forward to your questions and comments.

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BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!

By James Kobielus

In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”

Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.

Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.

Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding-edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.

No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):

• Level 1: Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications: This basic maturity level is for companies that have no prior BI or EDW; have little in-house BI expertise; and are comfortable with allowing casual users to use their browsers to customize parameterized reports from data from packaged business applications.                                                                
• Level 2: Deep presentation mashup against EDW: This level is for organization that do have prior BI and centralized EDWs, but have an understaffed BI development group and/or  power users and data modelers urgently require the ability to mashup and explore historical and current data within sophisticated BI workspaces.
• Level 3: Full BI mashup in federated environment: This level is for organizations that have decentralized, dynamic data management environments, and have the expertise to design reusable, composite data services to seamlessly mashup internal and external information.
• Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance: This level is for organizations that want to encourage subject  matter experts and operational users to collaborate on analytics created through mashup, but who are also concerned that all mashups be controlled, governed, and monitored in accordance with enterprise policies and best practices.

As I said, it will take a few years before we see a substantial number of enterprise case studies that implement the pinnacle of collaborative mashup with tight governance. Nevertheless, when you follow the evolution of next-generation solution portfolios from leading BI vendors such as SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and others, it’s clear that self-service user-centric mashup, to varying degrees, is a core theme.

BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.

AddressDoctor A Smart DQ Acquisition For Informatica, Still Moving Closer To MDM

by Rob Karel

Informatica today announced its planned acquisition of AddressDoctor GmbH, a premier global postal address data quality software vendor. AddressDoctor provides postal address cleansing and verification for over 240 countries through batch processing or real-time Web services, supporting 40 different character sets and can transliterate non-Latin characters including Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

While AddressDoctor may not be a household name for many data management professions, data quality (DQ) platform and master data management (MDM) vendors certainly know it. Vendors such as Capscan, DataFlux, Datanomic, IBM, Initiate Systems and Siperian either OEM or resell AddressDoctor technology to provide address cleansing capabilities within their broader DQ and/or MDM solutions. Even perceived competitors in the niche postal address verification market like Experian’s QAS and Melissa Data have relied on AddressDoctor to expand their global reach for postal address data.

Informatica also had a prior OEM relationship with AddressDoctor, so the ability to provide global address verification is nothing new. Instead, Informatica says the acquisition will support their “Pervasive DQ” strategy and will allow them to more easily embed address validation within their Profiling, DQ Scorecarding and Monitoring solutions, in addition to its Informatica On-demand “cloud” services.

But I also see this acquisition playing additional strategic roles for Informatica. First, by acquiring what amounts to a market-hub of global address verification technology, Informatica has the full attention of many of its DQ and data integration competitors like DataFlux and IBM. While Informatica has of course announced that they intend to support these prior partnerships, the reality is DataFlux and IBM should be shopping around for another channel to provide these capabilities – too risky to rely on the good graces of a tough competitor.

But for me, the most interesting outcome of this acquisition is that Informatica further entangles themselves with already strong partnerships with the two leading pure play MDM vendors, Initiate Systems and Siperian. Last year, Iblogged on Informatica’s acquisition of identity resolution (IR) vendor Identity Systems, and it seemed obvious to me then that Informatica was looking to do more than just to enter the IR market and enhance its DQ offering. I suggested at that time, and I believe even more strongly today, that these acquisitions are just the appetizers for Informatica as they determine how they can most successfully enter the ever-growing MDM market - not just as yet another new entrant in a market full of “me too’s”, but as a legitimate contender to derail MDM market share leaders IBM, Oracle, and SAP.

Here’s how:

Identity Systems, now branded as Informatica Identity Resolution, is certainly a great addition for Informatica’s data quality platform with its strong matching technology, but Identity Systems also remains the core match engine for Siperian’s MDM solution (among other MDM partnerships including D&B’s Purisma and Oracle). And now with the acquisition of AddressDoctor, Informatica also owns one of Siperian’s core data quality components. Add to that the fact that over 50% of Siperian’s customers use Informatica’s PowerCenter data integration platform to load data into the Siperian MDM Hub, it seems that Informatica is already directly influencing some pretty core parts of Siperian’s MDM success.

Informatica also has a solid partnership with Initiate Systems. In fact, Informatica even invested in Initiate, having participating in its last rounding of funding back in June 2008. It’s certainly feasible that Informatica could choose to acquire Initiate’s solid MDM platform instead, but the existing synergies between Informatica and Siperian still have me leaning towards that as the acquisition that can legitimately unseat IBM, Oracle, and SAP.

Of course all of this could be moot if Oracle decides to acquire Informatica to 1) resolve it’s noticeably absent data quality portfolio (beyond partnerships and OEMs), 2) give up trying to rationalize its Oracle-product-centric data integration portfolio (Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Warehouse Builder) in exchange for a market-leading heterogeneous platform, and 3) eliminate the risk of Informatica entering the MDM market as a competitor. These rumors have been floating around for a while now, and I’m not convinced - but big pockets like Oracle have been known to do the most interesting things…