BI, Analytics, And CEP: Some Fruitful Potential Follow-Ons From Software AG’s Acquisition Of IDS Scheer

 by James Kobielus

Yes, of course, Software AG is buying IDS Scheer primarily for the latter’s ARIS family of business process management (BPM) tools. I’ll leave it to my Forrester colleagues who focus on BPM--on both the IT and TI sides of the house--to call out the ramifications for Software AG’s positioning in that market.

But, believe it or not, this deal will also launch Software AG into the growing markets for business intelligence (BI), analytics, and complex event processing (CEP) solutions. We bet you didn’t realize that IDS Scheer has ARIS solutions in these fast growing markets, but in fact they do--and they’re continue to evolve those offerings.

It’s no surprise that IDS Scheer’s BI, analytics, and CEP offerings supplement and extend its BPM portfolio. Its CEP solution, ARIS Process Event Monitor, supports business activity monitoring (BAM). Its analytics offerings, ARIS Process Performance Management and ARIS Performance Dashboard, support visualization, dashboarding, scorecarding, drilldown, and alerting on process key performance indicators (KPIs), both historical and real-time. And its forthcoming BI offering, ARIS MashZone, will support self-service user development of reports, dashboards, and other views of process and business metrics.

IDS Scheer has little market share in these non-core segments. And the vendor is no immediate threat, by itself or under its future corporate parent, to the leaders in the BI, analytics, and CEP segments. Indeed, its forthcoming mashup-oriented BI offering only provides a subset of the features available from market leaders such as SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, and MicroStrategy. But the fact that Software AG will soon be able to provide its own offerings in those segments, rather than rely wholly on partners, represents an important step in its attempt to field a full service oriented architecture (SOA) solution stack.

As noted in a blog entry a year and a half ago, BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive SOA solution portfolio. SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features. This acquisition continues the ongoing SOA solution build-out strategy that motivated Software AG to acquire webMethods in 2007.

But it’s not clear yet whether Software AG plans to flesh out its BI, analytics, and CEP strategies going forward and thereby confront SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other SOA full-stack vendors head-on in these segments. It is also unclear how much effort or expense Software AG would incur in extricating the IDS Scheer offerings from the larger ARIS portfolio in order to make them more general-purpose and less BPM-centric. Nevertheless, Software AG will at the very least have a strong set of enabling technologies to support any such strategy in the near future.

What’s most exciting, and potentially differentiating, about the Software AG/IDS Scheer BI portfolio is the combination of CEP with mashup and an in-memory architecture to support truly real-time, interactive analytics. In other words, Software AG/IDS Scheer could take a page out of the book of another SOA full-stack vendor: TIBCO and its Spotfire product group. In doing so, Software AG/IDS Scheer would also be well-positioned to duke it out with SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, all of which are beginning to emphasize in-memory CEP-enabled BI strategies. As we noted in a report from late 2008, in-memory architectures are coming to dominate the BI arena. Likewise, Forrester has called attention in to the growing adoption of CEP for truly real-time BI.

Whether Software AG capitalizes on the opportunity to expand its SOA solution stack into BI remains to be seen. Considering that it took Oracle more than a year to publicly declare how it will position BEA’s CEP and data federation technologies within its own SOA stack, we may have to wait a while before Software AG and IDS Scheer craft an equivalent roadmap--if they ever do.

But if they wait too long, the newly merging vendors may find that the dynamic SOA, BI, and CEP markets have passed them by.

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!

Dislocation Intelligence In A Brutal Economy

By James Kobielus

It's painful to see the auto, newspaper, construction, financial services, and so many other formerly vibrant sectors of the world economy go down the proverbial tubes. One of the most nauseating realities is when millions of people lose their jobs, homes, and communities in a seeming blink.

I grew up in the perpetually recessionary Detroit area. I'm attuned to the regional dislocations that come from depending too much on an industry that has seen better days. Abandoned storefronts, dilapidated housing, vacant lots, tumbleweed-quiet city streets--all of it evidence of a growing ghost town, telltale signs of a marginal economy that depends on government programs, private charity, and low-wage service jobs. During my college years, I was a policy analyst with an urban coalition in downtown Detroit, and I could see that the slide was long-term and nigh irreversible.

Even in relatively well-off areas such as Washington DC, where I've spent close to a quarter-century, we’re not immune to serious economic dislocations. The National Capital Region, so reliant on federal spending, is likely to feel the brunt of whatever cuts Obama will almost certainly make to close this massive deficit. And even here you can’t escape dislocations in sectors that we all depend on, such as retailing, as evidenced by, for example, the ex-Circuit City big boxes that seem even bigger and boxier now that they’re totally empty.

In recent years, corporations have adopted location intelligence solutions to support their market-entry strategies, such as adding new stores and waging marketing campaigns. They also use these tools--essentially, geographic information systems coupled with predictive modeling--to optimize their footprint in existing markets. And to a lesser extent, they also use location intelligence to plan their exit strategy of closings and retrenchments. But when departures are hasty--such as any Chapter 11 proceeding--all we’re left with are vast tracts of vacant real estate, plus many formerly employed people who must find a way to survive amid ruins. Imagine how a General Motors or Chrysler bankruptcy will hit Detroit--it will be a liquidation to rival Hurricane Katrina in its devastation of a major city.

Dislocation intelligence is something that the leaders of the auto companies--and the Obama administration--should exercise when making the tough decisions to restructure this critical industry. People’s pain should be factored into decisions to close and relocate plants, so that, for example, whole cities--such as Flint, Toledo, and Janesville--can make a smooth exit from over-reliance on this one industry. As part of that effort, urban planners should consider the infrastructure that remains behind, so that, for example, whole regions of a city are not suddenly deprived of hospitals, grocery stores, and other basic amenities. Imagine you’re on welfare and have to somehow go 10 miles to buy a loaf of bread.

Mapping tools are just tools, not salvation. Detroit long ago passed a point of no return. The US auto industry will never recover the manufacturing jobs that attracted people from all over the world to southern Michigan, northern Ohio, and other regions.

But we as a country should try to smooth over these economic dislocations so that they don’t completely wipe some places off the map.

Can BPM Keep You From Getting Fired?

 By Clay Richardson

Okay, I have to admit it:  “My name is Clay and I am a political junkie.” They say the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. I am also a policy geek and I love watching C-SPAN.By now, I’m sure you’re wondering “What the heck does this have to do with I&KM pros?”

I believe last Wednesday’s House Hearing on Madoff and the SEC should be required viewing for all I&KM Pros – particularly for those of you that want to understand how BPM can keep you from getting fired.

If you caught the hearing in its entirety on C-SPAN (I had a front-row seat on my couch, thanks to being taken down by a nasty flu-like virus last Wednesday – this will become relevant a little later), you saw the whistleblower, Harry Markopoulos, rip into the SEC, FINRA, and other industry regulators. Mr. Markopoulos raised numerous red flags to the SEC about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme over an eight year period.

Pulling no punches, Mr. Markopolos called the SEC "incompetent" and FINRA "crooks" to their faces – senior representatives from both organizations were in the audience listening to the hearing and waiting for their opportunity to respond.  Following Mr. Markopoulos’s testimony, I thought "Hey, its time to get some popcorn, the fight’s on!" Then I recalled why I was home in the first place – sick, right? 

After a little break, the House brought out the SEC heads for their grilling.  I was particularly taken by the grilling given to the heads of SEC Compliance and SEC Enforcement.  My naïve assumption was that these people would have reasonable answers about why Madoff’s $50B Ponzi scheme fell through the cracks.  Boy, was I wrong!  They had not a single coherent answer.  In fact their collective answer was (I am summarizing here for them): "I don’t understand my own process."

Rep. Gary Ackerman completely went off on all of the SEC heads testifying at the hearing.  Based on Ackerman’s response, I hope all of the SEC heads started job hunting immediately following the hearing.  There is no doubt left in my mind that they will all be fired summarily (looks like I moved too slow on getting this blog post out).

After watching the hearing, I thought to myself "These people could have avoided being fired if they had simply implemented a good BPM solution."  Here are my Top 3 suggestions on how BPM could have kept them from getting fired (or at least kept them from appearing incompetent on C-SPAN):

Job Saver #1, Transparency – During the hearing, the SEC was grilled numerous times regarding specifics on how their compliance and enforcement processes worked.  For example, several congressmen asked "How many red flags does it take before action is taken?"  None of the SEC heads could answer this question.  Implemented properly, BPM provides the transparency needed to answer these types of questions.  Or at least it allows you to say, "We did not consider red flags as part of the process, and here is why…"  The other benefit of BPM is that the SEC's visual process for enforcement and compliance could have been published on the web for all to see.  Then, the SEC heads could have answered, "…as outlined in our current process, published on the Web…"  This would have helped them demonstrate the greatest degree of transparency.  I believe there is an opportunity here for process-wiki vendors (e.g., Lombardi Blueprint, Itensil, etc.)...

Job Saver #2, Business Rules – Many of the congressmen also asked about escalation rules for investigations in addition to several other "rules" related failures that allowed Madoff’s scheme to go undetected.  My immediate thought was that most of the rules discussed could easily have been captured by a rules engine to automatically escalate and route processes accordingly.  One of the congressmen asked "Do you give additional weight to tips coming from highly credible sources, like Mr. Markopoulos?"  The SEC responded, "Yes, we do.  However, we have to look at the history of the source."  The SEC's response left me thinking this is not a "rules" governed process – in other words "you are credible, if we think you are credible."  No, there should be documented and institutionalized rules that govern whether a source is credible.

Job Saver #3, Workload Management – Finally, one of the congressmen asked "How many fraud tips do you get in a given year?"  The SEC response:  "We get over 100,000 and there is no way we can chase down each and every one…"  I thought this was the most telling response.  In other words, the SEC was saying "We could not catch Bernie Madoff because we had too many fraud tips coming in..."  Using BPM, they could have automatically identified tips that had a high chance of fraud and routed these tips to be vetted by staff members with the appropriate expertise.

I&KM pros should take note!  If you have internal processes that are compliance-related (or otherwise), BPM is ideally suited to provide the transparency needed to make you look good in front of Congress, ahem, I mean key stakeholders,  that have hard charging questions when things go haywire.

After the House Hearing on Madoff and the SEC wrapped up, I finally decided I was sick enough to take myself to the doctor.  However, instead of going to my family practitioner, I decided to check out the “Minute Clinic”, CVS’s in-store quick clinic.  My experience there was the exact opposite of the fiasco I had just seen on C-SPAN.  I left the doctor thinking "The SEC could learn a thing or two from the Minute Clinic about how good processes work…"

In my next blog I will share more about my positive process experience at the "Minute Clinic"…

Meet One-On-One With Forrester Analysts At Our Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Consistently rated as one of the most popular features of Forrester Events, one-on-one meetings give you the opportunity to discuss the unique technology issues facing your organization with Forrester analysts. Business & Technology Leadership Forum attendees may schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with the Forrester analysts of their choice, depending on availability. Registered attendees will be able to schedule one-on-one meetings starting on Monday September 15, 2008. Book early!

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B

William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
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Matthew Brown
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Marketing and advertising, enterprise portals, intranets and extranets, information and knowledge management
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Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
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Bobby Cameron
Research coverage for CIOs
IT governance, risk, and compliance; the marketing of IT; serving the business; security and risk
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Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
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Patrick M. Connaughton
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Supply chain management services, supply chain management applications, enterprise mobility, RFID
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Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
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Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
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Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
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Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
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Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
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Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
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Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
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Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
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George Lawrie
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Retail information technology; consumer goods supply chain; pricing, promotions, and revenue optimization; collaborative processes such as trade promotions management and sales; and operations planning
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Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
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Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
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Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
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Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
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Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
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Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
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Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
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Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer service and support, customer experience, customer experience management, business strategy for customer experience
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Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
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Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
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Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
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Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
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Ted Schadler
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Real-time collaboration tools (instant messaging, presence, document sharing, etc.), cloud-based collaboration and email, mobile collaboration tools and applications, virtual worlds for the enterprise
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Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
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Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
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Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
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Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
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R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
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Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
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Gil Yehuda
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Enterprise Web 2.0 and Social Computing; collaboration strategy, tools, and culture; virtual communities of practice; virtual team collaboration
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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.

BI's New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond

By James Kobielus

Business intelligence (BI) remains one of the most vital and innovative sectors of the data management arena. The past year saw BI achieve a new degree of importance in the solution portfolios of users everywhere. In fact, BI has begun to play into a much broader range of enterprise IT planning and deployment decisions than ever before. What follows are the most important trends that will continue to transform the BI industry, and add a new degree of complexity into decisions confronting CIOs, enterprise architects, and information and knowledge management professionals:

• BI becoming SOA’s crown jewel: The past year has seen a rash of headline-grabbing M&A deals in the BI arena, with Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, SAP’s deal for Business Objects, and IBM’s pending takeover of Cognos—not to mention acquisitions of smaller BI and corporate performance management (CPM) application vendors by most of those firms. It’s far too easy to misinterpret these recent events as just more of the same M&A-stoked empire-building that we’ve come to expect from large IT solution vendors. What’s driving this recent industry consolidation—which is sure to continue in 2008--is growing vendor recognition that BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution portfolio. Though Oracle and SAP (and, to a lesser degree, IBM) already had decent BI wares in their respective SOA portfolios, none of them were on any enterprise’s short list of name-brand BI solution providers—until, that is, each of them decided to grab a leading BI pure-play. SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features.
• BI evolving into tailored business analytics: CPM—sometimes called “business analytics”—is rapidly becoming a key competitive front in the BI wars. Increasingly, BI/CPM vendors are offering tailored solutions for a dizzying range of horizontal business requirements and vertical industries. Vendors’ continued profitability also hinges on their ability to provide the professional services necessary to create, customize, and support business analytics for each vertical industry’s and specific customer’s unique requirements. Without a doubt, we’ll see further verticalization of product and service offerings by CPM vendors in 2008, which will provide a necessary hedge against the inevitable creep of commoditization into such horizontal analytics segments as financial, human resources, sales and marketing, and supply chain management.
• BI going truly real-time through complex event processing: Complex event processing (CEP) promises business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams. However, CEP has heretofore been conspicuously missing from the mainstream BI arena, necessitating stovepipe CEP implementations that are only loosely integrated with enterprises’ existing visualization, reporting, dashboarding, information modeling, metadata, and other BI infrastructure components. That will change big-time in 2008, as most leading BI vendors start to partner with CEP pure-plays, or acquire them outright, in order to strengthen their support for real-time event-driven applications. Indeed, we expect IBM to ramp up its CEP/BI integration now that it is acquiring both CEP pure-play AptSoft and BI/CPM vendor Cognos. AptSoft will also figure into IBM’s business process management (BPM) portfolio in support of closed-loop BI and business activity monitoring (BAM). We also expect to see SAP/Business Objects, Oracle/Hyperion, SAS Institute, Microsoft, Information Builders, and MicroStrategy venture into the CEP arena in the coming year. Likewise, it’s very likely that the newly independent Teradata, which has taken the lead in real-time data warehousing (DW), will snatch up a CEP vendor to build out its real-time BI portfolio.
• BI bundling with DW appliances: Appliances have even begun to take up permanent residence at the heart of the enterprise data center: in the DW and BI infrastructures. Increasingly, vendors are focusing on integrating, packaging, and pricing their DW/BI products as pre-configured, modular appliances for quick deployment. These appliances consist of processing, storage, and software components that have been prepackaged, preconfigured, and pre-optimized for core DW/BI functions such as multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) queries, bulk data loading, and online archiving. The past year saw a growing range of DW vendors—including such DBMS powerhouses as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft—reorient their DW/BI go-to-market strategies around the appliance model. In turn, leading BI vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos made a big push into the appliance arena. In 2008 and beyond, more and more DW vendors will pre-integrate BI solutions—their own and/or those of their partners—into their appliances. Increasingly, DW/BI appliances will be tailored, packaged, and priced for many market segments and deployment scenarios.
• BI goes collaborative: Collective intelligence is an organization’s most precious asset. Traditionally, the BI industry has offered little to directly address one of the most critical components of group IQ: the collaboration environment. Instead, most BI applications focus on delivering targeted reports, analytics, dashboards, multidimensional visualization, and other key data to individual end users in isolation, rather than to larger business teams. In the past year, though, the BI industry has begun to roll out more collaboration features in their products—such as Microsoft with their new Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 solution--or, at the very least, to begin talking about new collaboration features to expect in the coming year. In 2008 and beyond, we expect to see the BI, collaboration, and knowledge management segments converge. Likewise, we expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs, wikis, and social networking revolutionize the BI experience. Many BI vendors now realize that decision support environments should allow users to access intelligence wherever it may reside, be it in data warehouses or in the heads of remote colleagues.

Going forward, Forrester will increasingly focus on the cross-synthesis of BI with all of these solution areas. We will provide best practices, methodologies, and tools to help customers sort through the myriad issues.

Notes From Oracle OpenWorld

by Connie Moore, Colin Teubner, Rob Karel, Ken Poore, Rob Koplowitz, Stephen Powers, Barry Murphy and Claire Schooley.

A few weeks ago, several Forrester analysts attended Oracle World. Now that we've gotten back and had a chance to think about what we've heard, we wanted to post this blog to share our thoughts with clients. Here are some observations on what we heard from Oracle about BPM and middleware, data integration and data quality, search and collaboration, enterprise content management and social computing, message archiving and retention management, and human capital management.

BPM and Middleware feedback from Colin Teubner:

What really struck me is how much Oracle was talking about middleware. Charles Phillips opened his keynote talking about it and Oracle's application integration architecture (AIA — if you don't know what that is, it's a whole separate discussion), and Larry spent a lot of time in his keynote talking about it too. In fact, middleware has been the fastest growing part of Oracle's business for at least two or three years, and they have several significant advantages over IBM's stack from my perspective.

Specifically, they are talking about having the only business process management suite that covers content-centric processes using the same engine as for integration-centric or people-centric processes. (This discussion wasn't at the executive level, but farther down in the BPM product management area.) They poked fun at "some vendors" who make you use different, acquired technology for different types of processes. I haven't seen specifics of how Oracle's BPEL product (Collaxa) works with Stellent though, but they definitely do NOT go for IBM's idea of a "portfolio" of software. It's a comprehensive stack, and if you don't want to use one piece of it, that's fine — just use the other pieces and they'll integrate with what you have. They don't sell anything that overlaps in functionality with anything else.

Data Integration and Quality feedback from Rob Karel:

My main takeaway from OracleWorld, specifically around Oracle's data integration strategies, is that its data quality software strategy is a mess.

Oracle already has some internal competition from an ETL perspective between its Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) product that the Database Group embeds within the 11g database and the Fusion Middleware groups' Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), which was acquired last year from Sunopsis. While Oracle is doing some cross-development between the two solutions, for the most part these two teams operate independently with their own roadmaps and objectives — sometimes competing for mindshare.

The most recent demonstration of this was when I met separately with executives from the database group, the ODI team, and the master data management team and discussed what Oracle is doing about data quality. The ODI team just informed me of a DQ partnership with Trillium Software with the release of Oracle Data Quality for Oracle Data Integrator (ODQODI).  ODQODI is a joint development partnership that packages both Oracle's ODI data integration and Trillium's DQ products into a single license, single install. ODIODQ includes Trillium's batch data profiling, parsing, and matching functionality, although customers who are looking for real time data quality or postal address verification would need to engage Trillium directly to enable those capabilities and services. This is a strange partnership because I expect ODI to be Oracle's "real-time" integration solution, while the partnership only supports batch (not real-time) data quality.

The database team, on the other hand, continues to focus on data as an embedded part of OWB functionality and doesn't seem to care what ODI is doing.  In the meantime, the MDM team is focusing its integration efforts with ODI, but I don't see this Trillium/ODQODI partnership as all that valuable for their MDM product since they should prefer to have real-time/transactional data quality capabilities to complement their MDM offerings.

Oracle has other data quality solutions spread throughout its portfolio including Siebel Data Quality Matching Server used within its Siebel apps environment, recently acquired Hyperion System 9 Financial Data Quality management that came along with its purchase of BI vendor Hyperion, and matching and parsing functionality embedded within its Universal Customer Master, Oracle Customer Hub and Oracle Product Hub MDM offerings. To enhance data quality within its MDM offerings, Oracle also partners with Silver Creek Systems for product data quality and Trillium for customer data quality. 

I believe Oracle will need to reconcile its internal product development and partnering strategies to eliminate the confusion created by so many data quality offerings spread across its portfolio. 

Search and Collaboration feedback from Ken Poore:

I focused on search while at Oracle World. I had several one-on-ones, a few which included my colleague, Matt Brown. We had a session with a partner that had positive things to say about the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) product and team, most notably that the team was very helpful and took many of their suggestions and rolled it back into the product — a good sign for a still relatively young product. In my experience, that sort of 'listening' only lasts for the first two or three releases of a product. We also had a session with a customer, but it was more portal-centric and turned out to be marginally useful.

I had an extended couple of sessions with Vishu Krishnamurthy (Director of Development for most of their collaboration tools) and several of the product managers. It was a very positive two-way exchange. They shared many of their latest developments, and I shared some my thoughts on their direction as well as some ideas that I have been developing to help push the market along. I felt — and they concurred — that SES is just emerging as a true contender against similar products from IBM and Microsoft. They are still fleshing out a lot of me-too capability, but they are really bolstering their connectivity capabilities and entity extraction, two key areas in the enterprise search market these days that could leap-frog or least enable them to catch up quickly. Oracle has some really solid ideas, especially around distributing components of search indexing to the owners of the applications being searched (CRM, ERP, etc.) instead of leaving it in the hands of the 'search team'. Doing so enhances the buy-in from every department involved and leverages the application owner's expertise and context.

So while I would say there were no earthshaking announcements, I felt like they have a very strong product management, technical, and marketing strategy that will only gain momentum from this point forward. It is a very competitive market, and like IBM, they will struggle trying to be successful against the pure-plays for customers that do not have a significant incumbent investment in Oracle products (or in IBM products, in IBM's case).

Enterprise Content Management and Social Computing feedback from Rob Koplowitz:

I heard a bit about the ECM direction from Rich Buchheim. He states that at least one Stellent product will be retooled to run directly on Content DB. That's an interesting development from a scalability perspective. I suspect that will be a major engineering effort and won't be fully implemented in the next release.

The other thing that was interesting is that WebCenter Suite is being positioned as the standard front-end for Fusion apps. As a matter of fact, one of the defining elements of a "Fusion" app is that it will have a WebCenter front-end. The convergence of WebCenter and Content DB is pretty cool. Essentially, any app using WebCenter will have native access to content stored in Content DB. Essentially, it means that Oracle apps will be able to seamlessly surface content in context in any application. The cool part will be that content generated on one app can be surfaced anywhere. For example, if a document is stored as part of sales process in a SFA app it can be called natively from inside of a support CRM app if they want to see what the customer was promised. Since it's a Web service call from a database with rich metadata the content becomes extremely portable.

The other thing Oracle talked about a lot was Social Computing. There was a big emphasis on blogs, wikis, social networking, tagging and RSS in WebCenter, which again means it can be natively leveraged in Fusion apps.

Enterprise Content Management feedback from Stephen Powers:

I spoke with some members of the ECM team, and they were talking up integrations between Oracle’s Universal Content Management, and Siebel. But Siebel will act as the base application, not UCM. So, if Siebel customers are looking for ECM, Oracle wants to offer them an SOA-based ECM option that sits on top of Siebel, rather than trying to sell them a separate UCM package. They're also making noise around product catalog management, and real-time predictive analytics. They hedged a bit on functionality roadmap, though.

For Digital Asset Management (DAM), Oracle plans to go upmarket, with integrations with Adobe InDesign. And it will be able to have greater video management capabilities, such as management of multi-part files, indexing of closed captioning, management and indexing of call center audio files.

I also spoke with someone from Sealed Media, the DRM vendor that was acquired by Stellent a few months before Oracle bought them. Oracle has rebranded Sealed Media as Information Rights Manager. But I got the sense that they are not very well integrated with the rest of the company; while we spoke about Sealed Media functionality, I didn't get the sense that they're working very closely with other members of the UCM team.

Human Capital Management feedback from Claire Schooley:

HCM people in recruiting and learning talked about the social computing aspects of learning that are coming soon (whatever that means) and that will be a part of Fusion in the future. Here's an overview of the scenario:

An organization that wants to hire an intern who might turn into an employee after graduation would contact colleges and get student recommendations from professors. An email would then be sent to the students suggesting that they go to a link on company's Website and read about the job. If student is still interested, he/she registers and then can interact about the job with those in charge. If still interested, the student completes a proposal on how he/she would approach and carry-out the task along with information about themselves and a picture if they want. These proposals are read and reviewed by staff and online discussion occurs (Web and video) with the final two or three candidates. Once chosen, the successful candidate is put into a partitioned group of temporary employees and completes all the HR forms and information well before they start work. They also are part of a community of practice (CoP) that they can access to get more familiar with organization, project documents, etc. and meet and interact with people on the team they will work on. When they start work, students know and have interacted with the people they will be working with, will have taken care of all HR transactional material — and are ready to work. (The key is that all these technologies are linked seamlessly).

Convergence Of The 3 Bs

by Boris Evelson and Colin Teubner.

Business intelligence (BI) practitioners have always thought of the world as data-centric. Data integration, data warehouses, data marts, reports, and query builders were always about data. BI has traditionally excelled at answering questions like "what happened" or even "why did it happen" but always fell short on "what do I do about it" and fell short of the next logical steps which traditionally have been the realm of business process management (BPM) and business rules engines (BRE). This data-centric view of the world turns out to be plain wrong. The world is much more process and rules-centric. We run many processes every time we come to the office, these processes generate data, which in turn trigger rules, and in turn generate more data output that is being consumed by processes in an endless loop.

We've been researching the topic of "3Bs": BI, BPM, and BRE convergence for several months here at Forrester. We started out on the tack that while the requirements and applications for convergence between these technologies are very strong, almost intuitive, actual vendor solutions in the area are weak and require significant customization. While many vendors actually possess several of these technologies, innovation in combining them together has so far been limited to the BPM vendors — and because these companies tend to sell their wares as a platform, rather than as a specific solution to a problem, buyers are left to combine BPM, rules and BI themselves. Yes, many BI vendors can trigger basic report workflows based on certain conditions and can expose data or consume data as a service. And yes, many application vendors embed BI dashboards into applications. What we need today, however, are generic BI, BPM and BRE tools with clear integration points. Tomorrow, we'll be looking for end users and VARs putting these converged solutions together themselves.

Why is this convergence so important? BPM vendors sell efficiency gains, BI vendors sell visibility into business results, and rules vendors sell optimized decision-making — but for this type of software to have a profound impact on a business, all three technologies need to be used in a drive towards business optimization. BI tools are needed to help understand results of BPM processes; rules describe what constitutes a significant event and what actions should be taken; BPM is needed to provide process context and take action on those results.

And once an as-is process is optimized in this way, the process itself must be improved to see additional business gains. BI must step up and provide results in process context, combining both process metrics and business metrics. All this leads to real insight into the business, its processes and how they work, giving answers to more advanced questions. "How can we make this process faster?" becomes "Should we be doing this process?" or "What else do our customers need?"

An added benefit — icing on the cake — is "context-aware BI". BI has been traditionally hard to use, especially in a self service environment because most of the time users start with a blank slate. They open up a blank dashboard or an ad-hoc query tool and are immediately presented with a variety of KPIs, KPMs, facts, dimensions, etc. and are forced make a decision on where to start, what measures to pick first, what is really relevant to the problem at hand. In the converged world of process centric or context aware BI, one would almost never start with a blank dashboard. Since it is the process that pulls the dashboard automatically at the right place and the right time, the process is aware of where it is and what decision needs to be made. It can therefore pre-populate that dashboard with the right KPIs/KPMs or the right intersection of facts and dimensions for the user to hit the ground running with the analysis and decisions.

There seem to be a chicken and the egg syndrome going on here: Vendors are not putting a lot of attention to this matter because there's not much customer demand, and customers are not really thinking in terms of process-centric BI because no one's educated them on the benefits of going to converged 3B model. Who's right and who's wrong here? Please submit your thoughts and ideas and we'll do our best to include them in our upcoming report on the subject.