Governance Risk Compliance Agenda....Critical in Turbulent Economy, But Conspicuously Missing from IBM’s IOD Go-To-Market Message

By James Kobielus

If it’s October, it must be time for IBM’s annual Information On Demand (IOD) conference. Initiated 3 years ago, IOD has become an indispensable event for any Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professional who has deployed IBM’s sprawling data management solution portfolio.

And IBM doesn’t disappoint: each annual conference is jampacked with important announcements that improve the vendor’s positioning in the forefront of today’s information-driven economy. If anything, IOD has become so crowded with IBM announcements that some important events or themes can easily be overlooked or given less emphasis than they deserve.

IBM realizes this, which is why the vendor works hard in advance of the show to define a coherent set of themes that not only address key customer requirements but also tie to key new product initiatives or releases. This year, that overarching theme is “Information Agenda,” which, you’ll notice, I blogged on several weeks ago. At heart, Information Agenda refers to IBM’s IOD solution focus: positioning its offerings as key customer enablers for business agility, transformation, optimization, and efficiency.

It’s a great theme: very empowering, hopeful, and solution-focused. But, sitting here at IOD, it occurs to me that another key theme is looming in the background, threatening to eclipse it all. The approaching storm is the worldwide financial meltdown, economic slowdown, and the very real likelihood of sharp cuts in IT budgets everywhere. It manifests itself in the increased economic volatility and risk we all face, and for which we’re all trying to hedge all of our strategies and plans. It’s clamping down on us in the increasing government regulation, control, and monitoring being imposed on a growing swath of the world economy. It will result in government-mandated deployment of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions, which will need to leverage companies’ investments in business intelligence (BI), performance management, and data warehousing (DW) solutions.

Oddly, IBM paid precious little attention to GRC at this year’s IOD--though its Cognos group rolled out  enhancements to its financial performance analytics portfolio,  its enterprise content management (ECM) portfolio enhanced its e-discovery and records management features, and it deepened its already comprehensive Optim portfolio for information lifecycle management (ILM).

And it’s not as if IBM has no GRC strategy. On previous occasions, IBM has put forth a credible strategy that ties its ECM, identity management, and other offerings into a portfolio that is roughly on a function par with Oracle, SAP, and other diversified software vendor.

But not at this year’s IOD. To IBM’s credit, many of their execs discussed the economic climate soberly and insightfully. But nobody, it seemed, wanted to rain on the IOD parade--in which the sunny “business optimization” theme prevailed--by bringing the teeth-gritting GRC theme into it in any way.

My primary beef with Information Agenda? As noted in that previous post, it’s a bit too vague, and a tad too blandly optimistic. Yes, there are always business opportunities, but we’re now in a business landscape where the threats are even more salient.

So, IBM, let’s also discuss customers’ Governance Agendas....their Risk Agendas...their Compliance Agendas...their Demonstrate-to-the-Feds-That-Our-Books-Are-Shipshape Agendas...their Son-of-SarbOx Agendas...their Survive-and-Avoid-Government-Takeover Agendas. How does the IOD portfolio support those agendas?

The big bad recession. Everybody from Ben Bernanke on down says it’s here or coming soon. So why not address it head-on, soberly, with solutions, or, at the very least, approaches that leverage solutions in which customers have already invested?

On a related note, IBM failed to fully address another key concern in a sour economy: cutting IT costs without compromising investments in core BI, analytics, and operational data assets. On the DW appliance side of the equation, IBM did not present a strategic response to recent announcements by Oracle and Teradata, under which those competitors are now providing highly affordable petabyte-scale DW solutions. IBM has strong DW appliance offerings in its InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse portfolio, but it had no new announcements that match Oracle’s and Teradata’s big splashes.

So, if anything, those were the prime disappointments at this year’s IOD show. It was a missed opportunity for IBM both to counter the competition and also address a key concern of its budget- and survival-stressed I&KM customers.

Event Report: Siperian Masters 2008 - Customers Confirm Multi-Entity MDM Trends

by Ray Wang

About 200 attendees were present as Ramon Chen, VP of Marketing, kicked off the event to the theme of adventurers and pioneers in MDM at the Bridgewater Marriott (New Jersey).   CEO, Peter Caswell, led the keynote session with a view on where Siperian has been, where Siperian is going, and then introduced the Ravi Jagannathan VP of Product Management and Manish Sood, Senior Director of Product Management. They presented Siperian's road map well into 2012.  Key announcements include:

• Ongoing expansion of the partner ecosystem and alliances.
• Announcement of semantic masters for unstructured data.
• Focus on easier to maintain GUI
• Continued availability of modular deployment options and other cost effective implementations
• New state management and work flow integration tie backs to the Lombardi BPM tools
• Visually appealing data governance dashboards.

In addition, a few key trends emerged from conversations with customers and partners:

• Most customers who had MDM projects also were embarked on SOA projects
• Pharma customers successfully proved ROI and justification despite being in SAP and Oracle "only" environments
• Availability of system integrator resources has improved.
• MDM projects need to be more pervasive and address innovation in order to gain long term political support.
• Many customers have reached what Forrester Research considers a Level 3 and 4 MDM maturity.
• Prospects continue to see Siperian as short listed vendors
• Many seek more innovation from their MDM systems and are beginning to branch out of their single data entity focus.

The bottom line

Siperian customers seem to be well ahead of the pioneering stage with MDM.    Customers we spoke to remain satisfied with their decisions and have been successful in proving existing value.  many customers have transcended past level 3 on the MDM maturity model.

Your POV

Do these trends jive with what you are seeing in MDM and CDI? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.  Post a comment or privately reach out to me at rwang@forrester.com

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!

• a
• b
• c
• d
• e
• f
• g
• h
• i
• j
• k
• l
• m
• n
• o
• p
• q
• r
• s
• t
• u
• v
• w
• x
• y
• z

B

William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
See all »

Matthew Brown
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Marketing and advertising, enterprise portals, intranets and extranets, information and knowledge management
See all »

Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
See all »

Back to top »

C

Bobby Cameron
Research coverage for CIOs
IT governance, risk, and compliance; the marketing of IT; serving the business; security and risk
See all »

Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
See all »

Patrick M. Connaughton
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Supply chain management services, supply chain management applications, enterprise mobility, RFID
See all »

Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
See all »

Back to top »

E

Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
See all »

Back to top »

G

Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
See all »

Back to top »

H

Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
See all »

Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
See all »

Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
See all »

Back to top »

K

Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
See all »

Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
See all »

Back to top »

L

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
See all »

Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
See all »

Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
See all »

Back to top »

M

Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
See all »

Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
See all »

Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
See all »

Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
See all »

Back to top »

O

Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
See all »

Back to top »

P

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
See all »

Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
See all »

Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
See all »

Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
See all »

Back to top »

R

Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
See all »

Back to top »

S

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
See all »

Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
See all »

Back to top »

T

Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
See all »

Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
See all »

Back to top »

W

Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
See all »

R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
See all »

Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
See all »

Back to top »

Y

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
See all »

Back to top »

Chrome: Google’s Shiny New Browser Doesn’t Dull IE’s Dominance

By Sheri McLeish

Google's beta launch today of its own open source browser, Chrome, is an unsurprising step that complements Google's ongoing efforts to own the desktop and take market share away from Microsoft. While others have tried to and failed to chip away at Microsoft's desktop browser IE, Google has good reason to think it can go head-to-head with MS — it has the eyes of consumers in North America and Western Europe, and access to millions of people and resources to further own the desktop experience building upon search, email, and calendaring. This isn't simply a play for the browser market; it's a component of a larger, long-term strategy to take over the desktop.

The surprising part of the announcement of Chrome is the question it raises around Google's investment in Mozilla and the open source browser Firefox. According to a recent Forrester survey, Firefox now has nearly 20 percent of the browser market and is the closest competitor to Microsoft.  While many are scratching their heads at why Google would look to compete with itself, the likely scenario is that Firefox and Chrome can work together to erode Microsoft's browser market share. Firefox, with 200 million users, has already been appealing to the tech set as the open source alternative for the anti-Microsoft crowd. The Chrome browser can take advantage of Google's greater brand recognition, can leverage Google's presence as a search tool to increase awareness of Chrome, and it can evolve to suit Google's vision of the desktop experience and differentiate itself from the current browser paradigm. It's not just anti-Microsoft and open source, it's what Google is calling the "modern" browser, built from scratch without the baggage of past.

But the question remains about how Google can get people to adopt Chrome. For users to switch browsers they must 1) be aware of alternatives and 2) have compelling reason to do so. The choice of browser for most people is tacit. They use whatever comes installed with their computer or is provisioned by IT. Since IE comes bundled with Windows, most people are still using IE. Even Microsoft is challenged to get people to upgrade browsers to its latest versions. So despite the differentiating features like running complex web applications better on back end, for the enterprise, Google Chrome may present the same issue many have with Microsoft — fear of lock in, but now not solely with Microsoft, but Google as well. And there are questions of interoperability. Will Google's apps only work, or work much better with their browser? How interoperable will it be? Until these questions can be effectively addressed, the immediate threat to Microsoft's desktop dominance is minimal.

Is Salesforce.com The Key To The Cloud Kingdom?

By Rob Koplowitz

Today Google and Salesforce.com announced another step in their ongoing flirtatious relationship. Salesforce.com will now bundle Google business applications into its on-line CRM offering. Salesforce will also begin to distribute Google applications backed by Salesforce support. It's always interesting when these two make an announcement for two reasons: First, they are both 100% committed to cloud computing and they think about the future of the industry in very similar terms. Second, it is fundamentally interesting to conjecture about the potential of a Salesforce acquisition. Note the rumor mill cranking up on this topic a few weeks ago when Oracle arranged for a $2B line of credit.

Now, Marc Benioff has stated early, often and loudly that Saleforce.com is not an acquisition target and has every intention of becoming the next major software infrastructure vendor. Fair enough. Salesforce.com has done all the right things to do just that. They've invested heavily in an infrastructure and built a reputation that represents a significant barrier to entry to anyone that wants to horn in on their territory. Salesforce.com has a significant history of securely and reliably delivering mission critical enterprise applications in the cloud. Raise your hand if you can make that claim. Not a lot of hands.

That said, there are folks gunning for this emerging opportunity. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP all have on-line CRM offerings. IBM and Microsoft are moving into on-line collaboration. These are not necessarily folks you want coming after you. The disruption that can and will be caused by cloud computing is a potential source of risk and opportunity for every major player in the industry.

So, if cloud computing becomes the norm for more and more types of users, data and processes what are the characteristics that will define the winners? In a recent document,we defined some of them and rated Google and others. It's interesting to revisit Google and Saleforce as a single offering:

• Data Center Efficiency and Reliability — Google did extremely well. They run applications incredibly efficiently. They would do better with Salesforce's expertise in enterprise reliability.
• Applications Designed For Multi-tenancy — Google did very well. Salesforce.com would make the offer even better because of the nuances associated with enterprise requirements.
• Enterprise Experience — Google scored on the middle of the scale. When it comes to the cloud, no one does this better than Salesforce.
• Efficient Go-To-Market Channels — Google scored in the middle of the scale. The big players still have major leverage points. Saleforce.com helps and Google has the ability to completely redefine the go-to-market model.
• Application Functionality — Google scored in the middle again. That said, Google is delivering new functionality at a torrid pace and Saleforce.com has lots to bring to the table.
• Adjacent Market Leverage — Google didn't score well. They took a big step forward today by moving to integrate their productivity, content and collaboration offerings with a major player in CRM that already has a footprint in the enterprise. Still not as strong as the existing infrastructure players, but a step in the right direction.

Here's the bottom line. It looks like a sea change is coming and Salesforce.com is sitting smack in the middle of it. The big players are moving quickly and aggressively which could  ultimately spoil the best laid plans and aspirations of Salesforce.com. They like to squeeze little guys with good technology and markets. The problem here is that an acquisition of Saleforce.com by any of the major players represents a huge threat to all of the other players. So, squeezing could end up driving them and their assets into the hands of the enemy.

Oh No, Not Another 2.0 -- Database 2.0? Data Warehousing In The Cloud!

By James Kobielus

Boris Evelson's latest post on free BI got me thinking about another type of freedom.

Boris commented on the newly announced beta of a gratis, lightweight, Panorama-powered BI/OLAP-engine add-on to Google's hosted apps. You know, whenever anybody mentions BI/OLAP, I think of analytical databases, hence data warehousing (DW). And when my thoughts turn to DW, I often wonder when these dimensional data stores will be let loose from their earthly tethers and begin to float free in the SaaS cloud. This is no blue-sky speculation, but rather an inevitability in a world shifting to subscription-based SaaS for on-demand delivery of all infrastructure and application services. Where database services are concerned, this trend even has a name in popular circulation: Database 2.0 (aka "cloud databases").

Let it be known that Google is one of the pioneers in Database 2.0, though they haven't tooted their horn or done anything particularly special in this regard (smaller SaaS solution providers such as Trackvia, DabbleDB, and Zoho have more full-featured Database 2.0 offerings than Google, albeit not particularly BI/OLAP/DW-focused). A year or two ago, Google went open beta (still in that phase, actually) with a hosted database service called GoogleBase. Now, from what I've seen, GoogleBase is not a general-purpose transactional or analytical database. And it’s certainly not a DW or data mart in the clouds. Instead, GoogleBase seems to be an online repository -- or rather, depository -- into which external parties submit structured data for Google to crawl and index deeply for access from Google's big whompin' search engine.

Even more noteworthy is Microsoft's recent foray into the Database 2.0 space -- a move that some might consider a "validation" of this approach in the eyes of enterprise I&KM professionals. Microsoft has just rolled out a beta of its hosted SQL Server Data Services. The vendor has started to host services that have heretofore have been available only from SaaS partners. This is, of course, a key piece of the Redmond WA-based vendor's begrudging effort to push more solutions into a Microsoft-hosted SaaS cloud. However, from what I can see so far, Microsoft is simply hosting a subset of the functionality of its general-purpose RDMBS platform for OLTP and OLAP. However, Microsoft has not specifically optimized SQL Server Data Services for OLAP, unlike any truly scalable BI/OLAP/DW platform.

Back to Google for a sec. What I fully expect from them in the coming year or two -- and from every SaaS cloud everywhere before long -- are feature-complete, hosted, subscription-based DW services for high-performance, high-volume, complex analytics. Naturally, this cloud should be called DW 2.0. It should leverage the full virtualized, distributed, scalable, grid-enabled computing fabric that the Googles of this world can bring to bear on the very largest structured data sets, most resource-intensive query-processing tasks, and richest visualizations imaginable. Per Boris's suggestion, it could even serve as a supremely scalable BI, data mining, or predictive analytics "sandbox" for developers and power users who have no other speedy, cost-effective alternatives for procuring the necessary horsepower for various projects and production requirements.

I second Boris’s challenge: Google should consider integrating the Panorama OLAP-engine add-on (remember, it's just a beta) with a more analytics-enabling future version of GoogleBase (which is also still a beta). In so doing, Google -- if it eventually decides to go into full production with all this -- would be able to offer full-featured DW and BI services on a hosted platform that is as infinitely scalable as the concatenated string of Os inside the ever-extensible company name that displays within its multipage search-result screens. I also share Boris's concern that whatever hosted OLAP/BI/DW services Google eventually offers may lack enterprise-grade metadata management, data cleansing, data-source connectivity, security, and other key features.

I also expect Microsoft to evolve SQL Server Data Services in the DW 2.0 direction, an effort that no doubt would intensify if Mr. Ballmer succeeds in grabbing Yahoo. I'd like to see Microsoft cross-synthesize SQL Server Data Services with any hardware-partner-powered OLAP-acceleration approaches it may or may not be developing under its DW appliance initiative. At the very least, I'd like to see Microsoft provision some seriously scalable DW horsepower in its data center, perhaps through a partnership with Teradata.

Clearly, DW 2.0 services will need to be an order-of-magnitude more powerful than what we've come to expect under the first generation of SaaS-based BI/DW offerings on the market. Whether dedicated to a single customer's requirements or divvied up on a shared-tenant basis, DW 2.0 could be the biggest, baddest, most virtual DW "appliance" of them all. And it would be another key step in the progressive virtualization of the entire SOA stack, apps, middleware, hardware, and data services across the  Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0 fabric.

Oh yes, yet another 2.0 -- or two -- for you. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Google and/or Microsoft acquired a DW appliance vendor? I would not be at all surprised if announcements such as these precipitated from the cloud of pregnant possibilities.

And is it too far-fetched to imagine that Microsoft might turn around and acquire Teradata if the Yahoo takeover falls through? My crystal ball's still a bit cloudy on the matter.

But, hey, I'm free to speculate.

Microsoft Goes Hostile, Looks To Buy Yahoo! And Yes It Impacts You

By Kyle McNabb and Rob Koplowitz

This morning Microsoft announced a $44.6b bid to acquire Yahoo! Driven largely to bolster Microsoft’s search and advertising business in order to better compete with Google, this move does have a few hidden gems that will impact enterprise IT environments. For insights into the consumer side of this story, see the post from Charlene Li and Shar  Van Boskirk.

Google has not only thumped Microsoft in search and advertising, they have also taken the mind share lead in providing on-line business applications. Google Applications have had strong uptake in the consumer and, to a degree, the small business market. The delivery of business applications through the cloud might pose a bigger ultimate threat to Microsoft than losing the search & advertising wars. Microsoft is a huge, diversified company, but make no mistake, Office is paying more than its share of the bills. Anything that threatens Office threatens Microsoft. And Google threatens Office.

Microsoft has developed a strategy to compete with Google and the rest of the Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors that they call Software + Services. Microsoft’s Software + Services logic is simple and straightforward to understand. Microsoft will leverage their existing , dominant position on the desktop and compliment the software already on our computers with additional cloud based capabilities. Their argument, which is sound, is that Software + Service allows all of us people that use Office to continue to use these tools while gaining benefits offered in the new model; easier collaboration, greater mobility, progressing towards a single source of content truth, and the ability to access this content from any machine.

Yahoo! brings a number of assets to Microsoft that could ultimately help in their battle for cloud based enterprise computing:

• The lines between consumer applications and business applications are blurring. We use technology at work and at home, and the technology we use increasingly crosses the home/work lines all the times. Many of us use iPods, Google Groups, instant messaging, Google Mail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! throughout the day at work and home. Plus, our ability to self provision our own technology — desktop search anyone? — continues to rise. Yahoo! brings lots of users to Microsoft. And Yahoo! has a great deal of experience developing and delivering online services to people (Yahoo! Groups, Mail and IM all have huge bases that could ultimately be customers for Microsoft enterprise offerings ). And Yahoo!’s experience developing these services will really benefit Microsoft’s own Live initiatives.
• Yahoo! has massive data centers that are extremely efficient. If you want to make money in cloud based computing (and Microsoft does!) you need to be able to run efficiently and drive down data center costs. Microsoft is in the process of building out multiple massive data centers, but the additional capacity and expertise that Yahoo! brings to the table will be welcome assets in developing a long term software +services strategy.
• Yahoo! brings expertise on small business application delivery. They have some very good technology on lightweight client delivery, particularly in the area of mobile clients that Microsoft could leverage.

Now, the big question that remains to be answered in all of this is whether an acquisition that is led by the MSN team could ultimately provide value to the enterprise software folks that work in another building. In general, cross-organizational cooperation has not been a strength of Microsoft, but with barbarians like Google at the gate, it might be time to break down some silos.

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).

Interwoven Advances Its Interactive Marketing Push

by Stephen Powers.

Interwoven has announced its acquisition of Optimost, a company offering Web site testing and optimization through a software-as-a-service model. Optimost enables organizations to use multivariable testing to identify combinations of Web content — such as ads, pricing, and layouts — that get the best response from site visitors (all the better to drive up those conversion rates).

This isn't Interwoven's first effort to appeal to marketers; earlier this year, the company announced a targeting management module that allows non-technical users to manage contextual experiences for Web site visitors. This latest acquisition plays nicely into the story of traditional WCM vendors offering features such as targeting, testing, and analytics that will differentiate them from the platform vendors, which tend to offer more limited functionality in those areas.

My colleague Suresh Vittal commented that this acquisition is just another step in the broader issue of increasing relevance and targeting. The question now is whether Interwoven will continue to add additional components of an online marketing suite, such as enhanced campaign management and Web analytics, in order to further differentiate themselves from their competition.

An interesting sidenote to all of this is that while large enterprises have yet to embrace SAAS as an option for main WCM functionality, it appears that traditional vendors are awakening to the fact that SAAS add-ons can nicely complement installed solutions.

Autonomy Ushers In New Era Of Information Management With Purchase Of Zantaz

by Barry Murphy.

Today began with very interesting news — Autonomy entered into a definitive agreement to purchase message archiving and eDiscovery vendor Zantaz. This is a great purchase for Autonomy. They have already integrated IDOL server into Zantaz's archiving and eDiscovery applications, so they can capitalize on synergies immediately. eDiscovery is a hot market for both companies — the combined entities will have likely the best brand value in the eDiscovery space. With organizations truly called to action by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCPs), Autonomy/Zantaz has the solution set to help implement a short-term solution that can evolve into longer-term information management strategies (see our eDiscovery market overview for more information on how the FRCPs have become an information management spending driver).

This also makes Autonomy more attractive to the larger vendors, and I would not be surprised at all to see a CA, EMC, IBM, or Oracle in turn acquire Autonomy. Oracle makes the most sense as it is the only of the big infrastructure vendors that lacks the message archiving capability that Zantaz could provide.

This move also signals that the first domino has fallen in the eDiscovery market consolidation — the rest should begin to happen quickly. Take note – this acquisition sets the multiple at somewhere between 2x – 3x revenue (Zantaz was private, but estimates always put the company somewhere between $100M - $150M). eDiscovery pure-plays — get ready to entertain offers (and more importantly, be ready to accept them or get run over).

For Information and Knowledge Management Professionals or CIOs looking at eDiscovery and retention programs, watch for Autonomy/Zantaz to have solutions that can take you from the most basic message archiving deployments to advanced analytics-driven retention programs — the combined company should certainly be on any short-list for message archiving and eDiscovery.

Can Salesforce Help Google Storm The Microsoft Fortress?

by Rob Koplowitz.

Imagine two gigantic mountains of money. On top of each sits a warrior that wants nothing more than to be sitting on a pile of money twice the size. One warrior, we'll call him Google, dominates the world of on-line search and advertising. The other, we'll call him Microsoft, dominates productivity software.What's the fastest way to double the size of your mountain? Simple, take the other guy's pile.

Google entered the world of enterprise productivity software earlier this year. While they continually claim that they don't compete with Microsoft and that their goal is to bring collaboration and productivity to currently under-served workers,it's hard to imagine that they aren't eyeing that big pile of money that Microsoft is sitting on. Afterall, all those free lunches in Google's cafeterias aren't really free. Google wants you to give up that software and information on your laptop and access it all from their data centers.

Google spokespeople continually repeat the mantra, "We understand the enterprise". While I believe that to be true, I also think that Google has a lot to prove before being taken seriously as an enterprise software vendor. If they really intend to try to get at Microsoft's pile of money, they are going to have to demonstrate that they understand security, privacy and reliability and all in the emerging software as a services (SaaS) model. They also have to prove that they have the stomach to take on Microsoft for the long haul. Let's be clear here, Microsoft is not fond of anyone putting their hands on their pile of money.

Against this backdrop, we have an interesting new development. Rumors of a relationship between Google and Salesforce.com are popping up everywhere from blogs to the New York Times. Salesforce has spent the last seven years proving that critical business information and processes can be securely stored and accessed as a service. The proving ground has been customer relationship management, an application chock full of sensitive data you never want to see compromised. The bottom-line of those seven years has been that Salesforce has established their offering as secure, private and reliable in a SaaS model. Not may companies can make this claim. This accomplishment is non-trivial and represents a significant barrier to entry. As powerful as Google and Microsoft might be, they cannot make this claim.

We really don't know what, if any, relationship between Google and Salesforce might be in the works. That's the beauty of idle blog speculation! Let's just say that the two are working on some deep level of engineering integration. Imagine the world renowned efficiency of a Google data center meeting the Salesforce know-how in building multi-tenant, multi-domain, secure and reliable applications. Now consider the reach of the Google brand and the developing role of Apex as a platform for a developer ecosystem. Throw in Google's ability to fund research by reaching down into their mountain of money and maybe, just maybe you have the ingredients to really change the landscape for enterprise software.

Or maybe they'll just put their logos in each other's Web sites. ; )

Microsoft's Pending Acquisition Of aQuantive Impacts You...

by Kyle McNabb.

Quite a surprise this morning, waking up groggy after 4 fun filled days at our IT Forum event in Nashville, and seeing Microsoft's attempting to acquire aQuantive. You're probably thinking this acquisition has nothing to do with information and knowledge management. Oh but it does...especially for any of you looking to support your online operations through the implementation of Web content management and related technologies.

Why should you care? Well, aQuantive offers interactive design services through one of their operations, Avenue A|Razorfish. I've witnessed enterprises - such as yours - increasingly engage their interactive design agencies for not only site design and persona development support, but Web content management technology recommendation and implementation assistance. We often see Avenue A|Razorfish and Molecular resources assisting in Interwoven implementations, and other agencies supporting Vignette, FatWire, or Tridion implementations. And, now that Microsoft's about to acquire the services of aQuantive, you can expect to see at least one agency push for using SharePoint Server 2007 to support Web site initiatives.

I believe you're seeing the future of Web content management, a future in which Web content management's no longer looked at as a technology, but as an important piece to your Web/online operations.

Ebusiness, marketing communications, marketing operations, and other Web teams supporting customer experience initiatives will continue to push their interactive marketing service providers for design AND implementation help.  Microsoft's setting themselves up to be a sole source Web operations provider to many of you - providing you the design services AND the technology to deliver a compelling customer experience. SDL, granted not an interactive agency but a service provider to marketers for globalization support, is looking to tackle this future through their acquisition of Tridion - offering globalization services & technology PLUS content management technology for marketing operations throughout the world. Other interactive agencies will soon follow.

The impact:

• Other Web content management vendors would be wise to aggressively pursue strong relationships with interactive design agencies. And I believe many of these agencies can no longer remain agnostic to Web content management technologies, they'll have to create alliances, build up implementation skill sets, and address your implementation needs.
• You'll increasingly look for broader Web and online operations solutions that are based on strong Web content management capabilities to support your multi-site, multi-channel, and multi-language content management AND delivery needs.
• ECM strategy development will be impacted. You'll face less pressure to find one solution to support your Internal and external site initiatives. Instead, you may face more pressure to find solutions to support roles within, and outside, the organization - for example, one content management solution may be required to support Sales (Sales Intranet), Marketing (ebusiness, email, marketing communications), and Customer Support (call center) initiatives as they all relate to customer experience. Supporting R&D, Finance, or other roles could use another content management solution.

As this future unfolds, we'll be here to comment and, more importantly, provide direction and insight. And I'd like to hear from you. You can comment on this blog or email me at kmcnabb@forrester.com.

The New Software Industry – Forces At Play, Business In Motion

by Claire Schooley.

I attended a conference sponsored by Carnegie Mellon West; The Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley; the Software Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University; and Services: Science, Management, and Engineering Program at UC Berkeley. The one-day event was held at the Microsoft Campus at Moffitt Field in Silicon Valley. The goal of this conference was to discuss where the software industry is going. Ten sessions including individual speakers and panels from university and business communicated the strong message that software is at a crossroads and will dramatically change in the future, and . . . the change has already begun. To access slides of the speaker presentations go to http://west.cmu.edu/sofcon/postcon.

The changes are around growth of software-as-a-service, new roles of services as a value- add to commoditized software, and new businesses and pricing models. The overwhelming consensus was that software-as-a-service is where the growth is today. Speakers pointed out some of the most successful companies in terms of generating revenue like WebEx, Amazon, Google — all service-based. At the same time they do not see companies that have built their business around software like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft going “down-the-tube” just yet. In fact Oracle already has Oracle On-demand, a very successful service solution while supporting their enterprise installed customers. Companies that have these installed applications will not find it easy to change to a service-model, even it they wanted to. It requires architectural, economic and cultural changes and requires a ten-year time table to move from an installed software model to a services model. It seems much easier to start from the ground up like Salesforce.com.

The research of Professor Michael Cusumano, MIT Sloane School of Management shows a strong movement toward service innovation. Companies are looking for ways to add value to their existing products. CRM and ERP software has much the same functionality so it’s up to the services to make the difference. Software providers should ask themselves:

• How do we make services count?
• Where are the special value and revenue opportunities?
• How can we use innovative services to make product less commodity-like?

Because profit margins on services are lower, companies must work to find the best mix of product and services. Cusumano showed data on the movement toward services by large mature companies like IBM, Sun, EMC, and Cisco. When software companies have provided product for about 20 years, they hit the 50/50 crisscross of services and product. From that point on, services and maintenance grow faster then product. He sites SAP as having revenue of about two-thirds services and one-third product. Even younger companies like Google that have relied on the ecosystem to support their product will be forced to add services as they move toward becoming an enterprise solution.

The cost of software is dropping and the cost model is in transition. Timothy Chou, former president of Oracle On-demand and author of The End of Software gave an example of traditional software costing about $100/month; SaaS, at $10 a month; and Internet, like Google at $1 a month. Today the research lab is really the consumer using the Internet, YouTube, MySpace, Skype, and Wikipedia. Industry picks up the consumer innovations for future development. In the past it was just the opposite with companies as the innovators of new products. Personalization also plays an important role—who you are, where you are, what you like, etc. This context-awareness capability can be a bit intimidating. However, many people will delight at going to hotel registration and having the clerk recognize who they are, when they were last at the hotel, what their room preference was, and what amenities they liked. What about going to an upscale restaurant that has taken pictures of food you selected during previous visits, stored the data, and now provides you with your own personal menu! Is somebody doing your thinking? Yes, it’s Web 3.0!

SDL Acquires Tridion

by Stephen Powers.

The WCM vendor landscape has shifted again, as global information management solution vendor SDL has announced that it will acquire Tridion. SDL and Tridion are touting the complementary functionality of SDL’s translation management capabilities and Tridion’s WCM product, and the inevitable tighter integration between the two. The acquision certainly provides Tridion more stability, and gives the soon-to-be-christened SDL Tridion a strong Web content globalization story. This should also give Tridion leg up in the US; Tridion has opened two US offices over the past year or so in an effort to target the North American market, but SDL already has a bigger field organization there.

My take: this isn't an earthshaking announcement, but Tridion and SDL are stronger together than they are apart. For Tridion customers, the good news is that Tridion and SDL don’t have overlapping technologies, so this acquisition shouldn’t lead to any forseeable pain for future upgrades. And the Tridion management team will be in place for the next two years, lending some stability to the acquisition.

SDL and Tridion will be announcing a technology roadmap and integration timeline sometime in the next six weeks. Stay tuned.

Adobe Industry Analyst Days

by Colin Teubner.

Connie, Erica and I attended Adobe's analyst days this week in New York, and Connie and I had a chance to sit down with Bruce Chizen, Adobe's CEO, over lunch yesterday. Adobe is a major player in the Web 2.0 universe, with Flash (and the new Apollo technology) competing with Ajax-based technologies for creating rich internet apps (RIAs).

While Ajax is more open, Flash nonetheless can boast better cross-browser and cross-platform support, especially when moving into the realm of mobile devices. Ajax can run into problems just between Internet Explorer and Firefox, but the Flash player works in both browsers as well as in Safari — and on Linux too. In the mobile, world, Adobe showcased a first-of-its-kind tool for testing how a Flash movie looks on a variety of different cell phone models, with extremely rich metadata about each device. It was able to simulate things like the appearance of the screen outdoors vs. indoors, and the performance of a movie on different phones. We also saw a Sony PlayStation 3 running on Flash content.

One interesting question was about whether PDF was threatened by Microsoft's recent moves to create a replacement standard in its XML Paper Specification (XPS). Bruce's answer was, to paraphrase, "No." He believes — and I agree — that it's too late to displace PDF with any format, and especially not with one whose promoter has the goal of selling Windows and Office in mind. Adobe's recent submittal of PDF to the ISO will really help its adoption in government, too.

Back to Apollo, which is Adobe's new platform that combines elements of both Ajax and Flash, but allows applications to run in a browser or on the desktop. Adobe demonstrated an application for eBay that lets users continue monitoring the time to completion of an auction even if their internet connection goes down, for example. A startup called FineTune (finetune.com) also showed how it's building its music player application in Apollo. It remains to be seen what Apollo adoption will be like, but Adobe is allowing purveyors of Apollo applications to redistribute the Apollo runtime — so if developers are sold, it should find its way to consumers too.

Overall, Adobe has a diversified business with many strong products — not the least of which is Creative Suite 3, which takes best-of-breed apps like Photoshop to new levels — but we'd like to see them tie together different lines of business a little better. For example, why aren't they using LiveCycle BPM to drive workflows across the CS applications? Large design shops could really benefit from that kind of workflow automation (and it doesn't have to be overly rigid, either). That kind of cross-product synergy would make them a more important contender for the Information Workplace in the enterprise.