EMC To Acquire Kazeon

by Brian W. Hill

This week, EMC announced that it plans to acquire privately-held eDiscovery vendor Kazeon Systems, Inc. The deal, expected to close in Q3 2009, grew from an existing EMC-Kazeon partnership and will enable EMC to provide a range of natively developed applications to support eDiscovery needs.

As enterprises work to cut eDiscovery costs, the broader market for mitigating legal risk is expanding at a rapid clip. The market, however, remains highly fragmented, with a mix of big players and a multitude of smaller providers. Over the past couple of years, the market has been going through some growing pains and continues to consolidate. In exchanges with a large number of enterprises, buyers report frustrations in integrating applications that support disparate steps of the eDiscovery process – many are also increasingly questioning the long term viability of some of the smaller providers. As larger vendors look to round out and rationalize their portfolios, this consolidation trend holds promise in potentially easing enterprise eDiscovery integration headaches.

So will this deal prove to be positive for EMC customers seeking to mitigate legal risk and drive down eDiscovery costs? My immediate reaction is that the acquisition will be good for both EMC and its customers in the long term. Here’s why:

• EMC significantly expands its eDiscovery portfolio. Integration is a big headache for enterprises in meeting eDiscovery demands. In a Q3 2009 survey that Forrester conducted jointly with ARMA International, 60% of records management stakeholders perceived synchronizing eDiscovery, records management, and archiving efforts to be “challenging” or “very challenging” in meeting eDiscovery needs. These findings are in line with prior broader Forrester eDiscovery survey results and highlight a major common problem that enterprise face in eDiscovery. With this acquisition, EMC has greater potential to improve application integration across different steps in the eDiscovery process.
• EMC gets a significant bump in human capital with eDiscovery expertise. As a global provider of information infrastructure, EMC has extensive experience and capabilities developing products for IT enterprise buyers and effectively selling and marketing to them. On the other hand, the vendor’s bench strength targeting legal teams is far more limited. In a presentation this week, EMC’s Andy Cohen noted that Kazeon currently has 76 employees and 275 customers. If EMC successfully integrates Kazeon’s human capital, the acquisition will bolster the number EMC personnel who can credibly evangelize its eDiscovery offerings to external audiences and to the broader EMC sales force and who can contribute to developing future EMC legal risk mitigation solutions.
• EMC customers now have a clearer idea of the vendor’s direction for identification and collection solutions. EMC’s approach for managing content outside of Documentum for eDiscovery purposes has shifted a couple of times in over the past 2-3 years. During different periods, the vendor has emphasized product approaches (e.g., the now discontinued EMC Infoscape), services engagements linking different EMC offerings, and partner offerings. EMC customers report that this has been confusing. With Kazeon’s purchase price reportedly around $75 million, EMC has clarified its statement of direction for identification and collection solutions to support eDiscovery and brings a sense of stability for Kazeon customers who may have been concerned with the vendor’s financial prospects.

In the near- and mid-term, EMC will need to focus on clarifying its marketing messages and delivering on a revised product road map. Enterprises should exercise caution and closely monitor execution. Here’s why:

• EMC and Kazeon marketing messages overlap. Ironically, both EMC and Kazeon use the term “end-to-end” in marketing collateral. This begs the question of what product portfolio advantages should be expected when “comprehensive” eDiscovery vendors join forces. If I charged one dollar for every time a vendor used the term “end-to-end eDiscovery platform” in briefing me between now and the end of the year, I’d be a rich man. Vendors are making progress in plugging gaps, but in nearly all cases, these claims should be viewed as aspirational marketing statements. Our enterprise clients often report frustration when vendors use marketing terminology like this. They find that it can take a while to sift through the hype to understand what a vendor’s core eDiscovery capabilities actually are. Kazeon brings some important functionality to the table. In completing the acquisition, EMC will need to clarify marketing messages in its broader portfolio for legal risk mitigation.
• The deal will complicate other EMC eDiscovery partnerships. Over the past year, EMC has gone to market with StoredIQ and Clearwell Systems to meet needs for specific steps in the eDiscovery process. These partnerships have resulted in some deals and a few more are in the pipeline, but the number of joint EMC-StoredIQ and joint EMC-Clearwell Systems implementations in production is low. EMC’s Andy Cohen stated this week that EMC will continue to support these partnerships, but made it clear that for eDiscovery the vendor will be going to market with its EMC/Kazeon offerings. I expect that joint EMC deals with StoredIQ, Clearwell Systems, and other partners will dwindle due to perceived competitive conflicts. In February 2009, Kazeon announced analysis and review functionalityas an extension to its “end-to-end eDiscovery functionality.” It will be interesting to see what effect the Kazeon announcement will have on potential partnerships with vendors like CT Summation, CaseCentral, Concordance, FTI, Kroll, Iron Mountain/Stratify, Recommind, and others who provide proven review capabilities in on-premise and/or software-as-a-service models.
• The acquisition entails some overlap in functionality … and needs to be integrated. While Kazeon will bring significant new functionality to EMC’s eDiscovery portfolio, EMC will need to rationalize some areas of product overlap (e.g., legal hold functionality) and deliver on integrating the disparate offerings. Given the effort required to accomplish this, enterprises should have a “trust, but verify” approach in considering combined EMC/Kazeon offerings. It’s one thing for a vendor to acquire useful components and it’s another to integrate them deeply in a unified solution.

Acquiring Kazeon improves EMC’s standing in the eDiscovery market and improves its prospects for delivering effective solutions. Success will require tight portfolio integration, clear and effective communications describing EMC’s expanded portfolio, and retaining key Kazeon personnel.

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

Google Chrome Browser Gets Street Cred From Sony

by Sheri McLeish

Today’s news that Sony’s Vaio-brand computers are coming installed with the Google Web browser Chrome for users in the U.S. and Europe provides immediate legitimacy. The computers will also have Microsoft’s IE8 installed, but it makes Sony the first PC maker to sell computers with Chrome pre-installed. This opens the door for Google to rapidly boost consumer market share for its browser and signals that:

• Chrome is really ready for prime time. For Sony to agree to offer Chrome to its new Vaio buyers means that it’s passed muster to meet Sony’s user requirements. Chrome’s been touted for its speed and characteristic Google simplicity, but recent news reports show IE8 outperforming Chrome from a security perspective. In Chrome 2.0, Google added protections against cross-site request forgery and clickjacking that must offer enough improvement to assure Sony that it doesn’t pose a risk its buyers.
• Market share for Microsoft will continue to erode. For years Microsoft’s benefited from having IE pre-installed on new hardware. But as the result of anti-Microsoft backlash, court rulings in Europe, and increasing use of the web, adoption of alternative browsers has been creeping up. Firefox nets nearly 20% of the enterprise browser market and estimates of its adoption by consumers are more than double that. IE has never been more vulnerable, and Google can get a quick boost in market share with this move. Sony doesn’t disclose sales figures, but reports say it expects to sell 6.2 million PCs globally in the next year.
• Consumers will lead but enterprise likely won’t follow soon. While this move gives Google more street credibility with consumers, Forrester doesn’t believe that it signals an exodus from IE as the “official” browser for enterprises. Most organizations are standardized on some version of IE and continue to employ it because of the ease of centralized control and administration. Many are still locked into IE6 because of custom developed apps or third-party apps that only work with that browser version. Until Google invests in providing IT administrators with tools for managing or migrating apps (or perhaps inks a deal with OEMs that offer Chrome on business machines), IE will continue to dominate the enterprise landscape.

For Google, getting Chrome onto more consumers’ computers provides a foundation for its search engine as the default, along with the host of other services it offers, such as Google Docs. In speaking with information workers, consumers, and IT managers, Forrester hears again and again that the decision to go with Google or Microsoft is usually made once, and then the choice for everything else falls out of that decision. With the availability of Chrome alongside IE8 on Sony’s Vaio-brand computers, as well as Windows 7 being shipped in Europe minus IE8, the choice for many consumers becomes much more prominent and rapid.

Microsoft Office 2010: The Odyssey Continues

by Sheri McLeish

Sequels never can match the thrill of the original. But the good ones offer a compelling story of their own, develop familiar characters, and introduce something new and exciting. Last week Microsoft gave developers a backstage pass to preview Office 2010, due out in the first half of next year. The drama unfolds with Microsoft and Google waging a multi-front war with each other in search, browsers, productivity tools, and, soon, operating systems. Glimpses of the fourteenth iteration of Office reveal Web-based lightweight apps along with capabilities geared at improving collaboration, multimedia content development, and email management.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel … that’s a lot of competition for a sluggish software market that Forrester sees as being down by 5% or more for the year.  The glimmer of hope for software vendors will likely come from subscriptions revenue for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in 2010, which Forrester projects to grow by 7.5%.

Microsoft wants to lead that growing SaaS market. For enterprises, what’s notable about the Office 2010 story is that Office Web apps can be on-premise or hosted. The lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be free for consumers through Windows Live. Pow! But the bigger deal for enterprises is the option to host Office Web apps on-premises as annuity customers as well as via a hosted subscription through Microsoft Online Services. This option isn’t offered by Google today and, for the moment, may be what makes Office Web apps a hit in the enterprise.

To date, Microsoft’s dominance in large businesses remains mostly intact, with 57% of firms running Office 2007 and 80% supporting some version of Office.  Combined, the alternatives make up less than 8% of the enterprise market, according to Forrester’s March 2009 North America, Europe, And Asia Pacific Desktop Innovation Online Survey. And of those Forrester surveyed, 78% said they have no plans to look for an alternative to Microsoft Office. Real barriers remain for alternatives, from concerns about content control and security, sunk license costs, and online/offline issues for Web-based tools to fear of rejection by business users. Like it, love it, or not, people have a comfortable, familiar relationship with the Office apps. And that’s a critical edge Microsoft must maintain.

Technology Populism is fueling the collaboration and mobile collaboration markets and blurring the lines between work/life boundaries.  The influence of consumer experience can be equally powerful if harnessed by Google for email and productivity. Most enterprise IT departments rely on the feedback of their business users to measure the value of their productivity tools. Forrester data also shows upgrades generally driven by business demands (34%), because current tools are no longer supported (24%), are no longer compatible (16%), or because the culture demands it (15%). By promoting free access to Web-based tools, Microsoft seeks the sway of the public. Office 2000 ends support this month; Microsoft needs to get those firms on board with 2010 somehow. What will your firm do? What are your barriers to upgrading Office or moving to an alternative? Now is a good time to clarify your firm’s strategy, because 2010 looks like it could be a blockbuster year for buyers prepared to negotiate.

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.

Self-Service Business Intelligence Depends on Automated Data Discovery

 By James Kobielus

If you tuned into my Forrester teleconference yesterday, you heard me discuss the end-to-end infrastructure necessary to fully support mashup-style self-service business intelligence (BI).

One of the key features for BI mashup is automated source-data discovery, which spares information workers from having to find new data sources or fresh updates from existing sources. Instead, the user simply relies on the BI and back-end data virtualization infrastructure to perform these critical activities as ongoing background tasks. Once new sources and feeds are discovered, transformed to a common semantic model, and published to a BI-mashup registry, all the user needs to do is drag and drop them visually into their mashed-up reports, dashboards, and other analytics.

Automated discovery is not only key to BI mashup, but to trustworthy data as well, because it helps detect and remediate anomalies across disparate data sources. Only a few vendors on the market today provide strong features for automated source discovery. One of them is Composite Software, which recently released an appliance that performs these functions. Another is Exeros, which is the closest thing to an automated-data-discovery pure-play in the market today.

Or, rather, was the closest thing, until IBM announced this morning that it is acquiring Exeros. I’ve been following Exeros for several years and have long considered them a strong candidate for acquisition by a leading BI, data warehousing (DW), data integration (DI), or data quality (DQ) vendor. On IBM’s part, this acquisition makes great sense as a complement to its InfoSphere and Optim portfolios on the data management and governance side of the house.

It will also fit nicely with IBM’s Cognos portfolio as a key enabler, potentially, for BI self-service mashup. As I stated on my teleconference, some vendors are further ahead on putting together a completely mashup-enabling end-to-end BI solution, and Cognos is among them. You can download the teleconference slides from Forrester’s website, listen to my streaming audio, and/or wait for my forthcoming report for more in-depth thoughts on this topic.

Now the ball’s in IBM’s rivals’ courts regarding whether, when, and how they plan to add automated source discovery to their BI portfolios.

News Analysis: Oracle Waives Fees On Extended Support Offerings

Oracle President Charles Phillips pleasantly surprised Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Collaborate 09 attendees this morning during his keynote with the decision to waive Extended Support fees for a number of product lines through 2010 and 2011. As customers and prospects face one of the worst global economic crises, proactive relief on support and maintenance fees could not come at a better time.  Summary details of the program can be found in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Oracle's Revised Support Policies

(Source: Oracle Corporation)

Proactive change in support offering creates a win-win

Oracle's move to address the support issue may stem from a variety of reasons but the main focus centers around improving the vendor-client relationship for a few reasons:

• Responding to the global economic crisis.  Oracle has taken the initiative in listening to customers, partners, and industry watchers about customer reactions to the escalating costs of software maintenance.  Oracle's Applications Unlimited and Lifetime Support Programs have been successful in retaining acquired customers and have shown customers that acquisitions need not be slash and burn with minimal reinvestment.
• Providing more time for customers to adopt Fusion Apps. With the slow down, Oracle may be anticipating slower upgrade rates.  While no clear date and product road map has been communicated to customers, removing the price pressure on extended support fees provides customers with some breathing room on upgrade timing.
• Mitigating attention on high profit margins and its M&A strategy. After touting record profit margins near 50% and continuing its M&A strategy with the announcement to acquire Sun, customers have become concerned about the impact of less choice in the market.   This move may appease regulators and industry watchers and show that Oracle has some self regulating policies.

The bottom line - user groups should now determine the minimum R&D percentage of investment from revenues

Oracle continues to gain economies of scale with each acquisition.  The good news - Oracle has the capacity to reinvest $2.6B per year into R&D and the real dollar amount has increased from 1.9B in 2006.  While this is a large figure, the bigger and more important issue - what percentage of the maintenance revenues have been reinvested?  Here's where we find a slight drop from 12.6% to about 11.6% in 2008.  Consequently, like SAP's users and user groups, OAUG and the other Oracle users and user groups should begin to track the ratio of R&D dollars that tie back to the amount of maintenance revenue.   In fact, they may want to take a look at the SUGEN KPI's and see if they are applicable to Oracle's environment.  R&D spend from maintenance and the need for Third Party Support options will be the key ownership issues for the next 5 to 10 years.  In any case, the need for preserving and strengthening independent user groups will be one effective check and balance in the consolidating world of enterprise software.

Your POV

Do you feel Oracle made the right move?  What have your experiences been like with Applications Unlimited and Lifetime Support?  Send me a private email to rwang@forrester.com.  Posts are preferred!   Thanks and looking forward to your POV!

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Reposted from http://blog.softwareinsider.org

Oracle’s Sun Acquisition Accelerates Push Into Data Warehousing Appliances

By James Kobielus

Last fall, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that his company was getting into the hardware business, but I think he misspoke. At that time, he was referring to the new HP Oracle Database Machine with Exadata Storage, a high-end data warehousing (DW) appliance that incorporated hardware from his partner, as well as intelligent storage software technology from that partner--and even had the partner’s name first in the product name. If that was the criterion for “getting into the hardware business”--i.e., running on someone else’s hardware--then every software vendor on earth is in the hardware business, by my reckoning.

But today’s Oracle announcement is the real deal. Oracle is acquiring longtime partner Sun Microsystems, putting the software powerhouse fully into the hardware business--and hitting the DW industry like an earthquake. I’ll let my Forrester colleagues blog on the other implications of this deal--for the open source, Java, middleware, SOA, and other markets that Sun is in--and give you a few quick thoughts on the deal’s implications for the DW market.

For starters, this deal will give Oracle the ability to engineer a completely integrated DW appliance composed of all Oracle components, including hardware and software. Now Oracle will be able to take on Teradata and IBM--both of which have long offered their own integrated solutions--more aggressively with high-performance DW offerings. Just as important, Oracle will be able to leverage Sun’s manufacturing scale economies to bring its all-Oracle DW appliances below the $25K-per-terabyte threshold needed for penetration into the midmarket.

Also, Oracle will now have another widely adopted transactional database, the open-source MySQL, that it can--and should--consider tweaking and packaging on an DW appliance. To the extent that Oracle gives customers a choice of DBMSs on a DW appliance platform, it can gain a differentiator that Teradata, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, and Netezza lack (you have to go to a startup such as Dataupia for multi-DBMS choice on an appliance). Many information managers prefer to stick with their existing DBMSs when building a DW, and prefer to implement that DW on an appliance to take advantage of its out-of-box balanced configuration of CPU, memory, storage, and I/O.

Furthermore, Oracle is acquiring a hardware and operating system vendor that has long been one of the primary platforms on which its own DW/DBMSs, middleware, and tools have been deployed. This acquisition can only be welcome news for joint Oracle-Sun DW customers who have worried about Sun’s solvency for some time now and began to sweat serious bullets when IBM failed to emerge as a white knight. For many Sun customers, an Oracle-powered DW platform will now look like a safer bet than ever.

Of course, there are clear risks in this pending acquisition.

First, a combined Oracle/Sun sows uncertainty among the DW appliance vendors--such as Greenplum and ParAccel--who have partnered with Sun and now find themselves in earnest “co-opetition” with full-competitor (and then some) Oracle.

Second, Oracle’s other DW appliance hardware partners--including HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell--must be concerned that Oracle will now shift focus away from their respective appliance products in favor of those it builds with its own Sun hardware group.

And finally, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun--and possible future development of a MySQL DW appliance--may discourage customers from considering third-party DW appliances, such as from Kickfire--that build on MySQL. If that happens, and a market for non-Oracle-branded MySQL DW appliances never takes root, Oracle will be denying its MySQL customers the choice that Oracle Database customers already enjoy. Currently, Oracle Optimzed Warehouse customers can deploy that enterprise DBMS as a DW on their choice of Sun, HP, IBM, and EMC/Dell platforms.

Let’s hope that Oracle makes the most of its pending Sun acquisition. Ellison either misspoke last fall, or was speaking prophecy. Like most DW vendors, Oracle’s destiny is to grow ever more hardware-dependent for its long-term scalability, performance, and optimization story.

After So Many Years Of Ballyhoo, Semantic Web Still Searching For Killer App

By James Kobielus

Cynics might call Semantic Web a technology looking for a solution. And they might have a point.

Semantic Web refers to a long-running World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) initiative that is working toward an ambitious--some might say hopelessly Utopian--goal. At heart, it is a vision for how the World Wide Web should evolve to realize its full interoperability potential.

People vary widely in how they interpret the scope of the Semantic Web initiative. The tech industries are swarming with a wide range of projects, products, and tools that implement different variants of this vision. What vision is that? In the broadest sense, Semantic Web refers to an all-encompassing metadata, description, and policy layer that can, potentially, support universal, automatic, comprehensive end-to-end interoperability across every macro or micro entity—including data, components, services, applications, and services—on every conceivable level.

Whew!!! If that’s not the working definition of “pie in the sky” or “boil the ocean” (pick your metaphor), I don’t know what is. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to refer to Semantic Web as a definable market or solution segment. However, it’s not entirely vacuous.

For starters, organizations can implement W3C-developed semantic description standards—such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL)--to make the meaning of content unambiguously comprehensible to services, applications, bots, and other automated components. Second, there is a reasonably robust market for “ontology” tools to support RDF/OWL-based modeling of application semantics. Finally, there is some incremental adoption of these tools and concepts in established IT segments, such as:

• Enterprise content management (ECM): Semantic approaches can support more powerful discovery, indexing, search, classification, commentary, and navigation across heterogeneous stores of unstructured and semi-structured content. Semantic search—driven by concepts, not mere text strings--is regarded by some as a primary Semantic Web application. Indeed, many Semantic Web vendors are primarily implementing the technology in search engines that leverage ontology-based concepts to improve search accuracy and reduce spurious hits.

• Enterprise information integration (EII):Semantic approaches enable consolidated viewing, query, and update of structured data that has been retrieved from diverse sources. Indeed, most commercial EII environments present an abstract semantic layer that mediates access to heterogeneous data, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications, converging it all to a common presentation-side schema. A handful of those EII vendors have begun to support Semantic Web standards, primarily through third-party software plug-ins

• Enterprise service bus (ESB):Semantic approaches can facilitate multilayered application, process, and service interoperability across disparate environments. To date, there has been little production implementation of Semantic Web standards in the ESB arena, though some vendors have adopted semantics, ontologies, and RDF to describe the conceptual models implemented by application endpoints, agents, and intermediary nodes within ESB-like middleware approaches such as event stream processing.

But Semantic Web approaches are still on the periphery of these markets. 10+ years into its inception, Semantic Web still has no clear killer app. It’s not clear if or when that app will emerge.

The Growing Importance Of Enterprise Risk Management

by Kyle McNabb

Throughout the Fall of 2008 I had the opportunity to speak with a large number of professionals that work for or directly support executives responsible for compliance and risk management endeavors - such as Chief Risk Officers. I learned a few things that may impact your 2009 and 2010 plans for information management technologies such as business intelligence, business process management suites, and enterprise content management.

1) Boards and CFOs will prioritize initiatives supporting their enterprise risk management efforts. I asked what their top priorities were for 2009, and every one I spoke to claimed improving their risk management efforts in their top 3. And many said this was in direct response to their Board of Director's audit committee. In addition, a recent CFO Research Services (part of The Economist Group), accessible here, noted today's economic environment has finance executives more concerned about their risk management practices than their ability to access financing. Poor enterprise risk management programs can also have a negative impact on corporate ratings as Standard & Poor's announced it will incorporate enterprise risk management into their discussions with any rated company - this includes non-financial enterprises.

2) They will focus on driving risk management into business decisions. Risk management is not new. Enterprises have internal auditors, Chief Risk Officers, and others responsible for risk identification and management. However most of those I spoke with noted they were not as effective at driving risk management into business decisions, performance metrics were not often compared with risk metrics.

3) They believe technology's fundamental to helping them succeed. However they're not quite sure what technology is important to them. Risk comes in many forms - such as operational, financial, credit, brand, environmental, legal, and information. Frankly, no one solution can cover them all. While purpose built applications for business performance management and governance, risk, and compliance platforms do exist, those I spoke to acknowledge these solutions represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to supporting their efforts to identify, monitor, measure, and communicate risks to their peers, management, and board of directors. Many of them believe they've underutilized technologies such as business intelligence and document management to support their work.

What it means for information and knowledge management:

The challenge of supporting enterprise risk management efforts presents opportunity for technologies such as business intelligence, business process management suites, and enterprise content management. We've witnessed initiative after initiative fail to live up to expectations largely due to adoption issues or a misalignment of expectations, which often results from too little understanding of how business people need to work with information. But the high need given to supporting enterprise risk management efforts can give information and knowledge managers an opportunity to:

1) Understand the business context of an important role - those responsible for risk management. Now is the time to get to know those responsible for internal audit functions and those that work in the office of the Chief Risk Officer. Ask questions to help uncover their business context - look to uncover what information they need, how they use it, and what processes it supports.

2) Redefine how information management technologies provide value to the enterprise. There's no question you can define business cases around information management technologies that help remove costs from the organization or make people more productive.  Yet business people can still question the value these initiatives claim to create. But, as one VP of Internal Audit told me, "Improving our credit rating, that's real value."

Be proactive. Meet with your peers in audit and risk management roles to uncover how information management technologies can help them succeed. Given what I listened to last Fall, a case for supporting a strategic business endeavor such as enterprise risk management can have a longer and more positive impact than more tactical incremental productivity gains.

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.