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.

Autonomy Acquires Interwoven — What It Means For Search

By Leslie Owens

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy board game image courtesy of hellolapomme

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

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

By Matthew Brown and Leslie Owens

Today, we heard about several enhancements to a SaaS-based corporate site search offering from the folks over at Google Enterprise. This relatively unknown offering started as "Google Custom Search," was renamed "Custom Search Business Edition" in July of 2007, now sports the name "Google Site Search," and claims to have thousands of paying customers. Fully hosted at Google, the service lets Web site managers sign up, configure a crawl, customize the interface, bias how results are returned, and start searching at the low, low entry price of $100/year. Clearly, this service is a mere infant, relative to its mature enterprise search platform cousins, but this announcement is unsurprisingly consistent with Google's efforts to tap demand within the long tail of enterprise search buyers. Below are some questions we’ve received since this announcement:

Question: How much of an improvement are the new features - enhanced indexing and the ability to date bias searchable content - represent for business Web sites that are seeking search?

Forrester's take: Enhanced indexing, synonyms, date biasing, and top results biasing are necessary, but incremental, improvements to Google Site Search. Features like date biasing are very helpful when you want to prioritize time-sensitive content, like press releases or news content, over general "brochure-ware" pages on a corporate Web site. The Google Site Search product still lacks other features corporate site owners want, like the ability to push new content into the index as it is published and/or modify content crawling schedules so that new content can quickly be made available through the search function. But this release is definitely a step in the right direction.

We're also encouraged by the addition of "refinement categories" that let search-administrators specify URL patterns that can be presented as categories above the results to help searchers find their way to important content. And the online reporting capabilities for analyzing frequently searched terms are a real plus. Most significant is the zero-footprint implementation they get by being SaaS-based, which results in a $100/year price point for up to 5000 pages. This offering will be highly valuable to corporate Web site owners who don’t have boat-loads of cash or IT skills to buy and implement on-premise search solutions. Currently, many of these folks rely on the lousy search that comes embedded on their Web server. Just try the search function on the majority of corporate Web sites out there today and you'll quickly realize there is a massive opportunity to improve the quality of search.

Question: Do you think there will be wariness out there about the cloud-computing aspects of site search?

Forrester's take: Yes, of course there will continue to be wariness about the cloud-computing aspects of site search - especially among companies that like to make money online. Google has a lot of work to do to build awareness around what it is offering and to dispel people’s concerns that it is solely in the business of monetizing other people’s content through search advertising. Google is walking a very fine line in this regard.

For example, Google released a feature earlier this year on Google.com called “search-within-search” that lets users search the contents of a specific corporate Web site without ever leaving Google.com (this still works if you enter "Microsoft," "Cisco," "New York Times," or many other company names, into the Google.com search bar and then look at the search bar in the first result). If I’m a corporate Web site owner, I don’t like this one bit because I invest a lot of time (and money) in attracting people to my Web site, making my Web site easier to use, and hopefully, making it more profitable for my company. Essentially, search-within-search lets users dig deep into your Web site without ever visiting your site. This can be especially problematic for companies running advertisements on their corporate sites, but it also impacts any company investing in an overall brand experience via its Web site. If Google adds advertisements next to "search-within-search" results (to our knowledge it hasn't yet done so), corporate Web site owners will have to choose between letting Google monetize, monetizing the content themselves, or sharing the take with Google.

Long term, without broader awareness and better transparency into exactly what Google does with the corporate site information it indexes, Google will continue to face a real identity crisis between whether it's advocating for the corporate site search buyer, or it's just trying to print more money from other people's content. Near term, information and knowledge management pros looking at basic site search would be remiss not to at least try this offering. After all, a single cab ride to the airport can cost more than using Google Site Search for a year.

Competitive Business Intelligence, Harnessed Through Collaboration And CEP, Harvested Across The Cloud

By James Kobielus

Sometimes ideas for blog posts flow out of everyday conversations with colleagues. I want to thank Leslie Owens and Matt Brown for stimulating the following thought train.

The external competitive environment is the cloud where opportunities and threats hang, sometimes latent, sometimes looming. So it only makes sense that enterprises will outsource more of the competitive surveillance to the cloud of external resources, such as analyst firms, third-party market intelligence subscription feeds, social networking, Web 2.0, etc.

Of course, enterprises realize they don't dare outsource the competitive intelligence function entirely. That explains why they maintain research staff, tools, portals, and informational resources in-house. Mostly, these competitive intelligence teams monitor the prevailing market conditions that impact on their companies' core businesses. But, to a great degree, they also serve as an early-warning system helping their organization respond to specific breaking events -- i.e., the "disrupters" -- that threaten to capsize the corporate boat.

Recognizing this perennial "disrupter pre-emption" requirement, enterprises are concerned with best practices for setting up event-driven competitive intelligence operations. These best practices should help them survey the external horizon more comprehensively and proactively. Best practices should also help them foster, harness, and harvest internal collaboration among competitive-intelligence subject matter experts.

Essentially, competitive intelligence operations of this sort practice CEP in the following senses that I described in a previous post:

• Each event may be quite complex in its own right, standing for a linked set of data updates, application state transitions, and process status changes (NEW NOTE: a "disrupter" is any extremely complex, perhaps way too vague, but still undeniably important "event" -- disrupters aren't "tagged" as such -- and they may not be easily identified before, during, or after the fact -- maybe, hey Leslie, on-the-fly social tagging is the best way to approach this squishiness).
• Each event-reliant decision agent (e.g., end user) may access, interact with, and/or consume events through a complex interface (dashboards, analytics, semantic layer, etc.), across multiple devices (desktop, laptop, Blackberry, etc.) and have a complex event-enriched streaming  "experience" (NEW NOTE: competitive intelligence groups make use of the full range of portals, e-mail, IM, search engines, social networking, wikis, blogs, podcasts, workflow, alerts/notifications, etc.).
• Each event-reliant decision agent may be a complex creature in its own right with its own complex, convoluted, squishy decision-making methodology -- i.e., an individual human being with their own habits and cognitive/psychological dispositions; or a group making decisions collectively and collaboratively through workflow, or social networking; or a half-human/half-automated workflow behaving in the herky-jerky manner one would expect from a split-personality decision agent; or a completely automated orchestration of applications triggered by rules engines, etc.) (NEW NOTE: competitive intelligence teams are very human teaming environments, at heart -- everybody is a "sentinel" on the "lookout" for critical events while others are "sleeping" or attending to something else).

Tying in another observation from that earlier post, I expect that CEP for I&KM (i.e., real-time, event-triggered, under-deadline, continuously-refreshing dashboard-sharing collaboration applications) will play a key role in event-driven competitive intelligence everywhere. CEP, hence BI, will be used to beef up organizations' in-house competitive intelligence/surveillance function, supplementing (hopefully not replacing) the outsourced competitive intelligence/surveillance they get from analyst firms such as Forrester.

In such an environment, the self-service, in-house research portal's the chief presentation layer, and BI operates as an intelligence source and/or target accessible via the portal, with real-time/near-real-time data integration approaches (e.g., ESP, CDC, MOM, trickle-feed ETL, etc.) providing the low-latency plumbing to deliver those feeds to the DW/BI/portal/preso front-end.

The BI vendors are laying the foundation for this emerging best practice. If you look at what vendors such as Business Objects are doing, they're making more external, commercial, competitive intelligence feeds accessible, via partnerships with content aggregators/publishers, from their platforms (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070521_006524). They're also providing text mining/analytics-integrated tools (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070924_006494) for searching across internal and external, unstructured/semi-structured data sources. And they're expanding the social networking and other collaborative features, and mashup offerings, for bringing together real-time feeds of internal/external data/events (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20080313_00001).

Business Objects is a bit ahead of the industry curve on all these things. But it's clear that, as market leader, they've laid down the chief challenge for all BI vendors, to make their offerings more pervasive in competitive intelligence use cases, and also to harvest the informational resources of the Web 2.0 cloud to the max.

Microsoft Buys Into High-end Enterprise Search With FAST

By Leslie Owens and Ken Poore

The value of high-end search technology was demonstrated today as Microsoft offered to acquire FAST Search & Transfer for approximately $1.2b. The transaction, endorsed by FAST management and key investors, is expected to be completed in 2Q08. We see this as a good deal for FAST, a good deal for Microsoft and a good deal for customers. This is a transformative event for the enterprise search industry.

Let’s set the stage: for years, pure-plays like Autonomy, FAST, and Endeca have shouldered the burden of explaining the rationale for enterprise search as they have defined the market.  Now infrastructure players like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have woken up to this opportunity. This year will be the year to determine what enterprise search is, and what it isn’t: A platform? A system? A feature? Where does it belong in the enterprise and what is it for?

With this acquisition, Microsoft leapfrogs IBM and Oracle, who have both been rolling their own nascent search initiatives -or doing small acquisitions. Microsoft is now in a strong position to offer a full menu of search products, from basic implementations that compete directly with Google’s appliances to high-end, massively scalable media and commerce systems. They also significantly extend into features like auto-categorization, entity extraction, and clustering.

For Microsoft, FAST makes a lot of sense. Microsoft’s current search strategy was centered on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and its spin-off Microsoft Search Server Express. SharePoint’s search has consistently been criticized by high-end search providers as too lightweight – its SQL Server-dependent engine never proved to scale massively, and its search across unstructured content was superficial when compared to the deep semantic algorithms of market-leading search vendors. FAST’s strong search technology delivers Microsoft needed credibility outside the firewall and among major media outlets. And the acquisition saves Microsoft the cost and time of completely re-architecting its own search house. In addition to scalability, Microsoft buys itself into the big leagues with an enterprise-savvy connectivity solution in FAST’s Unity search federator. 

FAST’s strengths are derived from a well-regarded search technology platform that is at the core of many media, entertainment, communications, retail, and financial services web sites. FAST’s engine also powers the search in many large enterprises, reaching across the breadth of intranets, file shares, content management, databases, and other core business content sources. FAST touts Comcast, Best Buy, Deutsche Telekom, Reuters, Dell, TV Guide, CareerBuilder, and others as flagship customers—customers Microsoft shall claim as well.  FAST’s ESP platform, like the other leading search engines, brings a much stronger set of semantic and linguistic indexing capability that will greatly improve discovery of unstructured information over SharePoint’s limited keyword-centric search. 

FAST had a tough 2007, though. Well-publicized gaffes in how they recognized revenue forced a major restructuring of its management team, a realignment to focus on core (and lucrative) competencies, and a reduction in its workforce. What emerged was a company with a strong customer base and core technology that had a depressed stock price and was primed for takeover. Microsoft and FAST are established partners. Many SharePoint customers have already upsized their search to FAST when they outgrew the limits of SharePoint.

What does it mean to I&KM Pros managing a search initiative? If you are an existing SharePoint and FAST customer, you will (eventually) have a simplified vendor relationship, a changing professional services model, and a strengthened R&D team behind this functionality. You should save money on licensing too. For I&KM Professionals just starting to evaluate products, it will be harder to justify the purchase of an independent search company when the enterprise is already aligned behind Microsoft as an infrastructure solution for business productivity. Current customers of pure-plays Autonomy or Endeca should prepare to defend their choices with IT and business stakeholders who may be influenced by Microsoft/FAST’s unified infrastructure story.

On the positive side, we expect this acquisition will drive down the price point for high-end search. Microsoft won’t be able to slide in a line-item that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars into a SharePoint license agreement or the price tag for a SharePoint installation will become too big to swallow. This pricing pressure will have a ripple effect through the industry. Those who are negotiating new license agreements with independent search companies like Autonomy will soon have a big stick to use. This acquisition is another linchpin in Microsoft’s enterprise workplace strategy--FAST fills a big hole for enterprise-scale information discovery and it further builds SharePoint’s momentum for content management and collaboration.

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).

Microsoft Shakes Up The Enterprise Search Market – With FREE Search Server Express 2008

by Ken Poore.

Microsoft today put itself squarely into the enterprise search market by introducing Microsoft Search Server Express 2008. You can download the release candidate from its website and give it a try if you have a Windows 2003 Server with some free space on it. It's free today, and it will be free when it goes to general release in the first quarter of 2008. Don't be fooled by its cost; this is a capable product that will get the attention of anyone considering or in the midst of a search deployment. Search Server will disrupt the strategies of clients and vendors within the already confusing search landscape. It is better than 'good enough' on many fronts, including its connectivity into Documentum and FileNet content repositories — also free — and its unified administration interface. For more insights, take a look at Forrester’s view on the release.

Microsoft has its partner network at the ready, with more connectivity into other business systems like Cognos, Business Objects, SAS and others, and its partners offer opportunities to create vertical solutions around Search Server. Though the solutions will be light-weight compared to full-bore salvos from Autonomy, FAST, and Endeca, they will cost a fraction and be up and running in far less time.

Search Server Express should comfortably index and search 400,000-500,000 documents on a reasonably sized server, and capacity and performance can be scaled in a multi-server deployment using the licensed version of Search Server 2008. Many businesses and smaller sub-units with a larger enterprise will find Search Server Express quite adequate to drop-in to address a wide variety of uses, including an immediate knee-jerk 'We need search and we need it now!' mandate, as well as the needs of a project-centric search tool, or as a search box on an Intranet site.

Microsoft is flooding the market with a tool that will fit well within many businesses, and it will cast a threatening shadow over vendors that make specialized SharePoint search solutions. Google should take note, too; the market that they claimed with their search appliances just got very crowded.

“Users” Became “People” At Lotusphere 2007

by Matt Brown.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Lotusphere this year was the renewed focus on people, community, and social software. The theme ran through every aspect of the conference – from the new Lotus Connections product announcement to noticeable improvements in software usability across all Lotus and WebSphere products, and even to the forward-thinking forays into new social computing environments like Second Life. It was hard not to notice the excitement and interest of participants as they asked hard questions about how well social software concepts and technologies will translate into an enterprise setting – will people tag, bookmark, chat, converse, and share via these tools? And why would a company use these tools as opposed to using free services on the Web?  While we’re starting to see business users adopting these tools, clear answers to these questions will take time to materialize.

Of course, IBM is not alone in putting their emphasis on human beings – Microsoft’s latest wave of products also have many of these themes coursing through their marketing material.  This is good for the buyers of both software vendors’ products. For years the software industry as a whole has been characterized by products that are engineered before they’re designed – and the race to get new features on the market led to engineering groups throwing partially engineered products over the wall to red-meat-eating sales professionals who then crammed them down the throats of buyers. The feature war is over. I much prefer to see the software vendors competing to make people more effective and have impact in their roles – by making their software easier to approach, easier to use, and easier to integrate, and by helping people to make richer connections to each other.