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Three Areas Where SaaS Fell Short in 2006

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
9:03 AM

There is always room for improvement. While I'm out there working with the SaaS guys I am finding a few areas where many can improve. Or, where they fell short in 2006.

1. SaaS guys did not value the nonvisual interfaces, as much as the visual application engine.

SaaS guys need to learn how to make all of the functionality that's available through the visual interfaces available through the nonvisual interfaces as well...typically Web services. Today, most do not, and as we look to extend the reach of our SOAs to incorporate our SaaS partners, this requirement is on the critical path.

Continue reading "Three Areas Where SaaS Fell Short in 2006"

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Posted by Penny Crosman
Friday, December 22, 2006
4:47 PM

The promise of a fresh start, a new leaf, new projects, and maybe, just maybe, not repeating the mistakes and bad habits of the previous year is appealing, isn't it? We asked readers and industry luminaries what they plan/hope to do differently and predict will happen in the coming year. Here are some of their answers.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, December 21, 2006
7:06 AM

Here is another sure-fire way to make BI an everyday office tool: standardize on a BI suite that has all the goodies (OLAP, reporting, query, dashboards) optimized for your different user groups yet reduces the cost of ownership.

A fair few nay sayers out there continue to grumble that the latest versions of BI suites are a not at all integrated. Not true! You can read about the finer points of integration in the BIScorecard BI Suite Integration report along with analyses of each vendor, but the bottom line is that the latest releases are miles ahead of what were previously disparate products. Here are just a few examples:

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
11:46 AM

James Governer has prompted an important discussion on his popular blog regarding ECM and Security. He raises some very good questions while lobbying enterprise buyers to team with him to pressure ECM vendors to respond. I'm sure many ECM vendors will be secretly annoyed about this, for they pride themselves on their security capabilities. But it points to two different perspectives around security. The Architect views security as stopping bad guys from getting in (the Firewall Syndrome). The Document Management view casts security as assigning permissions (the ACL syndrome).

Posted by Antone Gonsalves
Monday, December 18, 2006
4:19 PM

People often say you can't beat free, and IBM and Yahoo are hoping that will hold true in search. The two companies have released a potentially market-shaking product called IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition that provides basic search functions for Intranets and Web sites, relying on Yahoo for Internet search.

Posted by Penny Crosman
Friday, December 15, 2006
1:51 PM

The latest U.S. Census report came out today, giving data analysts and market analysts plenty of government-generated statistics and predictions about how Americans will behave in 2007 (the report is actually based on 2005 data, but how much could we have changed in the past year?). Here are a few highlights:

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, December 14, 2006
1:49 PM

No doubt you’ve heard about the trend toward operational business intelligence. The idea is to democratize BI, liberating it from the gurus in the ivory tower and sharing it with the masses of business users so everyone can make smart decisions. Well, you can’t get more operational than core business processes, so there has been a lot of talk about the combination of BI and business process management (BPM).

Will these two systems become one some day, or are they merely complementary technologies? I’d lean toward the latter, viewing them as separate disciplines and technologies, but here are three ways they’re likely to complement each other.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Monday, December 11, 2006
8:55 PM

Intalio, which calls itself the Open Source BPMS Company, late last month announced the donation of a Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) tool and a Tempo “BPEL4People-based” workflow framework to the open source community. The BPMN modeler, donated to the Eclipse Foundation, is now available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and is part of the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project. This follows Intalio’s donation of its EMF model comparator to the Eclipse Foundation earlier this year, and complements the PXE BPEL Engine it previously donated to the Apache Software Foundation. The Tempo workflow framework is available under the open source Apache Software License. The project is hosted by SourceForge.

Posted by Penny Crosman
Saturday, December 9, 2006
5:41 PM

I spoke this week to the articulate and knowledgeable Dr. Lynn Harold Vogel, CIO of the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Center, about all the reasons why Americans don't have electronic medical records today, what the best e-health record initiatives out there today are, and how his hospital is building its own electronic records system and working to improve the way it treats cancer.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, December 8, 2006
11:24 AM

If all companies published and analyzed financial reports in extensible business reporting language (XBRL), the emerging standard wouldn’t offer the competitive advantage that it presents today. According to a report issued this week, early adopters who integrate XBRL data with performance management applications can expect to more easily:

• Leverage benchmarking for competitive analysis
• Identify internal areas for improvement
• Simulate mergers and acquisitions and other financial impacts
• Unify reporting in a single environment to increase data accuracy

Posted by Antone Gonsalves
Thursday, December 7, 2006
9:28 PM

Tibco's recent launch of its ActiveMatrix product has stirred up some discussion about whether the product suite would simplify the building of SOAs, or add complexity to an already difficult task.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Thursday, December 7, 2006
1:07 AM

Microsoft SharePoint is famous for its ease of creating -- and abandoning -- local workgroup portals. As readers of our latest Enterprise Portals Report know, this has not fundamentally changed in MOSS 2007. That could be a problem.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, December 4, 2006
7:45 PM

In my last blog, I asked you to think about how you can take your BI deployment to 110 percent of your employees. Part of what will get you there is technology dependent. The other part is business relevance.

In building a BI application or individual report, business and IT engage in a clumsy dance of users defining their requirements and IT interpreting those requirements. If the business doesn’t ask for something, they don’t get it. So users will over ask, and IT will do a data dump, overwhelming the business users. It's not a pretty waltz and is something more akin to Ben Stiller’s salsa attempt in Along Came Polly.

Posted by Penny Crosman
Friday, December 1, 2006
4:12 PM

Revisiting the themes of Thomas L. Friedman's two-year-old book, "The World is Flat," the New York Times columnist joined Reuters COO Devin Wenig, CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf, and O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly yesterday in a broad-ranging discussion of flat world, Web 2.0 and other themes with Forbes senior editor David Kirkpatrick. Here's what I got out of it.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, December 1, 2006
12:25 PM

Yesterday’s announcement by Business Objects that it has acquired software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Nsite was as remarkable for what it didn’t say about the company as what it did say.

Yes, Nsite is a SaaS vendor, and that should sound good to Wall Street. As I point out in “SaaS and SOA: Together Forever,” SaaS is one of the hottest categories in IT, expected to account for 25 percent of the business software market by 2011, according to Gartner, up from 5 percent last year. And yes, Nsite provides “an on-demand applications platform” as described in the press release, but that’s about as generic as saying “Nsite is an information technology company.”