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Oracle and SAP: Fur Flies as Executive Jumps Ship

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, March 29, 2007
5:28 PM

It's been an interesting week for the two giants slugging it out in the business software marketplace.

First Oracle filed suit against SAP for intellectual property intrusions into its Internet-based repository of product support information. Not to put too fine a point on it, Oracle accused SAP of wide-scale theft. Of course, this will play out over time, and ultimately, I expect, something like the true story will emerge.
I deliberately framed that last sentence loosely. Each company has tens of thousands of employees (almost 40,000 for SAP, more than 55,000 for Oracle), making it a considerable challenge to monitor and control their actions. Also, given those numbers, at any time more than few people are in the process of moving – from Oracle to SAP, say, or among the partner community. Since it's impossible to make sure all knowledge stays behind, it's tough to ensure that individuals do not cross the legal line protecting proprietary information.

Continue reading "Oracle and SAP: Fur Flies as Executive Jumps Ship"

Comments

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, March 29, 2007
1:51 PM

I'm in the process of updating my 2006 Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) Report series on BPMInstitute.org to the new-and-improved 2007 version. A major change from last year is a beefed-up evaluation scoring. I've discovered that many users (and most vendors) are happy to skip the 25-page walkthrough of the product and go straight to the scorecard at the end. Which product "won?" I haven't figured out the presentation - it will probably be some two-dimensional appoach, like the Forrester Wave or Gartner MQ - but I'm close to having a finished scoring methodology. It's probably asking for trouble, but I'm publishing it right here so that you can comment upon it.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
4:42 PM

…any more than, say, CEO stands for Capability Eludes Opportunity or CFO means Clever Financial Obfuscation -- okay, maybe there’s something in that last one. In a global economy that is more dependent than ever on information and technology, the CIO can only become more influential and in demand.

Forrester Research reports that global spending on IT in 2007 will rise 6 percent to reach $2.02 trillion. How big is that? Well, consider that global military spending is estimated to be “only” slightly more than $1 trillion. Or one way to look at it: chief information officers have twice as much opportunity to do good as military officers have to do harm (ignoring, for the moment, the not inconsiderable IT spending on military).

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
12:30 PM

I spoke about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) at Ajax World last week… great attendance, good speakers, good topics but no SaaS. Okay, a little SaaS. I think the SaaS players need to be serious about Ajax and RIA, else their customers make the call for them.

Ajax is changing the Web. As true dynamic Web interfaces are taking the place of static, pump-and-pull HTML/HTTP, we are seeing a sea change in what users expect from Web sites and SaaS.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
2:26 PM

The BI industry has long been rife with companies suing one another. Most recently, Hyperion and HyperRoll squabbled about patent infringements, finally agreeing to become partners. Business Objects and MicroStrategy kept counter suing each other over a period of five years, with both parties ultimately declaring victory and neither having to pay one another. Last week, Oracle joined the cacophony by filing claim against SAP.

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, March 26, 2007
7:47 PM

I recently sat in on a keynote presentation by Thomas Davenport of Babson College, who wrote a much-touted article on analytics in Harvard Business Review last year. He identified analytics as a competitive market advantage and illustrated his point with a number of case studies.

It's certainly important to recognize the value of analytics and to broaden the discussion, but analytics alone are only a small part of what is currently missing in business. To effectively apply the results of analytics also requires appropriate management processes and an understanding of how to utilize metrics and other relevant information to change operating plans, create initiatives and make decisions collaboratively, all while keeping an eye on the goals that matter.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, March 26, 2007
12:05 PM

InfoWorld has announced that their April 2 issue will be the last to appear in print. The magazine – the computing trade rag I'd most want to write for if I weren't part of the Intelligent Enterprise family – follows in IE's footsteps in going on-line only; IE's last print issue appeared in January. Like IE, InfoWorld cites the Web as "a more efficient delivery mechanism" and they also cite advertisers' desire for "more immediate gratification and measureable results than print can afford them."

Yet there's another important factor to on-line delivery that InfoWorld does not explore: reader preferences.

Posted by David Linthicum
Friday, March 23, 2007
10:35 AM

As larger organizations move toward SaaS, a few organizations are pushing back on this new model citing data privacy concerns. So, is data privacy a real issue? Or are IT managers reacting more to the lack of control than to data privacy? Let's do a few reality checks.

Posted by Product Maven
Thursday, March 22, 2007
6:17 PM

Business rules show up in a lot of applications. Call centers employ rules for routing, exception-handling, escalation and approvals. Financial services set up transactional and administrative rules based on deal value, customer status and regulatory scrutiny. Security software embeds access security rules. And as always, rules are made to be broken, so software developers ideally want something that business users can change without having to go to IT to alter code.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, March 22, 2007
11:45 AM

Keith Swenson is one of the true superheroes of BPM, and a pioneer in the development of interoperability standards. Known for his stalwart defense of XPDL, he periodically feels called upon to insist that XPDL does not compete with BPEL… then usually adding that XPDL is actually better. But I've always felt that Keith obscures the real difference between XPDL and BPEL and their relationships to the "real" BPM standard, which is BPMN.

The latest fracas started a couple days ago when Keith claimed victory in the non-war from the fact that eight of the 12 vendors in the top-three Quadrants of the Gartner MQ support XPDL. Even though a number of those vendors also support BPEL, at least as an interchange format for automated fragments of the process, it is fair to say that vendor support for XPDL is probably more widespread than vendor support for BPEL. So let's stipulate that - no problem.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
3:54 PM

As a writer and editor, I felt a twinge of guilt when I read Seth Grimes' blog on hyperbolic PR and "writers and editors who don't have the time, knowledge, and/or judgment to ask the right questions." Seth's last two blogs came about because a SaaS-model BI vendor served up what he felt was self-conscious PR overstating the market significance of the company's actual accomplishments. I guess I've read so many press releases -- and so few that tow the sober, responsible line that Seth puts forth -- that I've developed a permanent BS filter (and after rereading my own blog on said vendor, I don't feel guilty).

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
12:59 PM

"How do companies with such a trivial product get such [extensive] press?"

I had written in a recent blog entry about the claims and the coverage garnered by a BI software as a service (SaaS) company. Their products may be quite nice – their architecture and positioning seem sounds – but their grandiose self-depiction overstates their impact on the overall BI market.

The person who sent me this question founded a company that creates BI solutions using open-source software, a rival of the company I wrote about. His question was half serious, half rhethorical – he surely had his own answer in mind – but it's worth a moment's thought. Consider the following as two minutes of PR 101 from someone on the receiving end of many press releases.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
10:53 AM

Companies that develop formal practice areas around process management (sometimes described as a "BPM Center of Excellence") are far more likely to succeed than those that don't. That's one of the important conclusions of BP Trends' recent "Survey of Business Process Initiatives."

"There is an undeniable correlation between BPM project success and the use of a dedicated process team or Establishment of a Center of Excellence," wrote report author Nathaniel Palmer of Transformation + Innovation, the research and consulting firm that conducted the survey. "BPM programs are not likely to succeed beyond the departmental level (if at all) without having in place an organized business process team of some kind."

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, March 19, 2007
10:39 AM

Stranded travelers and lost luggage are daily news items of late. Outraged passengers, grounded on the tarmac for hours, are demanding a Passenger Bill of Rights. Airlines, BI can rescue you!

As James May, head of ATA wrote in a USA Today editorial, the best punishment for airlines with bad service records is natural economic forces -- let customers fly better-managed airlines. In reality, customers don't know which airlines are better managed as we have so little information about airline performance and even less about things like lost baggage rates.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Sunday, March 18, 2007
5:00 PM

Managing an intranet seems inherently an overwhelming task. First, there's the word, intranet. It sounds important, huge, nebulous, and boundless at the same time. In most enterprises, the opportunities for internal information sharing, collaboration, and process improvements are, well, limitless...but also very difficult to pull off.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, March 16, 2007
3:17 PM

You might get lost in buzzwords if you read this week's press release on IBM's "Dynamic Warehousing" strategy. Antone Gonsalves did a great job of boiling it all down, but here's a bit more insight gained in an interview with an IBM executive at the Gartner BI Summit.

"Real-time" showed up at least a couple of times in the release, but just what does it mean? "It means supporting decisions while a salesperson or a customer service rep is on the phone with a customer or while you're processing a claim," says Marc Andrews, program director, data warehousing.

Posted by Mark Smith
Friday, March 16, 2007
9:08 AM

Too often, businesses get little information in return for the millions of dollars they spend on information technology. We have built silos of BI tools attached to ERP and CRM systems that aren't designed to communicate common objectives across business. Even data warehouse efforts have not automated information processes, instead creating poorly structured libraries of data that business users may not be able to find or access.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, March 15, 2007
11:24 AM

Sandy Kemsley calls attention to an excellent review of BPEL's history and current status from Oracle's Dave Shaffer and Manoj Das in (ironically) WebSphere Journal. Probably the best summary of the differences between the new BPEL 2.0 and the little-lamented BPEL 1.1 standard that I've seen yet in print. She also notes the seeming fakeness of BPEL4People, a joint SAP-IBM white paper that appeared 18 months ago that has achieved what I agree is the highest buzz-to-bang ratio in the history of BPM.

My sources tell me that IBM and SAP have been meeting actively to put forth a BPEL4People spec later this spring, an activity that for some reason the companies' lawyers have shrouded in secrecy. If you recall my original post on this topic, the essence of the BPEL4People white paper is a new BPEL People activity that allows human task management to be integrated more directly with the BPEL logic than is possible with standard Invoke and an external task management service. That means BPEL4People "breaks" BPEL 2.0 engines, except for those with the foresight to implement the People activity. What, you don't have the specs for that? Oh, that's right…

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, March 15, 2007
9:12 AM

Competency centers -- a.k.a. councils or centers of excellence -- are making headway in the BI arena, and they grabbed a lot of attention at this week's Gartner Business Intelligence Summit. BI competency centers (BICCs) are typically cross-functional teams (architects, developers, support, analysts, line-of-business managers, etc.) that develop frameworks of metrics, goals and best practices that can then be shared with business units and departments throughout the organization. Ideally, they also ensure that goals are aligned with corporate strategy.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
2:47 PM

"Process-driven BI" has been a big theme at this week's Gartner BI Summit, so I sat in on a presentation by Gartner analyst Gareth Herschel on "Integrating Business Insight With Business Processes." Great presentation, overall, but those familiar with business process modeling and management might have been disappointed to hear little about the connection with those technologies. The performance management and process management camps share the whole idea of a "continuous circle of improvement," but perhaps Gartner knows that the BI crowd just doesn't get involved in the nuts and bolts of process management.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
12:25 PM

Day Two at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit was nonstop, with wall-to-wall sessions and appointments with industry's blue-chip and challengers. IBM, Microsoft, HP, SAS, SAP, Cognos and others weighed in the direction of their products, the direction of the industry and their take on customer wants and needs. You can visit our photo gallery to get a sense of the event, but I'll drill down on some of the bigger deals here in my blog… starting with Microsoft.

Tuesday's "Driving Pervasive BI and Performance Management" offered Microsoft's vision of taking these technologies and applications enterprisewide. Reflecting on his 13 years at Microsoft and status as "employee one" in the company's BI group, Bill Baker, GM of Office Business Intelligence, said "we're at a tipping point."

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
8:10 AM

The launch of LucidEra, an "on-demand, reporting and analysis solution that focuses on simplicity," has generated quite a bit of attention. The company has been put forward as the poster child for software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI, a pacesetter for an emerging BI revolution. My take? The company appears to have spun the impact of a modest, narrowly focused (and perhaps quite nice) solution far out of proportion to its real import.

LucidEra is designed to offer services via an integrated, hosted, Web-accessed BI stack. Their software platform covers data-source integration, ETL, reporting and OLAP functions. Sales Vice President Tina Babbi explained to me, "We sell solutions, not the BI platform. The first solution is a forecast-to-billing solution that analyzes opportunities in [Salesforce.com] through the billing cycle in the finance system."

Salesforce.com is a hosted customer-relationship-management (CRM) system. Fair enough; sounds like a solid foundation for a business. Babbi wrote in e-mail to me that "more applications are planned. Unfortunately we are not ready to share that roadmap at this time."

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, March 12, 2007
3:05 PM

The Hyatt Regency Chicago is sold out and the ballrooms, breakout sessions and exhibit hall are seeing heavy, heavy traffic here on the first day of the Gartner BI Summit. I would say it's standing room only, but nor are there lots of empty seats available. This conference is clearly well past the hype cycle and rising on Gartner's proverbial "slope of enlightenment" phase of market maturity."

If you read our "Summit Preview" there weren't a lot of surprises in Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's opening keynote, but he did share some new market analysis that he didn't talk about in that Q&A; interview. Hostmann said things like ETL, reporting, query and analysis and even data mining are well past the hype cycle and are moving up on the "plateau of productivity." Corporate performance management and business application data warehouses are just coming out of the "trough of disillusionment" whereas things like dashboards are just heading into the trough.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, March 12, 2007
1:58 PM

I'm seeing a number of software products "SaaSifying" as software as a service becomes an interesting way to deliver software and is more accepted in enterprises. One of the most innovative is the EA WebModeler from Agilense. You can find it at this site.

As explained by Steve Hunter, Agilense CTO:

"EA WebModeler is a business transformation enabling product. EA WebModeler helps organizations understand, cost, plan, and execute enterprise change by enabling organizations to build an actionable picture (model) of their current business and IT landscape, and develop models and plans of a future landscape."

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, March 9, 2007
2:53 PM

I was surprised to read this week that Dave DeWalt, one-time EMC rising star and former Documentum CEO, is leaving EMC to take the reigns at McAfee as CEO and president. DeWalt headed Documentum during its most innovative and aggressive years, and he spearheaded the sale of the company to EMC in 2003. He subsequently spearheaded EMC's fast-growing software division, but last year he took a less visible role as President of Customer Operations. In the same vein, long-time Documentum marketing executive David Milam left EMC last fall to join Zantaz.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, March 8, 2007
4:21 PM

[This is a re-post of something I wrote yesterday on the SAP Business Process Expert megablog, in case you don't follow that site.]

At the recent Gartner BPM Summit, I was shocked to see how high a pedestal the Gartner analysts now place simulation analysis in their gallery of must-have BPM capabilities. Ever obedient, the BPMS and modeling tool vendors now universally throw it into the box. How else to get into that Magic Quadrant?

But have these analysts ever really used these tools, or even scrutinized them closely? I'm not really sure. I haven't looked at all of them myself, but my sampling to date tells me this is a fake feature if ever there was one.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
12:49 PM

Business intelligence on demand for $3,000 per month for 100 users? That sounds pretty attractive, but LucidEra is not your typical BI suite that lets you build any application you want, now in a SaaS environment. It's specifically a BI-based forecast-to-billing application that includes data connectors (CRM, accounting, etc.), ETL, data cleansing, data warehousing, OLAP and a Web-based user interface.

But isn't BI supposed to be an all-purpose suite?

Posted by Tony Byrne
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
9:15 PM

We continue to look closely at the intersection between Web content management and Web analytics. There are several important issues here, but one keeps reappearing. It revolves around the growing tendency to use page tags in lieu of (or in addition to) log files for data collection.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
12:02 PM

There are mashups and then there are mashups, as I'm finding out. However, if you're looking for a clean definition of a mashup, here's WikiPedia's:

"A mashup is a Web site or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience."

What has occurred is that public Web APIs, such as those stood up by the likes of Google, are allowing savvy developers to take content and behavior from one SaaS and mash it together with another, thus forming a new application custom-made to solve the business problems of the end user.

Since there is plenty written about mashups I won't dwell on them here. However, the number and level of sophistication of mashups have grown exponentially in the last several months, and this trend will only continue. This could be the next great thing that happens to the world of SaaS, and a new way to sell the value of SaaS. Here's why.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, March 5, 2007
5:12 PM

Open-source business intelligence has changed nothing, yet it is making all the difference in the world.

What conclusion other than the first can you draw from analyst indifference and the yawns of established BI and enterprise application vendors? Six years after the launch of the open-source Mondrian OLAP server – widely used in the open-source (OS) world – there's no trace of open-source BI (OSBI) anywhere in Gartner's 2007 BI magic quadrant analysis. Yet Mondrian is the analytical core of at least four OSBI suites – JasperAnalysis, OpenI, Pentaho, and SpagoBI – and the packagers claim to be "selling" software like hotcakes. Clearly the explanation for the seeming contradiction is that we have two or even three different BI markets at work.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Monday, March 5, 2007
5:02 PM

Can't get enough insight on Oracle's planned acquisition of Hyperion? Ventana Research analysts Mark Smith, Robert Kugel and David Stodder - that's right, David Stodder - hold an analysts' roundtable discussion and Q&A; session on the planned Oracle/Hyperion deal, Tuesday, March 6 at 9 AM PT/12 PM ET.

Posted by Neil Raden
Friday, March 2, 2007
3:12 PM

Other analysts are preoccupied with the Oracle/Hyperion deal, but I'm not. There are so many important things to keep on top of that the financial doings of the industry are only secondary interests for me. After all, Hyperion itself is composed of three major companies – Arbor, Hyperion Software and Brio, some of which made major acquisitions of their own, including Brio's purchase of Scribe (SQR). This is just another step in an endless process. Some worry about consolidation of the market. I don't. There are dozens of companies waiting in the wings to become the next Hyperion.

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, March 1, 2007
5:30 PM

It has been clear for a while that Oracle needed to make a strategic acquisition to elevate its standing with corporate finance organizations, so few were surprised when the Redwood Shores database giant announced today it plans to acquire Hyperion Solutions Corp. When it comes to finance, Hyperion is, after all, the biggest kid on the block from customer, revenue and product-line perspectives.

The intention to acquire Hyperion is further proof that market consolidation is still the name of the game. It also is validation of the increasing importance of the CFO and the finance organization. The ownership and leverage of ERP has been waning for many years now and is just an IT maintenance function mostly and not a strategic finance conversation. This is a critical point that is now much more obvious to Oracle and SAP. The CFO relationship for influencing the management of budgets and many key strategic elements of decisions on technology is not to be under estimated.

How Hyperion will get along within Oracle remains to be seen. The finance components of Hyperion's offerings will be a good, complementary fit to Oracle Financials, but integrating its BI line may not be quite as simple. After all, Oracle has made its strategic bet clear with the release of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, a product that came courtesy of the earlier acquisition of Siebel. Hyperion BI will provide a starting point from which to build a future migration path. But what happens to Hyperion's BI customers in the meanwhile?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, March 1, 2007
4:26 PM

Every BI and performance management vendor has come out of the woodwork to offer an opinion on the Oracle/Hyperion deal. I'm gathering those comments and will share a few soon enough, but the companies I'm really anxious to hear from are SAP and IBM (and maybe HP belongs on that list as well). Consolidation happens in every technology market. It only goes one way, and every big, stand-alone vendor ultimately has a price.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, March 1, 2007
11:05 AM

So much for rumors! This morning, Oracle announced its intent to acquire Hyperion Solutions … not Business Objects as the rumor mill previously suggested. With performance management and BI slowly converging and arch competitor Microsoft about to release a complete product set, it's a smart but aggressive move on Oracle's part. For Hyperion, I only hope that the best people and products don't get lost in the shuffle.