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Poll Results on BPMN Portability

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
3:52 PM

There's no denying that BPMN is gaining traction in the marketplace. I see it in my training. I see it in BPMS and BPA vendors getting on board. But what's amazing about this is that it's happening without a standard way to store and interchange BPMN between tools. It almost boggles the mind that the creators of BPMN "forgot" about this when they started, and its current owners place model interchange so far down the priority list (it's still not in the draft BPMN 1.1 spec, not yet released).

At the OMG Think Tank last week, I had a small roundtable on "what should be the purpose of BPM standards?" Not well attended, but it was the afternoon of the last day, and half the audience had left for home already. Besides, the topic was sort of a subtext for the conference as a whole, already beaten to death. But clearly there is no unanimity on the subject.

Continue reading "Poll Results on BPMN Portability"

Comments

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
11:06 AM

After my post last week on PaaS (Platform as a Service), I've been thinking more about PaaS and its relation to SaaS, and I figured I would back up a bit and put things into context.

I think we are moving in three clear directions:

• First, the movement from visual to service-based interfaces.
• Second, the movement to outsourced or virtualized business processes.
• Finally, the acceptance of an on-demand platform for applications, services, and now development and enterprise architecture.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Monday, July 30, 2007
12:58 PM

Just a year or two ago, a major upgrade to the Documentum ECM platform would have been dominant news in the industry, but things change, and quickly. D6, the latest version of EMC's flagship enterprise content management platform, is undertaking a gradual roll-out through Q3 2007 to muted fanfare. EMC and its investors have high expectations for this new version, as the company's Documentum Content and Archiving division has shown only modest growth of 5 percent year-over-year, lower than most competitors.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Friday, July 27, 2007
10:52 AM

You could be excused for thinking that packet sniffing-based data collection for Web Analytics was long gone. Packet sniffing -- or network-based data collection -- was the basis of web analytics pioneer Accrue Software's technology in the mid '90s, but like log file analysis, it fell out of favor at least in the US market with the advent of page tag-based data collection.

Proponents argue that packet sniffing is superior because data collection becomes "hands off" once the collection appliance is installed between the router and network switch. There are no tags to maintain, nor log files to administer. On the other hand, if a data collector fails, you have not data.

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, July 26, 2007
9:28 AM

We all need to understand better how to establish high-quality, cost-effective information management strategies. As part of this effort, we need to identify methods and technologies that can automate and improve data processing.

Yes, data processing and other basic tenets of management information systems (MIS) from the 1980s are cycling back to the forefront of business and the desk of the CIO. The silos of data generated over the last decade continue to proliferate and to challenge organizations as they look to gain a consistent view of their operations, both historical and ongoing.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
11:09 AM

A comment on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Hubs from our own Brain Food Blogger served, inadvertently, to highlight the confusion that prevails in the CDI/PIM/MDM space. That's particularly unfortunate, because one simple mathematical equation could set the confusion to rest.

First, here's the equation, in terms of set theory: {CDI, PIM} Subset {MDM}.

In other words, customer data integration and product information management are both subsets of master data management, one focused on customers and the other on products. Too bad, they don't have conforming acronyms (who would think that CDI and PIM are so closely related?)

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
9:20 AM

What's the new buzzword? It's Platform as a Service, or PaaS.
In this article Salesforce.com promotes its Apex platform as a PaaS, something that goes well beyond the notion of a SaaS and that has the potential to change the game in how we consume all IT resources, not just applications.

From the article:

"Salesforce.com has announced the August release of Salesforce Summer '07 — the twenty-third iteration of the company's CRM application. In addition to service upgrades, the Summer '07 edition will introduce Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)— giving programmers and developers the power of customization through Apex Code, a programming language. Once the new edition is deployed, Salesforce.com promises technology departments and software developers the ability to do what end users have done for years through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)— automate computing."

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, July 23, 2007
12:14 PM

Face it: as a small or medium enterprise, you simply do not have the kind of leverage on offshore service providers as the GEs and Citis. But just because you aren't spending $20 million annually on offshore services doesn't mean that you have no options.

In its latest quarterly financial report, leading Indian offshore firm Infosys reports nearly 130 customers that spent $20 million or more in the last twelve months. But what of lesser clients? According to Forrester Research, offshore service providers are "increasingly willing to walk away from business rather than make concessions or alterations that don't suit them."

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, July 23, 2007
12:00 AM

You can't swing a dead cat by the tail in this industry and not hit a story about exploding data volumes, service-oriented architecture (SOA), pervasive/operational BI and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Moore's Law is supposed to handle that first one, but can it really? And what about the others? Are we really ready for them?

Moore's Law, it's true, has driven the cost of computer hardware down, relatively speaking, but in one area, hot storage, there is a monster under the bed. While the density of disk drives has doubled every eighteen months or so, and the price per megabyte (really, of gigabyte now) has followed a similar pattern, there is a component of disk drives that is not electronic and doesn't follow the same trend. The actual data transfer rates have not been improving at a rate anywhere close to the increases in drive capacities. So we may have bigger, cheaper drives, but it doesn't mean that we can read or write more data any faster, or, at least not at the dizzying rate of increase of CPU's, memory and disk drive platters. That's the first problem.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Friday, July 20, 2007
10:14 AM

If you're a Visual Sciences customer (i.e., HBX and Visual Site analytics, Publish CMS, or the former Atomz Search), you'd have to be a bit concerned by last week's report that the company is actively considering "unsolicited inquiries" to be acquired.

A press release indicates the company has hired Goldman Sachs as a financial adviser to assess potential deals, followed by the assurance from CEO Jim MacIntyre, "Meanwhile, we will continue to focus on building our business."

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Thursday, July 19, 2007
10:43 AM

One indication that the customer data integration (CDI) space isn't a very mature is that there are only 11 vendors in Gartner's just-released Magic Quadrant for the technology. Another indication is that just two vendors, IBM and Oracle, are in the "leaders" quadrant, and they just barely make it into that top-right sector. Two other vendors, Initiate Systems and Siperian, are within striking distance in the "visionaries" quadrant, but most vendors are stuck down in that lower-left, "niche player" quadrant.

Posted by Nelson King
Thursday, July 19, 2007
9:14 AM

For the two past weeks I've been on a working vacation in Montana, where dial-up Internet access is all there is. No DSL and mountains block satellite connection. A good place to experiment with Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that need to be functional when disconnected from the Internet. Of course, an RIA without the Internet violates the definition of RIA, but reality and Murphy's Law tell us that for certain Web applications, an Internet connection may not always be available when it is necessary to run the application.

Posted by Neil Raden
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
2:19 PM

Five years ago, I bought a covered wagon and put my family and whatever belongings we had into it and headed across the prairie. Well, figuratively speaking, anyway. I shut down my data warehousing/BI systems integration business and re-invented myself as a consultant to software companies. It wasn't really that bold of a move. I was tired of the constant travel and I had a fair amount of residual goodwill with the vendors so that I was able to pick up some work right away.

Along the way, I've learned a lot about how software companies work. And now, after five years, I'm something of a presumptive expert. From time to time, CEO's and founders and even venture capitalists ask me for my opinion about how to do this or that, and I always respond the same way: "I've never earned a dime running a software company, why would you ask me?" And it's true. I have the utmost respect for the entrepreneurs and managers who build something from nothing and have the attention span to attend to the details. I can't do that. I can help them in other ways, but the creation and nurturing is up to them. I'm not a company guy.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
10:54 AM

I received Gartner e-mail this week marketing their up-coming open-source summit. The message contains gems that illuminate Gartner's perspective on open source and the larger IT world.

I characterized Gartner as the oracle of IT establishment and looked at their summit plans in a blog entry last week. Analysts will explain the heretofore anti-establishment open-source movement, albeit without the help of representatives of the communities that lend open source its power and vibrancy. Gartner's theme -- a quite valid one -- seems to be that establishment IT needs to come to grips with open source, and of course that Gartner is the organization that can show the way. They claim to be good at it.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
9:19 AM

While much of the BI market has been busy expanding its solution breadth – acquiring or developing performance management capabilities – one vendor that has stayed focus exclusively on the BI front-end has been MicroStrategy. Only time will tell if its strategy will pay off, but CEO Michael Saylor has long maintained that there is still a lot of work to be done in the traditional BI space, to solve some of the harder BI problems.

One of those hard problems is impact analysis and regression testing. When someone makes a change any where in the BI lifecycle, say a physical field in the data warehouse, identifying affected reports is often guesswork. A handful of BI vendors do "okay" in telling you which reports are impacted (see BIScorecard, architecture criteria for detailed scores); for most others, the reports will out and out break.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
7:52 AM

According to this article at MyCustomer.com, by Stuart Lauchlan, Microsoft is gunning for Salesforce.com and plans to declare a price war with a lower subscription price. Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM is Microsoft's answer to on-demand CRM, and subscription rates will be $44 per user, per month for the professional version and $59 per user, per month for the enterprise version. In addition, there will be an introductory price of $39 per user per month for the professional version, which will offer a complete suite of CRM software through Microsoft Outlook and browser clients, and will also use Microsoft Workflow Foundation. All of this was revealed at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver last week.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, July 16, 2007
12:27 AM

There is a lot of conflicting information about the term “Operational BI.” We need some research to sort out the jargon and propose a clear definition for the term (I’m willing). All of the following are being positioned as Operational BI (not a complete list):

• Data warehousing of operational data for reporting, with or without integration
• Replication of operational data for reporting
• Direct reporting from operational systems
• Federated reporting from operational systems
• Process Intelligence
• Inline integration
• Sensing applications
• Decision services
• Real-time BI

Posted by Seth Grimes
Sunday, July 15, 2007
2:27 PM

Yes, Oracle 11g is a blockbuster release, sure to maintain the company's dominant market position.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, July 13, 2007
12:05 PM

This week, Oracle announced 11g, the latest upgrade to its flagship database. The announcement brooks great interest within the ECM community because, as we detail in the ECM Suites Report, so many ECM tools (including all the leading players) utilize the Oracle database.

Of particular interest is enhanced support for "LOBs" (Large Objects), such as documents, drawings, images, and so forth. Oracle says 11g can now provide:
• Comparable performance to regular file servers for access to large files
• Greater compression capabilities
• The ability to encrypt LOBs within the database environment

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, July 12, 2007
8:18 AM

As we consider the issue of IT budgets and the competition for funding between the tasks necessary to keep the lights on and investments for innovation and improvement, we start to appreciate the bind CIOs and IT managers find themselves in. The sheer mass of technology required to keep organizations operating has grown significantly in the last decade, and so have the maintenance demands to keep everything running.

As CIOs and IT management come under pressure to invest in the future, they're finding they need an even more thorough knowledge of their existing IT portfolios, what they can do, where they fall short and their worth to the company. Yet I find that many IT managers do not have enough information – about what technologies they actually have, how well they are performing and how much they cost – to make wise decisions about budget allocations. What is sad about this situation is that portfolio management applications like those from HP and PlanView have been readily available for many years.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
6:43 PM

I'm just back from Oracle's 11g launch event in midtown Manhattan, and I have to say I came away impressed. The database is at the center of Oracle's world, and company president Charles Phillips strutted the vendor's stuff — with his usual low-key swagger — on topics ranging from the firm's 30th anniversary to its 47-percent marketshare ("more than IBM and Microsoft combined" he asserted) to the long list of 11g upgrades and new features.

I lost track of how many of those features Phillips claimed to be unique to Oracle (and I'm following up with analysts to verify), but a few of the more impressive ones included OLAP cube-based management of materialized views and the use of standby servers to drive testing and performance improvements.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
3:49 PM

This year's big Drug Information Association (DIA) conference in Atlanta concluded with something of a shock for enterprise content management (ECM) vendors. Microsoft SharePoint will now compete directly with established Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences-focused vendors EMC|Documentum and Open Text. Pharma was supposed to be sacred ground for the big ECM vendors -- one area of turf where few thought Microsoft would tread.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
10:37 AM

"Governance," that wonderfully over-used term, is something that data management professionals love to preach. But to what extent do we practice it in our own professional activities, and how do we go about achieving this laudable objective?

Listen to a presentation from any data product or service vendor or to a speech from any data management professional – especially, one that is up to speed on the latest jargon – and you will hear the term "governance" mentioned sooner rather than later. Pay closer attention and you will find it's typically mentioned in the context of Master Data Management (MDM) or Customer Data Integration (CDI), and seldom otherwise. And therein lies the problem.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, July 9, 2007
9:46 AM

Virtualization has been a hot topic for the last few years as corporate America seeks to do things faster, better, and cheaper. Lately, I've been getting a lot of cross links with SaaS, so perhaps it's time to drill down on this topic a bit.

According to Wikipedia, "Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. One useful definition is 'a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources; or it can include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single logical resource.'"

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, July 9, 2007
7:21 AM

There couldn't be a greater contrast between the views on semantics of Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and of data warehousing figure Bill Inmon.

Posted by Neil Raden
Thursday, July 5, 2007
9:28 AM

There are plenty of software moguls living in Santa Barbara, but after twenty years of living here, I haven't met very many. Perhaps it's because, for the first fifteen years, I wasn't here very much, or maybe it's just because I'm not a software mogul myself. So isn't it ironic that I had a very nice lunch a couple of days ago, in Santa Barbara, with one of the few software company CEO's from Santa Barbara I do know, John Patton, CEO of Sight Software. Ironic because he now lives in Hanover, NH.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
2:29 PM

About two months ago, I wrote a commentary on Oracle's lawsuit accusing SAP of extensive illegal downloads confidential material from Oracle Support. Today, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann admitted to "inappropriate downloads." Unfortunately, the candor is probably a little late in coming, and this is likely to be the beginning rather than the end for SAP's troubles.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
1:16 PM

Gartner has announced an Open Source Summit for this coming fall. The summit will bring together, on the one hand, an analyst firm known for authoritative pronouncements on all things IT, and on the other, a disruptive model for software development that is, at its core, anti-authoritarian. The term that comes to mind is cognitive dissonance. How will the Gartner summit bridge two conflicting world views?

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
9:17 AM

The notion that an enterprise can run entirely on SaaS sends many traditional software folks running for their Red Book IBM manuals, and rocking back and forth muttering "Say it's not so. Say it's not so." However, there are some small businesses out there that are approaching the state of SaaS-only operation, and many companies are sure to follow.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, July 2, 2007
2:23 PM

I spent a couple days at the Data Governance Conference in San Francisco last week, not as a speaker, but strictly as a listener. It was nice of Davida Berger and Tony Shaw to invite me, and of course, it's always great to see friends and colleagues, but what I really wanted to get out of the three days was a deeper understanding of this concept of governance, what it means and how it works. I admit, I cringe at the word "governance," because it reeks of IT control and restrictions, something we've clearly had enough of for the past few decades. This, combined with the government's renewed interest in everything, seems like a perfect medium for the control freaks and compartmentalizers to push their agendas, creating more bureaucracy and less data democracy (though that is another term that makes me cringe, but let's save that for another time).

Posted by Product Maven
Monday, July 2, 2007
9:57 AM

Customer and partner testing of the next release of the DB2 9 database began last week as IBM unveiled the beta version of what's code named "Viper 2." The update is said to offer enhanced security and workload management features including:
• Automated, hands-off fail over for high availability
• Greater flexibility and granularity in security, auditing and access control
• Simplified memory management and increased customization capabilities