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The Lighter Side of Outsourcing

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, August 31, 2007
11:45 AM

Consumer confidence faltering in a sputtering economy, jobs continuing to move offshore at rapid pace… is this a time to laugh at outsourcing? Why not? As outsourcing vendors get increasingly sophisticated with their offerings — and corporate America gets increasingly greedy about the cost savings — here are a few glorious changes that we can all look forward to.

Continue reading "The Lighter Side of Outsourcing"

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Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, August 30, 2007
6:05 PM

I had a long briefing with database legend Michael Stonebraker today, and I feel compelled to share a few highlights of the conversation. Stonebraker is known as a visionary, and he has consistently turned those visions into long-term bets through commercial startups. Today's prediction? "Sooner or later, the entire data warehousing market is going to move to column-store solutions," Stonebraker asserts, column-store being the architectural basis of his latest venture, a startup called Vertica.

For those who don't know of Stonebraker, here’s a short bio. He was the main architect of the Ingres relational DBMS and the object-relational Postgres DBMS, both of which were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a computer science professor for 25 years. More recently at MIT, Stonebraker was a co-architect of the Aurora stream processing engine as well as the C-Store high-performance read-oriented database engine. He is the founder of four startups that have commercialized these prototypes: Ingres Corp., Illustra (acquired by Informix before the latter was acquired by IBM), StreamBase and, most recently, Vertica.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
10:16 AM

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor Open Text recently announced that it will deliver a major upgrade to the acquired (ex-Hummingbird) eDocs technology for the Legal sector. Not earth-shattering, but important news nonetheless.

For starters it will come as a big relief to the very substantial customer base in the Legal sector that Hummingbird had built up before its late 2006 acquisition by Open Text. Secondly, it reaffirms Open Text's commitment to building on other repositories where sensible — in this case Microsoft — the platform that dominates Legal.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
9:40 AM

Not long after my "WebTrends Release Boosts Scoring, Segmentation" post, WebTrends' Director of Product Marketing Matt Langie contacted me to tell me that I'd gotten their pricing wrong. Pricing for Marketing Data Warehouse is not $1,000 per month, as I thought I'd been told during the demo. Langie said this statement contained errors:

"Existing customers of the Marketing Warehouse will be upgraded to Score and Visitor Intelligence at no additional cost."

It should read:

"Existing customers of the WebTrends Marketing Warehouse will be upgraded to WebTrends Visitor Intelligence at no additional cost."
He added, "In addition, WebTrends Marketing Warehouse is no longer a standalone product that is licensed, but serves as the underlying database which powers the two new products in ML2, WebTrends Score, and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence. As such, new licensees of WebTrends Score or WebTrends Visitor Intelligence will now receive the Marketing Warehouse inclusive in these product offerings."

To this I responded with the following questions — questions that you might ask as a current or potential customer:

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
9:25 AM

Just back from vacation in France and was wowed by something unexpected — BI for waiters! (though the wine impressed me too).

When the waiter showed up to take our order, he wielded a kind of pen-computing/Palm device, not a pad of paper. I had never seen this before — at least not in NYC-area restaurants. At my enthusiasm, the waiter proudly declared "C'est nouveau!"… "it's new!"

Imagine the possibilities: When I order mousse au chocolat and it's sold out, the waiter can proactively recommend an available alternative – crème brulee (not escargot).

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, August 27, 2007
9:06 AM

In this article in Computerworld, the author cites a new Burton Group study warning larger enterprises away from the new, and cheap, SaaS-delivered Google office automation solution.

"'At just $50 a year per user, Google Inc.'s Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) hosted office productivity suite could be one of the cheapest mistakes a large business makes.' That's one of the conclusions of a study by the Burton Group, which said GAPE offers lots of good value for business users, but lacks strong regulatory compliance features and poor administrative tools for user accounts. That means a quick deployment in a large business could be a 'career-limiting move' for IT staffers who advocate its use without knowing of its shortcomings."

The core issue is security, according to the report.

"While usability is generally good — except for users who build complex spreadsheets — critical data security and regulatory compliance features are missing…"

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, August 24, 2007
11:26 PM

I've been puzzling out a technique, used by sites that machine-aggregate content, that may boost pages' Google rankings. The aggregators stuff their pages with (Google) ads and contextually similar - albeit just similar enough - content. All that pseudo-content surely moves them up the Google rankings. How else to explain the success of the bottom-feeders who exploit others' content in order to sell ads?

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, August 23, 2007
9:56 AM

There are many factors that pose a challenge for enterprisewide Master Data Management. Business ownership and ongoing participation, business process disruption, data integration and synchronization – these and other factors can make an MDM implementation painful, time-consuming and expensive. But there are also some factors that help reduce the pain and effort.

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
9:09 AM

Microsoft is on the final leg of their journey to release its dedicated BI technology to support performance management. This enterprise-level move has been expected for some time, and with the multi-year pre-marketing of the technology there are high expectations. Will it perform?

Microsoft PerformancePoint is a platform and set of tools that includes the long-awaited version of Microsoft Excel Server. Many components are aimed at the BI and performance management markets. The group of products is a critical first step toward becoming an enterprise-class vendor, but is it a large enough first step? I'm not sure yet, but let's look at a couple of examples and see what you think.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
8:25 AM

Search has many limits but the price is right and the alternative, reliance on traditional interfaces and human-structured information, is increasingly perceived as unacceptable. Yet there's still much to be said for old-school information-retrieval methods. Witness a new, search-free IT-market research tool, TechNavio, just launched by Infiniti Research.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
9:01 AM

This article reports on Gartner's prediction that the SaaS market will hit $19.3 billion by 2011. That's in just a few years. SaaS has clearly come a long way.

"The worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) market reached $6.3 billion in 2006 and is forecast to grow to $19.3 billion by year-end 2011, according to Gartner. SaaS is hosted software based on a single set of common code and data definitions that are consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers, at any time, on a pay-for-use basis, or as a subscription based on usage metrics."

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, August 20, 2007
3:09 PM

The appetite for Search continues to grow rapidly, and Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) has been one of the most aggressive players in the market. I've covered FAST's move to provide a contextual advertising alternative. Another company initiative boldly claims to revolutionize business intelligence. Yet FAST's recent difficulties, which appear to involve technical missteps and not just operational issues, should make us rethink the limits of search, particularly when it comes to extravagant claims about search-BI.

Posted by Joe Celko
Monday, August 20, 2007
11:35 AM

For this month's puzzler, consider a posting in a Newsgroup by Patrick L. Nolan at Stanford University. He has a small database with the following business rules:

1) Every person in the database is uniquely defined by a single key, their user_id.

2) Everyone is assigned a job category, call them 'A', 'B' and 'X'.

3) Everyone in job category 'X' has a supervisor who must be in either job category 'A' or job category 'B'.

4) Nobody can be their own supervisor.

One proposal was to divide job category 'X' into two, call them 'XA' and 'XB' respectively. All the 'XA' people would have 'A' supervisors, and all the 'XB' people would have 'B' supervisors.

Nolan immediately noticed that there is redundancy and the possibility of inconsistency. Suppose somebody in job category 'XA' somehow gets assigned to a supervisor in job category 'B', contrary to the definition of 'XA'. Can you think of a way to do this in pure DDL?

Posted by Nelson King
Friday, August 17, 2007
9:28 AM

In traditional IT software development circles, at a time say about 10 BW (Before Web), seeing the work of an artist (that is, someone who produces something in a recognized art form) was a matter of a Friday or Saturday night out on the town. Then along came the Web with all its bells and whistles… and pictures, and graphics, and animations, and video… and the Web page started to fill with the work of artists, if not works of art. Eventually applications destined for the Web were expected to have artwork, especially in the form of multimedia, and a generation of IT developers began to work with artists of many stripes.

Now we get to Rich Internet Applications, and the connection to artwork goes up a notch. Almost by definition, RIAs are supposed to be enhanced by graphics design and multimedia. In some cases the multimedia, for example a demonstration video, may be the purpose and majority content of the application. In any case, the roles of design and art work (in the broadest sense) are integral to the production of Rich Internet Applications.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, August 16, 2007
3:59 PM

VMware made a stunning debut on the New York Stock Exchange this week — reportedly the strongest IPO since Google — and the future looks good for VMware itself and for virtualization in general. The future, however, isn't fully here yet.

Virtualization looks good for a lot of exciting reasons. The central promise of virtualization is resource optimization — doing more with less. What's not to like about that? Companies like the promise of reduced cost and complexity (more on this later). In a recent survey, Forrester Research found that 40 percent of U.S. respondents currently use virtualization… but more than 90 percent are aware of the technology. Interestingly, the survey also indicates that large companies are much more likely to use virtualization than smaller businesses. Arguably the SMB sector more keenly feels the need for cost savings than larger corporations — could it be that the cost/complexity equation for virtualization works out unfavorably for smaller businesses?

Posted by David Linthicum
Thursday, August 16, 2007
12:09 AM

As the number of SaaS deployments expand worldwide, many analysts forecast a strong upward trend in outsourced applications. Indeed, by 2011, research firm Gartner claims that 25 percent of new business software will be delivered as SaaS.

Clearly, this seems to be the trend. As cost pressures come down on management, the use of SaaS will become more commonplace. In other words, it's not something that's just in style, but something that can quickly show an improvement on the bottom line when considering the cost of implementation and maintenance, as well as the value of the business processes it provides. Few companies have the resources to recreate or even compete with SaaS products such as Saleforce.com, NetSuite, and/or the emerging Web services marketplaces. And why should they when SaaS products are a fraction of the price of purchasing complete packages or building those services yourself?

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
10:17 AM

Web analytics vendor WebTrends released Marketing Lab 2 early this month, an ambitious effort that seeks to raise the analytics value of the product while improving usability.

The introduction of WebTrends "Score" and WebTrends "Visitor Intelligence" are the featured upgrades to Marketing Warehouse Version 2.0. Score lets you set values on events in order to measure engagement. While the idea of setting values is not ground breaking, analysts who currently spend time doing this offline in Excel will save time by setting values within the interface and having reports generated natively.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
10:28 AM

The Oracle 11g database, released today in its Linux version, differs from earlier releases in that it contains significant advancements pushing the leading enterprise database further ahead of the competition. But is it a database anymore?

In addition to improvements in performance, scalability and ease of administration that any major new version should have, Oracle has expanded the capabilities in information management for items such as documents, text, files and other unstructured data, including XML, and by doing so, it continues to encroach on the territory of content management systems.

In reality, though, what has caught the attention of OLAP and BI insiders is that in release 11g, Oracle completes the embedding of multidimensional access and storage capabilities from the Express technology it acquired 12 years ago. It's an interesting bit of timing — Oracle now has to decide what to do with recently acquired Hyperion Essbase, a long-time rival of Express. This adds more OLAP to the Oracle portfolio that yet needs to be formalized. Oracle appears to look to further implant this database as part of their global BI effort and differentiate it as a database-level OLAP option.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
9:34 AM

Business process management system vendor Metastorm acquired business process analysis vendor Proforma on August 1, which came as kind of a surprise to me, since the last thing most business analysts want is to have their modeling tool funnel them into some proprietary runtime. As usual, Sandy Kemsley has it covered.

I bring it up only because a graduate of my BPMN training pinged me about a white paper on the Metastorm Web site that disses BPMN big-time while at the same time admitting that the company probably needs to adapt its proprietary "SAR" notation to be more like the unlovable standard. The paper raises all of the usual canards about BPMN — it's too complicated for untrained business analysts, but does not cover all the implementation detail needed for execution.

Posted by Product Maven
Monday, August 13, 2007
7:41 AM

The Crystal Reports Viewer XI is an Acrobat Reader-style viewing client for Crystal Reports. Released today, the free, downloadable software lets you open and explore Crystal Reports documents, and you can generate customized views without placing demands on the report designer.

While some reporting environments rely on static document viewing and printing formats, this approach limits the ability of the user to explore the data. Crystal Reports Viewer XI lets you drill down into the report tables and save personalized views. This reduces the burden on IT and report developers to come up with customized reports. Users can share their files in native .rpt format via e-mail or on the secure crystalreports.com on-demand platform.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Friday, August 10, 2007
12:11 PM

This week, CMS Watch officially kicks off a formal training program. In conjunction with AIIM, we are providing classroom workshops (leading to official AIIM designations) in Information Organization & Access (IOA) and Business Process Management (BPM).

I'm very excited about these new courses. CMS Watch undertook the coursework development under the guidance of AIIM's Educational Advisory Group, and both organizations will be leading courses throughout North America, Europe, and (next year) Asia-Pacific. Here's why these courses are so terribly important.

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, August 9, 2007
9:50 AM

Oracle has gained a lot of weight in the BI market with its recent acquisition of Hyperion, gaining many new customers, and large number of experienced employees. Since its acquisition of Siebel, which was the source of their current Oracle BI Enterprise Extended Edition (EE) technology, Oracle had achieved critical milestones on their product roadmap. With the completion of the acquisition of Hyperion, Oracle now has a new challenge of integrating another large collection of BI technologies and financial management applications. The company is aggressively pushing its new agenda and is stating its differentiation as having the first and complete integrated, end-to-end enterprise performance management system.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
1:24 PM

Omniture recently announced a 78-percent increase in revenues over the second quarter of 2006 and 15-percent increase over the first quarter of 2007. Much of this growth was driven by international sales that accounted for $8.8 million, or 26 percent of all revenue. This was a 184-percent increase over last year. Of course, with growth comes challenges.

Ominture entered Europe two years ago starting in the UK, and it has since built a presence in France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain. Its January purchase of Instadia established a foothold in Scandinavia, and was quickly followed by the acquisition of UK behavioral targeting company, TouchClarity.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
5:51 PM

I've probably seen more than a hundred press releases promising products that will "put powerful yet intuitive reporting and analysis in the hands of business users." When I covered the content management market on a daily basis (a few years back), the PR mantra was "make everyone in the organization a content contributor." All too often, these types of products aren't all that easy or intuitive.

I was reminded of these promises as I researched this week's " In-Depth Analysis story, centered around an AberdeenGroup BI study released last week. The baseline assumption of the study is that companies want to improve access to actionable information, but the 370 study respondents reported these top-five obstacles:

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
11:44 AM

Last week, I got a briefing from the business process management (BPM) folks at Oracle, as part of my BPMS Report series, and I came away surprised at both the completeness and, in many ways, coolness of the offering. A few things stand out (for the rest you'll have to wait for the report, later this month):

Oracle provides a unique solution to the problems of business-IT interaction and round-tripping. For modeling, Oracle OEMs IDS-Scheer ARIS, rebranded Oracle BPA Suite, and has added to it Oracle SOA Extensions that link it to the executable process design and runtime environment, called Oracle SOA Suite. Modelers can use either traditional ARIS EPC or the new BPMN to model process activity flows, but Oracle favors BPMN, in keeping with its marketing theme of "standards-based BPM." Unlike most other BPMN-based offerings, this is full BPMN - intermediate events, pools and message flows, etc.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, August 6, 2007
8:22 AM

Those who leverage enterprise applications have two major complaints. First, the apps are too complex and too difficult to use. Second, they perform poorly, which is what I'm focusing on here.

The truth is, it matters not what type of application it is, SaaS, or traditional enterprise systems such as an ERP or CRM; ease-of-use and performance are always shortcomings in the minds of end users.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, August 3, 2007
10:35 AM

Microsoft SharePoint continues to grow apace. In a presentation to financial analysts earlier this week, Microsoft stated that in the past year it has seen 35-percent year-over-year growth and revenues of a staggering $800 Million. The company claims is has shipped 85 million seat licenses to 17,000 customers since the beginning of SharePoint time (in 2001).

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, August 2, 2007
12:29 PM

As BI becomes a mission-critical business application, it's increasingly important to partner with a BI vendor that understands your business and has a vested interest in ensuring your success. Why is it, then, that some BI vendors still have a hit-and-run sales approach?

As coincidence would have it, on a long plane journey from San Francisco back to New Jersey, I met a very important BI customer wedged in the middle seat next to me. It's a rare experience that a casual acquaintance shares my passion for this space, so I only too happily shared some research from my upcoming book and BIScorecard. As part of the BIScorecard strategic criteria, I include quality of customer account management and technical support.

This particular customer pays his BI vendor more than $400,000 in annual maintenance fees. Sounds like an important customer, right? Yet his last account rep lasted two weeks, and it has been years since anyone has taken much of an interest in their efforts — other than just to sell more software.

Posted by Neil Raden
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
9:28 AM

Business Objects Labs is continually releasing new prototypes that can be downloaded and evaluated. You have to applaud this sort of approach, and some of these widgets are interesting and, as prototypes, indicate that there is a lot of creative thinking going on there. I think that Business Objects "gets it" sometimes, but then at other times, they have me scratching my head. They claim on the Labs Web site to deliver on, "the vision of 'ambient business intelligence (BI)' by allowing end users to access lightweight, secure, and personalized BI widgets at all times."

That isn't ambient BI, that's mobile BI. Ambient BI, according to my definition in January, 2006, should advise and drive businesses with embedded analytics, real-time decision tools and vastly improved capabilities for people and unattended processes in every corner of the organization, and beyond it. I suppose it's encouraging that Business Objects is investing in Web 2.0 capabilities, but their product offering as a whole feels a little like a strip mall — lots of things to offer, but no coherent thread running through it.