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The Enterprise Content Management - SOA Divide

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, June 29, 2007
11:32 AM

In the content management world, I sense something of a backlash brewing against SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), but I wonder how real or or even practical this is. With most Fortune 2000 firms already way down the SOA path, there seems to be no turning back. At the enterprise architecture level, there is no Plan B.
So the issue for me is not whether SOA is the way forward for ECM, but rather how seriously some of the ECM vendors are embracing it.

Continue reading "The Enterprise Content Management - SOA Divide"

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Posted by Phil Kemelor
Thursday, June 28, 2007
1:26 PM

Nick Sharp, the VP and general manager of EMEA at WebTrends, recently wrote a piece for mycustomer.com entitled "Web Analytics is dead!". The gist of the article is that Web marketers should not look at Web analytics data in a vacuum, but rather, use it to drive marketing campaigns and solutions. No disagreement with the premise, and as I wrote in the Web Analytics Report, vendors continue to set up partner integration networks that enable Web analytics to be the "brains behind e-marketing."

There are a few things I find interesting in reading the article. One is the use of the term "Marketing Performance Management" (MPM). What is MPM exactly?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
1:05 PM

I'm still thinking about last week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, which ranks as the most exciting and thought-provoking event I've attended thus far this year. I'm not just saying that just because it's a CMP-produced event (okay, there's the disclaimer). There was a palpable sense of promise and limitless possibilities for new technologies and approaches.

Enterprise 2.0 was launched three years ago as "the Collaborative Technologies Conference," so it's no surprise that blogs, wikis, text messaging, presence awareness and all things social networking received a lot of attention. In fact, show manager Steven Wylie opened the event talking about the need to "fix our broken e-mail culture."

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
8:52 AM

Google is offering its mapping capabilities as a potential source of enterprise-class business intelligence in the area of location intelligence. Google has made its Google Maps for the Enterprise available at a low cost while providing telephone and e-mail support. The challenge for you is to decide whether this offering can meet your enterprise needs.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
10:47 AM

As highlighted in this article by Computer Weekly, SMBs using SaaS face a complex integration challenge.

"According to research firm Saugatuck Technology, as more companies use SaaS, the need to integrate those applications with the rest of a company's systems grows. In fact, 17 percent of SMBs are using more than one application delivered via SaaS, according to the Westport, Conn.-based firm's findings."

Indeed, as SMBs first moved into SaaS, they looked at SaaS-delivered applications as something new and interesting, and managed it as a silo. With increased use of SaaS, and as the business matures, there's a need to link SaaS-based apps with the rest of the enterprise. That type of integration is hard, but many SMBs now see the need.

Posted by Nelson King
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
9:47 AM

What is a Rich Internet Application? The Wikipedia entry says: "Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are Web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the Web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e. maintaining the state of the program, the data etc.) back on the application server. RIAs typically: run in a Web browser, or do not require software installation; run locally in a secure environment called a sandbox; and can be 'occasionally connected'."

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, June 25, 2007
2:06 PM

My commentary last week referred to data-related issues in identifying Iraqi insurgents for allied soldiers on the move. An obvious solution would be for the soldiers to carry mobile devices (e.g. laptops, PDAs) to verify identity on-the-spot. The trouble is, application and data synchronization for widely distributed mobile devices is still an imperfect science. It all boils down to the question: What's your poison?

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, June 25, 2007
7:30 AM

Some of you may have already seen a presentation floating around with a lot of WOW statistics about China and India and technology. If not, you can view it here: http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift

We're told that China has more honor students than the US has students, has the largest English-speaking population in the world, that Nintendo spends more money on basic research each year than the US spends on research into education and that a college freshman studying a technical topic will be learning things that are obsolete before he/she graduates.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, June 22, 2007
7:01 AM

The story begins with CA (Computer Associates), which spun off its Ingres line into a separate, open source project. Ingres is now teaming up with open source enterprise content management (ECM) provider Alfresco. The Ingres "Icebreaker" product (linux + database stack) will offer an ECM option provided via Alfresco.

Posted by Neil Raden
Thursday, June 21, 2007
8:21 AM

I hope that the debate between Davenport and McAfee about Enterprise 2.0 was more enlightening than the excerpt I read, because I'm left with the impression that neither one of them gets it, and I'm pretty sure that isn't true. Web 2.0 is driving the way companies are doing business. For proof, look no further than the fact that VC money has virtually dried up for enterprise software over the past five years. The only true innovation going on now is at the edge of the Consumer Web.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
1:03 PM

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in Technology Transfer's annual data warehouse and BI summit in Rome, Italy.

It's been about 11 years since I've been to Italy and this was my first work-related trip there. So I was a little nervous – does the Italian market care about the same issues as the U.S. market? Do they face the same challenges?

Posted by Neil Raden
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
7:51 AM

I read with interest Tom Davenport's article, "Humans and Black Boxes" in the June, 2007 issue of BIReview. He raises the issue about whether humans are required in the analytics process anymore, given the offerings of vendors of unattended data mining tools. After all, with all of the hardware and bandwidth at our disposal, shouldn't systems be smart enough yet to swim around in the data and come up with predictive models that are more accurate than we mere humans can? Of course, Davenport doesn't believe that, and neither do I.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
5:27 PM

The Enterprise 2.0 movement gets an "A" for awareness and technology development, but a sorry "C" for communicating business benefits and results. This report card, offered today by Harvard Business School professor and keynote speaker Andrew McAfee, sums up the mix of enthusiasm and hunger for practical applications in evidence here at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
10:28 AM

Can data quality and data integration technologies help quell insurgency in Iraq? Going by a recent New York Times news item, this seems to be the case, and serves to remind us yet again – if indeed there was any need – about the kind of profound impact data integration and quality can have on the success of any initiative, business or otherwise.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, June 18, 2007
11:32 AM

In my past life I was CEO of Bridgewerx, a company providing integration both as an appliance and as SaaS. Bridgewerx used a pretty sophisticated model for its time, and it's a good approach, since both models sell the notion of convenience and economy. Therein lies the synergy.

Indeed, Phil Wainewright, ZDNet blogger, agrees with me in his posting of June 15.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, June 15, 2007
11:40 AM

Complex event processing (CEP) technology is aimed at many of the same challenges as conventional BI technology, it's just that the frame of reference is real-time analysis rather than a separate reporting loop built on historical data. Thus, CEP is another threat to BI as we know it, and it's pretty apparent that this will be one of the next competitive battlegrounds for the big infrastructure players.

As I detailed in this week's top story, CEP spots patterns in high-volume data streams while they're still streaming, rather than after the fact. Latency is measured in milliseconds or microseconds, and the volumes of data can exceed 50,000 messages per second. You build models or queries and the CEP system spots the related patterns as they emerge. You can respond while the activity is still in process rather than after the fact.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, June 14, 2007
5:15 PM

As Curt Monash reports in his Text Technologies blog, Voice of the Customer was a central theme at this year’s Text Analytics Summit. The aim is to stay on top of reputation, quality, and product-design issues by crunching blog- and message-board text, call-center notes and e-mail, and free-text survey responses. (Some vendors call these activities "Enterprise Feedback Management.") Yet VOC and the analytical approach it typifies are only half the overall text-analytics picture. Text analytics still delivers very high value in traditional, non-VOC application domains such as life sciences and intelligence, areas where vendors still derive the major part of their revenues.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Thursday, June 14, 2007
10:21 AM

A just-released survey of 1,125 IT professionals worldwide reveals a link between slow delivery of IT projects and low business profitability. The study, conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of HP, revealed that among nearly half of companies surveyed, 25 percent or more of IT projects are delivered late. IT project hiccups can delay product launches and reduce anticipated revenues and cost savings, cutting overall company profitability.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, June 14, 2007
1:18 AM

The relationship between search and text analytics was a recurring topic at this week's Text Analytics Summit in Boston. The one supports information retrieval and the other just about anything else automated you can do with a document set, from knowledge extraction to automated classification and processing: complementary functions that rely on similar technical underpinnings. Ramana Rao, who has a wonderful ability to clarify, put it this way: "Google's white box makes everything seem so simple," but "we got to simplicity without handing the complexity of reality." It's text analytics, of course, that will equip search to handle complexity.

Posted by Nelson King
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
10:14 AM

My right knee jerks ever so slightly in reaction to Adobe's announcement, on Monday, June 11, of a beta release and a name change for its (once known as) Apollo project, now AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Some coverage is due, even if it is merely to note that as an important player in RIA (Rich Internet Applications), Adobe has thrown some more tidbits to developers – including a beta release of the new open source Adobe Flex 3. However, this is not news that will reverberate to the far corners of the IT shop.

That's if the IT shop knows something about Adobe software development products. In the IT industry media, Adobe Apollo achieved the appellation "much-anticipated" without ringing many doorbells at the enterprise. That needs to change, if only because shops moving into the Brave New World of RIA and Web 2.0 need to know who's who, and Adobe is most definitely one who is.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
8:56 AM

In presentations at conferences, I always ask how many people use Web analytics tools. A vast majority of attendees raise their hands. But in follow up with individuals, conversations often go like this:

Me: Are you getting real business value from your analytics solution?

Frustrated Web manager: No, the tool doesn't work. We're thinking of getting something else.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
9:08 AM

At a conference in Miami last week, I sat in on a presentation on the IBM Information Server, and afterward I chatted with an IBM Information Management executive. I'm usually inclined towards a healthy degree of skepticism of marketing presentations (who isn't?), but I must say that I walked away from both the chat and presentation impressed with what I'd seen and heard.

It's easy enough for large companies like IBM and Oracle to acquire smaller ones, either because they see a positive product or market synergy, or even simply to spoil it for the competition. The question is: what happens to the acquisitions down the road? In an earlier commentary written against the backdrop of the acquisition of customer data integration vendor DWL by IBM, I had wondered about how well IBM would integrate the DWL product. Integration is not easy, even for integrators themselves. Some 20 months later, my questions seem to be answered, at least in part, in the form of the IBM Information Server.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, June 11, 2007
4:48 PM

Shamus McGillicuddy writes in this article posted in Computer Weekly, "XO Communications recently announced a new partnership with Jamcracker, a Santa Clara company that offers a delivery platform for third-party SaaS providers. Via Jamcracker's platform, XO will offer a suite of SaaS business applications to SMBs in the 75 metropolitan areas it services." The concept is that smaller SaaS providers are lining up behind larger telecom players, in this case XO, to better penetrate markets that are underserved.

Jamcracker is an aggregator of SaaS providers, enabling them through a platform that provides provisioning and billing and all of the essentials that a lot of ISVs need in order to convert their products to SaaS. To further its SaaS offerings, Jamcracker is taking its wares to existing network players that have better connections with smaller businesses that are the more likely users of SaaS.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, June 8, 2007
4:56 PM

Retired Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, currently an executive at a Washington DC IT solutions provider, gives exactly the keynote presentation one would expect. He gives a keynote whose essence I've heard before: IT is a information sponge that can clean up some nasty, real-world spills. I heard this theme in 2003 when Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense, spoke at a Capital Hill program on data mining. It was the rationale for DARPA's ill-fated-but-resurgent Total Information Awareness program. It bespeaks an attitude that would apply IT on a massive scale in a rear-guard attempt to contain a political situation gone horribly wrong - we have to do something, right? - with not a moment's thought given to alternative paths.

Posted by Mark Smith
Friday, June 8, 2007
10:30 AM

Microsoft has announced its acquisition of Stratature, a master data management (MDM) vendor that supports the definition, sharing and maintenance of reference data. Stratature's technology is used by organizations with specific analytical master data challenges in which master data changes over time in financial, product and customer hierarchies. Microsoft lacked a solid position and technological approach to MDM and was under competitive pressure to respond.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, June 7, 2007
12:58 AM

Another datapoint to contribute to my growing belief that large enterprises are now reembracing reengineering. It seems that there is only so much streamlining you can do until you reach a point where you need to completely rethink a situation. That point is being reached by more and more large organizations, and radical change is now on the agenda for banks, insurance companies and manufacturing firms globally.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
10:19 AM

Most hosted Web Analytics vendors charge you according to page views -- not unreasonable since each view is a call to their server and a new record in their database. But what happens when Ajax and other rich applications eliminate the notion of a "page"? Well, vendors are now talking about pricing in terms of "events" or "server calls," rather than page views.

Expect to be asked about the number of Flash- and Ajax-based applications you're running. And if you add applications over the course of a SaaS contract, expect a scheduled audit to count these, assuming they have been tagged.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
3:17 PM

I find the recent press on operational BI an interesting resurfacing of events.

A few years ago, operational BI was a hot topic. With EII technologies that allowed BI tools to tap directly into source systems, some wondered if it was the demise of data warehousing as we knew it. (It wasn't.) Analytic applications share a similar story with operational BI, as many vendors initially jumped on this band wagon and later retrenched, either exiting this market entirely or rethinking their strategy.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
9:09 AM

It was interesting to see at IBM's recent Impact 2007 event on service-oriented architecture (SOA) that the only business intelligence (BI) vendor exhibiting to demonstrate interfaces to IBM's SOA technology was Actuate. We know that other BI vendors also are evolving their platforms to support Web services and XML, along with some other advancements in the service-oriented direction. But few have been motivated to go beyond the fundamentals; the BI market seems a little insulated from the SOA and enterprise architecture transformations.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, June 4, 2007
3:21 PM

We are all perfectly (and in some cases painfully) aware of the rising IT prowess of China and India. But a recent book written by a couple of Gartner analysts takes this theme to an intriguing new level: what if India and China were to combine their capabilities, not just in information technology, but in other areas of business as well? The book presents an arresting proposition, and is near the top of my suggested-reading list.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, June 4, 2007
9:05 AM

At Google's Developer Day event on May 31st, the company announced Google Gears, an open-source technology for creating offline Web applications.

For those of you who think "offline Web" is an oxymoron, perhaps you're right. However, this type of technology is sorely needed to get around a key limitation of SaaS - the ability to use your SaaS applications when you're disconnected from the Internet.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, June 1, 2007
12:20 PM

IBM and Business Objects announced on Tuesday that the two companies will deepen the strategic alliance they announced last November. They'll do so by developing joint solutions for the Asia Pacific market, extending already close ties in the North American and European markets. It's an indication that IBM does not discount BI – contrary to some suggestions – as just the tip of the iceberg. Okay, so IBM doesn't own a major BI/performance management player, as Oracle now does with its Hyperion purchase, and it's not offering its own reporting and analysis technology, as is Microsoft, but IBM does have partnerships with both Business Objects and Cognos, and it's free to work with others as well (as it does with Information Builders in the iSeries server market).

Posted by Mark Smith
Friday, June 1, 2007
9:06 AM

In an article two years ago, I wrote that service-oriented architecture (SOA) was technobabble, not strategic technology. In 2006 I noted that SOA was moving beyond chatter. Well, in later May IBM hosted Impact 2007 – an SOA event where people finally talked about it not only from an IT perspective but as real customers who have used SOA to deliver business value to their organizations. That’s good progress. Also CIO Magazine recently did a survey that found that CIOs who have embraced SOA earn higher compensation and have larger budgets as a percent of company revenue than those who do not support it.