Intelligent Enterprise

THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE WEBLOG

Blog Entries by Date

Google Analytics Suffers Outage

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Thursday, May 31, 2007
11:29 AM

Last week Google Analytics customers reported service outages that affected some for more than 24 hours. Worse, Google issued no official comment until Tuesday. As "Web Analytics Report" readers know, Google's official support partners fare no better than users, and in this case received no communications on the outage.

Continue reading "Google Analytics Suffers Outage"

Comments

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, May 31, 2007
11:10 AM

Tony Byrne has provided some advice to vendors regarding product demos. Those ten points make essential reading for vendors and customers alike, but there is another perspective. Since I have personally sat in on those demos both as a buyers' advisor and as a vendor (system integrator), I need to add three points that customers should keep in mind when asking vendors to demonstrate their products:

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
2:31 PM

I spoke to customers and vendors at the recent Emetrics Summit to find some answers. Customers generally underestimated the level of effort required of them -- for example the tagging required to collect "basic" data, such as downloads of PDFs, Excel and Word files. Not understanding the need to develop a process for data collection, page tagging, and analysis, customers often assume that once the Web analytics solution is in place, it will run itself.

Posted by Nelson King
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
9:08 AM

I've noticed, and perhaps you have too, that spokespeople for Microsoft, Sun and Adobe have a tendency to gingerly disparage Ajax. Conversations with them have a lot of "We like this/that about Ajax, but…" For their respective companies, Ajax is the classic "bag on the side." It doesn't fit their model: proprietary delivery methods (runtime clients, graphics engines), proprietary or semi-proprietary development tools—their own solutions for overcoming the deficiencies of HTTP Web applications. Although they rarely say so, it pains them that Ajax is so popular. They have to deal with it, treat it with kid gloves, even support it; but they don't like it.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
11:32 AM

This article By Eydie Cubarrubia highlighted a recent survey showing that a surprising number of public sector IT workers are pushing back on SaaS, coming to the conclusion that:

"On-demand software isn't so hot in the government sector. Two surveys released Thursday revealed that more than a third of respondents 'were slightly or not at all familiar with the emerging software-as-a-service business model.' The survey went on to say that 'Internet-based software will be used by government agencies only in 'small niche' areas.'"

"The surveys, conducted by GCN (Government Computing News), a government information technology news publication, and Government Futures, a government industry research firm, should serve as a warning that the SaaS sector cannot afford to rest on its laurels."

I'm tracking with this as well. In my recent dealings with the government, there does not seem to be an interest in SaaS. Why? Well, the government agencies feel that SaaS does not relate to them because of security concerns and, most of all, that their long procurement processes don't lead toward SaaS.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
8:07 AM

On May 30, a bunch of very smart people from a variety of industry and academic settings will gather in Santa Clara, Calif., to discuss service innovation in the technology industry, at a symposium organized by the recently formed Service Research Innovation Initiative (SRII). Regrettably, I won't be there (to provide balance to all that intelligentsia), but I did get a chance to catch up with Tom Pridham, Executive Director SRII, about it.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Friday, May 25, 2007
8:40 AM

I've been attending a lot of vendor demonstrations on behalf of clients recently. These are in-person demos, typically following a tight script, after a set of vendors has been down-selected following written proposals. More often than not, the demos don't turn out very well. To be sure, sometimes the customer is ill-prepared. But more frequently, the vendor just flubs it. I think that's avoidable.

As a rule CMS Watch does not give advice to vendors. Moreover, we stress the decisive importance of more advanced, proof-of-concept test phases as the real measure of suitability. But demos are important for vetting finalists for any proof-of-concept, and I've come to believe that customers could really benefit from better ones.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, May 24, 2007
12:22 PM

Buying Inxight is a smart move for Business Objects. Business Objects has strong analytics and is well positioned in the BI marketplace. Folding the capability to extract information from text into their technology stack is a natural next step for the company.

This acquisition affirms the text-BI/integrated-analytics strategy being pursued by other vendors, notably Attensity, Clarabridge, Intelligent Results, SAS and SPSS. It also follows the precedent of data-integrator Informatica's late 2006 purchase of text-analytics vendor Itemfield. While the Itemfield deal closed less than six months ago, a demo I saw at last week's TDWI World Conference showed that Informatica has made quick work of seamless integration of text-extraction into their flagship PowerCenter ETL product. Given that Business Objects has been an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) licensee of Inxight technology for several years – which provides at least one reason they didn't go after fellow French company TEMIS – I expect similarly quick inclusion of Inxight text analytics into Business Objects' Data Integrator product.

Posted by Product Maven
Thursday, May 24, 2007
12:04 PM

IBM this week announced self-learning content classification software designed to automatically categorize large volumes of information. The offerings are intended to help organizations find content and understand whether it's important and how it should be handled. The software is particularly aimed at classifying content that is unmanaged so it can be more easily found and retrieved.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, May 24, 2007
9:03 AM

Transactional document management (high-volume throughput of relatively static documents) has long been dominated by IBM and FileNet. EMC this week announced that it, too, wants to compete in this lucrative market. Hence as part of its forthcoming Documentum D6 release, they have announced "TCM" (Transactional Content Management). Currently, TCM is essentially a user interface module for high-volume scenarios, to be complimented at a later date by changes to the core D6 platform as well as better application of EMC's Captiva technology.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
10:06 AM

I really shouldn't call it a "BI Bake Off," because the demos are tightly scripted to maximize educational value and enable everyone to win. At TDWI in Boston last week, attendees of the course Evaluating BI Toolsets got to see Business Objects, MicroStrategy, and Oracle demo head-to-head, using the same data set and on topics attendees consider the most important buying criteria. (If you want to see Cognos, Microsoft, and SAS head-to-head, come to TDWI in San Diego in August).

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
8:02 AM

I've been blogging about the "platform on-demand" space for a while now, clearly a destination for many SaaS players with Salesforce.com leading the way. Indeed, Salesforce has been cobbling together an offering for some time now under the "Apex" brand. This week at its Salesforce Developer Conference, the company announced that it has added enough features to now offer Salesforce SOA, or SOA on-demand.

Posted by Nelson King
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
3:42 PM

Something about Sun JavaFX in a moment, but first a short preliminary expectoration: Rich Internet Applications (RIA) matter. They are not the be-all-end-all of applications, on the desktop or the Web, but they will be the élan vital (the vital force) that drives application development and the growth of the software industry for the next "generation" (figure three to eight years).

Because rich applications feature user interface and media prowess, they (apparently) must have a "graphics engine" of some sort running on each user's computer. Intuitively I think this engine is what counts most in the competition to develop broadly useful RIA. Yes, the underlying language(s) are important. So are development environments and designers. So are standards and security. But the performance, efficiency, and wide distribution across platforms of the graphics engine — because it directly affects both users and developers — will be the edge which is likely to determine winners from also-rans in the RIA marathon.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
8:34 AM

Business Objects announced this morning its intent to acquire Inxight Software, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company specializing in search technology including federated search, entity extraction, natural-language processing, text analytics and data visualization software. The deal, if closed as planned in July, will advance Business Objects' efforts to gain "streamlined access to both structured information within databases and data warehouses, and unstructured information such as e-mails, documents, notes fields, and Web content."

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, May 21, 2007
1:12 PM

Another day, another headline. SAP has decided that it needs to retool its financial performance management offering. Why? The reason is the business software giant’s announced acquisition of OutlookSoft, which I predicted when Cartesis, the other possible buyer, was taken out of play by itself being acquired by Business Objects. SAP has tried before to update its applications, but this time may be different. OutlookSoft comes with a strong Microsoft-based technology approach and capabilities for budgeting, planning, consolidation, reporting and analysis, all designed for finance departments. If it can harness these, SAP has the potential to be a significant player for financial performance management. In fact, OutlookSoft has not only a good foundation of customers but also a significant head start on Microsoft, which will be releasing the first major version of its technology for performance management at the end of the year.

Posted by Dave Stodder
Monday, May 21, 2007
8:28 AM

Orlando can seduce you. Informatica World, held the week of April 30 – May 3 at Marriott's huge World Center Resort, had to compete with unwavering sunshine, swimming pools, cocoa-butter smells and the patter of vacationing families as they flip-flopped their way down the long corridors with pool toys dangling from childrens' hands. The flight from San Francisco via Denver to Orlando can deposit you at the front desk feeling haggard and grumpy, but it's hard to maintain that sort of edge after a few hours on the grounds of one of these resort hotels amid such carefree folk.

True, nearly all my time was spent in the ballrooms and salons of the convention center. Food and drinks were plentiful, although I had my hand slapped for mistakenly lifting a muffin from a continental breakfast spread that it turned out belonged to a Lenovo sales meeting. Once I found the Informatica coffee and munchies, I settled in for keynotes and track sessions that painted seductive visions of their own. The subject was enterprise data integration; Informatica's goal is to be the hub that brings together structured and unstructured data and lets it flow easily across enterprise boundaries.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, May 18, 2007
8:34 AM

"When Search and ECM Collide" was the title of a tutorial I ran in New York this week. It's an important topic to explore as both Search vendors and ECM vendors both seem to believe that either

A. They can do without the other,
B. They understand the other fully and see the opposing technology as simply a minor supporting or interfacing toolset.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, May 17, 2007
9:22 AM

An Accelovation briefing earlier this week was doubly helpful in affirming my take on the maturity of the text-analytics market and in showing me that I might be doing my job wrong.

Regarding the first point: Despite an hour-long presentation by company CEO Jonathan Spier and VP of Products Jens Tellefsen, I don't have have a clue how the company's "business insight discovery technology" works. That's because the company is pitching solutions to business analysts and not to IT geeks like me, a sure sign that the underlying technologies are stable and capable, and Spier and Tellefsen steered our conversation away from tech talk.

That a vendor can center its message on what rather than how is a hallmark of a maturing market.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
1:07 PM

I recently read a good book that explains how to use analytics to derive competitive edge. The book is brimming with success stories in analytics-driven competition and is well worth the price (though I will give away a free copy of the book to one lucky winner - see drawing details below). The book also got me thinking about what constitutes "competitive advantage" in the context of BI.

All technology has the potential to provide competitive advantage…until, that is, your competitors also begin using the technology, at which point it becomes a commodity. Companies are then faced with two options, and most companies choose both: discover ways to get more from the technology and find other technologies to exploit. We have seen this happen ad infinitum. Barcodes, ERP, data warehousing, geo-spatial applications – technology provides the differentiation, only until others catch up. (Which raises the interesting question: perhaps technology can also provide a competitive disadvantage, e.g. RFID? But that's another story.)

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
8:45 AM

I profited from my recent Rome visit to learn more about an aggressive open-source business intelligence (OSBI) contender, SpagoBI, positioned to go head-to-head with leading OSBI rivals. I've known about SpagoBI for a couple of years; the software is produced by Rome-based systems integrator Engineering Ingegneria Informatica. It uses some of the same components as software from Pentaho and JasperSoft, packaged however in a framework that Technical Director Gabriele Ruffatti asserts is more flexible and extensible than those of Engineering’s OSBI rivals.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
4:57 PM

Extract, transform and load (ETL) technology is still heavily used for data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) initiatives, but it's also being tapped to support complex challenges including real-time and near-real-time data integration. In fact, use of ETL sometimes overlaps with techniques such as enterprise information integration (a.k.a. data federation) and targeted source-data-access methods like change data capture.

How do the latest ETL products stack up for these broader integration needs? The Forrester Wave Report on Enterprise ETL, Q2 2007, evaluated leading vendors across 68 criteria and found that IBM and Informatica maintain leadership positions in ETL thanks to their "ability to scale and perform batch and operational data integration in complex environments." Other key findings include the following:

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
1:08 PM

I'm working with a few VC players who are considering investing in startups. So, what's all of the rage these days in the VC community?Why it's SaaS.

Truth be told, there is SaaS everything these days, including pet management on demand, SaaS-delivered engineering systems and, my all-time favorite, SaaS applications that track other SaaS applications. Indeed, it's difficult to find a software startup that doesn't have a SaaS strategy or that's not an "all-in" SaaS player.

So, is this a bad thing? Well, it can be.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
9:29 AM

Saugatuck Technology really went out on a limb last week characterizing SAP's planned purchase of Outlooksoft as a reaction to Oracle's recent acquisition of Hyperion. What's next, a stunning revelation that Microsoft is using enterprise software strategies, including its BI strategy, to help drive sales of Office 2007 and Windows Vista?

Saugatuck's sense that "the integration of OutlookSoft should significantly improve SAP's positioning and ability to sell enterprise-enabled BI and performance management" is far less obvious to me. I mean, it's certainly positive and Outlooksoft is an innovative and fast-growing company, but I don't know that I'd use the word "significant" to describe the boost it will give SAP.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, May 14, 2007
12:12 PM

While in Rome last week to teach a class on "Open Source for the Enterprise," I had the pleasure of getting together with Roberto Galoppini, who consults and writes a very perceptive blog on commercial open source. Check out, for instance, this useful table classifying licensing and revenue models of companies commercializing open source software (OSS).

Roberto thinks a lot about open-source business models, and he took issue with an over-simplification in my course materials. We agree that a third column is missing from a table I had prepared contrasting Open and Closed approaches, this table –

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, May 11, 2007
1:33 PM

Microsoft has every reason to be pleased by the results of its first BI Conference. It was well organized, closely watched and, most importantly, well attended, with more than 2,800 making their way to Seattle for the May 9-11 event. It was really a coming-out party of sorts for Microsoft as a credible, large-enterprise-ready BI vendor. But in addition to those wowed by the presentations and wooed by the breadth of offerings, I did encounter a few critics who raised legitimate questions.

Microsoft has gone out of its way to answer its detractors at the event, starting by leading with the news that SQL Server will see its next major refresh in 2008 and promising to stay in a 24- to 36-month refresh cycle. Keynote speaker Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division, offered a deeper dive on "Katmai," the code name the next version of SQL Server, but more than half his presentation emphasized achievements to date and the scalability of SQL Server 2005.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, May 10, 2007
2:04 PM

If John Mancini mentioned business process management (BPM) once in his keynote address at last month's AIIM Expo he mentioned it a dozen times. Then there were the enterprise content management (ECM) vendors themselves talking up the connection with BPM. To me, the combination is a natural as good old document management, imaging and workflow, so I won't be surprised to see a big BPM push at AIIM 2008.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
2:49 PM

If a user conference is a barometer for market leadership, then Microsoft's first ever BI conference clearly shows they are in the top tier. More than 2,500 attendees have gathered here in Seattle to learn and share tips on Microsoft BI as a data warehouse platform, provider of BI front-end tools, and soon, performance management (due late summer).

Microsoft's rallying cry is "BI for Everyone." While "BI for the masses" borders on cliché (and I'm glad they wordsmithed their mantra), Microsoft most differs from other BI vendors on two points. First, is removing price as a barrier for wider adoption. As a case in point, the price of once independent ProClarity has been slashed from $800 to $200 per user under Microsoft's ownership. Even with price cuts, Microsoft says revenues for this product line has increased.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
2:30 PM

BPMN is the de facto standard for process modeling, but many leading modeling tools, particularly those incorporated within high-end business process analysis (BPA) suites, have so far been reluctant to adopt it. Now that appears to be changing.

Recently IDS Scheer announced that ARIS, generally considered the leading standalone BPA suite, would be supporting the full BPMN notation in the v7.0.2 service release this spring. Announcement of BPMN support was tucked into their press release on new simulation capabilities based on Lanner's technology. IDS Scheer will provide their own BPMN serialization using the "ARIS Markup Language" rather than XPDL or BPDM, asserting that customers are not asking for a standards-based serialization. Also, they are currently working on a mapping between EPC (ARIS’s standard process modeling notation) and BPMN.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
10:26 AM

I happened to catch this article by Jon Brodkin of NetworkWorld. It basically recounts recent research from Saugatuck Technology, highlighting some of the issues and opportunities when working with SaaS.

"'Use of software-as-a-service has more than doubled since the beginning of 2006 and will double again by the end of the decade, creating challenges for customers and vendors as they attempt to integrate hosted offerings with on-premise software,' according to research released this week by Saugatuck Technology."

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, May 7, 2007
2:03 PM

With Oracle's recent acquisition of Hyperion, the expectations of other industry heavyweights has heated up significantly. I've already examined SAP; now I move to IBM and what it will do to address this key information middleware technology.

IBM recently made the point to me that it did considerably less work with Hyperion than had Business Objects, Cognos and SAS and so it's not particularly worried about its acquisition by Oracle. Historically, IBM's software executives have insisted that these components are applications and not middleware and that IBM is not in the applications business. Recently, though, that monotone is fading, to be replaced by a new note: They now say "No Comment," or when they do comment, talk about Hyperion-like technology as though they believe this part of the BI market involves just the writing and delivering of reports.

Posted by Nelson King
Monday, May 7, 2007
9:16 AM

Not very long ago there were enterprise developers who did Web applications and other enterprise developers who did streaming and graphical Web programming (illustration, animation, videos, etc.). Essentially these were two different groups who only occasionally would meet on specific projects. That's changing. Whether you pack it into the Web 2.0 rubric or consider new offerings by Microsoft, Adobe, IBM and many others, it's apparent that the worlds of Web applications and rich media are melding into Rich Internet Applications (RIA). I know of a lot of enterprise shops that are lining up on this, because at the gut level (at least) we know it's going to be important – maybe even a dominant part of enterprise software development. Right now, however, this business of melding into RIA is messy.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, May 4, 2007
10:01 AM

At the recent AIIM Expo I had the privilege to lead a panel, "When E Means Big," where customers revealed lessons learned in truly huge ECM deployments, as opposed to the "regular" world of ECM. What struck me was how the discussion barely touched on technology, but instead gravitated toward such issues as governance, strategy, funding and ownership. A strong consensus emerged on the need for a detailed mid- to long-term strategy for ECM, that business cases needed to take into account cross-departmental processes and concerns, and that nearly all ECM at this scale is underpinned in some way by BPM (Business Process Management).

And most surprising: none of the panelists saw compliance as a key reason to deploy ECM tools. In their minds the only grounds for procuring such systems was good old-fashioned cost reduction and process improvement. This viewpoint appears to fly in the face of surveys and polls suggesting the opposite, but in line with anecdotal evidence for consultants and SI's who contributed to our recent ECM Suites Report research. Compliance is important, but improving the bottom line is essential...

Posted by Product Maven
Thursday, May 3, 2007
9:38 PM

It's not a SaaS offering and it's not a dummied-down business intelligence (BI) platform with features and functions removed to meet a target price point. To lower the cost barrier to BI, LogiXML offers the alternative of subscription-based licensing of its complete Web-based BI Platform, which includes ad hoc reporting, OLAP reporting, dashboarding, BI data services, security and managed reporting with a range of output options.

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, May 3, 2007
11:51 AM

We're seeing the market for analytics change again with TIBCO's announcement that it plans to acquire Spotfire, a rapidly growing provider of analytics for operations management. This merger will bring a significant analytics software business under the ownership of a leading information bus and business process management (BPM) provider.

TIBCO certainly is no stranger to applying analytics. Nonetheless, at first I was surprised by this move; until now, TIBCO has focused on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and integration technology for business events and activities and BPM. But TIBCO's CEO, Vivek Ranadivé, espouses the building of a predictive business, something that cannot be accomplished without analytics, which may suggest the reasoning behind acquiring Spotfire. Of course, ultimately it's about business: TIBCO, which has been investing in its information bus and complementary technologies and has made several acquisitions over the years, is looking for ways to expand what it sells to its customers. The acquisition lets it tap into Spotfire's base in operations and lines of business and to demonstrate to those customers the relevance of monitoring events and activities while applying analytics.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, May 3, 2007
8:39 AM

If it seems like your BI initiative isn't picking up speed, you are probably not alone. Recent findings seem to indicate that although everybody is talking about business intelligence, not everybody is doing it yet, at least to the extent expected. What to do?

A recent survey by InformationWeek brought out two interesting findings: the percentage of businesses providing BI tools to more than a quarter of their employees remains unchanged since last year, and major challenges to more widespread adoption include software/implementation complexity and unclear ROI. These are non-trivial challenges from both a technical and business perspective, and the onus is on vendors and IT practitioners to push the pedal.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
3:22 PM

Whenever I disagree with someone smart, I automatically assume I must be wrong and seek to understand why. So it really bothered me that Doug Henschen was so certain that customers are driving demand for BI/PM convergence in this blog. It also doesn't sit too well with me that the vendors are clearly pursuing this strategy, while I'm saying I'm only seeing a handful of customers buying into it.

Let me clarify though:

A BI solution that delivers measurable business benefit and thus improves business performance is the goal for most BI deployments. I strongly disagree with Applix's CEO Plummer's comment "BI has always offered a historical perspective, but the insight hasn't been actionable." As one customer recently explained to me, "we saw an immediate lift in sales the week we deployed our BI solution." Why? Because the BI team went to great lengths to understand the business drivers and to deliver information that allowed all front-line workers to affect those drivers. Note: Applix is not the only vendor to try to pidgeon-hole BI as backward-looking and inactionable.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
12:24 AM

Lacking support for fundamental concepts like human tasks and subprocesses, BPEL has become a favorite whipping boy of BPM vendors and consultants. But for all its faults, BPEL enjoys something that BPMN advocates can only dream about: an XML storage and interchange format that makes sense. It's often said that BPEL is an XML language not a graphical notation, but the reality is that graphical BPEL design tools all use more or less the same notation, based on a simple mapping to native BPEL language constructs: Receive, Reply, Invoke, etc. BPMN has a standard notation, but still lacks a standard storage and interchange format consistent with the fundamental goals of BPMN itself.

I've been thinking about this recently with the announcement from OMG that the "official" XML format for BPMN, based on OMG's new Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM), is in its final stages of ratification. Besides BPDM, Intalio has developed an alternative XML format for BPMN and has contributed it to the Eclipse Foundation. And let's not forget XPDL 2.0, the Workflow Management Coalition's reworking of its old process interchange warhorse to encompass various pieces of the BPMN spec. But to me, none of these proposals is as satisfying as BPEL's approach, which makes the XML format closely match the terminology and semantics of the process constructs, their target audience, and business purpose.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
4:19 PM

It's sad but true that in most organizations "business intelligence" is something of an oxymoron. The term ought to refer to the ability to ascertain the state of a company's performance and then to determine its future direction and competitive strategy by applying information and metrics. BI also relies on technology and the organization's human capital to help it gain deeper knowledge and timelier insights. Despite the fact that many companies fall short here, this is not an esoteric process. A pragmatic self-assessment can show you where new investments are necessary to provide business intelligence for everyone in your organization.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
8:53 AM

I had the privilege of chairing last week's European Text Analytics Summit in Amsterdam. The event was very enjoyable, in no small part because of the diversity of attendee backgrounds and roles. I've never attended any other computing event (outside the summit series) that mixes scientists, police investigators, and media-company product managers with technologists. While I can't say I learned anything completely new (to me), quite a few points surfaced that are worthy of note. I'll report some of them, grouped under the headings user stories, market, and technology.