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Yesterday morning, I awoke to the news that because of an unclear voting outcome, the U.S. presidential election remained undecided - which was rather like awakening to the fact that the sunrise had been indefinitely postponed. At press time I'm still clueless about who the next President of the United States will be, but at least I know the identity of the new Intelligent Enterprise Dozen - the 12 "Most Influential Companies in IT."
For those readers who may have joined us only in the last year, the Dozen is our annual editors' choice of vendor companies that through technology leadership, marketing muscle, business acumen - or, more likely, a combination of all three - have battled their way into the highest favor of today's IT-focused business organizations.
In the subjective opinion of Intelligent Enterprise editors, these companies best articulated the agenda under which customer organizations operated in the last year, and then did a better job than most of helping them fulfill it. The first step in delivering any solution is to thoroughly understand the problem (and not cause any new ones); these companies, by listening carefully to the heartbeat of the marketplace, have grasped that simple but often overlooked premise.
As is our habit and custom, we've complemented the formal Dozen selections with a list of "12 Hot Companies to Watch": those vendor companies deserving attention in 2001 as they vie to achieve industry influence similar to that of their Dozen counterparts. (Some of these companies have already met that objective in niche segments and now seek to expand their competitive footprint to reach broader markets.) Furthermore, we've iced the cake with a look at the "best of the rest" in their respective categories.
Four Pillars
This year, the shifting sands of industry influence have settled into a particularly telling pattern. A few of last year's laureates - including Siebel Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems, and SAP - have fallen off the top list. All three companies remain powerful, of course, but fell off their stride in 2000 in terms of pushing the envelope. (Influence is a fleeting thing; you either use it or lose it.) The newcomers, including WebMethods Inc., Tibco Software Inc., Ilog Inc., and Xchange Inc., suggest a fascinating convergence of four intersecting requirements: intelligence, infrastructure, integration, and collaboration. In fact, we've chosen to classify all our selections in these categories, which we believe serve as the pillars of model IT architecture.
For example, Xchange Inc. (formerly Exchange Applications Inc.) helps its clients optimize their customer-retention strategies in real time by dynamically integrating information about recent customer interactions - such as clickstream data from a Web site - with historical data about customer preferences. Since the company cut its CRM teeth in the 1990s with customers such as FedEx, it has clearly been influential in transforming old-style, batch-oriented CRM into a more dynamic, personalized process operating on permissions-based principles. This "new" CRM is based on an emerging confluence of analytic, integration, and collaborative capabilities.
In the infrastructure category, component development company Ilog may be the ultimate insider. It quietly provides important modules for the biggest names in enterprise software: Its configuration management, business rules management, and GUI components serve as important elements in solutions frameworks from Oracle, BEA Systems, and I2 Technologies. Indeed, you could safely say that Ilog is a major influence on the influencers.
Every Vote Counts
You almost certainly will have your own ideas about which companies deserve recognition for their impact on IT in the last year; if so, I encourage you to send your own list to me at jkestelyn@cmp.com. I expect at least as many reproaches as kudos, but as we've all been recently reminded, democracy is a messy process.
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