Product Unfocus

Vendors that put customers and services at the center, rather than products, are favored by product reviewers this year

By Michael L. Gonzales, Nelson King, Stewart McKie, Mark Smith

The End User Is King

In 2000, the customer became the focal point for companies and drove significant new investment in the areas of e-business and customer relationship management. This focus spawned issues for IT in application and system integration for data warehousing and end-user productivity. These factors provided new requirements that challenge existing approaches toward business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information portals. Two vendors, NQuire Software and Top Tier Software, came out with new product releases in 2000 that continue to address these market requirements but now have customer adoption to demonstrate their product and service offering value.

NQuire Software, which introduced NQuire Suite 2.0, addresses the information usability and access challenges found in existing BI and data warehousing products. The NQuire Suite provides a single point of access and analysis to distributed data sources (such as a data warehouse and various operational systems) that exist inside or outside the enterprise. The company did this by developing sophisticated query management and analytic processing technology with traditional information delivery capabilities. It introduced an adaptive English query interface, NQuire Answers, that lets business users ask questions more intuitively and can learn about users based on the questions they ask and how they phrase them.

Top Tier Software, which introduced Enterprise Integration Portal 3.0, helps employee efficiency through integration of e-business and enterprise application systems. Companies are faced with significant challenges in providing users the ability to quickly access and relate information from multiple enterprise applications (such as SAP, Oracle, and Siebel) and answer basic questions to meet business demands. Top Tier provides a "Drag and Relate" capability that enables the contextual flow and process of business questions. This approach can already be found embedded in SAP and Baan application offerings but provides the ability for IT to add integration into any application or information source.

---

Street Smarts

We read about "smart appliance" systems, the notion of data flowing from computers residing in the background, feeding continuously on-demand data to palmtop computers, cell phones, and even refrigerators. But aside from the fact that these so-called smart appliances communicate with one another, the reality is that they lack any intelligence at all. In fact, the excitement over these new toys, where the intelligence comes in, lies not in the appliances themselves but in the "killer apps" envisioned by the soothsayers of technology.

ArcIMS is an enabling technology that delivers on the promise of smart appliances. It represents the necessary infrastructure for intelligence delivered into your hands, as well as the spatial ingredient for BI and smart appliances. Not unlike date and time, spatial data represents a critical analytical perspective for which there is no substitute.

To illustrate, let's think about a Friday night drive when you're looking for a place to eat. Your wireless service knows that you prefer Italian food. And it knows that you especially enjoy tables with a window view. It would be great to have a list of Italian restaurants downloaded to your PDA via your wireless service as well as reservation schedules and even a table layout. But what if your PDA is even smarter? What if a street map of the region were displayed on your device with all Italian restaurants that had window table availability? Moreover, an estimated drive time and distance could be displayed for each restaurant.

Let's take this technology one step further: Suppose your wireless service could detect your speed and direction and suggest only Italian restaurants within a reasonable driving distance. Because we are raising our expectations, what if your service could also suggest that you take a 10-minute detour to a boutique grocer that carries your favorite Bordeaux - which your service knows you need because of course your refrigerator has notified it. The intelligence of the user who refrigerates Bordeaux may be questionable, but at least the user has one smart palmtop device!

ArcIMS serves up Internet-ready spatial intelligence today. While maintaining the high integrity of cartographic rendering, ArcIMS provides scalable dissemination of online, community-driven geographic information system (GIS) data over the Internet. The product is based on a client/server architecture, which affords considerable scalability. Consequently, appliances such as PDAs can function as the client merely displaying information that is processed on larger servers. This infrastructure means that small devices such as PDAs are no longer relegated to static spatial data such as city maps. Instead, the online identification of Italian restaurants and your drive time and distance to them is all done on back-end servers that simply send HTML pages to your appliance, providing a dynamic, interactive capacity.

ArcIMS's scalability is already being put to the test. National Geographic serves up more than one million maps daily from its service called the MapMachine (www.nationalgeographic.com/maps/index.html). Another example is one of the most active real estate Web sites, www.realtor.com, a site that serves up more than half a million maps daily using ArcIMS.

ArcIMS represents the establishment of a common platform and technology for the dissemination of GIS data and services. It is not just a software solution for a select audience of GIS practitioners or vendors. Instead, the product represents a major step toward the establishment of standards to introduce and publish GIS data and their representative services to a broad Internet user base. To that end, ArcIMS is better described as a framework - an infrastructure that enables the delivery of GIS to any variation of client-side applications. Simply put, ArcIMS is an enabler of the next generation of killer apps. For that reason, ESRI's ArcIMS strikes me as one of the most important technological advancements for the year 2000. Now if we can only solve the problem of people refrigerating red wines.

Mark Allen Smith (mark.smith@fullcircle strategies.com) is principal and founder of Full Circle Strategies and an expert in business intelligence, portals, and analytic applications.

Michael L. Gonzales (mlg@starfocus.com) manages a consulting firm called The Focus Group Ltd., specializing in ROLAP and OLAP techniques and technologies.