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January 1, 2003

Shrink Wrap

A look back at the (mostly) diminishing IT software sector

If one word can sum up the 2002 IT software market, that word is probably "contraction." Falling sales led many software vendors to shrink development efforts — or go completely out of business. So although we have a tradition of asking some of our product reviewers to pick their favorite product or vendor of the year and explain why it stands out or exemplifies its market, we had to make some concessions this year.

Philip Russom and Ganesh Variar opted to forego discussion of specific vendors or products altogether. Russom explains what has been stalling the analytic application market and what it will take to get it moving again. Variar discusses what he identifies as the most promising development in the database market: the new SQL standard.

Not all the product news is bleak. Nelson King finds one enterprise application development product worthy of mention, and the team of Barry Grushkin and Sergiu S. Simmel see many vendors contributing to the expansion of text-mining capabilities.

Dormant Potential

ANALYTIC APPLICATIONS

Any year now, I keep telling myself, will be the year of the packaged analytic application. I've been saying this since 1997, and it still hasn't happened. I believe the product type has compelling benefits, but three barriers have kept analytic applications from realizing their full potential.

Knowledge transfer is the leading barrier. It's difficult to capture the best practices of a business function and automate them with software, especially when reporting and analysis processes are seldom evident or predictable. IT and consultants deal with knowledge transfer on a per-project basis, satisfying the requirements of a single user base. But a software vendor must anticipate and satisfy the majority of requirements for many user communities. Despite vendor efforts, users report that it's hard to find an analytic application that satisfies the majority of their requirements out of the box.

The second barrier is customization. Even when a vendor's "all-purpose" analytic application fits most of a user base's needs, customization is required to complete the knowledge transfer. Most users view customization as a risky process that can lead to time and cost overruns, so they build instead of buy.

Economic issues constitute the third barrier. A packaged analytic application offers benefits such as low implementation costs, short time to market, and productivity boosts for users. However, vendors still can't articulate these benefits in a credible, financially quantified manner. So IT and business users are reluctant to make a business case to management. Pricing is also a barrier because vendors want too much money per user. And, of course, the sinking economy is a barrier to everything.

These facts aren't necessarily news. From the beginning, knowledge transfer, customization, and economic issues have hounded analytic applications — whether homegrown or vendor-produced — and I suspect they always will. Until these three hounds are held at bay, the business intelligence (BI) community should continue doing what it's been doing: Advance best practices for implementation and packaged vendor offerings of analytic applications.

Analytic applications made advancements in 2002, but not enough to counter the problems of knowledge transfer, customization, and economics. The potential is still there, especially in benefits such as low implementation cost, fast path to use, and high user productivity. So let's live in hope. If these benefits keep driving analytic applications closer to realizing their full potential, maybe 2003 will be the year.

Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.PhilipRussom.com] is a Giga Research Director at Forrester Research Inc., where he provides advice to user organizations about business intelligence, data warehousing, and data integration.

Develop Creatively

ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT

Maybe when business seems bleak and the world uncertain, it's the best time to think independently - out of the proverbial box. What I'm about to describe is out on the "creative edge" for enterprise software development, but Macromedia Inc.'s new MX product line has put together some opportunities that enterprise software people would do well to consider.

The Macromedia Flash system is well known to Web designers and developers as a means to inject some multimedia pizzazz into Web sites and applications. What's less well known is that during 2002, Macromedia introduced the MX line of products that now constitute one of the more unique and potentially fruitful Web application development environments.

The Macromedia lineup starts with the ubiquitous Flash Player (now version 6), which is the plug-in millions of people have downloaded to view Flash programming. This is the client side of Macromedia's system that has quietly (compared to Microsoft and Real Systems) garnered a big share of the multimedia player business. Because it's so widespread, Macromedia has an instant installed base for applications created by other MX products, including: Dreamweaver MX (Web authoring tool); Flash MX (for creating Flash multimedia programs); Fireworks MX (Web graphics creation); ColdFusion MX (the venerable ColdFusion Web application development tool); and two recently released products: Flash Remoting MX (connectivity to data and application servers for all MX products) and Flash Communication Server (FlashCom).

The point is that the MX suite of products can handle standard Web applications and a whole lot more. Flash Remoting and the FlashCom server are the kickers. Flash Remoting handles the heavy-duty data connections, and FlashCom represents a new breed of message-based server — using Macromedia's Real Time Messaging Protocol — that can package and transmit a variety of data and programming.

This arrangement certainly plays well with the Flash multimedia scenario, but FlashCom and Flash Remoting do more than stream video and audio. Among the many possible uses are video and data broadcasting, virtual conference rooms, whiteboard facilities, message boards, chat and live messaging, workflow collaboration, and multiuser training and simulation.

Consider how this kind of messaging server, database connectivity, and other Macromedia MX products might be put to use for some very unusual enterprise applications. While many IT people are enduring the slug-out between Java 2 Enterprise Edition (IBM, Sun, Oracle, and others) and .Net (Microsoft), it's encouraging to find an alternative enterprise-level development environment for Web applications that's not only viable but offers some unique capabilities — something to get those creative (and competitive) juices flowing.

Nelson King [nelsonking@earthlink.net] has written nine books on database application programming and is a long-time contributor to Intelligent Enterprise. He spends much of his time in the trenches of enterprise software development.