Intelligent Enterprise

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, says that Yahoo "will be launching a new generation of search in two to three months... Search is going to move in a completely new direction." The initiative, one would infer from today's Financial Express interview of Raghavan, will build on Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search software) platform, which implements a "self-service Web services model for developers and start-ups."

If there's one central theme in my DBMS2 blog, it's that modern database management system alternatives should in many cases be used instead of the traditional market leaders. So it was only a matter of time before somebody sponsored a white paper on that subject. The paper, sponsored by EnterpriseDB (disclosure noted), is now posted along with my other recent white papers. Its conclusion — summarizing what kinds of database management system you should use in which circumstances — is reproduced below.

Many new applications are built on existing databases, adding new features to already-operating systems. But others are built in connection with truly new databases. And in the latter cases, it's rare that a market-leading product is the best choice. Mid-range DBMS (for OLTP) or specialty data warehousing systems (for analytics) are usually just as capable, and much more cost-effective. Exceptions arise mainly in three kinds of cases:

Big Blue recently released its IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report, and it contains more than a few eyebrow-raisers. For example: Web-application-based security vulnerabilities have begun to outnumber reports involving conventional viruses and trojans (of the kind that target the operating system). We're now at the point where 51 percent of newly discovered software vulnerabilities depend in some way on Web-page interactions.

Also, there's been a sharp surge in the number of vulnerabilities that involve SQL injection (as opposed to cross-site scripting). Meanwhile, the use of infected image files (.gif or .jpg) as a way to inflict mayhem is on the decline.

What really got my attention, though, is the new Top Ten list of vendors with the most vulnerability disclosures. Normally you would expect Microsoft to be at the top of that list (I would, at least). Instead, it's at Number 3, behind Apple and... Joomla!. Fortunately, Joomla! can be secured, but it's quite possible that many novice Joomla! installers do not.

At the conclusion of Business Object's Influencer Summit yesterday, Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. Rather than attributing quotes to each executive, I've consolidated the responses on five topics:

"It's a case where one plus one equals three." Speaking at the first-ever Business Objects Influencer Summit in Boston this week, this is how Sanjay Poonen, SVP and GM of Performance Optimization Applications, explained an increase in BI revenues at the company since it became a unit of SAP.

Normally, following an acquisition, sales decline for the first year or so. Not so with SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, with Poonen claiming sales were 30% higher in the first half of the year compared to 2007. He explained that there is a difference in market dynamics when a market leader acquires another leader versus a niche player. Surprising as well is that company officials estimate half the sales came from new accounts, so the strong performance is not only from Business Objects tapping existing SAP customers.

I was in rainy Boston yesterday at the Business Objects Influencer Summit, which was kicked off with Jonathan Becher, SVP of Marketing for Business Objects. It's a very process-oriented message (which explains why I'm here): using business intelligence to drive process efficiency, improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution, and add flexibility to create new business processes that align operations to strategy.

Becher was joined by Doug Merritt, EVP and GM of Business User Global Sales (moving from a product role), who continued with the message of how total insight allows organizations to optimize business performance. Merritt discussed a number of customer case studies, focusing on how their easy-to-use end-user tools are being used to solve real business problems.

It's a disquieting thought, but signs are that 2009 may be the worst year for technology workers since the dot-com debacle. A recent poll of economists suggests that things will get worse before they get better — at least where the U.S. economy is concerned.

The survey – 50 economists polled by the Blue Chip Economic Indicators newsletter – expects the air to go out of the economy as the temporary lift to consumer spending (tax rebates) fades, and predicts that the sluggish economy will push the jobless rate to 6 percent in December and to 6.1 percent by the end of next year. The last time the unemployment rate was as high as 6 percent was in October 2003.

I attended the Actuate user conference last week where they brought forward a series of new advancements utilizing open source and new platform capabilities. Actuate's upgraded performance management applications and advancements in mobility further extend their use. Actuate is well known to larger corporations for vast deployments of reporting and information to the enterprise and across the Internet to customers and suppliers. Actuate has been recently shifting away from direct engagement in traditional BI market of query, reporting and analysis to data warehouses and instead extending their support of developers through open source and Internet/Intranet type applications. Actuate is extending support for Rich Internet Applications as the need for information across business and to consumers requires very scalable platforms that integrate across the enterprise.

Actuate also entered into the open source market in 2005 with BIRT (BI and Reporting Tools) contribution to Eclipse and their open source BIRT community. Actuate has bet that the use of open source will be a key component for their future and starting point for developers, where at some point will purchase support, services and then the more robust commercial products. In fact, Actuate open source efforts now contribute 10% of Actuate revenue. This open-source-based approach to commercial enterprise software expands Actuate's reach across the world and deepens relationships with developers. The benefit for developers is that it is easier to download and work with their basic products before determining what is needed for deployments that require support, services or higher-end technology.

What's common between one-click purchasing and cloud computing? Ponder that a moment. If you haven't guessed already, the former was assigned a ridiculous patent, and now the latter is on its way to an equally unwelcome trade mark.

Intellectual property protection, in the form of patents and trade marks, has long been hailed as a cornerstone of healthy capitalism. Unfortunately, it has also demonstrated the propensity to be a roadblock in the way of healthy capitalism. The classic example is, of course, Amazon's controversial "one-click" patent, which was, amazingly, expanded and then apparently (and thankfully) rejected by the USPTO.

Microsoft SharePoint goes open source? Shock, horror! Ok, well not quite, but an open source alternative to SharePoint is now an option with the release of Alfresco's Lab 3 Beta product. The new module allows you to hook Office into Alfresco, giving you the option to use Alfresco as opposed to SharePoint as your collaboration platform.

It's an interesting option. As readers of the CMS Watch ECM Suites Report 2008 know, Alfresco is one of the more interesting ECM vendors around. The question you might ask yourself however is, why would anyone want to do use Alfresco instead of SharePoint? Clearly open source enthusiasts will herald this as a major breakthrough — and those enterprises that espouse open source may well become customers. But then again, if you are going to dump Microsoft for the back end, why use Office at all, given there are open source alternatives?

Earlier this month I saw a press release with the headline "Oco and Business Objects Sign Deal... " Vendor partnerships don't usually float up to my must-cover list, but this one peaked my interest. After all, what does Business Objects, an SAP Company, the world's largest BI vendor and a software-as-a-service (SaaS) force in its own right, have to gain from Oco Inc., an upstart SaaS vendor that's a fraction of Business Object's size? Business Objects executive Mani Gill filled me in on the details.

Over the last few weeks, I've had the opportunity to speak to various customers about SharePoint licensing. The common theme is that most don't understand Microsoft licensing in general and SharePoint licensing specifically. In fact, most customers are pretty confused by the dizzying array of options, choices, and requirements Microsoft has constructed.

In particular, some customers got a nasty shock when they realized the (potentially expensive) difference between an Enterprise Agreement and an Enterprise License in MOSS.

With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there's not enough "there" there in the business rules management system market, what with only a handful of players, but yesterday's announcement by IBM that it will acquire ILog will certainly spark aftershocks. I came across a few particularly keen questions from a former industry insider.

To go straight to the source, I first spoke to an ILog exec yesterday who shared this bottom-line assessment of why the timing for this deal: "The market is maturing, and business rules are taking a legitimate position in infrastructure," said Jean-François Abramatic, Chief Product Officer. "It's clear now that business rules are an essential part of business process management/services-oriented architecture platform."

IBM today announced that it plans to acquire ILog, an unquestionable leader in the business rules engine marketplace. The acquisition comes at a time when ILog seemed to be faltering, with declining profitability and reliance on a troubled financial sector, but there's no doubting the tremendous value to IBM and customers.

IBM is not new to business rules engines (BRE). WebSphere has a rules component, and IBM has experience with various other rules integration models (e.g. PegaSystems, Haley etc.) as well as with in-house experimentation. Yet, IBM has always lagged in its BRE capabilities. In contrast, ILog is a known market leader with formidable capabilities and established market presence – Forrester ranks ILOG and Fair Isaac as the top two BRE vendors. Pegasystems and Corticon are the next largest competitors, while Haley was recently acquired by Australian company RuleBurst.

One week later it seems the support situation at Business Objects is settling down, although customers remain miffed and a handful still do not have access to support. There are lessons for customers and vendors alike from this situation, and a question of how the BI vendor will make amends to those most adversely affected.

For most customers, the issue of not accessing support was one primarily of inconvenience and frustration. As of mid last week, according to Business Objects, about 20 percent of customers lacked the ability to logon to the site to open or track existing cases. However, for some, the disruption in support service meant a delay in production implementations.

That's right. We read this all the time: In order to succeed, CIO's should be business leaders. But the fact is, leading the business is not the CIO's business. Yet that's not bad news... in fact, it actually makes the CIO more influential.

The fact is, heads of Marketing, Operations, Procurement etc. lead the business. The head of IT does not, by definition, lead the business. And this is true even the business is information or technology. For example, the CIOs of CA, Forrester, Gartner, Google and Microsoft — to name just a few information/technology providers — do not lead their businesses; their counterparts in sales & marketing and operations do. (Interestingly, the CTO for an information technology firm is much closer to being a business leader, because the CTO owns or advises the product strategy.)

Through the SharePoint product team's MSDN blog, Microsoft announced that it had released a significant infrastructure update for SharePoint (and related technologies like Project Server that leverages SharePoint components). The update seems to primarily address three areas:

Search functionality and search-related performance (like index performance).

Content Deployment bug fixes (which hopefully will correct a series of irritating bugs related to deploying content from one SharePoint environment to another in web content management scenarios). These are include the hotfix packs Microsoft released for content deployment back in May of this year.

General interface and performance improvements. In reading the three or four pages in Microsoft's site that aimed to describe what was actually included, it was difficult to pinpoint what these "improvements" actual mean to SharePoint administrators. However, Microsoft describes them as "...fixes and product performance updates driven by customer feedback which have resulted in significant platform performance improvements..." Again, I was unable to nail what precisely has changed or how significant the improvements were.

Oracle made big news today introducing the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Fusion Edition (Oracle EPM). The release marks both the final integration of Hyperion and Oracle technologies following last year's acquisition as well as a bold statement as to the future direction of enterprise performance management as a kind of ERP system for corporate management.

"We see businesses going beyond operational excellence they've achieved over the last 15 years and moving on to management excellence," said John Kopcke, senior vice president of enterprise performance management. "The Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System will allow companies to do from the management side of the business the same things that organizations have done from an ERP perspective."

When SAP acquired Business Objects early this year, it committed to keeping Business Objects as a separate company. As a separate company owned by SAP, it could better execute on its leadership in the BI market and remain open and agnostic to non-SAP customers and systems. Both also wanted to tap into any potential joint customers and synergies. One of those synergies is support.

Naturally, there are economies of scale in sharing support systems to track cases, provide searchable content, and so on. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that support is one of my hot buttons and one I consider to be a critical factor for evaluating BI vendors. When things go wrong with software — and they will — it's the quality of support that is the difference between success and frustration and failure.

Here's a company that gets how marketing 2.0 works: Metastorm is publishing podcasts on iTunes (that is, you can get them without providing your personal information to Metastorm) as well as having a YouTube channel and customer success stories on their own site that don't require registration.

I posted a while back about how Active Endpoints is publishing webinar replays (video) as well as audio podcasts and product release information (PDF) all in an RSS feed that I subscribe to in iTunes, no signup required. IDS Scheer has ARIS TV, also on YouTube. More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.

Over at the Adobe Developer Connection Web site, Belgian developer Sébastien Arbogast has posted an interesting article (a tutorial of sorts) on how to write next-generation Web apps in Flex. What's interesting isn't the Flex part (or the demo app itself, which is rather uninspired) but the underlying stack, which gives some hint, I think, of what Adobe's Flex evangelistas may be envisioning as LAMP-Next. It's a combination of Flex (for the presentation layer), BlazeDS (for messaging and presence), Spring (the runtime framework), Hibernate (for persistence), and MySQL (data layer). The application server used in Arbogast's example happens to be JBoss, but it could just as easily be something else.

I thought the billion-dollar FAST deal Microsoft made was crazy based on my conversations last year with FAST about their products and prospects. The Microsoft presentation at the Independent Analyst Platform in Phoenix last week reminded me to follow up on things that have been sitting in the queue for a couple months.

The Apple rumor mills, always busy grinding out compote, turned their attention to SproutCore in mid-June. SproutCore is Apple's almost-official JavaScript framework of choice for developing Rich Internet Applications. The open source creation of Charles Jolley at SproutIt, SproutCore has an independent Web site, and it's affiliation with Apple is hardly a well guarded secret; but its further delineation under non-disclosure at the Worldwide Developer's Conference set off a buzz.

It's long been known that Apple (that is Steve Jobs) doesn't want to work with Adobe Flash to develop Apple's RIAs, and that Apple was searching for alternatives in the Ajax/JavaScript camps. SproutCore is a JavaScript framework, one of scores, in part distinguished by being modeled after Apple's Cocoa development environment. SproutCore code executes completely within a browser (most browsers anyway), although Apple has already needed to hitch the SquirrelFish JavaScript Interpreter to its Safari browser to boost performance.

The whole issue of E-mail Archiving and Management (EAM) has come under the spotlight recently, triggered by a ruling by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco — a ruling that touches on the Fourth Amendment "Protection from unreasonable search and seizure." Plaintiffs argued that when employers read the content of text messages sent by their employees — text messages that were held by a hosted vendor, Arch Wireless — that the employees' fourth amendment privileges were breached. In other words, even though the employees were using company-paid messaging systems, the employer should still respect their privacy and the confidential nature of personal message exchanges.

Did you notice the new video player (top right) on our home page? This isn't just a better user interface, it's connected to a all-new video delivery infrastructure for TechWeb (the parent company of IntelligentEnterprise.com). This service, from an outfit called Brightcove, brings you a higher-quality viewing experience as well as faster and easier control over what you're watching.

I've sometimes gritted my teeth as TechWeb (formerly CMP) has evolved its video capabilities over the last few years. Do you remember "The News Show" with John Soat? That was our first foray into video, and I managed to contribute about a dozen segments to that show before we moved on to the next-generation initiative. Many people loved that daily program, but what people don't like, regardless of the content, is the push approach in which videos automatically start playing with audio on. This new player puts all the control in your hands. There's still room for improvement (we could use longer descriptive headlines, for example), but I think we're getting better and better at delivering thoughtful and informative content in video form. With this is mind, I thought I'd share my top-five list of IE-reader-relevant videos:

Yesterday, Oracle lifted the veil on its plans for BEA. Naturally, Oracle said the acquisition as a whole was not just for market share, but for BEA's technology, which would all become part of the Fusion middleware platform. There was a lot of material presented, but I'll focus on the product convergence plan as it relates to business process management suites (BPMS).

To rationalize the product set, Oracle first sorted the BEA product catalog into one of three buckets: 1) strategic, where BEA was considered superior to existing Fusion components or a new capability; 2) continue and converge, where BEA component would be positioned as secondary, maintained but eventually merged into the current Fusion offering; and 3) maintenance, mostly OEM offerings, which it seems Oracle wants to walk away from as soon as they can. The BEA installed base was reassured that all BEA current products would continue to be "supported," although those that are not "strategic" would not be enhanced.

Last week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to Procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular. Though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US-based Enterprise Content Management systems integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points:

• Never buy at the end of a quarter
• Avoid Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs)

There's something vaguely Orwellian, at times, about the language that turns up in quarterly and annual reports (the kind U.S. public corporations are required to file with the Security and Exchange Commission). Remember the classic slogans from Orwell's 1984? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Perhaps we should now add, "Higher prices mean lower cost of ownership."

I'm reading a well-known software company's quarterly report dated April 1, 2008, wherein the following rather noble-sounding statements are made:

The most interesting keynote at last week's Intalio User Conference was by Greg Olson, founder of Coghead, a BPM-in-the-cloud service that uses Intalio as the process engine under the covers. Coghead bills itself as a next-generation platform for situational apps, such as built today on Excel, Access, or FileMaker. Instead of professional developers, Coghead targets independent Web developers and power users. The platform is 100 percent Web based, a multi-tenant service hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, with simple subscription-based pricing (free for single user). You can define data, forms, and perform the usual set of database operations, so it's really easy to build a database app in the cloud.

Here's a clever video from Norway (by way of AIIM's Information Zen site) that reminds us that fear of new technology dates back to the transition from scrolls to books. In fact, there's little doubt that earlier collaborators resisted the move from tablets to scrolls. But who knew there were help desks way back when? Enjoy...

Did you know Adobe had a business process management suite (BPMS)? Most people don't, even though with more than 5,000 customers they could be considered a major player. One reason people don't know about Adobe and BPM is that the company doesn't talk about it in the usual way. In fact, it treats the normal catalog of BPMS features and functions, like workflow and integration adapters, as commodities. For example, Adobe includes process modeling and a workflow engine inside every copy of LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, although to get full human task support you need to get the Process Management ES component as well.

I have to comment on my colleague Doug Henschen's article, "Is Social Networking KM All Over Again?" Doug did right at the Enterprise 2.0 conference to focus on cloud computing, a much more appropriate topic for enterprises than social networking. From the corporate perspective, the "cloud" is a diverse source of information, including all kinds of social and traditional media, out there to be searched and filtered for exploitable enterprise-relevant nuggets. But precipitous enterprise adoption of social networking? That would be foolish, destructive and not just disruptive. Corporations rely on and benefit from hierarchies and restricted lines of communications. Being selectively anti-social, for corporations, is a good thing.

It seems obvious that enterprise IT shops take Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 with a large grain of salt. It isn't that managers don't listen to enthusiastic developers or ignore the industry hype. However, most of them are in the business of insuring the cart stays behind the horse – the horse being the enterprise's existing servers, data systems, and applications. Most of the big players in Web 2.0 for the enterprise get this. They carefully position their enterprise RIA/Web 2.0 technologies and products near the margin – an add-on, a pilot for a new direction, nothing too radical. That's essentially what IBM is doing with mashups, Microsoft is doing with Silverlight, and Adobe is doing with its newest release of LiveCycle ES – Update 1.

Last week I shared a post about an AIIM study that revealed (among many points) that receptivity to Web 2.0-style social networking is highest among "Knowledge Management-Inclined" organizations. The study didn't say what percentage of firms fit that description, so I tried to get in touch with one of the report authors to find out. As an experiment, I tried Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 tools for this bit of collaboration, and good old e-mail, a decidedly Web 1.0 tool, won the race.

I wouldn't have thought of this experiment had I not been practically goaded into it. You see, AIIM's Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen had this Odd Couple repartee going throughout their presentation. Wearing a suit and tie, Carl said, "As a Baby Boomer, I have very carefully established, serious online communities where we can collaborate… but you can also reach me via email."

Dan, wearing an un-tucked shirt and jeans, said, "I’m a Millennial… If you insist, I suppose I will take an e-mail address from you, but I'd rather that you use Twitter."

At last week's Enterprise 2.0 event, Dennis Howlett hosted a panel on micro-blogging (with a strong focus on Twitter, but not exclusively) that also included Chris Brogan of CrossTechMedia, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, Rachel Happe of IDC and Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting. Although not explicitly stated in the session description, the focus was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise.

Fitton and Happe feel that micro-blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or "a-ha", moment. It's like a gateway drug to social media, demonstrating the value of social media quickly. It allows for serendipity in business relationships, where people who you might not think of including in a project will see what you're twittering about it and self-select themselves into it, or leverage your ideas in their own work. Fitton also live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise (these are copied directly from her Twitter stream, hence are in reverse chrono order):

In one of my university political science classes, we had to read and review a now-famous essay by Francis Fukuyama titled "The End of History?" In the essay, Fukuyama argued that the apparent victory of modern liberal democracy over totalitarianism in the aftermath of the Cold War effectively marked the end of the ideological evolution of forms of government.

As I speak with more and more clients, I'm struck by the parallel between the essay's main argument and SharePoint (don't laugh... there's more). In much the same way Fukuyama suggests a resolved debate on forms of effective government, SharePoint seems to have halted virtually every conversation about alternate portal technologies. When speaking with my colleagues, Steve Krol, Exec VP of Services at Lyons Consulting Group, and Tony Byrne, CMS Watch founder, it seems they're seeing much the same thing. In fact, Steve went as far as to compare SharePoint to Kleenex, Band Aid, and Xerox — no one installs "portals" anymore, they install "SharePoint." This begs the question: does SharePoint represent the end-all of portal products?

For those who've read my first post on The Challenge of Mobile Analytics, if you are hoping for a silver-bullet solution that will give you razor-sharp accuracy and provide more robust metrics than the "traditional" vendors, you may be disappointed.

To recap: some new analytics vendors market themselves as purveyors of mobile analytics, both from a branding perspective and because they have clearly committed to figuring out how best to capture and report on mobile Web data. Meanwhile, traditional online analytics vendors haven't been as aggressive in this area. However, this doesn't mean that the mobile analytics vendors have necessarily come up with great solutions either. Right now, it seems the mobile-oriented players exceed the online analytics vendors in their integration of WURFL data as part of the service or software, usually enhanced with DeviceAtlas (which is considered to have a more current database than WURFL for phone and manufacturer information).

I didn't attend this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference (E2C) to spend lots of time hearing about wikis, blogs, bookmarking, expertise discovery and so on (I focused instead on cloud computing). I think social networking technologies are reaching maturity, and now that the likes of IBM and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft and (to an even lesser extent) Oracle are onto the most proven and popular capabilities, this is looking like another market set for consolidation.

Yes, pioneers and best-of-breed players will continue to innovate, and, yes, adoption will continue to grow. As evidence, there were plenty of success-story presentations at E2C from blue-chip outfits ranging from the CIA and Sony to Pfizer and Wachovia. So my question is, what's the next chapter?

Will large enterprises embrace cloud computing? A telling point during an "Evening in the Cloud" panel discussion at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference came when a member of the audience (an employee of integrator CSC) said, "I know of plenty of European companies that wouldn't touch you guys with a ten-foot pole if it means putting data in an American data center. The "you guys" in question were the executives representing Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. The objection cited was the Patriot Act, which has stoked plenty of fear about U.S. Government meddling in private data, but let's not get side-tracked on that issue. The point is that there are plenty of reasons why corporations won't move into the cloud until they can know more about where the data will reside and how it will be protected.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference kicked off yesterday with some workshops, but I just flew in this morning and am at my first session of the day (although not the first session of the day), a keynote by Google's Rishi Chandra on cloud computing. The same key message (buy lots of Google cloud computing) but some complementary points to the presentation I saw by Matthew Glotzbach at IT360 a couple of months ago; considering that they're both in product marketing for Google Enterprise, that's not surprising.

The focus of the presentation is cloud computing and how the trends in consumer applications are starting to bleed over into the enterprise world. Chandra discussed four trends that will accelerate adoption of cloud computing among enterprises:

Yesterday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference we were treated to a series of semi-structured Social Software demos pitting IBM (Connections) against Microsoft (SharePoint), all moderated by Mike Gotta of the Burton Group.

Interestingly, both vendors pushed the portal angle: IBM bringing WebSphere Portal Server into play (partly as a container to mix in its quite separate collaboration tool, Quickr) and Microsoft showing off various 3rd-party Web Parts that can compensate for the dearth of native Social Networking services in Sharepoint.

Microsoft recently announced the latest version of the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (v1.2). This announcement is significant in that, among specific improvements in and to "out-of-the-box" projects, Redmond has added support for Visual Studio 2008. For those of you actively developing on SharePoint, this update to the extensions means, among other things:

Almost two years ago, I reported on the IBM acquisition of FileNet, wherein I quoted their plan to "integrate IBM's BPM and SOA technologies with the FileNet platform." I interpreted this to mean that FileNet BPM could finally get separated from its document-centric chains, and become the product that it should have been years ago. Just as Jessica Rabbit said "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way," the FileNet BPM wasn't (isn't) document-centric, it's just marketed that way.

As the former director of e-business evangelism for FileNet in 2000-1 when they were launching this generation of the BPM product, I had some idea of what I was talking about — I saw that 40% of the BPM installations in some countries did not involve documents at all, and that this was due to the local sales and marketing messages and techniques rather than any inherently different BPM requirements between countries. So several years after I left FileNet, when the acquisition occurred and I saw that initial press release, I imagined that the best possible thing would be if the BPM product were to be separated out and made part of the IBM WebSphere suite, in order to flesh out the badly-needed human-facing workflow side of things over there. I realized that would mean some major surgery on the product, but a stronger unified BPM suite would emerge from that.

This week at Informatica's annual user conference in Las Vegas, they announced their role in the information economy that spans from their historical focus on enterprise to a new focus of supporting specific data integration needs of outsourcing, software as a services (SaaS) and business to business (B2B) markets. Informatica has created specific divisions to organizationally advance new products to meet specific needs of these markets. Informatica has a vision for providing data integration across geographic and business boundaries and down to the desktop. Informatica hopes to be the key provider of technology for enabling information management across and inside businesses and industries.

Last year everyone was talking about Web 2.0; this year it's all about the Mobile web. Let's take a look at what this means for mobile analytics, which by the way, I'll be speaking about on a panel at the Internet Marketing Conference in New York on June 4.

The bottom line: Mobile analytics are relatively new; beyond infancy, but certainly not for the faint of heart.

Although I don't remember when I first heard the term Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), I remember researching Web services around 2000. Back then, an architecture to handle Web services was unnamed, yet understood - at least to a degree. Now it has a name – SOA.

Back then, it seemed clear to me that Web services could provide more than just a way for Web-based applications to operate. With loosely coupled services communicating via standard protocol, while centralized directories allowed these services to describe their APIs, the sky seemed the limit. Reuse, long-chased but never achieved, seemed almost automatic. Platform independence, long-running transactions, and asynchronous processes — it would be like world peace.

In an earlier post, I commented on the (undeclared) "VM war" that seems to be shaping up between Adobe and Sun Microsystems. If Adobe has its way, PC users will soon be running Web-friendly desktop apps in a secure Virtual Machine environment built on Adobe technology. If Sun has its way, we'll all be running JavaFX apps. (And if Microsoft has its way, we'll all be using some combination of .NET and Silverlight.)

Sun appears to have overslept the alarm this time, however. The company announced its JavaFX-based RIA strategy a year ago to relatively little fanfare. And although the technology was touted at the recent JavaOne show, the fact still remains that few people outside the Java developer community have ever heard of JavaFX.

I recently had a chance to demo OpenSpan, which is one of the tools that you can consider for bringing those legacy apps into the modern age of composite applications. A big problem with the existing user environment is that it has multiple, disparate applications — Windows, legacy, Web, whatever — that operate as non-integrated, functional silos. This requires re-keying of data between applications, or copy and paste if the user is particularly sophisticated. I see this all the time with my clients, and I'm constantly working with them to find improvements that reduce double keying.

In OpenSpan Studio, the visual design environment, you add a Windows (including terminal emulator or even DOS window) or Web application that you want to integrate, then use the interrogation tool to individually interrogate each individual Windows object (e.g., button) or Web page object (e.g., text box, hyperlink) to automatically create interfaces to those objects: a very sophisticated form of screen-scraping, if you will. However, you can also capture the events that occur with those objects, such as a button being clicked, and cause that to invoke actions or transfer data to other objects in other applications. Even bookmarks in MS-Word documents show up as entry/access points in the Studio environment.

Regarding the BPMS Watch Ratings report I released last month, each of the 11 BPM Suites evaluated was scored on the same set of capability categories, based on a weighted list of features/attributes, including "Strength of Execution," representing a subjective catch-all attribute (the individual reports on each vendor are available here at BPMInstitite.org. Three process types described in the report — production workflow, case management, and integration-centric — apply different weightings to the various capability categories, but use the same score for each category.

I have been looking for a way to publish the details of the scoring, and at the same time allow users to apply their own weightings to the features in each capability category, as well as to create custom process types with their own capability category weightings. I wanted to do it online, not as an Excel download, but had no idea how to do that.

I spent a couple of days in Chicago last week at BEA's (oops, Oracle's) Participate user conference. This is where AquaLogic (née Plumtree) Portal/Collaboration/BPM customers come to meet without any pesky WebLogic enthusiasts around.

Of course the big question surrounding the whole event was the "roadmap" for these products going forward. We've blogged previously that Oracle finds itself in possession of no less than four portal products. As Enterprise Portals Report readers know, all four systems are all really quite different. (That ought to tell you something about the current marketplace.) Oracle, as vendors are wont to do, will likely tell customers that the benefits of using multiple portal products are additive. BEA customers should expect a new set of sales calls at some point this year.

I remember (lo these many years ago…) when IBM proved that the elephant could dance, and the name of the dance was PC. An obscure IBM skunk works in Boca Raton, Florida hatched this insanely great idea – a personal computer made out of cheap parts from all over the place – and two years later it became the world standard. Now I'm not saying that IBM's embrace of enterprise mashups is on the same order as the PC; but of all the really big IT companies, you'd think IBM would be among the last to adopt a technology called 'mashup.'

As I explored in this case study about a Defence Intelligence Agency mashup, the technology at its most fundamental addresses one of the oldest IT problems around: Delivering appropriate data in a usable fashion to those who make decisions. What's different now, obviously, is the Internet and the technologies behind Web applications and Web 2.0.

As the mists clear away on the HP-EDS deal, it appears that there’s good news in the making for companies that outsource their infrastructure, and not-so-good news for HP competitors. Judging from the technology analysts/media response, here is an early assessment of the impact of the merger…

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The recently announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.

News is that HP is purchasing EDS. HP was already marginally bigger than IBM, and now with this bold move, HP is looking to catch up with IBM in the lucrative Services sector, which provides a large chunk of IBM's revenue and an even larger chunk of profitability. In data management, though, IBM will probably continue to have a formidable lead for some time.

While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of reasons (a point I detail in the CMS Watch SharePoint Report 2008). Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST, see the Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog as CMSWatch.com, I highlighted a FAST presentation that showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts that demonstrate several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, including content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

That might be one way to restate the premise of a survey on the Business Process Management Notation standard that has stirred up quite a controversy. The survey is interesting (because it raises some some good questions about BPMN and business process modeling) and entertaining (because it challenges dogmatic thinking on the topic).

In nutshell, the researchers reviewed 126 BPMN diagrams collected from "consultants, seminar participants, and online sources" (in other words, more or less unscientifically, which of course does not automatically invalidate the research), and found that of the 52 distinct elements (symbols) that exist in BPMN 1.1 specifications:

- Only nine elements were used on the average in each diagram (i.e. less than 20%)
- Only five elements were used in more than half the models, and another six symbols in a fourth of the models
- 17 elements (more than 30%) were used in three or fewer models, including five elements not used at all!

The topic of business intelligence was largely missing in action at this week's SAPPHIRE event, though John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, an SAP Company, did give a keynote address today (albeit at 4:30 pm — not exactly prime time). One of the highlights of the presentation was a demo of Polestar running on top of the SAP BI Accelerator. Polestar is Business Object's search-style interface for BI while BIA is SAP's in-memory analytic appliance. The demo presented more evidence that in-memory technology will get fast-track attention in the SAP/Business Objects integration.

I'm picking and choosing my sessions here at SAPPHIRE carefully, in part because I have some prearranged meetings specifically about BPM. I had a chance one-on-one meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of NetWeaver BPM, this afternoon; funnily enough, just after I attended Ginger Gatling's session this morning, I had lunch in the press area, and when I mentioned that I'd seen the session on the new SAP BPM, three pairs of ears at the table swiveled around. These three, who I didn't know (nametags, unfortunately, hang below the level of the table when seated), gave me a light grilling on my opinions of what I had seen; although I figured that they worked for SAP, it wasn't until they stood up that I saw Hilpert's name tag.

By the time that we had our prearranged meeting, then, he knew that I'd seen a product overview, and he'd already heard my views on it, so we could jump right to some of the good stuff.

If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry it's "compliance."

To me it's like fingernails down a blackboard, and frankly if I never hear it used again then I would be a happy man. Of course I have to endure the word in virtually every article and vendor press release I read. I don't like the word because it is a blanket term that used without context is totally meaningless, yet it's a word (much like governance) that sounds impressive and few people in the room will admit that they don't really understand it. Well let me be among the first to point out that the Compliance Emperor often has no clothes.

My assessment might be a little harsh, but my experience in the last six years analyzing organizations across all industries and company sizes provides insight to a serious problem. IT has lost touch with reality as they have been disconnected from the situation in business and do not seem to be concerned about it. My last blog pointed to the state of business being mad as hell. IT is apparently responding by shifting focus to the management of an organization's data assets rather than worrying or focused about the capabilities needed by business.

Cheers to Microsoft Labs for their release of Search Commands, an Office 2007 add-in that "helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in... Word, Excel, and PowerPoint." The embedded Guided Help calls it "a useful complement to the usual method of browsing for commands by clicking tabs on the Ribbon."

I'm all for a way to work around Office ribbons, a set of interface elements introduced in Office 2007 that I characterized last September as "visually unbalanced." Ribbons degrade Office usability. I wrote in September that "they force extra clicking around for routine work and make it hard to find less frequently used functions." Microsoft is now, essentially, pleading guilty. Search Commands' Guided Help, in addition to calling the awkward process of "browsing for commands by clicking tabs" a "usual method," says Search Commands is "especially useful for finding commands that you use less often."

Are Web 2.0 innovations (mashups, cloud computing, web communities, etc.) conspiring to bring about the downfall of the relational database (RDBMS) as we know and love it? Is that venerable technology — which proudly and successfully beat back energetic onslaughts from the likes of object and xml databases, document management solutions, and indeed the World Wide Web, that near—infinite hyperlinked information store — now reeling against the momentum of Web 2.0? Or, to paraphrase a popular quote, is the news of the conventional database's demise greatly exaggerated?

The state of information adequacy across business has never been worse. The percentage of IT budgets allocated to improving decision support and business intelligence for business and the underlying information management technologies is now a miniscule fraction of total spend by IT for business. Even worse, the time it takes to implement improvements is dire. The cycle time has gone beyond normal response and in many organizations can be measured in years. How is this possible? Well, IT is not spending enough time and resources on assessing the situation and has become fully out of touch with the user and functional requirements for information and process needs.

We outsource manufacturing. We outsource services. Farming and mining already follow a natural global-sourcing model. Now, research says that we should outsource science too; it's good for American innovation. I guess the outsourcing genie is well and truly out of the bottle…

A recent article in the New York Times mentions research and researchers in American universities that have reached the conclusion that we have nothing to fear from the rise of science in low-cost countries like China and India. In fact, we should view this as an opportunity to "reduce the cost of producing new scientific discovery," which should help American innovation. In turn, this approach also decimates the theory that a shortage of US scientists will hamper American competitiveness.

It seems my last post, drawn from a press release, keynote slides, and mini-briefing, missed the coded messages in IBM's business process management suite announcement. Here is the decoded version.

The announcement of an "IBM BPM Suite" represents a big deal internally at IBM. It is intended to signify a commitment to a single BPMS based on interworking components from separate divisions — WebSphere, FileNet, Lotus, Rational, GBS, etc. It required signoff from all the various warlords — Rosamilia, Goyal, LeBlanc, Bowden, etc. They know they're not there yet, but the commitment to get there is new.

"Pinch me, I'm dreaming!" This is the line Salesforce.com is using to promote today's announcement of "Salesforce for Google Apps," a pairing of the software-as-a-service-based sales force automation offering with Google Apps. The New York Times had a scoop on the story this morning, and they pegged it with this quote from Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend."

The enemy in question is Microsoft, of course, and Salesforce for Google Apps will be going up against Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The twist here is that Salesforce and Google say they'll be able to mash up their SaaS-based apps so you can, for example, keep track of e-mails sent (through Gmail) to a particular customer right on that customer's sales record...

There were lots of provocative questions and comments on my previous two posts ("Technology is Not the Driver of BI Adoption" and "BI and Technology: Part II"), so I thought I'd just batch all my responses together.

I attended IT360 this week, mostly to hear Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise. It's a sad commentary on the culture of Canadian IT conferences that this session is entitled "Meet Matthew Glotzbach of Google" in the conference guide, as if he doesn't need to