Intelligent Enterprise

A lot of the work at the Real Story Group involves helping people make the right information management buying decisions. Not surprisingly, one of the most common areas where our customers seek our counsel is with vendor scoring and assessment methodologies.

The Real Story Group strongly advocates a test-based approach to procurement, based on the value of scenarios; nevertheless, many enterprises want to apply a quantitative, spreadsheet-based assessment approach. In some cases these can become really quite complex. We have advised on dozens of scoring spreadsheets, and like to think we have seen them all.

And over the years, we've learned a hard truth: more details and more complexity in a scoring methodology may not deliver you the right vendor. It can occasionally do the exact opposite.

The newly opened Google App Store isn't going to shake any foundations (yet) -- and Apple's iPhone Store it's not -- but it looks like great news for small and midsize businesses, and a step forward for cloud computing.

Clearly there is a great deal of difference between the Google App Store and Apple's iPhone Store... but that's really because the comparison would be apples to oranges. For example, Apple has, what, around 160,000 applications? Google has maybe 350 applications. This might seem like a drop in the ocean, but remember that Google apps are intended for businesses, so there are more per-capita users for each Google app. Also, of course, the applications are geared for very different purposes -- personal productivity and entertainment vs. business productivity and facilitation.

"Mainstream BI" continues to be more vision than reality, but how about mainstream analytics? This week visualization and analytics vendor TIBCO Spotfire took one step closer to making that a reality with its 3.1 release.

Statistical analysis and predictive analytics require expertise in both the data and statistical methods. Consuming the results of such analyses, however, does not. So imagine an expert who creates a model that optimizes which customer is most likely to respond to a marketing campaign. The process of determining which factors (such as age, gender, income, and customer tenure) most predict likelihood to respond is something the expert normally does. So the expert runs the model, refines the model for maximum response rates, and ultimately gives a list to the marketing department of which customers are their best targets.

Todd Hoff put up a provocative post on High Scalability called MySQL and Memcached: End of an Era? The post itself focuses on observations like:

• Facebook invented and is adopting Cassandra.
  
• Twitter is adopting Cassandra.
  
• Digg is adopting Cassandra.
  
• LinkedIn invented and is adopting Voldemort.
  
• Gee, it seems as if the super-scalable website biz has moved beyond MySQL/Memcached.

I don't want to accuse anybody of lying, but I've certainly had to sort through a lot of dubious competitive claims in the last week. As a journalist, I have many years of experience hearing ill-informed assertions, half truths and occasional bald-faced lies. I usually know BS when I hear it. Sometimes I'm still taken off guard.

The lesson I have relearned over the last week is that the more competitive the market, the more likely you are to hear misinformation. Integration and, particularly, cloud integration is one such field. Last week I interviewed Ilan Sahayek, the chief technology officer at open-source integration vendor Jitterbit, and he told me that Informatica and Cast Iron don't really address data migration to the cloud. He asserted the competitors' technology is more about ongoing synchronization work, and he specifically said that Informatica's "low-end" product doesn't support parallel processing. I took low-end to mean the Informatica Cloud Data Integration offering. When I asked Sahayek if he had knowledge of Informatica's latest releases, which were released in December, he equivocated.

Last week I attended my first Progress Software analyst day; I've been at Savvion events in the past, and their acquisition by Progress is likely why I was invited to the event. Progress CTO John Bates delivered the company's message on operational responsiveness, highlighting the importance of process and event management. He showed survey results stating that companies find it critical to respond to problematic events in real time, but only a small percentage are able to actually do that. Companies want real-time business visibility, immediate sense-and-respond capabilities, and continuous business process improvement in a cycle of responsive process management. Yeah, and I want a pony for Christmas. Okay, not really, but wishing doesn't make any of this happen.

By adding BPM to its suite, Progress brings together process and event management; this makes it possible to achieve this level of operational responsiveness, but it's not quite so easy as that. First of all, we need to hear more about how the suite of products are going to be integrated. Secondly, and more importantly, companies who want to have this level of operational responsiveness need to do something about the legacy sludge that's keeping them from achieving it: otherwise, Progress (and all the other software vendors) are just pushing on a rope.

Last month, Robert Shapiro of XPDL 2.x fame, also a member of the BPMN 2.0 Finalization Task Force in OMG, delivered an update on progress toward completing both XPDL 2.2 and BPMN 2.0. Here is the link to the unedited replay. Also, Sandy Kemsley does her usual fine job of summarizing the high points here.

I would just add a couple points to the discussion. The first regards an explicit sorting of BPMN 2.0 shapes and symbols into subclasses for the purpose of enabling tool interoperability. I tried hard to get this into the draft last May, but IBM, Oracle, and SAP didn't want to commit to anything specific at that time regarding their initial "BPMN 2.0″-branded offerings. Apparently they are feeling more comfortable about it now, as Robert believes there is a chance this could make the final draft.

I'm just back from the SAS 19th annual analyst summit, held this year in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It sounds like a boondoggle, doesn't it? But as it's the week after TDWI, with my daughter's birthday in between, for me it's one heck of a long trip with no time for skiing. Missing my daughter's birthday is not an option.

Beyond even the BI world, SAS is an inspiring company. With revenues just over $2.3 billion, it is the largest privately held software company. Its founder, Dr. Jim Goodnight, is visionary in the way he treats his employees. Fortune just named SAS THE best company to work for. Amid a severe recession, SAS has had no layoffs. With outsourcing the norm, SAS keeps everyone from grounds people to cafeteria workers to advertising executives directly on their payroll. Then there is the on-site day care, medical care, school, gym and more at its headquarters in Cary, NC. Dr. Goodnight's view is that if you treat employees well, they will be happier and more focused on the customer and delivering value to them. Even their subscription-based pricing model was ahead of its time, before SaaS made such pricing standard.

For years now, Google has played fast and loose with information confidentiality and privacy issues. As if further proof were needed, the PR disaster that is Buzz should be enough to firmly conclude that Google is not suitable for enterprise use-cases.

It is inconceivable that enterprise-focused vendors, be they niche specialists like Hyland, Open Text or Autonomy, or household names like Microsoft, IBM or Oracle, would ever contemplate the reckless move that Google undertook in deliberately exposing customers' private information to all and sundry with Buzz. Even if they did contemplate such a move, it would never have happened, as these firms not only have too many checks and balances to ensure it could not. But additionally they have a solid understanding that enterprise customers would simply not tolerate, or ever forgive such a move. It would be commercial suicide.

Who would have thought spreading the word on BI would be so hard? I battled two storms last week to get to and from TDWI in Las Vegas, finally arriving home to two feet of snow in New Jersey.

At the TDWI Executive Summit, I caught a presentation by Bill Baker (formerly of Microsoft, now of Visible Technologies) on social media and sentiment analysis. It's such an interesting and burgeoning field. As the volume of blogs, tweets, and social media content explodes, interpreting what consumers are saying about particular brands requires a combination of technologies, including data integration, text analytics and visualization, to name a few. He rattled off a list of a dozen vendors in this space and predicted that sentiment analysis would not remain a niche segment, but instead, would be subsumed by marketing firms. One interesting metric he suggested influencers (and influencees) should track is not only how many of you read my blog, but who actually comments and links to them. I had to chuckle at this lofty idea. Heck, getting page counts out of some of the organizations I write for is an impossibilitity. Some can't do it, and some say it's highly confidential. (Intelligent Enterprise gladly provides these metrics.)

When Howard Dresner recently pinged me about his new "Wisdom of the Crowds" business intelligence market survey, I thought it might have something to do with James Surowiecki's book of the same name. Turns out he's just tapping into your experience and opinions on various BI products, not further explaining the phenomenon whereby large groups invariably do a better job of answering questions and solving problems than learned experts.

Just the other week I wrote about the potential of using devices such as Apple's iPad for accessing enterprise documents. What seemed like good idea for the future turns out to be almost in the here and now. A small start up called SNAPPS has designed and launched a free app for the iPhone that provides secure access to IBM Quikr and IBM FileNet P8 documents; unsurprisingly an iPad version is in the works.

At this week's IQPC Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement conference in Toronto, David Haigh of Johnson & Johnson presented on how the company is using dashboards for process improvement efforts. Dashboards are an integral part of any business process management implementation. Haigh is part of the consumer products division, rather than pharmaceutical or medical, so he mentioned lots of name brands that we all see and use every day.

J&J's process excellence program covers a range of methods and tools, but Tuesday's talk was focused on dashboards as a visualization of a management system for your business: to set strategy, track progress, and make corrections. Like many companies, J&J has a lot of data but not very much that has been transformed into actionable information. He makes an automotive analogy: a car engine typically has 43 inputs and 35 outputs, but we drive using a dashboard that has that information rolled up into a few key indicators: speed, RPM, temperature and so on.

It's more than an incremental upgrade but everything promised isn't all there -- just yet, anyway. That's my quick take on SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, a major upgrade and consolidation announced today for the vendor's software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence offerings.

The new BI OnDemand unites (and replaces) two formerly distinct offerings: CrystalReports.com, the company's simplest and most popular SaaS offering, which has hundreds of thousands of users; and the previous version of BI OnDemand, the SaaS-delivered BI platform based on the vendor's conventional software.

Enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Open Text's planned acquisition of ECM + text-mining provider Nstein is an interesting bit of news, perhaps indicative of market challenges that may result from an over-narrow focus on a single, struggling market (publishing) and of the opportunities that text analytics -- software that automates tagging and classifying content, among other functions, to boost findability -- is perceived as presenting.

The story is significant in the text-analytics/publishing/content-management worlds. It gained the attention of TechCrunch, a much-visited site that "was founded on June 11, 2005, as a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies." In this instance, however, TechCrunch's "obsession" did not extend to thorough reporting, which is an interesting twist. TechCrunch got four points fair-to-middling wrong in one short, three-paragraph, four-sentence article, three of them in the 12-word headline alone.

I'll interweave my own analysis of the planned acquisition with a look at TechCrunch's reporting.

February is usually a busy month for data warehouse DBMS product releases, product announcements, and other real or contrived data warehouse DBMS news, and it can get pretty confusing trying to keep those categories of "news" apart.* This year is no exception, although several vendors -- including Teradata and Netezza -- are taking "rolling thunder" approaches, doing some of their announcements this month while holding others back for March or April.

*I probably have it worse than most people in that regard, because my clients run tentative feature lists and announcement schedules by me well in advance, which may get changed multiple times before the final dates roll around. I also occasionally miss some detail, if it wasn't in a pre-briefing but gets added at the end.

As part of a recent solution-provider survey, I posed the question, "What do you see as the 3 (or fewer) most important text-analytics technology, solution, or market challenges [or opportunities] in 2010?" to Hamish Cunningham, Research Professor of Internet Computing at the University of Sheffield (UK). Hamish is benevolent dictator of the GATE team, "researching human language computation." Their work is realized in a highly capable, open-source, text-analysis platform, the General Architecture for Text Engineering. I've used it myself!

Hamish is effectively GATE's CEO. While GATE work is funded in part by a number of sponsors and partners, Hamish is not beholden to VCs or shareholders and is decidedly uncorporate, that is, he'll tell you what he really thinks and what he's up to, openly. Check out his blog, Computing Text. One thing he's doing is shifting the GATE team to focus on users and support, by nurturing the GATE community and via a number of carefully conceived industry alliances. (Disclosure: I am a paid consultant to a GATE partner, Matrixware, a Vienna based services firm that is working with the Univ. of Sheffield and Bulgarian semantic-technologies developer Ontotext to build GATE into a commercially friendly product suite. My enthusiasm for GATE led to the consulting assignment, not the reverse.)

Hamish's reply to my Text Analytics Opportunities and Challenges for 2010 question didn't comfortably fit the model I had in mind for my article, but it's full of insight all the same. Here's what Hamish had to say on GATE and text-analytics futures: