January 29, 2008
Oracle To Purchase Captovation
On January 16, 2008, Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Captovation, a provider of document capture solutions. With Captovation, Oracle extends its solution for ECM for transactional content by adding a strong capture solution. The acquisition is expected to close by February 2008. Captovation already has joint customers with Oracle/Stellent and had actually partnered with Optica even prior to Stellent's acquisition. In this sense the acquisition is not surprising. "Oracle Capture" will be the new product brand.
For Oracle customers, it makes a more complete ECM solution, one that can address paper capture for invoice processing for ERP applications or more convincingly incorporate unstructured content for Siebel. For Captovation customers it means increased RD, investment protection, and access to Oracle's global support and services.
A win for both companies and the customers.
Posted by Forrester at 9:58 AM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2008
DOM Market Heats Up: EMC And HP Make Strong Moves - But For Different Reasons
HP’s plans to acquire Exstream combined with EMC’s intent to buy Document Sciences demonstrates that output management for transactional content is becoming critical to many large organizations. But how do you rationalize these two acquisitions? First let’s look at EMC. They add to their consistently improving transactional content assets. Whether it involves invoice processing, account notices and policies for insurance, or new account opening, DOM gives EMC more complete support of the document lifecycle. More to the point, Forrester’s predicted growth in Interactive DOM is very important for the major ECM players. Interactive DOM makes more use of ECM then Structured applications that are essentially batch processes with little human involvement. Interactive applications need human-centric business process management to help author, store, version, and manage content dynamically. EMC can now link their broad ECM platform to Document Sciences for this emerging area.
The HP acquisition is harder to see at first but is clearly aimed at the structured print channel and less at the interactive content and multichannel segment. From a hardware and document outsourcing standpoint for structured DOM, HP has not had as strong a footprint as OCE, Xerox, or IBM. Their printers � think PCL - have always been mid-range and not used for significant statement and transaction reporting volume. So why buy Exstream Dialogue, the market leader in that high-volume segment? With the acquisition, HP now gains a significant software position for this segment. With Exstream, HP can, as the balance between print and electronic delivery equalizes, direct output away from the major print centers to more distributed environments where they play well. They can help customers more strategically optimize their DOM environment, and for HP that makes money when bits are set to paper. This is important. Those readers that like grand strategies will respond to this theory. But anyone with a bit of “toner” under the fingernails knows that changing these high-volume environments is not for the faint of heart and needs a very strong ROI. There is a reason they are centralized. All this being said, DOM is important from any angle one takes, and HP and EMC are showing vision by launching into this market.
Posted by Forrester at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2008
Travel Benefits Challenged By Environmental Damage
An article in January 25, 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education really caused me to sit back and reflect. The author, a university professor, questions the contradiction of conference travel thousands of miles away to hear or give presentations in light of global warming, with air travel one of the greatest polluters. Academics as well as business people travel all the time. In many cases it's critical for executives to gather for multiple-day meetings that address an issue or for academics to conduct research and interact with colleagues. But these are often the exceptions. People travel all the time to one-day meetings or even two-to-three-hour events and then turn around and come home. In fact I fall into this category. Recently I traveled from California to Amsterdam to deliver a half-hour speech, have QA, and do a five-minute Website video. At the after-party, I had an opportunity to meet and make connections and learn lots. It was great! I loved it! And that's why people travel. . . as social animals we like the face-to-face interaction, the new environment, or the invigorating atmosphere of a new culture. But is that always enough reason (as the author states) to "put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than do 110,000 Chadians or 11,000 Indians in an entire year?" But patterns are hard to change, especially when we like and get additional value from traveling. After the speech I didn't turn around and come home but traveled on to Belgium and Germany (by fast train) to see friends and deepen those cross-cultural human bonds that are so important in our challenging world today.
Travel alternatives do exist . . . one is videoconferencing. I've written about the life-like experience of Telepresence where one sees colleagues thousands of miles away in life size with amazing clarity. Also today's High Definition videoconferencing is far different from past videoconferencing experiences with audio and video out-of synch or a technical crew needed to get the session started and to monitor quality during the event. And the cost today is certainly far less than the cost of trips across the ocean. The bigger question is "Will we make the change?" With all the evidence of how air travel puts large amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, etc. into the atmosphere, I think we will have to select carefully when travel is necessary or when a videoconferencing experience is the better fit.
Posted by Forrester at 9:45 PM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2008
Blended Real Life / Second Life Meeting Shows Promise
Last night I delivered a presentation on getting real work done in virtual worlds at a meeting of the Serious Second Life Group in Boulder, which meets at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado. The purpose of the meeting: discuss the viability of virtual worlds for entrepreneurial activities and getting work done. How's this for blended: I sat in a classroom on the university campus along with about 15 other people (academics, students, and business people). Those of us who had laptops, and many others who were not with us in the room at Boulder, had avatars logged into the virtual representation of the meeting in Second Life. A few laptops projected their screens onto large displays on the classroom wall (see Figure 1). We had a video camera set up in the classroom, which was streaming into the Second Life virtual meeting room (see Figure 2 � in the still snapshot on the virtual wall, taken from the video stream, that’s me on the left wearing a black sweater with a white stripe on the sleeve). My PowerPoint slides were also uploaded into Second Life, where they were projected onto another virtual wall. We had a microphone and speakers set up in the classroom and some participants with laptops wore their own headsets and mikes.
Figure 1: Second Life meeting projected onto displays in real-world meeting room
Overall, a blended physical / virtual world meeting has lots of promise. As technology evolves, we've seen tools to help people involved in virtual meetings (meetings for which not all participants are in the same physical location) become more engaged (and therefore effective). It started out with just a telephone. Then we started back-channeling with some or all participants via instant messaging while talking on the phone. Then we added application sharing, desktop sharing, and Web conferencing, so we can all view the same material. Add video on top of this, and you get a pretty interactive meeting. (I blogged about this in early December after using Microsoft RoundTable for a meeting.) Now, a 3D virtual world experience takes interactivity and immersion to a new level. While the technology is still clunky, it has enormous potential.
· Participants get control over their experience. People could choose whether or not to view the streaming video from the classroom and whether or not to use voice. They could text chat if they wanted to, or just sit and listen. They could choose where to sit, stand, or hover, and could control their camera view � zooming in on whatever they wanted to see most.
· Wait � who's who? The people who use Second Life and the avatars that represent those people do not share the same names and do not look alike. While this is not necessarily a dire deal breaker for business usage (I wrote about this in a blog post in December, 2007) it raises some challenges. Until Second Life users (residents) get used to each other's avatar's names and appearance, there can be a lot of confusion about who's who. Throughout the meeting last night I tried to match up the people in the classroom with me with the avatars in Second Life, to no avail. At the end of the meeting, introductions included things you wouldn’t expect, like That was me with the dragon on my shoulder. I could get used to � even enjoy � peoples' avatars looking unusual. But for real work to get done, virtual world participants must be able to display their real life names above their avatars. And meeting hosts must be able to exclude from meeting locations any avatar that doesn't have a real-life name displayed.
· Communication was tough and back channeling was rampant. We had voice conversations � sometimes more than one at a time � going on in the classroom. But people listening via Second Life voice over IP could only hear speakers who had mikes or were sitting near the in-room microphone. People had to remember to mute their mikes when they weren't speaking. And we got some screechy audio feedback and some pretty bad delays. People were chatting via group text chat and private instant message. With so many conversations going on, lots of communication was lost.
· The biggest technical problem: Second Life voice functionality. I have never been able to get Second Life voice working right, regardless of which microphone I'm using or what physical location I'm in (and therefore what network bandwidth I have). I thought maybe it was the fault of my laptop, which wasn't designed for this purpose. But last night we had problems with voice throughout the entire meeting. Sometimes we were plagued with horrible static. Other times the speaker's voice would cut in and out. It can't be blamed on network bandwidth on the university's end � the classroom had 10mpbs wireless connectivity.
· Spatialized voice is great � but takes some getting used to. In Second Life you hear the voices of avatars closest to you the loudest. If an avatar is standing to your right you hear their voice in your right speaker. If your avatar is standing too far away from the speaker's avatar you can't hear them at all. This is why during voice presentations in Second Life you will see avatars crowded around the speaker � it's the only way to hear. This crowding raises an important etiquette issue � the physics in Second Life allow you to bump into other people and literally shove them. Last night I found myself text chatting sorry more than once.
Figure 2: Streaming video from the physical meeting in the Second Life virtual meeting room
Posted by Forrester at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)
Data Warehousing Appliances: Growing Bigger Than A Breadbox, Softer Than The Bread
Now for my core coverage area � data warehousing (DW) � and the topic of my first Forrester research report, coming soon. (Everybody note: Boris Evelson is our lead BI analyst. But given that BI and DW are joined at the hip, I had to put in my two cents on the intersections of these (and other related topics � I also cover CEP for Forrester as it impacts information and knowledge management professionals).
The DW appliance wars are upon us. This can be seen in vendors' eagerness to slap the appliance label on a growing range of hardware-integrated solutions, most of which are much bigger than a breadbox, and also far more complex and costly � though, ostensibly, less so than the software-centric solutions they hope to supplant. Every vendor claims that its appliances are true "plug-and-play" solutions, though few customers are so naïve as to imagine that a complex IT solution can be as easy to install and setup as, say, a toaster-oven. In addition, vendors and industry observers are proliferating rival definitions of what constitutes a true appliance.
Depending on which vendor's religion you subscribe to, an appliance may come closer to one or the other end of the following solution spectrum:
• Simple DW appliances: Some DW appliances are simple "black boxes" that are designed and optimized for a single function or transaction type. Simple appliances, often packaged as blades or stand-alone assemblies, allow little if any modification or customization by the user.
• Complex DW appliances: Most DW appliances fall into this category. This sort of appliance is a complex assemblage of processing, input/output, storage, and other components integrated across one or more racks in an enterprise data center. Often, a complex appliance consists of one or more modular blades, which may or may not be able to stand alone.
Of course, there are plenty of opportunities for vendors to stretch the concept of an appliance to the breaking point. Unfortunately, one of the core features that most people associate with appliances � their physical tangibility � is starting to fall by the wayside. Increasingly, vendors are exploring the nouveau notion of the "virtual appliance." This refers to the concept of a self-contained software package that can be deployed rapidly to diverse operating and hardware platforms through virtualization technologies such as VMWare and Xen. It's not clear how these "virtual appliances" differ from existing development paradigms, such as Java, that also promise the ability to "write once run anywhere."
The DW appliance concept is softening along the human dimension as well. To further stretch the concept, more and more appliance vendors incorporate prepackaged professional services into their concept of an appliance. Some vendors are stressing global services as a core feature of their appliance offerings. According to this approach, the appliance is a broader solution package that includes services to help customers install, set up, maintain, and optimize the pre-configured hardware/software assembly.
CIOs, enterprise architects, and other professionals must wade through this welter of confusing, overlapping definitions to compare and contrast appliances against each other � and against the standard "software servers storage" DW deployment model.
A high-level guideline for DW practitioners: Use the same core criteria to evaluate DW appliances as you apply to traditional DW solutions: price-performance, functionality, flexibility, scalability, manageability, integration, and extensibility. Try not to invest any magic value in some solution simply due to the fact that the vendor has brought it to market under the "appliance" label.
Posted by Forrester at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)
