Forrester Information and Knowledge Management Blog

Oracle To Purchase Captovation

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:58:02 -0700

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.

DOM Market Heats Up: EMC And HP Make Strong Moves - But For Different Reasons

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:14:36 -0700

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.

Travel Benefits Challenged By Environmental Damage

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:45:29 -0700

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.

Blended Real Life / Second Life Meeting Shows Promise

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:15:33 -0700

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

Data Warehousing Appliances: Growing Bigger Than A Breadbox, Softer Than The Bread

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:24:42 -0700

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.

Information Workplace Platform Implications Of Oracle/BEA Acquisition

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:58:12 -0700

We’ve been getting lots of questions about what the Oracle/BEA acquisition means in the Information Workplace platforms market. Here’s our take:

Oracle has made assurances to BEA customers

Oracle has assured us that they will be very mindful of protecting the interests of existing BEA customers, just as they have been for customers of Peoplesoft and Siebel � and we find their assurances credible. It’s not in Oracle’s interest to aggravate these customers, and in many cases BEA customers are already Oracle customers, anyway.

There are six main areas of synergy we’ve identified:

Oracle and BEA have a lot of common customers, so there will be great channel efficiency to be had.
High-end middleware
Oracle benefits from BEA’s strengths in the telecom, brokerage, and government sectors
BEA has some product footprint on Microsoft.NET, if Oracle should choose to exploit that capability.
BEA is a leader in the growth of Information-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions, and the combination with Oracle (which also has some strong and complementary capabilities there, due in part to its acquisition of Tangosol last year) has the opportunity to drive adoption and innovation in the IaaS area.
Great partner-channel synergy � it will give Oracle more products to push through its large partner channel � a win-win for Oracle and its partners.

Yet with so many technology overlaps, something’s got to give

An Information Workplace platform delivers a core set of increasingly unified services that allows IT to roll out next-generation digital work environments that are seamless, contextual, individualized, visual, multimodal, social, and quick to create and modify. The core building blocks of an Information Workplace platform are content, collaboration and communication (including Social Computing tools), portal, and office productivity, as well as a new entrant: business intelligence for the masses.

Through its Business Interaction Division, BEA delivers portal, enterprise Social Computing, and BPM software products. The company has positioned this division as the corollary to IBM’s Lotus division.

To date, BEA has not really promoted an Information Workplace vision and its portfolio is missing key IW platform building blocks like content and office productivity. It’s also missing secondary elements like business intelligence, learning, and information rights management, choosing instead to integrate with other vendors’ products in some of these areas � especially content and office productivity.
As a result, when BEA is on the list of incumbent vendors in customers’ Information Workplace vendor evaluations, the vendor is usually not viewed as strategic. The effect: customers sometimes put plans in place to replace BEA’s portal and collaboration software with software from vendors they view as more strategically aligned.
Oracle and BEA share customers at a company level. But the actual stakeholders who buy products from each are quite different and complementary. Plumtree had roughly 2,000 customers at the time of the acquisition by BEA. Many of these customers were, and still are, people interested in intranets, communities, collaboration, and document sharing. Witness the stories of Caterpillar Equipment, Halliburton, and others who used Plumtree to create extensive collaborative networks and communities. Conversely, Oracle's portal 10g has been far more attractive to the composite applications, app dev, and business intelligence crowds.

Some of the products in BEA’s portfolio (e.g., AquaLogic User Interaction Portal) may have staying power due to their existing installed base, but risk not being seen as strategic by Oracle or its customers. One possible outcome is that Oracle keeps and supports the AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) customer base as a way to get farther into the Information Workplace platforms market. Another possible outcome is that Oracle keeps some of BEA’s offerings but ends up selling them primarily into the Oracle customer base. In this latter case, the products in the current BEA portfolio will likely fade from view as Information Workplace platform options.

Portal

Judging from the energy Oracle is putting behind WebCenter as a front-end to its Fusion applications strategy, Oracle WebCenter may be the ultimate winner in the portal and composite applications category (over the BEA products). Oracle already seems to be focusing most of its Ramp;D investment in WebCenter over its existing Oracle Portal 10g product. Despite Oracle’s willingness to support it, WebLogic Portal will likely be the most severe casualty of this acquisition since Oracle will have a difficult time selling multiple portals for composite application delivery. BEA’s ALUI Portal product is another story, however. A repackaging and re-branding of the Plumtree portal product, ALUI Portal has an enormous market presence for corporate intranets and extranets that’s likely to be seen as attractive to an Oracle that’s been far more competitive in the apps business.

Collaboration and Social Computing

· We suspect that the AquaLogic Pages, Ensemble and Pathways products will be melded with Oracle WebCenter, which is Oracle’s focus for many Web 2.0 technologies. Oracle will likely absorb the best from the BEA stack and the best from WebCenter into future versions of the WebCenter offering.

· Likewise, the BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration provides project-centric collaboration (shared tasks, calendars, events, announcements, documents), document sharing, wikis, blogs and situational applications. We suspect that this product may be supplanted by similar functionality Oracle provides (and plans to provide in future releases) in Oracle Collaboration Suite and also in WebCenter, which is tied tightly with the Fusion middleware strategy and is core to Oracle’s technology strategy.

Business process management

· Oracle’s stack has been designed to be as open as possible. The company will likely pick and choose the best parts of each company’s middleware stack to be part of Fusion middleware, and stop selling the rest while continuing to support it. Specifically in terms of AquaLogic BPM (formerly Fuego), Oracle might keep this product as a separate human-centric engine from its BPEL-based main process engine.

What the acquisition means for Oracle customers

The acquisition provides Oracle and its customers with a much more credible set of application platform capabilities at the high end of the market. Forrester has seen dramatically increased levels of interest, starting last year and continuing into 2008, in middleware to enable high-end application workloads in the financial services, telecommunications, and government sectors � right where BEA already has a strong presence.
It brings another set of important human resources into the Oracle fold. BEA has always been a powerhouse of strong engineering talent and innovation, and has recently continued that trend in the enterprise service bus (ESB) and Information-as-a-Service markets. Oracle and its customers will get much richer capabilities, and acceleration of Oracle’s ability to offer more capabilities in the future, as a result of this deal.
It also brings to Oracle customers some useful technology assets like the JRockit JVM, support for real-time Java, a strong portfolio of Eclipse-based developer tools (and also tools for BPM and other complementary areas), and strong Information-as-a-Service technology (BEA’s AquaLogic Data Services Platform is a leader in the market).
Oracle’s Service Delivery Platform is weaker and newer than BEA’s equivalent capabilities for telcos, and so telcos may conclude they should move to BEA’s product � which would bring some migration costs. Oracle certainly won’t force them down this road, though.
Similarly, BEA’s Event Server appears stronger than Oracle’s equivalent capabilities. But it’s not as well established in the market, being very new, so Oracle could rebrand it and merge it into its own event-driven software stack. There is some risk of disruption to advanced customers working with this high-end technology, although those risks are likely small since both products (Oracle’s and BEA’s) are so new.

What the acquisition means for BEA customers

· In the short term, it is bit of a non-issue because Oracle does a remarkable job of supporting legacy acquisition technology.

Cost pressures could mount from one of two sources: costs associated with migration from BEA to Oracle products, or the cost of Oracle’s “Lifetime Support” fees which may or may not be higher than what the customers have been paying to BEA for support.

BI's New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 08:08:33 -0700

Business intelligence (BI) remains one of the most vital and innovative sectors of the data management arena. The past year saw BI achieve a new degree of importance in the solution portfolios of users everywhere. In fact, BI has begun to play into a much broader range of enterprise IT planning and deployment decisions than ever before. What follows are the most important trends that will continue to transform the BI industry, and add a new degree of complexity into decisions confronting CIOs, enterprise architects, and information and knowledge management professionals:

BI becoming SOA’s crown jewel: The past year has seen a rash of headline-grabbing MA deals in the BI arena, with Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, SAP’s deal for Business Objects, and IBM’s pending takeover of Cognos�not to mention acquisitions of smaller BI and corporate performance management (CPM) application vendors by most of those firms. It’s far too easy to misinterpret these recent events as just more of the same MA-stoked empire-building that we’ve come to expect from large IT solution vendors. What’s driving this recent industry consolidation�which is sure to continue in 2008--is growing vendor recognition that BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution portfolio. Though Oracle and SAP (and, to a lesser degree, IBM) already had decent BI wares in their respective SOA portfolios, none of them were on any enterprise’s short list of name-brand BI solution providers�until, that is, each of them decided to grab a leading BI pure-play. SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features.
BI evolving into tailored business analytics: CPM�sometimes called “business analytics”�is rapidly becoming a key competitive front in the BI wars. Increasingly, BI/CPM vendors are offering tailored solutions for a dizzying range of horizontal business requirements and vertical industries. Vendors’ continued profitability also hinges on their ability to provide the professional services necessary to create, customize, and support business analytics for each vertical industry’s and specific customer’s unique requirements. Without a doubt, we’ll see further verticalization of product and service offerings by CPM vendors in 2008, which will provide a necessary hedge against the inevitable creep of commoditization into such horizontal analytics segments as financial, human resources, sales and marketing, and supply chain management.
BI going truly real-time through complex event processing: Complex event processing (CEP) promises business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams. However, CEP has heretofore been conspicuously missing from the mainstream BI arena, necessitating stovepipe CEP implementations that are only loosely integrated with enterprises’ existing visualization, reporting, dashboarding, information modeling, metadata, and other BI infrastructure components. That will change big-time in 2008, as most leading BI vendors start to partner with CEP pure-plays, or acquire them outright, in order to strengthen their support for real-time event-driven applications. Indeed, we expect IBM to ramp up its CEP/BI integration now that it is acquiring both CEP pure-play AptSoft and BI/CPM vendor Cognos. AptSoft will also figure into IBM’s business process management (BPM) portfolio in support of closed-loop BI and business activity monitoring (BAM). We also expect to see SAP/Business Objects, Oracle/Hyperion, SAS Institute, Microsoft, Information Builders, and MicroStrategy venture into the CEP arena in the coming year. Likewise, it’s very likely that the newly independent Teradata, which has taken the lead in real-time data warehousing (DW), will snatch up a CEP vendor to build out its real-time BI portfolio.
BI bundling with DW appliances: Appliances have even begun to take up permanent residence at the heart of the enterprise data center: in the DW and BI infrastructures. Increasingly, vendors are focusing on integrating, packaging, and pricing their DW/BI products as pre-configured, modular appliances for quick deployment. These appliances consist of processing, storage, and software components that have been prepackaged, preconfigured, and pre-optimized for core DW/BI functions such as multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) queries, bulk data loading, and online archiving. The past year saw a growing range of DW vendors�including such DBMS powerhouses as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft�reorient their DW/BI go-to-market strategies around the appliance model. In turn, leading BI vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos made a big push into the appliance arena. In 2008 and beyond, more and more DW vendors will pre-integrate BI solutions�their own and/or those of their partners�into their appliances. Increasingly, DW/BI appliances will be tailored, packaged, and priced for many market segments and deployment scenarios.
BI goes collaborative: Collective intelligence is an organization’s most precious asset. Traditionally, the BI industry has offered little to directly address one of the most critical components of group IQ: the collaboration environment. Instead, most BI applications focus on delivering targeted reports, analytics, dashboards, multidimensional visualization, and other key data to individual end users in isolation, rather than to larger business teams. In the past year, though, the BI industry has begun to roll out more collaboration features in their products�such as Microsoft with their new Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 solution--or, at the very least, to begin talking about new collaboration features to expect in the coming year. In 2008 and beyond, we expect to see the BI, collaboration, and knowledge management segments converge. Likewise, we expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs, wikis, and social networking revolutionize the BI experience. Many BI vendors now realize that decision support environments should allow users to access intelligence wherever it may reside, be it in data warehouses or in the heads of remote colleagues.

Going forward, Forrester will increasingly focus on the cross-synthesis of BI with all of these solution areas. We will provide best practices, methodologies, and tools to help customers sort through the myriad issues.

Hewlett Packard To Buy Exstream Software: DOM Is Getting Its Due

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:43:24 -0700

by Craig Le Clair.

In October of last year, I published Give DOM its Due and argued that for years, document output management (DOM) had been pegged as a back-office operation that produces customer statements and bills. And that now, customer experience demands will thrust DOM into a major software category supporting the growing and diverse content that enterprises must assemble and deliver to customers. A few weeks ago EMC purchased Document Sciences. And now on January 22, HP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Exstream Software, a privately-held provider of document creation and publishing software for print, mail and online channels. HP expects to close on this transaction in the second quarter of HP's 2008 fiscal year.

Exstream continues to be a leading choice for the high-volume segment of the DOM structured market and will greatly strengthen HPs document automation capability. Initially targeting service providers � a tough crowd � Exstream followed an object-oriented development model to allow re-use of document components, which was quickly adopted by service providers to provide similar applications to many customers. Today's focus is heavily in the interactive and on-demand DOM segments with strong direct sales. While revenue numbers were not available, Exstream has 300plus employees.

In an analyst briefing on the acquisition today, HP was clear that Variable Data Publishing (VDP), referring to the combination of specific customer data to a structured output format, is not just printing but a complete publishing infrastructure for capture, retaining, securing and extending digital content creation for the on line, mobile and the interactive environment - although there was little mention of the acquisition in the context of HP's well-publicized Print 2.0 initiative. HP intends to incorporate not only structured and unstructured information into future output applications, but also rich media such as audio and video.

Exstream fills a gap in HP's document automation capability which largely consisted of HP Output Server with roots in print infrastructure output management, and derived from the Dazel product. Exstream moves well up the value chain providing complete output creation and management with the ability to add value to the customer through TransPromo and highly personalized communications. As part of the Web Services and Software business unit within the Imaging and Printing Group, it will become an integral part of the overall IPG SW strategy and help link capabilities across HP's Technical Solutions Group and the office solutions area.

Yet, HP will have challenges and opportunities with this acquisition. They must carefully navigate very productive hardware channels, providing a more complete solution, but not directly competing with service bureau HW customers. They are also wading into the high-volume AFP and transaction printing market, traditionally not a sweet spot. And they must continue Exstream's support for non-HP hardware platforms, and to fully leverage the combination, they must train a sales force more accustomed to hardware then complex document automation sales like correspondence management.

Yet the pros far outweigh the cons for this combination. HP has greatly extended its capabilites at a time when DOM � particulalry for interactive applications � is heating up. Exstream customers get stronger worldwide sales and support and deeper Ramp;D pockets. HP is to be commended for showing vision in the document output space and yes � helping give DOM its Due.

Early Web Cam Experiences Can Detract From, Rather Than Add To, Videoconferences

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:27:18 -0700

By Erica Driver with Henry Dewing.

In early December I blogged about my first experience using the Microsoft RoundTable video conferencing solution for a multi-hour meeting in which I was a remote participant. That meeting was a one-way video and Web conferencing experience . I didn’t have a Web cam at my desk. I could see the participants in the main conference room but they couldn’t see me. My takeaways after this meeting were that I could concentrate better than I had been able to in similar meetings where I didn’t have the video stream from the conference room; I felt connected to the others even though we weren’t together in the same room; and non-verbal communication had been preserved. I was so excited about my experience that I went out and purchased a Web cam, thinking that two-way video would enrich my remote meetings even further.

A few weeks later I had another multi-hour conference call during which we used Microsoft RoundTable and Live Meeting. I hooked up my shiny new Logitech Web cam and it all went downhill from therer. Being a newbie with Web cam-based video conferencing, I found that having a camera on my end felt highly unnatural and significantly detracted from, rather than added to, my experience in the meeting. Here’s why, and what my colleague Henry Dewing, who covers video conferencing for technology product management and marketing professionals, has to say about it:

· I spent too much mental energy paying attention to whether � and how � other participants could see me. Maybe this is due to being a Web cam newbie, but I wasted way too many brain cycles making sure that the participants in the main conference room could see me okay and that I was communicating with them visually. I could see my own video stream in a little corner of my screen, which was very distracting. I tried to regularly look up at my Web cam to anyone who was looking at my video stream that I was listening and interested -- which took my eyes off the materials we were discussing and my keyboard where I was taking notes and focused my attention on the 2-inch black sphere of my camera. And I had to remember to close the privacy shade on my camera while I was eating lunch (which didn’t synchronize with the others’ lunch break due to a 3-hour time difference). Henry’s recommendations: if you are a remote participant using a Web cam, turn off your view of your own video stream. And remember that the views you have of those in the main conference room are not always head on and that is okay because it is normal in a meeting � the same is true for others’ view of you. Also, practice a bit with your Web cam beforehand so that you don’t choose poor camera angles, weak lighting, or sub-optimal audio configurations.

· When presenting, I didn’t have the benefit of seeing my slides or the audience. I had a harder time presenting my material than I otherwise would have because while I was talking I wasn’t looking at either the other participants or my slides � I was looking at a camera. My memory stinks so I found this to be quite hard. Even though the camera was just above the top of my laptop screen, when I glanced at my keyboard or computer screen, the other participants saw me with my head down.

· Eye contact was impossible. In order to appear to the other participants like I was making eye contact with them I had to look into my camera. This might be second nature for a fashion model or movie star but it sure wasn’t for me. And when I was looking into the camera, I couldn’t look at the video images of the other participants on my screen � so I couldn’t even get the illusion of approximated eye contact, which was distracting.

· The technology didn’t work seamlessly. Another remote participant had trouble viewing the video stream from my Web cam as well as the video streams from the conference room at the same time. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. And at one point in the meeting I could see via the little panoramic image of the conference room that my video image had mysteriously blown up to way bigger than life size � my face was taking up the whole projected screen in the main conference room. The on-site team was able to fix it in a few seconds, but it was a little bit disconcerting. Henry’s recommendation: make sure you set up all the network stuff ahead of time. Get the Web conference, audio bridge, and video conferencing devices all synched up so communication is seamless.

I’ll try it again � this was just my first attempt � but probably not for important, multi-hour meetings with clients where I have to simultaneously view presentation materials, participate in a multi-party voice conversation, take notes on my computer, and perhaps view a video stream coming out of the main conference room. At the very least, I’ll turn off the ability to view my own video stream. Both users like me and � according to Henry � vendors that offer technologies for video conferencing are on the steep end of the learning curve and that that may inhibit usability for the short term.

Millenials — Ignore Them At Your Peril

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:53:11 -0700

by Connie Moore.

I am a political news junkie. I came by it honestly because my family always discussed political events at suppertime, I was a student activist in high school and college, I majored in political science and history, and now I'm somewhat involved in local politics where I live. So I guess it's no surprise that my eyes and ears have been glued to CNN, The Washington Post, The Economist and just about every weekly news and business magazine I can get my hands on during this political primary season.

And how about that campaign???? For me, the democratic race has been amazing. At first, the debates were all about Iraq. But after the surprising Iowa caucuses, the discussion completely changed. Literally overnight � it's a totally different campaign season now. If you are a political junkie like me, you have to ask Why? What happened? Here's the short answer: The Millenials struck.

The Millenials, also known as Generation Y, were born between 1980 and 2000, and are about 43 million strong in the US (as compared to the 70 million Baby Boomers). Interestingly, the Millenials have been turning out in droves for Barack Obama, helping shift the discussion from Iraq and other topics to the need for change. Now, all the politicians, including the Republications, have picked up this change mantra. In fact, Business Week just ran a cover story called The Economics Driving The Youth Vote that examined why the Millenials want and even need change so badly. The magazine cover actually tells the story when it says The Facebook generation worries about jobs, health insurance, student loans, and credit-card debt. Now it's forcing candidates to pay attention.

Forcing is a good way to describe it. Even before every blasted TV reporter in America started saying it, I noticed that Hillary Clinton was flanked by baby boomers, including her husband and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, when giving her election night speech after the Iowa caucuses. In marked contrast, Barack Obama was surrounded by college kids and twenty-somethings during his victory speech that same night. Right away, everything started to pivot; all the politicians now talk endlessly (and mindlessly) about change and Hillary made sure she was surrounded by a younger crowd at the New Hampshire victory speech � even if it was older women voters who put her over the top.

What does any of this have to do with technology and business?

Here's the answer: the same Millenials hankering for change in the political environment are your new employees and colleagues. They are the future managers and executives at your company. And you will need these Millenials to fill senior positions, even faster than you may realize because large droves of boomers will retire or start working part-time in the very near future.

What do Millenials expect in the work environment?

Well, I'm guessing on this one, but I think Millenials will not tolerate the way most software applications work. If you take a hard look at some of the enterprise software apps we use every day in business, they are shockingly bad from a user experience perspective. Most boomers just soldier through these hard to use screens and get the job done using this awful software; I'm thinking Millenials won't. They'll go work somewhere else, or do something different. They'll be able to have their pick of jobs because 43 million workers can't fill the shoes of 70 million aging employees. Think about it: Millenials have grown up with a remote control in one hand and a mouse in another, and they expect a more TV/multimedia-like or computer game experience from software apps. I believe they will clamor for change, and systems will need to be designed differently to meet their expectations.

We also know definitively from our research that they learn differently. Millenials won't like to attend classroom training, and they won't even like taking online courses. Instead, Millenials want to learn on the job and have the systems teach them when help is needed. Claire Schooley has written extensively about the informal learning approaches needed to support Millenial expectations.

They'll also be socially connected while on the job. Who knows what software companies will emerge or get bought in this space over the next five years, but no matter what the vendors are named, the Millenials will use all sorts of mashups and social networks and collaboration/knowledge management software to stay connected and create/share their ideas. That means we need to start now developing new policies about content creation and intellectual property protection, identify trusted sources of information outside the company, and figure out the best way to herd the new social computing applications cats that keep popping up all the time without shutting down innovation in the workplace.

I think its time to start experimenting with virtual worlds � like Second Life. After all, the Millenials have grown up with MTV, and are much more right brained, visual thinkers than prior generations. Plus, if any of you are parents of tweens, you know that Webkinz have spawned a whole generation of children who think virtual worlds are a typical, normal experience rather than something unusual. This isn't to anoint Second Life the winner of the barely started virtual world race. In fact, I think Second Life's role in the virtual world/3D internet is somewhat equivalent to AOL when the internet was born, and that Second Life probably isn't the long term answer. Erica Driver and I believe that within the next five years, the internet as we know it will go 3D and virtual worlds and visual interfaces will be the norm when we sit down to work at computers and collaborate with others. In the meantime, Second Life and other products are great ways to get hands-on experience creating new business tools like those that Millenials expect and even demand.

That's it for now � gotta run. Wolf Blitzer's latest analysis of the South Carolina primary is about to air. I'm headed to the Situation Room.

Master Data Management 2007: The Year In Review

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:38:09 -0700

by Rob Karel.

As 2007 comes to a close, I've decided to take a step back to reflect on what's happening within master data management (MDM). In early 2007, I published a market forecast for master data management that highlighted a $344M total MDM software market size (not including services) in 2006 with anticipated growth to over $2.2B by 2010. In this research, I also predicted the following:

A single technology solutions for cross-data-domain MDM would be 18-24 months away (translates to mid-2008 at the earliest).
Data management vendors of all shapes and sizes would try to convince their customers that they offer MDM solutions, further confusing an already complex market.
There would be new large MDM players entering the market to challenge IBM, Oracle, and SAP.

From a technology perspective I have seen positive momentum towards multi-data-domain operational MDM solutions, especially from vendors such as IBM, Initiate Systems, Oracle and Siperian. That being said, in 2008, IBM and Siperian will appear to be first to market with these multi-domain offerings (Siperian's MDM Hub was available in early 2007 and IBM's MDM Server available early 2008). Of course, both of these vendors will need to continue to demonstrate significant 'in production' customer success stories to validate their approaches and architectures. Also none of these vendors have effectively figured out how to converge the process and workflow-heavy functionality required to support traditional product information management (PIM) solutions and I believe that will be the Achilles heel of most of these vendors (I believe IBM would agree with me regarding this challenge, which is why its MDM Server is complementing - and not replacing - IBM's WebSphere Product Center for its first release).

Unfortunately, I was more right than I even imagined when it came to vendors jumping on the MDM bandwagon. I have seen or heard MDM marketing from vendors specializing in data integration, business intelligence, data quality, data profiling, data warehousing, and enterprise search, as just a few examples. Certainly many (but not all) of these vendors can provide minor or even major functionality of value to an MDM ecosystem, but none provide the implied comprehensive MDM solution. It's almost as if these vendors believe that if they don't have MDM listed somewhere on their marketing collateral they will go out of business. Who knows, maybe they're right - but it certainly doesn't help information managers and enterprise architects trying to build their MDM strategy to decipher the market.

Regarding my prediction that a new major MDM player would enter the market, I'd have to say I've so far been proven wrong. Yes, Microsoft did acquire Stratature - but that was more of a BI-centric analytical MDM investment and doesn't qualify Microsoft as an operational MDM solution provider. More recently Damp;B acquired Purisma, which is certainly an interesting turn of events where one of the world’s largest providers of B2B data firmly enters the MDM software application market. But don't expect Damp;B to steal significant MDM market share from IBM, Oracle, or SAP - especially since Purisma primarily specialized in customer data. If anything, one can argue that SAP is losing relevance as a major enterprise MDM solution since its focus still seems to be on mastering only data within SAP environments with less focus on the more challenging heterogeneous environments facing most MDM challenges. But stay tuned in 2008, I still expect the major players to be challenged with HP high on my list of potential entrants. Also, don't count SAP out too soon - with its acquisition of Business Objects we may see some renewed energy and investment into its MDM products.

While all of the product development, marketing, and Mamp;A activity coming from the MDM vendors is interesting and entertaining, the most valuable and insightful information about the evolution of the MDM market comes from the Forrester customers I speak to every day. Unlike my coverage of more mature data integration technologies like ETL where vendor selection is the most common question asked, I rarely field questions about MDM vendor selection. Regarding MDM, these customers are more concerned about data governance, organizational readiness, architectural strategy, business case development, prioritization, and the biggie - do we really need to worry about MDM? If so, why?

What does it all mean? I'm happy to report that it means you are asking the right questions at the right time. Many MDM technology alternatives will be there for you once you're ready - the MDM vendors are making sure of that - but first be sure your organization is prepared to deal with the cross-functional and technical complexities of adopting a master data management strategy. Let's see what happens in 2008!

Notes From Oracle OpenWorld

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:49:00 -0700

by Connie Moore, Colin Teubner, Rob Karel, Ken Poore, Rob Koplowitz, Stephen Powers, Barry Murphy and Claire Schooley.

A few weeks ago, several Forrester analysts attended Oracle World. Now that we've gotten back and had a chance to think about what we've heard, we wanted to post this blog to share our thoughts with clients. Here are some observations on what we heard from Oracle about BPM and middleware, data integration and data quality, search and collaboration, enterprise content management and social computing, message archiving and retention management, and human capital management.

BPM and Middleware feedback from Colin Teubner:

What really struck me is how much Oracle was talking about middleware. Charles Phillips opened his keynote talking about it and Oracle's application integration architecture (AIA - if you don't know what that is, it's a whole separate discussion), and Larry spent a lot of time in his keynote talking about it too. In fact, middleware has been the fastest growing part of Oracle's business for at least two or three years, and they have several significant advantages over IBM's stack from my perspective.

Specifically, they are talking about having the only business process management suite that covers content-centric processes using the same engine as for integration-centric or people-centric processes. (This discussion wasn't at the executive level, but farther down in the BPM product management area.) They poked fun at some vendors who make you use different, acquired technology for different types of processes. I haven't seen specifics of how Oracle's BPEL product (Collaxa) works with Stellent though, but they definitely do NOT go for IBM's idea of a portfolio of software. It's a comprehensive stack, and if you don't want to use one piece of it, that's fine - just use the other pieces and they'll integrate with what you have. They don't sell anything that overlaps in functionality with anything else.

Data Integration and Quality feedback from Rob Karel:

My main takeaway from OracleWorld, specifically around Oracle's data integration strategies, is that its data quality software strategy is a mess.

Oracle already has some internal competition from an ETL perspective between its Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) product that the Database Group embeds within the 11g database and the Fusion Middleware groups' Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), which was acquired last year from Sunopsis. While Oracle is doing some cross-development between the two solutions, for the most part these two teams operate independently with their own roadmaps and objectives - sometimes competing for mindshare.

The most recent demonstration of this was when I met separately with executives from the database group, the ODI team, and the master data management team and discussed what Oracle is doing about data quality. The ODI team just informed me of a DQ partnership with Trillium Software with the release of Oracle Data Quality for Oracle Data Integrator (ODQODI). ODQODI is a joint development partnership that packages both Oracle's ODI data integration and Trillium's DQ products into a single license, single install. ODIODQ includes Trillium's batch data profiling, parsing, and matching functionality, although customers who are looking for real time data quality or postal address verification would need to engage Trillium directly to enable those capabilities and services. This is a strange partnership because I expect ODI to be Oracle's real-time integration solution, while the partnership only supports batch (not real-time) data quality.

The database team, on the other hand, continues to focus on data as an embedded part of OWB functionality and doesn't seem to care what ODI is doing. In the meantime, the MDM team is focusing its integration efforts with ODI, but I don't see this Trillium/ODQODI partnership as all that valuable for their MDM product since they should prefer to have real-time/transactional data quality capabilities to complement their MDM offerings.

Oracle has other data quality solutions spread throughout its portfolio including Siebel Data Quality Matching Server used within its Siebel apps environment, recently acquired Hyperion System 9 Financial Data Quality management that came along with its purchase of BI vendor Hyperion, and matching and parsing functionality embedded within its Universal Customer Master, Oracle Customer Hub and Oracle Product Hub MDM offerings. To enhance data quality within its MDM offerings, Oracle also partners with Silver Creek Systems for product data quality and Trillium for customer data quality.

I believe Oracle will need to reconcile its internal product development and partnering strategies to eliminate the confusion created by so many data quality offerings spread across its portfolio.

Search and Collaboration feedback from Ken Poore:

I focused on search while at Oracle World. I had several one-on-ones, a few which included my colleague, Matt Brown. We had a session with a partner that had positive things to say about the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) product and team, most notably that the team was very helpful and took many of their suggestions and rolled it back into the product - a good sign for a still relatively young product. In my experience, that sort of 'listening' only lasts for the first two or three releases of a product. We also had a session with a customer, but it was more portal-centric and turned out to be marginally useful.

I had an extended couple of sessions with Vishu Krishnamurthy (Director of Development for most of their collaboration tools) and several of the product managers. It was a very positive two-way exchange. They shared many of their latest developments, and I shared some my thoughts on their direction as well as some ideas that I have been developing to help push the market along. I felt - and they concurred - that SES is just emerging as a true contender against similar products from IBM and Microsoft. They are still fleshing out a lot of me-too capability, but they are really bolstering their connectivity capabilities and entity extraction, two key areas in the enterprise search market these days that could leap-frog or least enable them to catch up quickly. Oracle has some really solid ideas, especially around distributing components of search indexing to the owners of the applications being searched (CRM, ERP, etc.) instead of leaving it in the hands of the 'search team'. Doing so enhances the buy-in from every department involved and leverages the application owner's expertise and context.

So while I would say there were no earthshaking announcements, I felt like they have a very strong product management, technical, and marketing strategy that will only gain momentum from this point forward. It is a very competitive market, and like IBM, they will struggle trying to be successful against the pure-plays for customers that do not have a significant incumbent investment in Oracle products (or in IBM products, in IBM's case).

Enterprise Content Management and Social Computing feedback from Rob Koplowitz:

I heard a bit about the ECM direction from Rich Buchheim. He states that at least one Stellent product will be retooled to run directly on Content DB. That's an interesting development from a scalability perspective. I suspect that will be a major engineering effort and won't be fully implemented in the next release.

The other thing that was interesting is that WebCenter Suite is being positioned as the standard front-end for Fusion apps. As a matter of fact, one of the defining elements of a Fusion app is that it will have a WebCenter front-end. The convergence of WebCenter and Content DB is pretty cool. Essentially, any app using WebCenter will have native access to content stored in Content DB. Essentially, it means that Oracle apps will be able to seamlessly surface content in context in any application. The cool part will be that content generated on one app can be surfaced anywhere. For example, if a document is stored as part of sales process in a SFA app it can be called natively from inside of a support CRM app if they want to see what the customer was promised. Since it's a Web service call from a database with rich metadata the content becomes extremely portable.

The other thing Oracle talked about a lot was Social Computing. There was a big emphasis on blogs, wikis, social networking, tagging and RSS in WebCenter, which again means it can be natively leveraged in Fusion apps.

Enterprise Content Management feedback from Stephen Powers:

I spoke with some members of the ECM team, and they were talking up integrations between Oracle’s Universal Content Management, and Siebel. But Siebel will act as the base application, not UCM. So, if Siebel customers are looking for ECM, Oracle wants to offer them an SOA-based ECM option that sits on top of Siebel, rather than trying to sell them a separate UCM package. They're also making noise around product catalog management, and real-time predictive analytics. They hedged a bit on functionality roadmap, though.

For Digital Asset Management (DAM), Oracle plans to go upmarket, with integrations with Adobe InDesign. And it will be able to have greater video management capabilities, such as management of multi-part files, indexing of closed captioning, management and indexing of call center audio files.

I also spoke with someone from Sealed Media, the DRM vendor that was acquired by Stellent a few months before Oracle bought them. Oracle has rebranded Sealed Media as Information Rights Manager. But I got the sense that they are not very well integrated with the rest of the company; while we spoke about Sealed Media functionality, I didn't get the sense that they're working very closely with other members of the UCM team.

Human Capital Management feedback from Claire Schooley:

HCM people in recruiting and learning talked about the social computing aspects of learning that are coming soon (whatever that means) and that will be a part of Fusion in the future. Here's an overview of the scenario:

An organization that wants to hire an intern who might turn into an employee after graduation would contact colleges and get student recommendations from professors. An email would then be sent to the students suggesting that they go to a link on company's Website and read about the job. If student is still interested, he/she registers and then can interact about the job with those in charge. If still interested, the student completes a proposal on how he/she would approach and carry-out the task along with information about themselves and a picture if they want. These proposals are read and reviewed by staff and online discussion occurs (Web and video) with the final two or three candidates. Once chosen, the successful candidate is put into a partitioned group of temporary employees and completes all the HR forms and information well before they start work. They also are part of a community of practice (CoP) that they can access to get more familiar with organization, project documents, etc. and meet and interact with people on the team they will work on. When they start work, students know and have interacted with the people they will be working with, will have taken care of all HR transactional material - and are ready to work. (The key is that all these technologies are linked seamlessly).

Convergence Of The 3 Bs

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:02:21 -0700

by Boris Evelson and Colin Teubner.

Business intelligence (BI) practitioners have always thought of the world as data-centric. Data integration, data warehouses, data marts, reports, and query builders were always about data. BI has traditionally excelled at answering questions like "what happened" or even "why did it happen" but always fell short on "what do I do about it" and fell short of the next logical steps which traditionally have been the realm of business process management (BPM) and business rules engines (BRE). This data-centric view of the world turns out to be plain wrong. The world is much more process and rules-centric. We run many processes every time we come to the office, these processes generate data, which in turn trigger rules, and in turn generate more data output that is being consumed by processes in an endless loop.

We've been researching the topic of "3Bs": BI, BPM, and BRE convergence for several months here at Forrester. We started out on the tack that while the requirements and applications for convergence between these technologies are very strong, almost intuitive, actual vendor solutions in the area are weak and require significant customization. While many vendors actually possess several of these technologies, innovation in combining them together has so far been limited to the BPM vendors - and because these companies tend to sell their wares as a platform, rather than as a specific solution to a problem, buyers are left to combine BPM, rules and BI themselves. Yes, many BI vendors can trigger basic report workflows based on certain conditions and can expose data or consume data as a service. And yes, many application vendors embed BI dashboards into applications. What we need today, however, are generic BI, BPM and BRE tools with clear integration points. Tomorrow, we'll be looking for end users and VARs putting these converged solutions together themselves.

Why is this convergence so important? BPM vendors sell efficiency gains, BI vendors sell visibility into business results, and rules vendors sell optimized decision-making - but for this type of software to have a profound impact on a business, all three technologies need to be used in a drive towards business optimization. BI tools are needed to help understand results of BPM processes; rules describe what constitutes a significant event and what actions should be taken; BPM is needed to provide process context and take action on those results.

And once an as-is process is optimized in this way, the process itself must be improved to see additional business gains. BI must step up and provide results in process context, combining both process metrics and business metrics. All this leads to real insight into the business, its processes and how they work, giving answers to more advanced questions. "How can we make this process faster?" becomes "Should we be doing this process?" or "What else do our customers need?"

An added benefit - icing on the cake - is "context-aware BI". BI has been traditionally hard to use, especially in a self service environment because most of the time users start with a blank slate. They open up a blank dashboard or an ad-hoc query tool and are immediately presented with a variety of KPIs, KPMs, facts, dimensions, etc. and are forced make a decision on where to start, what measures to pick first, what is really relevant to the problem at hand. In the converged world of process centric or context aware BI, one would almost never start with a blank dashboard. Since it is the process that pulls the dashboard automatically at the right place and the right time, the process is aware of where it is and what decision needs to be made. It can therefore pre-populate that dashboard with the right KPIs/KPMs or the right intersection of facts and dimensions for the user to hit the ground running with the analysis and decisions.

There seem to be a chicken and the egg syndrome going on here: Vendors are not putting a lot of attention to this matter because there's not much customer demand, and customers are not really thinking in terms of process-centric BI because no one's educated them on the benefits of going to converged 3B model. Who's right and who's wrong here? Please submit your thoughts and ideas and we'll do our best to include them in our upcoming report on the subject.

Microsoft RoundTable: An IMAX Movie Experience After Listening To FM Radio In Your Car

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:59:23 -0700

by Erica Driver.

This week I had a 2 ½ hour conference call with one of our clients. Normally I wouldn't blab to the world who we work with. But I think it's necessary here in the spirit of full disclosure - I'm about to rave about a first-time experience I had during a meeting with Microsoft using a Microsoft product called RoundTable.

A couple of my Forrester colleagues and 6 or 7 people from Microsoft were in a conference room in Redmond, Washington and I was in my home office in Rhode Island. Microsoft set up a Live Meeting Web conferencing session and had a RoundTable audio/video conferencing device on table in the meeting room. During the meeting, I had a screen like this one on my desktop (see screenshot below). It showed the PowerPoint slide we were discussing as well as a panoramic video of everyone in the conference room and a close-up of whoever was making the most noise in the room at the time. If we had been using the voice capabilities of the RoundTable device, rather than a separate conference bridge, the video close-up would have switched to whoever was speaking at the moment (including me, if I had had a Web camera on my laptop).

Now, is it just me or is it really, really hard to consistently pay attention during a long, multi-party phone conversations? I blogged about this in a post a few days ago. Here's where the beauty of RoundTable comes in:

I could concentrate - I was fully engaged. Normally my eyes try to distract me from the work my ears are doing. It's often difficult to discern who's speaking and I have trouble making sense of silences. But this meeting was to a typical conference call as going to an IMAX movie is to listening to the radio while in your car - it's much more likely your mind will wander while you're listening to music and navigating the roads than when multiple senses are engaged in an immersive experience, as is the case at the Omnitheater.
I felt connected to the others even though we weren’t together in the same room. The Forrester team had a communication back channel open via instant messaging (as, I'm sure, did the Microsoft team). This, in combination with the audio, video, and Web conferencing, enabled me to be a stronger contributor and helped prevent me from being relegated to a gray box on the table, as often happens during meetings when most people are together in one room with just one or two dialed in on the phone.
Non-verbal communication was resurrected. During conference calls, so much communication gets lost in the silences between words. But as I interacted with my colleagues and the Microsoft team yesterday I could see heads nodding, people smiling or laughing silently, taking notes - all things I would have no idea of without the video. I could see who left the room and when they returned. I guess even Microsoft is new at this - at one point in the conversation someone on the Microsoft side said during a quiet moment, I’m feverishly taking notes. I said, I know, I can see you and we all got a chuckle. And sometimes when people in the room were speaking to me, I could see them looking at the phone on the table. (That probably would have been different if I was on video too.)

This session was my a-ha moment about the power of video to transform virtual meetings. It's time for me to get a Web cam.

What Does It Matter That Second Life Is Vacant?

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:43:19 -0700

by Erica Driver.

I'm doing a lot of research on using virtual worlds for work these days and have been spending some time in Second Life. One of the characteristics I notice is that there seems to be a dearth of people (avatars) around. Does it matter? Well, it depends what your expectations are. If you think of Second Life as "sort of like the Web," where you can teleport alone (surf the Web) from island to island (Web site to Web site) then it shouldn't matter that most islands you'll visit are devoid of human presence. Think about audio and Web conferencing tools: an audio or Web conference is "vacant" until one or more of the expected parties join in, and we consider that perfectly acceptable. But if this is your expectation, it may freak you out more than a little bit if you see an avatar fly by you unexpectedly or an unknown avatar suddenly materializes next to you and addresses you via the chat window.

It matters if you are using it to socialize, explore, and interact with people. In fact it matters a lot. You will likely find that Second Life feels like an abandoned fantasy wasteland. Even when you visit islands put up by companies to communicate with customers, you'll usually find that no one is around. To get information you typically wander around a virtual hall reading posters and watching videos. One way to find and interact with other people in Second Life is to join business-related groups or attend events.
It doesn't matter if you are using it for meetings and collaboration. Just meet your party in the designated spot in Second Life and do what you always do: introduce yourselves, talk, gesture, chat via IM. If the space you are meeting in supports upload and sharing of presentations and word processing documents, even better. Keep in mind, though, that support for office documents is a custom-created capability in Second Life today, unlike alternative virtual world technology like Qwaq Forum.