Application Development

Oracle Moves Solidly Into SaaS With Taleo Acquisition

Paul Hamerman — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:09:12 +0000

Oracle Corporation announced its purchase of Taleo for $1.9 billion on Feb. 9, 2012, signaling a major shift in its stance on software-as-a-service (SaaS) and talent management applications. The transaction is expected to close midyear 2012, subject to regulatory and stockholder approvals.

Oracle has long held a "we can build it better" position on talent management, learning, and recruitment applications but struggled to compete with best-of-breed talent management vendors like SuccessFactors (recently acquired by rival SAP), Taleo, Kenexa, Cornerstone, and SumTotal Systems. Oracle has been reticent to offer these (or any other) applications via SaaS, preferring a licensed/on-premises business model that provides early revenue recognition versus the deferred revenue model of SaaS.

In fact, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been outspoken in his anti-SaaS stance in recent years, changing his posture somewhat with the Oracle Public Cloud announcement at last October's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Meanwhile, the HR apps market shifted overwhelmingly to the SaaS (subscription-based) deployment model, which has become virtually ubiquitous in recruitment, learning, and talent management and is also growing in core HRMS via ADP, Ultimate Software, and Workday.

By acquiring Taleo, Oracle puts itself back in the game for SaaS recruiting and talent management. Taleo is a market leader in recruitment automation and has a competitive portfolio of products across performance, compensation, and learning management. The $1.9 billion deal price is more than six times Taleo's 2011 annual revenues of $309 million, a high premium but substantially less than the $3.4 billion and 11-times revenues that SAP recently paid for SuccessFactors.

The Merger Of Misys And Temenos — Moving Out Of The Gap Between Gorillas And Antelopes

Jost Hoppermann — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:08:46 +0000

Less than a week ago, initial information became public that Misys and Temenos may intend to merge. On February 7, 2012, a press release stated that "Temenos and Misys today confirm that they have reached agreement in principle on certain key terms and are in continuing discussions regarding a possible all share merger of the two groups." Now Misys and Temenos have about one month to finalize their merger -- or abandon it. It is obvious that this merger has the ingredients to become one of the most significant mergers in the banking industry in the past few years. With the probability of the merger now sufficiently high, here is my initial take.

There are two obvious reasons for this potential endeavor of Temenos and Misys (let's call the combined company MIsys-TemeNOS ["MiNos"] for the time being to avoid terms such as "new company" or "NewCo"):

Embracing The Open Web: The Technologies You Need To Know

John R. Rymer — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:55:11 +0000

The open Web is a culture, a community -- and a set of preferred technologies for Internet applications. While HTML5 is the best known of these technologies, the open Web also includes JavaScript (client and server), CSS3, Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs), and mobile frameworks such as jQuery Mobile. Together, these technologies comprise a new application platform for the Internet that will gradually replace today's web platforms (HTML4, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Simple Object Access Protocol [SOAP] web services, Java EE, and .NET) for most applications. Forrester recently published research outlining the open Web platform's key components, their readiness, and how the platform is evolving.

Open Web developers tend to use a variation of the façade pattern for their applications but refine the pattern to focus on standard web formats and protocols and services delivered via the Web -- so we refer to it as the open Web façade. Developers draw on three bodies of de jure and de facto standards to implement the open Web façade pattern:

Here Comes The Open Web – Embrace It

John R. Rymer — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:52:38 +0000

The Web is moving on to a new era of openness, mobility, and digital business. The open Web is a platform built on HTTP (the fundamental web protocol), a new generation of HTML, dynamic languages, and wide use of Internet services for everything from video encoding to social graphs to order management and payments. The open Web made its debut in consumer applications; for enterprises, it will power a new generation of customer engagement applications. The open Web will be particularly important to app Internet systems that bridge mobile devices, cloud services, and enterprise applications and data. Forrester recently published a report that will equip application development and delivery leaders with an understanding of the open Web and its potential value.

We define the open Web as: a culture and community emphasizing openness, transparency, and freedom of developer choice as well as an application platform based on HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript clients, HTTP/representational state transfer (REST), and cloud services. The open Web includes the app Internet as one potential design pattern.

A new breed of developers is propelling the open Web: young developers who grew up on the Web and develop outside the firewall -- primarily producing applications aimed at consumers. Their career expectations were also born of the Web, and they expect openness of information, technology, and expertise. Open Web developers share certain motivations that have shaped the open Web trend. They:

Here Comes The Open Web — Embrace It

Jeffrey Hammond — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:11:07 +0000

One of the things I enjoy the most about being an industry analyst is that I've spent the past six years meeting some great developers. Personally, I'm not sure I could cover any other technology area then application development. The reason is simple: I see developers as a worldwide force for good (It's almost axiomatic, as the bad apples become "hackers"). Developers innovate, they create, they push technology forward -- and they are fun to go have a beer with at the end of the day.

While writing for developers is fun, it's not always easy. For the past few years, my topic coverage areas have sometimes felt a bit disjointed -- almost as if there are two different developer communities out there that I deal with. In the past, I've referred to these groups as the "inside the firewall crowd" and the "outside the firewall crowd." The inquiries I have with the first group are fairly conventional -- they segment as .NET or Java development shops, they use app servers and RDBMSes, and they worry about security and governance. Inquiries with the second group are very different -- these developers are multilingual, hold very few alliances to vendors, tend to be younger, and embrace open source and open communities as a way to get almost everything done. The first group thinks web services are done with SOAP; the second does them with REST and JSON. The first group thinks MVC, the second thinks "pipes and filters" and eventing. I could go on and on with the comparison.

You Think Changing To Increase Business Agility Is Hard? If IOR Did It, Believe Me: You Can Do It Too

Diego Lo Giudice — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:58:51 +0000

Think of a medieval fortress: It was originally used for a small army, it has walls nine meters thick, and it's surrounded by buildings hundreds of years old. Upon entering, you are confronted with the concept of eternity.

This fortress is located in the smallest state on earth -- though it is also perhaps the best-known state in the world. The business housed within the fortress is what many might classify as a SME but with with complexity of a large enterprise, holy but busy, centralized but truly global -- its work spans hundreds of countries with hundreds of currencies and hundreds of languages -- and it serves very special and demanding clients.

Have a clue yet of where we are?

Zoom on Italy, then zoom on Rome, then zoom on Vatican City, and you can't miss the round tower (Torrione Sisto V) where the Vatican Bank, or Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR ), is located. You won't be allowed in if you are not a client, an employee, or part of a religious congregation. Change comes hard to institutions this steeped in tradition. To give you a clue, IOR's previous managing director spent his entire career at IOR -- 60 years -- and retired at the age of 80. We all know it's the soft and cultural aspects of transformation that are the hardest part for any organization.

Nevertheless, IOR has been going through a major change since 2008, working to replace its legacy IT system with a modern BT one. The new BT system brings more flexibility for the business, richer business functionality, and greater integration and development capabilities. Enabling fast change is the key driver for IOR's IT transformation program from IT into BT.

How did IOR's CIO and AD&D leader make it happen? He:

Collaborative Problem Solving And Robot Design

Jeffrey Hammond — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:36:22 +0000

To pick up the narrative from my last post, we're currently one week into the First Robotics build season for 2012. Team 811 is busy working away on an initial sprint. The goal is to get a minimum viable product (a drivable robot) up by the end of sprint one, which will then be used as a base to move toward a competitive robot that can play this year's game, Rebound Rumble.

So how did Team 811 get from "huh?" to full-speed prototyping in 4 days? How does anyone get 40+ teenagers moving in the same direction when the number of unknowns is significant and the problems to solve look insurmountable? For team 811, the key was starting with a 3-day process called "Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS)." Think of it as a pre-sprint process to build team buy-in and reduce downstream back-biting and second guessing.

So what is CPS? It's a technique that starts with a problem statement and then encourages divergent thinking to brainstorm creative solutions to that problem. Criteria that allow evaluation of those potential solutions are then applied by the entire group. This starts a process of combining divergent ideas into stronger overlapping concepts and identifying those ideas that have the strongest combination of feasibility and ability. The result would be recognizable to many agile teams: a burndown "punch list" of items and strategies to drive early prototyping and the team's first sprint.

Agile Development And Robots: Are You Smarter Than A 10th Grader?

Jeffrey Hammond — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:20:25 +0000

One of the counterintuitive things that we observed early on in the days of object-oriented programming was that developers with no previous programming experience often picked up concepts like inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism much more quickly than seasoned programmers and became productive earlier than their more experienced counterparts. Today I feel like I'm on the other end of this learning challenge as I try to adapt to new programming concepts in JavaScript or Python. I think the biggest reason for this phenomenon is that experienced folks have to unlearn what we know, and it's hard to give up certainty and the mechanisms that allowed us to achieve success in the past. I think the same principle is at work when you look at toddlers that instinctively "get" how to use the iPad - they expect everything to work that way. It should be so easy for all of us.

Does this same sort of thinking apply to software and systems development processes? I'll tell you why I think it does. For the past three years I've been a mentor for a US FIRST Team (Team 811, the Bishop Guertin Cardinals). During this time period, I've seen high school students with little to no technical experience instinctively adopt many principles that experienced Agile teams would recognize. For these kids, Agile development is like using an iPad - they take to it naturally because it just makes sense given the context of what they are trying to do.

Software Requirements Are Where We Define Value

Tom Grant — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:49:23 +0000

Revolutions take two forms. The most familiar kind is the noisy, conspicuous, disjunctive event that marks a clean break from the past. Yesterday, George III was our monarch. Today, he's not. The other kind of revolution is a more gradual and subtle event, when multiple forces pointing in the same direction push people into a new world. The shock of Pearl Harbor, the power vacuum left by a devastated Europe and Japan, a reinvigorated economy, and an aggressive superpower adversary made Americans feel, for the first time, that they needed to be far more deeply involved in international affairs than ever before. Without any formal declaration, Americans became internationalists after 1945.

Something like that second kind of revolution has happened with software requirements. Over the past decade or so, organizations grew increasingly worried about the problems that took root in bad requirements. The problems took many forms (portfolios filled with applications no one was using, users unhappy with the software that complicated their lives more than helped them, ideas that no one vetted carefully, etc.) and arose from just as many sources.

All of these discontents pointed in a common direction: Take requirements more seriously. In Forrester's Q1 2011 Application Development And Delivery Organization Structure Online Survey, "improvements of requirements" appeared at the top of the list of initiatives that would improve software development the most.

Five Axioms For Application Development In 2012

Mike Gualtieri — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:29:13 +0000

Software Is Not Code; It Creates Experiences

Ultimately, customers don't judge you based on how well you gather business requirements, choose development technologies, manage projects, or march through the development process -- they judge you based on how they feel before, during, and after they use your software. This is the digital experience. If you get the customer experience wrong, then nothing else matters. And expectation inflation is sky-high thanks to the Apple-led smartphone revolution. To succeed in the new age of digital experience, application development professionals must collaborate with their business partners and customers to create experiences that customers love. You need a new approach represented by these five axioms:

Software is not code; it creates experience.
Development teams are not coders; they are experience creators.
Technical talent is table stakes; great developers must be design and domain experts.
Process is bankrupt without design; you get what you design, so you had better get the design right.
Software is a creative endeavor, not an industrial process like building automobiles. Structure your methodology to empower your creative talent.

Doable? Definitely. Forrester clients can read the full report to learn how: Digital Experience Strategy: Follow These Three Mega Rules To Beat The Competition In 2012.

So, Are Accounting Systems Non-Differentiating?

George Lawrie — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:05:26 +0000

Do you ever wonder which IT investments really drive competitiveness or comparative advantage for your firm and which are there simply to support mundane processes that are identical to those of all your competitors? Do you ever wonder if it might make sense to standardize on "best practices" for non-differentiating processes and supporting application implementation?

Received wisdom is that accounting processes are not differentiating and so it makes the most sense to support them with packaged apps or maybe with software-as-a-service solutions. Larger firms often implement shared services for financial management across all their business units or even outsource altogether apparently dull processes such as invoice settlement or collections.

But does that really stand up to scrutiny?

One retailer, with which Forrester worked, confessed to having 17 definitions of margin depending on which types of supplier rebates and volume discounts were included. We asked how they calculate markdown and they grinned.

The more I thought about it, the more this fact disturbed me. In some types of specialty retail, inspired opportunity buying is the key to competing with the bulk buying muscle and supply chain scale economies of global discount retail chains.

Many retailers import merchandise and have to calculate "landed cost" based on customs and freight invoices that arrive long after the goods in question have been sold. What price weighted average actual cost accounting, or margin calculation, in such a scenario?

Where is the scope for creative dealmaking in standardized accounting applications that deliver lowest common denominator functionality across verticals as diverse as local government, with its focus on fund or commitment accounting, engineer to order manufacturing with a focus on multi-period project costs and retail with a focus on margin measurement and management?

Three Things I'd Tell Your CIO

Kyle McNabb — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:22:30 +0000

Back in August of this year, Marc Andreessen published an essay in the WSJ highlighting his thoughts on why software's eating the world. I encourage you to read it. It highlights something we firmly believe. We've entered the age of software, and you're at its center. With December upon us and many of you engaged in finalizing 2012 plans and reviewing your 3 - 5 year strategies, I encourage you to look beyond tech developments like cloud, big data, and the App Internet. Focus instead on what you need to deliver good software, and keep three things I'd gladly tell you and your CIO top of mind.

SAP’s Acquisition Of SuccessFactors Re-engergizes Its HCM And SaaS Strategy

Paul Hamerman — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:52:37 +0000

SAP is a paying a substantial premium to acquire SuccessFactors, a leading SaaS performance and talent management vendor. The press release of December 3, 2011 states that the deal price of $40 per share is a 52% premium over the Dec. 2 closing stock price. Even more startling is that SuccessFactors has a revenue run rate of roughly $300 to $330 million for 2011, and the acquisition price of $3.4 billion is more than 10 times revenue! Why then did SAP make this move?

SAP's cloud strategy has been struggling with time-to-market issues, and its core on-premises HR management software has been at a competitive disadvantage with best-of-breed solutions in areas such as employee performance, succession planning, and learning management. By acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP puts itself into a much stronger competitive position in human resources applications and reaffirms its commitment to software-as-a-service as a key business model.

In my recent research for a soon-to-be-published Forrester Wave™ on human resource management systems (HRMS), I noted that SAP has more than 13,000 customers using its HCM suite. Yet the adoption of SAP's learning and talent management products is much less (a few thousand, perhaps), which is noted in my colleague Claire Schooley's "The Forrester Wave™: Talent Management, Q2 2011." The talent management Forrester Wave also clearly shows that SAP's embedded talent management offerings lag well behind the best-of-breed specialists in learning and performance management. The bottom line here is that SAP HCM customers predominantly run best-of-breed talent management solutions alongside their SAP core HRMS (i.e., the transactional employee system of record).

Meeting The Challenges Of The Empowered Consumer

George Lawrie — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:24:54 +0000

Retail is experiencing substantial change because consumers are now empowered by the web with information about price, availability, and merchandise features.

The retail industry is still served by solutions that are too fragmented to adequately balance the asymmetry introduced by radical price transparency. There are solutions for transactions, web site, stores, and so on but little to empower the cross-channel retailer to really meet the consumer's needs.

I've recently been looking at IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative and its portfolio that integrates:

1) Store applications. IBM has well-established high-volume store apps appropriate to high-volume, low-touch retailing but correctly identifies these as inappropriate for fast-growing specialty retail with low-volume "high touch." This is why it acquired the "asset" of Open Genius.

2) Web metrics. IBM acquired Coremetrics in order to bring the discipline of measuring traffic, conversion, and average order to cross-channel retailing. It's only by monitoring such metrics that retail can understand which marketing strategies are really successful and which market segments are most receptive.

3) Direct-to-consumer initiatives. IBM acquired Unica as a platform for integrating automated direct-to-consumer marketing with its cross-channel offering.

Forrester's Call: Platform-As-A-Service Cloud Development Is Poised For Breakout

Mike Gilpin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:34:38 +0000

My colleague John Rymer expects platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology to "cross the chasm" into mainstream status over the next three years (2012-2014). Today, PaaS solutions, which provide application development and deployment tools abstracted from the underlying cloud infrastructure on which they run your apps, fall into four types: 1) Pure cloud integrated development environments (IDEs); 2) Traditional IDEs that offer the option of cloud deployment; 3) IDE-neutral cloud runtimes that can run apps built by multiple types of IDEs; and 4) PaaS solutions designed for use by business developers. John sees all four of these categories aiming to cross the chasm in this timeframe but doesn't expect all four segments to succeed in making that transition.

Why does this matter? PaaS is one of the easiest and most productive ways to take advantage of cloud economics, and the elasticity of the cloud, by providing an easily consumable elastic app platform. Today, most apps for the cloud either lack the ability to automatically scale up or down in their use of cloud resources, based on demand, or else gain that ability through complex programming to low-level APIs and frameworks. PaaS provides access to the cloud without all the drama. Only through taking full advantage of these attributes of the cloud can your business realize the full benefits the cloud theoretically provides.

Application Development

Oracle Moves Solidly Into SaaS With Taleo Acquisition

Categories:

The Merger Of Misys And Temenos — Moving Out Of The Gap Between Gorillas And Antelopes

Categories:

Embracing The Open Web: The Technologies You Need To Know

Categories:

Here Comes The Open Web – Embrace It

Here Comes The Open Web — Embrace It

You Think Changing To Increase Business Agility Is Hard? If IOR Did It, Believe Me: You Can Do It Too

Categories:

Collaborative Problem Solving And Robot Design

Agile Development And Robots: Are You Smarter Than A 10th Grader?

Software Requirements Are Where We Define Value

Categories:

Five Axioms For Application Development In 2012

Categories:

So, Are Accounting Systems Non-Differentiating?

Categories:

Three Things I'd Tell Your CIO

Categories:

SAP’s Acquisition Of SuccessFactors Re-engergizes Its HCM And SaaS Strategy

Categories:

Meeting The Challenges Of The Empowered Consumer

Categories:

Forrester's Call: Platform-As-A-Service Cloud Development Is Poised For Breakout

Categories: