The Forrester Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

Microsoft Office 2010: The Odyssey Continues

2009-07-16T13:16:38-04:00

By Sheri McLeish

Sequels never can match the thrill of the original. But the good ones offer a compelling story of their own, develop familiar characters, and introduce something new and exciting. Last week Microsoft gave developers a backstage pass to preview Office 2010, due out in the first half of next year. The drama unfolds with Microsoft and Google waging a multi-front war with each other in search, browsers, productivity tools, and, soon, operating systems. Glimpses of the fourteenth iteration of Office reveal Web-based lightweight apps along with capabilities geared at improving collaboration, multimedia content development, and email management.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel … that’s a lot of competition for a sluggish software market that Forrester sees as being down by 5% or more for the year. The glimmer of hope for software vendors will likely come from subscriptions revenue for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in 2010, which Forrester projects to grow by 7.5%.

Microsoft wants to lead that growing SaaS market. For enterprises, what’s notable about the Office 2010 story is that Office Web apps can be on-premise or hosted. The lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be free for consumers through Windows Live. Pow! But the bigger deal for enterprises is the option to host Office Web apps on-premises as annuity customers as well as via a hosted subscription through Microsoft Online Services. This option isn’t offered by Google today and, for the moment, may be what makes Office Web apps a hit in the enterprise.

To date, Microsoft’s dominance in large businesses remains mostly intact, with 57% of firms running Office 2007 and 80% supporting some version of Office. Combined, the alternatives make up less than 8% of the enterprise market, according to Forrester’s March 2009 North America, Europe, And Asia Pacific Desktop Innovation Online Survey. And of those Forrester surveyed, 78% said they have no plans to look for an alternative to Microsoft Office. Real barriers remain for alternatives, from concerns about content control and security, sunk license costs, and online/offline issues for Web-based tools to fear of rejection by business users. Like it, love it, or not, people have a comfortable, familiar relationship with the Office apps. And that’s a critical edge Microsoft must maintain.

Technology Populism is fueling the collaboration and mobile collaboration markets and blurring the lines between work/life boundaries. The influence of consumer experience can be equally powerful if harnessed by Google for email and productivity. Most enterprise IT departments rely on the feedback of their business users to measure the value of their productivity tools. Forrester data also shows upgrades generally driven by business demands (34%), because current tools are no longer supported (24%), are no longer compatible (16%), or because the culture demands it (15%). By promoting free access to Web-based tools, Microsoft seeks the sway of the public. Office 2000 ends support this month; Microsoft needs to get those firms on board with 2010 somehow. What will your firm do? What are your barriers to upgrading Office or moving to an alternative? Now is a good time to clarify your firm’s strategy, because 2010 looks like it could be a blockbuster year for buyers prepared to negotiate.

BI, Analytics, And CEP: Some Fruitful Potential Follow-Ons From Software AG’s Acquisition Of IDS Scheer

2009-07-14T12:14:13-04:00

by James Kobielus

Yes, of course, Software AG is buying IDS Scheer primarily for the latter’s ARIS family of business process management (BPM) tools. I’ll leave it to my Forrester colleagues who focus on BPM--on both the IT and TI sides of the house--to call out the ramifications for Software AG’s positioning in that market.

But, believe it or not, this deal will also launch Software AG into the growing markets for business intelligence (BI), analytics, and complex event processing (CEP) solutions. We bet you didn’t realize that IDS Scheer has ARIS solutions in these fast growing markets, but in fact they do--and they’re continue to evolve those offerings.

It’s no surprise that IDS Scheer’s BI, analytics, and CEP offerings supplement and extend its BPM portfolio. Its CEP solution, ARIS Process Event Monitor, supports business activity monitoring (BAM). Its analytics offerings, ARIS Process Performance Management and ARIS Performance Dashboard, support visualization, dashboarding, scorecarding, drilldown, and alerting on process key performance indicators (KPIs), both historical and real-time. And its forthcoming BI offering, ARIS MashZone, will support self-service user development of reports, dashboards, and other views of process and business metrics.

IDS Scheer has little market share in these non-core segments. And the vendor is no immediate threat, by itself or under its future corporate parent, to the leaders in the BI, analytics, and CEP segments. Indeed, its forthcoming mashup-oriented BI offering only provides a subset of the features available from market leaders such as SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, and MicroStrategy. But the fact that Software AG will soon be able to provide its own offerings in those segments, rather than rely wholly on partners, represents an important step in its attempt to field a full service oriented architecture (SOA) solution stack.

As noted in a blog entry a year and a half ago, BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive SOA solution portfolio. SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features. This acquisition continues the ongoing SOA solution build-out strategy that motivated Software AG to acquire webMethods in 2007.

But it’s not clear yet whether Software AG plans to flesh out its BI, analytics, and CEP strategies going forward and thereby confront SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other SOA full-stack vendors head-on in these segments. It is also unclear how much effort or expense Software AG would incur in extricating the IDS Scheer offerings from the larger ARIS portfolio in order to make them more general-purpose and less BPM-centric. Nevertheless, Software AG will at the very least have a strong set of enabling technologies to support any such strategy in the near future.

What’s most exciting, and potentially differentiating, about the Software AG/IDS Scheer BI portfolio is the combination of CEP with mashup and an in-memory architecture to support truly real-time, interactive analytics. In other words, Software AG/IDS Scheer could take a page out of the book of another SOA full-stack vendor: TIBCO and its Spotfire product group. In doing so, Software AG/IDS Scheer would also be well-positioned to duke it out with SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, all of which are beginning to emphasize in-memory CEP-enabled BI strategies. As we noted in a report from late 2008, in-memory architectures are coming to dominate the BI arena. Likewise, Forrester has called attention in to the growing adoption of CEP for truly real-time BI.

Whether Software AG capitalizes on the opportunity to expand its SOA solution stack into BI remains to be seen. Considering that it took Oracle more than a year to publicly declare how it will position BEA’s CEP and data federation technologies within its own SOA stack, we may have to wait a while before Software AG and IDS Scheer craft an equivalent roadmap--if they ever do.

But if they wait too long, the newly merging vendors may find that the dynamic SOA, BI, and CEP markets have passed them by.

Office 2010 Backstage: Content + Context = Collaboration

2009-07-13T12:58:01-04:00

by Ted Schadler

Microsoft announced more details on Office 2010 today. It's a healthy release from my perspective: more, simpler, better, faster, cleaner. But there's an interesting new thing that Microsoft has introduced with this release. They call it "Backstage," but it might be easier to think of it as the context of the document -- everything you need know about it and everything that you can do with it.

At the highest level, Backstage is all the stuff you do once the document has been created: save it, print it, email it, etc. It's also all of the metadata associated with the document: permissions, version history, etc. This makes it much easier for teams to collaborate on documents and for documents to be part of a workflow or business process.

It looks like this:

So why does this matter? Three reasons:

The "context" of the document as visible as the contents of the document. It's as if the book just got a cover, a card catalog label, and an availability tracker. Wow. Metadata that matters to anyone who's looking for the document.
Documents can carry their permissions around with them in a machine-manageable way. This is critical in a world where IT doesn't always control the devices that information workers use to access documents. For security reasons alone, it's valuable to have the permissions explicit and attached to the document itself.
Backstage is extensible.That means IT shops and third-party developers can build applications that attach context to important documents. For example, a budgeting process goes through approval steps. For the first time, the document itself can carry the status on the book jacket, not at the top of the doc itself. This matters because computers can update the status easily by changing the metadata value.

Clearly, we all need to go learn a lot more about Microsoft's intentions to utilize Backstage as a core platform element of the Office 2010 system. For example, how will Backstage by harnessed by SharePoint? But in the meantime, it's something new to consider as the Office 2010 train pulls out of the station.

Thoughts, comments, concerns? Please comment.

Podcast: The Rise Of The Machine (Translations)

2009-07-02T10:31:19-04:00

Our latest featured podcast is Tim Walters's "The Rise Of The Machine (Translations)."

There has been a recent increase in the use of computers to translate information from one human language to another. In this podcast, senior analyst Tim Walters discusses the reasons for this boom in machine translation, how the two main types of machine translation work, and the business use cases for it.

We look forward to your questions and comments.

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FatWire Plucks Castaway Interwoven And Vignette Customers From Leaky Dinghy In The North Atlantic

2009-06-25T10:06:11-04:00

By Tim Walters, Ph.D

Not quite, but that’s the general tone of the “rescue program” recently announced by Web content management (WCM) vendor FatWire. Following the acquisition of Interwoven by Autonomy, and the announced acquisition of Vignette by Open Text, FatWire is offering Vignette and Interwoven customers the opportunity to switch to their Content Server solution at no cost.

Naturally, there are some provisos. First, although license fees are waived, the maintenance and support payment (typically 15-20% of the original license fee) that has gone to Interwoven or Vignette is now paid to FatWire. (Bad luck, I guess, if you’ve just made the annual payment to the other vendor.) Second, you’re also supposed to sign up to employ (and license) content migration tools and services from FatWire partners Vamosa or Kapow Technologies. (Vamosa has jointly agreed to waive the initial license fee for their migration solution.) Third, this limited time offer expires on September 30, 2009. (But try calling on October 1 and see if they refuse to answer the phone.)

FatWire acknowledges that the program does not by itself constitute a compelling financial argument to switch. But they hope that by removing the license fee hurdle, they might entice some disaffected Interwoven or Vignette customers.

That target audience could be huge. In our recent survey on WCM adoption, 7% said they are “very unsatisfied” with their current WCM solution and a further 25% are “unsatisfied.” Since Interwoven and Vignette together claim about 2000 customers, and if we assume the (dis)satisfaction rates apply equally across the board, that’s (theoretically) 640 unsatisfied customers that should be stamping out HELP in the sand to signal passing aircraft. But before FatWire staffs up their HAZMAT trucks they might want to tend to the (equally speculative) 160 unsatisfied users of their own products.

Despite the high dissatisfaction rates for WCM, announcing a “rescue program”is a touch too dramatic, and one has to hope that the rhetoric doesn’t escalate. What’s next: “SDL Tridion vows to free customers held hostage by FatWire’s TeamUp splinter group”?

Why the theatrics? Here are two potential benefits for FatWire:

It makes some noise. FatWire is the only privately held company in Forrester’s 2009 WCM Wave report. A publicly traded vendor would get plenty of coverage for announcing a boring “customer transition effort.” FatWire has to propose a rescue program that tosses a “lifeline” to customers who are, evidently, trapped in a cave without “a path forward.”
It smokes out the prospects. The real challenge with a competitive replacement program is finding the WCM program owner at the target companies. By announcing a putative financial incentive, FatWire might hope some targets will identify themselves.

Finally, think about the effect of this announcement on those FatWire prospects who are not current Interwoven or Vignette customers. If, say, a major airline that’s currently using SDL Tridion asked to be “rescued” on the same terms, is FatWire going to turn them down? If a current prospect with a pen posed over a fat six-figure deal catches wind that FatWire is giving away licenses, aren’t they going to want some of that too?

In short, the announcement could have been simply, “The Deal Desk Is Open.” It’s a buyer’s market. FatWire is being a little more obvious than others in acknowledging that vendors have lost pricing power, at least for higher end solutions. As the street hawkers said during a recent visit to Rome: “Half price! Half price! . . . How much have you got?” If you can scrape together a little cash, it’s a great time to buy WCM.

And if your chosen solution later leads you into the wilderness, you can always count on a competing vendor to rescue you.

Calculating The Fully Loaded Costs Of Corporate Email: It's Bigger Than You Think

2009-06-21T18:48:15-04:00

by Ted Schadler

Since colleague Chris Voce and I published a pair of reports on corporate email in the cloud (one on the infrastructure and operations and one on the cost of running email on-premises or in the cloud), we have had dozens of discussions with our clients accompanied by detailed cost analyses of the true cost of running email on-premises versus running it in the cloud.

While the cloud-based cost of email is pretty transparent (many providers, including Microsoft and Google, publish their per-user per-month costs), the cost of running email on-premises is often a big mystery to everyone, including most CIOs. The big challenge is that the costs are spread throughout the budget: some in the hardware budget, some in the software budget, some in the storage budget, some in the cost of capital budget, some in the staffing budgets, and so on.

After dozens of these discussions and after a survey of 53 information & knowledge management professionals to ask about the cost of email, it is abundantly clear that few firms know their true cost of running email on-premises. And this matters if you're considering a move to cloud-based email.

But it an accurate calculation of on-premises email also matters if you are contemplating upgrading your email to a more current version that might support cheaper storage, higher automation, or reduced email database size due to eliminating redundant copies of attachments. You can compare your current costs against the fully loaded costs of the new system with its higher efficiencies.

So we spent four months building and vetting a detailed cost model to help our clients and the industry at large understand how to calculate their cost of running email on-premises. Here's a clue: It's more than you think.

When you factor in servers, storage, server software, software maintanence, hardware and software administration, power, archiving, message filtering, mobile costs, even financing, you find out that the cost of email for 15,000-person organizations can be as high as $40 per user per month, and even for a normal information worker without mobile email, it can cost more than $27 per user per month. Of course, you can and should segment your workforce into different tiers — for example, mobile executives, information workers, and occasional users — and provision them with different size mailboxes, email clients, and mobile email.

With all of that as input, you can calculate the fully loaded cost of email for each workforce segment.

The same data, presented as a table looks like this:

Of course, the prices come down for larger organizations and not everybody needs all these services. And sure, we can talk about higher automation levels, cheaper storage, more efficient message filtering, and the lots more, but at the end of the day, you have to factor in all the costs of running email on-premises if you are going to make a decision about upgrading or moving email to the cloud.

Have other thoughts? Want to discuss them? Please comment.

Sun Learning Exchange: Indeed, What If Work Meant Community?

2009-06-21T17:57:37-04:00

by Ted Schadler

In early June, Sun Microsystems announced the Sun Learning Exchange. This is a commercial offering that borrows directly from Sun's own experiments, experience, and expositions on learning. We've written about this in a Forrester report: Tap The Potential Of "YouTube For The Enterprise," and now it's available to others.

Sun's CTO of Learning, Charles Beckham, has tapped his experience as a Java entrepreneur (he was part of the team that built one of the first J2EE application servers, NetDynamics) and bent it to the challenges of on-the-job learning. In an interview with Charles last fall, we came away convinced that his just-enough, wisdom of the crowds, power of video approach to learning was important.

Three things anchor the Sun Learning Exchange:

The power of all employee-generated media, including video, audio, and blogs.
A learning platform that is minimally invasive and maximally open to social contribution.
A metric on social contributions to drive participation.

It's too early to tell how compelling and successful this will be for customers; after all, Sun is officially a company in transition and it's not yet clear what lies ahead for the group. (Though we believe that Oracle could easily adapt these concepts and platform to its new Beehive messaging and collaboration platform and use it to attract new customers to that offering.)

What does this mean for Information & Knowledge Management professionals?

What it means (WIM) #1. Learning has officially entered the social software lexicon. Social software is not just for collaboration anymore. It's now also for employees mentoring each other, bringing customers and partners into the environment, and learning on the fly.
WIM #2. Social software has gained another entry point into the organization: HR. Learning has long been the bailiwick of HR, not IT. But with the technology-enablement of learning that's been going on now for years with Web conferencing and training software, social software is yet another reason for these two groups to get even closer together.
WIM #3: Sun Microsystems cum Oracle deserves a closer look for collaboration innovation. We have been impressed with Oracle Beehive — it's well integrated, fabulously priced, and easy to forklift into place. (It's also still in early versions, and missing some pieces of the collaboration platform, including an easy workflow tool kit.)

Disagree? Have thoughts or experiences to share? Please comment.

Great News For The Process World—A Sea Change Is Coming

2009-06-19T19:12:30-04:00

By Connie Moore

I've been working in the Business Process Management field for long time. How long? How's this—I remember when there wasn't any BPM—it was all just workflow. Plus, I remember when there wasn't any continuous improvement or Agile vs. Waterfall, it was just big bang Business Process Reengineering.

I've also been working in the content management and collaboration space for a long time. How long? I remember when people who tracked document imaging (me included) didn't know what document management was. And I remember when Lotus Notes and Groupwise defined the collaboration space, and nobody thought for two seconds about Microsoft.

Why do I ramble on through technology's memory lane? It's because I want to set the stage for what I'm about to write.

For years I've been talking about the need to marry structured processes with ad hoc processes. More than that, I've said we need to look at work from the worker's perspective, and tackle all the work that the person does. Instead of carving off the structured process and automating just that, and then leaving all that other work for the information worker to figure out how it gets done, I've argued that we should look at work holistically. We should very deliberately add that chaotic, messy ad hoc world of work to our structured processes, and stop relying on information workers to mentally and physically (through cut and paste) integrate all their collaboration tools with structured processes. After all, haven't you heard the complaints about information overload from stressed-out workers? Yep, me too—and we could do a lot to make that headache disappear by giving workers a highly contextual workplace that is powered by BPM.

But I've been a voice crying in the wilderness. I'm not kidding. Whenever I would talk about collaboration with BPM vendors, they would somehow think I was talking about straight through processes between companies. That's collaboration, right??? And whenever I would talk about BPM with content and collaboration vendors, they would look at me blankly and mumble something about using simple workflow for approving documents. It felt like two disconnected worlds that desperately needed to find each other.

In the past three months, I've noticed a huge sea change.

It first hit me when I visited Salesforce.com in April. One of the major, high-buzz topics of conversation that day was about integrating Facebook and Twitter with Salesforce's application. The very fact that an application vendor was taking integration with Web 2.0 tools so seriously was an eye-opener. Things were definitely heating up on the integrating collaboration with structured processes frontline.

Then, I went to SAP's SAPPHIRE conference. The same thing happened. SAP showed applications that integrated information-rich visual data from Business Objects with its structured processes. Admittedly, this was more of a BI focus than a collaboration focus, but still, it marked the convergence of structured processes with more people-designed, visual information.

Today, I attended the Workflow Management Coalition's Process.gov event and got firsthand validation that organizations have really started to integrate the structured and ad hoc worlds. Michael Ruiz from Deloitte demonstrated an application for the US Navy that supports Marine Domain Awareness.Situational awareness is the key concept behind this app. By integrating BPM with chat, e-mail, workflow, context sensitive collaboration, mobile messaging, picture messaging, wikis and data, the Navy can provide a highly contextual world for military analysts that automates every aspect of the job. It was an amazing demonstration of how process becomes more powerful when married with all the other people-oriented tools information workers use every day.

I think a sea change is coming in the process world. Yes, straight through processes have their place. And yes, BPM tackles many back office, transactional processes that don't have a heavy or even moderate collaboration angle. But there's a huge world of work out there that involves e-mail and BI reports and documents—and we will truly put a dent in productivity time sinks if we can somehow get our arms around the entire world of work—not just that part that involves swim lanes, role activity diagrams and BPMN. Let's go work!

Podcast: The Use Of Text Analytics To Mine Unstructured Content

2009-06-16T14:49:15-04:00

Our latest featured podcast is Leslie Owens's "The Use Of Text Analytics To Mine Unstructured Content."

In this podcast, Leslie sheds light on the tools and resources available to analyze and classify “unstructured text,” such as emails or survey documents. These tools could yield solutions to business problems as an add-on for business intelligence tools, or for customer relationship management.

We look forward to your questions and comments.

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BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!

2009-06-09T14:12:06-04:00

By James Kobielus

In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”

Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.

Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.

Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding-edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.

No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):

Level 1: Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications: This basic maturity level is for companies that have no prior BI or EDW; have little in-house BI expertise; and are comfortable with allowing casual users to use their browsers to customize parameterized reports from data from packaged business applications.
Level 2: Deep presentation mashup against EDW: This level is for organization that do have prior BI and centralized EDWs, but have an understaffed BI development group and/or power users and data modelers urgently require the ability to mashup and explore historical and current data within sophisticated BI workspaces.
Level 3: Full BI mashup in federated environment: This level is for organizations that have decentralized, dynamic data management environments, and have the expertise to design reusable, composite data services to seamlessly mashup internal and external information.
Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance: This level is for organizations that want to encourage subject matter experts and operational users to collaborate on analytics created through mashup, but who are also concerned that all mashups be controlled, governed, and monitored in accordance with enterprise policies and best practices.

As I said, it will take a few years before we see a substantial number of enterprise case studies that implement the pinnacle of collaborative mashup with tight governance. Nevertheless, when you follow the evolution of next-generation solution portfolios from leading BI vendors such as SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and others, it’s clear that self-service user-centric mashup, to varying degrees, is a core theme.

BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.