Category: Research

Compuware Refocuses—Optimization, Performance, Portfolio Management In, Quality Out

Posted on by DavidKelly

Well, okay, maybe that headline is misleading, but the details aren’t.

Detroit-based software giant Compuware isn’t really dropping the quality of its products, but it is selling off its Quality Solutions product line to help refocus its business on areas where it can compete most effectively.

On Wednesday, May 6th, Compuware announced an agreement that MicroFocus would acquire Compuware’s Quality Solutions line, including the products themselves as well as the 330 people in the development, sales, and customer-support teams. The deal is valued at $80 million and expected to close this quarter.

Compuware has never been a company that moves particularly fast—but for them, and their customers, that’s been a good thing. For years, Compuware has been a reliable, steady and practical IT partner for governments, mainframe-oriented IT shops, and large organizations.

But this announcement, which Compuware portrays as another step in its “Compuware 2.0 evolution” is expected to allow Compuware to invest resources and energy in what it sees as high-opportunity markets, from application performance and mainframe optimization to IT portfolio management and healthcare collaboration. Perhaps another way to read this is that while Obama’s stimulus package has the potential to jack up the need for new technologies, modernization of healthcare and other government IT environments, it doesn’t necessarily mean that companies will be spending significantly more on code testing or development tools.

In a fascinating move, MicroFocus also moved to acquire Borland Software Corporation (which, after all these years, I still have a soft spot in my heart for. Who can ever forget Turbo Pascal, SideKick, or my favorite, Turbo C ((that was a great development tool!))). Of course, more recently, Borland had spun off its traditional developer tools group into CodeGear (sold last year to Embarcadero Technologies), and had refocused on open application lifecycle management. MicroFocus hopes that by acquiring complementary technologies from Borland and Compuware that it will be able to create a market-leading position in the application testing/automated software quality market. Such a position would work well to broaden

MicroFocus’s leadership in the application management and modernization business.
And although this move makes some sense from Compuware’s perspective, don’t kid yourself that quality or good old testing is dead—it isn’t. And even though the next five years will no doubt see a big inflection point between traditional, workstation-oriented development products and processes and cloud-based ones, there are still plenty of applications and organizations that can benefit from solid application quality solutions. Longer term, however, the real winner that market will be the company (perhaps MicroFocus?) that’s able to deliver forward-looking (i.e., cloud-oriented) technologies that span these IT needs and deliver practical solutions to increasing software and application quality.

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Compuware Changepoint

Posted on by DavidKelly

For over 35 years Compuware Corp. has been a leader in enterprise software and services. Over the past decade the company has increasingly focused on helping organizations transform IT investments into business assets. A good example of this strategy is Compuware Changepoint.

Changepoint, the company’s business-centric IT management solution, is designed to help IT and business managers gain better visibility into the enterprise IT environment. In addition the latest version, Changepoint 2009, demonstrates Compuware’s ability to meet the changing needs of its customers. Changepoint 2009 focuses on adding functionality in three key areas: financial management, resource management, and usability. These changes reflect the new economic climate that enterprises find themselves in today, enabling IT managers to improve portfolio management, identify priorities, and deliver on business and IT goals with tightened budgets and waning resources. By adding functionality in investment planning, resource management, and funding allocation, Compuware provides an even stronger solution that can help customers develop mature financial discipline, a necessity for today’s IT department.

Download the complete Compuware Changepoint Upside Research Product Brief.

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Esker DeliveryWare

Posted on by DavidKelly

COMPANY OVERVIEW
With 24 years of field experience, Esker is no newcomer to document process automation. Headquartered in France, Esker has a worldwide presence with more than 80,000 customers and more than 2.5 million people using various products and services that help automate document-intensive processes. The company merged with several other companies in the United States in 2000 to round out its document process automation offerings, and the results are a platform of products that connect a company’s existing systems and move documents through processes in an efficient and cost-effective way. Esker’s products work particularly well within enterprises that have Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) systems such as SAP or Oracle E-Business Suite, helping them to eliminate resource-intensive order-to-cash or procure-to-pay processes that involve printing orders or invoices, walking them to another point and re-keying the data. Esker DeliveryWare is a solution that can automate a wide range of document-based processes such as accounts payable, sales order processing, purchasing and customer invoicing. The product works best in enterprises that have a significant volume of document handling tasks that can benefit from automation.

COMPANY STRATEGY
– Focus on providing products that automate labor-intensive workflows as well as reducing the integration challenges between internal systems and external sources.
– Offer customers measurable ROI with the potential for up to 70% reduction in order and invoice processing costs.
– Work closely with ERP system vendors (including SAP) to provide customers with value-added products that leverage installed ERP systems.
– Offer customers a variety of delivery models, including SaaS and on-premise solutions to complement customers’ existing IT infrastructure.
– Target manufacturing sector with many document-intensive processes and a high amount of ERP system usage.

IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY Esker DeliveryWare offers customers several options for implementation. For those companies that desire an on-premise solution, DeliveryWare can be implemented within existing IT infrastructure. Depending on the complexity of the implementation, customers are able to go live in as short as one or two days, up to 8 weeks, while costs can range from less than $20,000 to over $100,000.

For those companies that want to reduce the burden on IT resources and minimize capital expenditures, especially in light of the current economic conditions, Esker offers a software-as-a-service model for DeliveryWare that provides a flexible pay-as-you-go model and low implementation costs. Hosted data centers have the highest levels of availability, reliability, security, and disaster recovery to provide enterprises with a turnkey solution for document process automation.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
– Raise visibility of Esker and DeliveryWare in North America to build document process automation market share.
– Increase partnerships and alignment with other ERP vendors and also Document Management vendors to create complimentary sell to installed bases.
– Define and communicate value of solution, even though it cuts across traditional market segments or product categories.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Despite the automation that enterprise resource planning systems provide, there are still gaps in coverage, especially when the processes go beyond the corporate walls. This is often a pain point for organization, because they must meld manual processes with automation, and the results can be resource-intensive, error-prone, and inefficient. For example, taking an order from inside an ERP system, printing it out, walking it across to another system, and re-keying the data is not an optimal environment for business operations, and yet it is often the reality in many companies.

Esker’s DeliveryWare solution is part of a category of tools that seek to remedy the situation highlighted above. Document process automation is an important part of increasing efficiency and effectiveness with processes throughout the enterprise. Despite the economic downturn, document process automation provides a bright spot because organizations see immediate cost-savings and bottom-line impact from implementing such a solution. Esker has the advantage of offering on-premise or on-demand services, enabling an even lower initial investment to start gaining efficiency and reducing costs and errors associated with manual document routing and processing.

Esker has carved out a specific niche in the broader BPM space, and as a result has a very focused, highly successful business model. Upside Research recommends that Esker continue to expand its alignment with the leading ERP vendors, tighten integration to their solutions, and build its brand awareness outside Europe to capture more market share.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Esker DeliveryWare is a comprehensive solution for automating document processing throughout and beyond the walls of the enterprise. It replaces costly manual and error-prone steps in common procure-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles by automating document routing and reducing document handling times. DeliveryWare allows enterprises to capture, customize, transform, route and deliver data and documents from any source to any destination. The solution’s centralized management enables streamlined electronic business communications and facilitates faster payment cycles, increased visibility into order processes.

Upside Take
The area of document process automation is a subset of Business Process Management, and it has the benefit of a very clearly defined return on investment for organizations. Enterprises that have high volumes of paper- and document-centric tasks around sales ordering and payment are well aware of the pain points of their non-automated processes. Therefore, offering a solution to these problems with a clear ROI and several delivery options is a key to success. Esker has done a remarkable job aligning itself with one of the leaders in ERP to offer customers a complementary solution to the ERP systems that run their businesses. The key for Esker will be to raise its visibility and extend its interoperability with other ERP vendors to appeal to a wider swath of customers.

VENDOR DATA
Esker Inc.
U.S. headquarters
1212 Deming Way
Suite 350
Madison, WI 53717 www.esker.com
Phone: 800.368.5283
Email: info@esker.com
Founded: 1984
Ownership: Public
Employees: 240
Employees in R&D: 25%
Total Company Revenue: 26.6 million Euros (2008)
Industry Segment:
Process Automation
Key Partners:
– SAP
– Microsoft
Reference Accounts:
– Whirlpool
– Kimball International
– Pentair Water
Product: DeliveryWare
Number of Installations: 80,000 customers worldwide, with more than 2.5 million users.

Download the complete Esker DeliveryWare Upside Research Product Brief.

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IBM Extends SOA Influence with Series of Announcements

Posted on by DavidKelly

Recently, IBM announced its latest SOA and BPM-related new product and service releases, which are centered around what IBM calls Smart SOA™. Smart SOA is a term that IBM is using to describe IBM’s approach to using SOA to power the enterprise and create smarter business outcomes. IBM started using the “Smart SOA” in the fall of 2007 and believes that now, one year later, it’s been able to refine the message and marshal its product lines behind the message to deliver (what it calls) a “true integrated and consumable technology platform” for enterprise customers.

According to IBM, those customers have not been idle in the past several years, with more than 7,000 of them successfully launching some type of SOA project, and a number of them well into significant SOA projects. IBM numbers reveal that 61% of IBM customers define themselves as being at the foundational, or starting level of SOA adoption, another 29% have extended into end-to-end SOA projects, and 11% define themselves as being involved in transformational SOA that involves a dynamic enterprise mindset.

Among the core announcements that IBM has included in its Smart SOA™ event are the following:

• IBM announced its new SmartBusiness INSights to help clients start down the SOA path by identifying where the most opportunities for success lie within their organization. These are an actionable set of guidance and approaches around core, industry-focused business processes that will help the client identify the process and describe how SOA can help them achieve their goals. SmartBusiness INSights exist for a number of industries, including banking, insurance, and healthcare.

• Enhancements to IBM’s CBMSOMA Method, an integrated methodology that connects business strategy to services and focuses on componentization from a business method and technical method, threading a path together from strategy to realization. According to IBM, this has been extremely well-received and many customers have adopted this as a reliable way to manage their SOA deployments.

• Industry Solutions and Frameworks – IBM is increasing its building frameworks for SOA to nine, including three new entries: Integrated Information for Chemical & Petroleum; Network Centric Operations for Defense & Public Safety; and Product Development Integration. The frameworks reflect key industry processes and consist of pre-built industry components built on IBM Smart SOA™ foundation. The frameworks leverage industry and technology open standards.

• Key Agility Indicators are benchmarks that IBM has created from more than 16,000 engagements through Global Services. IBM believes that KPI’s are no longer enough to identify the agility necessary for today’s business. The company has over 300 Key Agility Indicators that span processes like supply chain, IT, human resources. All of these are now embedded into WebSphere Business Modeler & Monitor to provide additional content to help customers rapidly align their monitoring with the key agility indicators in their industry.

• In the BPM arena, in addition to several enhancements to IBM’s existing BPM platform, the company announced The Business space, a new capability that is delivered in many of its products, creating a unified user interface. It is a combination of Lotus mash-up technology and the world of BPM. Through Business space, users can customize their workspace by role. This is integrated across multiple IBM products to create a customizable and flexible user interface that retains a uniform consistency to align all stakeholders to the business process goals and objectives.

• Also new in the BPM arena is the BPM Healthcheck Services, designed to identify current strengths and weaknesses, provide a diagnostic BPM report, and create a strategic roadmap for BPM.

• IBM has created a number of enhancements to its entire SOA platform that tie in with the Smart SOA™ brand, including tools both web-based and traditional that help customers choose a path for SOA – taking a closer look at their business priorities, identifying a project, develop an idea of the ROI they might want to achieve, and when ready graduate to a complete SOA assessment with Global Services. IBM stressed in the announcements that it wants customers to find the right “on ramp” to SOA and therefore drive their success.

To further establish itself as the renowned leader in SOA, IBM is launching a global road show designed to display some of the successes its customers have seen using its platform for SOA. The IBM Smart SOA™ World Tour visits 100 cities in 10 days during the month of October 2008, and includes 100 customers telling their SOA success stories, designed to meet the current needs of that locality. The events will include various roundtable discussions and seminars targeted at all levels of the SOA workforce, from line-of-business down to developer.

The Upside Uptake
The quantity of individual announcements that accompanied this market update is extensive. While there are too many to cover in detail here, we would like to add some analysis to IBM’s overall SOA strategy and where BPM fits into the picture. Clearly, IBM is demonstrating with this update that it is firmly planted in the SOA world. The company has been very successful in engaging customers to adopt SOA-based projects and gain business benefits from those early endeavors. The fact that the majority of IBM’s customers are still in the “foundational SOA” stage is indicative of the larger enterprise IT market as a whole as well as the level of complexity that exists with such an ambitious goal as SOA adoption. One of the most important components of this announcement in our eyes is the acknowledgment by IBM that not all businesses are created equal, and therefore creating a variety of “on ramps” for businesses to approach SOA adoption is critical to conversion.

BPM plays a critical role to IBM in the entire advancement of Smart SOA™. The BPM products and solutions that IBM offers are often an opportune first introduction into SOA for many companies because they blend the measurable, results-focused deliverables of a BPM project while building the SOA foundation that IBM advocates. Upside Research believes that building a robust, enterprise-scale SOA foundation is a key to creating a powerful BPM solution.

Much about the BPM announcements from IBM centered on “taming the chaos through business process management” and the product enhancements were about increased business event management, transactional capabilities, and business process optimization. Upside Research believes this reflects the current objectives in the market to optimize key business processes for smarter business outcomes, and again this feeds into IBM’s Smart SOA™ platform. The newly announced Business Space is a clear indication of not only how central IBM holds BPM to its overall platform, but also how IBM is reading the market and trying to deliver an interface for BPM (and SOA) that is more in line with how the majority of its customers work.

With these announcements, one of the themes that was evident was IBM’s awareness of how its core customers are changing and how IBM is keeping pace to meet market demands. The staid notion of the Fortune 500 is one of the past, especially with recent financial market volatility. Today’s company needs to be as agile as possible, and there is no guarantee that the winner today will be holding the trophy next year. Therefore, reading its customer base is a critical component of IBM’s success, and IBM seems to be listening. There is heavy focus by IBM on “Green” technology initiatives, as they relate to SOA in this instance. Also, the notion of creating the “business space” as a parallel to the omnipotent My Space generation is a nod toward the non-traditional ways that technology is being consumed by business and personal users. Upside Research is curious to see how this plays out in the business world, but applauds IBM for thinking outside the box to embrace new paradigms.

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Alternatives to White Papers

Posted on by DavidKelly

In addition to the white paper options listed here, there are a number of other options that can help software and service companies articulate their business and techincal value to prospective clients and customers, including:

– A “First Looks” report is usually a short paper that provides a first look or sneak peak at a new technology or product release. These reports can also include screen shots and examples of how the product is used. These reports are particularly good for helping customers to visualize and understand how new products or technologies can be used and why they’re relevant.

– Technical or business articles are written under the name of a company executive and provide perspective on a particular technology, application of a technology, value proposition or perspective on an industry or business trend. These pieces are helpful for establishing thought leadership and visibility.

– Case studies provide either brief or longer examples of how organizations are being successful with a company’s products. Case studies can call out key recommendations, important lessons learned and business benefits.

– Newsletters provide a way to build and extend customer relationships while providing value and education to prospects.

For information on how Upside Research can help your company create a winning white paper, contact us at info@upsideresearch.com

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Top Seven White Paper Approaches

Posted on by DavidKelly

White papers provide a range of benefits—from articulating technology or business vision, to providing detailed examples of how a new technology or product can address a specific business problem, to establishing thought leadership. Custom white papers can be written to elicit a range of results. However, we’ve found through experience that most white papers fit into our Top Seven list of White Paper Approaches.

1. Thought Leadership. When it’s important to establish a thought leadership position, white papers are a particularly good approach. Thought leadership white papers can be used to establish credibility, to steer purchase decisions, and to set the agenda.

2. Business Benefits. Many white papers are aimed at business executives to help them understand why their organization needs a specific product or technology. Business benefit-oriented white papers help put technology into a business context.

3. Technical Education. White papers can provide an in-depth discussion of technical issues and help educate key technical decision-makers on new technologies or alternative solutions.

4. ROI Analysis. ROI-oriented white papers provide a framework for understanding the value and benefits that can be derived from a software investment.

5. Setting the Sales Context. White papers can also help set the sales context by providing prospects with an understanding of the financial and technical components of a solution. They can also be used to specify the decision criteria that organizations should use when selecting products. These papers provide a framework for a salesperson to walk through the sale.

6. Competitive Positioning Papers. Competitive positioning papers articulate how a product, company or service should be compared to alternatives.

7. Position Papers. Position papers articulate a company’s position on a technology or business matter, such as a technical standard.

For information on how Upside Research can help your company create a winning white paper, contact us at info@upsideresearch.com

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Endeavors Application Jukebox

Posted on by DavidKelly

Endeavors Technologies believes it is one of the best-kept secrets in application virtualization and streaming. From its roots as a research project at University of CA Irvine more than ten years ago, the company has grown and developed three new versions of a commercial product, Application Jukebox, aimed at providing on-demand application delivery through a portable application virtualization and streaming architecture. Perhaps most interesting is Application Jukebox SaaS Edition, which extends the flexibility of on-demand virtualization and streaming beyond the enterprise to deliver applications to users when and where they need them. The applications of Application Jukebox are numerous, from enterprise IT application distribution and license enforcement and version control to consumer gaming through a web portal. Currently, 500,000 users are utilizing Application Jukebox (or one of its previous versions). If rumors regarding an upcoming pilot program from Microsoft that will allow service providers to stream Microsoft Office through a SaaS model prove true, Endeavors will be poised to make an even more significant impact on the SaaS market.

Company Strategy
– Today, offer three different versions of Application Jukebox to appeal to enterprise IT departments, individual developers, and consumer-focused ISVs.

– Deliver fully configurable virtualization by enabling administrators to choose between sandboxed and integrated virtualization, or any combination of the two.

– Partner with Service Providers and ISV’s to enable them to offer a variety of application virtualization and streaming options to their customers.

– Extend channel development in enterprise market through channel partnerships that define the benefits of Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition.

Implementation Strategy
Application Jukebox includes three primary components to enable application virtualization and streaming. The Application Jukebox Player is the client installed on end-user machines that creates the virtual environment for the application to execute in. The Application Jukebox Server is based on an Apache server, and provides the interface for the SaaS environment as well as the administration component to oversee license enforcement and a database to manage users and provide reporting capabilities. Application Jukebox Studio is used to create streamable and virtualized application sets from an original installer. As a SaaS implementation, Application Jukebox enables applications to be streamed to the user desktop with zero footprint – once the user is finished using the application, it is removed. This is a significant advantage of the solution from an implementation perspective because it doesn’t consume any bandwidth on the desktop and also provides protection from piracy as the application is never installed on the client. The server can be installed by following the install wizard and documentation. Installation typically takes several hours for someone who understands the prerequisites: Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS (optional for a SaaS Edition), Apache Tomcat/Java KRE and Active Directors (optional service for Enterprise Edition).

Critical Success Factors

– Successfully build out channel relationships to extend reach of Application Jukebox into target vertical markets.

– Educate market about advantages of application virtualization and streaming for the enterprise.

– Leverage recent market momentum of SaaS to extend reach to undeveloped channels.

– Communicate specific benefits of Application Jukebox in relation to competitors and illustrate how Application Jukebox is being used by each category of users (IT, service and content providers, consumer, etc.)

Upside Analysis
SaaS is an approach to enterprise software that is gaining steam across corporate IT departments. Its benefits are numerous – the ability to better control and manage application licenses, upgrades, and usage while delivering exactly the application services that users need, when they need them and where they need them. Endeavors Technologies has been working to bring the benefits of application virtualization and streaming in a SaaS model for quite some time, and Application Jukebox is the culmination of its decade-plus efforts. Among the benefits of Endeavors’ solution are its light footprint, standards-based foundation, portability, flexibility of applications, and rapid deployment. The fact that Application Jukebox enables the administrator to control whether an application is launched in a “sandbox” or integrated virtualization environment, or any combination of the two, is a key differentiator from the competition.

When Endeavors Technologies calls itself one of the “best-kept” secrets, it wasn’t far off the mark. Upside Research believes that the technology that Endeavors has developed has a wide range of applications, and the company is pursuing several of them currently. The consumer application of streaming games is an intriguing one and has been very successful to date. However, we believe that the enterprise capabilities of this technology are equally, if not more, valuable, and we encourage Endeavors Technologies to further develop these channels with specific enterprise-focused applications and success stories. The ability to optimally control application distribution, licensing, and updates will deliver significant benefits to overworked IT departments. The biggest challenge that Endeavors Technologies faces is having the bandwidth to develop all of the potential that Application Jukebox presents.

Download the Complete Endeavors Application Jukebox Product Brief.

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Software as a Service–The Next Step

Posted on by DavidKelly

I really like the idea of software-as-a-service. But I’m not ready yet to give up my own applications. They’re too powerful, too handy, and too hard to live without.

But maybe that’s about to change.

For me—and for many other people—that’s what software-as-a-service has been about. Web-based solutions designed to be used by people connected to the Internet. Of course, another approach to software has a service has been technologies like Java or browser plug-ins, which enable people to selectively and dynamically download and use software programs.

But there’s another angle to software-as-a-service. It doesn’t just have to be about using Web interfaces and browsers to access hosted software, or downloading plug-ins. It can also be about streaming full-blown Windows applications from a centralized location (hosted environment, corporate servers, etc.) down to local computers (laptops or desktops). Most users have plenty of raw processing power available. What’s been missing is a way to easily package applications, stream them efficiently, install them correctly, and manage any licensing requirements on an on-going basis.

That’s were companies like Endeavors Technologies comes in. While Endeavors (based in Irvine, California, www.endeavors.com) has been around for a dozen years or so and has had successful application streaming products available for years, their new Application Jukebox SaaS Edition directly addresses the issues of packaging and managing the delivery of desktop applications, upgrades and patches to customers in a software-as-a-service model.

I believe that there’s a big opportunity for both software companies and organizations when it comes to the “virtualization” of traditional desktop software programs and software-as-a-service, and that the market is going to see a significant expansion of their use over the next years.

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Understanding the Levels of Governance

Posted on by DavidKelly

While there are a number of ways to look at governance, let’s look at some of the different levels (or types) of governance that are happening (or should be happening) in an organization:

– Service level governance. Service level governance typically has to do with the definition, the modeling, the provisioning, etc. of services that are part of an SOA solution.

– SOA governance. SOA related governance deals with how to manage the lifecycle of services and processes within an organization. As noted above, SOA governance should include processes that handle the entire SOA lifecycle, from service requirements through service design, development and deployment, and all the way to on-going maintenance, upgrades, re-use and even service retirement.

– IT governance. IT governance has a much broader perspective than simply the governance of services. Instead, IT governance deals with business and IT alignment and managing IT initiatives so they’re consistent and supportive of business needs. IT governance basically includes the structures, processes and accountability aspects for ensuring that an organization’s IT department is supporting business needs.

– Corporate governance. Corporate governance is the biggie. Corporate governance has to do with the overall polices and processes within the greater corporate organization and ensuring that an organization follows consistent practices and supports and meets regulatory and business requirements.

Understanding the different levels of governance is important when trying to build a business case for SOA and trying to ensure that your organization is taking the appropriate steps to reduce risk and align business and IT.

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Adobe LiveCycle ES

Posted on by DavidKelly

Adobe Systems has established its products as the ubiquitous desktop client for viewing dynamic forms and documents, most notably with its Adobe Reader and Flash Player. With more than 900 million connected desktop computers and devices utilizing Adobe client software, there is no doubt that Adobe products are an integral part of the business landscape.

In 2004, the company launched LiveCycle, a set of servers designed to make forms and documents more interactive, extending PDF to back-end processes. The latest version, LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, merges this with the Flex and Flash capabilities from Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, providing companies with the ability automate business processes with customer engaging forms and user interfaces. Based on a re-written and unified J2EE server platform, LiveCycle ES provides a collaborative development environment for automating business processes across industries such as financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and government. As a player in the human-centric category of BPM, Adobe currently has more than 1,300 LiveCycle ES customers.

COMPANY STRATEGY

• Encourage the creation of “customer engagement” applications that are web-based processes to help simplify and automate process that cross organizational boundaries and improve communication with external constituents.

• Provide a unified, standards-based platform that supports SOA and web services to create processes that extend back-office systems outside the corporate walls.

• Build on momentum of Reader and Flash products as de facto clients for engaging users to execute human-centric processes.

IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
The latest version of LiveCycle ES has been designed to enable collaborative development. With a standards-based J2EE foundation and an Eclipse-based integrated development environment, LiveCycle ES runs on a wide variety of platforms. The solution utilizes SOA to connect with back-office interfaces. LiveCycle ES offers an inclusive development environment with development and production repositories that can be shared among different types of users. The solution is available in a turnkey configuration with JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, and runs on Windows, Solaris, Linux and AIX operating systems.

Adobe finds that its customers are typically using three different methods for implementation. Some have contracted directly with Adobe for professional services, while others choose to use one of Adobe’s many regional systems integrators for assistance. Finally, some of the customers choose to implement the solution themselves. Average implementation time varies, but typically runs six months. However, with the latest release of LiveCycle ES, there have been a number of implementations that have been completed in the three-month timeframe.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

• Build strong use cases in vertical markets to expand reach of solution across targeted verticals.

• Strengthen partnerships in target vertical markets to deliver stronger offering to customers.

• Increase packaged solutions offerings, including forms, templates, solution accelerators to enable customers to more quickly implement the product.

• Clearly define how LiveCycle works with existing traditional integration and business process management solutions that customers may have.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Adobe LiveCycle ES is an intelligent and powerful extension of several desktop client applications that have become indispensable in everyday business. Leveraging the ubiquity of Adobe Reader and Flash, LiveCycle ES enables organizations to create human-centric business processes that engage the end user in a format they are already familiar with, an important component of the ultimate success of BPM. The latest version of LiveCycle ES solves some of the challenges of earlier releases by replacing more than 12 separate servers with one unified J2EE server platform and an integrated development environment that promotes collaborative development by all stakeholders. This product shines in human-centric processes that require approvals or exceptions tied to forms but do not require heavy back-office integration and transaction processing.

Upside Research believes that Adobe has a compelling solution for extending the use of interactive forms routing and online rich internet applications that seek to engage customers. While the product is not intended to do some of the heavy system-to-system process integration or back-office transaction processing that other BPM solutions provide it fills an important need in the market for a process solution that can be rolled out via user centric interfaces to a variety of constituents. Extending some of the pre-packaged component of LiveCycle ES will further enhance the product’s differentiation in the market as well as its ability to be implemented more quickly.

Download the complete Adobe LiveCycle ES Upside Research Product Brief.

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