Category: Upside updates

HTML5 and Document Sharing

Posted on by UpsideAdmin

Recently, Crocodocs announced its new embeddable HTML5 document viewer and annotator, a self-proclaimed first of its kind. The news came with an announcement of a partnership with Yammer, one of the enterprise pure play social media platforms. The Crocodocs tools give Yammer a full-fledged document sharing and collaboration platform, enabling users to embed any type of document into the micro-blogging platform for viewing and collaboration. With HTML5, this also makes the embedded documents viewable on mobile platforms. The question is, what impact will it have on the grip that Microsoft and Adobe have on the document viewing and collaboration market?

Read our complete analysis of HTML5 and the collaboration market at IT Briefcase.

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Collaborative Business Analytics

Posted on by UpsideAdmin

The business analytics market is not immune to the rise in popularity of social networking for the enterprise. In fact, many proponents of business intelligence and decision management solutions see social networking as a way to extend business analytics to the masses. Enterprises have struggled with extending BI functionality beyond the dashboards that power users inhabit. New social networking and collaboration capabilities foster advanced analyses and better brainstorming among BI users, which may be just the antidote this segment needs.

Among the BI vendors, several have made recent announcements around their solutions’ new collaboration and social networking capabilities. IBM recently announced its Cognos 10 release, which embeds the collaboration capabilities from Lotus Connections right into Cognos 10. Users familiar with the Cognos interfaces can post messages, participate in discussions, add comments on data points, and access decision networks. The goal of Cognos 10 is to establish information hubs that span the enterprise, pulling in users around threaded discussions associated with BI content.

Read the full post on collaborative and social business analytics at ITBriefcase.com.

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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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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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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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SOA and Flexibility

Posted on by DavidKelly

A significant portion of organizations are considering SOA to help enable greater reuse from both new and existing assets. In many cases this takes the form of breaking down legacy applications into usable components for reuse across projects and teams. When designed correctly services can be used in new projects without customization.

A move to SOA can also help integrate IT assets, making it easier for IT organizations to react more quickly to business demands as business needs change, especially if applications are broken down into reusable components modeled along the lines of an organization’s business processes. By creating these types of “business services” organizations are creating assets that can be leveraged by the business. From the business case perspective, managers should focus on the hard benefits such as decreases in project time, reductions in time or risk, and increases in efficiency from using SOA interfaces and business services.

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New storage technologies for consumers

Posted on by DavidKelly

Consumers are essentially gobbling up storage faster than businesses are. When you stop to think about it, it’s not surprising, given the huge growth in digital cameras, the move to DVRs and digital videos, digital music (from MP3s to downloadable iTunes movies, TV shows and music), and more.

We can see the impact of the direction of this trend in some of the recent announcements by companies like Seagate and Maxtor, at January’s consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. For example, Seagate announced the introduction of its Maxtor® BlackArmour™ storage solution, a 2.5-inch consumer-friendly, portable AES government-grade encrypting external storage device that makes it simple for consumers (or business users) to securely and easily take their data with them. With hardware-level encryption, the device is designed to keep content locked even if it’s lost or stolen. Although these types of technologies have been around for years, what’s amazing is that you’ll get 160GB of portable, secure storage for a retail price of $149.99, all from your local Staples or electronics store.

Another interesting part of their announcement was the introduction of Maxtor Central Axis software, a software solution that enables users to remotely connect, access, upload, and share content on a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive, networked on your local home network—without breaching network firewalls. In effect, consumers and home office workers now have an easy way to share and access files remotely while maintaining a high level of security.

I believe that over the next few years we’ll see a huge change in the types and volume of storage devices that standard consumers are using in their homes. We’re going to see both a diversity of applications—from hard drives designed to move movies or music to automobile playback systems to home office storage, backup and remote access. In any case, a great many of these changes in the consumer storage technology landscape will undoubtedly filter back up to the enterprise, affecting the design, deployment and use of future business storage technologies for years to come.

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