Event Report: IBM Unveils the Information Agenda at IOD 2008

(Photo: The show floor from IBM IOD 2008 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center
Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

IBM’s third annual Information On Demand event emerges as part of the “Must Attend” list of Enterprise Software pow wows. More than 7000 attendees were treated to 600 technical skill building sessions and 120 business leadership sessions. This year’s theme focused on the need to create an Information Agenda to sustain a competitive advantage and achieve business optimization. Some interesting perspectives from the event:

• Business optimization growth is twice as fast than business automation growth. IBM makes the case that workforce productivity, customer profitability, financial risk insight, and other optimization applications gain more traction than automation apps like ERP, HR, Financials, and CRM.
  POV: The era of automation emphasis is coming to an end. After years of depositing data into systems, enterprises seek value from all the information in their ERP, CRM, or HR system. Users expect more than automation from systems and want actionable insight designed for roles that are proactively delivered.

• IBM is positioned for business optimization via its acquisitions in Information On Demand. The thesis - IBM is delivering information assets via DB2, FileNet, and Informix. Business value in this trusted information can be unlocked via InfoSphere and then realize optimized business performance via business intelligence (i.e. Cognos)
  POV: Delivering an Information Agenda requires a tightly integrated stack. This requires significant integration of canonical data models, business processes, meta data, and semantic information. While IBM has made progress in bringing together its acquisitions, at this point in time no vendor has truly delivered on this from a software basis. Considerable amounts of professional services help is still required for success.

Customers See Value In an Information Agenda, now that they know what to call it…

As I was there to give talks on integrated data management strategies - Track 2787: The ROI of Instance Consolidation and Track 2792: The Business Value of Integrated Data Management, it was refreshing to find an information focused audience. Here are some interesting conversation snippets and observations:

• Customers desperately seeking access to “real-time” and “near-time” data from legacy apps.
• Everyone wants more device delivery choices.
• The stack war will be Blue vs Red in the next 3 to 5 years.
• Operational business intelligence critical for actionable insight.
• BI is not a luxury during a downturn but a necessity for success.
• Data archiving plays an interesting role in data optimization and meeting compliance requirements
• MDM continues to gain traction as deal volumes have picked up in Q3 and Q4. This could be the “last big spend” before 2009 as a VP of Apps at a large CPG firm expressed.

Your POV

Have you created your own information agenda? Does this term resonate with you? Has your organization shifted from treating data as a commodity to valuing information as an asset? Post a comment or privately reach out to me at rwang0@gmail.com .

(Photo: View from Mix @ THE Hotel during the IBM Cognos reception - IOD 2008
Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Monday’s Musings: Expect More Acquisitions By the Big 4 in 2009

Continued economic slow down, credit crisis, and diminished IPO market create the perfect storm for the Big 4 or as fellow blogger Josh Greenbaum likes to call it, MISO (ie. Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle). Here are four trends at work that shape the thinking on why 2009 will be another year of continued consolidation:

• Most privately held vendor exit strategies focus on acquisition not IPO. Many firms with IPO plans have been told by their boards to refocus on revenue growth and partnerships. The intention - use partnership success to both drive revenue growth and attract acquisition by a larger vendor. Many see acquisition by the Big 4 as the best exit strategy at this point in time.
• Strategic acquisitions target vendors with strong recurring revenue streams. Chatter from BBQ’s and luncheons highlight vendors with large maintenance revenues as an area for potential targets. Nurting a profitable and recurring revenue stream will allow many vendors to share overall development and support costs as they weather the next storm. The hunt is on for vendors who fit this bill as private equity and vendors chase after these assets. Case in point - the intention to acquire Epicor by Elliot Associates.
• Economic conditions lowers publicly traded vendor valuations. For companies with a prescribed target list, its never been cheaper to acquire a competitor. Most P/E ratio have become quite attractive and fall below the standard 2X to 3X revenue price target.
• Pressure remains to grow new markets. the larger vendors express tremendous interest in acquiring new distribution channels, micro industry verticals, and new geographical coverage. One great example is the movement in the Microsoft Dynamics partner base. The rumors of M&A run fierce as the partners consolidate to gain scale for regional and global delivery. The fight for Axon by HCL and Infosys also highlights the consolidation happening around SAP system integrators as they transition into solution providers.

The bottom line.

Despite the gloomy economic outlook, end users should assume that the biggest vendors will continue their torrid pace of acquisitions. As these acquisitions factor into long term apps strategies and planning for 2009 purchases, users must assume that truly specialized solutions with significant industry footprint will be acquired. One proactive approach is to suggest acquisitions and tie-ups to key vendors during discussions with their senior management on financial viability as well as long term roadmap and strategy.

Your POV.

Who do you think will be acquired by whom next? Look forward to your thoughts. Post a comment or drop me a line at rwang0@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Industry View: SaaS Applistructures Deliver on the Promise of Tying Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0

Walking out of the SalesForce.com Event on Tuesday the 10th had me thinking about the promise of Web 2.0 for the enterprise via middleware, SaaS platforms, and this notion of Applistructure. The thing that really struck home was not the utility computing model that Marc rants and raves about, nor the great drag and drop content management capability of Koral that was being demo'd. What struck home more than anything was how applistructure was taking shape via SaaS and how quickly SaaS could deliver Web2.0 capabilities to the Enterprise.

Okay, let me take a step back, what's applistructure? Well, applistructure refers to the boundary blurring between business applications and infrastructure software. Originally coined by Ken Vollmer of Forrester (Giga) in 2003, the term is shaping up, especially with the rise of middleware platforms (e.g. IBM WebSphere "Blue Stack", Oracle Fusion Middleware "Red Stack", Microsoft VS.Net "Rainbow Stack", and SAP NetWeaver "Blue and White Stack") that are doing everything from being the appserver, delivering BPEL, modeling business processes, addressing content management, providing business intelligence, coordinating master data, solving identity management, etc. SaaS itself is an applicstructure and as these applistructures take hold in the enterprise world via middleware, the SaaS vendors including SFDC, NetSuite, and WorkDay, have the best opportunity to deliver on most of the collaborative aspects of Web2.0.

Unfortunately for most enterprises, not much of the Web 2.0 impact we feel here in the Valley has made it into the mainstream middleware platforms. In fact recent announcements of Lotus Quickr, SAP's end-user widgets, Microsoft Office 2007, and Oracle Web Center show slow to moderate progress in this arena. Hot for Web2.0 for years has been tagging, mash-ups, social network, participation architectures, and the spirit of the individual and wisdom of the tribe. Though we're starting to see wiki's, blogging, and RSS become the new collaboration standards for enterprises its really been the SaaS movement that's driving Web2.0 adoption into the Enterprise.

Similar to the shift in attitude on utility computing and the simplification of licensing and pricing to cost/user/month, I think we can count on SaaS to be the game changer again. I eagerly await to see what other Web2.0 innovations like the Koral acquisition by SFDC will make its way to the likes of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM in this emerging solutions centric software world order.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2007 by R Wang. All rights reserved

Event Report: CDI-MDM Summit, SF, CA

I recently moderated a track with a colleague of mine (Rob Karel) at the CDI-MDM conference this March 26h and 27th at the San Francisco Marriott. Though master data management penetration in the enterprise still hovers in the high single digits, its obvious the energy, activity, and investment around MDM continues to grow. Some quick observations at the event:

• Hierarchy management and data governance remained the most sought after topics
• Vendors seemed to outnumber clients (We found this later not to be the case)
  
• Clients who were there remained at the technical level
• Projects were beginning to require a higher level of executive sponsorship
• Effective change management was beginning to become a critical success factor in all sizes of projects
• Customer projects (given the bias of the event) dominated discussions though other entity types such as products and location became ancillary requirements.
  

In general, this event was a great chance to catch up with others pursuing the development of MDM tools and solutions. And as always it was great to see my familiar faces from Siperian, Initiate, DataFlux, Purisma, IBM, Oracle, VisionWare and, i2 at the event.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2007 by R Wang. All rights reserved