Event Report: Dreamforce 2008 - Love is In the Clouds

(Photo: Main show floor for Dreamforce 2008 at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

Over 9,000 attendees made it to the annual San Francisco pilgrimage to hear the high priest of SaaS kickoff the event. This year’s theme focused on the future of Cloud Computing, a focus on success, and how much Salesforce loves its customers. Key product, technology, and partnership announcements from the November 3 to 5 event include:

• Force.com expands usage to new product and services. Force.com sites allows customers to publish Force.com data and apps to any site, basically supporting customer built web apps. SFDC will take care of domain, URL, RSS management, etc when customers run their Web apps on Force.com. Other expansions include Force.com for Amazon and Force.com for Facebook. On the Amazon front, SFDC also will support applications being built using Amazon web services, in effect creating a mega cloud. Facebook support allows developers to tap into the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

  POV: Movement to expand the platform into new B2C facing markets give SFDC credibility in new social media markets as well as taking the Cloud wars to the consumer. Consider this a continuation in the battle for domiance of IDE’s in the cloud.

• CODA showcases its financial package on APEX for the North American market. While Coda2Go was launched at Dreamforce Europe in London last May, attendees at Dreamforce 2008 in SanFrancisco had a chance to see first hand how the 30 year old vendor had completed its rewrite. With enterprise financials built on this new platform, Salesforce.com customers now have more choice in financial solutions within the ecosystem.POV: Like many mid-market vendors, CODA had the opportunity to bet on the next platform and chose a SaaS approach over an on-premise middleware platform. Most mid-market vendors bet on a Microsoft VS.NET “Rainbow” Stack, IBM Websphere, or Progress Software. These middleware platforms allow companies to spend 10 to 15% of budget on tools and technology instead of a staggering 33% that many would spend if they built their own middleware. CODA’s decision is market leading for the industry and is reflective of its groundbreaking historical bets on HP3000 in the 70’s, VAX (DEC) in the 80’s, and AS/400’s (IBM) in the 90’s.
• Glovia, a Fujitsu Company, builds order management on Force.com. Customers seeking lead to billing solutions in order management can now turn to the Glovia solution for order management, inventory, fulfillment, and billing. Glovia takes the order from Salesforce.com and brings it into the order maangement system giving it visiblity from prospect to invoice. Enterprises can also check status via the web or on a mobile device via Salesforce mobile.POV: Salesforce.com’s ecosystem strategy allows other vendors to build key back office end to end processes. As more companies add to the ecosystem, SalesForce will continue to gain market relevance against enterprise vendors struggling to move to a true multi-tenant onDemand delivery model.

The bottom line - SaaS platforms continue to morph into cloud computing

Recent decisions by CODA, Glovia, and a host of software vendors show that the transition from on-premise middleware platforms to cloud-based platforms has begun. Application development and delivery professionals seeking new delivery models can benefit from these new platforms. Force.com is gaining momentum and given its history will emerge as one of the top 3 platforms for both customers and software vendors. The real question out there - what will vendor lock-in look like in the world of cloud computing? Will it be like the mainframe lock-ins 40 years prior?

Your POV.

Are you considering a SaaS deployment? Will you move to the cloud? Are you a software vendor looking at ditching your on-premise middleware platform? Feel free to share with me your thoughts. You can post here or send me a private email to rwang0@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.

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.

Event Report: Siperian Masters 2008 - Customers Confirm Multi-Entity MDM Trends

(Photo: Siperian Masters'08 registration area. Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

About 200 attendees were present as Ramon Chen, VP of Marketing, kicked off the event to the theme of adventurers and pioneers in MDM at the Bridgewater Marriott (New Jersey). CEO, Peter Caswell, led the keynote session with a view on where Siperian has been, where Siperian is going, and then introduced the Ravi Jagannathan VP of Product Management and Manish Sood, Senior Director of Product Management. They presented Siperian's road map well into 2012. Key announcements include:

• Ongoing expansion of the partner ecosystem and alliances.
• Announcement of semantic masters for unstructured data.
• Focus on easier to maintain GUI
• Continued availability of modular deployment options and other cost effective implementations
• New state management and work flow integration tie backs to the Lombardi BPM tools
• Visually appealing data governance dashboards.

In addition, a few key trends emerged from conversations with customers and partners:

• Most customers who had MDM projects also were embarked on SOA projects
• Pharma customers successfully proved ROI and justification despite being in SAP and Oracle "only" environments
• Availability of system integrator resources has improved.
• MDM projects need to be more pervasive and address innovation in order to gain long term political support.
• Many customers have reached what Forrester Research considers a Level 3 and 4 MDM maturity.
• Prospects continue to see Siperian as short listed vendors
• Many seek more innovation from their MDM systems and are beginning to branch out of their single data entity focus.

The bottom line

Siperian customers seem to be well ahead of the pioneering stage with MDM. Customers we spoke to remain satisfied with their decisions and have been successful in proving existing value. Many customers have transcended past level 3 on the MDM maturity model.

Your POV

Do these trends jive with what you are seeing in MDM and CDI? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Post a comment or privately reach out to me at rwang0@gmail.com Check it out on the Forrester Blogs.

(Ramon Chen presenting the 2008 Siperian Masters Awards.Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Event Report: Sterling Commerce Connection, Denver, CO

(Image courtesy of Sterling Commerce)

Sterling Commerce Pushes Closer to the Perfect Order
Sterling treated customers and prospects to a packed agenda of product announcements, customer case studies, and educational sessions at this year's customer conference. Here are a few quick observations from the event:

• Transformation from infrastructure supplier to solution provider near complete. Prior to the acquisition of Yantra in 2004, Sterling Commerce was known for its integration, data sync, and EDI capabilities for the supply chain. Through the successful integrations of additional specialist vendors such as Nistevo (2006) and Comergent (2007), Sterling Commerce continues to show progress in not only integrating but also extending its application capabilities in selling and fulfillment.
• New products focus on addressing the perfect order. Attendees continued to express their interest and desire to achieve the perfect order. Multi-channel capabilities and advanced order process functionality topped many conversations. Sterling's unveiled and showcased its new capabilities in inventory replenishment and new merchandising and marketing capabilities.
  
• Post merger integration with Comergent remains on track. Despite the departure of CTO, Bill York, key former Comergent executives such as Jean Kovacs and Andy Nicholas remain with significant management roles. Conversations with product team members and customers suggest that overall delivery on the integrated multi-channel selling and fulfillment appears to be ahead of schedule.
  
• Customers continue to displace existing systems. Conversations with over 23 customers indicate that many continue to choose a Sterling solution over their existing ERP or CRM provider. Of the 23 customers, 7 had Oracle, 11 had SAP, 2 had i2, and 2 had Click Commerce.

The bottom line:
As customers make the shift from functional centric to business process centric software, processes that support the perfect order (i.e. opportunity to order capture, order capture to order fulfillment, order fulfillment to order completion, and order completion to order settlement) will elevate in importance. Solutions that support the end to end order process across multiple channels will truly bring differentiation and strategic advantage to an enterprise. Sterling's focus in this area and continued execution along the late Sam Starr's strategy will bring this vendor closer to delivering the perfect 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: i2 Planet 2007, Orlando, FL

Given the recent consolidation in the industry and increasing dominance of both Oracle and SAP, I couldn't help but wonder if supply chain had gone the way of CRM or if it was a specialized field that would continue to stand out like business intelligence. In fact, I normally don't specialize in supply chain but was at this year's i2 Planet mostly to get caught up to speed on i2's order management cycle capabilities and Agile Business Process Platform (ABPP). Here are a few quick observations from the event:

• Lots of interest and enthusiasm for the new generation supply chain. Customers expect demand-supply synchronization and related real-time demand management integration to provide faster time to results and greater flexibility. More importantly, customers expect demand shaping to drive visibility across the value chain. You could see the eyes light up and the energy levels go up especially in the TMS (Freight Matrix), POS Demand Sensing, and demand shaping sessions.
  
• Supply chain continues to be a proactive discipline. More than ensuring that the right product reaches the right customer at the right time, users expect to drill into the root-cause and rapidly apply corrective actions. New generation supply chains deliver on the convergence of visibility, planning, collaboration, control, and analysis. Customers continued to express the need to be vigilant.
  
• i2 has developed significant expertise in the front end sub processes. By besting SAP at Lenovo, i2 proved not only the strength of its order fulfillment to order completion, but also its ability to move into opportunity to order capture via not only its configurator but also its multi-channel capabilities. Believe it or not, the complete order management cycle on the Lenovo site runs on i2.
• ABPP provides the technology foundation for i2's future. After some extensive discussions with both Sanjiv and Pallab it became clear that i2 has a clear understanding of its role in the future of solution centric software ecosystems. I believe i2 intends to emerge in the next 3 to 5 years as a complete supply chain solutions provider with a platform that will support a wide range of deployment options, solution options, partner extensions, and professional services. This will not be an easy task to deliver, but the intention is to provide customers and partners with flexibility via the toolkit (e.g. MDM and business content library).
• Many SAP customers continue to choose i2 while Oracle customers remain hesitant. From talking to customers and system integrators, i2 continues to hold its ground and gain some momentum in the SAP install base. Key factors include user reluctance to upgrade to NetWeaver and i2's continued lead over SAP in advanced capabilities. Penetration and growth in SAP accounts parallels the experience of BI vendors Cognos and BO who have entrenched themselves with business users in "SAP only" environments. However, i2 needs to figure out how to win over Oracle customers. To date, I see Oracle customers more likely to explore hot acquisitions such as G-Log and Retek while holding on to their latest release of JD Edwards or Oracle EBS.
• i2 remains a thought leader in the industry. I often joke if i2 stopped building software it would be the supply chain consultant of choice like an Ann Grackin at ChainLink or AMR Research. The conversations I had with all levels within the company showcase their bench strength and passion. Discussions in the breakout sessions and throughout the event showed that a good majority of the best of the best were i2 customers.
  

Despite the current industry consolidation and shift to the next generation of software, I believe i2 can pursue a strategy similar to Amdocs and succeed in not only a horizontal capability but several industries with end to end solutions and services. The push to solutions selling and services revenue on a flexible platform is the first step. The real story is how much investment in R&D and innovation capabilities will i2's board allow in a post- Mike McGrath era.

(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