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January 1, 2002

Beginning Of the Beginning

In this issue we renew our focus on solutions to make your company smarter, faster, and more profitable

by Justin Kestelyn

I can hardly believe it, but here I am writing a column for another January 1 issue. The speed at which 2001 passed makes me feel like we ripped a hole in the space-time continuum somewhere.

The swift pace of the clock, however, does offer some advantages: It means that we can escape the past faster than ever before (not a trivial benefit), and that we're always that much closer to a new beginning. And if ever we needed a new beginning, both in the world at large and in the IT community specifically, we need one now.

The world at large will have to wait, but fortunately for our readers, this special Editors' Choice issue reflects several new beginnings. For example, it marks the initiation of a new editorial calendar (see IntelligentEnterprise.com/pdfs/IE_ Editorial_Cal02.pdf), which we believe is highly representative of the topics that will be on your minds in the next year. Furthermore, it contains an updated, refreshed version of our traditional January 1 feature — The Dozen (see the 2001 version at Intelligent Enterprise.com/010101/ dozen) — that we have newly adapted to the specific needs of IT and business managers in intelligent enterprises.

Whereas past versions of the Dozen professed to identify the "most influential" solutions providers in IT — a rather broad and subjective mission, in the new and improved version — we intend to recognize those vendors that are most successfully enabling intelligent enterprises today. In other words, we seek to acknowledge companies that in some fashion are helping their customers execute those ongoing business process and technology transformations that will help make them smarter, faster, and more profitable. Given the competitive climate, this mission is more timely and topical than the previous one, as well as more focused on real-world customer problems.

I'll maintain your suspense and keep editorial director David Stodder's selections to myself for now.

PRIME MOVERS

As is customary, we have complemented the "main" Dozen with a list of Companies to Watch this year. In accordance with the new mission I described, these selections include solutions providers that we believe will make increasingly important contributions to intelligent enterprises in 2002 in the areas of intelligence, integration, infrastructure, and collaborative commerce. In that sense, these companies — 48 in all — are all potential candidates for the main Dozen in 2003.

Here are some examples:

In the intelligence category, we recognize OutlookSoft Corp. — a provider of Web-enabled analytic applications founded by Hyperion Solutions veterans Craig Schiff and Charles Cho in 1999 — as a company that will make significant contributions to its customers in the area of business performance management. For a company with such a short track record, OutlookSoft is attracting plenty of attention for its uniquely collaborative approach to financial planning and modeling.
Sybase, that old RDBMS stalwart, is successfully recreating itself as a provider of information integration solutions that span well-regarded application server (EAServer), application integration (New Era of Networks assets via acquisition), and portal (Sybase Enterprise Portal) technologies. Sybase can now safely claim to have busted out of the RDBMS box after several years of effort.
As long as we're on the subject of "creative destruction," how about a hand for Borland Software Corp. (formerly Inprise Corp., and before that, Borland version 1.0)? Evergreen app-dev tools such as Delphi, JBuilder, and Borland C++ Builder have kept the company viable through numerous reorganizations by consistently helping development teams create, deploy, and maintain strategic application infrastructure within project guidelines.

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WHAT'S YOUR VIEW?

As usual, we welcome your feedback about our choices; you may find some of them surprising, and others not surprising enough. Drop us a line at iemagazine@cmp.com with your personal favorites. Happy New Year!