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Why 'SaaS-ified' Apps Fall Short

Posted by David Linthicum
Friday, November 30, 2007
11:28 AM

We've talked about the SaaS-ification of existing applications before, and it's a prime activity for many software companies as they look to reinvent their applications as SaaS offerings. Unfortunately, the results often leave users wanting more. In moving to the Web, you have to leave many of the nice, dynamic capabilities behind, and thus have a "brower-based, unsatisfying, on-demand version of a desktop application," as blogger Dave Rosenberg describes it (though he applies a more off-color term than "SaaS-ification").

We've seen these types of applications before, with the online version of Microsoft Office being the best example. In essence, someone takes an existing enterprise application, recreates it as a Web-delivered app, and in doing so, dummies it down and reduced its features. Typically, these apps are less attractive and harder to use.

Continue reading "Why 'SaaS-ified' Apps Fall Short"

Comments

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, November 29, 2007
9:07 AM

I'm told blogs are supposed to be short and sweet. So my long- winded blog on BI industry consolidation turned into, well, an article — longer, carefully considered, supporting graphs and all. While all this vendor activity fuels the gossip and speculation among analysts, journalists, and vendors, some customers have been decidedly unfazed. Does it help them fix their data quality problems? Nope. Executive level buy-in. No way. Improve the business-IT partnership. Sadly, no, here too.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
11:13 AM

It was easy to get lost in the maelstrom that was Oracle OpenWorld. With more than 45,000 visitors, it takes over San Francisco each year. Its "appreciation" parties are legendary — this year three simultaneous stages featuring Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks, and Lenny Kravits — and made it clear (as if it were necessary) that Oracle is an industry giant.

In the wake of Oracle's acquisition of Stellent, enterprise content management (ECM) was firmly on the agenda. Or rather Fusion Middleware was firmly on the agenda, and ECM was discussed as an integral part of it. The Stellent acquisition was very different from the (admittedly much larger) acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft, as they have continued as separate stand-alone business groups and products (albeit now running on the same middleware and platforms). Stellent the brand is no longer. The acquired functionality has already been repositioned and in some cases rearchitected as a set of services that coexist with other standard functions such identity management, security, integration, and BPEL.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
8:14 PM

Given the strengths of open source database management systems (DBMSes), open source seems like a natural platform for data warehousing. We've seen a number of success stories over the last few years, Travelocity, O'Reilly, FTD, and Frontier Airlines among them, but the roster of case studies is mighty thin. But I've only recently (re-)started looking — in the last couple of years, on the open-source front I've covered mostly BI (e.g., May, March) — and I hope to find many more for a report I am planning on open source (based) data warehousing (OSDW).

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
9:14 AM

The consolidation game continues apace, this time in the Business Rules solutions marketplace. I received an e-mail message from Paul Haley, the erstwhile founder and chairman of Haley Systems, one of the better-known business rules software in the US, informing me that Haley Systems had been acquired…and that, not having gone with the acquisition, he himself is now once again foot loose and fancy free ("like you, vendor neutral," as he put it).

For the record, Haley Systems was acquired by RuleBurst, which is an Australian firm with a good footprint in areas of the world that Haley Systems did not cover, so there is now another truly global player in the business rules market.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
5:08 PM

I'm getting pretty tired of the agonizing whether recent market events and trends mean the end of business intelligence as we know it.

Some of my fellow pundits are scrutinizing vendor consolidations and they're studying the impact of the emergence of new analytical approaches and application-delivery methods. Consolidation will mean a refocusing of product development for acquired vendors, that's all, not "the end of BI as a separate application" as Ephraim Schwartz, for instance, sees it. Schwartz acknowledges authoritative views that are contrary to his — "As Howard Dresner, principal at Dresner Advisory Services, says, 'For every vendor that is acquired, there are 20 emerging companies offering new approaches, technologies, and business models.'" — but dismisses them and slights the impact that Software as a Service, SaaS, has already had on BI.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
8:59 AM

Microsoft has been making noise about its free Web analytics solution since January. The company finally announced the beta of Gatineau at the end of October.

Focused primarily on those who use Redmond's AdCenter service, Gatineau will draw comparisons with Google Analytics. However, Gatineau offers some interesting differentiation, such as the ability to derive demographic data from site visitors who have signed up for a Live ID through Microsoft's Hotmail or Messenger. Microsoft claims that all this data is made anonymous before being passed to Gatineau.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
10:56 AM

Recently at cmf2007 Raimond Kempees, a developer and consultant at Radagio, gave a nice talk assessing MOSS 2007. Among other things, Raimond relayed some of the challenges he and other developers have experienced with Web Parts. It all reminded me of the love/hate relationship customers endure with portlets in the Java portal world.

On the one hand, the Web Parts framework is very attractive for plugging widgets into dashboard-type pages. In addition to what ships natively with SharePoint, you can find lots of third-party Web Parts. But their quality and safety varies substantially, and inevitably you need to extend them... and then how do you handle support? There is also perennial confusion and inconsistency about how much logic to put in the presentation tier, and how much to place in objects behind the scenes.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
10:20 AM

Has enterprise search finally reached the tipping point? Yes, seemed to be the conclusion of many of the experts at the recent Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose, CA. Of course these are people with a vested interest in believing this to be the case, but there was palpably more energy, commitment, and enthusiasm for enterprise search than in previous years. I chatted with Sue Feldman of IDC and she confirmed my feelings that something has changed, that enterprise search is entering the mainstream, and that there is no turning back.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, November 19, 2007
1:28 AM

Everyone loves SaaS, or so it seems. However, the increased use of SaaS-delivered applications creates headaches for IT operations folks. What's core to the problem is the fact that enterprises don't directly control their SaaS infrastructure, and thus, things such as outages and performance issues are largely out of their control. Indeed, the best they can do is to send e-mail messages or make phone calls. There is no server to kick, no host to reboot.

The dilemma is that while IT operations wants to continue to control all applications, including SaaS, there is little they can actually do to resolve issues. Or, is that completely true? There are ways that IT operations can manage SaaS, and do so proactively.

Posted by Mark Smith
Friday, November 16, 2007
9:51 AM

This week is Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco and it is one of the largest enterprise software conferences in the industry. But not just that their conference has taken over the city of San Francisco but that is has over 25 press releases and announcements in three days. The keynotes at the conference from Oracle and industry executives provide some good opportunity to understand the operations and direction of Oracle and also where they feel more than confident. Highlighting a lot of the hard work they have made with Oracle 11g information management platform and rationalizing of their applications. Clearly Oracle celebrating their 30th anniversary has a lot to be proud of in their rise to one of the largest software companies in the world.

Listening in to one of the keynotes by Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, Fusion Middleware of Oracle on Tuesday, he reviewed a broad range of what is happening with their technology platform. There were many positive advancements and points in the presentation of Oracle's Fusion middleware, but one point should not be left without comment.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, November 15, 2007
11:18 AM

IBM buys Cognos. SAP buys Business Objects. I agree with Neil Raden: "One big yawn."

Neil's take:

[Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos] have made substantial progress in refurbishing their products for a completely new world, but refurbishing only goes so far. The architectures can't really cut it. They need to scale, they need to be intelligent, they need to react in real-time when necessary, unattended when appropriate. They need to live on the Web.

Products like that are coming from start-ups.

Neil's analysis is spot on but calls for elaboration. Neil sees outmoded product (and process and business?) architectures as impeding innovation, for the established BI vendors and implicitly for the organizations that rely on their tools. But there's more to the picture than scalability, "intelligence" (whatever that is), real-time reaction, autonomicity, and webification. The more is imagination: openness to, and the ability to deliver, new ways of analyzing data and using analytical findings.

Posted by Nelson King
Thursday, November 15, 2007
8:58 AM

Recently, while working on my review of Adobe's development products aimed at Rich Internet Applications (RIA), it struck me that here was a vendor with a brilliant array of creative tools that appeared to be challenged to assemble appropriate backend support (especially for the enterprise) in areas such as data access, security, team development and application management. Not unlike the current situation for the enterprise in general — a Cart and Horse problem.

The horse, of course, is the pull of rich presentation media and highly interactive user interfaces. The horse is lively, interesting to watch and, in practice, leads the way. The cart is the conveyance vehicle, all the backend machinery that enables a Rich Internet Application. The cart is homely and utilitarian, but made of necessary things such as data management, security systems, and communications. The current problem is that enterprise IT, quite naturally, prefers to put the cart before the horse.

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
12:25 AM

An important event for Teradata occurred recently when it completed its spin out from its parent company, NCR. This milestone was over a year in the making and gives Teradata the ability to more independently operate as a public entity. The company also announced third-quarter revenue of $375 million, which puts it well on the way to being a $1.5 billion technology provider in 2007.

I'm sure you all know the Teradata brand and its dedicated focus on data warehousing, but the company has also been building — through acquisition, organic efforts and partnerships — a robust set of analytics solutions that span line-of-business and vertical industries. In October, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) won the Financial Performance Management Leadership Award from Ventana Research on the strength of its ability to meet deep, domain-specific customer requirements — a capability richly supported by Teradata.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, November 12, 2007
11:59 PM

Okay, I waited for the last shoe to drop. Now that IBM plans to gobble up Cognos, leaving only Microstrategy as an independent BI pure-play, and a much smaller one than Hyperion, Business Objects or Cognos, I'm ready to offer my opinion of the whole thing.

Yawn.

Who cares? All it means is that Business Intelligence software as we know it is a mature technology that finally got some attention from well-heeled giants like Oracle, SAP and IBM. Don't expect them to take these platforms and rocket them into the stratosphere. All they are after are the impressive customer lists and what we used to call in the commercial property and casualty business, gross line underwriting. One-stop-shop. Give me the whole deal.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, November 12, 2007
2:30 PM

And then there were none... as in, no major pure-play BI/Performance Management vendors nor BI-agnostic database vendors following IBM's announcement to acquire Cognos.

The acquisition came as little surprise with many industry watchers speculating already last year that IBM would acquire Cognos. In a conference call this morning, neither Cognos nor IBM executives, however, would say the timing of the acquisition had anything to do with the recent SAP-Business Objects deal, or Oracle-Hyperion, or Microsoft's release of Performance Point (is there an elephant in the room?). Instead, Steve Mills, vice president of IBM’s Software Group, said the timing centered on IBM's ability to execute such a sizable acquisition and in response to changing market dynamics with more customers wanting an end-to-end solution. Rob Ashe, CEO of Cognos, said that the acquisition was merely a matter of taking a long-standing partnership to the next level.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Monday, November 12, 2007
2:00 PM

People are acting surprised because IBM bought the last of the big BI platform vendors. I can't figure out why. The marriage of IBM and Cognos has been whispered about for several years. IBM kept saying "we don't want to be in the application business," but they also weren't in the ETL business or the content applications business either.

As a software vendor, IBM is all about enterprise infrastructure. BI as it's talked about today is mostly reporting infrastructure, and as such has become mainstream infrastructure — exactly the sort of thing IBM does.

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, November 12, 2007
1:02 PM

Today's breaking news is that IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Cognos. Just last week I called IBM stubborn for not addressing BI seriously at its annual IBM Software Group analyst summit. Well for a good reason, IBM was avoiding the BI discussion as they have been working rigorously on the details on this announcement. This finishes the years of rumors and the fall of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion into the hands of large enterprise software providers. Making the announcement today is strategically an interesting time as Oracle launches its annual OpenWorld conference and highlights its progress with the acquisition of Hyperion. IBM is smart to act now or be left out of the strategically important BI and Performance Management market.

IBM plans to add Cognos to its Information Management division, which is a precarious position to place the company as this group is not well versed on the BI market, as I have previously written. Considering that it has placed brands like Tivoli, Rational, Lotus and WebSphere at the same level, IBM is spending a lot of money to place Cognos under Information Management, which is focused on middleware technology and infrastructure. There are some great synergies between Cognos BI and IBM Information Management group where they have a great opportunity to have deeper integration, but it will impact Cognos' current agreement to license competitive Informatica data integration technology.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, November 12, 2007
10:15 AM

Mark Smith's Friday blog post was just the latest in a chorus of calls for IBM to drop the above-it-all attitude and jump into the business intelligence market. Well, the company has finally responded, announcing this morning that it will acquire Cognos for $5 billion in cash.

What gets me about IBM is that it is such a cool cucumber. Here it is, the last to act with few good choices left, yet it manages to come up with a winner, painting it as a carefully considered deal it came up with after scouring a vast array of choices.

Posted by Mark Smith
Friday, November 9, 2007
9:59 AM

This year's IBM Software Group Global Industry Analyst Summit brought the traditional annual update of the company's progress this year and its direction in the year ahead. Led by the head of the Software Group, Steve Mills, the event focused on the theme of integration from business to IT and across the software reference architecture of IBM products. This whole area is clearly a continuing challenge for most IT organizations and the technology landscape is becoming more complex. Integration is at the core of IBM's approach, and the company capitalizes on a very strong portfolio of middleware and services. With dozens of product releases this year and a lot queued up for 2008, IBM is one the software companies that you have to watch.

IBM's Software Group is very profitable and it has grown consistently, thanks in large part to more than 50 technology supplier acquisitions since 2000. These acquisitions have blended into the existing IBM software brands of Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere, Rational and Information Management, and the company continues to drive new capabilities and introduce technology innovations. IBM is clearly a very large and dominant provider of application, collaboration, data management, and middleware technologies that compete with those from large providers like HP, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and plenty others. Despite heated competition from a array of software providers large and small, IBM is still very conservative about talking up any technological advantages it may have in the market. Touting size and stability as a strength is a good start, but it would round out the company's position if executives could articulate why IBM's products and approaches are superior to those of other vendors in terms of capabilities and architecture.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
5:11 PM

I had to chuckle at Doug Henschen's blog on the confusing terminology on business intelligence and performance management. We in IT seem to use whatever term will generate the most buzz and to heck with whatever confusion ensues. "Analytics" is yet another term in which vendors use it to mean different things and we all interpret it differently.

In a recent conversation with SAS, we seemed to be talking at cross purposes. The SAS executives kept using the term "analytics" when really what they were referring to was predictive analytics. My incorrect interpretation was that they were talking about general data analysis. Given that predictive analytics is one of SAS biggest differentiators, misinterpretation is not good, kind of like a genericized trademark.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
3:27 PM

In a year when the Net is abuzz about Web 2.0, Tableau Server, out this week, qualifies as Web 0.2. But don’t get me wrong. Web 2.0 is about social media and collaboration, user-driven integration, on-demand access, and a first level of semantic search and discovery. On the back-end, Web 2.0 is about network-accessible services that enable all that stuff. Tableau Software’s first foray onto the Web is a modest step when considered in light of Web 2.0 agendas, and also in light of the very high expectations created by the company’s stand-alone Tableau Desktop application. It is not, however, a failure. Rather it shows caution, implicit care to get it (collaborative Web computing) right and not overextend and underdeliver.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
9:48 AM

I'm sure that James Taylor has almost given up on me ever writing a book review of Smart Enough Systems: I wrote a brief advance review back in April that's printed in the book, but nothing since it was released. Recently, I had a chance to finally meet James face-to-face after a couple of years of emailing back and forth. Also, James' situation has changed since the book was released: he left Fair Isaac and is now an independent, working (I think) with his co-author, Neil Raden. Neil, who also I met briefly recently, is an independent consultant and analyst who has been focused on business intelligence for quite a while; James refers to his work as "BI 2.0″ (a term that I think that I invented in my blog in early 2006). The two of them met through James' blog and started the conversation about how someone needed to write a book about this crossover area between business rules and business intelligence.

Just to get started, here's my pre-release review:

Posted by Joe Celko
Monday, November 5, 2007
7:51 AM

In many situations, auxiliary tables are faster and more appropriate than SQL with computations (a topic I address at length this week in "Celko on SQL: Auxiliary Tables vs. Declarative Coding"). To illustrate, consider a classic problem. You have a theater and a bunch of seats you wish to sell for a performance (or think of seats for an airline flight). The seats have a sequential serial number from 1 to (n) for inventory. But in the theater building and on the tickets, the seats are arranged in rows of (k) seats and referenced by the pair (row_nbr, seat_within_row_nbr). You could construct an auxiliary table like this:

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, November 2, 2007
8:56 AM

It would be interesting to know how many failed enterprise content management (ECM) projects stemmed from the wrong deployment methodology. I was pondering this after a discussion with Liz Ure recently in London. Liz is the Head of Information Strategy for the Scottish Government and she talked about the inappropriateness of methodologies that emphasize implementation, rather than change.

There are any number of methods being touted for ECM, from Agile to Prince2 through any numerous of (AA-style) "step" approaches. I have long argued that any methodology is better than no methodology, and these are all fine in their way. But to Liz's point, they all emphasize successful system deployment, with a focus on "going live."