Pattern Finder

Mike Gotta's Take on Cisco's UC Analyst Day

Mike Gotta has a post on the Burton Group CCS Blog about a recent Cisco Unified Communications Analyst Day. It's an interesting counterpoint to what Microsoft will be announcing today.

His overall impressions:

• Cisco is serious about collaboration and becoming a significant and strategic player in the collaboration market.
• Cisco is focusing on synchronous collaboration and social computing as its point-of-entry into the collaboration space (versus trying to establish itself first in more traditional areas associated such as e-mail, calendar/scheduling, discussion forums, etc.).
• Cisco might be underestimating the need for it to have some storyline around content -- very little discussion during the session (none that I can actually recall). Convergence of ECM with collaboration parallels the convergence of communications with collaboration.
• WebEx Connect and the WebEx Media Tone Network represent a key platform play that parallels what Microsoft and Google are doing re: SaaS.

Cisco's coming at the content management space from the side and its ability to execute make it a long-term threat within the content and collaboration space. In short, Cisco is now a company to watch in this market, and Mike's post is a good primer on the possibilities.

Travel Tidbits

I'm on a two-day consulting trip on the West Coast at the moment, and last night I realized it was panning out to be somewhat typical, so I thought I'd pass along this view of analyst life.

Over the years, between being a developer, a product manager, and an industry analyst, I've been to a wide variety of places, such as Australia (twice), London (total time spent there, probably four months), Toronto, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Portland (OR), New York, Dallas, Minneapolis, and Chicago, to list a few. Within the next several months I will travel to Barcelona, Boca Raton, and Orlando.

While some view this as romantic and exciting, it's a combination of being interesting and wearing. To use this trip as an example:

Well, At Least I Didn't Forget My Backpack: As I was sitting in Logan's Terminal B yesterday morning I saw a well-known industry analyst having breakfast at a cafe about to head to a conference in Las Vegas. I mulled over walking over and saying hello--we've attended several events together in the past--when all of a sudden this frantic look came into her eyes. Apparently, her backpack was missing and she spent a minute looking around wildly until she realized she'd left it at the Hudson News store. (There'd been several announcements over the loudspeaker about a backpack left there, but apparently they didn't register.) At that point, I figured I'd let her heart rate get back to normal rather than say hello; I also made a note to myself to not do that.

Alaska Airlines--Not Bad: This was the first time I'd taken Alaska Airlines, and it was pretty good. Probably and inch more legroom than I'm used to on American, and leather seats. While the flight attendants' work ethic was nowhere near that of jetBlue, they were pleasant.

Uh, I Can't Get in My Room and I Need Shampoo: When I checked into my hotel they gave me room cards that didn't work. The reader had clearly lost its juice: it didn't give me a red or green light. However, I had to schlep about an eighth of a mile twice to find out they didn't work before I could convince the front desk to give me a different room. Then, once I got in my room, I found out that the next morning my hair would be smooth and silky but not necessarily clean: I had two vials of conditioner but no shampoo.

So there you have it: a day in the life of a traveling analyst.

Google Search Appliance 5.0 Released; Headroom Increased

Google has released version 5 of its Google Search Appliance (with a nod to the product's fifth anniversary via a blogpost by Matthew Glotzbach, Program Management Director for Google's Enterprise division).

Among the new features that Google lists are:

• Content Connector Framework: A framework that developers can use to index documents stored in repositories. Google supplies pre-built connectors for Microsoft SharePoint, IBM FileNet, OpenText LiveLink, and EMC Documentum, while partners supply connectors for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, Interwoven, Hummingbird (now part of Open Text), and others. However, just because you can access documents within a repository doesn't necessarily mean you can index them. For example, while the Search Appliance can index Microsoft Office documents stored in binary format (.doc, .xls, .ppt), it cannot yet Microsoft Office documents stored in XML format (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx: those that follow the Ecma International OOXML standard). This capability is planned for the future: Google is currently saying early in Q1 2008.
• SAML Bridge and SAML SPI Enhancements: Making it easier to integrate the Search Appliance with Windows Integrated Authentication.
• Date Biasing: Allowing administrators to twirl knobs in the background so older documents are ranked lower.
• Parametric Search: Letting users filter results by attributes such as price, file type, and size (which filters can be used depends on the metadata included with the content).

Oracle Announces GA of Universal Records Management 3.2

Today Oracle announced general availability of Oracle Universal Records Management 10g Release 3. This is one of the products they inherited when they acquired Stellent, and I  liked the product then. While other content management vendors were concentrating on archiving only the content they created, Stellent was moving to pull in a wide variety of content (hence the "Universal" in the product name).

Oracle is continuing the tradition. One of the press releases (sent to me by Oracle but not yet on the site) lists the partners that are all integrating with the software in one way or another: Autonomy ZANTAZ, Iron Mountain, Jordan Lawrence, Mimosa Systems, Symantec, and Wipro Technologies. ZANTAZ and Symantec, both offer e-mail archiving solutions that in the past were often added to, rather than integrated with, records management solutions from content management companies. In fact, this balkanization of records management systems has been one of the huge hurdles in this space. As I mentioned in last year's report on electronic records management (Electronic Records Management: From Digital Dumpster Diving to Thoughtful Triage), there have historically been five different segments:

• Backup/archiving/ILM
• Messaging
• Content management
• Electronic discovery
• Policy management

Each one of these has its own set of vendors, its own set of buyers, and its own set of features. This siloed way of dealing with records management has been a huge frustration to enterprises, which want to enter their policies in one place and have their myriad of systems follow these instructions. (Known as the "magic happens" feature.) Currently, enterprises have to re-enter the same policies into multiple systems. This is getting better--for example, Symantec's Enterprise Vault handles e-mail, instant messaging, SharePoint, and a number of other content types. Happily, Oracle also is also working towards the "magic happens" feature.

Several other items of note in the announcement. First, Oracle is including a license for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search within the Universal Records Management product. A nice way to seed the market. Second, Oracle is being up front with pricing. After talking to a number of vendors over the past month who refused to divulge pricing--Microsoft's announcement of its SaaS-based Office initiatives is one example--it was a stunner to find a vendor being so up front about costs:

Oracle Universal Records Management is available immediately and is priced at $100,000 per processor and $10,000 per processor for agents.

Oracle Universal Records Management is also sold as a part of the Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite, which bundles Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Imaging and Process Management, and Oracle Universal Records Management at $150,000 per processor.

I applaud this transparency. While I'm sure customers can negotiate a better price based on purchase volumes and so on, this at least gives folks a ballpark figure. At the very least, enterprises want to know whether they should even consider a certain product, and the vendor stating the price up front helps them make at least one cut without a lot of rigmarole.

Vendor Oops #2: Not Giving Me Contact Info

About a quarter of the time, I have a vendor briefing and I never get any contact information from the people I talk to. It's not a huge deal, because if I have a later question I can always go to the vendor web site and call the main phone number or send an e-mail to [email protected], but it's not optimal.

First, it's an extra step or two, so if I have a general question that several vendors can answer I'm inclined to call someone whose number I have. Second--a somewhat embarrassing admission--I don't always know who I talked to. At the briefing, we get on the phone--sometimes several people are on cellphones without great reception--and the PR person says, "And here is Sam Xyzertizhw to talk about WhizBang's great new product." No title is offered, I'm not quite sure if I got the name right, and it turns out I didn't when I try to follow up: "May I please speak to Sam Xyzertizhw?" "We don't have anyone by that name here." "OK, how about a Sam in Marketing?" "No, I'm sorry, sir." "Hmm, OK, thanks, for your help."

PR folks often don't give that information out because they want to be the conduit between the analyst and their client. By interjecting themselves in the middle, they can prove their worth: "I scheduled six analyst briefings and handled four analyst calls this month." However, the turnover in PR firms is notorious, both in terms of personnel and clients, so often the PR person you talked to six months ago is either gone or no longer handles the vendor you talked to.

So, if you're a vendor and you want to make it easy for an analyst you briefed to call you, put your name and contact info in the presentation and then make sure you send me the  presentation. It's a simple thing, but a lot of vendors don't do it. Be one who does.

IBM Lotus Symphony Performance Tests

I put up a post last week about IBM's new Lotus Notes Symphony office software suite, saying that based on an article in PC World, it seemed to be sloow in loading and a significant consumer of system resources. In short, the free software had some hidden costs. Shazaam, I got a ping from IBM Analyst Relations along the lines of, mmm, a few facts are not correct and how about a briefing on the product?

Fair enough, I thought. I'm still waiting for that to occur. But in the meantime, I figured I'd download the software and try it out myself, so I could ask some intelligent questions during the briefing. At a summary level, here's what I found, when running the software on a Pentium 4 with 2 GB of memory:

• On average, an IBM Lotus Notes Symphony app (Beta 1) takes three to four times as long to load as the comparable Microsoft Office 2003 product (with some significant outliers: e.g., 15 and 33 times as long).
• An IBM Lotus Notes Symphony app (Beta 1) consumes more CPU at load time than the comparable Microsoft Office 2003 product.
• An IBM Lotus Notes Symphony app (Beta 1) consumes three to five times more memory than the comparable Microsoft Office 2003 product.

Note: I tested Symphony against Office 2003 because (1) that's what I have loaded on my desktop PC and (2) that's what the majority of information workers are currently using. Here are the specifics.

FT: Free for Casual Users; Fee for Heads Down Users

According to a story in The New York Times, the Financial Times "as of mid-October will allow users to get up to 30 articles a month for free, said John Ridding, chief executive of the newspaper. Anyone who wants to view more online material will have to subscribe to the site."

This is a very interesting subscription model. In the past, media sites have gone with the "all or nothing" route: either the content is free (The Washington Post) or it's available for a fee (The Wall Street Journal). The Financial Times, with its new pricing, is discriminating between heads down and casual users.

This is a usage model that we've seen for years in software. For example, business intelligence vendors  typically have an expert client workbench and a casual user viewer. The expert user version is a fat client, costs more, and has deep functionality; the casual user version is browser-based, costs less (sometimes free), and has basic functionality. These vendors realized that making a casual user pay the same fee as a heads down analyst just wasn't going to fly. Maybe we're finally seeing the same attitude in the online content space.

Book: "Peripheral Vision"

Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company, talks about how to watch the periphery so you aren't blindsided by changes in customer behavior or a new competitor in an adjacent market. The authors are George Day (Wharton bio;  Professor of Marketing and Codirector of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at Wharton) and Paul Schoemaker (Wharton bio; Research Director at the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at Wharton and Chairman of Decision Strategies International).

As an industry analyst, figuring out the coming changes in the market is what the job is all about. Starting out as an analyst almost ten years ago, I got lucky: when I worked at Aberdeen Group, I covered both the business intelligence and content management markets. Since they both deal with information, a trend in one market--not surprisingly--often happens slightly later in the other. Most analysts never see the correlation, because they're forced to specialize in one market or the other. Because I covered both, I could see the larger pattern, and made accurate prognostications that stunned vendors in the disrupted market: they never saw it coming. I've had multiple vendors and enterprises say to me, "What you predicted is uncanny. How did you know that?" If they read this book they'd know the answer. (It also explains why I keep my hand in on the BI space, even though I no longer officially cover it at Burton Group.)

The Other Shoe Has Dropped: Microsoft Announces Microsoft Online

The other shoe has dropped. After hinting for about a year that it had a software and SaaS strategy, Microsoft today officially took the wraps off, issuing a press release. The product is called Microsoft Online, a SaaS-based set of solutions that were previously available only as software:

• Microsoft Communications Online (SaaS version of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007)
• Microsoft Exchange Online (SaaS version of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007)
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Online (SaaS version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Microsoft considers this IT-centric set of solutions different from its Live solutions, which are not IT-centric (i.e., end user or SMB-focused): Windows Live, Office Live, Dynamics Live CRM, MSN, Windows Live ID, and Xbox Live. Furthermore, Microsoft Online is targeted at the high end: companies with more than 5,000 employees. With Office Live targeted at businesses with 10 or fewer employees and Microsoft Online targeted at businesses with more than 5,000 employees, there's a pretty big gap in the middle. However, Microsoft (in the form of Jeff Raikes) hinted that the company will go after mid-sized businesses in the long run. My take is that  Microsoft has decided that after it's figured out how to serve both extremes of the market, handling the middle part will be a piece of cake.

Also announced are Microsoft Office Live Workspace, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live (SaaS version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM), and Exchange Labs (R&D testing of messaging and unified communication). Office Live Workspace is a free collaboration workspace. As the beta signup states, "Store 1000+ Microsoft Office documents in one place; share files—you control who can view and edit; works with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook."

This is a huge announcement, with major ramifications in the market. Here are the "net it out" notes I jotted down after the pre-briefing by Raikes on September 27th:

Adobe Gets Into Word Processing and More, Buys Virtual Ubiquity

Adobe announced today that is was buying Virtual Ubiquity, a firm out of Waltham, MA that has written a word processor (Buzzword) built in Flex and running in Flash. I saw a demo of it a number of months ago and it's pretty nice. However, I'm not sure the world needs another word processor--the impression that anyone who reads just the first paragraph would walk away with.

You have to read a bit farther into the announcement to figure out that it's a slightly different animal than say, Microsoft Word:

The application also will run on Adobe® AIR™, offering users a hybrid online/offline experience and the ability to work with both hosted and local documents. The powerful collaboration capabilities in Buzzword enable multiple authors to edit and comment on documents from anywhere, at anytime, while document creators can set permissions that virtually eliminate version control chaos. For more information on the acquisition and access to Buzzword beta software, please visit http://www.adobe.com/go/buzzwordfaq .

Hiding further down, in the sixth paragraph of the press release, is Adobe's announcement and description of a file-sharing service:

Adobe also made available today a free online document sharing service, codenamed “Share.” Users simply select the documents they want to share, send a message to recipients, and set whether the files will be publicly accessible or restricted. Built with Adobe Flex technology, the rich interface provides a smooth experience, integrating simple workflows to upload and share documents with high quality online previews to speed up finding the right document. Additionally, the beta will include a set of REST APIs to let developers create mash-ups with their applications, including storing and accessing files, as well as creating thumbnails and Flash-based previews of documents. People can learn more about the service and sign-up for access at http://www.adobe.com/go/labs_share.

In short, Adobe has announced it will offer a service that will compare favorably with the word processing functionality of Google Apps, Premier Edition. Of course, Adobe doesn't have the buzz of Google, and Adobe's announcement will probably get lost in all the headlines about Microsoft's announcement of Microsoft Online. The phrase, "A voice crying in the wilderness" comes to mind....