By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 2nd February 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Nuance is a company with a plethora of products that cover the gamut of voice recognition, document capture and print management. Nuance has largely grown through acquisition (about 50 in the last ten years) so it is probably better known by its product names which include established brands such as PaperPort (desktop productivity), OmniPage (OCR), Dragon Dictate (voice recognition), eCopy (document capture and workflow) and Equitrac (print management) – its most recent acquisition. Overall, Nuance’s 2011 revenue reached $1.318 billion in 2011 with 2012 sales expected to reach $1.6 billion.  Boosted by its eCopy and Equitrac acquisitions, its imaging division growth has been strong, revenue reaching $177m in 2011 and expected to exceed $200m in 2012.

At its first European analyst event in London, Nuance discussed its strategic priorities for 2012, which include integration of its scan and print products and expansion of mobile and cloud delivery platforms. Nuance’s goal is to become the “MFP software standard” through delivering integrated cross-platform document capture and print management products – eCopy and Equitrac. Today, both products are well established, and Equitrac is already widely used to control and monitor print usage and costs across many verticals, with a particularly strong presence in the legal market – Nuance estimates that, globally, over 3,000 law firms use Equitrac. Its strong MFP and printer partner alliances mean Equitrac has long been used by major printer and copier OEMs such as HP, Ricoh and Xerox to provide enhanced multivendor print management capabilities for tracking, monitoring and reporting on scan, copy and print usage to their managed print services (MPS) customers.

This broadens the already strong OEM relationships on the eCopy side, including Canon, Konica Minolta and others.  With Equitrac, eCopy and its desktop products, Nuance has business relationships with nearly all major MFP, printer and scanner manufacturers worldwide.

Capturing the MPS opportunity
Nuance sees MPS as a key driver for its growth in the coming year and views the Equitrac and Nuance document imaging solutions as important components of helping MPS providers to succeed. Indeed there is rapid adoption - Quocirca research shows that around 45% of large corporates now have some form of MPS as they seek to reduce the cost and complexity of operating previously unmanaged printer fleets, typically characterised by a patchwork of devices from different manufacturers, with different consumables, paper, supplier and service requirements. Few organisations have the tools to track and monitor usage leading to spiralling print costs – both financial and environmental. Security is also an issue as all too often documents are left in output trays exposed to prying eyes.

MPS addresses these issues through three major phases – assessment, optimisation and on-going continuous management. Nuance’s Equitrac products have a strong part to play in all phases, helping organisations to not only reduce print wastage through tracking and reporting, but also enhance security, promote user mobility and reduce environmental impact. Key to this is Equitrac’s “Follow-You” or pull-printing which releases documents only upon user authentication – through either user PIN or smart card authentication. The results are compelling - Liverpool John Moores University discussed how they had saved £100,000 and reduced page volumes by 4.5 million per year through implementing Equitrac.

Nuance is also looking to address the largely untapped opportunity for MPS in the SMB market, via the reseller channel. Many resellers lack the resources or skills to deliver their own MPS, and are looking for a low-cost approach based on 3rd party platforms. Nuance intends to participate in this market which is seeing the emergence of cloud-based MPS offerings from vendors such as HP and Xerox. To capitalize on the emergence of cloud-based technologies and to support its partners’ Managed Services initiatives, Nuance will continue to expand its product portfolio (print management, capture and OCR) from on-premise deployments to off-premise (cloud) models. This will provide a set of cloud-based print management, document capture and OCR technology services to partners who wish to include them as part of their own managed services offerings. 

With the likes of HP and Xerox already having established cloud MPS platforms, Quocirca believes that Nuance will need to get these solutions to market quickly, particularly if it wishes to target the emerging ecosystem of independent MPS providers who will be looking for multivendor supported cloud-based services.

Quocirca believes that Nuance has product breadth, technical resources and channel reach to create a compelling set of enterprise cloud services around its eCopy and Equitrac products. However, given that both eCopy and Equitrac platforms have been gained through acquisition, Nuance still has some work to integrate them.

Talking to printers?
Given its heritage in speech recognition consumer technology, Nuance is uniquely positioned to apply this technology to enhance the printer and MFP user experience. The printer industry is far from immune from IT consumerisation, which continues to influence user expectations in the workplace. Whilst employees are used to the convenience, elegance and usability of tablets and smartphones, MFPs, in comparison, are in danger of becoming the elephant in the room.

Whilst most people are familiar with how to press print or copy, few users bother navigating complex nested menus to access finishing options or scan features. Businesses may therefore miss opportunities to minimise paper wastage through using features as duplex or booklet printing instead of single side printing. 

One technology that could improve the use of MFPs is voice recognition. Nuance has long been a leader in this field, and quietly provides back-end voice recognition functionality for Apple’s Siri. Could we in the future be telling our printers to print and staple 5 copies of a document – or scan and document and email it to a colleague? Yes - according to Nuance, the technology is already here to make it possible. It remains to be seen whether hardware vendors will embrace this opportunity to bring printers and MFPs into the 21st century.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research Posted: 28th November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

There are many words now being written, especially in marketing circles, about the "gamification" of BPM and process improvement. However, there appears to be little consensus on what it might be and what it might mean.

The linkage of game theory with process technology has been occurring for some time. However the most successful company in the space historically did not make a lot of noise about it. Alan Trefeler of Pegasystems is a chess master and has been using the gaming principles of chess as the core of the company's software for many years. While TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadive believes that in applying the principles of how great game players succeed to business will provide greater competitive advantage.

As someone who has been using scenario and role play based training for some years it is interesting to see how the tide is turning. It used to be that people laughed or, worse still, resisted the idea that you were going to encourage their people to play games in order to learn. Now it seems that teaching and learning via games is highly fashionable.

Singularity, BizzDesign and 21apps all make use of and promote the idea of game play in order to extract requirements and motivate people for change in the process arena. In the case of the first two their focus is on ensuring that their customers deliver better applications faster. As we know, any vendor needs happy referenceable customers and ensuring that the systems built with their technology are more effective is important to Singularity and BizzDesign. Both of these companies use structured role/scenario play to speed up leaning and enable people to quickly discover problems for themselves.

My impression is that, while the structure is extremely effective as a learning and discovery tool, the challenge is that people may not always follow through with buying your technology afterwards.

In the case of 21apps it is more a case of using games as tools, so continuing to use traditional techniques like SWOT analysis or brainstorming, but using game ideas to make the sessions more effective.

Two recent books are driving much of the current interest, "Gamestorming" by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo and "Innovation Games" by Luke Hohmann. Both books are packed with ideas and games to help you in all sorts of different situations. Luke Hohmann also has his own web site where you can play many of the games online.

The rationale for playing games is grounded in good learning theory. We learn and retain information faster when playing. Cast your mind back to when you were 4 or 5 years old and think of the games you used to play, either on your own or with your friends. It might be that you were like me at that age and loved maths! Well actually I loved the games the teacher played and found that they helped me learn maths. At that age I found maths easy and fun - all because of the games we played. In my case, wind the clock forward 8 years to a bigger school where there were lectures and stern teachers and, surprise, surprise, I quickly learned to hate maths! And my skills failed to live up to the teacher's ideas of what they could or should be - how I wished they understood learning and games theory then. Your specific experiences will be different, but I suspect if you think hard enough you will find similar instances in your own past.

As an organisation looking to gain or build consensus, capture requirements, generate ideas, overcome resistance or any one of a hundred other things, the use of games via a skilled facilitator will speed up your results, increase motivation and overcome challenges. If you are not already applying games as a part of your process workshops then you are definitely missing an opportunity.

It is not all upside though; much role and game play success is down to the interactions among people and the dynamics of the group and this is an area of worry when it comes to vendors and tools.

There are online games, such as IBM's Innov8 and others, that make use of interactive worlds like Second Life. Their biggest appeal will always be to those who might normally play computer games, especially in an online community. This, for me, brings a high risk, for these situations might provide realistic business and process scenarios for us to work on, but fail to provide a great deal of real world interaction among people, thus diminishing some of the potential return.

In summary, all businesses should be looking at the latest developments in games and the application of games to learning. In order to leverage the techniques you will need to access or train good facilitators, measure success by the outcomes and not by the bulleted "you will learn lists", and be prepared for you and your teams to discover things about themselves and their work that they may not have ever thought of.

Lastly, do not be seduced by technology. The use of games theory, as applied by people like Trefler and Ranadive, has sound roots. They are helping to create systems that work more like we, as people, do. Others who take games and simply computerise them are not leveraging the underlying theory benefits and may, in fact, also destroy some of the interaction benefits they purport to support.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 25th November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Nearly every enterprise – including commercial businesses, educational institutions and government organisations – relies on printing to support essential business processes, whether it is back-office operations such as accounting or payroll or front-office activities such as sales and marketing.

Regardless of how dependent an organisation is on printing, IT departments struggle with similar management challenges: providing reliable print services that meet organisational expectations while containing operational costs.

Too often, organisations own a broad range of print, copier, scanner and fax equipment, often from different vendors, requiring different software, consumables and supplies. Devices may often be outdated and inefficient, and few organisations know how many assets they have, how they are being used, and how much it costs to own, maintain and operate them.

This makes it increasingly difficult to optimise efficiency and control costs, and creates a huge IT and administration headache. Organisations facing staff shortages or lacking the correct technology expertise do not have the resources and skills to keep on top of print management issues, leaving them exposed to spiralling print costs, reduced productivity and increased risk due to unprotected devices.

This has prompted many businesses to move to a managed print service (MPS) to ensure more efficient and effective print infrastructure operation and management, from the office to the print room.

A managed print environment can deliver strategic business advantage, supporting cost reduction imperatives and environmental demands along with improved compliance and reduced risk. Today, the strongest uptake of MPS has been among large enterprises (1000+ employees). Our recent research suggests that half of European large enterprises have implemented or are piloting MPS.

The emergence of independent MPS providers that offer vendor-agnostic, best-of-breed technology, software and services is promising to expand the penetration of MPS beyond the exclusive domain of large enterprises.

This channel provides an important role in delivering impartial assessment services and unbiased MPS recommendations. Services such as multivendor break-fix, support and supplies replenishment enable organisations to protect existing hardware investments rather than moving immediately to a standardised print environment.

By retaining the flexibility to add devices from multiple vendors, independent MPS providers can innovate with the latest technology and introduce new capabilities independently of any single incumbent printer or copier supplier.

While hardware vendors will have a vested interest in moving the customer to a standardised environment, most of the major MPS vendors are able to support and manage a multivendor environment at the initial stages of an MPS engagement, sweating the assets as needed.

Not many organisations operate a standardised fleet at the outset. It is therefore vital to select an MPS provider that can provide an impartial assessment of the print environment.

However, if an organisation is planning to move to a standardised environment, a hardware-centric MPS may be the best approach. This can be supplied by a hardware vendor, SI or independent MPS provider. Many hardware vendors will use channel partners to deliver MPS midmarket.

Vendor-neutral providers can often negotiate the best prices on equipment and supplies, delivering quality at lower cost.

It is in the interest of an independent MPS provider to offer the right device for the purpose, regardless of brand. While a single-vendor strategy forces an enterprise to settle for a single vendor's offer for each area of the enterprise, a multivendor strategy enables a true best-of-breed approach across the organisation.

Pricing for traditional MPS contracts is often based on minimum volumes. We have found that is the top inhibitor of MPS adoption. Independent MPS providers often use different pricing models such as pay-per-print, so customers do not pay for pages they have not printed.

Although hardware vendors have been the predominant MPS suppliers for decades, the market is at a tipping point, evolving to encompass a wider range of providers. Independent firms should take advantage, particularly if they have the resources and infrastructure to design and deploy MPS.

This window of opportunity is limited, though: the technology that enables independent MPS providers to move up the MPS stack is also available to competitors such as SIs, managed services providers and hardware vendors, which are using the same or similar technology to move down the stack.

As MPS providers look to gain further mid-market traction, we expect further consolidation in the market. Specifically, we expect hardware vendors to acquire more independent providers to strengthen their multivendor MPS delivery and service capabilities. A report is here.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Some of you may have read my recent blog posting on Progress OpenEdge version 11; the company's 4GL application development environment. I was very interested to know more as I am a firm believer in the need of ERP applications to embrace BPM as a means to assist in making the ERP solutions more agile and flexible to meet the current business requirements. Of course there is also a need to make these applications more mobile as well move to a service-based architecture so reduce costs. So I was interested to see what Progress were delivering to their business partners with this new release.

Understanding OpenEdge

Progress has positioned OpenEdge as "The complete development platform to rapidly build business process-enabled applications for secure, reliable deployment across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud." They have been very successful creating over 1500 Progress business partners who have built over 5000 applications in 150 countries with the platform. These ASPs and ISVs use Progress Software's products to build and deliver packaged software applications. These applications are currently under active development and generate more than $5 billion annually. Progress Software applications are used by more than 2 million people worldwide, second only to SAP. So we are dealing with a major ERP infrastructure.

For those of you not familiar with OpenEdge, you will want to understand what the components are in the product architecture, so I will provide just a short piece to whet your appetite. For those of you who already know the product please skip to next section.

OpenEdge platform was first announced by Progress in 2001. It is built on two core components: the Progress RDBMS and DataServers and the Progress AppServer. The DataServers provide developers with an alternative to Progress's own database, giving access through ODBC to other DBMS products such as Oracle. Microsoft SQL Server or IBM DB2/400. Figure 1 shows the major software components in the architecture.

Figure 1: OpenEdge V11 Architecture (Source: Process Software)

Other parts of the platform include:

• OpenEdge Studio automates much of the work in creating user interfaces and business components with visual tools included in the AppBuilder. The AppBuilder is a central workbench providing visual tools for defining objects, laying out interfaces, and linking data.
• WebSpeed Workshop is an integrated suite of development tools for building ITP (Internet Transaction Processing) applications that run on the WebSpeed Transaction Server component of the OpenEdge Application Server.
• Roundtable TSMS delivers integrated Software Configuration Management (SCM) to Progress OpenEdge development. Roundtable provides a complete solution that integrates task management, version control, impact analysis, smart compilation, release control, and schema management.
• OpenEdge Translation Manager and Visual Translator provides tools for preparing and delivering files, translating the application objects themselves, and integrating the applications back into the original source code to support multilingual application.

Strategy

What drives Progress Software's strategy and product decisions? Progress told me that they listen closely to their customers and partners, while looking into and researching the market and industry trends. Current trends are that businesses need to change rapidly to take advantage of emerging business models (like SaaS) to integrate applications and functionality, both within the four walls of the enterprise and within the extended enterprise of suppliers, partners, and customers.

In its SaaS technology delivery, Progress Software has identified the following seven key success factors:

• Multi-tenancy: the ease of going from 1 to N on-demand customers (tenants).
• Information security and compliance: ensuring that data and applications are accessed only by those who need to know.
• UI flexibility: being able to easily use the UI technologies that meet the needs of the customer.
  
  
  Figure 2: OpenEdge UI Strategy (Source: Progress Software)

• Personalization: ensuring that the application looks exactly as the tenant and end-user want.
• Integration: the ability to easily integrate with any other application by supporting all relevant standards
• Operational excellence: being always available with the ability to scale to any size.
• Productivity: a highly productive environment focused on a versatile platform and industry best practices.

Another key to Progress' strategy is their channel activity with partners and their focus on solution selling. The market in 2011 effected Progress's financial results for the 3rd quarter in September last year, when Richard D. Reidy, president and chief executive officer of Progress Software, said: "With our focus on solution selling, delays in closing larger deals have a material impact on our quarterly results. Total revenue grew in the Application Development Platforms (ADP) segment due to continued strong performance in our application partner and OEM channels. "

Role of Partners

The Progress Software Partner Program provides support to their partners, ensuring that they are fully trained and certified on Progress Software's solutions in order to meet the requirements of customers. The program provides materials to enable partners to market, sell, implement, and support Progress solutions. These materials are made available through the Progress partner portal, Web-based training, as well as custom instructor-led training. There is a history of working together on joint sales opportunities.

So Partners play an important role in Progress's revenue stream. The OpenEdge Platform provides partners with a versatile development environment to develop applications solutions both quickly and to quality.

Issues identified

The requirement from business organisations is for flexible and agile solutions that can be delivered quickly. Organisations are looking to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by driving down the cost of deliver and deployment of applications with in addition a reduction in the cost of customization. However it is not just TCO that is being looked for but also a reduction in time-to-market (TTM) so as to be more responsive to changes in user and market needs; this requires faster application deployment. Progress stated at a recent partner conference that, "Where business applications are responsive to changing business conditions and customer interactions - the moment they occur there is an increase in revenue, profit is maximised and losses are minimised,"

Over time what has happened in application development is a process to simplify the writing to enable maintenance to be able to be performed more quickly. Firstly we saw the introduction of DBMS technology to "simplify "the way we retrieved and maintained data. The next move, which started in the 80's but really got going through the late 90's and 2000's was to remove the business process from the code through the use of BPMS technology. In conjunction with this has come the need to remove the UI code as the proliferation of different devices has expanded and so was born the concepts of "portals", which also introduced the first aspects of personalisation of applications to how business users actually worked. Another development has been to look at removing the business rules that carry the decisions that need to be automated through the use of BRMS technology (If the reader wants to know more about BPMS and BRMS please look at the Market Reviews produced by Bloor over the last years.) During the last 20 years we have also seen the acceptance of organisations basing their IT strategy around a service-oriented architecture (SOA)

So what developers of applications need now is a common toolset that will allow them to exploit all of these developments from a single entry point. The toolset also therefore has to exploit more standards - although most of them are based on XML!

Progress Software's Response

Progress has stated that, "Regardless of the size or industry, BPM is at the core of every responsive business and modern IT infrastructure." They see BPM as providing the following:

• Visibility - through the use of graphical modelling tools business processes can be captured in a way that all business users can "see" how the business operates;
• Agility - As the processes are modelled, not coded, changes to requirements can be made faster than with traditional applications;
• Improved Processes - Processes can be automatically monitored to identify areas for improvement
• Leverage Existing Investment - Avoiding "rip and replace" projects by modernizing existing business applications to take advantage of workflow and new BPM capabilities.

The strategy for OpenEdge was summarised by Matt Cicciari, Progress Software's Product Marketing Manager for OpenEdge, as based around 4 precepts:

1. Business Process Management (BPM) to provide a business user with the ability to assimilate the business process based on assumptions as to the frequency of the process execution and resources required to execute different steps of the process, and it will also automatically generate comprehensive documentation of the process.
2. Cloud deployment to provide a way of better servicing business' requirements by providing applications as a service that leverage elasticity thus reducing the TCO and TTM.
3. Simplifying development and deployment to cater for move towards a personal computing environment where business users are increasingly mobile and using devices of their choice to access business applications.
4. Patent -pending multi-tenancy built directly into the database to physically separate sensitive data and support growth for SaaS business models, especially in the Cloud.

Savvion acquisition

At the beginning of 2010, Progress acquired Savvion. I wrote an article on this (BPMS Market consolidation continues: Progress buys Savvion). Richard D. Reidy, president and chief executive officer, Progress Software said at the time: "We believe that achieving operational responsiveness has become a business imperative, enabling business to achieve the highest level of operational performance. Our acquisition of Savvion enhances our goal to provide unprecedented business visibility, responsiveness and business process improvement, coupled with the highest degree of data integrity and integration."

OpenEdge BPM

With the announcement of OpenEdge v11, Progress has started the process of merging seamlessly the Savvion BPMS platform with the OpenEdge Development platform. What does this mean? Well when v11 goes to general release at the end of this year, the OpenEdge and Savvion development environments will be merged to be one seamless toolset. Thus allowing an application developer to model and define the business process and link the process steps defined to different programs that he/she may have defined using Open Edge's Eclipse environment. Cicciari told me that in 2012, Progress plans to complete the merger of the 2 products by merging the run time environments

Multi-tenancy

OpenEdge v11 also introduces support for multi-tenancy, the real key to delivering a platform to support effective cloud computing. Progress has implemented support with physical separation occurring within database, rather than using virtual technology. Tenant authentication is required for data access. Additional tenant aware features include auditing and transparent data encryption, and support for groups. Progress provides powerful back-end administrative tools like a web-based DBA console to streamline tenant provisioning within the application. Additionally, ISVs can take advantage of new APIs that enable the application to provision new tenants "on-the-fly" to support dynamic businesses.

Arcade

Progress Software describes Arcade is a Cloud deployment platform. The Arcade portal environment provides access to an online Cloud community to assist partners and customers to test, demo and deploy SaaS and Cloud-enabled business applications. It also provides on-demand, Cloud-based access to Progress products, allowing a user to learn about the capabilities and benefits offered by these products. Arcade's focus is on public clouds, with Amazon being their first, but the architecture and design of Arcade was built with the purpose of allowing multiple Cloud vendors to be utilized. Mike Ormerod, Software Architect at Progress Software, in a recent blog[1] stated, "It's perfectly feasible that using Arcade you could have an Application Server running on one public cloud vendors infrastructure in one geographic region, and an associated Web Server running on a completely different cloud vendors infrastructure in a different part of the world, allowing the deployment of servers close to the user for maximum performance."

Moving to the new release

Progress have realised that Partners will want to move to this new version of the platform and make use of the new capabilities. To ensure success with the release, Progress have identified a certain number of key partners to work with initially to establish best practice that can be transferred to others later. This segmented approach is also based on the partners' customer base as some industry markets are more ready than others.

However it is not just about software and Progress have been clever in putting together an approach to development that partners can take advantage of, whether this is for enhancing existing solutions or building new ones. This involves the following steps:

• Define the process of the application, using the Progress Savvion BPA tool.
• Identify code segments in the existing application, which acts as external source (often external sources of data information). If those code segments are not Web services yet, consider converting them to Web services at the same time.
• Map code segments that implement interfaces to steps in the process. If those interfaces are not Web-based yet, then Progress suggests that they are re-implementing using Progress Savvion BPM Web Form Designer.
• Identify code segments that implement business logic associated with the steps in the process.
• Identify exception-handling and error-processing code segments.
• Consider combining code segments in the above three steps into services that implement steps in the process.
• Eliminate dead code. Often there will be some code that is not need and does not form part of any of the business process. Those segments of code are dead code. They are not necessary, and can be eliminated.

Conclusions

We are moving into a world in which process plays a more and more important place. To be able to work in today's business world where agility and flexibility and quickness of response are important, our business processes have to be event-driven, so as to allow the rules to be separated out for easy maintenance. But there is one more dimension to the way that we have to look at the process world now and these processes have to be people centric. What does this mean? The "Y" Generation of new workers are very computer literate, but not in the same way as those of us in the "X" generation. By this I mean the Y Generation have grown up texting, playing video games, using Facebook and Twitter everyday. They have grown using collaborative software and with a great deal of mobility and use of different devices to interact with. So to support people-centric event-driven processing world, we need a software infrastructure that allows us to separate our business rules and business processes out of the code of our applications and most importantly can run on any device without major configuration.

So how does the new version of Progress Software's OpenEdge development environment measure up to these requirements? Bloor's overall view is that the strategy ticks many of the boxes - for instance, process code and business rules separated out by using the Savvion platform; the use of an interface to separate the user interface from the application code. Progress Software has considered how their solution partners can use the new version to migrate their current solutions. Bloor would have like to see the use of Automated Business Process Discovery technology to have helped discover the process. However in a subsequent briefing on Savvion only, I learnt that the new release of Savvion doe in fact support ABPD using transaction monitoring technology to gather details about events that can then be used to create process diagrams. So Progress solution partners can not only enhance their existing applications using an add-on style, but can if they desire rebuild their applications completely on to the new platform using the process improvement technology on Savvion.

The bottom line is that Progress Software have made a major step toward providing a development platform fit for solutions to be delivered to business that supports people-centric, event-driven processes.

[1] http://blogs.progress.com/openedge/2011/04/progress-arcade-whats-that-can-i-play.html

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 14th November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Two recent events with rather different audiences reveal that not everyone is convinced that the benefits of technology adoption will be evenly shared. In particular, what was highlighted were some disconnects between organisational gain and personal risk.

At a gathering of senior IT executives at a CBR dining club dinner sponsored by Riverbed and Dimension Data, a number of CIOs voiced their thoughts regarding the IT industry’s current apparently all-enveloping rising star—‘cloud’. While there was widespread appreciation of the possibilities and potential for the deployment of IT resources into the cloud, there were some significant reservations about the reality.

Vendors and service providers have been keen to promote the benefits of cloud, but they need to appreciate how implementation will affect their customers, in particular one part of the decision making process; the CIO, IT director or individual IT manager most directly responsible. This is the person that gets it in the neck when something goes wrong—irrespective of who in the external cloud ecosystem is really to blame.

The selling job elsewhere in the organisation is slightly less daunting. Those involved directly on the financial side recognise the cost savings of pushing (human and/or IT asset) resource demands into a virtual infrastructure provider, especially if they can cut precious capital expenditure at a time when borrowing is difficult. Many users recognise the flexibility of ‘on demand’ access to IT, storage and services, especially while on the move. Mobile and remote access, fuelled by consumer behaviours and social media, have become a regular expectation and a perceived necessity.

However, IT managers, whose jobs depend on the reliability, fidelity and robustness of the services being delivered, see risk. And who can blame them when recent downtime and outages from what seemed unshakeable cloud service providers—Google, RIM, Amazon, Microsoft—demonstrate that even large and well planned IT systems can fail?

Quocirca regularly advocates the use of a total value proposition to understand the wider benefits and drawbacks of technology adoption. This goes beyond a simple ROI or TCO financial proposition, to encompass the less tangible positive and negative impact on the organisation, its competitive positioning and, crucially, on the individual or individuals making a technology implementation decision. In this context the total value proposition also considers an element often missed out by those looking at technology change in an organisation—a “total liability proposition”, perhaps—to understand the potential negative consequences, as these weigh most heavily on those making the decision, as it is their neck on the line.

The second event indicated where a respectful approach to risk might emanate where other critical players in the value chain discussed where they might contribute and benefit from cloud adoption. This was a gathering of diverse telecoms companies and service providers at the NetEvents, Italy conference. Here the interest in cloud as potential new sources of revenue and enterprise influence was strong, but it was dosed with a heavy realisation that significant credibility would be at stake if something went wrong.

Telecoms providers, unlike some of the IT industry, have a healthy respect for Murphy’s Law (if something can go wrong, it will), in addition to the more famous ones that are attributed to the value and growth of Moore’s Law of transistor numbers doubling every eighteen months and Metcalfe’s Law of the increasing value of connectedness. They know that their survival is dependent on fundamental attributes that some vendors in the IT industry like to portray as differentiated marketing benefits, like security, availability, interoperability and predictability.

The telecoms industry’s measured approach and involvement in the blossoming cloud market is to be welcomed, and should, over time, start to allay the understandable fears of those within enterprise who are responsible for delivering IT services. As well as trusting them to provide resilient networks, CIOs and IT directors might look to their telecoms providers to supply computer power. Then maybe Sun Microsystems (and Oracle, through its acquisition) was right after all, the network really is the computer?

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 3rd November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

In the old days, those tasked with ensuring their organisation’s networks were secure, reliable and sufficient for their needs were dealing with known resources and predictable usage. Network equipment was confined to the organisation’s various premises, the larger of which were linked via dedicated leased lines; smaller locations were often deemed unworthy of network access. The applications that ran over the network were nearly all planned and provisioned by the IT department. That has all changed in the last twenty years as the internet has become a fundamental business resource and employees have become far more mobile.

Today, ensuring the performance, reliability and security of network usage requires that a holistic view is taken of internal network resources, the internet and mobile network services. Only when this is the case can the impact the network has on the end-to-end user experience be understood and a minimum acceptable service level aspired to.

The problem is exacerbated by unpredictable workloads. IT departments themselves have been loading networks with ever more resource hungry applications, for example voice and video conferencing. They have also been cramming more and more processing power in to data centres through the use of virtualisation, which means more network resource is required per physical server. They are also using online resources to supplement internal infrastructure which requires a reliable and suitably “broad” interface to the internet.

On-demand services also make it easy for lines of business to provision their own applications and IT resources. Employees can do this too; accessing social media sites and firing up mobile apps at will, sometimes for good business reasons, but more likely for personal use. Such unplanned use makes ensuring network performance and security problematic, to say the least.

Data from Plan B Disaster recovery reported in Quocirca’s recent report, “Don’t forget the network”, shows that the most common reason for application failure is a network communications breakdown of some sort. In other words the network is the soft under belly of most organisations’ IT infrastructure. To get on top of this requires that the user experience is constantly monitored and that when that experience is not good enough, the impact that the network is having is understood.

Mitigation may require upgrades to network services or equipment, but it may be sufficient in some cases to simply adjust and optimise usage of the existing network. A port assessment by Networks First, a network management company (who sponsored Quocirca’s recent report), shows that in many cases network equipment is actually underutilised. With intelligent application it should be possible to drive more performance out of existing resources.

For many it makes sense to hand the complexities of ensuring minimum network service levels to a third party management company. The initial stage of any such assignment is discovery. What equipment and services are in place and how do they map together to form the total network. It may seem surprising that a given organisation does not already know this; however, most networks have been cobbled together over a number of years by a succession of network managers and contractors, often dealing with tactical issues without regard for an overall long term network strategy.

Once the network components are understood, the network’s current base performance and loading can be assessed. Whether this is good or bad, it is a necessary measure to provide a benchmark for measuring how the management company improves service levels going forward. The user experience needs to be measured on an on-going basis and ensuring it does not regularly drop below a target baseline and that when it does this the reasons why are understood, and if necessary, remedied.

The tools required for monitoring and managing network performance tend to be sophisticated and expensive. Open source ones are available but need good technical skills to make effective use of. Smaller organisation may not have access to any such tools and larger organisations may lack the time or wherewithal to get the most out of them. Network management companies will have developed the expertise to use such tools and can share their cost over a number of customers, making them available to their customers, whatever their size.

Whatever steps are taken to ensure the on-going performance, availability and security of a network, the cost of doing so must be justified by three factors. First, it must be possible to reduce running costs, or at least ensure better on-going performance, without excessive short to medium term investments in new equipment and/or services. Second, the business risks posed by the network and problems with its performance and security must be mitigated and minimum service levels guaranteed. Third, a stable network that performs well and has excess capacity should be able to be relied upon to provide new business value as and when required.

The majority of businesses will not have the in depth understanding of their networks to be sure of achieving many of these goals. Most will not even have had a recent network assessment. If they did, they may well be surprised at how poorly it is serving them and how much may be gained from addressing this. A functional network is imperative for a 21st century business. A well-managed high-availability, high-performance and secure network can be a distinct competitive advantage; a poorly managed one a fundamental business risk.

Quocirca’s report, sponsored by Networks First, “Don’t forget the network”, is freely available here: http://www.networksfirst.com/dontforgetthenetwork.aspx

By: Andy Jones, Director and General Manager, Europe, Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Posted: 31st October 2011 Copyright Xerox Global Document Outsourcing © 2011

The term “sustainability” used to be a buzzword heard in company meetings. Today it’s an essential concern in the boardroom.

In a global survey  of 766 CEOs conducted last year, 93 percent said sustainability is critical to the future success of their companies. Their responses support what we’ve heard from Xerox customers for years: sustainability is no longer just “nice to have” but a fundamental part of business.

Long before going green was popular and sustainability entered our daily vocabulary, Xerox put sustainability practices into place across the company. We know (based on decades of experience) the challenge organisations face in bringing their sustainability vision to life, especially when it comes to daily practices in the office.

Taking the first step
One of the first places to start is taking stock of how office equipment currently is used. The printer you can’t live without at work may be your biggest green offender. Older printers often take up a lot of energy and a single-function device is rarely as efficient as one that also copies and scans.

Small changes to everyday habits can reduce an office’s carbon footprint, like these fast, inexpensive ways to reduce the amount of power used:

1. Unplug devices that aren’t frequently used: Devices consume phantom power even while in standby mode. If there are scanners, printers, or guest computers that aren’t needed every day, unplug them in between use.
2. Purchase ENERGY STAR-qualified equipment: When purchasing new office equipment, consider the cost and features and how it will impact your energy use. Arm yourself with a list of products that are ENERGY STAR qualified to make a smart purchasing decision.
3. Make use of energy-saving settings: Enable the built-in energy-saving settings found on current technology products. These are like the low-power mode on your printer and the hibernation mode on your computer.

Document and printer Management
Over the years Xerox has seen a number of common practices that hinder efforts to reduce an organisation’s carbon footprint. One of the most common is the tendency to support far more devices than necessary, including old, energy-inefficient machines.

Other challenges to sustainability include:

• Lack of departmental control over how / what people print.
• Devices not placed in an optimal position, so they are either under- or over-utilised by staff. Energy can be spent unnecessarily if staff don't make the most of available devices.
• Ordering and storing more consumables than needed. This takes up valuable office space.
• Unconnected network-enabled devices aren’t remotely monitored or proactively fixed, leading to an excess of printer-related calls to the IT helpdesk and more engineer site visits.

Organisation-wide print policies to restrict print volumes can help with many of these challenges. The policy could include:

• Mandatory double-sided printing.
• Limiting job sizes.
• Developing rules to ensure certain document sizes and types are printed only on certain devices.

As simple as these steps are, we’ve found many businesses don’t implement these well.

And there are other areas for improvement. Innovations in printer hardware and software, such as new energy-saving printers which include sleep, can help significantly. And some devices feature green-friendly parts made from recyclable plastics. There's also new imaging technology like Xerox’s proprietary solid ink  which has substantial sustainability benefits. A solid ink printer or multifunction printer uses solid sticks (or blocks) of no-mess, non-toxic ink instead of toner or inkjet cartridges. It is easy to use, produces great colour print quality, is cost-effective, and very good for the environment.

These innovations, combined with an organisation’s proactive approach to managing its own unique printing environment in a more sustainable way can go a long way toward ‘greening’ a business.

Seeking assistance
Many organisations outsource print management to address these issues. Our customers have realised cost savings of up to 30 percent whilst also reducing energy usage, solid waste and carbon footprint by at least 20 percent (and in many cases significantly more) across the lifecycle of devices.

We do this by introducing a managed print service (MPS), which gives an organisation visibility into its document output costs. This environment is then managed on an ongoing basis whilst delivering against mutually agreed KPIs and SLAs. At Xerox, we’ve seen this approach deliver impressive results for a number of different clients – from the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council to defence provider Selex Galileo.

Like the CEOs questioned in the survey, these organisations see sustainability as critical to future success and have sought help in changing what was once just a vision into reality.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research Posted: 26th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Earlier this year we saw the acquisition of Metastorm by OpenText, who then went on to acquire Global 360 as well. For many observers, whilst the opening moves being from OpenText may have been a surprise, the fact that vendors were looking at cross acquisitions certainly was not.

In some ways, BPM vendors may well have been positioning themselves for takeover when they launched into Case Management, for in doing so they will have raised their profile with ECM vendors and potentially made it clearer to them why they needed to beef up process within their portfolio.

The linkage between the two markets makes a lot of sense, and Case Management just proves it, especially in the financial and insurance sectors. These sectors have been highly document-focused with heavy regulation and, of course, the routing of and acting on of documents has been a key part of their many process initiatives over the years. It is likely that, in some part, the purchases will have been driven by the view that BPMS sales were beginning to hurt traditional ECM sales, at least in some vertical markets.

What may be most surprising is that, until this week, we had not seen any similar moves by other players in the ECM sector. EMC, Adobe and Xerox might have been expected to follow the lead of OpenText, but it seems for now they are either happy to let others lead, or are still trying to find a position that works for them.

So, this week, the unexpected announcement was that Lexmark was the first to follow OpenText, by acquiring Dutch BPMS vendor Pallas Athena. It is taking Pallas Athena into its standalone business unit, Perceptive Software.

With a reported price paid of $50m, this also marks one of the smaller number of BPMS acquisitions where the purchase price was publicly stated. Industry watchers will be sure to be looking at the Pallas Athena deal along with the Global 360 one in order to get stronger ideas on the value of remaining BPMS players.

Of course, while OpenText  may be credited with being the first in the current round, others would suggest that IBM actually started the trend with their acquisition of Filenet some years ago.

This latest acquisition is one of many over the past couple of years in the BPM space causing some to question the long-term survivability of BPM vendors. I think it is true that now people are starting to see what value others are putting on companies, further acquisitions are likely, but probably no more than one would expect in a relatively fragmented market.

What will be more interesting is to see which type of convergence will dominate, the taking of BPM into ECM, or the folding of BPM into applications by ERPM or CRM type vendors, or integration markets. The initial rounds of acquisition were certainly driven by Integration - witness the TIBCO acquisitions and the WebMethods acquisitions at the start.

In the short term don't be surprised to see another two or three BPM vendors joining up with or being acquired by others in the ECM sector. It does not make sense for those without a strong BPM story to remain on the sidelines much longer.

Whichever way you look at it, process is being increasingly seen as a key driver and the need to provide customers with easy ways to gain insight into, improve and create agile processes is a must.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 25th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

At the end of September this year (20th September), SAP announced their intention to acquire business-to-business integration provider Crossgate. I was intrigued by this release and wanted to know more.

Who are Crossgate?
When you look them up on the Internet what you find is that they are a German company with their headquarters in Munich. The company was founded in 2001 as Indatex and renamed in 2006 to Crossgate. It is a privately owned company with over 200 employees.

What do they sell?
They provide electronic data interchange (EDI) and related services (XML industry standards, outbound e-Invoicing, inbound OCR and fax recognition, SMS, e-mail, WebEDI, Spoke Units, and CAD/CAM) as an on-demand service. They term this a "Business-Ready Network".  The company specialises in linking to SAP and they have more than 40,000 companies who already use their B2B 360° Services for SAP Solutions to exchange documents with customers, suppliers, logistics partners, governments, and banks.

What do these services provide their customers with?
It is pretty complete package covering managed services such as 24/7 professional support and consulting operations. Moreover, the available services also include transaction management, conversion and real-time monitoring, business integration analysis during transactions, long-term archiving, straightforward data transfer, JIT messaging, qualified electronic signatures, and validation services.

Figure 1: Crossgate Business Ready Nertwork (Source: Crossgate)

What I also found out was that SAP had acquired an interest in the company in October 2008. At this time, Crossgate also became a global provider in SAP's business process outsourcing program, following the integration of NetWeaver Process Integration into Crossgate's platform.

In February 2010, Crossgate announced that SAP was to resell Crossgate's B2B functionality as an extension of SAP's application functionality under the name SAP Information Interchange. SAP was to sell and maintain this offering. Most recently, SAP agreed to resell and market the SAP E-Invoicing for Compliance application by Crossgate, which allows companies to send and receive digitally signed, compliant PDFs or EDI invoices electronically. So as you can see Crossgate and SAP have had a recent history in close co-operation.

Therefore, when I came to have a briefing with Peter Kuerpick, SAP's EVP & Corporate Officer, I was interested to know how SAP would integrate Crossgate into the SAP portfolio. Kuerpick explained that the acquisition was part of SAP's Cloud plan. Today Crossgate supports EDI and other similar protocols: what SAP see is the product becoming the backbone of business network. Kuerpick explained that the initial integration would be to provide collaborative design support with full integration come later. As with any acquisition of software, this full integration will probably take somewhere between 12 to 18 months to complete. I asked about the target for this solution as many large enterprises already have a B2B solution in place whereas the larger number of SMEs may not have but do have a need for the capabilities offered by Crossgate. Kuerpick agreed and then showed that there was already support for the SAP products aimed at this market - SAP Business All-in-One, SAP Business ByDesign, and SAP Business One.

This acquisition will fill a gap in SAP's offering to businesses and, by the fact that it is a service, it will have the appeal for SMEs of not being a capital cost but an operational one. Crossgate has already a well-established customer platform and, from their viewpoint, this will enable them to develop business outside of Germany. It would seem to be a real win-win solution for SAP, Crossgate and, not least, their customers and prospects.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research Posted: 25th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

For many years it seemed as though the domain of modelling in an SAP environment was the preserve of only one tool. IDS-Scheer, with their ARIS tool, was the undisputed dominant player. Whether this was because of both companies being German, whether it was to do with the cross shareholding, or simply great sales and marketing by IDS-Scheer, other vendors fought shy of fighting the ARIS dominance. But now it seems that is changing.

Ever since the acquisition of IDS-Scheer by Software AG, there has been a sense of opportunity among other vendors. The last 18 months have seen several vendors talk about that opportunity and consider entering the fray. I know from my own experience that, in some cases, senior management within vendors has been split on whether to enter the market or not.

Historically, vendors such as MEGA International and Nimbus Partners have dabbled, but not really appeared to make great headway. Casewise, too, has in the past attempted, without great success, to address the SAP market, but did announce last year that they were planning to re-enter the fray with their Casewise4ERP offering.

Today though, things have changed. IBM, iGrafx and QPR are addressing the needs of the SAP community head on. QPR originally partnered with Nobultec Ltd to provide the interfacing between the company's modelling offering and SAP, and then they purchased the company.

Meanwhile, IBM turned to UK-based Silwood Associates to provide the required interfaces for their System Architect product. iGrafx, meanwhile, chose to partner with the German vendor Transware.

While the opportunity to tray and service more than 100,000 organizations using SAP in more than 120 countries is obviously a factor, vendors also have their eye on other prizes - with Oracle and other Software AG competitors as targets, as well as SAP themselves. Most vendors believe that Oracle and the others will increasingly be looking at alternative business modelling solutions for their own practices and systems, so the prize of an illusive major OEM contract is also driving them forward.

The acquisition of Nobultec by QPR was definitely a smart move and surely increases the market value of both Transware and Silwood. Some years ago another company aimed to act as a bridge between tools. That vendor, Software One, was quickly snapped up by Oracle and thus others were prevented from easy interfacing between tools. It remains to be seen whether history might yet repeat itself in this space.

One thing we can be sure of is that SAP customers have never had such choice before and, for them at least, the opportunities to reduce the cost of the modelling aspects of implementation will be pleasing.

At the time of writing, no particular SAP-related deals had been announced although IBM is understood to have closed some SAP/System Architect deals within 7 days of their announcement! IBM, iGrafx and QPR all have products being demonstrated and shown; as yet I am not aware of Casewise having a commercial product, but rumour has it the company may well have recently closed a $1m deal as a result of their Casewise4ERP offering.

It remains to be seen which, if any, of these vendors may take over the mantle of "dominance" in the SAP space, but having cost effective, easy to use options and, most of all, choice, has to be a good thing.

SAP customers should, for the most part though, remain cautious, as many of these offerings come as a result of partner technology, which may or may not be available in the market on a longer term basis. As has been stated, even IBM are offering via partner technology.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 29th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

The overarching message of Xerox's recent analyst briefing was about being  "services-led, technology-driven". Xerox is certainly a company in the midst of  transformation. Its total revenue has grown from $15.2bn in 2009 to  approximately $23bn in 2011.

Services now represent about half its business, up from 25 per cent two years  ago. Already an established player in the document management/processing  outsourcing market, its acquisition of ACS last year, a BPO firm, means it is  now a leading player in the services market, with an estimated value of $500bn  that combines document outsourcing, business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT  outsourcing.

While the ACS integration promises to expand Xerox's penetration into the  enterprise, it is also actively pushing its managed print services (MPS) capabilities to the SMB and mid-market sectors. Globally, Xerox is working to  accelerate the transition of its global partner network to a services-led  model.

Xerox now has more than 2,500 partners offering some form of MPS. In addition  to its traditional channel partners, its global MPS partner network also  includes a range of managed IT services, technology and software partners,  including Cisco and Computacenter.

In an increasingly commoditised hardware market, MPS is a reseller opportunity  to increase revenue through providing customers with a contractual approach to  purchasing or leasing hardware together with service and supplies.

Central to Xerox's channel MPS initiative is Xerox Partner Print Services,  which sits between its basic equipment service packages, such as eClick and  PagePack, and its direct enterprise MPS offerings.

Xerox XPPS is a cloud-based platform hosted by Xerox and offers a range of  standardised components to support a multivendor environment, such as assessment  and optimisation, device discovery and monitoring, sales contract management,  business intelligence (BI) reporting, service management and delivery, and a  customer service portal. Its recent acquisition of NewField IT and its AssetDB technology has been key  to partner enablement providing the backbone for assessment and proposal  generation architecture for XPPS, as well as an ongoing optimisation of customer  contracts.

Xerox has built a comprehensive certification and accreditation process for  XPPS salespeople and partners to support their MPS sales efforts. Accredited  XPPS partners must be able to demonstrate successful delivery for a client's  managed print service. In Europe, Xerox has approximately 170 XPPS partners,  having grown from 90 at the end of 2010. Almost 80 per cent of these partners  are fully accredited XPPS partners. One of the key strengths of Xerox's  XPPS offering is its multivendor device support, which will appeal to multibrand  resellers and also offers opportunities for Xerox's concessionaires.

In particular, the managed IT services market represents an opportunity for  multivendor MPS platforms such as XPPS, as it enables managed service providers  (MSPs) to integrate MPS with their existing managed service platforms. Although so far printing is not typically an integrated  component of managed IT services, Quocirca believes MSPs will be the next  development in expanding the opportunity for MPS among SMB and midmarket  businesses.

Xerox has certainly set a stake in the channel MPS ground, and many of its  competitors are seeking to emulate its actions. The vendor has already  successfully remodelled its Enterprise MPS tools and technologies for the SMB  and midmarket. And, as such, Xerox is positioned well to support its partners'  transition from box-shifting to a services-led approach.

Its XPPS offering appeals to a wide range of resellers, in our view particularly those strategically focused on MPS. Xerox, of course, recognises that not all its resellers will transition to  XPPS. There will always be some that are reluctant to use a vendor-hosted  infrastructure to manage their multibrand base, which may have concerns about  where and how their customer data is hosted. It should be noted, though, that Xerox has extensive ISO 27,001 security  standardisation and proper contractual terms in place to mitigate such concerns.  In such cases, resellers may consider independent third-party management tools backed up by their own networks of service engineers.

Nevertheless, for those resellers ready to develop their MPS capabilities,  using a flexible and robust hosted platform such as XPPS is a viable approach,  for both Xerox-only and multibrand resellers. Not only does this limit the risk when investing in building a MPS platform,  it also gives resellers access to Xerox global supply chain and delivery  centres. This should appeal particularly to resellers that want to expand their MPS  delivery across regions.

For now Xerox is ahead of the game when it comes to its channel MPS  initiatives, but competitors are following fast and competition will not only  come from its traditional competitors but also from those in the managed IT  services market with which Xerox, wisely, has already engaged.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 5th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

A snippet in Private Eye earlier this year (8 July, 2011) showed how touchy companies can get about the use of their brand names. Following the unfortunate death of a festival goer in a toilet at Glastonbury (who also happened to be a political activist and friend of the UK’s Prime Minister), a number of publications reported that the body has been found in a Portaloo®. Apparently, this was not true; it was not a Portaloo®, but some other brand of “mobile toilet”. Portakabin, who owns the Portaloo® brand, had written to the publications in question complaining at this misrepresentation. This seems an unnecessary quibble, there was no suggestion the toilet had contributed to the death and no maligning of the brand per se. However, other misuses of brand names are not so innocuous.

A growing concern over the past decade or so has been the abuse of brand names online. This includes both the misleading use of domain names and misrepresentation and/or illegal use of brands in other ways. Back in 2000, the UK rock band Jethro Tull won a case against a cyber-squatter who had registered a number of domains including www.jethrotull.com and was trying to sell them on to those with an obvious interest. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) found in the band’s favour; ruling that the squatter “had set up the addresses in bad faith and failed to show a legitimate interest in them”.

While most well-known organisations now have control of the high-level domains associated with their brand, the growing number of available domains still makes it relatively easy for someone to mislead through the use of a slightly more obscure domain. This might mean that cyber-squatting is less prevalent but it does mean brand-jacking is easier. There are two reasons for doing this; to benefit by association and, more seriously, to perpetrate fraud. The later involves either selling fake branded products or convincing someone to give up personal information thinking they are visiting a legitimate branded web site, for example, that of a bank (usually attracting them in the first place with phishing emails or messages on social media sites). "It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you"

Of course, the selling a fake branded goods does not need a spoofed web site, this can just as easily be done via markets such as eBay. So, the need to monitor and protect brands is a far-reaching exercise. To that end, a number of services have been developed to help organisations achieve just that from vendors such as MarkMonitor, Envisional and PICA. Their services range through domain name monitoring, identifying online brand name misuse, spotting sales of counterfeit goods and getting rogue sites associated with phishing campaigns shut down.

MarkMonitor publishes a freely available Brandjacking Index report, which shows the prevalence of brand abuse over the years and focuses in on specific issues, such as diverting genuine enquiries for hotel bookings (spring 2011 edition).  Its customers include manufacturers like Epson and Deckers, where it has helped stem the sale of counterfeit goods, and pharmaceutical giant Novartis, where it consolidated and protected its wide range of domain names.

A strong recognisable brand is an invaluable asset for any organisation; however, misuse can see strong brands rapidly devalued. The exploitation of brands has become much easier as the world has moved online over the last few decades. It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you. Failing to ensure this will lead to a loss of business and may cause rapid deterioration of your brand's value.

By: Andy Jones, Director and General Manager, Europe, Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Posted: 26th August 2011 Copyright Xerox Global Document Outsourcing © 2011

The saying is probably as old as the marketing business: It costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Many companies today focus the bulk of their marketing budgets on acquiring new customers. But what happens after that? Once prospects become customers, they typically receive an ongoing series of routine communications that do little to deepen the relationship or build the brand. Statements and invoices, policy notifications and updates—these “transactional” documents convey important information. But that’s about it.

In a world where competition is intensifying and long-term customer loyalty is increasingly viewed as a prize corporate asset, the failure to maximise the impact of these valuable touchpoints represents a missed opportunity to improve the bottom line.

This customer opportunity can be most commonly seen within the financial services industry. If a bank has a 20 percent customer attrition rate on average, the firm must acquire 20 percent net new clients each year just to remain in the black. The cost of customer acquisition averages 200 euros per retail account.  So it’s easy to see why using marketing spend effectively to maintain customer loyalty is essential to revenue stability and, ultimately, growth. Not only this, customer experience will be a key competitive battleground for financial institutions going forward; customers will join for a superior experience and customers will leave over a poor one.

We offer the following tips to financial services institutions to make the most of customer communications:

1. Strike early: Most cross-selling opportunities occur during the first few months of a customer relationship. Research shows that banks that communicate with customers early and often in the relationship improve cross-selling results and lower attrition rates. Customer welcome packs are a common means of building on the initial relationship; they need to be crafted carefully and tailored to the customer and product needs.

2. Be responsive: By scanning and electronically storing the documents needed to open an account, banks can provide a faster, more efficient account-opening process, obtain information for more personalised communications, ensure greater data accuracy and increase compliance. Looking through paper records or shunting them off to storage facilities will not be deemed adequate in the future. Start thinking now about back file conversions, information repositories and comprehensive workflow capabilities to make servicing the customer a natural and seamless act for your customer service agents.

3. Take inventory: Any communication with a customer—by phone, web or face-to-face—is an opportunity to acquire data about their life stages, attitudes, needs and preferences. The information can then be centralised and integrated into the bank’s inventory of brochures, catalogues, fulfilment literature, direct mail and statements so that details about individual customers or targeted segments can be placed in a bank’s own document templates to deliver greater impact. Analytics will be crucial; banks can take a page from what retailers do in this regard, in order to know your customer well enough to both sell and service him.

4. Get personal: While most information from banks today appeals generically to a mass audience, they are more likely to generate sales if they personalise every document, e-mail, etc. Incorporating variables in documents such as the customer’s name, product type or life event is the key to generating response rates that far outstrip the typical 0.5–2 percent expected from direct-mail campaigns. Of course you also need to know if your customer will welcome personalised communication or if it will be considered an invasion of privacy. 

For example, getting personal can go hi-tech with quick response codes (QR codes), modules that marketers print on communications for customers to scan with smartphones, directing them to a personalised landing page with tailored information about products and services, case studies, helpful tools, etc. In order for QR codes to be effective, marketers should stay true to the basic principles of marketing. People will only engage and interact with the content if it is relevant to them. The content on the initial communications piece must be relevant in order for the person to be interested in navigating to the landing page, and the content on the site must be relevant in order for the person to spend a meaningful amount of time there.  

5. Keep it simple: Keep product information—including rates and fees—as simple as possible (and feasible given regulatory requirements) so bank staff can explain them and customers can understand them.

6. Be creative: Customers say they would be more responsive to more informal and creative communications from their financial institution; get the marketing and legal departments to work together to produce understandable and compliant communication.

7. Change the channel: Different customers prefer different communications channels (direct mail, e-mail, online, text messages, etc.), so ask early in the relationship which method the customer prefers and stick with it. Communicate offers in terms that customers or prospects will readily understand, through the channel they prefer, and at a time when they are open to receiving it.

8. Embrace social media: Don’t be afraid. In the modern communications landscape, customers are increasingly expecting their service providers to communicate with them via social media. Bank executives must ask themselves: What are our consumers’ expectations and requirements around social media? What information do they want shared via social media, and what conversations do they want to participate in? To address these questions, banks have begun to create social media teams charged with transforming traditional methods of doing business. Beyond social channels, however, banks must decide whether to build the infrastructure and processes to manage the social media communications, or to “borrow” the infrastructure and process instead (meaning: outsource it). Social media channels are fabulous opportunities to learn what your customers are thinking about.

Personalising customer communications promises to be an effective way to maintain customer loyalty and win new customers when done efficiently. The document supply chain is crucial to this end: In many cases banks keep a large marketing inventory, employ multiple service providers, and duplicate many processes—slowing down the document supply chain and incurring unnecessary costs. To be able to reap the benefits of personalised communications knowing when to engage a third-party solution provider who specialises in optimising business processes is becoming more important.

Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s largest retail bank, understands that a strong business process outsourcing partner can automate workflow, consolidate vendors and improve touch points with their customers. Working with Xerox, the bank has transformed its document supply chain and is now supporting its excellent customer service with high-quality, targeted marketing materials while at the same time streamlining business processes and realising savings in cost and time. Suppliers can bring innovation, use technology and process enhancements in customer care, transaction processing as well as document and digital asset management capabilities to improve efficiencies.

Power is changing hands in the industry, slowly but inexorably. Power is moving to the customer. Customers will insist on dealing with their financial institution when and where they choose, with their preferred channel and on their terms. Customers will want to be in control and know that their financial institution consciously put them in control with their needs first. Improving the customer communications process is a vitally important step for attracting and retaining the right customers.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 15th August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

During the last month, I have had two briefings from OpenConnect around their Comprehend product which overlaps not only the Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD) but also business intelligence and also workforce analysis and optimisation. The company describes Comprehend as a process intelligence and workforce analytics solution.

Who are OpenConnect? They have their headquarters on the LBJ Freeway in Dallas, Texas. They were founded in the 1980s and initially concentrated their software development on products to make using the mainframe easier. The company has an impressive technology development record with 9 patents granted and multiple patents pending. They sponsor a research chair at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven in Belgium on Business Process Discovery & Intelligence.

Figure 1: OpenConnect product development timeline (Source: OpenConnect)

With Comprehend, OpenConnect have concentrated on the financial services and healthcare insurance sectors where 6 of top 20 US healthcare players are customers as well as a leading global property and casualty provider. As an example, major healthcare insurance players include WellPoint, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota and multiple others.

From an alliance perspective, OpenConnect is a supporting member organization to America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national trade association representing the health insurance industry and with NASCO, the integrated membership and claims processing system for some of the largest Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans.

OpenConnect has 3 primary technology partners:

• Mark Logic Corporation with its XML server, to store, manage, search and dynamically deliver content;
• IBM: OpenConnect are members of PartnerWorld for Software and PartnerWorld for Developers programs; and
• RSA Security: OpenConnect has integrated RSA Security's encryption technology into their products. OpenConnect has received RSA SecurID and RSA ClearTrust Certifications which validate WebConnect SSO's interoperability with RSA Security's array of identity and access management solutions.

So how do OpenConnect go to market? In the US, the company has its own sales personnel. OpenConnect's key markets in Europe, which include Germany, France, the UK, Austria and Switzerland, also have direct sales. Its EMEA headquarters resides in Munich, Germany.

So what does Comprehend do? The product was first released in 2005 at the prestigious DEMO Conference and was specifically aimed at discovering processes in mainframe based systems. Although the mainframe is still a major part of their story, OpenConnect are able to cover other types of systems as well. The product can be broken down into a number of components as shown in Figure 2.

The first component - The Collectors - captures information about an organisation's business processes using passive techniques. They are system-specific solutions to capture keystroke/click level activity from web, desktop or mainframe based systems. Currently the following collectors are available out-of-the-box and the others shown in Figure 2 are in development:

• Web: TCP/IP intercept allows passive capture of full web interaction for internal users and external customers.
• IVR: Log files of customer interactions are used to provide details of menu interactions.
• Desktop: A small (less than 1.5mb) applet is downloaded on the desktop to capture keystrokes and events based on a central configuration.
• Mainframe: TCP/IP intercept allows passive capture of users interaction with 'green-screens'.
• Files / Databases: Log files and databases can be interrogated to discover root cause of process and workforce operational inefficiencies.

Figure 2: Comprehend Architectural overview (Source: OpenConnect)

Comprehend contains 4 intelligence engines which form the knowledgebase to carry out the analysis of the information gathered and produce the process maps.

• User Activity Replay: the information from the Collectors can be fed into User Activity Replay to replay exactly what a user saw and did across a single or multiple systems.
• Analytics Cluster: the information from the Collectors forms the basis of user workflow analysis in Analytics Cluster. While multiple collectors can feed the engine, it provides a system-specific (e.g. web or IVR or mainframe...) view of how users are moving from screen to screen. Activities are defined in the engine that converts keystrokes/clicks into events. By defining the set of pages/screens that makes up an activity, every time a user executes any subset of clicks/transactions within an activity, an event is generated. All of the data extracted from the pages/screens that were part of the activity become attributes of the event.
• Process Intelligence Cluster: the events derived in the Analytics Cluster provide the basis for the Process Intelligence Cluster to discover, analyze and provide actionable intelligence for process improvement. It combines events from multiple sources to produce a single process view. The engine provides:
  • Workforce Intelligence-where are users spending time, what is the variations between workers, or job types.
  • Process Intelligence-what is the actual lifecycle of a claim, loan, or other 'job'. What's driving re-work or process delays.
  • Customer Intelligence-where are customers struggling using an organisation's applications, abandoning a self-service channel for more expensive communication.
• Dashboards and Reporting: The analysis in the Process Intelligence Cluster can be simplified and exposed as conventional table oriented data. This allows standard reporting tools to utilize the data and insights from the engine analysis into everyday operational reports and dashboards

OpenConnect have taken their experience of working with their customers using Comprehend to deliver specific services and preconfigured versions of Comprehend to the market. These include:

• Understanding the claims process - this is based on the auto-adjudication % and also are able to show the lifecycle of a claim.
• Workforce management

OpenConnect Comprehend has an impressive set of capabilities that shows the company's pedigree and knowledge of their target market. The diagrams and reports are very comprehensive and easy to understand.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 26th July 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

A lot has been written over the years about the way processes work within organisations. However, when one really looks under the covers what we find is that every process is driven by an event. Once the event occurs, decisions are taken by an "Identity", that can be an actual person or an automated device that has knowledge about the way the business reacts to this particular type of event. This "decision" is a rule. Once the rule has analysed the data surrounding the event, it makes a decision about which process should be started.

Let me illustrate this thinking. I am currently responsible for the administration of grass hockey elite squads in my county and this moment in time is one of the busiest, as parents respond to the invitations to join the county training squads and pay their children's fees. My event is the arrival of post each day. First decision on hearing the post come through the door, is do I collect now or a bit later? Once I collect, I hit the next event of "sorting the post". I have basically a decision on what sort of post has arrived:

1. If it is hand written or has the words "Director of Coaching" or "JDC", then the letter is of immediate interest and goes into the right pile on my desk;
2. If it is a business letter such as bank or credit card company communication, then it goes onto a pile on top of my printer;
3. If it is addressed to another member of my family, it goes into a pile on the left side of my desk, which, at the end of sorting, I take out to the kitchen for distribution;
4. If it is a magazine then it goes into another pile to be taken into the lounge for reading later.

So I have now applied my sorting "rule", which results in 4 different processes being kicked off; all of which can occur simultaneously, or near enough! Let's follow the post that is affected by decision 1 above. My next event is to open the letters and skim read the contents. Now comes the next set of decisions (rules):

1. If the letter is concerned with the Summer Camps I am running it goes into a pile on the left side of my desk;
2. If the letter is concerned with registration for the County JDC, then I check to see if a cheque is attached or not:
   1. If there is a cheque it goes into a pile on the right of my desk;
   2. If there is no cheque, then I write "No Money received and the date" on the form and put it on a pile on top of my printer.

For those letters about Summer Camps, I now start the process of registering the form. This process involves opening the right spreadsheet at the right tab, checking if the player involved is registered on the County database or not, entering all the necessary details of the form and finally banking the cheque.

For those letters about the County JDC that have a cheque, I now start the process of completing the registration of the player on the database and, for the double entry book keeping, updating the entry on the fee registration tab of a spreadsheet. The form is then filed in the completed box file store. For those County JDC letter with no cheques, I check to see if there has been a request to pay electronically and if so mark the form 'electronic payment' for latter checking with my bank records. If there is no information, then I email the primary address and ask how payment will be made.

What you can see is a pattern of Event followed by Decision (Rule) followed by Process and so on until you reach the final event-the end of the process!

My events, decisions and process are analogous to those that many organisations deal with every day in terms of customer orders, complaints, claims.

But what if, when the event occurs, all that you know is what the final outcome has to be and nothing about how you get from the starting event to the end event-what people refer to a "dynamic case management?". Well, if you look at BPM tools that support this capability, they are actual driven by the same pattern of event - decision - process; the difference is that the decision is more complex and will, in all probability, involve collaborative working with more experienced colleagues and other parties involved.

What I am seeing therefore is that the future of management of process in an organisation is no longer about just the workflow that connects all the current components that have been identified from the application portfolio, but also the identification of the events that trigger each major process and the rules that control what happens. However in today's mobile world there is one other piece to the jigsaw that has to be taken into consideration and that is the "identity" that triggers the event and those that are involved. This is all about the location and the device used to trigger the device or that will be used to receive information to make decisions.

By: Andy Jones, Director and General Manager, Europe, Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Posted: 25th July 2011 Copyright Xerox Global Document Outsourcing © 2011

Cost savings remain top of mind in the wake of the UK Government’s first official budget and as we anticipate the next stage of the Comprehensive Spending Review. This focus has created a number of unique challenges that are increasing the demands on an organisational infrastructure: 

• Deep budget cuts to central and local government programmes and, inevitably, to headcount, have encouraged public sector bodies to consolidate the number of suppliers and procurements between departments in an effort to lower costs. Suppliers must support the UK Government’s search for efficiency and savings and are expected to provide the expertise to improve services.

• In order to deliver services more efficiently, the Government is looking to best-in-class delivery models which are standardised, optimised and scalable.

• As taxpayers increasingly want to know where their money is being spent, there is a need for greater transparency. The public focus on performance, results and return on investment means public sector organisations need clear, appropriate service level agreements. Management information to track performance against the agreements is also a must.

• The demand by constituents for convenience and choice in the communications channels that they use to interact with UK Government means agencies must adapt. To instil change, agencies will need to study best practices from the commercial sector and Government activities abroad, as well as between existing departments and agencies.

Meeting the new expectations is not an easy task, and many organisational infrastructures, in both the public and private sector, simply are not up to the challenge. Today’s emphasis on meeting short-term financial targets by avoiding large capital expenditures and taking existing assets off the balance sheet takes precedence over decisions to initiate change. And, as time passes, the infrastructures become ever more costly to update. To reverse this trend, it’s best to think of infrastructure as a strategy for growth and identify the areas that would benefit most from modernisation.

Picking your targets
When it comes to an organisation’s infrastructure, most people immediately think of information and communications technologies. This is true of the UK Government too, with the ICT industry being an immediate target for achieving cost savings through the formation of the Efficiency Reform Group. The estimated UK Government expenditure in this area is c£18bn p.a., according to the likes of Kable and Intellect.

Yet there are additional and even larger areas to consider. We believe the document-related costs of UK Government could be as much as £50bn p.a. The costs of handling, processing, filing, archiving and destruction of documents—as well as other steps in the document life cycle—are several times those of ICT. As such they are a very worthwhile target for efficiency savings.

In the past, improving these processes did not go much beyond a simple review of office-based printing with the idea of ‘printing less’. This narrow approach ignores the critical role printed documents play in business processes. To truly improve the infrastructure, it’s preferable to review how documents are printed across an organisation.

For example, there are multiple records that relate to one individual citizen, so Government departments have typically used printed records to understand the whole picture. Paper essentially is the ‘glue’ that holds many of these existing processes together. However, in an increasingly digital world, print often limits processes, representing one of the key features of a ‘legacy infrastructure.’  Following are several examples of where Xerox has helped public sector organisations transform their document-related processes.

Transformation in practice – The Department for Work & Pensions
The UK Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) wanted to review and revamp the end-to-end management of forms across more than 1,000 offices. The idea was to make information clearer and more accessible to the more than 20 million UK citizens it serves. The DWP faced two major challenges: meeting UK Government requirements to improve efficiency and reduce costs and eliminating repetitive processes performed by multiple suppliers in individual department silos.

Xerox worked with the DWP to create an infrastructure that supports continually improving service, is measured against advancing targets, and delivers value at every stage. The chosen solution transformed document services by creating a single-service management infrastructure for all core print and related requirements.

The effort has produced savings in a number of different areas:

• 30,000 office devices rationalised to 8,000
• Device energy use cut in half
• Warehouse space cut by 12 percent, from 90,500 to 80,000 square feet
• Wasted print reduced by 66 percent
• Average document review cycle shortened by 40 percent, from five months to three
• Improved quality and effectiveness of communications with citizens
• 21 percent overall savings in line with Government efficiency review targets

Transformation in practice – Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust wanted to digitise traditionally paper-based services, specifically patient records. The Trust looked to achieve a 20 percent reduction in costs and a 20–25 percent improvement in lead times for print jobs through the use of a Web portal and standardisation of work processes. In order to meet the needs of both patients and staff, it also needed transparent reporting on service levels, demonstrating immediately improved efficiency.

Xerox worked with Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust to develop a ten-year records management partnership. The project was broken down into phases with the idea of continually improving service while rolling out the use of electronic records. Medical and union stakeholders would be involved throughout the process.

Just two years into the project, improvements have appeared in a number of areas:

• 7,500 missing records found, leading to improved patient safety
• Complaints eliminated as files available at point of need
• Records staff transferred to Xerox, equipped with new skills and now working in safe environment
• Expected savings of £2 million over ten years
• Secure information governance and auditing standards implemented

What are the barriers to transformation?
These examples demonstrate the substantial benefits of modernising government infrastructure, and they point to what can happen when organisational leaders look beyond hitting short-term financial targets. It’s important to note, however, that these efforts do not come without a lot of work and a certain amount of risk. It seems a fairly obvious point, but suppliers need to demonstrate the return on investment of every single project and ensure they focus on outcomes.

Through its experience working with a number of different organisations, Xerox has identified six key guideposts that mark the path to successful modernisation. These points were summarised in a whitepaper presented by ACS, a Xerox company, to the U.S. White House last year. The whitepaper was prepared following the White House forum on modernising government, which took place on January 14, 2010.

According to the white paper:

• Success breeds success, incrementally. Don’t try to do too much too soon. Success requires continuous improvement and refinement.
• Start at the end. Focus on what your customers—or rather citizens—want, and don’t forget to communicate.
• The social and technological landscape may be changing with extraordinary speed, but many core human characteristics remain vital. Be sure to look at how technology fits into the bigger picture of what customers really want.
• Technology alone won’t deliver transformation. Policies and regulations, staffing, programme design and other aspects of operations all play a part as well in driving cultural change.
• Focus in on risks. Manage risks actively, be ready to recover, and get experts involved to help you keep your project on track.
• Measure what matters, know what counts, and deliver results.
• No two modernisation efforts are alike. Set goals, plan accordingly and prepare for the unexpected.

At Xerox, we believe these points are extremely relevant to the UK public sector. As the case studies above illustrate, results happen when focus is put on the interactions between operations, technology, and policy.  Marrying the demands of government and citizens with the capabilities of your infrastructure requires vision and the help of a trusted partner experienced in making these transformations happen. 

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 20th July 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

WSO2 today announced the debut of the WSO2 StratosLive platform as a service (PaaS) and the launch of WSO2 Stratos 1.5, the newest release of WSO2’s open-source cloud middleware platform software. Together, they provide comprehensive cloud middleware solutions for enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite application development and deployment in the cloud.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company offers a complete PaaS both as on-premise software and as a hosted service, running the same production-ready code wherever it best suits customers’ privacy, service-level agreement (SLA), and deployment requirements. [Disclosure: WSO2 is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

StratosLive provides a complete enterprise deployment and integration platform, including application server, enterprise service bus (ESB), database, identity server, governance registry, business process manager, portal server and more.

Stratos provides the same capabilities to organizations that want the benefits of a PaaS running on their own premises. It builds on and extends WSO2's Carbon enterprise middleware platform by taking the Carbon code and adding cloud functionality for self-service provisioning, multi-tenancy, metering, and elastic scaling, among others.

All Carbon products, including the latest features from the recent Carbon 3.2 platform release, are available both as part of the Stratos cloud middleware platform and as cloud-hosted versions with instant provisioning on the StratosLive public PaaS. WSO2's approach enables developers to migrate their applications and services between on-premise servers, a private PaaS, a public PaaS, and hybrid cloud environments, providing deployment flexibility.

“The cloud is a compelling platform for enabling enterprises to combine the agility they’ve gained by employing SOAs and composite applications with an extended reach and greater cost efficiencies,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “At WSO2, we’re delivering on this promise by providing the only truly open and complete PaaS available today with our WSO2 StratosLive middleware PaaS and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 cloud middleware platform.”

Four new products
The launch of StratosLive and Stratos 1.5, adds four new cloud middleware products:

• Data as a Service provides both SQL and NoSQL databases to users based on both MySQL and Apache Cassandra. This allows users to self-provision a database in the cloud and to choose the right model for their applications.
• Complex Event Processing as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of CEP Server, which launched in June 2011 and supports multiple CEP engines, including Drools Fusion and Esper, to enable complex event processing and event stream analysis.
• Message Broker as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of Message Broker, which launched in June 2011 and supports message queuing and publish-subscribe to enable message-driven and event-driven solutions in the enterprise. It uses Apache Qpid as the core messaging engine to implement the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard.
• Cloud Services Gateway (CSG), first launched as a separate single-tenant product, is now a fully multi-tenant product within Stratos and StratosLive.

With StratosLive and Stratos, central cloud features are built directly into the core platform—including multi-tenancy, automatic metering and monitoring, auto-scaling, centralized governance and identity management, and single sign-on. The Cloud Manager in StratosLive and Stratos offers point-and-click simplicity for configuring and provisioning middleware services, so developers can get started immediately and focus on the business logic, rather than configuring and deploying software systems.

Additionally, the Stratos cloud middleware platform features an integration layer that allows it to install onto any existing cloud infrastructure such as Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), and VMware ESX. Enterprises are never locked into a specific infrastructure provider or platform.

The availability of StratosLive and Stratos 1.5 brings several new core platform enhancements:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) Web application support
• Google Apps integration
• Metering and usage throttling
• Billing
• Multi-tenant logging

WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 are available today. Released under the Apache License 2.0, they do not carry any licensing fees. Production support for the Stratos starts at $24,000 per year. StratosLive middleware PaaS is available at three paid subscription levels: SMB, Professional, and Enterprise, as well as a free demo subscription. For details on subscription pricing, visit the WSO2 website.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 19th July 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

It is hard to believe that, in the 21st century digital age, one of the most business-critical documents—the invoice—is still created and sent mostly in paper format. In 2010, of the 30 billion invoices sent in Europe, only 10% were done so electronically. In a global economy where many other processes are being automated, a reliance on any paper-based business process seems archaic. But so far, attempts to move to true 100% electronic invoicing have been hindered by market fragmentation, cost and concerns around legal standards and interoperability. However, the emergence of managed services which provide a hybrid approach to total invoice management promise to help businesses make a gradual transition to electronic invoicing, by processing both paper and electronic invoices based on buyer and supplier preferences.

A recent Ricoh study [1] shows that, on average, 42.5 per cent of all business critical information is still in hard copy format. There is no doubt that invoicing contributes to this figure, as it remains one of the last bastions of manual processing and is labour-intensive, inefficient, costly and error prone. Quocirca estimates that the cost of processing paper invoices through manual means can range anywhere from €8 to €10 per invoice, which is significant when applied across the mountain of paper such that many businesses process on a daily basis.

Manual processes can also result in slow invoice reconciliation making it difficult to secure early-payment discounts, which in turn can result in poor supplier relationships. Furthermore, companies that continue to rely on paper-based invoicing methods may have difficulty preparing audit trails for closing books and meeting the requirements for European VAT audits. Ricoh’s study also indicates that only 39% of companies have the ability to follow an audit trail for all their business critical documents. A high reliance on paper also comes at an environmental cost—not only in paper waste but also in the associated energy costs of transporting the physical invoices.

It is unsurprising therefore that more businesses want to implement electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) to remove manual processes, speed up invoicing cycles and eliminate non-value add activities for accounts departments. Benefits of e-invoicing are far-reaching. Quocirca estimates that e-invoicing can enhance business efficiency through reducing the costs of handling invoices by up to 70%. The most obvious benefits are the direct cost savings for sending the invoice (paper, postage and printing) and in processing (accepting the invoice, processing and approving it) for the recipient.

These compelling drivers are now set to broaden e-invoicing adoption, enabling more organisations to begin the transition to electronic invoicing. In 2011, approximately 5 million European businesses are expected to send or receive electronic invoices. Initiatives such as the European Commission’s plans to revise the E-Signatures Directive in 2011 are a bid to encourage businesses to make more use of electronic invoices. Electronic invoicing is also part of the European Commission’s flagship “A Digital Agenda for Europe” which wants to see e-invoicing to be the predominant form of invoicing by 2020.

 Today the market is categorised by a mix of software products deployed on-premise and hosted services, most of which offer integration to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, compliance with varying country regulations and supplier on-boarding. E-invoicing networks are becoming more popular as invoices, regardless of data standards, are interchanged via a third party service providers or invoice portals. Once enrolled in a network, which may charge an upfront fee as well as an on-going fee, a supplier can send electronic invoices to any customer on the network. However such networks rely on full supplier and buyer participation, and generally appeal to larger businesses. Smaller suppliers may have little incentive to participate in networks and may not be able to justify the joining fee. But in a competitive environment they can feel under pressure to comply in order to retain the business. Meanwhile, as businesses move to electronic invoicing at a different pace, they will find themselves operating disparate processes for handling paper and electronic invoices. Poor integration of these processes is costly and inefficient.

As full e-invoicing requires buy-in along the whole supply chain, a big-bang approach to e-invoicing is not realistic. Consequently, some leading businesses are adopting a hybrid approach which provides a phased transition to e-invoicing, whilst enabling them to retain paper-processes for some suppliers and buyers where appropriate. A managed service provider (MSP) takes full control of the invoice process—including the manual capture of paper invoices and document scanning, the handling of a diverse range of invoice receipt formats (e.g. xml, CSV, EDI, fax, email or paper) and the sending of invoices in a buyer’s preferred format. Software is developed, maintained and operated by the MSP, with customers paying a “fee per transaction”, enabling lower costs.

Those businesses in the e-invoicing vanguard are already reaping the benefits. Ricoh, an MSP that provides such services, cites the example of a sportswear manufacturer who operated an expensive and inefficient invoicing process. Mailing 4.5 million paper invoices and statements a year, they outsourced their entire invoice process, planning to transition from paper to electronic invoicing over three years. Using Ricoh’s i-Invoicing service, according to customer preference, invoices are either uploaded to a web portal for online viewing, or printed and dispatched by conventional means. Customers are able to download and pay bills by logging on to the secure web portal. The number of paper-based transactional documents distributed by Ricoh on the manufacturer’s behalf is expected to reduce by 3.6 million per annum, saving €3 million.

By not restricting the format of invoices, a managed service ensures that the benefits of e-invoicing are not limited to just large enterprises, but also extended to SMEs who will gain access to a wider market of potential customers and suppliers, especially larger organisations who may prefer working with e-capable trading partners. E-invoicing will be a major factor in making business process more efficient for many businesses in the future. Those that start now will be ahead of the game as the e-invoicing market steadily builds towards critical mass.

Read Quocirca's report at: Electronic Invoicing: Ready for Prime Time

[1] Ricoh Process Efficiency Index, June 2011. www.ricoh-europe.com/thoughtleadership

By: Ike Ononogbu, Managing Partner, InforData Consulting Posted: 8th July 2011 Copyright InforData Consulting © 2011

We have just gone past the half way mark of 2011 and several events—conferences, seminars, and webinars—have taken place. A number of them have one common denominator, Data Management. The 20th and 21st century has seen an increase in mergers and acquisitions as organisations pursue growth and wider customer base. Invariably this has led to the explosion of data held within an organisation. This trend seems to have shifted the focus on how best to manage this ubiquitous item.

What is it that makes data so important? The information that comes from data reveals the state of an organisation. Sales figures, financial status, revenue, forecasts are all derived from data. Information at the disposal of organisations, if accurate, can be used to strategize and gain competitive advantage. In reality, data is the engine that moves an organisation.

One way of understanding your data sets and managing it to gain a competitive edge is through Master Data Management (MDM). In recent times there has been a flurry of interest in MDM and recognition of its importance. It has been noted organisations that are interested in implementing MDM solutions often struggle to address the challenges that come with implementation. Gartner, in a published article titled ‘MDM 'Primer': How to Define Master Data and Related Data in Your Organization’, states that “MDM program managers and leaders need to ensure a shared understanding of what defines master data across the organisation. MDM programs will not go very far without this. If your organisation plans to adopt MDM, you need this “primer” to help define master data across business and IT”. The paper goes on to talk about key findings and recommendations.

While there are immense challenges in implementing a Master Data Management (MDM) solution, the benefits are overwhelming. It has been said that by 2013, Master Data Management (MDM) will reduce data redundancy in organizations. As a result will save 80% of the costs associated with managing this redundant data.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 27th June 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Many organisations are reducing the complexity, cost and risk of operating an unmanaged print environment by adopting a managed print service (MPS). However, while cost reduction has long been the primary objective for MPS, sustainability is also working its way up the agenda.

At Kyocera's recent European analyst briefing, sustainability was a key theme for its Managed Document Services (MDS) offering. Certainly, the environmental impact of unmanaged printing should not be ignored. Poor print management results in wasteful printing and the use of out-dated or redundant devices can also lead to high energy consumption. Implementing responsible printing practices can therefore go a long way to improving an organisation's environmental credentials as well as significantly reducing costs.

As paper remains an important part of many a business's workflows, the focus must be on the "less paper office" rather than the utopian ideal of the paperless office. The nature of printing may be changing—rather than outsourcing high-quality printing, it is conducted in-house and rather than printing and distributing reports, information is distributed electronically and printed only when the recipient feels it is necessary. Meanwhile, the increase in mobile working is creating demand for printing on the move. MPS seeks to address these new requirements for printing in the 21st Century, while ensuring the print environment operates cost effectively and securely with a minimal environmental impact.

Of course there are many simple steps to reducing the environmental impact of printing. These include using recycled paper, enforcing duplex printing and implementing company-wide print policies that encourage employees to print responsibly. But to make real savings—both financial and environmental—businesses need to have a complete visibility on printing volumes and overall costs. This requires a true picture of how many devices there are in an organisation and what is being printed where and by whom.

MPS addresses these needs in three main stages—the assessment, optimisation and ongoing management of the print environment. Most of the MPS measures to reduce printing costs also have an environmental benefit. Device consolidation brings order to the printer chaos that characterises a typical unmanaged print environment. Replacing single function outdated inefficient devices with modern energy efficient multi-function ones (MFPs) reduces energy usage and also enables enforced policies such as duplex printing to be enforced.

But probably one of the most important factors in eliminating paper waste is through the use of "follow-me printing", which eliminates the common occurrence of "print and forget". When a printer job is sent to a network-enabled MFP, the document is only released when an employee authenticates at the device using either a password or swipe card. Documents within individual print queues not printed after a certain amount of time are automatically deleted.

The added bonus of "follow-me printing" is that documents can be released at any location within a corporate network, promoting user mobility. This not only reduces paper waste by eliminating uncollected output, it promotes document security and mobile working. Quocirca believes these will be the driving factors for the adoption of MPS over the coming year.

Kyocera shared details of its MPS engagement with the Royal Sun Alliance (RSA) in the UK. Over five years, Project SPEC (Simplifying Print through Enhancement and Consolidation) aims to reduce RSA's fleet of more than 3,000 printers, managed by a number of vendors, to just 282 high-performance devices, operated through a centralised system. After one year, RSA has reduced print volume by 13 per cent, paper consumption by 21 per cent and energy consumption by 55 per cent. These milestones are showcased in RSA's Corporate Social Responsibility report highlighting the quantifiable cost and environmental benefits of operating a managed print environment.

Green IT should no longer be a nice-to-have afterthought behind cost reduction. More businesses now consider sustainability as a key priority due to combined customer demands, new regulations on carbon trading and constrained financial circumstances. More suppliers are expected to meet environmental criteria—according to Kyocera, sustainability is a key part of almost 80 per cent of MPS tenders with a typical weighting of 35 per cent, from about 10 per cent a few years ago. As sustainability rises up the CIO agenda, they will expect the capability to quantify the environmental impact of their print environment to meet reporting requirements.

Vendors such as HP and Xerox already address such needs through the provision of carbon calculators to assess energy consumption and associated carbon output. Quocirca believes that more MPS vendors will need to provide such analysis as part of their MPS arsenal to demonstrate how MPS can boost cost savings and environmental credentials. With a broader product range planned for the coming year, and plans to unify its offerings across Europe, Kyocera's MDS initiatives show it is catching up with the main players in the market.

By: Dominic Monkhouse, Managing Director EMEA, PEER 1 Hosting Posted: 16th June 2011 Copyright PEER 1 Hosting © 2011

There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings that make finding the right provider very difficult. Questions that always arise are - how do you know you’re getting good service and value for money? What should you do if you suspect you’re not?

Here are the basic facts you need to know about hosting:

What goes on behind closed doors?
Many hosting providers do not make it a policy to notify customers when they experience downtime. What this means in reality is that your website was out of action and you didn’t even know. For e-commerce businesses, SMEs outsourcing software or white-label web services, this isn’t just an inconvenience, it can hit profits. Finding out revenue has taken a hit due to faulty web availability is never an easy thing to take—nor should it be accepted.

Make sure your hosting provider reports regularly on uptime—don’t take their ‘uptime guarantee’ as gospel. It should also live by its SLA (Service Level Agreement) and provide regular reports, rather than granting credits retrospectively for downtime. It’s also worth noting that large chunks of downtime are often excluded from credits under the guise of ‘trouble-shooting’. Have a conversation with your provider and agree how uptime will be proved, what the process is, and what the definition of ‘downtime’ actually is. This way you’ll know exactly what you’re entitled to and it’ll be difficult for your hosting provider to get away with poor service.

Know what you’re paying for
Many hosting providers will give you an all-in fee for set-up, hardware, operating system, support and bandwidth. This may seem like an easy option but the problem with these deals is you can’t see exactly where your money is going, and so can’t see if you’re paying for things you don’t need. The best way to ensure you’re not taken for a ride is to ask for a breakdown of services and individual quotes for support, bandwidth, additional hardware etc. It’s the only way to know what’s being delivered, what isn’t, and what is surplus to requirements.

Always ask about pricing for over-usage. What happens if you exceed your allotted monthly bandwidth? And how much more will it cost to add an extra Gig of RAM? Over-usage pricing can be horrendous and a sharp shock if you weren’t expecting it. You need to know what’s included and, more importantly, what isn’t. Ask for the extra cost of things like memory, hard-drive, bandwidth per Gig and back-up to be quoted separately, as they could come back to bite you.

Know who is really hosting you and do your own research
In some cases, a hosting provider will actually have a host itself. This means you may be paying a margin when you could get a better prince and SLA by going direct. The closer you are to the host, the faster the fault resolution so it pays to do a bit of research.

One of the best tools to discover your real host is the anti-phishing toolbar from netcraft.com. It allows you to see who is hosting your site and the other sites they are hosting. If you don’t want to ask your provider for a reference, but you do want to find and contact some of its customers, this is the perfect way to do it.

References are always good. One way to avoid being conned is the Alphabet Test. Ask for your provider’s references, ignore them, then choose any letter of the alphabet and ask for three references beginning with that letter. If you don’t get any, you know the initial references weren’t exactly robust.

Understand your contract and your exit options
Many hosting providers will offer a discount on longer term contracts which may sound like a good deal. But if the provider isn’t delivering within the SLA, you’re stuck with poor service or forced to pay a hefty exit fee. Instead, sign a month to month contract. You may pay a little more, but you will have the flexibility to leave or alter your hosting agreement at any point which will make life easier in the long-run.

If you are stuck in a long contract with a bad provider, it’s often worth paying the exit fee to switch to a month-to-month contract. Moving between hosting providers is not hard or difficult, there are many digital agencies that can handle migration projects without difficulty, so don’t be put off about changing things and never resign yourself to bad service.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 13th April 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

One thing is guaranteed at InfoSec this year—there will be plenty of people talking about the cloud. However, they will not all be talking about the same thing. When it comes to IT security they will be taking one of three angles; securing the cloud, using the cloud securely and using the cloud to deliver security. If you can establish early on which of these any given discussion alludes to you then you may proceed with a little more clarity.

Having said that, many discussions involving the cloud tend be a bit vague. So you would also be well advised to establish what sort of cloud is being alluded to, as Quocirca will in this article. If it is a public cloud service, is it regarding the provision of infrastructure or applications? – i.e. infrastructure as a service/IaaS or software as a service/SaaS. If it is not a discussion about public cloud services then it must about the private cloud, which is just an efficient way of configuring and using private data centre resources using technology that has been developed to build a public cloud infrastructure.

Let’s take the first of those security issues mentioned above—securing the cloud or, to be precise, helping IaaS and PaaS providers secure their services. These service providers need firewalls, intrusion protection, content security etc. just as those configuring private IT infrastructure do. There are some differences, mainly around scalability; the fast growing number of users of public cloud services means providers need highly scalable and reliable products to be able to keep growing and maintain service levels. There are also some specific issues with regard to virtualised infrastructure and multi-tenancy platforms that they need to address. However, on the whole, one should expect, given the stakes and the effort put in, that public cloud services will in many cases be more secure than privately owned and run IT infrastructure.

The second issue is secure use of the cloud. This involves making sure the communication between an organisation’s users and the cloud services they are expected to use is secure. This is really no different to making sure remote users can safely access privately owned IT applications and infrastructure. Cloud service providers know what they are doing here too; for them everyone is an outsider, so the default is to authenticate access and communicate securely. It also involves making sure the use of cloud based services employees invoke themselves is secure (social networks, web mail, collaboration tools etc.) Much of this is about content filtering, preventing bad stuff coming in and good stuff getting into the wrong hands.

The final issue is using the cloud to deliver security. This is an established and growing practice. One of the first use cases was to deliver anti-virus updates over the internet rather than distributing them on diskettes. Perhaps the largest cloud based service is Microsoft update, delivering patches to hundreds of millions of PCs on a regular basis to try and keep them secure from the latest exploits. Email filtering, web content filtering, security management and a range of other requirements are being delivered as on-demand service by security vendors and the managed security service providers (MSSP) they partner with. They also rely of the cloud to gather most of the information they have on known threats through their protection networks.

Enjoy InfoSec; you won’t be able to avoid discussions about the cloud, but you can get more out of them if you establish the angle a given vendor is taking. Don’t cloud over—but be cloud aware.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 30th March 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

At its recent Analyst Summit in San Francisco, HP delivered a strong vision on how it aims to grow its printing revenues across consumer, SMB, enterprise and commercial markets. Whether it's consumer web aware printers, retail publishing such as SnapFish, managed print services (MPS) or digitising the commercial print processes, HP demonstrated a range of products and services and an integrated go-to-market strategy that will enable it to extend the reach for its vast portfolio.

HP certainly has a strong vision to integrate its cloud, mobile and security offerings and the one area where HP is certainly able to exploit the convergence of these trends is printing. HP has the technology expertise in each of these areas, to provide it with a competitive advantage over its traditional print and copier competitors who are all looking to capture more revenues from products and services in a mature market where HP currently dominates.

HP‘s Imaging and Printing Group’s (IPG) revenues grew by 7% in 2010, and overall, IPG accounted for 20% of HP’s revenue. Supplies revenue represents 67% of overall IPG revenue, with commercial printer hardware and consumer printer hardware accounting for 22% and 11% respectively. The consumer market for printers is highly commoditised, so HP is increasing its focus on grabbing a larger share of the commercial market. Commercial printer hardware shipments growth is important, not only for revenue but also the supplies revenue growth these devices can deliver on an on-going basis.

HP’s vision for its IPG business includes having an “ecosystem for on- and off-ramps and a comprehensive cloud-based platform”. In simple terms, this means enabling users to connect to any HP networked printer, multifunction peripheral (MFP), print shop and retail storefront from any device, securely and seamlessly wherever the user is at any one time. Behind this objective is the goal to ultimately drive higher value pages, such as colour which generate much more revenue than black and white pages, which in turn drives supplies revenue.

The mobile opportunity
HP also described its innovation around its web-enabled printers, which use the webOS platform. It’s ePrint service enables printing on any internet connected device by sending the output as an email attachment directly to the printer. HP has high hopes for adoption of this among home and business users alike. It shipped 3 million units of its web-enabled printers in Q1 2011 and expects to ship 20 million by the end of this year. 

Indeed, the advent of smartphones and tablet devices such as the iPad has generated a new wave in development of printing solutions for platforms such as the BlackBerry, Android and iOS. As well as ePrint, HP has also worked closely with Apple to develop direct printing support for HP printers and MFPs in the latest release of AirPrint available on devices running iOS 4.2 or later. HP also announced that it would provide support for Google’s Cloud Print later this year. 

The launch of its webOS TouchPad tablet also this year will undoubtedly bring native driver support into webOS for HP devices and, as such, HP is well positioned to integrate the mobile and printing experience for these devices—although it remains to be seen how popular they will be. While HP has brought mobility to the forefront of its print strategy—other vendors such as Xerox and Ricoh have also released products for printing to their printers and MFPs from smartphones.

Growing service and solutions revenue
HP is also looking to drive high value recurring business through managed print services (MPS) where it currently has 3,000 customers. MPS is a burgeoning market offering printer vendors an opportunity to capture more pages through managing office, commercial and production print environments. HP is already seeing the fruits of its joint go-to-market MPS activities between IPG and its Enterprise Business (EB) unit. This has resulted in a 200% rise in joint IPG/ES total contract value growth with 74% of the HP enterprise funnel including joint pursuits. HP also indicated that its average deal size is seven times higher through joint activities.

HP is certainly well positioned to capitalise on these joint opportunities and the two groups seem to be well aligned in their go-to-market approach. HP intends to further drive the value of MPS contracts by increasing the sales of attached document workflow solutions. In 2010, these accounted for 75% of its MPS contracts, compared to 25% in 2008.

Having developed a strong service portfolio for enterprise clients, HP is now building an infrastructure for its channel partners to deliver MPS to SMBs encouraging them to move to a contractual model away from traditional transactional sales. HP has developed QuickPage, a turnkey service offering that provides billing, account management and financing for channel partners. This hosted infrastructure minimises the resources and investment necessary for channel partners to participate in the lucrative MPS market.

An expanding print service provider ecosystem
Accelerating the analogue-to-digital transformation in graphics is another opportunity for HP to drive supplies and page growth in the commercial printing market. HP estimates that 1.46 billion pages were printed on its high speed inkjet presses in 2010. The fact that over 95% of graphics pages such as labels and packaging, signage, publishing and collateral are still analogue clearly represents a huge opportunity for HP.

As a technology giant, HP has the breadth and scale to operate in all areas of the print industry—covering consumer, SMB, enterprise and commercial print. Its vast integrated go-to-market infrastructure sets it apart from some of its competitors, and certainly the joint approach with its Enterprise Services business will boost MPS revenues. But in the enterprise and commercial print arena it faces stiff competition from rivals such as Xerox and Ricoh who are both adapting their portfolios to capture wider enterprise print opportunities. HP has got its finger in many print pies, but it will be the ability to execute on increasing page growth through its product and services that will ultimately drive its revenues in the future.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 29th March 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Recognizing broad integration as an essential ingredient to modern business agility, Workday today delivered a set of cloud-based integration capabilities to its partner ecosystem and growing stable of software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP users.

The Workday Integration Cloud Platform is joined by a graphical tools suite designed to broaden the use of integration by more types of workers so they—as well as IT—can build and deploy the desired integrations that best support processes among and between businesses.

Workday is using its SaaS-based enterprise solutions for human resources, payroll, and financial management as a beachhead for popularizing integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The goal is to allow for complex, custom integrations to be built using Workday tools and then be deployed and managed in the Workday Cloud. [Disclosure: Workday is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Opening up integration functions to more users on the front lines of business-to-business requirements empowers those workers. But providing those integration capabilities on a common enterprise cloud environment—one that exploits enterprise service bus (ESB) technology and SOA benefits—gives the users freedom without risk of chaos or lack of control and management.

Incidentally, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

Early advocacy of iPaaS
An early advocate for the "integration as a service" concept, Workday is delivering on that vision in a way that could rapidly broaden its appeal beyond human resources management (HRM) and enterprise ERP and into more general cloud services. The strong integration capabilities bolsters the appeal of Workday's applications services, draws in more service partners, and sets the stage for providing wider integration capabilities.

While business-to-business integration is a key requirement for how companies support their employees—with complex interactions across suppliers for payroll, benefits, and recruitment—the data and access control in human resources systems proves an essential ingredient for making general integrations become more automated and safe. The new cloud integration services and tools allow customers and partners to build, deploy, run and manage custom integrations for the numerous systems and applications that connect to and from Workday.

But Workday executives say that "the sky is the limit" on where cloud-based integration—that is part and parcel with applications services—can go. And the timing is pretty hot. That's because we’re seeing that companies are focused on the business process level more, and that the resources, assets, participants and interfaces that support those processes are more varied and distributed than ever.

The challenge, then, is not just middleware integrations amid a more complex and dynamic environment, but of integrating more types of services and resources from more places by more people. The bottleneck of IT-administered integrations based on installed integration platforms does not seem up to this task. The integration requirements need to shift right along with the elements that support “boundaryless” processes.

Beat the complexity
Additionally, the historic separations of data integration, application integration and web services interoperability and access need to come together better. Those tasked with crafting and adapting business processes need to architect across the domains of integration, not be hobbled by the complexity and incompatibility among and between them. Logic and data need to play well together regardless of where they reside or how their underlying technology behaves.

In order to accomplish these new requirements, an uber integration capability that can be leveraged by various IT constituents amid an ecosystem—not installed by any or all those IT environments—appears the best and fastest approach. An integration platform in the cloud that can be leveraged and managed with enterprise-caliber security and access control at the process level can solve these vexing problems for data, process, workflow, collaboration and traditional integration methods.

Embedding the integrations as core features of the common applications architecture also frees up the lock-in from the database integration hairball that often builds around on-premises n-tier architectures. The brittle nature of such custom integrations has also driven up the cost of computing significantly, while holding back companies from adopting new technology at a business pace, rather than an integrations pace.

That's why iPaaS and a multi-tenancy cloud environment can be a powerful productivity enhancer: businesses can far better create relationships between their organizations and pursue process innovations without the need to adjust a vast hairball of legacy software. Cloud-based integration can turn IT into a rapid enabler of process innovation, rather than a costly bottleneck.

Furthermore, the need to address people, process and technology concerns is cliche for all IT activities, but perhaps most important for how process integrations really work. Who gets to integrate what and how, and who can give permissions for cross-organizational interactions has been a thorny issue. Workday's approach to cloud integration building leverages permissions and policy-driven access and governance to make integration crafting a more mainstream corporate competency.

Benefits of multi-tenancy
Because Workday's SaaS offerings are architected on multi-tenancy operational model, whereby all users and partners to the Workday services and applications are in synch on versions and updates, integrations can be made and amended with far less complexity. A major deterrent for legacy-based EAI and middleware integrations is in the risk and complexity of making integrations that break when its time to upgrade apps or platforms.

And while APIs and lightweight connectors have been a huge benefit in recent years, the APIs interactions are not always enough for enterprise-level process integrations. There's also the problem of API sprawl, and the need to manage the interactions holistically and comprehensively.

In a nutshell, Workday is working to break the integration-platform-database-applications vise that can hinder and bind enterprises and governments. The relations need to go deeper than APIs. Solving this is no small feat, but it may be one of the greatest long-term benefits of the cloud computing model, both in terms of cost and agility. It's the processes, after all, that count most and should be easy to safely make, remake and iterate on.

It's time that agile integration become a feature of more applications, rather than a hand-crafted after-market exercise at the complex database and middleware tiers. And if that can happen quicker and better as a cloud-based iPaaS model, I'm all for it.

Collaboration moves to services level
The need to effectively cobble together services, data, participants and logic and management in business processes needs to go beyond the over-burdened IT team. Social media trends show us that productivity comes from allowing individuals to reach out and craft new and better ways of doing things, of being collaborative wherever and however they can to support their goals.

Already we’re seeing self-motivated users integrate through outside entities, Facebook and Google apps being a prime examples. They are also accessing their own apps and data via web and mobile apps and via app stores. More data is being generated and stored in a variety of clouds and/or partners, and so the need to integrate the data from and amid third parties is an imperative, especially to gain comprehensive analytics. We need to both manage and examine Big Data as well as Far-Flung Data. Integration is a huge part of that.

As I mentioned, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 28th March 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

The IT distribution channel has always been considered a major influence on the adoption of new products, services and ideas by end-user organisations. So as the IT industry seems set on moving relentlessly forwards with the message that the cloud is the future, how important is the channel in helping the delivery of that technology?

The relationship between IT vendors and the resellers that ultimately shift many of their products has always been like that between the proverbial chicken and egg. Resellers need products to sell and vendors need resellers to sell their products, at least at high volume with a low cost of sale. But does the cloud change this?

At one level, it has the potential to do so. Some vendors, such as Microsoft, that have been stalwart supporters of the channel in the past have wavered. Microsoft now offers some of its cloud-based products for sales direct to customers as well as via partners—for example, Microsoft Office 365, or BPOS as it was previously known.

Furthermore, the further up the cloud stack a customer buys, the less there is for a reseller to offer. For example, an infrastructure-as-a-service offering still needs some systems and application software licences to make it functional, whereas software as a service includes all that, and so just needs user-access devices and connectivity.

However, a reseller that maintains strong relationships with its customers may not have too much to worry about for two reasons. First, no vendor, not even Microsoft, can offer a full range of cloud services and second, cloud-based services will never be the be-all and end-all. IT delivery will always be an appropriate mix of on-premise and on-demand services for a given organisation.

Resellers need to help their customers strike a balance between on-premise delivery and on-demand services and, in doing so, maintain their value-add. To achieve this balance, they must identify appropriate cloud offerings to add to their portfolio so they can offer these to customers alongside on-premise alternatives.

Requirements can be reviewed case by case, with the reseller being impartial and suggesting the most suitable approach for each customer.

A customer that is growing fast might need rapid access to more processing power. Is this best provided by buying more servers and renting the datacentre space to deploy them or buying commodity virtual servers from a managed hosting provider? Is content security best deployed at the network edge or in the cloud? A range of factors will provide the answers to these questions and help the reseller make its recommendation.

When a cloud-based service seems to be the best option, it still needs to be integrated with on-premise infrastructure. Some would argue smaller organisations could source all their IT needs from the cloud but that can never be true if you look at all the IT infrastructure requirements.

There will always be a need for user end-points—PCs, laptops and smartphones—as well as routers and printers. A true value-added reseller with strong client relationships must operate at this level, providing services to manage and secure IT across this entire infrastructure, integrating cloud-based services as appropriate.

At this stage, it is worth mentioning another aspect of the cloud that resellers should remind their customers about. Making sure the use of IT is secure and compliant is not just about selecting when best to use cloud services, it is also recognising that end users will make use of such services anyway.

Whether it is social networking for business or personal use, collaboration tools, online office tools or even on-demand server-storage utility services, users can choose to invoke these directly for themselves. Resellers need to help their customers control or monitor the use of such services.

How does a reseller go about assembling an on-demand portfolio? Some providers of on-demand services are more channel-friendly than others—some are indifferent. Amazon may not have much of a reseller program for Amazon Web Services but this does not stop a reseller from building EC2 servers or S3 storage into their propositions.

However, it may make more sense to work with a provider such as Rackspace, which has an active partner programme and prides itself on support, as this choice will allow a reseller to back its own service guarantees with those from its supplier. Salesforce.com has always seen the channel as a second to direct sales whereas for NetSuite it is seen as the primary route to market. That attitude is reflected in the way both organisations incentivise partners.

All that said, selecting cloud services is just one of the challenges. Making sure they appear as unified, coherent and seamless set offerings, with a single billing and an integrated management portal is too much to ask of most resellers. There is help at hand from some distributors, who also have to work out how to exploit the cloud and stay in the game.

For example, COMPUTERLINKS has recently launched a range of cloud services under a new brand name called Alvea. This brand includes on-demand servers and storage, data backup, security and collaboration services. Unified billing and management are built into the offerings and resellers can white-label the whole thing to appear as their own.

Being a well-established distributor, COMPUTERLINKS knows a thing or two about incentivising resellers and, for the same reasons, has chosen to work with channel-friendly suppliers, plugging gaps with its own offerings as appropriate.

Ingram Micro assembled a set of cloud services branded Seismic, perhaps an indication the Earth really is shifting under the channel or at least the clouds above it. Certain other distributors look ready to follow the lead of COMPUTERLINKS and Ingram Micro and build out cloud-service portfolios of their own.

Cloud-based services will continue to grow as a proportion of overall IT spending for the foreseeable future. Resellers and distributors that fail to recognise this fact and extend their portfolios accordingly will be failing their customers and themselves.

By: Ike Ononogbu, Managing Partner, InforData Consulting Posted: 28th February 2011 Copyright InforData Consulting © 2011

Heading South
Is the cost of data management heading south? Have you had a discussion with a client considering moving away from inefficient data management processes or a client looking to implement a transformation project? If you have, my guess is that pricing must have been a thorny issue. One would then ask why such organisations stick to the 'tried and tested' procedures that are quite expensive.

Step in Open Source
In the past few years we have seen the rising interest in Open Source. This has been fuelled by the popular belief that you can possibly get value for money at a reduced cost. The idea of Open Source in relation to technology has long been in existence but the idea of Open Source in relation to data integration is a new concept. Open Source is not just about giving access to source code, it also involves free redistribution of applications. Some offer both free distribution and a licensing option.

I recently attended a dialogue session focused on Open Source and it is evident organisations are beginning to look at and explore the gains Open Source has to offer. Coming from industry chieftains, who constituted the panel at the session within the private and public sector, it certainly is a good sign for Open Source evangelists.

The Difficulty
So, why has it been difficult for Open Source to really take flight? During the dialogue session, the reasons were not in short supply. They ranged from contractual agreements between System Integrators and clients to risks involved in implementing integration projects using ‘non-mainstream’ applications. Members of the audience, of course, did counter the argument for, citing the government’s cost-saving drive as a big enough incentive. Some, also, did point out the superiority of some Open Source products, in terms of functionality, over closed applications.

Data Integration
Looking at Open Source within the data integration arena, Talend easily comes to mind. Talend, a Paris-based software house, offers an Open Source data integration tool with a free standard edition version and a subscription version. The company publishes the code of its core modules and offers the developer community the ability to improve the product. Nevertheless, Talend R&D drives the road map/strategy.

Talend seems to be succeeding in its awareness drive which has seen it sign-up a number of clients in the private and public sector. It must be added that their data integration tool is effective.

Pros and Cons
As with every evolving concept there are positives, to build on, and negatives, to address.

Negatives

• Intellectual Properties issues: Who owns what?
• Who reaps the financial gains from the sale or use of the product?

Positives

• Costs: The reduction in costs associated with Open Source weighs heavily in its favour.
• Easy access: Free versions are available on-line.

While the evangelists of Open Source proclaim the philosophy according to Open Source we have to remember it has to be judged based on its merits and not just on costs.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 17th February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

I can remember the many hours of heartache trying to work out what actually happened when I was trying to document a business process for a customer. Invariably, Joe tells you one thing, Sarah tells you something completely different and “Old Bob” tells you that for “X” we do it that way. Trying to untangle these conflicting issues to understand the business rules and the process paths is hard work but vital.

So it was with a lot of enthusiasm (as well as scepticism) that I agreed to be briefed by Teemu Lehto, QPR Software’s Vice President of Business Development about their new product ProcessAnalyzer v2, described as an Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD) tool.

So what is Automated Business Process Discovery? ABPD is an emerging field that discovers the business processes based on examining the electronic footprints the users leave in the IT assets supporting the process. This allows the business process to be automatically discovered and documented in near real time. Approaching the business process “bottoms-up” from the detailed facts of instances of the process provides a detailed depiction of the business process, complete with all the nuances of the process, complete with detailed statistical information on how often different variations of the process are executed, how long it takes, what data conditions give rise to process variations, and what variations there are between different users or groups.

Why should you be interested? Well, Jim Sinur, Gartner Research VP, listed the topic as number 2 in their The Top Ten BPM Technologies in March 2010. Gartner have seen ABPD as a means to overcoming the following issues in the way we currently model processes. It is a costly and time-consuming process that is vulnerable to human interpretation, where we come across inadequate business knowledge and a lack of objective validation techniques. Pretty hard on those of us who have made a living out of working through this morass to get to the heart of the matter—the actual process. To give Gartner their due they do recognise that ABPD will be an aid to making the process quicker and less costly and I would certainly agree with this. Forrester have also introduced ABPD as a new evaluation criterion in their Forrester Wave: Business Process Management Suites, Q3 2010. So the two senior industry analyst houses see this as an important area. From Bloor’s viewpoint we also see that ABPD is an important technique to aid in the discovery of processes which are already in operation.

So what about the new entrant, QPR Software’s ProcessAnalyzer v2? Lehto explained that QPR had started work on the product back in 2009 and, during last year (2010), they put a first release out to some of their customers to test the waters. These initial tests proved that the functionality was right, so QPR then redeveloped to make it easier to use. ProcessAnalyzer can extract the necessary information it requires from a number of different data sources including SQL databases, ODBC, web services (XML) and OLAP. The first striking thing about ProcessAnalyser is the user interface—Microsoft Excel—thereby making it very familiar and easy to use for a large majority of users. Now we all know that currently Excel has a limit of 1million rows, so I asked Lehto what happened if you were dealing with more than 1million rows of data. QPR then used SQL Server to hold the data.

Figure 1: QPR Software ProcessAnalyzer capability summary (Source: QPR Software)

In the demonstration I was shown, an Excel spreadsheet with patient number, process step, organisation unit, start time and end time was used to generate a process flow diagram with swim lanes based on the organisation unit data and each process step contained the number of instances as well as the total and average duration of the step. When moving to the flow view, incoming and outgoing processes are shown with green and red arrows respectively. The flow arrow that is most used is thickened and on each flow the volume of the flow and its duration is shown. The process visualization capability allows the user to drill down to individual cases. The chart shows the average duration of each activity within the swim lane (organisation unit for the demonstration). The resource load analysis report shows the resources used on a timeline. Simultaneous cases are shown on top of each other. The colours classify the cases based on their duration. The case comparison report is a graph describing the total duration of cases. As in the previous graph, the width of a box describes the average duration of the activity and the colours classify the cases based on their duration.

Lehto outlined what QPR Software saw as an example project. The first step would be to analyse the project specification and then set the objectives and define the scope. The next step would involve the identification of relevant IT systems and specifying analysis data. The data then has to be gathered before the analysis is carried out. The various outputs from the tool are then presented and discussed. The project is completed by fine tuning the analysis based on feedback.

QPR ProcessAnalyzer Desktop version is priced very attractively at €780/month/user and can be purchased directly from the QPR website. A person familiar with log files and Microsoft Excel learns the usage with the provided tutorial and can make the analysis himself. There is also a  Starter Pack, which includes 1 month usage for 1 person plus 2 days of training and consulting service.

Who else offers ABPD solutions? Here are 4 vendors and their products that I have identified:

• With the acquisition of ARIS, Software AG offer the ARIS Process Performance Manager. ARIS has had a very close relationship with SAP and is used by the latter in documenting the processes within the R/3 package. This provides similar capabilities to what I have described for QPR.
• Fujitsu, with their latest release of Interstage BPM V11, have incorporated an automated discovery engine, originally developed by their services division for client projects. This tracks all the ad hoc subtasks, and can make suggestions on improving the process based on how the process was actually executed including the user-created subtasks, rather than how it was originally designed. It uses Flash to view how many times each path was traversed in the process. The product uses system logs as input.
• StereoLOGIC, based in Toronto, Canada, offer StereoLOGIC Discovery Analyst. It is niche company only offering this tool.. The discovered business processes are published in standard BPMN and XML formats and can be exported into Microsoft Visio and IBM WebSphere Business Modeler.
• Pallas Athena of Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, offer ReflectOne, which uses event logs from applications to extract the information to produce process models.

ABPD is a very useful component to establish exactly what actually happens in a business process so that bottlenecks and unusual exceptions can be identified and improved. By automating the steps, time and effort, as well as human error, are reduced. If you add the ability to simulate and pass through to a BPMS engine to control in the future, we are talking about serious time saving.

Organizations have been looking for this for a long time; QPR has ventured into the market in a much bigger way than anyone else in terms of what you can do with QPR ProcessAnalyzer and how easy to use the product is.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 16th February 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

There are two basic ways to prevent employees getting up to no good on the web and keeping web-based threats at bay; you can do it at the a network edge, or you can force all access via an on-demand proxy service (web security-as-a-service). In general terms, the first approach suits on-premise users (i.e. those behind the firewall) and the latter suits mobile users. Of course, most businesses have to support both types of users. So, a hybrid approach using a combination of both delivery methods can make sense.

The approach taken by a given vendor depends on its heritage. So, Blue Coat, a long-established vendor of web security appliances, has always been firmly in the network edge camp—but not for much longer. This week it has announced the Blue Coat Cloud Service. Blue Coat customers will now have a choice of approaches. However, initially, it will not be possible to integrate the new on-demand service at the management and policy level with existing Blue Coat Proxy SG appliances, although this is planned for a later date. So, at this stage, Blue Coat’s announcement is more about making its technology available to new customers who want an on-demand service than extending the protection it provides for existing customers.

Blue Coat will not be alone in having both offerings but not fully integrating them. Other vendors already have the same problem. Ever since its acquisition of MessageLabs, Symantec has been building out its on-demand service to bolster its on-premise ones. Initially, Symantec was focused mainly on email but its acquisitions of MI5 (2009) and Rulespace (2010) allowed it to expand its offering to include the web, although with four products involved its policy engines are yet to be fully integrated.

McAfee should, in principle, with its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), be able to provide a coherent approach to defining policy across both its on-premise and on-demand security services, but in practice it has yet to fully integrate the latter and ePO does not cover its cloud-based services. Cisco too, which acquired the market-leading on-demand web security firm ScanSafe in 2010, is still to integrate policy with its IronPort on-premise appliances (IronPort was originally purely for email security, but Cisco is adding web security).

The most integrated approach to both on-premise and on-demand web security is available from a veteran in the space; Websense. Its TRITON Security Gateway Anywhere has offered a hybrid approach for over a year now, allowing customers to define policy for both web and email security in one place to deliver on-premise or on-demand.

Other vendors, such as Webroot, which focuses on the small and mid-sized business market, where on-demand services fit well, says it sees a future where 90% of all its business services are delivered online. However, it is hedging its bets by partnering with Palo Alto Networks, whose next-generation firewalls sit firmly at the network edge and include URL filtering based on Webroot’s BrightCloud technology (Palo Alto Networks does support remote users by forcing access back via its firewall, it calls this Global Connect). Trend Micro has a hybrid offering for email security but not currently for web activity; its InterScan Web Security is available only as an appliance.

So, the Blue Coat announcement will be good news for those who have always wanted to benefit from its technology but think such security is best delivered on-demand, but unless its customers want to manage policy and other aspects of web security in two places, they will not be able to extend their on-premise security to the cloud just yet. Furthermore, Blue Coat is yet to add email security services to any of its products. As many of its competitors already offer both, this is another limitation that may hold some new prospects back.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 10th February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

As the realisation comes to the software market that the new generation of workers need user interfaces that fit with the lifestyle of Facebook, Twitter and mobile phones with apps, we are starting to see how various software companies are meeting these changes. For the BPMS market, Appian have always been one of the companies leading the way and with the release of Appian 6.5, which includes a new interface called Appian Tempo, they have produced a release that is geared towards the end user of BPMS-driven solutions in terms of a mobile and social interface with cloud capabilities.

Malcolm Ross, Appian’s Director of Product Management, told me “The release delivers a revolutionary way to extend process visibility and participation through native mobile device access, real-time collaboration, filtered and personalised views of key business events, integration to external systems, and the ability to take direct action in a familiar and intuitive social media interface.” So what does the new Appian interface deliver?

Mobility

Appian Tempo provides native client applications for the Apple iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone as well as RIM BlackBerry devices. Ross explained that mobile BPM allows employees to stay connected, allowing them to monitor, collaborate and take action on important business decisions regardless of where they are. It also extends BPM participation beyond pre-defined process participants to include all levels of the organisation. The iPhone and iPad applications are available for immediate download from the Apple App Store. The BlackBerry application is available now from the Appian Forum community site, and will be available shortly on the BlackBerry App World site. A native application for Google Android devices will be available shortly.

Figure 1: Appian Tempo user interface on BlackBerry, iPad and iPhone. (Source: Appian)

Social

There always seems to be a contradiction about incorporating social media into a business world. Social technologies are powerful communication and collaboration platforms, but they must be harnessed in a business context to have business value. Ross explained, “Appian utilises familiar social tools and interfaces to drive business collaboration across the enterprise through personalised, filtered views that allow easy collaboration with the ability to take action when needed.” Users can filter views by relevant application or process areas and subscribe to customised feeds to monitor the key events and information that is meaningful to them. As well, users can comment, pose questions and collaborate on business events through real-time message posts and ad hoc updates to targeted groups within and outside of pre-planned business processes. The last user capability is to “Take Action”; here a user can generate actions and complete tasks from inside the event feed or from a mobile device, using optimised web and mobile forms to capture data and route tasks.

Customer-Driven

Samir Gulati, Appian’s Vice President of Marketing, described how Appian 6.5, and in particular Appian Tempo, had been driven by their customers’ business needs. One example is Archstone, a leading apartment management company, headquartered in the USA. Archstone have a highly mobile and dispersed workforce which is supported by a system built on Appian. David Carpenter, Director of BPM, Archstone, stated that “Appian Tempo delivers a new level of value to our customer service associates through instant mobile access to our key enterprise processes and forms.”

Comment

I was very impressed with the demonstration of Appian 6.5 and the Appian Tempo interface. From an end user viewpoint it opens up the ability to make real-time decisions where and when they are needed by using collaborative technology. The product is definitely easy-to-use and intuitive. While all events and collaborations can be secured at a granular level, organisations that make use of the new Appian release will need to think about the security implications of the information that can be shared.

In addition to on-premise deployment, Appian has emerged as the BPM-in-the-cloud market leader. When you add the capabilities of Appian Tempo to those already in the Appian BPMS and Appian Anywhere, as well as Appian’s specific knowledge about industries such as government and financial services, you have a very compelling proposition.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 27th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Data virtualisation is the latest technology to enjoy its moment in the hypelight and there has been some considerable debate within the blogosphere about what it actually is and what its relationship is to data federation, data integration and EII (enterprise information integration).

Rather than start from scratch I thought I would go back through my files and see what I had written about this in the past (if anything). I found the following definition of an EII platform (that is, what you need to support EII, which is, after all, about information rather than mere data). What I wrote, some three years ago, was that an EII platform needs to do four things:

1. “It virtualises your data – it makes all relevant data sources, including databases, application environments and other places where data may be sourced, appear as if they were in one place so that you can access that data as such.
2. “It abstracts your data – that is to say, it conforms your data so that it is in a consistent format regardless of any native structure and syntax that may be in use in the underlying data sources.
3. “It federates the data – it provides the connectivity that allows you to pull data together, from diverse, heterogeneous sources (which may contain either operational or historical data or both) so that it can be virtualised. It should also enable things like push-down optimisation so that query joins can be mastered in the optimal place.
4. “It presents the data in a consistent format to the front-end application (typically, but not always, a BI tool) either through relational views (via SQL) or by means of web/data services, or both.”

Actually, I didn’t quite write that: I have updated it somewhat but the gist is the same.

Clearly, data federation is not the same as data virtualisation. Moreover, federation is not necessary for virtualisation, depending on why you are doing the virtualisation. If you want to link a number of data marts together so that you can query across them then clearly the query optimisation capabilities of a federation engine will be necessary. On the other hand, if you want to create Mashups or other applications that have relatively lightweight access requirements, or you want to use virtualisation to support MDM-like capabilities, then such functions may not be necessary. Instead you can use data services. Data services may also be more appropriate in environments where less of the data is relational and more of it comes from a variety of unstructured sources or from the web. Indeed, there is a whole new discussion to be had about the distinctions between data virtualisation for unstructured data and structured data (or a combination of the two) but that’s a subject for another day.

The other question that arises is whether parts 1, 2 and 4 are all actually parts of the same thing. I think 2 and 4 probably are or, at least, the differences are so slight that there is no point in making a distinction.

Parts 1 and 2 are another issue. If data virtualisation is about having a virtual data source that does not necessarily mean that it is easy to work with. It is certainly easy to imagine a huge hybrid database that contains relational and non-relational data, pdf documents and a whole bunch of other things, but that would not necessarily mean that the data was all in a common format and, therefore, easy to work with. So, I think both 1 and 2 are required and are different. It is certainly true that it does not make much sense to implement data virtualisation without an abstraction layer but that doesn’t mean they are the same thing.

Finally, I haven’t talked about data integration at all. Well, the fact is that leading data integration products support data services so you should certainly be able to virtualise data sources even if you can’t federate them (they won’t typically have the sort of distributed query optimiser you would want from a data federation product). The question will be how easy it is to build the abstraction layer with a data integration tool. Of course, you can create all the transformations and mappings necessary for this purpose but what you would really like is something that automates a lot of this abstraction rather than requiring you to build it for yourself. It is in these two areas—federation and automated abstraction—that the pure players in the market, especially Composite Software and Denodo, have a significant advantage over the data integration vendors.