Company
webMethods provides business process integration to the world's largest corporations and government agencies. webMethods' flagship product suite, webMethods Fabric, is the only integrated platform to deliver both SOA and BPM, delivering rapid ROI to our 1,500 customers around the globe. With webMethods, customers can take a process-centric approach to their business problems, allowing them to leverage their existing IT assets, dramatically improve business process productivity and ROI, and rapidly create competitive advantage by making their business processes work harder for their company.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Saturday, June 02, 2007
FT.com / In depth - Google extends its advertising reach
FT.com / In depth - Google extends its advertising reach
Google extends its advertising reach
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: June 2 2007 02:30 | Last updated: June 2 2007 02:30
Google on Friday extended its advertising reach with the acquisition of Feedburner, the news feed service.
The deal, rumoured to be worth $100m, is far smaller than its intended $3.1bn acquisition of DoubleClick, the online advertising company, but it opens up a growing area of advertising for the Silicon Valley company.
Google extends its advertising reach
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: June 2 2007 02:30 | Last updated: June 2 2007 02:30
Google on Friday extended its advertising reach with the acquisition of Feedburner, the news feed service.
The deal, rumoured to be worth $100m, is far smaller than its intended $3.1bn acquisition of DoubleClick, the online advertising company, but it opens up a growing area of advertising for the Silicon Valley company.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Highlights From the TCS Analyst Briefing | AMR Research
Highlights From the TCS Analyst Briefing | AMR Research
A few weeks ago, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) brought nearly all of its executive team to Boston for its annual, two-day analyst briefing. Before the formal session began, we were fortunate to have an hour alone with S. Ramadorai, the company’s CEO and managing director. Under his stewardship, TCS’s revenue has doubled every 2 to 2.5 years. When the company’s fiscal year ended last March 30, TCS was the first Indian services firm to crack the $4B annual revenue mark, closing FY07 at $4.29B. It was also the first to reach $3B, too, reaching that milestone in the same year.
Skills shortages are real: may be short 150,000 people
For the last few months, we have written about the looming skills shortages presented by the continued adoption of SOA and related technologies. For its part, TCS has trained 40,000 of its consultants—about half of its workforce. About 4,000 have engagement experience, with 75% to 80% described as billable. To broaden and complement its internal training, TCS is joining forces with other vendors. For example, the company is an active member of SAP’s Enterprise Services Community and several of SAP’s Industry Value Networks.
A few weeks ago, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) brought nearly all of its executive team to Boston for its annual, two-day analyst briefing. Before the formal session began, we were fortunate to have an hour alone with S. Ramadorai, the company’s CEO and managing director. Under his stewardship, TCS’s revenue has doubled every 2 to 2.5 years. When the company’s fiscal year ended last March 30, TCS was the first Indian services firm to crack the $4B annual revenue mark, closing FY07 at $4.29B. It was also the first to reach $3B, too, reaching that milestone in the same year.
Skills shortages are real: may be short 150,000 people
For the last few months, we have written about the looming skills shortages presented by the continued adoption of SOA and related technologies. For its part, TCS has trained 40,000 of its consultants—about half of its workforce. About 4,000 have engagement experience, with 75% to 80% described as billable. To broaden and complement its internal training, TCS is joining forces with other vendors. For example, the company is an active member of SAP’s Enterprise Services Community and several of SAP’s Industry Value Networks.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
FT.com / Technology - Words – the final frontier
FT.com / Technology - Words – the final frontier
Words – the final frontier
By Ade McCormack
Published: May 30 2007 10:25 | Last updated: May 30 2007 10:25
It is well known within scientific circles that Star Trek was in fact a series of promotional videos for future technologies. As the following quotation suggests, Star Trek displayed great prescience in predicting how the language of new technologies was likely to evolve:
“The core elements are based on FTL nanoprocessor units arranged into 25 bilateral kelilactirals with 20 of those units being slaved to the central heisenfram terminal. Now this is the isopalavial interface, which controls the main firomactal drive unit . . . The ramistat kiloquad capacity is a function of the square root of the intermix ratio times the sum of the plasma injector quotient.”
It may also explain why senior executives have been known to mumble: “Beam me up Scottie,” when exposed to people that display all the characteristics of a Monte Carlo random buzzword generator.
This is a problem, given the important role IT has to play in business today. Poor communication across the business-IT department boundary is the most pernicious form of IT value-damping.
My view is based on more than two decades of experience, both as a technologist and as an IT value advisor. Until technology becomes sufficiently pervasive to obviate the need for humans in both the creation of new IT systems and the support of existing systems, humans will continue to be a major cause of IT related problems.
First, let us dwell on the underlying issues:
●Geek chic: The IT industry has its roots in science and, on day one, those in IT were indistinguishable from scientists. Subsequent advances in technology have in effect dumbed-down the skills needed to be a technologist.
Despite that, they have retained the “scientist” mindset and so display many of the associated traits. Communicating effectively with lesser intellects (ie users) unfortunately is not one of them. To the outside world the IT department can seem like an exclusive club, where users are not welcome.
The feral nature of some technologists can also lead to pack behaviour, which results in younger techies mimicking the behaviour of the “alpha technologist”. So the ability to confuse users is passed down from generation to generation.
●Tensions: Tensions between the IT department and users underpin the evolution of the IT industry. In essence there is an ongoing dispute over who controls the IT assets. Much like a restaurant where the customers (users) are constantly vying to bring in their own food and cooking utilities, and the staff (IT department) are insistent that all the cooking is done in the kitchen using restaurant produce.
This leads to mutual suspicion and ultimately a breakdown in trust. Some technologists will use jargon as a form of verbal chaff to confuse and disorient the users; a technique that gives the technologists a sense of power over their “adversaries”.
●Emotional Intelligence: Traditionally, IT people generally have high IQs. Anyone who has ever argued with a techie will have felt the full brunt of their logic.
But sometimes it is not smart to be right. Business people generally recognise the wisdom in not alerting the boss to the fact that he is an idiot – or one’s partner that they should lose some weight. Many technologists fail to understand this perspective.
As well as being a little too direct at times, the problem manifests itself through a lack of empathy or emotional intelligence. Such technologists happily talk to users as if they are also technologists and so make no allowance for the fact that they do not understand technical jargon. The lack of an empathy gene leads to jargon-rich communications from the IT department.
●Technology vendors: The battles raging in the IT industry are often literally a war of words. If one technology company can be seen to be associated with a given buzzword then this makes subsequent marketing easier.
Hence the marketing departments of many technology vendors spew out new terminology in the hope that some of it will stick to the market. This often results in technologists confusing each other, sometimes by accident and sometimes to assert the techno-pack pecking order.
An overall lack of standards in the IT industry in respect of terminology has led to many synonyms and homonyms. This has a lubricating effect on miscommunication both within and across the IT department sand bags. Perhaps this is where industry regulatory efforts should be focused?
The business implications of obfuscating terminology are profound. The resultant sub-optimal use of IT leads to poor cost management across the business, reduced competitive advantage, poor business decision making and in the extreme, prison for board members.
Support industries such as IT recruitment and training are similarly left in a state of confusion. Their buzzword bewilderment leads to poor talent acquisition and inappropriate development, which in turn leads to poor IT value realisation.
So what can be done to reverse the IT industry’s “speaking in tongues” condition? Here are a few suggestions:
Ensure the CIO is user-centric in mindset and so at least acknowledges this problem. Ideally the CIO’s remuneration needs to be index-linked to user-happiness. Consequently, smart and financially motivated CIOs will address this issue as a priority.
Recruit only business-literate IT staff. The propeller-head nerdie geeks need to be fast-tracked to extinction. Where such people are critical to your organisation, ensure that they are kept away from users. The HR director needs to be aware of their role in this.
Challenge IT staff on their use of IT jargon. Highlight that if they have any interest in building systems that actually help the business, they must use language that is rich in user terminology and light on technology jargon.
By the time a technologist reaches maturity, the technobabble condition is irreversible. We need to address this problem while our future technologists are at school and university. The teachers and professors have a critical role to play in this respect.
Many organisations get around the issue by using business/systems analysts to patrol the demilitarised zone that sits between the user and IT communities. Organisations that have happy users and a very low analyst to technologist headcount are ahead of the curve. In my view, analysts are a workaround and in an efficient business-IT ecosystem they would have no place.
Technobabble is at best a symptom of technology staff indifference to the plight of users and at worst a political tool for keeping the users in check.
Either way it is unacceptable. Technobabble reflects poorly on the IT industry and diminishes the value that the sector might deliver to both business and society. Nothing less than genetic reprogramming will address this and so a cultural overhaul is required.
As we have seen, Star Trek recognised the problem, and as the extract below highlights, it recognised that some technologists are beyond recovery:
Captain Kirk: “You’d make a splendid computer.”
Mr Spock: “That is very kind of you, Captain!”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Words – the final frontier
By Ade McCormack
Published: May 30 2007 10:25 | Last updated: May 30 2007 10:25
It is well known within scientific circles that Star Trek was in fact a series of promotional videos for future technologies. As the following quotation suggests, Star Trek displayed great prescience in predicting how the language of new technologies was likely to evolve:
“The core elements are based on FTL nanoprocessor units arranged into 25 bilateral kelilactirals with 20 of those units being slaved to the central heisenfram terminal. Now this is the isopalavial interface, which controls the main firomactal drive unit . . . The ramistat kiloquad capacity is a function of the square root of the intermix ratio times the sum of the plasma injector quotient.”
It may also explain why senior executives have been known to mumble: “Beam me up Scottie,” when exposed to people that display all the characteristics of a Monte Carlo random buzzword generator.
This is a problem, given the important role IT has to play in business today. Poor communication across the business-IT department boundary is the most pernicious form of IT value-damping.
My view is based on more than two decades of experience, both as a technologist and as an IT value advisor. Until technology becomes sufficiently pervasive to obviate the need for humans in both the creation of new IT systems and the support of existing systems, humans will continue to be a major cause of IT related problems.
First, let us dwell on the underlying issues:
●Geek chic: The IT industry has its roots in science and, on day one, those in IT were indistinguishable from scientists. Subsequent advances in technology have in effect dumbed-down the skills needed to be a technologist.
Despite that, they have retained the “scientist” mindset and so display many of the associated traits. Communicating effectively with lesser intellects (ie users) unfortunately is not one of them. To the outside world the IT department can seem like an exclusive club, where users are not welcome.
The feral nature of some technologists can also lead to pack behaviour, which results in younger techies mimicking the behaviour of the “alpha technologist”. So the ability to confuse users is passed down from generation to generation.
●Tensions: Tensions between the IT department and users underpin the evolution of the IT industry. In essence there is an ongoing dispute over who controls the IT assets. Much like a restaurant where the customers (users) are constantly vying to bring in their own food and cooking utilities, and the staff (IT department) are insistent that all the cooking is done in the kitchen using restaurant produce.
This leads to mutual suspicion and ultimately a breakdown in trust. Some technologists will use jargon as a form of verbal chaff to confuse and disorient the users; a technique that gives the technologists a sense of power over their “adversaries”.
●Emotional Intelligence: Traditionally, IT people generally have high IQs. Anyone who has ever argued with a techie will have felt the full brunt of their logic.
But sometimes it is not smart to be right. Business people generally recognise the wisdom in not alerting the boss to the fact that he is an idiot – or one’s partner that they should lose some weight. Many technologists fail to understand this perspective.
As well as being a little too direct at times, the problem manifests itself through a lack of empathy or emotional intelligence. Such technologists happily talk to users as if they are also technologists and so make no allowance for the fact that they do not understand technical jargon. The lack of an empathy gene leads to jargon-rich communications from the IT department.
●Technology vendors: The battles raging in the IT industry are often literally a war of words. If one technology company can be seen to be associated with a given buzzword then this makes subsequent marketing easier.
Hence the marketing departments of many technology vendors spew out new terminology in the hope that some of it will stick to the market. This often results in technologists confusing each other, sometimes by accident and sometimes to assert the techno-pack pecking order.
An overall lack of standards in the IT industry in respect of terminology has led to many synonyms and homonyms. This has a lubricating effect on miscommunication both within and across the IT department sand bags. Perhaps this is where industry regulatory efforts should be focused?
The business implications of obfuscating terminology are profound. The resultant sub-optimal use of IT leads to poor cost management across the business, reduced competitive advantage, poor business decision making and in the extreme, prison for board members.
Support industries such as IT recruitment and training are similarly left in a state of confusion. Their buzzword bewilderment leads to poor talent acquisition and inappropriate development, which in turn leads to poor IT value realisation.
So what can be done to reverse the IT industry’s “speaking in tongues” condition? Here are a few suggestions:
Ensure the CIO is user-centric in mindset and so at least acknowledges this problem. Ideally the CIO’s remuneration needs to be index-linked to user-happiness. Consequently, smart and financially motivated CIOs will address this issue as a priority.
Recruit only business-literate IT staff. The propeller-head nerdie geeks need to be fast-tracked to extinction. Where such people are critical to your organisation, ensure that they are kept away from users. The HR director needs to be aware of their role in this.
Challenge IT staff on their use of IT jargon. Highlight that if they have any interest in building systems that actually help the business, they must use language that is rich in user terminology and light on technology jargon.
By the time a technologist reaches maturity, the technobabble condition is irreversible. We need to address this problem while our future technologists are at school and university. The teachers and professors have a critical role to play in this respect.
Many organisations get around the issue by using business/systems analysts to patrol the demilitarised zone that sits between the user and IT communities. Organisations that have happy users and a very low analyst to technologist headcount are ahead of the curve. In my view, analysts are a workaround and in an efficient business-IT ecosystem they would have no place.
Technobabble is at best a symptom of technology staff indifference to the plight of users and at worst a political tool for keeping the users in check.
Either way it is unacceptable. Technobabble reflects poorly on the IT industry and diminishes the value that the sector might deliver to both business and society. Nothing less than genetic reprogramming will address this and so a cultural overhaul is required.
As we have seen, Star Trek recognised the problem, and as the extract below highlights, it recognised that some technologists are beyond recovery:
Captain Kirk: “You’d make a splendid computer.”
Mr Spock: “That is very kind of you, Captain!”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Thursday, May 24, 2007
With Popfly, Microsoft Enters 'Mashup' Tool Market
With Popfly, Microsoft Enters 'Mashup' Tool Market
With the alpha version of Popfly, Microsoft joins its competition in creating tools that will help move "mashup" technology from a "cool" Web developer hobby to a business value enabler.
With the alpha version of Popfly, Microsoft joins its competition in creating tools that will help move "mashup" technology from a "cool" Web developer hobby to a business value enabler.
FT.com / Companies / IT - Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
FT.com / Companies / IT - Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 24 2007 01:59 | Last updated: May 24 2007 01:59
Microsoft has played down reports that it could acquire Yahoo, saying agreeing to buy the Aquantive online advertising company for $6bn last week has given it all it needs.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist, told the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference in Las Vegas in answer to a question on whether the search engine company had assets that could assist the software giant: “From where we are today, I think we have all the pieces.”
Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 24 2007 01:59 | Last updated: May 24 2007 01:59
Microsoft has played down reports that it could acquire Yahoo, saying agreeing to buy the Aquantive online advertising company for $6bn last week has given it all it needs.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist, told the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference in Las Vegas in answer to a question on whether the search engine company had assets that could assist the software giant: “From where we are today, I think we have all the pieces.”
FT.com / Companies / IT - Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
FT.com / Companies / IT - Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 24 2007 01:59 | Last updated: May 24 2007 01:59
Microsoft has played down reports that it could acquire Yahoo, saying agreeing to buy the Aquantive online advertising company for $6bn last week has given it all it needs.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist, told the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference in Las Vegas in answer to a question on whether the search engine company had assets that could assist the software giant: “From where we are today, I think we have all the pieces.”
It emerged earlier this month that Microsoft had made a tentative takeover approach for Yahoo.
But on Friday, Microsoft agreed to pay $6bn incash for Aquantive – more than four times the size of its previous largest acquisition.
Mr Mehdi hinted that Microsoft would makemuch smaller bolt-on acquisitions in future to fill inany gaps in its internet offerings.
“There are other small pieces that we’re in the process of getting to as well, organically or otherwise,” he said.
He added that the Aquantive deal put Microsoft in a strong position to serve display advertisements on websites targeted to users’ interests and behaviour.
He said this kind of advertising was growing faster than the text-based kind that appears with search results on services such as Google’s.
Google has agreed to pay $3.1bn for DoubleClick, whose technology serves display advertisements.
Microsoft is objecting to the deal on antitrust grounds, arguing that it would give Google 80 per cent of the market.
A merger or partnership with Yahoo could have given Microsoft access to the Silicon Valley company’s own advertising technologyas well as its extensive content from a network of websites.
But Microsoft’s sites, including the MSN network, already boast the largest internet audience withhalf a billion visitors a month and with the Aquantive acquisition it will offer advertising services to sites outside its network. This is something it has not yet attempted, apart from a relationship with the Facebook social networking site.
A combined Microsoft and Yahoo would still trail Google significantly in search.
Google had 55 per cent of all search queries in the US in April, according to Nielsen NetRatings, compared with 22 per cent for Yahoo and 9 per cent for MSN/Windows Live.
Mr Mehdi said Microsoft was planning new features for its search service that would give Google a “run for their money”.
He said it was necessary to “do something big and bold and different” to try to displace the market leader.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Microsoft plays down Yahoo move
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 24 2007 01:59 | Last updated: May 24 2007 01:59
Microsoft has played down reports that it could acquire Yahoo, saying agreeing to buy the Aquantive online advertising company for $6bn last week has given it all it needs.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist, told the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference in Las Vegas in answer to a question on whether the search engine company had assets that could assist the software giant: “From where we are today, I think we have all the pieces.”
It emerged earlier this month that Microsoft had made a tentative takeover approach for Yahoo.
But on Friday, Microsoft agreed to pay $6bn incash for Aquantive – more than four times the size of its previous largest acquisition.
Mr Mehdi hinted that Microsoft would makemuch smaller bolt-on acquisitions in future to fill inany gaps in its internet offerings.
“There are other small pieces that we’re in the process of getting to as well, organically or otherwise,” he said.
He added that the Aquantive deal put Microsoft in a strong position to serve display advertisements on websites targeted to users’ interests and behaviour.
He said this kind of advertising was growing faster than the text-based kind that appears with search results on services such as Google’s.
Google has agreed to pay $3.1bn for DoubleClick, whose technology serves display advertisements.
Microsoft is objecting to the deal on antitrust grounds, arguing that it would give Google 80 per cent of the market.
A merger or partnership with Yahoo could have given Microsoft access to the Silicon Valley company’s own advertising technologyas well as its extensive content from a network of websites.
But Microsoft’s sites, including the MSN network, already boast the largest internet audience withhalf a billion visitors a month and with the Aquantive acquisition it will offer advertising services to sites outside its network. This is something it has not yet attempted, apart from a relationship with the Facebook social networking site.
A combined Microsoft and Yahoo would still trail Google significantly in search.
Google had 55 per cent of all search queries in the US in April, according to Nielsen NetRatings, compared with 22 per cent for Yahoo and 9 per cent for MSN/Windows Live.
Mr Mehdi said Microsoft was planning new features for its search service that would give Google a “run for their money”.
He said it was necessary to “do something big and bold and different” to try to displace the market leader.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
destinationCRM.com: Enterprise Content Management Is Growing
destinationCRM.com: Enterprise Content Management Is Growing
The market is expected to grow as enterprises seek to consolidate the vast amounts of unstructured data in word processing, spreadsheets, and other formats, according to a report
The market is expected to grow as enterprises seek to consolidate the vast amounts of unstructured data in word processing, spreadsheets, and other formats, according to a report
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Enterprise Content Management mit Open Source – Praktische Ansätze für Alfresco
Enterprise Content Management mit Open Source – Praktische Ansätze für Alfresco
Die Dokumenten-Management-Lösung Alfresco schickt sich dank offener Architektur und leistungsfähiger Schnittstellen an, kommerziellen Systemen in vielerlei Hinsicht das Wasser zu reichen. Ein Beitrag von Heiko Robert, Director ECM dmc digital media center GmbH, mit freundlicher Unterstützung des T3N Magazin.
Die Dokumenten-Management-Lösung Alfresco schickt sich dank offener Architektur und leistungsfähiger Schnittstellen an, kommerziellen Systemen in vielerlei Hinsicht das Wasser zu reichen. Ein Beitrag von Heiko Robert, Director ECM dmc digital media center GmbH, mit freundlicher Unterstützung des T3N Magazin.
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Web-Duo bekämpft Microsoft
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Web-Duo bekämpft Microsoft
Eine Allianz mit dem Mietsoftwarepionier Salesforce soll Google den Einstieg in das Geschäft mit Software als Webservice erleichtern. Im Visier haben die beiden kalifornischen Konzerne den Erzrivalen Microsoft.
Eine Allianz mit dem Mietsoftwarepionier Salesforce soll Google den Einstieg in das Geschäft mit Software als Webservice erleichtern. Im Visier haben die beiden kalifornischen Konzerne den Erzrivalen Microsoft.
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Google’s goal: to organise your daily life
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Google’s goal: to organise your daily life
Google’s goal: to organise your daily life
By Caroline Daniel and Maija Palmer
Published: May 22 2007 21:08 | Last updated: May 22 2007 21:08
Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
The race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines as it will allow the industry to offer far more personalised advertisements. These are the holy grail for the search industry, as such advertising would command higher rates.
Mr Schmidt told journalists in London: “We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”
He said Google’s newly relaunched iGoogle service, which allows users to personalise their own Google search page and publish their own content, would be a key feature.
Another service, Google personalised search, launched two years ago, allows users to give Google permission to store their web-surfing history, what they have searched and clicked on, and use this to create more personalised search results for them. Another service under development is Google Recommendations – where the search suggests products and services the user might like, based on their already established preferences. Google does not sell advertising against these services yet, but could in time use them to display more targeted ads to people.
Yahoo unveiled a new search technology this year dubbed Project Panama – which monitors what internet users do on its portal, and use that information to build a profile of their interests. The profiles are then used to display ads to the people most likely to be interested in them.
Autonomy, the UK-based search company is also developing technology for “transaction hijacking”, which monitors when internet surfers are about to make a purchase online, and can suggest cheaper alternatives. Although such monitoring could raise privacy issues, Google stresses that the iGoogle and personalisation services are optional.
The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK said it was not concerned about the personalisation developments.
Earlier this year, however, Google bowed to concerns from privacy activists in the US and Europe, by agreeing to limit the amount of time it keeps information about the internet searches made by its users to two years.
Google has also faced concerns that its proposed $3.1bn acquisition of DoubleClick will lead to an erosion of online privacy.
Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit.
Mr Schmidt said this year that the company was working on technology to reduce concerns.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Google’s goal: to organise your daily life
By Caroline Daniel and Maija Palmer
Published: May 22 2007 21:08 | Last updated: May 22 2007 21:08
Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
The race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines as it will allow the industry to offer far more personalised advertisements. These are the holy grail for the search industry, as such advertising would command higher rates.
Mr Schmidt told journalists in London: “We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”
He said Google’s newly relaunched iGoogle service, which allows users to personalise their own Google search page and publish their own content, would be a key feature.
Another service, Google personalised search, launched two years ago, allows users to give Google permission to store their web-surfing history, what they have searched and clicked on, and use this to create more personalised search results for them. Another service under development is Google Recommendations – where the search suggests products and services the user might like, based on their already established preferences. Google does not sell advertising against these services yet, but could in time use them to display more targeted ads to people.
Yahoo unveiled a new search technology this year dubbed Project Panama – which monitors what internet users do on its portal, and use that information to build a profile of their interests. The profiles are then used to display ads to the people most likely to be interested in them.
Autonomy, the UK-based search company is also developing technology for “transaction hijacking”, which monitors when internet surfers are about to make a purchase online, and can suggest cheaper alternatives. Although such monitoring could raise privacy issues, Google stresses that the iGoogle and personalisation services are optional.
The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK said it was not concerned about the personalisation developments.
Earlier this year, however, Google bowed to concerns from privacy activists in the US and Europe, by agreeing to limit the amount of time it keeps information about the internet searches made by its users to two years.
Google has also faced concerns that its proposed $3.1bn acquisition of DoubleClick will lead to an erosion of online privacy.
Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit.
Mr Schmidt said this year that the company was working on technology to reduce concerns.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
FT.com / Companies / US & Canada - Microsoft ready for a strategic upgrade
FT.com / Companies / US & Canada - Microsoft ready for a strategic upgrade
Microsoft ready for a strategic upgrade
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 21 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 21 2007 03:00
Consolation prize or prize capture? Microsoft's $6bn acquisition of online advertising company Aquantive on Friday was a secondary target, but may prove to be a source of primary growth in the future.
The software giant turned its attention to Aquantive after it lost out to Google in a bid for Aquantive's rival, DoubleClick. Google will pay $3.1bn in that deal, almost half as much as Microsoft is paying.
This is the parsimonious Redmond company's biggest ever buy - costing more than four times its previous record, the $1.45bn paid for Danish software company Navision in 2002.
But cash-rich Microsoft can easily afford the 85 per cent premium it has paid and the acquisition had become a strategic imperative - the online ad business is expected to be worth $40bn in 2007 and is growing at 20 per cent a year, a rate that makes its core software business seem becalmed.
"We have walked away from some transactions over the last few years because we have considered they haven't been strategically important enough to pay a premium for," said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer, on Friday.
The Seattle company is key in that it provides a complete advertising solution for Microsoft's ambitions to sell and profit from advertising beyond its own network of websites. It also enables it to stay in touch with market leader Google.
"Google has significantly more advantages than Microsoft," says Shahid Khan, a partner at Interactive Broadband Consulting.
"If you go back, it started selling, using its own ad-serving technology, then it built a sales force and started selling on other people's websites, and then expanded to print and radio. Now DoubleClick gives it even more technology, better integration with ad agencies and publishers and the best platform overall."
Microsoft has been way behind, admitting as much in making anti-trust complaints that Google combined with DoubleClick will have 80 per cent market share for serving online ads.
It only recently developed its own ad-serving technology and, apart from a partnership with the Facebook social networking site, has confined its business to its own network of sites such as MSN and Windows Live.
"We are new in the advertising business but we have made a lot of investment," says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's chief advertising strategist. "We have the biggest audience for an ad network - half a billion users visiting our properties every month. To this point, we have really not run advertising for other companies except Facebook . . . now we will."
Mr Mehdi says Aquantive has bigger revenues and profits than DoubleClick and offers the best ad tools.
Tim Vanderhook, chief executive of the SpecificMedia online ad network, agrees Aquantive's Atlas tool for advertisers is a superior product offering. "Microsoft has paid up to catch up. I was really surprised that DoubleClick was the initial prime target, it's only an ad-serving technology, it doesn't have a division that buys or sells online media [like Aquantive]," he says.
In seeking a more complete solution through Aquantive, Microsoft is following Google in trying to build a broad platform that can serve as a one-stop shop for advertisers trying to reach specific audiences across a range of media.
Shahid Khan cites Microsoft's earlier acquisition of Massive, which serves in-game advertising, and Google's moves to sell TV advertising. He believes mobile advertising networks will be the next acquisition targets as the big players spread their offerings to advertising on cellphones.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Microsoft ready for a strategic upgrade
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 21 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 21 2007 03:00
Consolation prize or prize capture? Microsoft's $6bn acquisition of online advertising company Aquantive on Friday was a secondary target, but may prove to be a source of primary growth in the future.
The software giant turned its attention to Aquantive after it lost out to Google in a bid for Aquantive's rival, DoubleClick. Google will pay $3.1bn in that deal, almost half as much as Microsoft is paying.
This is the parsimonious Redmond company's biggest ever buy - costing more than four times its previous record, the $1.45bn paid for Danish software company Navision in 2002.
But cash-rich Microsoft can easily afford the 85 per cent premium it has paid and the acquisition had become a strategic imperative - the online ad business is expected to be worth $40bn in 2007 and is growing at 20 per cent a year, a rate that makes its core software business seem becalmed.
"We have walked away from some transactions over the last few years because we have considered they haven't been strategically important enough to pay a premium for," said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer, on Friday.
The Seattle company is key in that it provides a complete advertising solution for Microsoft's ambitions to sell and profit from advertising beyond its own network of websites. It also enables it to stay in touch with market leader Google.
"Google has significantly more advantages than Microsoft," says Shahid Khan, a partner at Interactive Broadband Consulting.
"If you go back, it started selling, using its own ad-serving technology, then it built a sales force and started selling on other people's websites, and then expanded to print and radio. Now DoubleClick gives it even more technology, better integration with ad agencies and publishers and the best platform overall."
Microsoft has been way behind, admitting as much in making anti-trust complaints that Google combined with DoubleClick will have 80 per cent market share for serving online ads.
It only recently developed its own ad-serving technology and, apart from a partnership with the Facebook social networking site, has confined its business to its own network of sites such as MSN and Windows Live.
"We are new in the advertising business but we have made a lot of investment," says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's chief advertising strategist. "We have the biggest audience for an ad network - half a billion users visiting our properties every month. To this point, we have really not run advertising for other companies except Facebook . . . now we will."
Mr Mehdi says Aquantive has bigger revenues and profits than DoubleClick and offers the best ad tools.
Tim Vanderhook, chief executive of the SpecificMedia online ad network, agrees Aquantive's Atlas tool for advertisers is a superior product offering. "Microsoft has paid up to catch up. I was really surprised that DoubleClick was the initial prime target, it's only an ad-serving technology, it doesn't have a division that buys or sells online media [like Aquantive]," he says.
In seeking a more complete solution through Aquantive, Microsoft is following Google in trying to build a broad platform that can serve as a one-stop shop for advertisers trying to reach specific audiences across a range of media.
Shahid Khan cites Microsoft's earlier acquisition of Massive, which serves in-game advertising, and Google's moves to sell TV advertising. He believes mobile advertising networks will be the next acquisition targets as the big players spread their offerings to advertising on cellphones.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Microsoft startet teure Verfolgungsjagd
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Microsoft startet teure Verfolgungsjagd
Die Übernahme kommt einem Geständnis gleich: Mit dem 6 Mrd. $ teuren Kauf der Online-Werbefirma Aquantive gibt der weltgrößte Softwarekonzern Microsoft zu, dass seine eigene Technologie nicht ausreicht, um im Online-Werbemarkt zu Google aufzuschließen.
Die Übernahme kommt einem Geständnis gleich: Mit dem 6 Mrd. $ teuren Kauf der Online-Werbefirma Aquantive gibt der weltgrößte Softwarekonzern Microsoft zu, dass seine eigene Technologie nicht ausreicht, um im Online-Werbemarkt zu Google aufzuschließen.
Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise Content Management Software Market Will Reach $4.2 Billon in 2010
Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise Content Management Software Market Will Reach $4.2 Billon in 2010
Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise Content Management Software Market Will Reach $4.2 Billon in 2010
STAMFORD, Conn., May 21, 2007 —
Due to the increasing need for companies to manage content at the enterprise level, the worldwide enterprise content management (ECM) software market is expected to grow more than 12 percent per year through 2010, from $2.6 billion in 2006 to more than $4.2 billion in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. In 2007, worldwide ECM revenue is projected to total $2.9 billion, a 12.8 percent increase from 2006 (see Table 1).
The vast majority of the information a company has is unstructured data residing in word processing documents, presentations, rich media files, spreadsheets and other file formats. Companies must make this content available to workers, business partner’s customers, and applications across the organization to automate business processes, increase efficiency, reduce costs and repetitiveness, make employees more effective and gain competitive advantages.
“For many organizations, unstructured content is fundamentally out of control,” said Tom Eid, research vice president for Gartner. “Employees are creating all types of content for internal and external use with delivery through both formal and informal channels (such as wikis and blogs). While some of this business-specific content is now being managed through insurance claims processing, loan origination, case management and Web content management, the vast majority of this content is not being managed as an enterprise asset.”
Table 1
EnterpriseContent Management Software, Worldwide, 2006-2010 (Millions of Dollars)
2006 2,614.4
2007 2,949.3
2008 3,316.8
2009 3,755.2
2010 4,248.3
Total Software Revenue
Source: Gartner (May 2007)
Gartner analysts said many factors will shape the ECM market over the next several years. Vendors and the individual technology markets from which they come will continue to consolidate. The quality, performance and ease of use of software products will improve. ECM offerings will split into two tiers: broad, platform-based solutions will tackle heavy-duty chores, such as focusing on process-centric and mission-critical documents, such as compliance efforts, while streamlined basic content services (BCS) offerings will appeal to companies that need only entry-level functions, such as document security and library services.
“In many instances, it is appropriate to have BCS and ECM technologies being used together,” Mr. Eid said. “BCS will increase the adoption of ECM technologies. As more content is created, more content will need to be managed. As the content becomes more valued, it will become more of a corporate asset that is managed in a more comprehensive manner through ECM offerings.”
Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Forecast: Enterprise Content Management Software, Worldwide, 2006-2011, Update,” This report examines the state of the worldwide enterprise content management software market and looks at what trends are developing, and includes a full forecast for the market. The report is available on Gartner's Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=505618&subref=simplesearch.
Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise Content Management Software Market Will Reach $4.2 Billon in 2010
STAMFORD, Conn., May 21, 2007 —
Due to the increasing need for companies to manage content at the enterprise level, the worldwide enterprise content management (ECM) software market is expected to grow more than 12 percent per year through 2010, from $2.6 billion in 2006 to more than $4.2 billion in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. In 2007, worldwide ECM revenue is projected to total $2.9 billion, a 12.8 percent increase from 2006 (see Table 1).
The vast majority of the information a company has is unstructured data residing in word processing documents, presentations, rich media files, spreadsheets and other file formats. Companies must make this content available to workers, business partner’s customers, and applications across the organization to automate business processes, increase efficiency, reduce costs and repetitiveness, make employees more effective and gain competitive advantages.
“For many organizations, unstructured content is fundamentally out of control,” said Tom Eid, research vice president for Gartner. “Employees are creating all types of content for internal and external use with delivery through both formal and informal channels (such as wikis and blogs). While some of this business-specific content is now being managed through insurance claims processing, loan origination, case management and Web content management, the vast majority of this content is not being managed as an enterprise asset.”
Table 1
EnterpriseContent Management Software, Worldwide, 2006-2010 (Millions of Dollars)
2006 2,614.4
2007 2,949.3
2008 3,316.8
2009 3,755.2
2010 4,248.3
Total Software Revenue
Source: Gartner (May 2007)
Gartner analysts said many factors will shape the ECM market over the next several years. Vendors and the individual technology markets from which they come will continue to consolidate. The quality, performance and ease of use of software products will improve. ECM offerings will split into two tiers: broad, platform-based solutions will tackle heavy-duty chores, such as focusing on process-centric and mission-critical documents, such as compliance efforts, while streamlined basic content services (BCS) offerings will appeal to companies that need only entry-level functions, such as document security and library services.
“In many instances, it is appropriate to have BCS and ECM technologies being used together,” Mr. Eid said. “BCS will increase the adoption of ECM technologies. As more content is created, more content will need to be managed. As the content becomes more valued, it will become more of a corporate asset that is managed in a more comprehensive manner through ECM offerings.”
Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Forecast: Enterprise Content Management Software, Worldwide, 2006-2011, Update,” This report examines the state of the worldwide enterprise content management software market and looks at what trends are developing, and includes a full forecast for the market. The report is available on Gartner's Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=505618&subref=simplesearch.
Friday, May 18, 2007
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Microsoft makes $6bn ‘bet’ on Aquantive
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Microsoft makes $6bn ‘bet’ on Aquantive
Microsoft makes $6bn ‘bet’ on Aquantive
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 18 2007 13:54 | Last updated: May 18 2007 23:15
Microsoft on Friday announced the biggest acquisition in the software company’s history, buying online advertising company Aquantive for $6bn and making what it described as a “big bet” on its own long-term growth.
The move – the largest deal in the advertising industry – continued the frenzy of interest in online advertising, coming a day after WPP bought 24/7 Real Media in a deal that valued the group at $649m. It also follows Google’s deal to buy DoubleClick for $3.1bn and Yahoo buying the RightMedia advertising exchange outright for $680m.
Microsoft has traditionally focused on small deals to acquire new technologies. The most it had paid previously was $1.45bn for the Danish software company Navision five years ago.
But Microsoft has been desperate to match Google’s advertising muscle and reportedly failed in an earlier multi-billion dollar bid for DoubleClick. It offered $66.50 a share for Aquantive, an 85 per cent premium to its closing price on Thursday.
Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platform and services division, said: “It is a big bet on advertising monetisation for the long-term growth of the company and this is a significant step forward.” He said the online advertising market would be worth $40bn this year and was growing at 20 per cent a year.
The acquisition means Microsoft will market its services to the wider internet.
Aquantive includes Avenue A Razorfish, one of the largest interactive advertising agencies. Tim Vanderhook, chief of the Specific Media online advertising network, said: “I think this will be sold off; it doesn’t really fit with Microsoft’s strategy and they can get a huge chunk back of the $6bn they paid.”
Microsoft has raised antitrust objections to Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, which gives the search giant a strong grip on the growing online display advertising market. But Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, said Aquantive was complementary to Microsoft’s business and should not face any such objections, as it would promote competition.
Mr Johnson said the Aquantive deal would help Microsoft seize a significant opportunity in delivering services to a range of devices such as PCs, phones, game consoles and emerging media such as internet television.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Microsoft makes $6bn ‘bet’ on Aquantive
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 18 2007 13:54 | Last updated: May 18 2007 23:15
Microsoft on Friday announced the biggest acquisition in the software company’s history, buying online advertising company Aquantive for $6bn and making what it described as a “big bet” on its own long-term growth.
The move – the largest deal in the advertising industry – continued the frenzy of interest in online advertising, coming a day after WPP bought 24/7 Real Media in a deal that valued the group at $649m. It also follows Google’s deal to buy DoubleClick for $3.1bn and Yahoo buying the RightMedia advertising exchange outright for $680m.
Microsoft has traditionally focused on small deals to acquire new technologies. The most it had paid previously was $1.45bn for the Danish software company Navision five years ago.
But Microsoft has been desperate to match Google’s advertising muscle and reportedly failed in an earlier multi-billion dollar bid for DoubleClick. It offered $66.50 a share for Aquantive, an 85 per cent premium to its closing price on Thursday.
Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platform and services division, said: “It is a big bet on advertising monetisation for the long-term growth of the company and this is a significant step forward.” He said the online advertising market would be worth $40bn this year and was growing at 20 per cent a year.
The acquisition means Microsoft will market its services to the wider internet.
Aquantive includes Avenue A Razorfish, one of the largest interactive advertising agencies. Tim Vanderhook, chief of the Specific Media online advertising network, said: “I think this will be sold off; it doesn’t really fit with Microsoft’s strategy and they can get a huge chunk back of the $6bn they paid.”
Microsoft has raised antitrust objections to Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, which gives the search giant a strong grip on the growing online display advertising market. But Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, said Aquantive was complementary to Microsoft’s business and should not face any such objections, as it would promote competition.
Mr Johnson said the Aquantive deal would help Microsoft seize a significant opportunity in delivering services to a range of devices such as PCs, phones, game consoles and emerging media such as internet television.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - Blink, and there's another million
FT.com / Companies / IT - Blink, and there's another million
Blink, and there's another million
By Emiliya (edited by) Mychasuk
Published: May 17 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 17 2007 03:00
Joining the ranks of the newest young paper millionaires in the media sector is the 29-year-old running the video search portal called Blinkx, Sri-Lankan born Suranga Chandratillake.
The £114m listing of Blinkx on Aim will deliver him a paper worth of about £2.7m, based on his holding of 4.5m options.
Mr Chandratillake started at the age of eight when his father, a professor of nuclear chemistry, brought home a second-hand BBC computer to play with.
"The BBC computers at the time had no games on them, so the only way I got anything out of it was to write bits of code myself," Mr Chandratillake says.
He went on to study computer science at Cambridge and, while still at university, wrote risk- balancing algorithms for Morgan Stanley and founded a technology company, Anondesign, with friends.
At the age of 23 he joined Autonomy, the search software company, and by the time of his 25th birthday had become the US chief technology officer.
After three years at Autonomy, in 2004 he founded Blinkx. The company used Autonomy's search technology in exchange for giving Autonomy an option.
Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, says Blinkx reminds him of the early days when he founded Autonomy in 1996, when he was only a few years younger than Mr Chandratillake. Mr Lynch went on to become theUK's first internet billionnaire.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Blink, and there's another million
By Emiliya (edited by) Mychasuk
Published: May 17 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 17 2007 03:00
Joining the ranks of the newest young paper millionaires in the media sector is the 29-year-old running the video search portal called Blinkx, Sri-Lankan born Suranga Chandratillake.
The £114m listing of Blinkx on Aim will deliver him a paper worth of about £2.7m, based on his holding of 4.5m options.
Mr Chandratillake started at the age of eight when his father, a professor of nuclear chemistry, brought home a second-hand BBC computer to play with.
"The BBC computers at the time had no games on them, so the only way I got anything out of it was to write bits of code myself," Mr Chandratillake says.
He went on to study computer science at Cambridge and, while still at university, wrote risk- balancing algorithms for Morgan Stanley and founded a technology company, Anondesign, with friends.
At the age of 23 he joined Autonomy, the search software company, and by the time of his 25th birthday had become the US chief technology officer.
After three years at Autonomy, in 2004 he founded Blinkx. The company used Autonomy's search technology in exchange for giving Autonomy an option.
Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, says Blinkx reminds him of the early days when he founded Autonomy in 1996, when he was only a few years younger than Mr Chandratillake. Mr Lynch went on to become theUK's first internet billionnaire.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Microsoft Patent Claims Pose No Immediate Risk for Users
Microsoft Patent Claims Pose No Immediate Risk for Users
Microsoft claims that a variety of open-source software projects violate its software patents. A general trend toward more aggressive patent licensing tactics is on the horizon.
Microsoft claims that a variety of open-source software projects violate its software patents. A general trend toward more aggressive patent licensing tactics is on the horizon.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Microsoft geht gegen Google vor
FTD.de - Medien+Internet - Nachrichten - Microsoft geht gegen Google vor
Google hat seine Konkurrenten durch den milliardenschweren Zukauf des Online-Werbevermarkters DoubleClick gehörig aufgeschreckt. Mehrere Unternehmen forderten die US-Kartellbehörden zum Eingreifen auf - Wortführer ist ausgerechnet Microsoft.
Google hat seine Konkurrenten durch den milliardenschweren Zukauf des Online-Werbevermarkters DoubleClick gehörig aufgeschreckt. Mehrere Unternehmen forderten die US-Kartellbehörden zum Eingreifen auf - Wortführer ist ausgerechnet Microsoft.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - Autonomy to fund growth with £70m share placement
FT.com / Companies / IT - Autonomy to fund growth with £70m share placement
Autonomy, the Cambridge-based search software company, is planning to raise an estimated £70m from a share placement.
It indicated that the money from the placement of 9.5m new shares would not be earmarked for acquisitions but used to fund growth and for "general corporate purposes".
Autonomy, the Cambridge-based search software company, is planning to raise an estimated £70m from a share placement.
It indicated that the money from the placement of 9.5m new shares would not be earmarked for acquisitions but used to fund growth and for "general corporate purposes".
Google geeft toe dat het wil concurreren met Microsoft - Personal Computer Magazine
Google geeft toe dat het wil concurreren met Microsoft - Personal Computer Magazine
Google heeft eindelijk officieel toegegeven dat het met Microsoft wil concurereren in de softwaremarkt. Het was al langere tijd duidelijk, maar Google wilde het voorheen niet expliciet zeggen.
Google heeft eindelijk officieel toegegeven dat het met Microsoft wil concurereren in de softwaremarkt. Het was al langere tijd duidelijk, maar Google wilde het voorheen niet expliciet zeggen.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Forrester Research: Can Salesforce.com Reinvent Content Management?
Forrester Research: Can Salesforce.com Reinvent Content Management?
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The enterprise content management market is in tremendous flux with IBM's acquisition of FileNet, the introduction of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Oracle's acquisition of Stellent. Clearly, the industry's biggest vendors see a huge opportunity. Now salesforce.com has entered the fray with the acquisition of Koral and looks to redefine content management software as a service (SaaS) in the same way it redefined customer relationship management (CRM). The new offering, Salesforce Content, will be initially offered as a standalone collaborative document management system and will be optionally bundled with salesforce.com's CRM solutions. It is only the second application offered by the SaaS leader and will test the vendor's ability to move beyond its CRM roots and become a true infrastructure provider.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The enterprise content management market is in tremendous flux with IBM's acquisition of FileNet, the introduction of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Oracle's acquisition of Stellent. Clearly, the industry's biggest vendors see a huge opportunity. Now salesforce.com has entered the fray with the acquisition of Koral and looks to redefine content management software as a service (SaaS) in the same way it redefined customer relationship management (CRM). The new offering, Salesforce Content, will be initially offered as a standalone collaborative document management system and will be optionally bundled with salesforce.com's CRM solutions. It is only the second application offered by the SaaS leader and will test the vendor's ability to move beyond its CRM roots and become a true infrastructure provider.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Microsoft - Week of 05/10/2007 (Northern Light)
Microsoft - Week of 05/10/2007
When Microsoft reported its earnings last month it drew some surprises; Vista, the company's new operating system, is selling well. Until the announcement, most of the news about Vista, and Microsoft in general, reported its problems and predicted its negative impact. It seems that in this Microsoft has had the last laugh. But as with any empire, there is a dark side. Microsoft trails its online rivals Google and Yahoo! and is well aware that it needs to make some headway in this area. Its need to do so was evidenced by recent talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! Talks were over quickly, but the fact remains that while Microsoft may keep moving ahead, its work is cut out.
If earnings reports are indicative of a company's strength Microsoft appears to be doing well; on April 26 the company posted a 65 percent rise in quarterly profit. While the projections of the company for 2008 are only at the midpoint of analyst projections, the rise was enough to send shares of the company up five percent. "The strength of Vista is really driving this," Kim Caughey, an analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group, told Reuters. This piece of news was a surprise to many, and not just those in the press and analyst communities. According to Reuters, Chris Liddel, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer, said consumer sales of Vista surpassed even the company's own expectations by $300 million to $400 million. Apart from the standard Microsoft bashing Chief Executive Steve Ballmer's February statement that some analyst estimates for Vista sales were "overly aggressive," had led to concerns.
According to BusinessWeek, "while some corporate customers still opt for the predecessor Windows XP when they buy new computers, for software compatibility reasons, a remarkably large number are taking the new operating system." That 'remarkably large number' amounts to 85 percent of its current operating system's sales. Given all the negative hype that is likely a surprise, but even more so when it is pointed out that Vista is selling more robustly than XP did at the same time in its life cycle. Contrary to popular expectation, Vista appears to be paying off; the Client Division which consists mainly of Windows sales for PCs reached $5.3 billion. This of course is good news to Microsoft, Windows and Office account for more than half of Microsoft's total revenue and a majority of its profits. Benjamin J. Romano of the Seattle Times put it well, "The report served to quiet some grumbling about the new operating system's performance and acceptance, and it seemed to assure investors that the cash cows are safely in the pasture."
Though the new operating system and Office suite may represent cash cows, Microsoft's online search presence may be best referred to as a dog. Microsoft comes in a distant third, behind Google and Yahoo! Vista sales make Microsoft happy; its search performance does not. According to BusinessWeek, "At the end of January Chief Financial Officer Christopher Liddell expressed dissatisfaction with the company's search engine growth. 'We lost market share' . . . We are clearly not happy with that.'" The dissatisfaction expressed by Liddell was over a few numbers: As of March 1, growth on Microsoft's search site was up 2.5 percent; Yahoo!'s 29 percent and Google's 40.6 according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Also while Google boasts 53 percent of searches, and Yahoo! follows with 23 percent, Microsoft stalls at 9 percent.
In early March Christopher Payne, the corporate vice-president in charge of Windows Live Search left the company and it is still being kept quiet as to why. BusinessWeek states that at that time, "Concerns over leadership of the division resurfaced," and that, "his replacement faces a tall order." As they look for a replacement Microsoft will also be looking for a solution. Knight Ridder reports that, "Beyond having enormous resources to spend on battling Google and Yahoo, Microsoft has a valuable roster of popular Web services and sites that can direct search traffic to the Live Search site." Microsoft will attempt to leverage this roster and encourage users to execute more searches; it will embed search into its instant messenger client as well as on its online sites. "If we got all of these people to do one search a day, that would be a big bump for us," says Whitney Burk, Microsoft's public relations manager for competitive strategy. In an unusual approach Microsoft will also try to woo users via financial incentives. According to Network World, "In an apparent attempt to boost its disappointing Web-search market share, Microsoft is giving financial incentives to large corporate customers whose employees use Microsoft's Live Search engine . . . In exchange for their employees' Live Search usage, Microsoft is providing 'service or training credits' to these customers." Justin Osmer, senior project manager for Microsoft's Live Search group, says, "We know it's an uphill battle, but we're in it for the long haul." That long haul has also directed Microsoft to look for some shortcuts.
According to the Wall Street Journal, "Recent talks between Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. over how to band together betray increasing unrest at Microsoft over how to compete with Google Inc. and get in step with the booming online-advertising market." When word of discussions between the two companies broke last Friday various sources tossed about numerous scenarios; however those might best be discussed at a later time, when the two companies are still talking. (Word of the talks ending arrived on the heels of word that they had begun.) Still, the scenario surrounding the talks is noteworthy. The Wall Street Journal stated that "Microsoft's online division could be heading for a shake-up, say people familiar with the situation. Failure by the Redmond, Wash., company to make better headway against Google in Internet search, combined with Microsoft losing a deal to Google last month to buy online-advertising specialist DoubleClick, has spurred Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to consider new action, these people say." The Financial Times has similar thoughts, "The talks have been prompted by an acceleration in the shift of audience and advertisers online, and Microsoft’s failure to build effective search engine and online advertising arms of its own, say analysts and industry executives." And while the point is moot, now that talks are over, it is interesting to note the view that even Yahoo! couldn't help Microsoft. On this Forbes notes, "Microsoft's money-losing online business posted sales growth of just 10.9 percent last quarter. Yahoo! does make money, but last quarter its sales rose a mere 9 percent, excluding traffic acquisition costs."
A company as big a Microsoft with fingers in as many pots will have both victories and its defeats; both can come hand in hand.
When Microsoft reported its earnings last month it drew some surprises; Vista, the company's new operating system, is selling well. Until the announcement, most of the news about Vista, and Microsoft in general, reported its problems and predicted its negative impact. It seems that in this Microsoft has had the last laugh. But as with any empire, there is a dark side. Microsoft trails its online rivals Google and Yahoo! and is well aware that it needs to make some headway in this area. Its need to do so was evidenced by recent talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! Talks were over quickly, but the fact remains that while Microsoft may keep moving ahead, its work is cut out.
If earnings reports are indicative of a company's strength Microsoft appears to be doing well; on April 26 the company posted a 65 percent rise in quarterly profit. While the projections of the company for 2008 are only at the midpoint of analyst projections, the rise was enough to send shares of the company up five percent. "The strength of Vista is really driving this," Kim Caughey, an analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group, told Reuters. This piece of news was a surprise to many, and not just those in the press and analyst communities. According to Reuters, Chris Liddel, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer, said consumer sales of Vista surpassed even the company's own expectations by $300 million to $400 million. Apart from the standard Microsoft bashing Chief Executive Steve Ballmer's February statement that some analyst estimates for Vista sales were "overly aggressive," had led to concerns.
According to BusinessWeek, "while some corporate customers still opt for the predecessor Windows XP when they buy new computers, for software compatibility reasons, a remarkably large number are taking the new operating system." That 'remarkably large number' amounts to 85 percent of its current operating system's sales. Given all the negative hype that is likely a surprise, but even more so when it is pointed out that Vista is selling more robustly than XP did at the same time in its life cycle. Contrary to popular expectation, Vista appears to be paying off; the Client Division which consists mainly of Windows sales for PCs reached $5.3 billion. This of course is good news to Microsoft, Windows and Office account for more than half of Microsoft's total revenue and a majority of its profits. Benjamin J. Romano of the Seattle Times put it well, "The report served to quiet some grumbling about the new operating system's performance and acceptance, and it seemed to assure investors that the cash cows are safely in the pasture."
Though the new operating system and Office suite may represent cash cows, Microsoft's online search presence may be best referred to as a dog. Microsoft comes in a distant third, behind Google and Yahoo! Vista sales make Microsoft happy; its search performance does not. According to BusinessWeek, "At the end of January Chief Financial Officer Christopher Liddell expressed dissatisfaction with the company's search engine growth. 'We lost market share' . . . We are clearly not happy with that.'" The dissatisfaction expressed by Liddell was over a few numbers: As of March 1, growth on Microsoft's search site was up 2.5 percent; Yahoo!'s 29 percent and Google's 40.6 according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Also while Google boasts 53 percent of searches, and Yahoo! follows with 23 percent, Microsoft stalls at 9 percent.
In early March Christopher Payne, the corporate vice-president in charge of Windows Live Search left the company and it is still being kept quiet as to why. BusinessWeek states that at that time, "Concerns over leadership of the division resurfaced," and that, "his replacement faces a tall order." As they look for a replacement Microsoft will also be looking for a solution. Knight Ridder reports that, "Beyond having enormous resources to spend on battling Google and Yahoo, Microsoft has a valuable roster of popular Web services and sites that can direct search traffic to the Live Search site." Microsoft will attempt to leverage this roster and encourage users to execute more searches; it will embed search into its instant messenger client as well as on its online sites. "If we got all of these people to do one search a day, that would be a big bump for us," says Whitney Burk, Microsoft's public relations manager for competitive strategy. In an unusual approach Microsoft will also try to woo users via financial incentives. According to Network World, "In an apparent attempt to boost its disappointing Web-search market share, Microsoft is giving financial incentives to large corporate customers whose employees use Microsoft's Live Search engine . . . In exchange for their employees' Live Search usage, Microsoft is providing 'service or training credits' to these customers." Justin Osmer, senior project manager for Microsoft's Live Search group, says, "We know it's an uphill battle, but we're in it for the long haul." That long haul has also directed Microsoft to look for some shortcuts.
According to the Wall Street Journal, "Recent talks between Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. over how to band together betray increasing unrest at Microsoft over how to compete with Google Inc. and get in step with the booming online-advertising market." When word of discussions between the two companies broke last Friday various sources tossed about numerous scenarios; however those might best be discussed at a later time, when the two companies are still talking. (Word of the talks ending arrived on the heels of word that they had begun.) Still, the scenario surrounding the talks is noteworthy. The Wall Street Journal stated that "Microsoft's online division could be heading for a shake-up, say people familiar with the situation. Failure by the Redmond, Wash., company to make better headway against Google in Internet search, combined with Microsoft losing a deal to Google last month to buy online-advertising specialist DoubleClick, has spurred Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to consider new action, these people say." The Financial Times has similar thoughts, "The talks have been prompted by an acceleration in the shift of audience and advertisers online, and Microsoft’s failure to build effective search engine and online advertising arms of its own, say analysts and industry executives." And while the point is moot, now that talks are over, it is interesting to note the view that even Yahoo! couldn't help Microsoft. On this Forbes notes, "Microsoft's money-losing online business posted sales growth of just 10.9 percent last quarter. Yahoo! does make money, but last quarter its sales rose a mere 9 percent, excluding traffic acquisition costs."
A company as big a Microsoft with fingers in as many pots will have both victories and its defeats; both can come hand in hand.
FTD.de - Management - Business Wissen - E-Mail-Archivierung: Gesetzliche Anforderungen erfüllt?
FTD.de - Management - Business Wissen - E-Mail-Archivierung: Gesetzliche Anforderungen erfüllt?
E-Mails sind schnell versendet und empfangen. Für sie gelten aber dieselben gesetzlichen Anforderungen wie für alle Geschäfts- und Handelsbriefe. Doch in vielen Unternehmen fehlen die organisatorischen Regelungen und technischen Voraussetzungen für die richtige Archivierung.
Was sind Geschäftsbriefe oder Handelsbriefe?
Im ersten Schritt gilt es zu klären, was die Geschäfts- oder Handelsbriefe sind, für die gesetzliche Aufbewahrungspflichten gelten. Das ist im Handelsgesetzbuch geregelt: Alle, die ein Geschäft vorbereiten, abwickeln, rückgängig machen oder abschließen. Beispielsweise:
- Angebote,
- Auftragsbestätigungen,
- Lieferscheine,
- Korrespondenz zur Projektabwicklung,
- Rechnungen,
- Rückgängigmachung oder Kündigungen.
Uninteressant sind Werbesendungen, Prospekte und Angebote, die zu keinem Geschäftsabschluss geführt haben.
Alle ausgehende Post muss aufbewahrt werden
E-Mails sind schnell versendet und empfangen. Für sie gelten aber dieselben gesetzlichen Anforderungen wie für alle Geschäfts- und Handelsbriefe. Doch in vielen Unternehmen fehlen die organisatorischen Regelungen und technischen Voraussetzungen für die richtige Archivierung.
Was sind Geschäftsbriefe oder Handelsbriefe?
Im ersten Schritt gilt es zu klären, was die Geschäfts- oder Handelsbriefe sind, für die gesetzliche Aufbewahrungspflichten gelten. Das ist im Handelsgesetzbuch geregelt: Alle, die ein Geschäft vorbereiten, abwickeln, rückgängig machen oder abschließen. Beispielsweise:
- Angebote,
- Auftragsbestätigungen,
- Lieferscheine,
- Korrespondenz zur Projektabwicklung,
- Rechnungen,
- Rückgängigmachung oder Kündigungen.
Uninteressant sind Werbesendungen, Prospekte und Angebote, die zu keinem Geschäftsabschluss geführt haben.
Alle ausgehende Post muss aufbewahrt werden
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
MIX07 Conference Marks a Turning Point for Microsoft
MIX07 Conference Marks a Turning Point for Microsoft
Microsoft's announcements at MIX07 about its Silverlight cross-platform plug-in, the Windows Live platform and other aspects of its Web strategy indicate that the company is getting serious about the Web in the Web 2.0 era.
Microsoft's announcements at MIX07 about its Silverlight cross-platform plug-in, the Windows Live platform and other aspects of its Web strategy indicate that the company is getting serious about the Web in the Web 2.0 era.
Monday, May 07, 2007
FT.com / Companies / US & Canada - Evolution of the internet opens doors for Microsoft
FT.com / Companies / US & Canada - Evolution of the internet opens doors for Microsoft
Evolution of the internet opens doors for Microsoft
By Richard Waters
Published: May 7 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 7 2007 03:00
A coming shift in the dynamics of the internet advertising business, as the momentum starts to shift away from the keyword-based systems used by search engines, is one of the biggest factors behind Microsoft's takeover approach to Yahoo, according to industry executives and analysts.
Microsoft has shown few signs yet that it is even starting to win back any ground lost to Google in search, despite heavy investments over the past three years to build its own search engine and keyword advertising system.
Evolution of the internet opens doors for Microsoft
By Richard Waters
Published: May 7 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 7 2007 03:00
A coming shift in the dynamics of the internet advertising business, as the momentum starts to shift away from the keyword-based systems used by search engines, is one of the biggest factors behind Microsoft's takeover approach to Yahoo, according to industry executives and analysts.
Microsoft has shown few signs yet that it is even starting to win back any ground lost to Google in search, despite heavy investments over the past three years to build its own search engine and keyword advertising system.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Friday, May 04, 2007
FT.com / Comment & analysis / Editorial comment - The case for an independent media
FT.com / Comment & analysis / Editorial comment - The case for an independent media
The case for an independent media
Published: May 4 2007 22:46 | Last updated: May 4 2007 22:46
“You are in the field to defend the public interest, the financial truth for investors and the funds that should support the widow and the orphan,” said Clarence Barron, proprietor of The Wall Street Journal from 1902 until 1928. The founders of many media companies left trusts and special voting powers to protect such journalism, but with profits hurt by a shift to digital media, those structures are under siege.
Reuters, a financial information provider and the world’s largest news agency, has received an approach. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has bid for Dow Jones, owner of the Journal. Rebel investors, meanwhile, are demanding change at the New York Times Company.
The case for an independent media
Published: May 4 2007 22:46 | Last updated: May 4 2007 22:46
“You are in the field to defend the public interest, the financial truth for investors and the funds that should support the widow and the orphan,” said Clarence Barron, proprietor of The Wall Street Journal from 1902 until 1928. The founders of many media companies left trusts and special voting powers to protect such journalism, but with profits hurt by a shift to digital media, those structures are under siege.
Reuters, a financial information provider and the world’s largest news agency, has received an approach. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has bid for Dow Jones, owner of the Journal. Rebel investors, meanwhile, are demanding change at the New York Times Company.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Business Research Engine: Document Information
Business Research Engine: Document Information
Microsoft has been beating the Live.com software-as-services drum for 18 months now, and has now delivered some of the most significant products and services under that banner to date. Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash player, is getting backing from .NET, the company's application development platform.
Microsoft has been beating the Live.com software-as-services drum for 18 months now, and has now delivered some of the most significant products and services under that banner to date. Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash player, is getting backing from .NET, the company's application development platform.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Autonomy says 1st-quarter profit more than doubled - International Herald Tribune
Autonomy says 1st-quarter profit more than doubled - International Herald Tribune
LONDON: Britain's Autonomy Corp., a maker of software to track computer data, said Wednesday that first-quarter profit more than doubled after the company won new business.
Net income rose to US$11 million (€8.1 million) in the three months through March 31, from US$4.8 million in the same period a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Sales gained 17 percent to US$65.5 million (€48.2 million).
"The combination of strong organic revenue growth and operational gearing ... resulted in continued growth in operating margins and bottom line profitability," Chief Executive Mike Lynch said.
Autonomy's customers include BAE Systems PLC, Ford Motor Co. and Nestle SA.
Shares in the company surged 9.2 percent to 763 pence (US$15.26; €12.34) on the London Stock Exchange.
The Associated Press Published: April 25, 2007
LONDON: Britain's Autonomy Corp., a maker of software to track computer data, said Wednesday that first-quarter profit more than doubled after the company won new business.
Net income rose to US$11 million (€8.1 million) in the three months through March 31, from US$4.8 million in the same period a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Sales gained 17 percent to US$65.5 million (€48.2 million).
"The combination of strong organic revenue growth and operational gearing ... resulted in continued growth in operating margins and bottom line profitability," Chief Executive Mike Lynch said.
Autonomy's customers include BAE Systems PLC, Ford Motor Co. and Nestle SA.
Shares in the company surged 9.2 percent to 763 pence (US$15.26; €12.34) on the London Stock Exchange.
The Associated Press Published: April 25, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
FT.com / Companies / IT - Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 25 2007 08:20 | Last updated: April 25 2007 08:20
Autonomy, the Cambridge-based search software company, on Wednesday announced plans to demerge and float its consumer division, with allows people to search internet TV and video clips.
The consumer division will be renamed Blinkx, and listed on London’s AIM exchange for growth stocks in May. Autonomy will retain around 10 per cent of the shares following the float.
The company is considering issuing new shares at the time of the float to provide funding for the new business, which is expected to be initially lossmaking.
Blinkx is looking to create an advertising-funded business, along the lines of the Google business model.
Autonomy creates software that can search unstructured information, such as emails and pictures. It is used by a hundreds of large companies to track and organise corporate data.
Autonomy has struggled to enter the consumer market, however. It launched a consumer internet search technology in 2000 but was dwarfed by rival search engines such as Yahoo and Google, and quietly withdrew the product.
In 2005 the company re-entered the consumer sector, when it began a joint venture with China Netcom, the telecommunications operator, called OpenV, to provide a internet video search for Chinese consumers.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, has always maintained that Autonomy’s search technology is ideally suited to help consumers search internet television, video clips and other online entertainment, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years.
Unlike Google and Yahoo’s search engines, Autonomy’s technology does not rely on text and keywords, but uses mathematical formulae to detect patterns in any type of information, including pictures and sounds. The technology is used by the BBC, for example, to search and organise its archives.
The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated.
Autonomy shareholders will be given shares in Blinkx in lieu of a dividend, which the company has do date never paid.
The Chinese OpenV joint venture will not be part of the Blinkx group, and will maintain exclusive rights to the technology in China.
The news of the demerger came as Autonomy announced record first quarter results, which saw adjusted pre-tax profits nearly doubled to $19.5m from$10.3m in the same period last year.
Revenues for the first quarter rose 17 per cent from $56.1m to $65.5m, thanks to new corporate customer wins, including SFR and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and increasing adoption of the software by technology partners such as IBM, Oracle and Symantec, who are integrating it into their own products and services.
Earnings per share increased to 7 cents from 4 cents last time.
Shares in Autonomy, which have increased 37 per cent in value since the start of the year, rose nearly 9 per cent to 760p in early trade.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 25 2007 08:20 | Last updated: April 25 2007 08:20
Autonomy, the Cambridge-based search software company, on Wednesday announced plans to demerge and float its consumer division, with allows people to search internet TV and video clips.
The consumer division will be renamed Blinkx, and listed on London’s AIM exchange for growth stocks in May. Autonomy will retain around 10 per cent of the shares following the float.
The company is considering issuing new shares at the time of the float to provide funding for the new business, which is expected to be initially lossmaking.
Blinkx is looking to create an advertising-funded business, along the lines of the Google business model.
Autonomy creates software that can search unstructured information, such as emails and pictures. It is used by a hundreds of large companies to track and organise corporate data.
Autonomy has struggled to enter the consumer market, however. It launched a consumer internet search technology in 2000 but was dwarfed by rival search engines such as Yahoo and Google, and quietly withdrew the product.
In 2005 the company re-entered the consumer sector, when it began a joint venture with China Netcom, the telecommunications operator, called OpenV, to provide a internet video search for Chinese consumers.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, has always maintained that Autonomy’s search technology is ideally suited to help consumers search internet television, video clips and other online entertainment, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years.
Unlike Google and Yahoo’s search engines, Autonomy’s technology does not rely on text and keywords, but uses mathematical formulae to detect patterns in any type of information, including pictures and sounds. The technology is used by the BBC, for example, to search and organise its archives.
The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated.
Autonomy shareholders will be given shares in Blinkx in lieu of a dividend, which the company has do date never paid.
The Chinese OpenV joint venture will not be part of the Blinkx group, and will maintain exclusive rights to the technology in China.
The news of the demerger came as Autonomy announced record first quarter results, which saw adjusted pre-tax profits nearly doubled to $19.5m from$10.3m in the same period last year.
Revenues for the first quarter rose 17 per cent from $56.1m to $65.5m, thanks to new corporate customer wins, including SFR and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and increasing adoption of the software by technology partners such as IBM, Oracle and Symantec, who are integrating it into their own products and services.
Earnings per share increased to 7 cents from 4 cents last time.
Shares in Autonomy, which have increased 37 per cent in value since the start of the year, rose nearly 9 per cent to 760p in early trade.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Google's Expanded Workplace Products Won't Usurp Office Yet
Google's Expanded Workplace Products Won't Usurp Office Yet
With the Tonic Systems acquisition, Google continues to widen its offerings into a full collaboration suite. Adding presentation features takes it closer to competing with Microsoft Office.
With the Tonic Systems acquisition, Google continues to widen its offerings into a full collaboration suite. Adding presentation features takes it closer to competing with Microsoft Office.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks -- CMS Watch
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks -- CMS Watch
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks
by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
23-Apr-2007
Enteprise Content Management (ECM) technologies can have a huge impact on your business. So naturally, buyers will do well to carefully assess both ECM products and the vendors that sell them.
It is all too easy to select vendors for your short list based on their supposed “leadership” status in the market – status given either by analyst firms or by the vendors themselves. As our ECM Suites Report amply describes, ECM represents a very wide range of technologies to solve an equally wide range of business problems. Your challenge becomes making the right “fit” for your specific needs.
Once you have identified toolsets that meet your requirements, you also need to consider the vendors. Again “leadership” status in a top right quadrant on an analyst chart does little more than tell you who has the biggest revenues in the sector, along with the widest array of technology to offer. It does not tell you whether the vendor’s corporate status is in state of flux, or whether the product set is currently undergoing an overhaul, or whether both are in the process of becoming somewhat irrelevant in the marketplace due to a lack of innovation and investment.
Major ECM vendors will gladly dazzle, and wine and dine your team, but though they may appear to be a safe and conservative choice, in fact today many are ironically higher-risk partners.
All of these factors involve risk to you, the buyer. So we'd like to provide you with some key indicators to recognize and weigh those risks. Interestingly, you'll see that major brands that would appear a safe and conservative choice actually, in some circumstances, represent higher-risk choices.
To gain maximum value from this analysis you need to consider two key factors: Your enterprise and the ECM marketplace. Each buying organization is different. What represents a high risk to one may represent a chance for innovation and a competitive advantage to another. What represents a staid, uninspiring, and somewhat slow-moving product set to one enterprise may represent a solid area of comfort and low risk to another. And of course, vendors and products are in constant flux.
Charting Risks
The chart below represents four key dimensions that we believe should supplement a functional, cost/value analysis in any major procurement decision. Use this tool in addition to the specific product research that looks in more detail at the detailed functional and technical capabilities of the technology sets.
There is no “right” or “magic” or “leader” location this chart. Buyers with strong internal IT processes and a predilection for “early adoption” may favor a vendor undertaking fundamental change, on the grounds that they can influence roadmaps and new technology and “leapfrog” competitors stuck with older tools and approaches. Other customers will prefer an ECM supplier evolving at a more moderate pace; while still other buyers will prefer a more conservative approach. It is for you to decide where your preferences sit.
The four dimensions we plot are:
1. Size – Denotes the relative size and importance of the vendor in the broad technology marketplace.
2. Focus on ECM – Indicates how much of the firm’s efforts are focused on ECM. For some it is a side activity, for others it is the sole focus.
3. Vendor Evolution – Weighs the current pace of change at the vendor itself: Is it evolving as the marketplace changes? Has it just been acquired, or acquired another product?
4. Product Development – Weighs the current pace of change for the ECM solution. Is the product line about to undergo a major revision? Is the firm in the midst of trying to piece together many disparate modules. Or is little happening, with a mature product undergoing minimal change?
Each buyer will rate the importance of these dimensions differently and we encourage you to make use of this tool interactively. Our placement of the vendors denotes our assessments as of mid-2007; we will update it substantially every six months. To be sure, the vendor are in motion but here is our quick snapshot.
The Vendors
EMC|Documentum
EMC|Documentum is going through a period of major change in 2007: not only is D6 (a major upgrade to the product) due in September, 2007, but the firm lost recently lost its charismatic leader Dave DeWalt – a loss seemingly unexpected by EMC, and one that will have a major impact on the executive leadership, and by default corporate and product direction of the Documentum product set. Hence our placement of EMC Documentum firmly in the Refresh sector toward the Turbulence sector of the chart.
IBM / FileNet
When IBM bought FileNet in late 2006, they took on a product set in P8 that had recently undergone a major revision to Version 4. There is integration work to be done to make sense of the two parallel product sets (IBM CM and FileNet P8) but there is less turmoil than may have been expected. Likewise, as the entire executive team from FileNet replaced the previous IBM team, there will be a period of settling down, and certainly there will be change over time to manage; hence our placement of IBM across the Turbulence and Shifting sectors.
Oracle / Stellent
Oracle will apparently allow the Stellent UCM product set to continue in its current guise for some time to come, and instead is concentrating on integrating elements to run on top of its Content DB and BPEL process manager, so there is less turmoil here than we might have thought. Nevertheless this is a period of major change for Stellent, albeit one we expect to settle down sooner rather than later, in large part due to Oracle’s enormous resources and the relatively small size of this acquisition for Oracle. Hence placement across the Turbulence and Refresh sectors.
OpenText / Hummingbird
Corporately Open Text has a clear, applications-oriented strategy, yet there can be no underestimating the scale of the task they face in rationalizing not just the Hummingbird acquisition, but a myriad of prior purchases. Hence our placement in Shifting albeit bordering Restructuring.
Alfresco
The new kid on the block in the ECM world, Alfresco has made a mark quickly on the market, and yet despite being a new firm, they are surprisingly stable and well-funded. They are not undergoing any major corporate change, and the product is reaching a point of some maturity (as an ECM platform), but the company is still experimenting with licensing and governance models; hence our placement in Shifting, bordering Balance.
Interwoven
The WorkSite products have clearly done well for Interwoven, yet it remains unclear whether the company will commit to them to the same depth as its traditional WCM tools. Interwoven operates as a group of fiefdoms, this particular group is in comparison to others moving slowly both at the product and corporate level, hence we have placed them in Stasis, bordering on Maintenance. They are potentially a good match for a conservative buyer.
Vignette
Like Interwoven, Vignette’s original WCM products seem to get more attention than the company’s acquired ECM tools. As such little of import is happening with the product set. Some elements from the Tower acquisition appear to be languishing, and corporately addressing this does not appear to be high on their agenda. Hence our placement of Vignette in the Maintenance sector bordering Stasis.
Xerox
Xerox is a very large firm, but DocuShare is a tiny part of this mammoth company – albeit a small part that has done well. The product is mature, and we expect changes to be organic and incremental. The executive team responsible for DocuShare also remains stable, though the larger Xerox company continues to show little real interest in DocuShare – hence our placement and weighting of Xerox in Continuity.
Microsoft
Despite all the hype around SharePoint, ECM is not a major area of focus for Microsoft as a whole, even if it is getting more attention now than in the past. But the deeper story here is that SharePoint remains nowhere near complete or mature, even if it is progressing well. As such, we expect it to undergo some major revisions over the next year or so. Hence we have positioned Microsoft in Overhaul.
Hyland
Hyland is a stable company with a stable product set, developing its technology continuously, if conservatively. Hence our placement of them in the Balance sector.
[Editors note: this article was excerpted from the recently released ECM Suites Report, which contains detailed evaluations of each of these vendors.]
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks
by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
23-Apr-2007
Enteprise Content Management (ECM) technologies can have a huge impact on your business. So naturally, buyers will do well to carefully assess both ECM products and the vendors that sell them.
It is all too easy to select vendors for your short list based on their supposed “leadership” status in the market – status given either by analyst firms or by the vendors themselves. As our ECM Suites Report amply describes, ECM represents a very wide range of technologies to solve an equally wide range of business problems. Your challenge becomes making the right “fit” for your specific needs.
Once you have identified toolsets that meet your requirements, you also need to consider the vendors. Again “leadership” status in a top right quadrant on an analyst chart does little more than tell you who has the biggest revenues in the sector, along with the widest array of technology to offer. It does not tell you whether the vendor’s corporate status is in state of flux, or whether the product set is currently undergoing an overhaul, or whether both are in the process of becoming somewhat irrelevant in the marketplace due to a lack of innovation and investment.
Major ECM vendors will gladly dazzle, and wine and dine your team, but though they may appear to be a safe and conservative choice, in fact today many are ironically higher-risk partners.
All of these factors involve risk to you, the buyer. So we'd like to provide you with some key indicators to recognize and weigh those risks. Interestingly, you'll see that major brands that would appear a safe and conservative choice actually, in some circumstances, represent higher-risk choices.
To gain maximum value from this analysis you need to consider two key factors: Your enterprise and the ECM marketplace. Each buying organization is different. What represents a high risk to one may represent a chance for innovation and a competitive advantage to another. What represents a staid, uninspiring, and somewhat slow-moving product set to one enterprise may represent a solid area of comfort and low risk to another. And of course, vendors and products are in constant flux.
Charting Risks
The chart below represents four key dimensions that we believe should supplement a functional, cost/value analysis in any major procurement decision. Use this tool in addition to the specific product research that looks in more detail at the detailed functional and technical capabilities of the technology sets.
There is no “right” or “magic” or “leader” location this chart. Buyers with strong internal IT processes and a predilection for “early adoption” may favor a vendor undertaking fundamental change, on the grounds that they can influence roadmaps and new technology and “leapfrog” competitors stuck with older tools and approaches. Other customers will prefer an ECM supplier evolving at a more moderate pace; while still other buyers will prefer a more conservative approach. It is for you to decide where your preferences sit.
The four dimensions we plot are:
1. Size – Denotes the relative size and importance of the vendor in the broad technology marketplace.
2. Focus on ECM – Indicates how much of the firm’s efforts are focused on ECM. For some it is a side activity, for others it is the sole focus.
3. Vendor Evolution – Weighs the current pace of change at the vendor itself: Is it evolving as the marketplace changes? Has it just been acquired, or acquired another product?
4. Product Development – Weighs the current pace of change for the ECM solution. Is the product line about to undergo a major revision? Is the firm in the midst of trying to piece together many disparate modules. Or is little happening, with a mature product undergoing minimal change?
Each buyer will rate the importance of these dimensions differently and we encourage you to make use of this tool interactively. Our placement of the vendors denotes our assessments as of mid-2007; we will update it substantially every six months. To be sure, the vendor are in motion but here is our quick snapshot.
The Vendors
EMC|Documentum
EMC|Documentum is going through a period of major change in 2007: not only is D6 (a major upgrade to the product) due in September, 2007, but the firm lost recently lost its charismatic leader Dave DeWalt – a loss seemingly unexpected by EMC, and one that will have a major impact on the executive leadership, and by default corporate and product direction of the Documentum product set. Hence our placement of EMC Documentum firmly in the Refresh sector toward the Turbulence sector of the chart.
IBM / FileNet
When IBM bought FileNet in late 2006, they took on a product set in P8 that had recently undergone a major revision to Version 4. There is integration work to be done to make sense of the two parallel product sets (IBM CM and FileNet P8) but there is less turmoil than may have been expected. Likewise, as the entire executive team from FileNet replaced the previous IBM team, there will be a period of settling down, and certainly there will be change over time to manage; hence our placement of IBM across the Turbulence and Shifting sectors.
Oracle / Stellent
Oracle will apparently allow the Stellent UCM product set to continue in its current guise for some time to come, and instead is concentrating on integrating elements to run on top of its Content DB and BPEL process manager, so there is less turmoil here than we might have thought. Nevertheless this is a period of major change for Stellent, albeit one we expect to settle down sooner rather than later, in large part due to Oracle’s enormous resources and the relatively small size of this acquisition for Oracle. Hence placement across the Turbulence and Refresh sectors.
OpenText / Hummingbird
Corporately Open Text has a clear, applications-oriented strategy, yet there can be no underestimating the scale of the task they face in rationalizing not just the Hummingbird acquisition, but a myriad of prior purchases. Hence our placement in Shifting albeit bordering Restructuring.
Alfresco
The new kid on the block in the ECM world, Alfresco has made a mark quickly on the market, and yet despite being a new firm, they are surprisingly stable and well-funded. They are not undergoing any major corporate change, and the product is reaching a point of some maturity (as an ECM platform), but the company is still experimenting with licensing and governance models; hence our placement in Shifting, bordering Balance.
Interwoven
The WorkSite products have clearly done well for Interwoven, yet it remains unclear whether the company will commit to them to the same depth as its traditional WCM tools. Interwoven operates as a group of fiefdoms, this particular group is in comparison to others moving slowly both at the product and corporate level, hence we have placed them in Stasis, bordering on Maintenance. They are potentially a good match for a conservative buyer.
Vignette
Like Interwoven, Vignette’s original WCM products seem to get more attention than the company’s acquired ECM tools. As such little of import is happening with the product set. Some elements from the Tower acquisition appear to be languishing, and corporately addressing this does not appear to be high on their agenda. Hence our placement of Vignette in the Maintenance sector bordering Stasis.
Xerox
Xerox is a very large firm, but DocuShare is a tiny part of this mammoth company – albeit a small part that has done well. The product is mature, and we expect changes to be organic and incremental. The executive team responsible for DocuShare also remains stable, though the larger Xerox company continues to show little real interest in DocuShare – hence our placement and weighting of Xerox in Continuity.
Microsoft
Despite all the hype around SharePoint, ECM is not a major area of focus for Microsoft as a whole, even if it is getting more attention now than in the past. But the deeper story here is that SharePoint remains nowhere near complete or mature, even if it is progressing well. As such, we expect it to undergo some major revisions over the next year or so. Hence we have positioned Microsoft in Overhaul.
Hyland
Hyland is a stable company with a stable product set, developing its technology continuously, if conservatively. Hence our placement of them in the Balance sector.
[Editors note: this article was excerpted from the recently released ECM Suites Report, which contains detailed evaluations of each of these vendors.]
Friday, April 20, 2007
FT.com / Companies / Financial services - USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
FT.com / Companies / Financial services - USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
By Doug Cameron in Chicago
Published: April 20 2007 19:24 | Last updated: April 20 2007 19:24
The US Futures Exchange is 99 years old and male, at least according to its new MySpace page in what market experts view as the first move by the derivatives sector into the world of social networking.
The details provided by the Chicago-based exchange which, like its peers, prides itself on the transparency of its markets, could just catch the eye of regulators. The USFE is in fact less than one year old, formed in late 2006 when Man Group took over the US exchange formed by Eurex, the derivatives platform controlled by Deutsche Börse. Its sex was previously undisclosed.
The appearance of the USFE on a site beloved of teenagers and musicians comes as it launched its inaugural contract on Friday, based on the outcome of the two-way battle for control of the Chicago Board of Trade.
The ”binary” contract is viewed as an opportunistic move ahead of the formal launch of the USFE, target retail investors with the exchange’s initial product offerings before widening to attract institutions and hedge funds.
Binary futures offer an all-or-nothing pay-out on a range of defined outcomes, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the Intercontinental Exchange winning the CBOT bid battle or the acquisition of CBOT by a third party.
The USFE has been working on its Myspace page for a number of weeks and was first reported by John Lothian, a Chicago-based trader who publishes a widely-followed blog and newsletter. “For the longest time I had only one [MySpace] friend, said Mr Lothian who, like many in the sector, was previously unaware of the social networking site before signing up to view the USFE offering.
Mr Lothian is now joined by 13 other friends on the USFE page.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
By Doug Cameron in Chicago
Published: April 20 2007 19:24 | Last updated: April 20 2007 19:24
The US Futures Exchange is 99 years old and male, at least according to its new MySpace page in what market experts view as the first move by the derivatives sector into the world of social networking.
The details provided by the Chicago-based exchange which, like its peers, prides itself on the transparency of its markets, could just catch the eye of regulators. The USFE is in fact less than one year old, formed in late 2006 when Man Group took over the US exchange formed by Eurex, the derivatives platform controlled by Deutsche Börse. Its sex was previously undisclosed.
The appearance of the USFE on a site beloved of teenagers and musicians comes as it launched its inaugural contract on Friday, based on the outcome of the two-way battle for control of the Chicago Board of Trade.
The ”binary” contract is viewed as an opportunistic move ahead of the formal launch of the USFE, target retail investors with the exchange’s initial product offerings before widening to attract institutions and hedge funds.
Binary futures offer an all-or-nothing pay-out on a range of defined outcomes, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the Intercontinental Exchange winning the CBOT bid battle or the acquisition of CBOT by a third party.
The USFE has been working on its Myspace page for a number of weeks and was first reported by John Lothian, a Chicago-based trader who publishes a widely-followed blog and newsletter. “For the longest time I had only one [MySpace] friend, said Mr Lothian who, like many in the sector, was previously unaware of the social networking site before signing up to view the USFE offering.
Mr Lothian is now joined by 13 other friends on the USFE page.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Thursday, April 19, 2007
ECM-Strategie: Konsolidierung der Vielfalt im Unternehmen
ECM-Strategie: Konsolidierung der Vielfalt im Unternehmen
Anwender haben ein sehr unterschiedliches Verständnis von Dokumenten und Content Management. Die Spanne reicht von der einfachen MS Office-Dateiverwaltung auf dem Server mit Volltextsuche bis hin zur Prozessunterstützung in Content-zentrischen Prozessen, die in eine heterogene Anwendungslandschaft unter Einhaltung regulatorischer Anforderungen integriert werden können. Dementsprechend vielfältig und selten direkt miteinander vergleichbar sind auch die verschiedenen Angebote der Hersteller.
Anwender haben ein sehr unterschiedliches Verständnis von Dokumenten und Content Management. Die Spanne reicht von der einfachen MS Office-Dateiverwaltung auf dem Server mit Volltextsuche bis hin zur Prozessunterstützung in Content-zentrischen Prozessen, die in eine heterogene Anwendungslandschaft unter Einhaltung regulatorischer Anforderungen integriert werden können. Dementsprechend vielfältig und selten direkt miteinander vergleichbar sind auch die verschiedenen Angebote der Hersteller.
ASG Needs to Act Fast to Make the Most of Mobius Acquisition
ASG Needs to Act Fast to Make the Most of Mobius Acquisition
Buying Mobius will give Allen Systems Group more customers and a wider document archiving portfolio. But ASG must develop the business and exploit combined assets quickly to stave off rivals in this maturing market.
Buying Mobius will give Allen Systems Group more customers and a wider document archiving portfolio. But ASG must develop the business and exploit combined assets quickly to stave off rivals in this maturing market.
Google Extends Advertising Dominance With DoubleClick Deal
Google Extends Advertising Dominance With DoubleClick Deal
Google's purchase of DoubleClick will change the landscape of online advertising by enabling Google to offer both search-based and display advertising to its clients, ultimately boosting the vendor's competitive position.
Google's purchase of DoubleClick will change the landscape of online advertising by enabling Google to offer both search-based and display advertising to its clients, ultimately boosting the vendor's competitive position.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Adobe and Microsoft Face Off Over Rich Media Platforms
Adobe and Microsoft Face Off Over Rich Media Platforms
Announcements made at the same event by Microsoft and Adobe of a desktop video player and rich media browser extension, respectively, have given new prominence to the companies' previously hidden rivalry.
Announcements made at the same event by Microsoft and Adobe of a desktop video player and rich media browser extension, respectively, have given new prominence to the companies' previously hidden rivalry.
New Content in IBM's ITUP Should Prove Useful to ITIL Shops
New Content in IBM's ITUP Should Prove Useful to ITIL Shops
A new version of the IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool should prove useful to many organizations implementing the IT Infrastructure Library, because ITUP's new content offers how-to guidance that ITIL lacks.
A new version of the IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool should prove useful to many organizations implementing the IT Infrastructure Library, because ITUP's new content offers how-to guidance that ITIL lacks.
FT.com / Services & tools / SearchFT.com / Services & tools / Search
FT.com / Services & tools / SearchFT.com / Services & tools / Search
Google/DoubleClick
FT.com site
Published: Apr 16, 2007
After being on the receiving end for so many years, Microsoft can finally stir the anti-trust pot for somebody else. It should have learnt some tricks along the way to put the spotlight on Google's acquisition of online advertising platform DoubleClick. Microsoft's experience in Europe could be particularly useful, given that regulators there have been willing to go after fast-changing technology companies.
But does the complaint that a DoubleClick deal risks giving Google too much power in the provision of online adverts hold water? Possibly. Leave search advertising aside for now, where Google is the global market leader. In display advertising there are two main companies that serve ads to websites around the world. Google is the strongest in the contextual side – where ads are targeted based on the information on a given web page. DoubleClick is the strongest in ads that are placed according to the behavioural history of each internet user.
There is a risk that putting the two together – and allowing them to use the sheer scale of information they have about internet users – would raise barriers to entry for rivals. Those already exist, given the cost of building an ad-serving platform.
Microsoft, for example, has discovered how difficult it is to get into the provision of search-related advertising from scratch. Its failure, so far, in that arena is a big reason for its reaction to Google's deal. After all, advertising is the fuel for the internet and Microsoft has very little.
That is a good reason for people to take Microsoft's gripes with a fistful of salt. There are rivals who serve display ads. But regulators should still look very closely at how they define the market when assessing Google's deal. Too much dominance for one company now might be difficult to undo in the future.
Google/DoubleClick
FT.com site
Published: Apr 16, 2007
After being on the receiving end for so many years, Microsoft can finally stir the anti-trust pot for somebody else. It should have learnt some tricks along the way to put the spotlight on Google's acquisition of online advertising platform DoubleClick. Microsoft's experience in Europe could be particularly useful, given that regulators there have been willing to go after fast-changing technology companies.
But does the complaint that a DoubleClick deal risks giving Google too much power in the provision of online adverts hold water? Possibly. Leave search advertising aside for now, where Google is the global market leader. In display advertising there are two main companies that serve ads to websites around the world. Google is the strongest in the contextual side – where ads are targeted based on the information on a given web page. DoubleClick is the strongest in ads that are placed according to the behavioural history of each internet user.
There is a risk that putting the two together – and allowing them to use the sheer scale of information they have about internet users – would raise barriers to entry for rivals. Those already exist, given the cost of building an ad-serving platform.
Microsoft, for example, has discovered how difficult it is to get into the provision of search-related advertising from scratch. Its failure, so far, in that arena is a big reason for its reaction to Google's deal. After all, advertising is the fuel for the internet and Microsoft has very little.
That is a good reason for people to take Microsoft's gripes with a fistful of salt. There are rivals who serve display ads. But regulators should still look very closely at how they define the market when assessing Google's deal. Too much dominance for one company now might be difficult to undo in the future.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Die RAF für Kino und Wohnzimmer Martina Gedeck soll Ulrike Meinhof werden - Kultur - sueddeutsche.de
Die RAF für Kino und Wohnzimmer Martina Gedeck soll Ulrike Meinhof werden - Kultur - sueddeutsche.de
Bernd Eichinger plant, die Erfolgscrew seiner "Elementarteilchen" nun für eine Verfilmung der RAF-Geschichte zu gewinnen. Neben der Oscar-erfahrenen Gedeck sollen Moritz Bleibtreu und Nina Hoss in die Rollen von Terroristen schlüpfen.
Bernd Eichinger plant, die Erfolgscrew seiner "Elementarteilchen" nun für eine Verfilmung der RAF-Geschichte zu gewinnen. Neben der Oscar-erfahrenen Gedeck sollen Moritz Bleibtreu und Nina Hoss in die Rollen von Terroristen schlüpfen.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
FTD.de - IT+Telekommunikation - Nachrichten - Google kauft für Rekordpreis DoubleClick
FTD.de - IT+Telekommunikation - Nachrichten - Google kauft für Rekordpreis DoubleClick
Google baut seine Vormachtstellung in der Internet-Werbung aus: Der Suchmaschinenbetreiber übernimmt für 3,1 Mrd. $ in bar die New Yorker Online-Werbefirma DoubleClick. Damit zahlte Google einen Rekordpreis - und stach Konkurrenten Microsoft aus.
Google baut seine Vormachtstellung in der Internet-Werbung aus: Der Suchmaschinenbetreiber übernimmt für 3,1 Mrd. $ in bar die New Yorker Online-Werbefirma DoubleClick. Damit zahlte Google einen Rekordpreis - und stach Konkurrenten Microsoft aus.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Interwoven veröffentlicht verbesserte Collaborative Document Management-Lösung
Interwoven veröffentlicht verbesserte Collaborative Document Management-Lösung
Höhere Produktivität und Flexibilität durch optimiertes Content Management
Interwoven, Inc., ein weltweit führender Anbieter von Content Management-Lösungen, gab die Veröffentlichung einer verbesserten Version von Interwoven Collaborative Document Management bekannt. Diese Lösungs-Suite optimiert das Zusammenwirken dokumentengestützter Geschäftsprozesse und bietet Unternehmen die Möglichkeit, beweglicher und flexibler zu agieren.
Höhere Produktivität und Flexibilität durch optimiertes Content Management
Interwoven, Inc., ein weltweit führender Anbieter von Content Management-Lösungen, gab die Veröffentlichung einer verbesserten Version von Interwoven Collaborative Document Management bekannt. Diese Lösungs-Suite optimiert das Zusammenwirken dokumentengestützter Geschäftsprozesse und bietet Unternehmen die Möglichkeit, beweglicher und flexibler zu agieren.
Salesforce.com Buys Into ECM (AMR)
Salesforce.com is acquiring on-demand content management provider Koral, Inc., and while the deal is so small that salesforce.com isn’t required to report its size, it’s a big enough deal for the press and investment community to take heed. But even after wiping the hype off, the acquisition points to looming changes in the content management market. Koral, a $2.5M venture-funded startup, had already demonstrated its capability, ease of use, and ease of integration as a salesforce.com AppExchange partner. Salesforce.com will deploy Koral in a two-pronged content management strategy:
Salesforce.com’s vision for content management is aggressive, suggesting competition with long-standing, firmly established enterprise content management (ECM) providers like Documentum, FileNet, and Open Text and more pointedly, Microsoft’s rapidly growing SharePoint product. Established ECM vendors have far too frequently expressed their growth potential in terms of how much information is unstructured (industry lore has it as about 85%) versus structured. Warning customers that their information is unstructured incites neither fear nor urges to buy. The better point, one that Koral and salesforce.com express aptly, is that only 5% of employees use any content management system. Productivity, collaboration, and knowledge management needs dictate that far more people should; compliance mandates that far more must.
Of course, the value of getting to more users is not lost on Microsoft, already in front of most business users and seeking to retain and leverage the position. It may only come to a salesforce.com-Microsoft showdown if someone can successfully evangelize a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for content management; not an easy task considering companies’ efforts to consolidate their content management investments while addressing growing compliance concerns. These days, compliance is a primary or secondary concern in almost every content management inquiry AMR Research takes. In many industries and for many business processes, systems must meet rigorous regulatory standards, some advising and some requiring that documentation must reside within the enterprise’s control. A deeper look at this acquisition, its ramifications in the ECM market, and the future of SaaS in ECM can be found in, “Salesforce.com Buys Into ECM: Is Content Management Ready for SaaS?”
Salesforce.com’s vision for content management is aggressive, suggesting competition with long-standing, firmly established enterprise content management (ECM) providers like Documentum, FileNet, and Open Text and more pointedly, Microsoft’s rapidly growing SharePoint product. Established ECM vendors have far too frequently expressed their growth potential in terms of how much information is unstructured (industry lore has it as about 85%) versus structured. Warning customers that their information is unstructured incites neither fear nor urges to buy. The better point, one that Koral and salesforce.com express aptly, is that only 5% of employees use any content management system. Productivity, collaboration, and knowledge management needs dictate that far more people should; compliance mandates that far more must.
Of course, the value of getting to more users is not lost on Microsoft, already in front of most business users and seeking to retain and leverage the position. It may only come to a salesforce.com-Microsoft showdown if someone can successfully evangelize a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for content management; not an easy task considering companies’ efforts to consolidate their content management investments while addressing growing compliance concerns. These days, compliance is a primary or secondary concern in almost every content management inquiry AMR Research takes. In many industries and for many business processes, systems must meet rigorous regulatory standards, some advising and some requiring that documentation must reside within the enterprise’s control. A deeper look at this acquisition, its ramifications in the ECM market, and the future of SaaS in ECM can be found in, “Salesforce.com Buys Into ECM: Is Content Management Ready for SaaS?”
Monday, April 09, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - The race for the $100 laptop
FT.com / Companies / IT - The race for the $100 laptop
The race for the $100 laptop
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Published: April 9 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 9 2007 03:00
When a team of education and technology experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in 2004 they were going to overcome the digital divide by making a $100 (£51) laptop for the poor children of the world, they were ridiculed.
Technology executives said such an extreme drop in cost would be "impossible". Even those who saw the team as visionaries thought the "one laptop per child" (OLPC) project had no future beyond charity.
Three years later, OLPC appears to be changing the computer industry, although not in the way its founders imagined. The sector has discovered the marketing power of the poor and has increasingly come to believe that the vast majority of the world's population that does not already possess a computer will be one of the main drivers of future growth.
"Currently the semiconductor population is limited to the 800m people at the top of the pyramid," says Cynthia Chyn, a researcher at the Institute for Information Industry, a Taiwanese government-funded think-tank. "The industry is in search of a PC for the next billion."
Over the past year, global hardware and software companies have announced initiatives aimed at this group. Intel, one of OLPC's fiercest critics, has developed low-cost computers aimed atstudents in third-worldcountries, including the "Classmate" PC and the "Eduwise" laptop.
Its rival AMD has pledged to get half the world's population online by 2015 with a device called the Personal Internet Communicator. Microsoft is supporting the establishment of kiosks in villages in developing countries, where residents would share a computer and just pay for usage.
Analysts see some of these moves as no more than public relations campaigns, defensive attempts to make sure that the respective company's brand or technology has a foot in the door once these countries turn into real markets.
But recently companies have started taking steps that are neither charitynor PR: Dell, the world's number two computer company, launched a desktop computer in China last month that sells for as little as $336, more than 60 per cent below the price tag of its previously cheapest machine.
Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract manufacturer of notebook computers, says next year it will start making laptops that will sell for only $200. It is also making the OLPC, the first shipments of which are due to be made this -summer.
Most of these moves have been made possible because the OLPC project forced a group of companies to develop a laptop with the goal of making it as cheap as possible.
This turned out to be far easier than critics had suggested. Costs were cut by using a cheaper form of liquid crystal display, leaving out the hard disk and running the machine on open-source software rather than Microsoft Windows.
"Not all people need to have as heavily loaded PCs as they have today," says Michael Wang, Quanta's president.
Intel's founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years, driving the technology industry to produce ever more powerful devices.
Now, though, computer makers will have to use the most advanced technology to produce "older", simpler specifications, argues Jeremy Wang, Asia-Pacific executive director of the Fabless Semiconductor Association.
Mr Wang of Quanta predicts that many different laptops will appear on the market with price tags between $600 and $200 - the lowest price for a laptop so far. "There will be many different combinations [of software and hardware components] for different segments," he says. Quanta has transformed its OLPC project team into a new business unit. "Their task is to create a market," he says.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
The race for the $100 laptop
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Published: April 9 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 9 2007 03:00
When a team of education and technology experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in 2004 they were going to overcome the digital divide by making a $100 (£51) laptop for the poor children of the world, they were ridiculed.
Technology executives said such an extreme drop in cost would be "impossible". Even those who saw the team as visionaries thought the "one laptop per child" (OLPC) project had no future beyond charity.
Three years later, OLPC appears to be changing the computer industry, although not in the way its founders imagined. The sector has discovered the marketing power of the poor and has increasingly come to believe that the vast majority of the world's population that does not already possess a computer will be one of the main drivers of future growth.
"Currently the semiconductor population is limited to the 800m people at the top of the pyramid," says Cynthia Chyn, a researcher at the Institute for Information Industry, a Taiwanese government-funded think-tank. "The industry is in search of a PC for the next billion."
Over the past year, global hardware and software companies have announced initiatives aimed at this group. Intel, one of OLPC's fiercest critics, has developed low-cost computers aimed atstudents in third-worldcountries, including the "Classmate" PC and the "Eduwise" laptop.
Its rival AMD has pledged to get half the world's population online by 2015 with a device called the Personal Internet Communicator. Microsoft is supporting the establishment of kiosks in villages in developing countries, where residents would share a computer and just pay for usage.
Analysts see some of these moves as no more than public relations campaigns, defensive attempts to make sure that the respective company's brand or technology has a foot in the door once these countries turn into real markets.
But recently companies have started taking steps that are neither charitynor PR: Dell, the world's number two computer company, launched a desktop computer in China last month that sells for as little as $336, more than 60 per cent below the price tag of its previously cheapest machine.
Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract manufacturer of notebook computers, says next year it will start making laptops that will sell for only $200. It is also making the OLPC, the first shipments of which are due to be made this -summer.
Most of these moves have been made possible because the OLPC project forced a group of companies to develop a laptop with the goal of making it as cheap as possible.
This turned out to be far easier than critics had suggested. Costs were cut by using a cheaper form of liquid crystal display, leaving out the hard disk and running the machine on open-source software rather than Microsoft Windows.
"Not all people need to have as heavily loaded PCs as they have today," says Michael Wang, Quanta's president.
Intel's founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years, driving the technology industry to produce ever more powerful devices.
Now, though, computer makers will have to use the most advanced technology to produce "older", simpler specifications, argues Jeremy Wang, Asia-Pacific executive director of the Fabless Semiconductor Association.
Mr Wang of Quanta predicts that many different laptops will appear on the market with price tags between $600 and $200 - the lowest price for a laptop so far. "There will be many different combinations [of software and hardware components] for different segments," he says. Quanta has transformed its OLPC project team into a new business unit. "Their task is to create a market," he says.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Roland-Berger-Studie Experten erwarten grünes Job-Wunder - Deutschland - sueddeutsche.de
Roland-Berger-Studie Experten erwarten grünes Job-Wunder - Deutschland - sueddeutsche.de
Die globale Klimaschutz-Debatte hat einer Studie zufolge äußerst positive Auswirkungen auf den deutschen Arbeitsmarkt. Im Jahr 2020 werde die Öko-Branche mehr Mitarbeiter ernähren als die Autoindustrie.
Die globale Klimaschutz-Debatte hat einer Studie zufolge äußerst positive Auswirkungen auf den deutschen Arbeitsmarkt. Im Jahr 2020 werde die Öko-Branche mehr Mitarbeiter ernähren als die Autoindustrie.
FT.com / Business Life - Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
FT.com / Business Life - Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
By Chris Nuttall
Published: April 9 2007 17:04 | Last updated: April 9 2007 17:04
At Twittervision.com the beginnings of what could be a fresh trend in internet self-expression are being spelt out on a map of the world.
Users of this addictive new website can see a text bubble flash up over the state of Arizona with a picture icon of the sender “Chilblane” inside. “Resetting all of my album art,” it says. The world map spins over to Sydney, Australia: “Waiting on my girlfriend to come,” says CJH2. Then to Tokyo: “Keep snoozing, can’t start my day yet,” says Nobi. “Twitter – the reality TV of the blogosphere,” comments LoveHouseRadio back in Richmond, Virginia.
Twittervision’s pop-up bubbles of instant texted thoughts from around the world are a “mash-up” of Google Maps combined with a live feed of the short messages sent out by users of Twitter.com’s service.
Its popularity has forced its creator, David Troy, to create a periodic warning to people who have been glued to their computer monitors for long periods: “You have been watching Twittervision for 12 hours. Do you want to continue?”
Mr Troy pays homage to Twitter – the original service that created the online ecosystem of which Twittervision.com is part – for helping create the phenomenon of text messages that turn into web television.
The service was launched last year to let people post brief messages to groups of friends and the public at large, letting them know their current actions and thoughts.
It has rapidly become the poster child of a new trend of micro-blogging, where the social networking tool is reduced to single sentences, pictures and the most everyday emotions and events.
Besides Twitter, another internet tool called Tumblr is enabling scrapbook-style blogs of pasted quotes, pictures and thoughts. Radar.net creates social connections through the posting of camera phone images. And services such as Jaiku, Mozes and Moodgeist have their own take on this new form of web shorthand.
Twitter was invented by Jack Dorsey, a developer at Obvious Corp, a San Francisco start-up. He thought of mashing up existing concepts such as groups of friends and instant messaging (for example: “I’m away from my desk”) and MySpace-style “I’m listening to ColdPlay” status messages. The resulting service allows users to let each other know what they are doing, wherever they are, through mobile phone SMS text messages.
Twitter users tend to update their status from their computers during the day and their phones at night. In each case they are restricted to 140-character messages.
“I really like that constraint. I’m a person of few words. I really like conciseness and making every word count,” Mr Dorsey says.
He feels that Twitter messages avoid the abstraction and commitment of composed blog posts and free people from the obligations of technologies such as the phone and e-mail, where responses are expected in a timely manner.
“Twitter is more ambient,” he says. “You are basically writing on a wall and if someone chooses to read it they can do.”
Hitwise, the web research firm, says visits to Twitter.com in March were up 135 per cent on the previous month and 500 per cent on January, but they have yet to reach critical mass.
Lee Ann Prescott, research director of Hitwise, says Twitter is entertaining but users are still trying to find useful applications for it.
“This is still really niche. It takes a lot of time for a network like this to build,” she says.
Tumblr has attracted 50,000 users so far and 10,000 posts an hour are coming into its micro-blogs. Users can press a Tumblr button in their browser to attach to their blogs a video, photo, quote or link they find while surfing or to post a random thought.
“This is going to be the year of short form,” says David Karp, Tumblr’s founder. “Blogs are great if you want to hammer out commentary, but what if you’re not particularly comfortable as a writer? There are a lot of people who just want to share stuff and we wanted to make a simple, shallow funnel for them.”
With Radar.net’s postings of camera phone pictures, users don’t even have to write. “Pictures have an entirely different feeling,” says John Poisson, the service’s founder. “They can have an immediacy that is compelling.”
Given the underlying appetite for concision, he notes: “A photo can be worth a thousand words.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
By Chris Nuttall
Published: April 9 2007 17:04 | Last updated: April 9 2007 17:04
At Twittervision.com the beginnings of what could be a fresh trend in internet self-expression are being spelt out on a map of the world.
Users of this addictive new website can see a text bubble flash up over the state of Arizona with a picture icon of the sender “Chilblane” inside. “Resetting all of my album art,” it says. The world map spins over to Sydney, Australia: “Waiting on my girlfriend to come,” says CJH2. Then to Tokyo: “Keep snoozing, can’t start my day yet,” says Nobi. “Twitter – the reality TV of the blogosphere,” comments LoveHouseRadio back in Richmond, Virginia.
Twittervision’s pop-up bubbles of instant texted thoughts from around the world are a “mash-up” of Google Maps combined with a live feed of the short messages sent out by users of Twitter.com’s service.
Its popularity has forced its creator, David Troy, to create a periodic warning to people who have been glued to their computer monitors for long periods: “You have been watching Twittervision for 12 hours. Do you want to continue?”
Mr Troy pays homage to Twitter – the original service that created the online ecosystem of which Twittervision.com is part – for helping create the phenomenon of text messages that turn into web television.
The service was launched last year to let people post brief messages to groups of friends and the public at large, letting them know their current actions and thoughts.
It has rapidly become the poster child of a new trend of micro-blogging, where the social networking tool is reduced to single sentences, pictures and the most everyday emotions and events.
Besides Twitter, another internet tool called Tumblr is enabling scrapbook-style blogs of pasted quotes, pictures and thoughts. Radar.net creates social connections through the posting of camera phone images. And services such as Jaiku, Mozes and Moodgeist have their own take on this new form of web shorthand.
Twitter was invented by Jack Dorsey, a developer at Obvious Corp, a San Francisco start-up. He thought of mashing up existing concepts such as groups of friends and instant messaging (for example: “I’m away from my desk”) and MySpace-style “I’m listening to ColdPlay” status messages. The resulting service allows users to let each other know what they are doing, wherever they are, through mobile phone SMS text messages.
Twitter users tend to update their status from their computers during the day and their phones at night. In each case they are restricted to 140-character messages.
“I really like that constraint. I’m a person of few words. I really like conciseness and making every word count,” Mr Dorsey says.
He feels that Twitter messages avoid the abstraction and commitment of composed blog posts and free people from the obligations of technologies such as the phone and e-mail, where responses are expected in a timely manner.
“Twitter is more ambient,” he says. “You are basically writing on a wall and if someone chooses to read it they can do.”
Hitwise, the web research firm, says visits to Twitter.com in March were up 135 per cent on the previous month and 500 per cent on January, but they have yet to reach critical mass.
Lee Ann Prescott, research director of Hitwise, says Twitter is entertaining but users are still trying to find useful applications for it.
“This is still really niche. It takes a lot of time for a network like this to build,” she says.
Tumblr has attracted 50,000 users so far and 10,000 posts an hour are coming into its micro-blogs. Users can press a Tumblr button in their browser to attach to their blogs a video, photo, quote or link they find while surfing or to post a random thought.
“This is going to be the year of short form,” says David Karp, Tumblr’s founder. “Blogs are great if you want to hammer out commentary, but what if you’re not particularly comfortable as a writer? There are a lot of people who just want to share stuff and we wanted to make a simple, shallow funnel for them.”
With Radar.net’s postings of camera phone pictures, users don’t even have to write. “Pictures have an entirely different feeling,” says John Poisson, the service’s founder. “They can have an immediacy that is compelling.”
Given the underlying appetite for concision, he notes: “A photo can be worth a thousand words.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Sunday, April 08, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - Californian IT surges into London
FT.com / Companies / IT - Californian IT surges into London
Californian IT surges into London
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 8 2007 22:04 | Last updated: April 8 2007 22:04
A record number of Californian information technology companies including Google, MySpace and Bebo have opened offices in London in the past year, leading a surge of investment by foreign business in the capital.
There were a record 250 foreign direct investment projects into London in 2006, up more than 40 per cent on the previous year, according to new figures from Think London, the capital’s foreign direct investment agency.
The number outstrips activity during the dotcom boom in 2000, when 182 investment projects came to London from abroad.
Some 25 Californian IT companies invested in London last year, making them the largest identifiable group of foreign businesses coming to the city.
The US as a whole accounted for 54 per cent of projects, with Californian companies, including non-IT businesses, making up 15 per cent of all London foreign investment projects.
This compares with 10 per cent from India and 7 per cent from Canada, the next biggest investors.
In response to the influx, Think London recently opened offices in San Francisco, in addition to those in New York and Beijing.
Key projects include the rapid growth of Google’s UK operations during the last 12 months. The company now employs hundreds of UK staff and runs a significant part of its mobile and wireless development work out of its huge office complex in Victoria.
Some of the investments have been relatively modest in financial terms. Bebo, the social networking site, opened a UK office this year with the hire of a single executive, Joanna Shields, poached from Google. Sling Media, the video-streaming company, similarly employs just one person in London.
But such small beachheads can grow quickly. MySpace, a social networking rival to Bebo, sent three managers from California to London in January 2006. A year later it had an office of 55 people in Soho.
Californian IT companies say they see London as a centre for convergence of the technology and media industries.
The fact that many global media companies, advertising agencies and telecommunications operators have headquarters in London makes the city a good place for dealmaking.
Google, for example, has signed key deals with Vodafone, the UK mobile phone operator, and with British Sky Broadcasting, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite television business, in the past year. MySpace has done a deal with Vodafone. And Bebo is working with Orange in the UK on the first deal to give mobile phone users access to the social networking site.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Californian IT surges into London
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 8 2007 22:04 | Last updated: April 8 2007 22:04
A record number of Californian information technology companies including Google, MySpace and Bebo have opened offices in London in the past year, leading a surge of investment by foreign business in the capital.
There were a record 250 foreign direct investment projects into London in 2006, up more than 40 per cent on the previous year, according to new figures from Think London, the capital’s foreign direct investment agency.
The number outstrips activity during the dotcom boom in 2000, when 182 investment projects came to London from abroad.
Some 25 Californian IT companies invested in London last year, making them the largest identifiable group of foreign businesses coming to the city.
The US as a whole accounted for 54 per cent of projects, with Californian companies, including non-IT businesses, making up 15 per cent of all London foreign investment projects.
This compares with 10 per cent from India and 7 per cent from Canada, the next biggest investors.
In response to the influx, Think London recently opened offices in San Francisco, in addition to those in New York and Beijing.
Key projects include the rapid growth of Google’s UK operations during the last 12 months. The company now employs hundreds of UK staff and runs a significant part of its mobile and wireless development work out of its huge office complex in Victoria.
Some of the investments have been relatively modest in financial terms. Bebo, the social networking site, opened a UK office this year with the hire of a single executive, Joanna Shields, poached from Google. Sling Media, the video-streaming company, similarly employs just one person in London.
But such small beachheads can grow quickly. MySpace, a social networking rival to Bebo, sent three managers from California to London in January 2006. A year later it had an office of 55 people in Soho.
Californian IT companies say they see London as a centre for convergence of the technology and media industries.
The fact that many global media companies, advertising agencies and telecommunications operators have headquarters in London makes the city a good place for dealmaking.
Google, for example, has signed key deals with Vodafone, the UK mobile phone operator, and with British Sky Broadcasting, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite television business, in the past year. MySpace has done a deal with Vodafone. And Bebo is working with Orange in the UK on the first deal to give mobile phone users access to the social networking site.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Friday, April 06, 2007
Thursday, April 05, 2007
FT.com / Technology - The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
FT.com / Technology - The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
By Alan Cane
Published: March 28 2007 10:13 | Last updated: March 28 2007 10:13
The time staff waste searching for “stuff” – the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively – has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours – a quarter of their working day – searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as “enterprise search”, a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: “Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
“An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time.”
So Autonomy uses “spiders” and “ants” – intelligent software – to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing – known as “federated search” – are unworkable: “They glow red hot and melt.”
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like “Turkey” will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: “The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision.”
She argues that search technologies have improved “by leaps and bounds” in the past two years: “Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user’s query and give a meaningful response.”
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: “The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog.”
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: “This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements.” It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don’t know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: “There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be,” he claims, “but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment.”
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: “We have lots of information that is unsearchable – valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation.”
The BBC uses several search tools – Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: “At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
“We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience – the people who pay our licence fees.” “Infax”, a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document – whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery – exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don’t know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
By Alan Cane
Published: March 28 2007 10:13 | Last updated: March 28 2007 10:13
The time staff waste searching for “stuff” – the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively – has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours – a quarter of their working day – searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as “enterprise search”, a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: “Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
“An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time.”
So Autonomy uses “spiders” and “ants” – intelligent software – to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing – known as “federated search” – are unworkable: “They glow red hot and melt.”
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like “Turkey” will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: “The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision.”
She argues that search technologies have improved “by leaps and bounds” in the past two years: “Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user’s query and give a meaningful response.”
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: “The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog.”
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: “This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements.” It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don’t know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: “There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be,” he claims, “but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment.”
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: “We have lots of information that is unsearchable – valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation.”
The BBC uses several search tools – Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: “At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
“We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience – the people who pay our licence fees.” “Infax”, a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document – whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery – exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don’t know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
The McKinsey Quarterly: How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey
The McKinsey Quarterly: How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey
By and large, executives are satisfied with their previous investments in Internet technology, and most are investing in trends that promote automation and networking online.
By and large, executives are satisfied with their previous investments in Internet technology, and most are investing in trends that promote automation and networking online.
MOSS 2007: Microsofts dritter Anlauf sorgt für Aufmerksamkeit
MOSS 2007: Microsofts dritter Anlauf sorgt für Aufmerksamkeit
Microsoft setzt mit dem Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 auf Synergie-Effekte mit Produkten aus dem eigenen Hause. Beim Funktionsumfang wurde stark zugelegt. Wichtige Lücken der Vorgängerversion, z. B. in den Bereichen elektronisches Dokumenten-Management (EDM), Workflow und Web Content Management wurden geschlossen. Zwei wesentliche Schwachpunkte im Bereich der Verwaltung von elektronischen Dokumenten wurden beseitigt, indem eine rollenbasierte Rechteverwaltung für Dokumentenbibliotheken, Ordner und einzelne Dokumente implementiert wurde und indem mit MOSS 2007 nun Inhaltstypen (oft auch als Content Types oder Dokumententypen bezeichnet) eingeführt wurden, die eine einfache Erfassung der Metadaten zu Dokumenten ermöglichen.
Microsoft setzt mit dem Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 auf Synergie-Effekte mit Produkten aus dem eigenen Hause. Beim Funktionsumfang wurde stark zugelegt. Wichtige Lücken der Vorgängerversion, z. B. in den Bereichen elektronisches Dokumenten-Management (EDM), Workflow und Web Content Management wurden geschlossen. Zwei wesentliche Schwachpunkte im Bereich der Verwaltung von elektronischen Dokumenten wurden beseitigt, indem eine rollenbasierte Rechteverwaltung für Dokumentenbibliotheken, Ordner und einzelne Dokumente implementiert wurde und indem mit MOSS 2007 nun Inhaltstypen (oft auch als Content Types oder Dokumententypen bezeichnet) eingeführt wurden, die eine einfache Erfassung der Metadaten zu Dokumenten ermöglichen.
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Microsoft's SharePoint Technologies: What to Expect in 2007
Microsoft's SharePoint Technologies: What to Expect in 2007
The upcoming Office 2007 release contains an unprecedented number of server-side components, including newly Office-branded SharePoint tools that support high-performance workplace domains, such as portals, content management and collaboration. In addition to building enterprise SharePoint applications, planners also need to deal with the many ad hoc SharePoint instances that exist "under the radar." These can be a nuisance or they can be a useful part of an overall information ecosystem. Find out what's new, how SharePoint interacts with Microsoft and other applications, how to take advantage of SharePoint ubiquity and what it all will cost.
The upcoming Office 2007 release contains an unprecedented number of server-side components, including newly Office-branded SharePoint tools that support high-performance workplace domains, such as portals, content management and collaboration. In addition to building enterprise SharePoint applications, planners also need to deal with the many ad hoc SharePoint instances that exist "under the radar." These can be a nuisance or they can be a useful part of an overall information ecosystem. Find out what's new, how SharePoint interacts with Microsoft and other applications, how to take advantage of SharePoint ubiquity and what it all will cost.
Google steigt USA-weit in die TV-Werbung ein - Nachrichten - computerwoche.de
Google steigt USA-weit in die TV-Werbung ein - Nachrichten - computerwoche.de
Der Suchmaschinengigant Google wird in den USA in den lukrativen Markt mit TV-Werbespots einsteigen.
Der Suchmaschinengigant Google wird in den USA in den lukrativen Markt mit TV-Werbespots einsteigen.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Sunday, April 01, 2007
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
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