If you want our take on where Oracle's taking BEA...
Read
this new report.
I know we're not the quickest off the mark, but we wanted to get the whole team working together to author something comprehensive, and with travel and so on, that took a few days.
We'll admit to being pessimistic about BEA's prognosis going into the Oracle acquisition, but Oracle's early communications highlight its understanding of the strengths of the BEA technology, as well as of BEA's market footprint. What's more, the company is also openly committing to support BEA customers' existing working relationships and arrangements, and has pledged not to force product migration on any customer. There is more that Oracle needs to do, of course, but this is a good start.
Labels: BEA, MWD, Oracle
New Collaboration Service Launch!
We are delighted to announce the launch of our second Continuous Advisory Service (CAS), which focuses on collaboration. Following the same format as our BPM Continuous Advisory Service (introduced in May), the
Collaboration service offers a combination of in-depth reports, an interactive online vendor comparison tool, and optional analyst access relating to topics covered within the service.
The service launch sees the publication of our first
Strategic Insight report, which examines the relationship between collaboration and knowledge management, and our first
Market Insight report, which assesses the value of consumer social networking standards such as OpenSocial within the enterprise.
In parallel with the new premium service, we have published four new reports into our free "Guest pass" research library: two reports which outline our approach to assessing collaboration software, and two new Vendor Capability Assessments (VCA) which focus on the collaboration software portfolios of
Microsoft and
IBM respectively.
If you want to have a look at the Collaboration Continuous Advisory Service for yourself, we're offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial
here.
Labels: collaboration, MWD
Links for 2008-07-04 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
Collaborative mind mapping
I don't usually blog about individual briefings from vendors, but I've just had a fascinating briefing from
Mindjet, a company which has developed an interactive, collaborative mind mapping solution based on its established personal mind mapping technology. Mindjet Connect allows multiple users to synchronously edit a central mind map, seeing what each other is editing in real time while maintaining full versioning and rollback, and combining this with communications-centric collaboration capabilities such as group chat, video conferencing, whiteboarding and desktop sharing. With almost 20 years of engineering and market experience, Mindjet should be in a good position to recognise the potential of its core solution, but what I think is interesting is that the company has created a slick, powerful and flexible collaborative application which sets a standard for many of the current new wave of collaboration software vendors. Where many talk about the power and innovation of wikis, I think the new Mindjet Connect solution competes very favourably in this space. I'll be writing an On The Radar report on Mindjet soon.
Labels: collaboration, Mindjet
A comprehensive analysis of IBM's BPM Suite
After months of tweaking and review, our coverage of IBM's BPM technology offering is now live. It joins our coverage of
Appian,
BEA (we're keeping an eye on this, of course, and will update it as soon as is practical),
Lombardi,
Software AG and
TIBCO.
We've been working on this assessment since the autumn of 2007: the delay is mostly due to the breadth of IBM's portfolio (the assessment report runs to 33 pages, whereas most of the others come in around 20 pages) - combined with the fact that, just as we were about to finalise the report, IBM changed its portfolio positioning, introducing the
BPM Suite. Anyhow the effort has been worth it - we think the result is pretty comprehensive and definitely worth reading if you're in the process of selecting a BPM technology vendor.
The IBM BPM assessment report is available as part of our
Guest Pass library, here; the detailed comparative scoring information, which you can personalise in line with your preferences and constraints, lives in the online vendor comparison tool that's part of our
BPM continuous advisory service. Although this service isn't free, you can get a 7-day free trial, so you can use the tool now to see how IBM stacks up in the context of your own environment and preferences -
just fill in this form.
Next up is Pegasystems - the assessment process is already underway.
Labels: BPM, ibm, MWD
