Birst is a multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider of data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and analytics for both public and private cloud deployments. Today we published this On the Radar briefing note that follows a simple “ten questions” format, which we designed to provide a concise but thorough overview of a company and its products and services. We use this format to focus on the capability and suitability of specialist vendors – to help you build the best possible vendor shortlists when looking to make new technology investments.

This report is available for immediate download by paying advisory service subscribers, or can be purchased separately (see the report’s library page for more information).

You can find the report here in our library, along with key messages and a full table of contents.

Yesterday, my colleague Helena Schwenk and I attended Cloudforce London 2011, Salesforce.com’s regional customer and partner event. While a much smaller affair than the company’s main San Francisco conference, the London event has become increasingly popular – with demand for attendance meaning that it had to extend to a second day (today) this year, as well as streaming the content live for those who were unable to attend.

As ever, Marc Benioff (the company’s founder, chairman and CEO) was centre stage, this year focused on the company’s new “social enterprise” vision, which he delivered through a rather long keynote speech in his usual subtle and understated (ahem) style. As much as I like the Chatter technology (you can read my analysis of Salesforce.com’s opportunity in the social technology market here), I do find it unnerving how quickly the company has changed its strategy and branding from being all about cloud and CRM to being a social collaboration player. Clearly Salesforce has *not* abandoned its cloud/CRM focus, but both were wholly relegated in emphasis at this event in favour of “social”. There was a certain sense of bandwagon jumping to the proceedings – the Cloud2 focus of last year’s Cloudforce event was broadly glossed over this year – and I felt there was far too much “your organisation must be social” and not enough about *why*. In general, the main arguements which came across from Benioff were that:

1) Facebook is huge now, so you have to embrace social

2) If you don’t, you’ll be left behind.

To demonstrate this, he showcased a number of customer organisations – including Dell, Burberry and Toyota – and how they are using Chatter for internal collaboration around sales and customer service processes, and how they leverage Facebook and Twitter to engage with customers. At the centre of Salesforce’s social positioning and offering is the creation of a “social profile” which captures details of , for example, customers’ Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn identities, and tracks social interactions relating to the organisation concerned.

Some of these are excellent case studies, and will no doubt be inspiring to similar organisations who are considering their opportunities with social technologies. However, it was noticeable that all the case studies were (typically large) consumer-facing brands; there was no evidence of how the technology would be useful to organisations who sell to businesses rather than individuals. In fact, the social profile concept seems to fall down here – if you are selling to a business, the social identity of the corporate brand (assuming the customer has one) will be primarily marketing, and therefore largely useless for customer support purposes.

However, it’s easy to forget that it is still early days for Chatter – the product has only been available for 15 months – and the company has done a great job in that time of marketing the product and driving adoption across its existing customer base. So far, there is little evidence of significant success beyond that captive market, but that is nothing to worry about yet. I do think Salesforce is on the right track with its social enterprise positioning, but there is definitely room for improvement in terms of communicating the arguments to organisations – “just do it” just isn’t enough.

You may remember back in July we carried out an online survey into the experiences and perceptions of organisations into cloud email. I’m pleased to announce that we have just published the results from the survey, in our new Market Insight report Perceptions and reality: the truths of cloud email. 56 organisations took part, almost half of whom had already deployed cloud email, and this gave us the opportunity to compare the “before” and “after” of this growing trend, to identify the myths associated with moving email to the cloud, and see what potential adopters should really be worrying about.

Here are some of the key findings from the report:

• Reduced licence costs are a “red herring”. Despite the promise of reduced licence costs being a major driver for the majority of organisations we surveyed, only half of those who had already switched to cloud email reported that they had achieved reduced licence costs; 15% of respondents reported no cost reduction at all.
• Concerns about availability and reliability are overstated. Over 55% of those respondents who had not yet made the switch cited availability and reliability as a primary concern, while in reality only 7% of early adopters found this was an issue in practice.
• Organisations tend to underestimate integration issues. With all the focus on availability, privacy and security, only a minority of organisations are considering the issue of integrating cloud email with their existing systems, and yet this is the cost commonly cited issue among those who had already moved to cloud email.

Do these results correlate with your experience? I’d be interested to hear your views, so don’t be shy!

For more analysis of collaboration news, trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

Last week I made my annual 24-hour flying visit to the US east coast and the Progress Software analyst day. Last year CEO Rick Reidy laid out plans to create a $1billion company by bringing together a number of its brands (particularly Savvion, Actional, Apama) together under the concept of ‘Operational Responsiveness’ through ‘Responsive Process Management’ (RPM).

Unsurprisingly, the 2011 event was principally a continuation of the 2010 day – as last year, this year was pretty much all about RPM and Progress’ efforts so far in developing its technology and marketing. The meat of the event saw Reidy, backed up by CTO John Bates and John Goodson, Rob Levy’s replacement as SVP Products, announcing and (fleetingly) demonstrating Progress RPM Suite 2.0� and Control Tower 2.0.

The second release of the RPM Suite deepens the integration between Actional (transaction management and event adapters), Apama (event processing) and Savvion (BPMS) technologies, but most importantly brings Control Tower 2.0 into the picture.

Control Tower 2.0 adds a number of significant capabilities – particularly:

• Progress Visual Analytics – embedded analytics tools to help administrators drill down from high-level dashboards to underlying models, KPIs, and process instance data
• The ability to launch corrective actions on-the-fly in the Savvion platform from within Control Tower, in response to alerts regarding process problems
• Collaborative web-based process modelling from within Control Tower (this is something Savvion’s been working on for a while).

My concern at the previous year’s event was that Progress was in danger of painting itself into a corner: by highlighting RPM as the “next step beyond BPM”, it was in danger of creating for itself a very specialised niche. It seems that the company understands this challenge, and is doing some things to try and avoid this particular trap. We heard about three specific initiatives, all of which are related.

Firstly, it’s creating a set of vertical industry ‘solution accelerators’ – building on the Savvion strategy pre-acquisition – aimed at tapping directly into buying needs of line-of-business executives in target industries. These are being driven by dedicated Progress VPs in six key sectors: capital markets, banking, insurance, travel, supply chain, and comms/media. Solution accelerators target particular industry issues (for example in comms/media the three currently-available accelerators target order management, integrated trouble management and order visibility and assurance).

Solution accelerators comprise two layers atop the Progress RPM Suite. The lower layer is a set of solution-specific ‘foundation components’ (protocol and application adapters and so on) that are sold and supported by Progress as products; customers will receive fixes and updates to these through maintenance contracts. The upper layer is a set of solution-specific templates and assets that are provided ‘as is’ and not supported or maintained by Progress.

Secondly, and building on its strategy of developing solution accelerators for particular industry pain points, Progress is now pitching its RPM technology set as an enabler for software solutions to problems that sit between traditional packaged apps and traditional custom software development.

Thirdly, it’s delivering a SaaS platform for its large existing OpenEdge partner base to help them use Progress RPM technologies, together with their OpenEdge investments, to deliver new offerings for customers. The platform is called Arcade, and it combines a technical platform (hosted versions of Progress technologies on Amazon and Rackspace) with business development platform (services to help Progress partners demonstrate promote their applications, deliver joint go-to-market programmes around joint offerings with Progress, and so on). Arcade is currently in beta and is due to become generally available soon.

The company is putting a lot of effort into becoming more business- and industry- focused but there’s more to do. For one thing, investment in industry solution accelerators isn’t unique to Progress: IBM, for one, is putting a lot of investment in this area; Pegasystems is also renowned for having a strong focus on its solution frameworks (Pega spends 50% of its R&D developing its frameworks; Progress’ investment in this area is likely very much smaller, based on remarks by Reidy on the day).

Having said all that, the steps outlined by Progress are mostly pointing in the right direction. There are exceptions, though: for example, the strangely-named “Business Process Transformation Live” methodology briefly outlined at the event is really nothing of the sort, and definitely fails the test of making sense in an industry exec buyer context.

A few weeks ago I was given a hush-hush pre-briefing on a new product offering from Active Endpoints called Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com. It takes the BPM and SOA technology provider into new territory, but I think it�s a sensible move � and one that prefigures a broader trend I think we�ll be seeing a lot more of within the BPM technology space over the coming year or so. I’m a little late to the party regarding the launch of the product, but hopefully I’ll be able to add a slightly different take on things.

First, let�s look a little at Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com.
Cloud Extend for Salesforce is based heavily on Active Endpoints� Socrates product, which was announced in early March. Socrates provides a quick, simple model-driven design and development environment for creating �screenflows�: networks of linked user forms and guides that assist people (such as customer service reps) carry out multi-step tasks and interactions. Socrates makes use of Active Endpoints� core design tools and engine, but specialises them for design and deployment of user interaction models.
Cloud Extend for Salesforce then embeds Socrates screenflows and the Socrates design tools within Salesforce application UIs. You can easily link individual actions specified within screenflows to Salesforce API calls, too � making Cloud Extend �what it says on the tin� � a way to fairly seamlessly extend the functionality of Salesforce.com applications, particularly in the context of guided user interactions and workflows.

Of course, Salesforce.com does already offer a visual workflow and user guidance capability called Visual Workflow (based on technology acquired when it bought call centre tools vendor Informavores in 2009) – but right now, one of Cloud Extend’s key differentiators is that the tools, as well as the runtime engine, are integrated right into the Salesforce.com cloud-based user experience. There’s no obvious separation between design time and runtime, so there’s an attractive immediacy to what you put together. At the moment, Visual Workflow relies on an offline Windows-based modelling tool. Another thing that marks Cloud Extend out is that it’s more focused – rather than being pitched as a general-purpose workflow layer for Salesforce.com, it’s very deliberately designed to address a particular set of challenges to do with guiding people as they carry out multi-step interactions and tasks using Salesforce.com.

Now it�s tempting to think of Cloud Extend for Salesforce as a part of the clutch of cloud-based workflow offerings that are now appearing which aim to help customers orchestrate functionality and tasks across multiple SaaS applications (examples include RunMyProcess) but in reality it�s part of a different trend: the closer interweaving of packaged application functionality with model-driven workflow and process management functionality. As the market for BPM technology matures we�re seeing more and more BPM technology vendors look for ways to deliver their technologies as value-added components to application vendors; and we�re also seeing application vendors look for ways to offer (sometimes constrained) BPM capabilities as embedded features within their own offerings. Salesforce.com�s business model and technology delivery platform mean Cloud Extend comes at this from a particular angle, but it�s important to not get too distracted by the �cloudiness� of the offering.

In the background Cloud Extend for Salesforce is delivered from a multi-tenanted installation of the ActiveVOS technology, hosted by Active Endpoints rather than on the Force.com platform. Although there�s single sign-on between the core Salesforce applications and Cloud Extend which greatly simplifies usage from a customer perspective, things might not be so clear-cut from a data hosting and compliance perspective. Salesforce.com delivers its applications from multiple datacentres around the globe to help its customers deal with data ownership and compliance issues, but as far as I know the Cloud Extend technology is only hosted in the US right now. Cloud Extend for Salesforce is offered on a per-user subscription basis, at 25% of the cost of Salesforce.com enterprise pricing.

It’s still very early days for Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com (Active Endpoints is running an Early Access Program for it right now) but I’ll be watching its development with interest.

What do you think – do you expect we’ll see more of this kind of thing in the packaged application space (whether SaaS-based or ‘traditional’)?

Last month Actuate unleashed a slew of products announcements that are wrapped up an umbrella brand ActuateOne – a unified product suite for developing and deploying reporting, analytic and dashboard applications. The suite leverages the open source Eclipse project, BIRT, and utilises the core capabilities of Actuate 11, the company’s commercial BI offering for large scale and higher performance user deployments. The release is part of Actuate’s strategy to galvanise company growth and demonstrate leadership in what it calls Rich Information Applications, offerings that deliver a high level of interactive and dynamic content as a way of increasing user adoption and ease-of-use.

In-memory, dashboard and cloud deployment capabilities increase reach of ActuateOne

There are two new tools included in the ActuateOne product suite: BIRT Data Analyzer and BIRT 360.

Data Analyzer is a multi dimensional analysis tool that utilises 64-bit in-memory capabilities enabling end users to interactively explore data within dashboards and Excel with limited help from IT. This initiative follows the trend by vendors to include in-memory processing options into their portfolios that load and query data in memory (which is much faster) – rather than having to process it on disk.

To validate its position as a leading Rich Information Application provider Actuate has also released BIRT 360, a web based authoring tool for building operational and analytical dashboards. The tool includes capabilities for leveraging rich Internet technologies such as AJAX for interactive report viewing and an Adobe Flash charting library. In addition the tool supports monitoring of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and enables developers to comppose dashboards using BIRT gadgets and third-party Google Gadgets (such as Google Maps). These are all features designed to raise the appeal for end users looking for a more intuitive and dynamic analysis experience – especially in applications that require a high degree of self-service and interactivity such as customer-facing applications.

In fact BIRT 360 and BIRT Data Analyzer represent just two of a range of output formats supported within ActuateOne.  Others include BIRT spreadsheets, email and mobile devices where ActuateOne content is accessible via mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry.

Finally, ActuateOne now includes capabilities for elastic clustering of iServer (its scalable server for BI deployments) which allows administrators to dynamically adjust the configuration of iServer in response to varying capacity and application requirements. This move is designed to offer a more flexible and arguably lower cost deployment option for ActuateOne customers as well as following a general trend in the BI market whereby commercial open-source vendors such as Jaspersoft, Pentaho and Talend have started similar initiatives.

Developer productivity remains a key tenet but the data integration effort should not be overlooked

ActuateOne has been designed with a heavy emphasis on developer and end user productivity.  Actuate believes the architecture of BIRT will help  promote faster development of applications through its support – amongst other things – for reusing object-oriented components and libraries and by leveraging the BIRT Open Data Access framework for connecting to multiple data sources including print streams and documents (courtesy of its Xenos acquisition).

While there is merit in offering a more unified developer experience as demonstrated within ActuateOne, this should not be seen as the definitive answer to fast-tracking analytic application development. This approach for instance does not eradicate the significant effort (and cost) involved with making the data consumed within analytic applications ‘fit for purpose’. ActuateOne does provide a more cohesive developer environment, but any developer gains should be set in context of the overall data integration effort.

ActuateOne is ready to ship and will be generally available in October 2010. For a more detailed analysis and overview of the ActuateOne release, see our new Vendor Insight report.

I was (very slowly) getting wound up to splurge an in-depth post on Google’s partnership with VMware around the Google App Engine, but then I read William Vambenepe’s blog: From VMWare + SalesForce.com (VMForce) to VMWare + Google: VMWare’s PaaS milestones.

I think he’s done a lot of the work for me…

What I will do is build on one of William’s key points:

“These VMWare+Salesforce and VMWare+Google announcements are also interesting for what is NOT there. Isn’t it interesting that the companies that VMWare enables with a PaaS platform are those which… already have a PaaS platform? What we haven’t seen is VMWare enabling a mid-tier telco to become a PaaS provider. Someone who has power, servers and wires and wants to become a Cloud provider. VMWare is just starting to sell them an IaaS platform (vCloud) and cannot provide them with a turnkey PaaS platform yet by lack of application services (IDM, storage…) and of a comprehensive (i.e. not just virtualization) management platform.”

The value that VMware’s providing in both the force.com and Google App Engine cases is that it’s layering the Spring programming model – a very popular and well-used programming model – on top of existing platforms that lacked programming models that were slap-the-forehead compelling for mainstream app developers.

At the moment VMware has an IaaS foundation, as William says, and it also has the programming model. With RabbitMQ and Gemstone now part of the mix too, it’s in a position to start filling out the platform-layer services that developers are interested in. But even without those, VMware’s Spring complements force.com and GAE very nicely: they provide the public infrastructure and sets of interesting platform services; Spring provides a programming model that 2 million or so Java developers are familiar with.

It’s a sweet strategy that differentiates nicely from Microsoft (“open, multi-Cloud”); and everyone else (“it works across publicly-hosted and on-premise infrastructure”). I’m very interested to see what VMware does next.

Just a quick note to say that I’m honoured to have been asked to provide a keynote presentation at the upcoming CloudSlam ’10 virtual conference being held from March 23-25.

My presentation is scheduled for 11am ET / 8am PT on March 23rd and is titled “Cloud forecasting: models, predictions, pitfalls and planning”. More details are available here. I’m also moderating a panel with some IBM folks at 4pm ET / 1pm PT on March 23rd, which should be fun (though it’ll be 9pm for me, so if I jabber it’s because I’ve had too much coffee ;-)

Last year’s event was a pretty big success by all accounts, so I’m really excited to be taking part. I hope to see you there!

In the meantime – if you’d like to see a preview of some of what I’ll be talking about (obviously I’ll be mixing it up a bit for CloudSlam) then you should check out our own virtual Cloud event, available on-demand here. It’s free – you only need Guest Pass access to our research library to access the content. I’d love to hear what you think about the research we’re doing in this area.

One of the themes we delve into in our free online framing a Cloud Computing strategy event is the emerging role of the Service Integrator. This is something I’ve been talking about for a while in discussions with clients but I thought I’d share it a bit more widely…

So what is a Service Integrator? Simply put, a Service Integrator relates to the SaaS/Cloud Computing world in the same way that a Systems Integrator relates to the on-premise computing world.

Right now we’re at a stage in Cloud computing development which is dominated by “early adopters”. Typically such companies are willing to go an extra mile to get the benefits of a new technology and technology model – things that many other companies would consider too complicated, risky or expensive.

Activities which fit into this category include integrating data and functionality (both between Cloud-based platforms and applications, and between Cloud-based and on-premise systems); encrypting sensitive data and securing communications; backing up and restoring data; replicating and managing resources to maximise reliability and availability; and so on and so on.

While today’s adopters of Cloud Computing may be quite happy to shoulder the technical burden of making remote resources “fit for purpose” within their enterprise, we should assume that most won’t. Particularly when you consider that a big part of the promise of Cloud Computing is that with this model, you’re delegating responsibility for managing technology. Why, if you’re so interested in a model of computing which is fundamentally tied to outsourcing – and particularly if you’re interested about using this model not just for one application but for a wide variety of purposes – would you choose to take responsibility for integration yourself?

If use of Cloud Computing is to move beyond tactical use in the early adopter community, there’s going to be a big opportunity out there for providers who can wrap multiple Cloud-based services and platforms up and deliver them as bundles of managed services.

So… duh… isn’t this the same thing as systems integration then? Well, maybe a little – but not completely. There are three distinct levels that a Service Integrator can work and add value at, which further blur the boundaries between “traditional” systems integration work and outsourcing/managed services provision work:

• Technical integration. This is primarily “traditional” systems integration project work – delivering code to create and stitch custom and off-the-shelf application services together.
• Management integration. This is managed services work that is focused on delivering seamless experiences to service consumers, to agreed levels of quality. Reliability, security, availability, break/fix, helpdesk services and disaster recovery all play here.
• Contract integration. This level of integration work is about providing “one throat to choke”. The Service Integrator takes responsibility for all back-end contracts with resource and application service providers, and becomes the single integrated billing and payment point for the end customer, also creating a single point of liability for quality of service delivered.

Now of course many established Systems Integrators already combine work of different kinds (for example development/integration and application management) to create overall offerings for clients – but here, we see increased industrialisation of some the services provided (particularly as infrastructure providers like Informatica, Pervasive, and Cast Iron get in on the SaaS act at the technical integration layer), and also more focus on the economic benefits of the Cloud Computing model (rather than on “all-in” pricing for multi-year contracts). We’re already seeing a number of service providers stepping into this space, as well as new players springing up. Examples include (though there are many more):

Capgemini – which has created a specialised Cloud Computing centre of excellence and is providing advisory and integration services for its clients.

Accenture – which has created a set of services to help clients examine potential around Cloud Computing and SaaS.

CSC – which has launched two specific new offerings: Cloud Orchestration (principally operating in our technical integration layer) and Trusted Cloud (operating in our management integration layer).

Saaspoint – a specialist Cloud Computing/SaaS consultancy centred on delivering services based around Salesforce.com application service implementation, citing over 700 clients.

Bluewolf – which focuses on integrate a variety of services (often centred around Salesforce.com’s applications) for customers interested in driving change in marketing, sales and services processes.

For me, one of the most interesting things here will be to what degree the flexible pricing and billing models that have become expected in the Cloud Computing space are offered on to customers when these intermediaries become better established in this market. Will service integrators find ways to make margin out of Cloud Computing providers’ pricing and billing arrangements (for example by pooling a set of back-end application service licenses across multiple clients, and “soaking up” some of the variable demand for capacity that way) but not passing these efficiencies onto clients, instead preferring to drive clients towards fixed-price multi-year contracts? Or will they start to adopt more granular pricing and billing practices? Indeed, will this become an area of differentiation between the established SIs and the upstarts?

I’d love to hear what you think… this is a topic we’ll be digging into more over the course of this year.

If you’d like to check out our Cloud Computing event, it’s available free and on-demand… just go here. You’ll need a free Guest Pass ID to access the content, but signing up only takes a few seconds and you also get access to an extensive library of written research.

It’s easy to dismiss Cloud Computing as just another IT industry hype bubble that will one day burst, showering everyone in a slightly stale-smelling mist. Certainly, as with all waves of technology advancement, there’s been an *awful* lot of hype about the potential and – just like any other technology advancement – Cloud Computing offers no silver bullet for anyone’s IT investment or management woes.

Nevertheless our research (including a survey of 350+ IT architects in 9/09) shows that many organisations are dipping their toes in the Cloud (if that’s not a heinous non-sequitur) and they are seeing success. What’s also interesting is that some of the most eager proponents of Cloud Computing and Cloud-based application use aren’t in those industries which are typically at the leading edge of technology adoption (financial services, telecom); they’re in industries like media, retail, utilities, pharma which are more generally thought of as conservative investors in IT. This is because Cloud Computing is not a model of technology ownership – it’s a model of service delivery and consumption.

2010 will see every major IT vendor and service provider moving to offer or enable Cloud-based infrastructure and services. You need to be prepared to reap the potential benefits while managing the potential risks – and this means having a solid awareness of how Cloud Computing concepts fit into the rest of your existing IT investment portfolio. Only then can you chart a course that makes sense for you (and which won’t be driven by the proprietary interests of one or more IT suppliers).

Here’s some questions to think about that can help you frame a strategy:

• What are the ways that Cloud Computing can deliver value, and in what kinds of scenario? How does the value of a “private Cloud” relate to the value of a “public Cloud”?
• How is Cloud Computing really related to SaaS? What does this mean for me if I’m considering using the Cloud as a strategic source of IT services? Where does SaaS make most sense?
• What are the tradeoffs that I’ll experience on choosing a Cloud Computing platform, and what will be the downstream effects?
• What’s the real story with security in a Cloud Computing environment? Is the security issue a show-stopper?

With all this in mind, yesterday we launched a two-part online event designed to help enterprises frame a Cloud Computing strategy. It’s made up of two on-demand webinars which you can view at any time – and it’s completely free of charge (you just need to register for Guest Pass access to our site first – which also gives you access to a big chunk of our research library for free, too).

The event is sponsored by Google Enterprise – and we’re very grateful for their support. Nevertheless we designed and created the content without any input from Google – it’s a completely independent piece of work.

We’d love to hear what you think of this event. We’re currently exploring a number of options regarding holding future events like this, so your feedback is crucially important to us. Once you’ve viewed the content you can provide feedback right from the event home page – or alternatively leave us a comment below!