harmon.ie (pronounced “harmony”) provides on-premise software which enables tight integration between email clients and document management and document sharing tools, helping to reduce the number of tools individuals need to access in order to collaborate, and improving adoption of alternative collaboration tools within an organisation. This On the Radar briefing note 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 small, specialist vendors – to help you build the best possible vendor shortlists when looking to make new technology investments.

This report is available to 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.

With its recent focus on Business Process Excellence following its acquisition of IDS Scheer, it’s perhaps easy to forget that Software AG still has a healthy business as an integration middleware provider.

The purchase of Terracotta, announced May 23, doesn’t immediately stand out as a great fit for a company that pitches itself as helping customers with Business Process Excellence; but it absolutely does potentially help fire up Software AG’s integration middleware business.

The acquisition of Terracotta should potentially help Software AG in two ways:

1. To enable it to deliver significantly increased scalability and price/performance for its large integration middleware customers. Integrating Ehcache, BigMemory and Terracotta Server Array capabilities with its existing ESB, application integration, MDM and other integration components will enable Software AG to drive these technologies into more demanding customer scenarios more cost-effectively – and bolster its defenses against the ever-present integration middleware business onslaught from IBM and Oracle (both of which have made significant moves in the caching platform area).
2. To help it evolve its integration middleware platform into a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology layer that customers can deploy either on-premise or on an externally hosted IaaS platform. This latter initiative is ongoing, and I’m told it’s set to bear fruit in the coming months. Other enterprise infrastructure platform players (like IBM and TIBCO) are making plays here: it makes sense for Software AG to do the same.

All this perhaps looks a little like Software AG is playing catch-up against the other big infrastructure software players. By going for Terracotta, though, Software AG has a potential trump card in its hand: Terracotta’s very large existing open-source developer community (by virtue, largely, of ehcache). If it can find ways to bring this community with it as it tackles (1) and (2), that could give Software AG a real leg-up.

Nurturing such a community isn’t straightforward, though – you can’t ‘buy’ such a community in the same way that you might buy a business and its assets. Clearly, through the sale to Software AG, Terracotta as a business gets access to business scale – Software AG might provide it additional development resources, as well as of course field sales and marketing resources. That doesn’t  necessarily straightforwardly translate into a benefit to the surrounding community, though.

I’m not a deep expert in this area, but it’s clear to me that one of the things Software AG will need to look at is ways it can provide bridges between this developer community and its existing portfolio of commercial enterprise software technologies. It’s not clear yet to what extent Software AG might ‘OSSify’ its current portfolio, particularly in the direction of the PaaS development work it’s gearing up for. Like James Governor said, the bar for open source PaaS, driven by developers, has been set awfully high by VMware. Everyone else needs to get inline. But this is something I’ll be watching with great interest.

One last word: don’t take these references to ‘Cloud platforms’ to mean that Software AG aims to become a public cloud service provider; it’s an infrastructure software company and it will continue to do what all smart infrastructure software companies do – sell shovels to prospectors.

What do you think – does this move fire up Software AG’s business, or is there a big fall-out waiting to happen?

Personally I hope things turn out well; enterprises and developers alike need a competitive marketplace for integration middleware and other related infrastructure software, with strong independent specialists – competition from independents keeps things (more) honest and open, and drives service and innovation. Integration and middleware are all about “open”.

Last week, infrastructure generalist vendors TIBCO and Progress Software, both of which sell BPM technology alongside complementary technology (event processing, ESB, data integration, analytics, and so on) announced their Q3 financial results.

TIBCO announced that it had achieved 23% growth year-on-year in both license revenue and overall; Progress announced that it had achieved 8% growth overall (but 14% from software licenses). For the year-to-date, TIBCO hit revenue of $512.8m; Progress hit revenue of $384m.

Interestingly, both companies share a figure: both companies source around 35% of their revenue from new license sales, with 65% coming from services and maintenance – both companies are mature. Also interestingly, both companies have been using similar campaigns to attempt to reinvigorate their fortunes, and engage customers in business conversations rather than deep-tech conversations (“my ESB’s faster than your ESB,” etc).

For TIBCO, it’s all about helping customers capitalise on a “two-second advantage“; for Progress it’s all about building companies that exhibit Operational Responsiveness. For both, it’s about tying together technology that helps organisations sense changes, opportunities and challenges quickly (event processing) with technology that can make sense of those events and drive the right response into the organisation or the market (BPM, integration technologies, and so on).

Both companies have played up the roles that their “responsiveness” technologies are playing in their growth. It’s certainly good to see veteran players like TIBCO and Progress rediscovering a bit of mojo; let’s see whether they can parlay this upward swing into longer-term growth plays. For me, the health of a handful of  “independent” infrastructure software players is a good sign for industry at large, because it maintains a level of industry choice that just wouldn’t be there if the market collapsed down to the usual behemoths.

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!

A couple of months back I had a brief Twitter exchange with David Bressler of Progress Software (@djbressler), following a comment I’d seen from Judith Hurwitz (@jhurwitz) at Progress’ analyst day regarding the lack of brand awareness that the company has out there in industry. What I said was: “Progress is a bit like Unilever – top-level brand is vanilla, sub-brands have chops”. What I meant is that these days, there’s little knowledge of what Progress does (a typical response is either “Who?” or possibly “oh, they used to sell a 4GL and a database in the 1990s, didn’t they”) – whereas there’s much more recognition of brands like Sonic (SOA infrastructure), Actional (SOA management / governance), IONA (middleware, SOA infrastructure), Apama (event processing), DataXtend (data integration) and DataDirect (data connectivity, legacy application integration).

David replied that Progress is a technology company’s company – which is absolutely correct: Progress has a long and successful history of providing a platform for other software vendors to embed in their application offerings. And he followed up with this blog entry, saying “We’d love for the Progress brand to have some chops, and we’re trying but it’s not trivial.”

Well, for a few weeks I’d been meaning to write a blog post of my own exploring this – but in the general headlong rush that we’ve been experiencing so far this year, I’d forgotten to write that post. When I saw today’s news that there’s been a change at the top at Progress, though, I was finally prompted to write some thoughts down. (Thanks for the pointer Miko).

The main thought in my head all those weeks ago was that it’s all very well for Progress to be a bit like Unilever – with the sub-brands (Sonic, Actional, Apama, DataDirect, and so on) having much more visibility in industry than the parent brand – as long as the company doesn’t want to start pulling together broader IT and business infrastructure propositions that tie together pieces from the different brands. Unilever is well-known for owning a vast portfolio of products, many of which actually compete with others in the portfolio (Dove v Lux; or Persil v Surf, for example. The invisibility of the parent brand is fine for Unilever, but it’s bad news for Progress if it wants to really make the most of its potential within enterprises (by cross-selling or bundling its products to help customers with broader opportunities, for example).

So this is the point where the company has to undergo a pretty radical shift. As reported in PCWorld, the new Progress Software CEO (formerly the COO) has established a target of doubling the company’s annual revenue to around $1bn, by “reorienting sales towards multi-product suites, as well as aiming marketing messages more at business executives than IT workers” – that is, precisely what it’s not currently suited to doing.

This goal makes absolute sense, and in fact it has made sense for ages. The majority of the markets where Progress’ brands play are growth markets where there’s real opportunity, right now; and what’s more, the combination of the offerings could have real power, too.

The required shift will be no picnic, but there are worse times for Progress to be trying to make it happen. There’s a new man at the top with a new broom, no doubt; and what’s more, there’s still a small window of opportunity open for another medium-to-large-sized specialist infrastructure software vendor to pick up business, following BEA’s acquisition by Oracle a few months back. TIBCO and Software AG have recently been making much of BEA’s disappearance as an “independent” infrastructure software vendor, and it’s surely no coincidence that both these companies also have aspirations to reach $1bn in annual revenues (Software AG has been particularly vocal about this of late). Progress has long had the potential to join Software AG and TIBCO as a serious contender for enterprises wanting to avoid getting into bed with the MISO pack (Microsoft, IBM, SAP or Oracle) for whatever reason, but until now it just never seemed to be able to be bothered to do what was necessary.

With a new CEO at the top, it’ll be fascinating to see whether Progress can move up a gear. If it succeeds, then enterprises wanting to avoid giving too much technology supplier power to the MISO pack may well have a new choice – and in a market where consolidation has recently been rampant, more choice would be refreshing for everyone.

I’m pleased to announce that MWD’s new report, Ideals and reality: understanding the context for your enterprise collaboration strategy, is now available for free download from our website. The report offers our perspective on the role of technology in enterprise collaboration, and highlights the key issues facing organisations looking to implement collaborative working practices.

One of the most interesting messages to come out of the report is the fragmented nature of the collaboration software market today, both in terms of the breadth of tools classified as collaboration tools, and the lack of cohesion between those tools when it comes to implementing them in an enterprise setting. The lack of adequate standards for integrating the different functions – both with each other, and with organisations’ existing IT environments – basically means that an organisation is left to take all the risk if it wants an integrated environment. The cost and complexity of integration, and the likely possibility that any custom integration work will need to be re-built with every new product upgrade, places additional pressures on already challenging cost justifications for collaboration. This is of course also a major issue for the software vendors, as it will serve only to dampen collaboration market growth potential.

It’s important for organisations and vendors alike to remember that collaboration software does not equal a collaborative working environment; there are many more factors that need to be considered. This report calls out some of the key organisational, cultural and governance challenges that organisations face in implementing collaboration – and offers advice on how to deal with them.

Click here to read the report, and I welcome your comments!