Showing posts with label Baer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baer. Show all posts

Sunday, February 07, 2010

BriefingsDirect Analyst Panelists Peer into Crystal Balls for Latest IT Growth and Impact Trends

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 49, with panel of analysts discussing the future of cloud computing, SOA, social networks and the economy.

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Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 49. I'm your host and moderator Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events, with a panel of industry analysts and guests comes to you with the help of our charter sponsor, Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS business process management system.

Our topic this week hones in on the predictions for IT industry growth and impact, now that the recession appears to have bottomed out. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their top five predictions for IT growth through 2010 and beyond.

To help us gaze into the new IT trends crystal ball we are joined by our panel. Please join me in welcoming Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Hey, Jim.

Jim Kobielus: Hey, Dana. Hi, everybody.

Gardner: Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger. Howdy, Joe.

Joe McKendrick: Hi, Dana. Very nice to be here.

Gardner: Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum. And, Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Hi, Brad.

Brad Shimmin: Hey, Dana.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, CEO of Blue Mountain Labs. Good to have you with us, Dave.

Dave Linthicum: Hey, guys.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, vice-president of collaboration services at The Open Group. How do you do, Dave? [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts. See more on the consortium's recent conference in Seattle.]

Dave Lounsbury: Hello, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink.

Jason Bloomberg: Good morning, everybody.

Gardner: And, JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant. Good to have you with us, JP.

JP Morgenthal: Good to be here.

Gardner: I've decided to do this in a random order this time. So, based on the pick of the short straw, Brad Shimmin, you're up, what are your top five predictions for IT in 2010?

Brad Shimmin

Shimmin: Thanks, Dana. And, I have got a set of five. Obviously, mine are geared toward collaboration and conferencing, so I'll just put that out there as a caveat, but I think it will help if we're going to try to strive for consensus later on.

Let me just begin with the first and most obvious, which is that clouds are going to become less cloudy. Vendors, particularly those in the collaboration space, are going to start to deliver solutions that are actually a blend of both cloud and on-premise.

We've seen Cisco take this approach already with front-ending some web conferencing to off-load bandwidth requirements at the edge and to speed internal communications. IBM, at least technically, is poised do the same with Foundations, their appliances line, and LotusLive their cloud-based solution.

With vendors like these that are going to be pulling hybrid, premise/cloud, and appliance/service offerings, it's going to really let companies, particularly those in the small and medium business (SMB) space, work around IT constraints without sacrificing the control and ownership of key processes and data, which in my mind is the key, and has been one of the limiting factors of cloud this year.

Next up, I have "software licensing looks like you." As with the housing market, it's really a buyer's market right now for software. It's being reflected in how vendors are approaching selling their software. Customers have the power to demand software pricing that better reflects their needs, whether it's servers or users.

I think the weapons will be user facing enterprise apps that work in concert with line-of-business solutions on the back-end.



So, taking cues from both the cloud and the open-source licensing vendors out there, we will see some traditional software manufacturers really set up a "pick your poison" buffet. You can have purchase options that are like monthly or yearly subscriptions or flat perpetual licenses that are based on per seat, per server, per CPU, per request, per processor, or per value unit, with a shout out at IBM there -- or any of the above.

You put those together in a way that is most beneficial to you as a customer to meet your use case. We saw last year with web conferencing software that you could pick between unlimited usage with a few seats or unlimited seats with limited usage. You can tailor what you pay to what you need.

Third for me is the mobile OS wars are going to heat up. I'm all done with the desktop. I'm really thinking that it's all about the Google Chrome/Android. I know there's a little bit of contention there, but Google Chrome/Android, Symbian, RIM, Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile, all those devices will be the new battle ground for enterprise users.

I think the weapons will be user facing enterprise apps that work in concert with line-of-business solutions on the back-end. We'll see the emergence of native applications, particularly within the collaboration space, that are capable of fully maximizing the underlying hardware of these devices, and that's really key. Capabilities like geo-positioning, simultaneous web invoice and, eventually, video are really going to take off across all these platforms this year.

Win or lose

But, the true battle for this isn't going to be in these cool nifty apps. It's really going to be in how these vendors can hopefully turn these devices into desktops, in terms of provisioning, security, visibility, governance, etc. That, to me, is going to be where they're going to either win or lose this year.

Four is "The Grand Unification Theory" -- the grand unification of collaboration. That's going to start this year. We're no longer going to talk about video conferencing, web conferencing, telepresence, and general collaboration software solutions as separate concerns. You're still going to have PBXs, video codecs, monitors, cameras, desk phones, and all that stuff being sold as point solutions to fill specific requirements, like desktop voice or room-based video conferencing and the like.

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But, these solutions are really not going to operate in complete ignorance of one another as they have in the past. Vendors with capabilities or partnerships spanning these areas, in particular -- I'm pointing out Cisco and Microsoft here -- can bring and will be bringing facets of these together technically to enable users to really participate in collaboration efforts, using their available equipment.

It will be whatever they have at hand. They're not forced to go to a particular room to participate in a conference, for example. They can just pick up their mobile phone or their preferred method of communication, whether they just want to do voice, voice/video, or chat.

For enterprise-focused vendors, we're going to see them playing in the waves in a number of ways.



And last but not least ... I'm sorry. I'm probably going to get kicked for this, but, because I'm a technical optimist . . . the Google Wave is really going to kick in in 2010. I may be stating the obvious, or I maybe stating something that's going to be completely wrong, but I really feel that this is going to be the year that traditional enterprise collaboration players jump head long into this Google Wave pool in an effort to really cash in on what's already a super-strong mind share within the consumer ranks.

Even though they have a limited access to the beta right now, there are over a million users of it, that are chunking away at this writing code and using Wave.

Of course, Google hosted rendition will excel in supporting consumer tasks like collaborative apps and role playing games. That's going to be big. For enterprise-focused vendors, we're going to see them playing in the waves in a number of ways. They're going to embed them within existing collaborative applications. They're going to enable existing apps to interact with Google Waves.

This is the case with Novell’s recently announced Pulse. You guys saw that. They're going to extend existing apps to make use of wave-like capabilities. They're going to create some competitive functionality that looks like a Google Wave but isn't a Google Wave, and doesn't really care what Google is doing with Wave. And that's it, Dana.

Gardner: Well, Brad, that was an excellent list. If I can plumb through this a little bit, it sounds like we are going to be using Google Wave to do unified collaboration on a mobile operating system, coming from the cloud and we are going to get to negotiate for the price we will pay for it.

Shimmin: Perfect. You strung them together like jewels on a thread. Thanks.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, you're up next. What are your top five?

Dave Linthicum

Linthicum: My top five are going to be, number one, cloud computing goes mainstream. That's a top prediction, I'm just seeing the inflection point on that.

I know I'm going out on the edge on this one. Go to indeed.com and do a search on the cloud-computing jobs postings. As I posted on my InfoWorld blog few weeks ago, it's going up at an angle that I have never seen at any time in the history of IT. The amount of growth around cloud computing is just amazing. Of course, it's different aspects of cloud computing, not just architecture with people who are cloud computing developers and things like that.

The Global 2000 and the government, the Global 1, really haven't yet accepted cloud computing, even though it's been politically correct for some time to do so. The reason is the lack of control, security concerns, and privacy issues, and, of course, all the times the cloud providers went down. The Google outages and the loss of stuff with T-Mobile, hasn't really helped, but ultimately people are gearing up, hiring up, and training up for cloud computing.

We are going to see a huge inflection point in cloud computing. This can be more mainstream in Global 2000 than it has been in the past. It's largely been the domain of SMBs, pilot projects, things like that. It's going to be a huge deal in 2010 and people are going to move into cloud computing in some way, shape, or form, if they are in an organization.

People are pushing back on that now. They’ve had it. They really don’t want all of their information out there on the Internet ...



That's going to continue going forward. I don’t think we are going to outsource everything as a cloud, but, in the next five years, there is going to be a good 10-20 percent existing on the cloud, which is huge.

The next is privacy. I’ll shift gears a bit. Privacy becomes important. Facebook late last year pulled a little trick, where they changed the privacy settings, and you had to go back and reset your privacy settings. So, in essence, if you weren’t diligent about looking at the privacy settings within your Facebook account and your friends list, your information was out on the Internet and people could see it.

The reason is that they're trying to monetize people who are using Facebook. They're trying to get at the information and put the information out there so it's searchable by the search engines. They get the ad revenue and all the things that are associated with having a big mega social media site.

People are pushing back on that now. They’ve had it. They really don’t want all of their information out there on the Internet, who their friends are, who they are dating, all these sorts of things. They want it secured. I think the rank and file are going to demand that regulations be set.

People are going to move away from these social media sites that post their private information, and the social media sites are going to react to that. They're going to change their policies by the end of 2010, and there's going to be a big uproar at first.

Cloud crashes

Next, the cloud crashes make major new stories. We've got two things occurring right now. We've got a massive move into the cloud. That was my first prediction. We have the cloud providers trying to scale up, and perhaps they’ve never scaled up to the levels that they are going to be expected to scale to in 2010. That's ripe for disaster.

A lot of these cloud providers are going to over extend and over sell, and they're going to crash. Performance is going to go down -- very analogous to AOL’s outage issues, when the Internet first took off.

We're going to see people moving to the cloud, and cloud providers not able to provide them with the service levels that they need. We're going to get a lot of stories in the press about cloud providers going away for hours at a time, data getting lost, all these sorts of things. It's just a matter of growth in a particular space. They're growing very quickly, they are not putting as much R&D into what these cloud systems should do, and ultimately that's going to result in some disasters.

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Next, Microsoft becomes cloud relevant. Microsoft, up to now, has been the punch line of all cloud computing. It had the Azure platform out there. They've had a lot of web applications and things like that. They really have a bigger impact in the cloud than most people think, even though when we think of cloud, we think of Amazon, Google, and larger players out there.

Suddenly, you're going to see Microsoft with a larger share of the cloud, and they're going to be relevant very quickly.



With Azure coming into its own in the first quarter of next year in the rise of their office automation applications for the cloud, you are going to see a massive amount of people moving to the Microsoft platform for development, deployment, infrastructure, and the office automation application. The Global 2000 that are already Microsoft players and the government that has a big investment in Microsoft are going to move in that direction.

Suddenly, you're going to see Microsoft with a larger share of the cloud, and they're going to be relevant very quickly. In the small- and medium-sized business, it's still going to be the domain of Google, and state and local governments are still be going to be the domain of Google, but Microsoft is going to end up ruling the roost by the end of 2010.

Finally, the technology feeding frenzy, which is occurring right now. People see the market recovering. There is money being put back into the business. That was on the sidelines for a while. People are going to use that money to buy companies. I think there is going to be a big feeding frenzy in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world, in the business intelligence (BI) world, and definitely in the cloud-computing world.

Lots of these little companies that you may not have heard about, which may have some initial venture funding, are suddenly going to disappear. Google has been taking these guys out left and right. You just don’t hear about it. You could do a podcast just on the Google acquisitions that have occurred this week. That's going to continue and accelerate in 2010 to a point where it's almost going to be ridiculous. Well, with that, Dana, those are my predictions.

Gardner: Excellent, Dave. We appreciate that. Let's go to other Dave today. This is Dave Lounsbury. Tell us please from your perspective at The Open Group, what your top five predictions are?

Dave Lounsbury

Lounsbury: I'm going to jump on the cloud bandwagon initially. We’ve seen huge amounts of interest across the board in cloud and, particularly, increasing discussions about how people make sense of cloud at the line-of-business level.

Another bold prediction here is that the cloud market is going to continue to grow, and we'll see that inflection point that Dave Linthicum mentioned. But, I believe that we're going to see the segmentation of that into two overarching markets, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service market (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. So that's my number one prediction.

We'll see the continued growth in the acceptance by SMBs of the IaaS and PaaS for the cost and speed reasons. But, the public IaaS and PaaS are going to start to become the gateway drug for medium- to large-size enterprises. You're going to see them piloting in public or shared environments, but they are going to continue to move back towards that locus of controlling their own resources in order to manage risk and security, so that they can deliver their service levels that their customers expect.

My third prediction, again in cloud, is that SaaS will continue to gain mainstream acceptance at all levels in the enterprise, from small to large. What you’ll see there is a lot of work on interfaces and APIs and how people are going to mash up cloud services and bring them into their enterprise architectures.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues.



This is actually going to be another trend that Dave Linthicum has mentioned as a blurring of a line between SaaS and SOA at the enterprise level. You’ll see these well on the way to emerging as disciplines in 2010.

The fourth general area is that all of this interest in cloud and concern about uptake at the enterprise level is going to drive the development of cloud deployment and development skills as a recognized job function in the IT world, whether it's internal to the IT department or as a consultancy. Obviously, as a consultancy, we look to the cloud to provide elasticity of deployment and demand and that's going to demand an elastic workforce.

So the question will be how do you know you are getting a skilled person in that area. I think you'll see the rise of a lot of enterprise-level artifacts such as business use cases, enterprise architecture tools, and analytic tools. Potentially, what we'll see in 2010 is the beginning of the development of a body of knowledge: practitioners in cloud. We'll start to recognize that as a specialty the way we currently recognize SOA as a specialty.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues. I don’t know if this is a prediction or not, but I wonder whether we're going to see our cloud harbor in 2010 its first big crash and the first big breach.

We've already mentioned privacy here. That's going to become increasingly a public topic, both in terms of the attention in the mainstream press and increasing levels of government attention.

There have been some fits and starts at the White House level about the cyber czar and things like that, but every time you turn around in Washington now, you see people discussing cyber security. How we're going to grow our capability in cyber security and increasing recognition of cyber security risk in mainstream business are going to be emerging hot topics of 2010.

Gardner: Thanks so much. Next up, Jim Kobielus. Tell us where you see things going in 2010. Your top five, please?

Jim Kobielus

Kobielus: Yes, my top five in 2010. In fact, I blogged that yesterday. I blogged six yesterday, but I'll boil it down to five and I'll make them even punchier. It's only going to be focused on analytics my core area.

Number one: IT more or less gives up BI. Let me constrain that statement. IT is increasingly going to in-source much of BI development of reports, queries, dashboards, and the like to the user through mash up self-service approaches, SaaS, flexible visualization, and so forth, simply because they have to.

IT is short staffed. We're still in a recession essentially. IT budgets are severely constrained. Manpower is severely constrained. Users are demanding mashups and self-service capabilities. It's coming along big time, not only in terms of enterprise deployment, but all the BI vendors are increasingly focused on self-service solution portfolios.

Number two: The users who do more of the analytics development are going to become developers in their own right. That may sound crazy based on the fact that traditionally data mining is done by a cadre of PhD statisticians and others who are highly specialized.

Basically, we're taking data mining out of the hands of the rocket scientists and giving it to the masses through very user-friendly tools.



Question analysis, classification and segmentation, and predictive analytics is coming into the core BI stack in a major way. IBM’s acquisition of SPSS clearly shows that not only is IBM focusing there, but other vendors in this space, especially a lot of smaller players, already have some basic predictive analytics capabilities in their portfolios or plan to release them in 2010.

Basically, we're taking data mining out of the hands of the rocket scientists and giving it to the masses through very user-friendly tools. That's coming in 2010.

Number three: There will be an increasing convergence of analytics and transactional computing, and the data warehouse is the hub of all that. More-and-more transactional application logic will be pushed down to be executed inside of the data warehouse.

The data warehouse is a greater cloud, because that's where the data lives and that's where the CPU power is, the horse power. We see Exadata, Version 2 from Oracle. We see Aster Data, nCluster Version 4.0. And, other vendors are doing similar things, pointing ahead to the coming decade, when the data warehouse becomes a complete analytic application server in its own right -- analytics plus transaction.

Predictive analysis

Number four: We're seeing, as I said, that predictive analytics is becoming ever more important and central to where enterprises are going with BI and the big pool of juicy data that will be brought into predictive model. Much of it is coming from the whole Web 2.0 sphere and from social networks -- Twitters, Facebooks and the like, and blogs. That's all highly monetizable content, as Dave Linthicum indicated.

We're seeing that social network analysis has a core set of algorithms and approaches for advanced analytics that are coming in a big way to data mining tools, text analytics tools, and to BI. Companies are doing serious marketing campaign planning, optimization, and so forth, based on a lot of that information streaming in real-time. It's customer sentiment in many ways. You know pretty much immediately whether your new marketing campaign is a hit or a flop, because customers are tweeting all about it.

That's going to be a big theme in 2010 and beyond. Social network analysis really is a core business intelligence for marketing and maintaining and sustaining business in this new wave.

Right now, we're in the middle of a price war for the enterprise data warehousing stack hardware and software.



And, finally, number five: Analytics gets dirt cheap. Right now, we're in the middle of a price war for the enterprise data warehousing stack hardware and software. Servers and storage, plus the database licenses, query tools, loading tools, and BI are being packaged pretty much everywhere into appliances that are one-stop shopping, one throat to choke, quick-deploy solutions that are pre-built.

Increasingly, they'll be for specific vertical and horizontal applications and will be available to enterprises for a fraction of what it would traditionally cost them to acquire all those components separately and figure it out all themselves. The vendors in the analytics market are all going appliance. They're fighting with each other to provide the cheapest complete application on the market.

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You can see what Oracle has already done with Exadata Version 2, 20K per usable terabyte. We see other vendors packaging even more functionality into these appliances and delivering them to mid-market and large enterprises. Small companies can deploy a complete analytics environment with BI, ETL, and everything for much less than they could just a few years ago.

And, one last thing. There is a cloud twist in everything I am describing or discussing here. Analytics gets dirt cheap, and even more so, as more of this functionality is available in the cloud. We're seeing a boom of SaaS-based BI and data warehousing vendors. In the coming years, pay-as-you-go, subscription-based, low risk, fund it out of OpEx rather than CapEx, is coming to analytics everywhere. So, that will be a huge trend in the coming year.

Gardner: Thanks Jim. Next, we're going to Joe McKendrick. Joe, what's your top five for 2010?

Joe McKendrick

McKendrick: Thanks, Dana. You also gave us the option to talk about the decade ahead, and I was thinking whether I should talk about the year ahead or the decade ahead. It occurred to me that just as we had a 2000 problem a decade ago, we now have a year 2012 problem. I just saw the movie 2012 a couple of weeks ago. The world is going to end and it's going to get flooded.

Gardner: So, the cloud is going to be big, dark, and made of soot. That's it. It's all over. We are all going to – cloud.

McKendrick: Exactly. I might have some arks floating around, and you worry about the IT systems on those arks.

Gardner: Well, you are a pessimist. Back down to earth.

McKendrick: Back down to earth. Okay, 2010. My world, of course, is SOA, and the big question for 2010 is what will Anne Thomas Manes have to say about SOA to start off the year?

Gardner: What's dead this year?

McKendrick: Right. In the first week of this year, Anne came out and said that SOA is dead. That caused a lot of angst, anxiety, discussion, and brooding for pretty much the entire year. It really had an impact.

Gardner: It kept you in page views.

McKendrick: Yeah, thanks, Anne. So, I am hoping Anne will come out with something good at the beginning of 2010. She'll probably say that SOA is still dead. That's my prediction.

Gardner: What is the state of SOA in 2010, Joe?

McKendrick: Part of it will be tied into the economy. By all indications, 2010 is going to be a growth year in the economy. We're probably in this V shape. See, I'm actually an optimist, not a pessimist. The world may end in 2012, but for 2010, we're going to have a great economy. It's going to move forward.

For this decade, we're looking forward to the rise of something called "social commerce," where the markets are user-driven and are conversations.



What happened with SOA? SOA really proved itself through 2009. I know a lot of instances where companies had a service-oriented culture, had flexibility, had visibility into their applications, their services, and their data. This played a great role in helping them pull through in terms of visibility into the supply chains and logistics. I know of a home builder -- and that's a tough industry -- where a SOA implementation really increased its sales turnaround time and enabled it to tighten up, be more efficient, and pull through this economic dark hole we went through.

I think 2010 will be a year of growth. As I said in previous podcast, we had these economic downturns: 2000-2001, 1990-1991, 1981-82. These downturn periods were always followed by periods of spectacular growth, especially in terms of technology -- and usually a huge paradigm shift in technology.

It's hard to say what. Nobody at the time of those downturns could have predicted what was ahead. Nobody predicted the dot-com boom back in 1992. But, what we're seeing is the service-oriented thinking. It's not just IT. It's service-oriented across the board -- the idea of the loosely coupled business, businesses that could start on a shoe string budget in IT, thanks to the availability of cloud, and move forward in the market.

Ten years ago, we saw the rise of e-commerce. For this decade, we're looking forward to the rise of something called "social commerce," where the markets are user-driven and are conversations. To use the quote from the book "The Cluetrain Manifesto," markets will be driven by users who interact with each other. Companies that will succeed and get ahead will encourage this social commerce, the interaction with customers over social networking sites.

Gardner: Alright Joe, I'm confused. Are we still on number one prediction or are you on number two?

McKendrick: That was my number one prediction, the impact of the economy. We're going to start seeing some new paradigms rising. Folks here talk about cloud computing.

The new normal

Number two: Cloud computing. We’ve all been talking about that. That's the big development, the big paradigm shift. Clouds will be the new "normal." From the SOA perspective, we're going to be seeing a convergence. When we talk about cloud, we're going to talk about SOA, and the two are going to be mapped very closely together.

Dave Linthicum talks a lot about this in his new book and in his blog work. Services are services. They need to be transparent. They need to be reusable and sharable. They need to cross enterprise boundaries. We're going to see a convergence of SOA and cloud. It’s a service-oriented culture.

Number three: Google is becoming what I call the Microsoft of the clouds. Google offers a browser and email. It has a backend app engine. It offers storage. They're talking about bringing out an OS. Google is essentially providing an entire stack from which you can build your IT infrastructure. You can actually build a company’s IT infrastructure on the back of this. So, Google is definitely the Microsoft of the cloud for the current time.

Microsoft is also getting into the act as well with cloud computing, and they are doing a great job there. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. By the way, Google also offers search as a capability.

Gardner: Is there anything that Google won’t do? That’s the easier list. What won’t Google get into this year?

McKendrick: They probably won’t get into building and selling hardware.

Gardner: I heard about a phone they’re into selling. Are they in partnership with a phone?

Everybody will be providing and publishing services, and everybody will be consuming services.



McKendrick: Right, with Verizon, but it's the only thing they won’t really touch.

Gardner: My prediction is that they won’t get into snow plowing. Google will not get into snow plowing in 2010. That’s my only safe bet.

McKendrick: That’s probably about it.

Number four: We're going to see less of a distinction between service providers and service consumers over clouds, SOA, what have you. That's going to be blurring. Everybody will be providing and publishing services, and everybody will be consuming services.

You're going to see less of a distinction between providers and consumers. For example, I was talking to a reinsurance company a few months back. They offer a portal to their customers, the customers being insurance companies. They say that they offer a lot of analytics capabilities that their customers don’t have, and the customers are using their portal to do their own analytic work.

They don’t call it cloud. Cloud never entered the conversation, but this is a cloud. This is a company that’s offering cloud services to its consumers. We're going to see a lot of that, and it’s not necessarily going to be called cloud. You're not going to see companies saying, "We're offering clouds to our partners." It’s just going to be as the way it is.

Number five: In the enterprise application area, we've seen it already, but we're going to see more-and-more pushback against where money is being spent. As I said, the economy is growing, but there is going to be a lot of attention paid to where IT dollars are going.

I base this on a Harvard Medical School study that just came out last month. They studied 4,000 hospitals over a three-year period and found that, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being invested at IT, IT had no impact on hospital operations, patient care quality, or anything else.

Gardner: And, that’s why I don’t go to hospitals.

McKendrick: There are ramifications for other industries as well. What’s the impact of all this IT expenditure? Ultimately, this may help the cloud model in the long run. Okay, that's my five.

Gardner: Excellent. Let’s go to JP Morgenthal. What are your top five predictions, JP?

JP Morgenthal

Morgenthal: First, I'm going to predict that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM -- none of them are going to be supporting Tiger Woods as a sponsor next year.

Gardner: Another risk-taker.

Morgenthal: Sorry, man. I had to throw it out there. It was just sitting there, and no one else picked it up, like a $100 bill on the street. Okay, number one: Cyber security. As someone stated earlier, it's interesting what’s going on out there. I am beginning to understand how little people actually understand about the differences between what security is and information assurance is, and how little people realize that their systems are compromised and how long it takes to eliminate threat within an organization.

Because of all of this connectedness, social networking, and cloud, a lot of stuff is going to start to bubble up. People who thought things were taken care of are going to learn that it wasn’t taken care of, and there will be a sense of urgency about responding to that. We're going to see that happen a lot in the first half of 2010.

Number two: Mobile. The mobile platforms are now the PC of yesterday, right? The real battle is for how we use these platforms effectively to integrate into people’s lives and allow them to leverage the platform for communications, for collaboration, and to stay in touch.

It seems everywhere I go, people are willing to spend a lot of money on their data plan. So, that’s a good sign for telecoms.



My personal belief is that it overkills information overlook, but that’s me. I know that everywhere I go, I see people using their iPhones and flicking through their apps. So, they hit upon a market segment, a very large market segment, that actually enjoys that. Whether small people like me end up in a cave somewhere, the majority of people are definitely going to be focused on the mobile platform. That also relates to the carriers. I think there still a carrier war here. We've yet to see AT&T and iPhone in the US break apart and open up its doors to other carriers.

Gardner: Let that happen in 2010.

Morgenthal: We all say that, but this is a fertile ground for priming what’s been a notoriously dead pump. Two years ago, I wrote a blog entry about what happens to technology in an era where the economy is down? It seems everywhere I go, people are willing to spend a lot of money on their data plan. So, that’s a good sign for telecoms.

Gardner: Yeah, the human species has spoken. They like mobile and they like ubiquitous broadband, and that’s not going to change, right?

Morgenthal: I agree with you. But the question is, should people pay for it or should the government give to you free? In the US, I hear a lot of social groups saying, "Hey, everybody should have broadband like it’s electricity."

Gardner: So, maybe Tiger Woods pays for everybody’s broadband for six months. He's got the money to do it, and then everybody will forget about this marriage thing.

BI and analytics

Morgenthal: I think you’ve got a new business model. Number three: Business intelligence and analytics, especially around complex event processing (CEP). CEP is still in an immature state. It does some really interesting things. It can aggregate and correlate. It really needs to go to that next step and help people understand how to build models for correlation. That’s going to be a difficult step.

As somebody was saying earlier, you had these little Poindexters sitting in the back room doing the stuff. There's a reason why the Poindexters were back there doing that. They understand math and the formulas that are under building these analytical models. Teaching your average USA Today reader how to build an analytical model is akin to teaching everybody how to write programs by drawing pictures. It still hasn’t happened. There's a reason why.

Gardner: So, you are saying that this is a year of CEP, that’s your stake in the ground?

Morgenthal: CEP and analytics -- and the two tied together. You’ll see that the BI, and data aspects of the BI, side will integrate with the CEP modeling to not only report after the fact on a bunch of raw data, but almost be proactive, and try to, as I said in my blog entry, know when the spit hits the fan.

Gardner: Right. So, at this time next year, I won’t be having analysts on to predict that what’s going to happen in 2011. We’ll just plug it into a CEP engine and we’ll get all the right answers.

Morgenthal: That’s assuming you could find the right people to program it, which is a whole other issue. I had done as my number five, so I’ll save that, but number four is collaboration. We’ve crossed the threshold here. People want it. They're leveraging it.

The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.



I've been seeing some uptake on Google Wave. I think people are still a little confused by the environment, and the interaction model is not quite there yet to really turn it on its ear, but it clearly is an indication that people like large-scale interactions with large groups of people and to be able to control that information and make it usable. Google is somewhat there, and we'll see some more interesting models emerge out of that as well.

Gardner: So, is there another way to say that, JP, which is the people stop living in their email and start living in something more like Google Wave?

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Morgenthal: I don't see them doing that and wouldn't predict that, but they are clamoring for collaboration, and I think the market will respond.

Gardner: Alright.

Morgenthal: New and innovative ways to collaborate.

Gardner: Alright, number five for you.

Morgenthal: Labor. We're at a point where the market is based on all these other things based on the cloud. We had a lot of disruptive technologies hit in the past five years -- enterprise mashups, SOA, and cloud computing. The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.

I think that 2010 has to be a year for training, rebuilding, and getting some of those skills up. Today, you hear a lot of stories, but there is a large gap for any company to be able to jump into this. Skills are not there. The resources are not there and they are not trained. That's going to be a huge issue for us in 2010.

Gardner: Thanks. We're on to our next analyst prediction, and that would be with Jason Bloomberg. Jason, what are your top five?

Jason Bloomberg

Bloomberg: Thanks for getting to me, Dana. I'm going to be a bit of the naysayer of the bunch. We work primarily with enterprise architects now, so we are on the demand side more than the supply side for IT capabilities. So, our perspective is colored through the glasses of the architect.

Dana, you asked us for not just the one- or 10-year predictions, but also positive and negative. So, my first four are things that I predict won't happen, and we can fill in the blanks in terms of what will happen.

First of all, sorry, Dave, I just don't see cloud computing striking it big in 2010. When we talk to enterprise architects, we see a lot of curiosity and some dabbling. But, at the enterprise scale, we see too much resistance in terms of security and other issues to put a lot of investment into it. It's going to be gradually growing, but I don't see such a point coming as soon as you might like.

Small organizations are a different story. We see small organizations basing their whole business models on the cloud, but at the enterprise level, it's sort of a toe in the water, and we see that happening in the 2010.

Another thing we don't see really taking off in any big way is Enterprise 2.0. That is Web 2.0 collaborative technologies for the enterprise. You know, "Twitter On Steroids," and that kind of thing. Again, it's going to be more of a toe in the water thing. Collaborative technologies are maturing, but we don't see a huge paradigm shift in how collaboration is done in the enterprise. It's going to be more of a gradual process.

Another thing that we are not seeing happening in 2010 is CIOs and other executives really getting the connection between business process management (BPM) and SOA. We see those as two sides of the same coin. Architects are increasingly seeing that in order to do effective BPM you have to have the proper architecture in place. But, we don't see the executives getting that and putting money where it belongs in order to effect more flexible business process. So, this is another work in progress, and it's going to be a struggle for architects to make progress over the course of the year.

Gardner: Alright, Jason, would today's announcement that IBM is acquiring Lombardi be a buttress to your point there?

Bloomberg: Well, that's a software story at this point. It's not a best practice story. IBM, being on the supply side, is attempting to push products like this into the market and they have this strategy for integrating the Lombardi technology with their existing technology. That doesn't necessarily mean that, from the buyer perspective, they see the full connection of how BPM and how SOA fit together and how leveraging architecture will support the business process optimization efforts in the enterprise.

Software vendors were hoping for a huge year, but they're going to be disappointed. It's going to be a growth year, but it's going to be moderate growth for the vendors.



So, tools are there and the tools are maturing, but as far as the demand, I see it growing slowly in fits and starts, as people figure out the role architecture plays.

Gardner: Okay, next one please.

Bloomberg: As far as the end of the recession, yeah, we're all hoping that the economy picks up, and I do see that there is going to be a lot of additional activity as a result of an improving economy, but I don't see a huge uptake in spending on software per se.

Spending in IT is going to go up, but in terms of what the executives going to invest in, they're going to be very careful about purchasing software. That's going to drive some money to cloud-based solutions, but that's still just a toe in the water as well.

Software vendors were hoping for a huge year, but they're going to be disappointed. It's going to be a growth year, but it's going to be moderate growth for the vendors.

Gardner: So that must be why Oracle bought Sun, right?

Bloomberg: Well, we'll have to see. There's been a lot of press on their core strategy in terms of what they are trying to do. Clearly, consolidation is in the cart. I'd agree with that. Part of that is because there are only so many software dollars to go around, and that's going to continue to be the case for a while.

Gardner: Okay, thank you. What’s your next point?

Bloomberg: Those are my first four. Those are the negatives. Not to be too negative, in terms of the positive, what we see happening in 2010 is increased focus on "MSW." You know what MSW is, right? Politely speaking it's "Make Stuff Work." Of course, you could put a different word in there for the S, but Make Stuff Work, that's what we see the architects really focusing on.

They have a good idea now of what SOA is all about. They have a good idea about how the technology fits in the story and the various technologies that have been mentioned on this call, whether it's analytics, data management, SaaS, and the cloud-based approaches. Now, it's time to get the stuff to work together, and that's the real challenge that we see.

SOA-Plus

The SOA story is no longer an isolated story. We're going to do SOA, let's go do SOA. But, it's SOA plus other things. So, we're going to do SOA, BPM, and the architecture driving that, despite the fact that the CIO may not quite connect the dots there.

SOA plus master data management (MDM) -- it's not one or the other now. It's how we get those things to work together. SOA plus virtualization. That's another challenge. Previously, those conversations were separate parts of the organization. We see more and more conversations bringing those together.

SOA and SaaS -- somebody already mentioned that SaaS is one segment of the cloud category. It's little more mature than the rest. We see more organizations understanding the connection between those two and trying to put them together.

Gardner: Are you that we're seeing services orientation of the enterprise?

Bloomberg: You can put it that way, and we like putting it that way, because we're the SOA guys. It depends on who you talk to whether the people in the organization see it that way or, rather, see that that there's a role for architecture as part of how you do things right. When we talk about architecture broadly, we're just talking about general best practices.

No one piece of the story is the whole story anymore. It's going to be a heterogeneity story in the enterprise and how we actually get this stuff to work together.



If you think about governance, for example, as a core set of best practices for running an organization, the key best practice is for it to be architecture driven, and that simply means best-practice driven. So, you can think of architecture as a way of codifying and communicating IT best practices as well as organizational best practices for leveraging IT.

We see that becoming more prevalent over time, as organizations understand the importance of connecting architectural best practices with the other things they're doing.

Before, we had this disconnect. We'll do middleware and we'll do SOA, but we don't really see the connection where we confuse one for the other, and that was a big issue. A large part of why Anne Manes said SOA was dead was because we were confusing SOA with the software enablers that vendors were trying to sell them. With the SOA label on the box, they opened the box and said, "Where's my SOA? I don't get it."

Well, organizations are getting that. Now, they're seeing that there is a connection, and they're trying to get this stuff to work together. In the enterprise context where it's heterogeneous, it needs to scale. It’s broad based, and there are a lot of moving parts. No one piece of the story is the whole story anymore. It's going to be a heterogeneity story in the enterprise and how we actually get this stuff to work together.

Gardner: A services-oriented whole greater than the sum of the IT parts?

Bloomberg: Yeah. We're happy to call this services-oriented, even though the organization, as a whole, may call it variety of different things, depending on the perspective of the individual.

Gardner: Great. Thanks so much. Okay, last but not least, Tony Baer, are you still out there? Thanks for your patience.

Tony Baer: I am here, present, and I am alive.

Gardner: You have to be quick, because we're almost out of time. What are your top five, Tony?

Tony Baer

Baer: Not a problem. I’ll make it very, very quick. Actually, I am just going to add various comments. On cloud and virtualization, basically I agree with Jason, and I don't agree with David or with Joe. It’s not going to be the "new normal." We're going to see this year an uptake of all the management overhead of dealing with cloud and virtualization, the same way we saw with outsourcing years back, where we thought we'd just throw labor costs over the wall.

Secondly, JP, I very much believe that there is going to be convergence between BI and CEP this year. I agree with him that there's not going to be a surge of Albert Einsteins out there. On the other hand, I see this as a golden opportunity for vendors to package these analytics as applications or as services. That's where I really see the inflection curve happening.

Number three: Microsoft and Google. Microsoft will be struggling to stay relevant. Yes, people will buy Windows 7, because it's not Vista. That’s kind of a backhanded compliment to say, "We're buying this, because you didn't screw up as badly as last time." It doesn't speak well for the future.

Google meets a struggle for focus. I agree with Joe that they are aspiring to be the Microsoft of the cloud, but it may or may not be such a good thing for Google to follow that Microsoft model.

Finally, I agree with Jim that you are going to see a lot more business-oriented, whether it's BI, BPM, or IBM buying Lombardi. I hope they don't mess up Lombardi and especially I hope they don't mess up Blueprint. I've already blogged about that.

I very much believe that there is going to be convergence between BI and CEP this year.



One other point -- and I don't know if this fits into a top five or not -- but I found what Joe was talking about very interesting in terms of the let-down on health-care investment in IT. There's going to be lot a of pushing in electronic medical records (EMR) this year. I very much believe in EMRs, but, on the other hand, they are no panacea. We're going to see a trough of disillusionment happen on that as well.

I don't know if that's fast, but that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Gardner: Well, that was great, very zippy, I appreciate that and I'm afraid we're out of time. I want to thank our guests and our panel for these very insightful predictions. It's going to be a fun year. Everything from Google and snow plowing to cheap, but not private and not secure, cloud -- a lot to look forward to.

Let me again thank our panel, Jim Kobielus, senior analyst of Forrester Research, thank you so much.

Kobielus: Have a good, happy new year everybody.

Gardner: Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger. Thank you, sir.

McKendrick: Thank you and looking forward to a great 2010.

Gardner: Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum, thank you.

Baer: Yes, thanks.

Gardner: Great insights from Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Thanks.

Shimmin: Thanks much, Dana.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, CEO of Linthicum Group, again appreciating your insights.

Linthicum: Thanks, everybody.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, vice president, collaboration services at The Open Group, thanks so much for joining us.

Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink. Very good. I appreciate your input.

Bloomberg: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant. Thank you, sir.

Morgenthal: Thank you, Dana. Thank you for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to be with this group.

Gardner: And, I would like to thank our sponsors for the BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Active Endpoints.

This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time. Have a great and happy new year.

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Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 49, with panel of analysts discussing the future of cloud computing, SOA, social networks and the economy. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

BriefingsDirect Analysts Discuss Software AG-IDS Scheer Acquisition and Prospects for Google Chrome OS

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 44 on Software AG's acquisition of IDS Scheer and the implications of the Google Chrome operating system.

Download the transcript. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.

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Take the BriefingsDirect middleware/ESB survey now.

Dana Gardner: Hello and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 44. I'm your host and moderator Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events, with a panel of industry analysts, comes to you with the help of our charter sponsor, Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS visual orchestration system, and through the support of TIBCO Software.

Our topic this week on BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, and it is the week of July 13, 2009, centers on Software AG's bid to acquire IDS Scheer for about $320 million. We'll look into why this could be a big business process management (BPM) deal, not only for Software AG, but also for the service-oriented architecture (SOA) competitive landscape that is fast moving, as we saw from Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Another topic for our panel this week is the seemingly inevitable trend toward Web oriented architecture (WOA), most notably supported by Google's announcement of the Google Chrome operating system (OS).

Will the popularity of devices like netbooks and smartphones accelerate the obsolescence of full-fledged fat clients, and what can Google hope to do further to move the market away from powerhouse Microsoft? Who is the David and who is the Goliath in this transition from software plus services to software for services?

Here to help us better understand Software AG's latest acquisition bid and the impact of the Google Chrome OS are our analysts this week. We are here with Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Hi, Jim.

Jim Kobielus: Hey, Dana. Hello, everybody.

Gardner: Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum.

Tony Baer: Hey, Dana, good to join you again.

Gardner: Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis.

Brad Shimmin: Hi there, Dana, and hi, everyone out there.

Gardner: Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink.

Jason Bloomberg: Good morning, everybody.

Gardner: JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant.

JP Morgenthal: Hey Dana, and for you fellow people, that's @JPMorgenthal for you.

Gardner: There you go. Also, Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and ZDNet and SOA blogger. Welcome, Joe.

Joe McKendrick: Hi, Dana, glad to be here.

Gardner: Let's start on the whole Software AG bid. JP, I just learned this morning that you were an architect there at IDS Scheer. Tell us a little bit about why you think this is a big deal.

Morgenthal: No, I wasn't at IDS. I was at Software AG. I was there prior to the webMethods acquisition.

Gardner: Yes. My mistake. Sorry.

Morgenthal: No problem. It's really interesting. When we first started thinking about building out a SOA platform and making Tamino the heart of it, the metadata repository, it was one of the key applications we saw for Tamino in a SOA platform. I actually was looking for different metadata partners.

I looked at IDS Scheer back then and that's what they were sowing a while back, so I had lost track of them and come back to find that now they're driving the whole concept of business process design, which is really interesting.

It seems that the general consensus on the acquisition, though, seems to be focused heavily on their association with SAP, and that the move seems to be driven by more of a business relationship than a technical relationship. If you look at the platforms, there is some overlap between the webMethods platform and the ARIS platform.

So, it would make sense that, if they were going after something, it wouldn't be just more design functionality. There has to be something deeper there for them to grow that business even larger, and certainly SAP is a good target for going after more additional business.

Gardner: So, is this an acknowledgment that SAP needs a SOA partner and that this is Software AG's move on the dance floor to sort of step up the music a bit?

Morgenthal: SAP probably doesn't believe that they need an SOA partner, but I think that the fish are starting to nip around the outer boundaries. SAP customers are to the point now, where they are looking for something more immediate, and obviously the redevelopment of SAP as a complete SOA architecture is a long-term endeavor.

So, how do you start moving there in an incremental fashion? A lot of SOA platform vendors are starting to identify that there is a place for them on the outer edges, until SAP gets to make its full transformation.

Gardner: Hey, Jim Kobielus, do you agree that this is more than just a technology acquisition? What do you think? Does SAP need a SOA dance partner?

Kobielus: Does Software AG?

Gardner: No, SAP, and that Software AG is perhaps an intermediary step.

Kobielus: Wow, that's an interesting question. Honestly, I don't think SAP needs another dance partner here. Let's say, hypothetically SAP acquired Software AG. What could Software AG with IDS Scheer on board offer SAP that they don't already have? There is the BPM. There is the enterprise application integration (EAI). I don't really see anything obvious.

Gardner: JP, help him out. Why did you make that statement?

Feeding at the outer edge

Morgenthal: Well, I made the statement that the groups, like the combined effort of a Software AG with webMethods and IDS Scheer actually becomes one of the feeders on the outer edges of the SAP market. While SAP is in its cocoon, it needs to turn from caterpillar into SOA butterfly, and heaven knows whether that will actually survive that transformation.

There are a lot of SOA platforms starting to eat at the outer edges of the cocoon, feeding off of that, and hoping the transformation either fails or that there will be a place for them when the SOA butterfly emerges.

Kobielus: I don't think that necessarily Software AG would be a good fit for SAP. There are a lot of redundancies. I don't think that this notion of a Teutonic hegemony has legs here.

What's really interesting here is that, clearly Software AG is on a tear now to build up their whole

I think it goes both ways. You can't separate the technology from the strategic implications of this deal

SOA stack. I blogged on this under Forrester. People didn't realize that IDS Scheer is actually now a business intelligence (BI) vendor. They've got a self-service mashup BI product called ARIS MashZone, in addition to the complex event processing (CEP) product and an in-memory analytics product.

IDS Scheer, prior to this acquisition, has been increasingly positioning themselves in the new generation of BI solutions. That's been the one area where Software AG/webMethods has been deficient, from my point of view. In these SOA wars, they're lacking any strong BI or CEP capabilities.

Now, IDS Scheer, their BI, their CEP, and their in-memory analytics is all tied to business activity monitoring (BAM), and all tied to BPM. So, it's not clear whether or when Software AG, with IDS Scheer on board, might start turning all of that technology or adapting it to be more of a general purpose BI CEP capability. But, you know what, if they choose to do that, I think they've got some very strong technologies to build upon.

Gardner: Tony Baer, how do you come down on this technology, filling in the cracks, as Jim Kobielus believes, or the larger strategic implication that JP was alluding to?

Baer: I think it goes both ways. You can't separate the technology from the strategic implications of this deal.

For one thing, I don't think SAP itself thinks it needs a partner, in that, through NetWeaver, it has tried to control the middle tier in addition to the application tier, but they've not been that humongously successful in the market.

The other thing is that, yes, they have essentially defined an architecture for exposing their processes as services. They keep changing the names of it, so I forget what the latest acronym for it is. But, from the SAP standpoint what they lack is SOA governance. They lack a lifecycle there. SAP has always been very much around its own internal governance, and that's been a really interesting omission.

Other dimensions

More broadly, there are other dimensions to this deal, which is that Software AG's webMethods business gets a much deeper process-modeling path. I don't know how redundant it is with the existing modeling. I don't think there are many BPM modeling languages that are deeper than ARIS, and that's selling pretty awesomely. As a matter of fact, you can look at Oracle, which uses it as one of the paths to modeling business process, along with the technology they picked up from BEA.

Gardner: So what's the theory there, Tony, that the tool and its popularity will drag in some more on the infrastructure side?

Baer: For Software AG, what it’s going to drag in is immediate access to the SAP base, and that's huge. It also basically lays down a gauntlet to IBM and Oracle, especially Oracle, which has an OEM agreement. All of a sudden they have an OEM agreement with a major rival, as they're trying to ramp up their fusion middleware business in their SOA governance story.

Gardner: There is a lot of that going on nowadays.

Baer: Oh heck, yes, and so I see this as being incredibly disruptive, and I think a very smart move for Software AG.

Gardner: Let's go to Brad Shimmin. It seems like we've got some jockeying going on, and there aren't really too many mid-tier SOA infrastructure players left that these other behemoths can play chess with, their little pawns that they can move in front of their other players and play one OEM's agreement deal off of another, as they all try to come up with the total stack. What's your perspective, Brad? Are we almost at the end of the SOA consolidation process?

Shimmin: I don't think so. When you look at the big players, just as you said there, Dana, with their little OEM games -- reindeer games -- that get played, those are becoming less and less of an issue.

Look to the governance. About two years ago, most of the vendors are OEM. That certainly has turned around, such that these vendors, the big players we're talking about here, are very much providing in-house stacks. That speaks to what Tony and JP have been saying about getting some governance and SAP and getting better middleware and SAP customers. That's why I think this is such a big deal, and, as Tony was saying, why it's so disruptive.

It's not just that they have a fuller stack now, but there is a more complete stack for SAP customers. NetWeaver has been hanging in there. SAP definitely thinks it is middleware, but then why else would there be so many players on the outside, providing integration services for SAP applications running on not NetWeaver

But, back to your question about the smaller players, Dana, it seems like it's now a class society, where you have the big players -- the IBMs, Oracle, SAPs, and now Software AGs of the world -- and then you have the rogue players in these open-source space that are coming up, that have room to play.

We're talking about the Red Hats, the -- I'm blanking on the others here. There are probably three or four software vendors out there that are playing just in the open-source middleware space that has a great player like WSO2. Another one that's really good is MuleSource, although they're kind of limited.

Bifurcated environment

The point is that, when you have this really bifurcated environment, it gives you fewer acquisitions and more competition, and that's what's going to be great for the industry. I don't see this as leading to further consolidation at the top end. It's going to be more activity on the bottom end.

Gardner: Jason Bloomberg, isn't there no small dose of irony that the SOA landscape is being driven by folks trying to do it all? I thought the whole notion of SOA was being able to include more players and more components to interact and interoperate. What's going on?

Bloomberg: That's a important point to bring up. This IDS Scheer announcement really doesn't have anything to do with SOA. That is surprising, in a way, but also consistent with some of the fundamental disconnect we see within Software AG, between the integration folks on one hand and the BPM folks on the other.

There are some people within Software AG, typically the CentraSite team, Miko Matsumura and his strategy team, who really understand the connection between SOA and BPM. But, for the most part, basically the old guard, the German staff, just doesn't see the connection.

This fundamentally confuses the marketplace, because you have the integration-centric SOA

Whoever wrote the press release doesn't even understand that SOA is architecture. It makes you wonder where the disconnect is.

message out of Software AG. You have the metadata-driven CentraSite message that tries to pull it together, but doesn't have a dominant position within the context of the Software AG marketing. Then, you have the BPM folks, who just don't understand that SOA has anything at all to do with BPM.

If you read the 'BPM For Dummies Book' that Software AG put together, for example, they don't even understand that SOA has any connection to BPM. Software AG released a press release a few weeks ago that described SOA as a technology. Whoever wrote the press release doesn't even understand that SOA is architecture. It makes you wonder where the disconnect is.

With the IDS Scheer acquisition, if you read through what Software AG is saying about this, they're not connecting it with their SOA story. This is part of their BPM story. This is a way for them to build their vertical BPM expertise. That's the missing piece.

They have this BPM capability that they got from webMethods, and there is some Fujitsu technology in there as well. Poor Fujitsu, I guess, is the odd one out on this one. Software AG is looking to add some vertical capabilities, but because they're not tying it with the SOA story, they run the risk of continuing to be the outlier player, when it comes time to compete against Oracle and IBM.

They don't understand

Kobielus: Let me butt in a second, because in Forrester we've been discussing this. We don't think that Software AG understands fully who they are acquiring, because they don't really fully understand what IDS Scheer has on the SOA side. They don't understand the BI and CEP stuff.

So, I agree wholeheartedly with what Jason is saying. They're acquiring them just for the BPM, but that really in many ways really understates what IDS Scheer potentially can offer Software AG.

Bloomberg: Yeah, that's a good point. It's worth highlighting that IDS Scheer does have some pretty solid SOA capabilities within the context of their BPM focus.

Now the question is what Software AG will do with that part of the story. Will it get lost in the shuffle or will it really be integrated into the overall SOA stack in a way that enables them to have a better process-driven SOA story?

That's going to be a challenge for them, because that involves some shifting of thinking, not

They're acquiring them just for the BPM, but that really in many ways really understates what IDS Scheer potentially can offer Software AG.

across the whole organization, but within this sort of old guard Software AG folks who have been resistant to this part of the story.

Morgenthal: Just to add a little more fodder, if I haven't lost track of who's who in Software AG, isn't the person who ran this acquisition Dr. Kürpick, if I have that name right. Didn't he come out of SAP, and isn't he more focused on the business process end of things than the SOA end of things?

Bloomberg: Who wants to chime in on that one?

Kobielus: It is Kürpick, but I don't know what his background is.

Morgenthal: I believe he came out of SAP, and I believe his background is on integration and BPM.

Gardner: So, JP, to your point, we seem to have a mixed understanding of whether BPM is the source or a larger infrastructure benefit. I think you were making the point that the BPM could be perhaps a point on the arrow. If you've got your tool embedded, if you've got business process expertise, and you are moving down the stack from the process level, that that could be something that would drag in other aspects of a SOA environment.

Morgenthal: This is funny, because this keeps coming up over and over. Early on, I used to work with BrainStorm Group on their SOA BPM shows, and, at the height, the BPM show got up to like 600 people. I was doing the SOA side of the story in the track.

Driving the business

At the breaks, I would go talk to these people, and the BPM people would all look at me like I was talking another language, and say, "I don't deal with that." These are people who were doing BPM initiatives in their organization, they were like, "That's for the IT guys. I'm the business." So, time and time again, I found out that the BPM people were the ones driving the business.

Now, the number of people who have been attending BPM conferences has been dropping significantly, saying basically that if training went out to the business people, the business people are doing the business analysis. They are using the BPM tools like IDS Scheer more than webMethods, which would be the IT stuff.

At the BPM level, a lot of the initiatives are still, I believe, with the business and hasn't translated down into IT dollars and IT deliverables. That's a big issue now with regard to this acquisition for Software AG. Before, they could only play on the IT side of this shop. They had no story to play with the business. Now, they can go back to all those people who are still doing this at the business initiatives and have a story for them, with a roadmap, for how to bring this into IT. I think that sells well. I think IBM uses that, but I still find IBM’s tools very IT-centric.

Baer: JP, you're right on the mark there. There has always been a huge cultural divide between

The question, then, for the vendors is which vendors can really support that story in a way that doesn’t defeat the purpose by a self-serving software sales pitch.

the business folks, who felt that they own BPM, versus the IT folks, who own the architecture or the technology architecture, which would be SOA. What’s really interesting and what's going to stir up the pot some more -- and this is still on the horizon -- is BPMN 2.0, which is supposed to support direct execution.

When I was over at Oracle a few weeks back, they were talking about their strategy. They were saying, that unless a business process, as you model in BPMN, is transactionally complex, you could theoretically make that model executable and essentially ace out IT. I'm a little cynical about that, but it's going to be an interesting thing that stirs up the pot in coming months.

Bloomberg: It's interesting you mention SOA as technical architecture, because that's a fundamental misconception of what SOA is about. SOA is really more of a style of enterprise architecture that pulls together both business and IT.

But, you're right that a lot of organizations still see SOA as technical architecture, as something distinct from the BPM, and those are the organizations that are failing with SOA. That part of the "SOA is dead" straw man is that misconception of SOA as about technology. That's what’s not working well in many organizations.

On the plus side, there are a number of enterprises that do understand this point, are connecting business process with SOA, and understand really that you need to have a process driven SOA approach to enterprise architecture.

The question, then, for the vendors is which vendors can really support that story in a way that doesn’t defeat the purpose by a self-serving software sales pitch. That's always difficult, because the software sales people are there to sell the software. So you don't buy SOA. You do SOA, and doing SOA includes business process work, as well as technology work.

Telling the story

The prize goes to the vendor who really can tell that story properly. That's difficult for all of them and they're all are struggling with this. That's the story for 2010. Will it be IBM, Oracle, or Software AG who tells an architecture-driven BPM/SOA/enterprise architecture (EA) story in a way that really does help organizations solve their problems, as opposed to just pushing the software and letting customers figure out how to use it.

Gardner: Thanks, Jason. Let me go to Joe McKendrick. Joe, it sounds like something we don't talk about too often is the importance of the sales function, the sales department, and how these things enter the market. It sounds as if the sales department is selling to the business side of the house, and that's how their strategy perhaps lines up.

Or, if they've got another product set that they're going to sell to the technology side of the house, well, then that's how they're going to continue to enter the market, because that's the side where they get the PO.

But, isn’t that self-defeating, when it comes to SOA as an architectural paradigm shift, as we've mentioned here? How do we that? Is there another step that we need in bringing SOA into the market that educates or changes the sales culture so that they don't simply go after the short-term product sale, but look for more strategic sale?

McKendrick: Yeah, Dana, that's a big challenge. You're right. The sales people from the vendors have specific relationships with individuals within companies. They may tend to be IT people on one hand or you may have some folks on the business process side, depending on the types of products, and usually the paths don't cross.

I wonder, too, with SOA. That's been the challenge, as we've been discussing about SOA. It's been confined somewhat to the technical side of the house, perceptually, and the proponents of SOA tend to come from the IT side.

Gardner: I guess what I was getting at, Joe, is that the separation between SOA and products seems to be taking place not just on the buy side. It's probably taking place on the sell side as well, as is demonstrated perhaps by what we're hearing today about the IDS Scheer buy being absorbed by one part of Software AG and not across the board.

McKendrick: Absolutely. You really can’t sell SOA. Theoretically, you don't need to buy any products to start SOA in your organization. It's ludicrous to try to sell SOA, the package itself. That's something that's been discussed for years -- selling SOA in a box. You can sell individual products.

Let’s face it. It's a tough environment, and vendors are on these quarterly cycles. They need to push the product out there, and they'll call it whatever they need to call it to get the product out. Maybe SOA is even diminishing as a sales term. It's cloud nowadays.

Gardner: Jim Kobielus, do you agree that this might be what we're up against? In a down economy, sales people need to sell, and, product-by-product, that's what they're going to go after. At the same time, they do an injustice to this larger architectural shift.

Shifting the focus

Kobielus: Yeah, for sure. What gives me hope on the Software AG-IDS Scheer merger is the fact that what I heard on the briefing is that Software AG realizes they need to shift from a technology and sales driven model towards more of a solution and consulting driven business model. First of all, that's the way that you lock in the customer in terms of a partnership or an ongoing relationship to help the customer optimize their business and chief differentiation in their business.

What I found really the most valuable thing about the briefing on the acquisition that we got from them the other day was IDS Scheer adding significant value to Software AG. Software AG pointed to the business process tools under ARIS. That's a given. They focused even more on the EA modeling capabilities that IDS Scheer has, and even more on the professional services on the vertical solution side and the BPA consulting side -- consulting, consulting, consulting, relationship building, solution marketing.

I think Software AG knows that they need to put the IDS Scheer solution focus first and foremost. In a down economy, that's the way to lock in these premium engagements and these

It's interesting hearing about the BPM and SOA disconnect, and it certainly doesn't surprise me.

ongoing relationships that will be essential for Software AG to differentiate themselves from vendors like IBM, Oracle, and SAP, who have been solution focused for quite some time in the SOA sphere.

Gardner: Tony Baer, we need to wrap up on the Software AG acquisition. Are there any other takeaways that we've missed on this one?

Baer: It's interesting hearing about the BPM and SOA disconnect, and it certainly doesn't surprise me. I totally agree with Jason. The problem is that it's a perception that those business stakeholders view SOA as the technology architecture and, more specifically, business process execution language (BPEL) as that bastardized execution language, which I think is probably a little bit of envy on their part.

I can sort of understand that there is a degree of creative tension within Software AG in terms of understanding the connection between BPM and the SOA.

I very much agree with Jim -- I'm Mr. Agreeable today -- that it really is all about solution sell. I was just up doing consulting yesterday with a vendor in the tools industry and telling them that they have to do more of a solution sell.

That's a really tough nut for vendors to crack, because, as the CEO was telling me, "I agree with you, but our sales guys still have quarterly numbers that they have to meet, and if customers want product, we're not going to say no." That's a tough one.

Gardner: Brad Shimmin, do you agree that the solution sell is a multi-year process, but right now these companies need to get some POs signed? Perhaps that's what at work here in terms of filling in of the cracks with this acquisition?

Pre-sales and post-sales

Shimmin: There is pre-sales and then post-sales, and the post-sales is very separate. You have your services organization, and as everyone has been saying here, that's the key to this IDS Scheer acquisition by Software AG.

Software vendors like IBM, Oracle and SAP, which are solution based, have these well established organizations, but do nothing except go out and say, "You know what? You really need to lead with BPM, and by the way, in order to make BPM work, you need to have this great infrastructure and architecture underneath and that happens to be using our SOA components." Those guys know how to do that.

Software AG, as we said, is going to take some time to get that up to speed. In the meantime, it's all going to be driven by the numbers. You're selling infrastructure, you're selling webMethods' software endpoints to the IT folks, and you're selling ARIS to the business folks. To bring those two together is going to take quite a bit of time.

Baer: I think it's kind of important to look at IDS Scheer's numbers. They've actually flattened out. The SAP market is pretty mature. Within the webMethods space, it's younger, dynamic and growing. That could be a way to give IDS Scheer and ARIS a bit of a jolt, if Software AG can deal with those structural issues.

Gardner: Okay. In the second half of our show, let's take a look at this WOA drive. I was

Everyone thinks this is an attack at Microsoft. I'm looking at it as a Mac user and see a huge hole in the market.

impressed with the Google Chrome OS, not necessarily on its technical merits -- we don't know too much about it yet -- but the idea that Google is willing to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft and sees the marketplace is ready to absorb an OS designed of, for, and by the web.

Does anyone else share my impression that this is a harbinger of a larger shift towards the web?

Shimmin: I just think it's reflective of the shift that's already underway. When you look at Google Chrome OS, it's Linux, which is a well-established OS, but certainly not something you would call a web-oriented OS. Chrome OS is really something akin to GNOME or KDE running on top of it. So, technologically, this is nothing spectacularly new.

I think that what Google is doing, and what is brilliant about what they're doing, is that they're saying, "We are the architectural providers of the web, people who make the pipes go, and make all of you able to get to the places you want to go in the web through our index. We're going to build an OS that's geared toward you folks. We're going OEM and through vendors that are building netbooks, that are definitely making a point of contention with Microsoft. Because Microsoft, as we know, is really not pleased with the netbook vendors, because they can't run Vista or eventually Windows 7."

Gardner: Not only that, but they can't charge the full price that they would have liked to charge for an OS, because these things only sell for $400.

Shimmin: Exactly.

Morgenthal: I have differing opinion, and of course an opportunity to tick off the entire Slashdot audience. Everyone thinks this is an attack at Microsoft. I'm looking at it as a Mac user and see a huge hole in the market. I've got to pay almost $2,000 for a really good high-powered Macintosh today. All they did was take BSD Unix and really soup it up so that your basic user can use it.

Out of the slime

People on the Linux side are like, "Oh, Linux is great now. It's really usable." I've got news for you. It's no way nearly as usable as Windows or the Mac. As far as usability, Linux is still growing out of the proverbial slime.

But, if you take that concept of what Apple did with BSD and you say, "Hmm, I'm going to do that. I'm going to take Linux as my base and I'm going to really soup up the UI. I'm going to make it really oriented around the network, which I already did, and I have a lot of my apps in the Cloud, I don't necessarily need to build everything large scale. I still need to have the ability to do video, tie things in, and make that usable, but I'm also going to be able to sell it on a $400 netbook computer."

Now, you're right down the middle of the entire open market, because people can't stand Windows XP running on these netbooks. As was previously said, you can't yet run Windows 7 yet or Vista. We don't know what Windows 7 is going to look like, as far as usability, and the Mac is costing way too much.

There is a huge home run right through the middle. You just run right up the center and you've

First of all, it's vapor, because this is not going to be released, I think, until the second half of 2010.

got yourself a massive home run. It doesn't have to be about going after the enemy. It's not about hurting the enemy. It's about going after your competitors.

Gardner: If Mac OS stays in the top tier and something like Google Chrome OS comes in, the only other player to suffer is Microsoft. Isn't that who gets squeezed out?

Morgenthal: No, I actually think you're starting a grass-roots effort that could knock Apple out, because Apple's maintained its proprietary nature. If you can deliver the equivalent of an Apple-based set of functionality and the usability of the Mac on a $400 netbook, or a bigger if you want, you hurt Apple. You don't hurt Windows.

Gardner: I appreciate your point, but I think that Apple is okay at the top tier. I think this is more aimed at the bottom of the Windows tier, and the price-sensitive audience, both in the consumer and business spaces. What do you think Jim Kobielus?

Kobielus: I think it is, exactly what you said, Dana. First of all, it's vapor, because this is not going to be released, I think, until the second half of 2010.

Gardner: Yes, second half next year.

Kobielus: And, they haven't announced any real features. They haven't announced any final pricing. It will probably be nil or nothing. There's so much that has yet to be defined here. How long ago was it they introduced Android, and how much adoption does Android have in the mobile space?

Gardner: Well, it's got developer hearts and minds, which is probably important.

"Google hegemony"

Kobielus: Yeah, yeah. People keep expecting the big "Google hegemony" to evolve or to burst out, so everybody keeps latching onto these kinds of announcements as the harbinger of the coming Google hegemony and all components of the distributed internet-work Web 2.0 world. I just don't see that happening.

I think this is exciting. They've got all these kinds of projects going, but none of them has even begun to deliver for Google anything even approximating the revenue share that they get from search-driven advertising.

So, this is interesting, but a lot of Google projects are interesting. Google Fusion Tables are interesting for analytics, but I just can't really generate a big interest in this project, until I see something concrete.

Gardner: Okay. Tony Baer, are you ho-hum on this as well, or do you think that this signals that the OS gets buried underneath that layer that is your Web interface and your ability to coordinate with cloud services level?

Baer: I vote for the ho-hum. I agree with Jim. Their business model has been, so far, throwing

Some may need netbooks. Some may want smartphones. Some, like myself, still deal with regular brick computers. It's just a diversity.

as much mud at the wall as possible and seeing what sticks. To date -- and this is one place where I would actually agree with Steve Ballmer -- they've really been a one-trick pony.

You've got to put this in perspective, The Microsoft Office base is not a growing base. It does indicate, though, that there are many types of alternative clients that are emerging, and I don't think anybody has claimed those emerging clients. So, JP has an interesting point in terms of that. It basically fills the hole that Apple is not trying to fill.

Gardner: What about the iPhone. Doesn't the iPhone fill that hole? It's a low entry at $200 and does a lot of what a PC does.

Baer: Well, iPhone, compared to a computer, is low entry, but its expensive compared to a smartphone.

Shimmin: I am sorry to interrupt you, but Apple has netbook coming out in October too, so they're trying for that market as well.

Baer: I'll grant you that point. The important thing mostly is that it does point to a new diversity of clients. Some may need netbooks. Some may want smartphones. Some, like myself, still deal with regular brick computers. It's just a diversity.

So, I think that's really what Google's move heralds. As to whether Google really actually shoots in the long run, I'm waiting for the evidence.

Gardner: Okay. Jason Bloomberg, how about you, a ho-hum or a shift?

Mostly irrelevant

Bloomberg: At ZapThink, we're focused on the enterprise. We talk primarily to enterprise architects who are really trying to figure out the big picture of how enterprise IT resources can meet the ongoing changing business needs. From that perspective, Google is mostly irrelevant. So, I'm definitely in the ho-hum category.

Sure, maybe they will carve out a niche in the netbook OS market, but from the perspective of the enterprise, that's a very small piece of what they're worried about.

Gardner: Let me go to Joe McKendrick. Joe, does what Google has brought to the table have an impact on the enterprise?

McKendrick: Eventually it does. The Google Chrome OS is kind of a marker on the road. I think back to why I started using Google several years ago, and I think why a lot of people started using it. It was so fast. I used AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, and all these other search engines, and I just liked Google, because it was real fast. It got me to where I was going in a very fast and efficient manner.

I don't know about Chrome delivering this capacity, but I think what's happening is that the OS is becoming more something that's getting in the way of where you want to go.

I use XP and Vista both. I'd rather just get on the computer and get immediately to where I want

Why can't everyone have a client computer, a device that simply has some kind of very thin OS and the browser connecting them to all the cloud services they need?

to go on the Web and not have to fuss around with all these features with the OS - booting up, security features, updates, patches, and so forth.

I think the world is moving that way. Why can't everyone have a client computer, a device that simply has some kind of very thin OS and the browser connecting them to all the cloud services they need?

That's what's great about smartphone. I love the smartphone because it just goes to where you need to go very rapidly. You're not fussing with the OS. It's more of an embedded, invisible, thin capability, and that's what enterprises are looking for as well.

Gardner: JP, we talked about OEM agreements and how important they are behind the scenes in the technology industry. The OEM agreements that Microsoft has with their hardware vendors are perhaps seeing some strain.

Microsoft didn't do any favors for their hardware vendors with the debacle that Vista was, particularly as that came during the precious year or two before this recession. That could have driven a lot of sales that now will probably never happen.

Do you think that Google, not only has an opportunity to come into the market, as you mentioned, with a technology, but perhaps is going to be a friend of the enemy for these hardware people. They'll probably give this thing away and allow these hardware developers, distributors and creators to benefit from the services marketplace of advertising in a sort of backhanded way, and they get basically free software from Google as a result?

Who'll win the desktop?

Morgenthal: For them, it comes down to who is going to win with the desktop applications. That's what it comes down to. The only reason these hardware vendors are making the investment in Microsoft is because customers want a Microsoft platform, most likely because they are running Office or some other Microsoft application. It's what they're trained on and still comfortable with.

There's a great video out there that Google did asking people on the street, like a Jay Leno walk by, what is a browser? About 92 percent of people didn't even know what the browser was. They're like, "The browser is Google. Yeah, I go to Google." They don't understand it's an application that renders HTML. They don't know that. They have no clue.

It's very easy in this day and age, we get on a phone, we talk, and we know the stuff inside and out. You've got to realize that 92 percent of people out there don't get it. It's easy for Microsoft to go put up a video that shows how great Vista is and how people were snookered into, "Wow, that's the next version of the OS. Look how cool it is. No, it's really Vista." Of those 92 percent of people, you don't think at least 50 percent of those are still going to come in and say, "I want a Vista machine," after seeing that? Of course they are. That's why the hardware vendors don't have a choice.

Microsoft doesn't have to worry. Yes, they want to make good friends with these people, but

I don't know what Google really wants. Basically . . . they're going to throw as much mud against the wall and see what sticks.

ultimately it's the consumers who are coming in and saying, "I want this type of machine, I don't trust that Linux stuff. I don't know anything about that. I don't want to go there. I was told if I go there, I'd better know how to actually get to a command line and work." That's what they still hear.

Gardner: Tony Baer, JP says that the hardware people don't have a choice. Does Google want to give them a choice?

Baer: I don't know what Google really wants. Basically, as Jason and I were saying, they're going to throw as much mud against the wall and see what sticks. I like Jim's metaphor on them being the Xerox PARC for Web 2.0.

If Google were serious, in other words, if they really did have a more of a strategic business plan for this, I would say yes. But, as long as it's just, "Let's just throw something else out there, and by the way, this is not going to come for another 12-18 months," I have a hard time taking this seriously.

Gardner: Brad Shimmin, suppose I'm HP, Dell, or I'm Acer, and I need to sell these $400 netbooks, because that's my only growth area right now and might be for the next two years, before these corporate budgets start growing again. I could sell that thing for $400. Microsoft is going to take $150-200 just for the OS, and Google wants to give a free OS. What am I going to do?

Let the user decide

Shimmin: I would have both of them on there, and let the users make a choice. I'm still thinking about the price tag.

Gardner: For the Microsoft OS.

Shimmin: That's what I'm saying. They want to make a buck and they'll do it the best way they can. If they're getting it free from Google, they'll put it on there as a option, but they'll still pay homage to Microsoft, because, as we've been saying, it has to be. They still have ownership of the desktop.

In my mind, the curious thing about all this is that what's made the iPhone and the BlackBerry so successful is that they're self-contained machines. The OS and the hardware are very tightly controlled and very tightly integrated. What's made the PC and the Windows OS such a pain and so detrimental to productivity is that it's very much the opposite of that.

The Mac -- and I'm a Mac user too by the way -- is that it makes us more productive. The OS

The Mac . . . makes us more productive. The OS doesn't get in the way of the Internet. It actually makes the Internet better.

doesn't get in the way of the Internet. It actually makes the Internet better. It's because it's a controlled environment, but it's really expensive to do the things that way as a company, due to costs in manufacturing.

If Google Chrome is going to go out there the way Android has gone out there, which is, "Let's look for some OEM vendors to make this work and it's going to be based on Linux," I don't ever see it actually doing what the BlackBerry and the iPhone have done in terms of making the 'net better.

I think that it's going to be for those Slashdot folks, who really like that kind of thing and want to make it go. I see this taking a lot longer for the white label stuff to really make things work as well as the closed environments have.

Gardner: Well, I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. I appreciate everyone's input.

We've been talking about the acquisition by Software AG of IDS Scheer, and also the possible impact that the Google Chrome OS could have in the market. It seems most of our people think, that's not such a big deal.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors for the BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition Podcast Series; they are Active Endpoints and TIBCO Software.

I also want to thank this week's panelists, Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks, Jim.

Kobielus: Always a pleasure.

Gardner: How about a little excitement there, Jim?

Kobielus: I am still overstimulated. That's a redundant statement.

Gardner: Are you overstimulated too Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum?

Baer: I really love these podcasts, Dana.

Gardner: Nicely done. Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis.

Shimmin: Still here, and not even caffeinated.

Gardner: Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink, thanks for joining.

Bloomberg: Come to our new SOA and Cloud Governance course.

Gardner: Excellent. JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant. What plug do you have for us JP?

Morgenthal: Until next time.

Gardner: Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and ZDNet and other web property blogger extraordinaire in SOA and BI and all sorts of things, right?

Morgenthal: Call me Joe "not a slave to fashion" McKendrick.

Gardner: Thanks very much. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Download the transcript. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 44 on Software AG's acquisition of IDS Scheer and the implications of the Google Chrome operating system. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

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