| SearchCRM.com: The average enterprise has 3.2 business intelligence tools from different vendors and 13 BI tools in all — but more is not better. Management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton feels good about paring back to two BI tools, and the four key BI vendors — Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and SAS — are vying to become the single source of choice for BI. Hyperion, the focus of this article, is hoping to win with its tight Microsoft Office integration. | Sponsor: IT Manager Development Series | | Maximize Your IT Management Career
This collection of 10 PDF-format books is packed with real-world advice that will help you realize your full potential as an IT manager. And the bonus IT Manager Toolkit includes 80 Word and Excel tools you can use right away. > Click here to learn more. | SearchWebServices.com: There are still major obstacles to SOA implementation. True interoperability is still out of reach. (Even basic SOAP implementations have small but important differences that cause problems.) People haven't learned how to write contracts or policies — the basic SOA "specifications." There's a significant lack of architects with the right skill set. Standards are too incomplete, too limited or poorly conceived. Companies pick the wrong products. And of course, there are always the political factors. (Free registration required) ebizQ: When business processes are manual, exceptions are no big deal. But when they're automated, exceptions — also known as "problems" — can have a dramatic effect on the cost of doing business. Transactions typically become exceptions due to missing data, erroneous data, system errors or integration problems. Manual fixes to any of the above are time-consuming, and have the potential to introduce new errors. The key insight: Organizations need to admit errors will occur, and plan for them in advance. | | Special Offer: Free White Paper VoIP: Creating a Strategy That Enables Future Voice Applications
Enterprises are discovering that the most critical component to evaluate as it forges a solid VoIP strategy is the underlying architecture of the unified messaging system. The architecture determines system performance, IT overhead, and future application readiness. This informative white paper outlines the architectural components needed to create a foundation for future advanced communications applications. Check it out today! | | | | CIO.com Australia: Much of this material has appeared elsewhere (e.g., Verizon's integration of 25 separate systems to handle its "get customer record" function), but the detail here is richer. There's also a unifying Big Idea: Enterprise IT needs an integration layer. "Get enough services and you can start building a map of the business expressed in technology," which is what an SOA ultimately is. Developers resist the concept, and some CIOs argue that the redundancies SOAs eliminate are not a bad thing. Enterprise Systems: The complicated machinations of the various storage camps — serial-attached SCSI (SAS), serial-ATA II (SATA II) and fibre channel (FC) arrays — are reviewed in this information-packed article about the recent SNW Europe tradeshow. Key insights: SAS arrays will replace FC except in specialized niches. SATA II will have problems, because the standard has been so dumbed-down that virtually any device can claim conformance. Expect FC vendors to exploit the balkanization created by this dumb-down, and throw a wrench into integration efforts. Computerworld New Zealand: Alfresco, led by Documentum co-founder John Newton, is close to releasing an open source platform for enterprise content management (ECM). Unlike other open source ECM offerings, which focus on Web content, Alfresco will handle knowledge bases, management of documents, records and images, and e-mail archiving. One potential market: companies with simple document collaboration needs successfully addressed by Microsoft's SharePoint. Like SharePoint, Alfresco's offering looks like a shared drive — and emulates the Microsoft shared drive protocol. | IT Marketplace | | | | | Tell the IT Business Edge audience of technology decision makers about your product, service, event, or job. Click here to list it in the IT Marketplace! | | 3 QUESTIONS:
New Guidelines from the Liberty Alliance
With Michael Aisenberg, director of Government Relations for VeriSign and chair of the Liberty Alliance Public Policy Expert Group. Liberty recently released business and policy guidelines for deploying federated identity management, a key integration technology that has a direct impact on Web services and service-oriented architectures. Question: Are there still factions when it comes to the technology of federation? Or are we moving beyond that?
Aisenberg: One of the key issues is, how does a technology community that is in the midst of moving from proprietary components to commoditized components adapt itself to the demands from some sectors of its customer community that are already mature and see the technologies as commodities and are looking for price advantages and interoperability, while other sectors are still looking for "gold-plated" solutions, one-offs, or are enamored with the older, proprietary approaches? In the authentication space, we have a blended environment. Security is now where the action is globally, authentication is one of the key elements of security tool-making, and there is a significant trend towards the commoditization of authentication tools. Liberty's existence is a recognition of this trend towards commoditization. Liberty's architecture and specification answer the mail for those who are at that point in their understanding and appetite for authentication tools. But there are still going to be some people who want the gold-plated, one-off solution. Question: Should IT managers concern themselves with these new guidelines, given that they are primarily related to business and legal issues? Do they need to worry about them?
Aisenberg: IT managers need to pay attention to them. I wouldn't say they need to worry about them because the whole point of these guidelines is to relieve all of the customer communities that look at them from worry. Question: What exactly is a "Liberty-enabled" identity or device?
Aisenberg: Anyone logging onto a Liberty-enabled Web site has a "Liberty identity" that allows them to sign on once and then move from site to site within the federated network without having to reenter passwords. So, a Liberty-enabled identity generally refers to Liberty deployments. On the other side of the equation, there may be TVs, cameras, computers and a variety of other devices that support Liberty's identity specifications. These are Liberty implementations. Based on the deployments we are seeing around the world, we expect there will be well over 1 billion Liberty-enabled identities and devices by the end of 2006. | | Also from IT Business Edge: Voice & Data Convergence Voice & Data Convergence examines the strategic and tactical implications of emerging IP telephony technologies, from VoIP services to advanced CRM systems to security considerations. Find out what every IT decision maker should know. Click here to sign up! | By the Numbers
105 percent Increase in spending on hosted CRM from 2003 to 2004, according to AMR Research. $17 billion Anticipated growth in enterprise applications market between 2004 and 2009, according to AMR Research. 36 percent Enterprises actively considering business process management technology, according to a recent Intelligent Enterprise survey. Twenty-four percent were already piloting BPM.
Breaking Headlines
eWEEK: JBoss has extended its JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) with new and enhanced open source software. The addition of Drools, a business rules engine, contributes dynamic processing and intelligent routing of business processes based on SLAs or other business rules. The new JBoss jBPM 3.0 features simplified persistence, extended task management and a pluggable architecture. Coming in early 2006: JBoss Messaging, designed to enhance the SOA capabilities of the JEMS platform. SearchStorage.com: Hurricane Katrina underscored data management issues faced by enterprises every day. The first snafu was a Red Cross oversight, which prevented the organization from posting locator information on some 25,000 victims because it neglected to obtain data release forms along with the data. When at least 20 quickly assembled alternate databases appeared on the Web, they were incompatible. In response, Yahoo built a (semi-successful) tool to enable an integrated search. The biggest lesson: Databases may suddenly need to serve unanticipated purposes. eWEEK: The OASIS standards body has announced a new initiative to define specifications that will help standardize Web services consensus protocols, making it easier for architects to build SOAs. The three protocols are WS-Coordination (which will be completed first), WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity. The interoperability of these three standards has already been demonstrated. Some of the biggest names in enterprise technology are involved, including Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Tibco, webMethods, IBM, Iona, Hitachi and Composite Software. Emerging Trends
GCN: Web services may be behind the larger trend described here, which is thinking about IT performance in terms of business services rather than focusing on independent components. For example, rather than looking separately at the databases, storage arrays and messaging software that comprise an e-mail system, managers could monitor the performance of all these systems in an integrated fashion, to understand how e-mail is working. A number of government organizations, including the General Services Administration, are taking this approach.
internetnews.com: Because of the distributed nature of modern computing, database designers and architects are using the same process as application programmers. Their domains overlap, even at Microsoft. This article provides a hypothetical example that involves applying the business intelligence functionality from SQL Server 2005 to the application layers within Visual Studio to render information for business users. (SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 will be launched Nov. 7.) destinationCRM.com: The release of two major analyst studies plus an important vendor upgrade have elevated master data management (MDM) to buzzword status. MDM essentially addresses the problems business units encounter when they need to share data, e.g., about customers, products and locations. According to IDC, the MDM market will reach $10.4 billion by 2009. AMR Research calls MDM a best practice that should be part of every major IT initiative. A key concept: Data stewardship, which implies sharing, must replace ownership. IT Business Edge: Integrating the Enterprise
| Issue 42, Vol. 3 | | DISCLAIMER: At the time of publication, all links in this e-mail functioned properly. However, since many links point to sites other than itbusinessedge.com, some links may become invalid as time passes. | | This e-mail is sent by: NarrowCast Group, LLC, 124 N.First St., Louisville, KY 40202 | Copyright ©2003-2005 NarrowCast Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Mike Stevens has spent over 20 years as a consultant to technology companies large and small, focusing on enterprise solutions and architectures.
You can reach him at ebusiness@itbusinessedge.com.
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