I find it interesting that two of our ebizQ bloggers, Michael Dortch and James Taylor, both are writing about BI in the context of BPM this week.

Michael also contributed a feature to the ebizQ-RFG analyst corner about BI and BPM, called BI in BPM: Business Knowledge Management. I recommend you check it out, here.

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ebizQ blogger Dennis Byron let me know in advance yesterday of a bunch of excitement going down in the Open Source world today. For all those people not sure why Open Source is such a big deal, read this now!

The Free Software Foundation basically announced that the new version of its general public license will go through an additional review process before being released. You can read all about it from Dennis here.

The blog seekingalpha.com reported some stuff from Reuters about it yesterday, but Dennis commented on that blog and then on his own, that there were inaccuracies rife in that particular announcement.

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Jon Pyke of the Process Factory and the Workflow Management Coalition has a great article out on ebizQ right now, about the XPDL Standard as the "silent workhorse of BPM." I've had lots of comments on it, so make sure to check it out. Get it here!

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Thanks to Sara Kaufman for this information.

Jan Dawson, VP of the U.S. Enterprise Practice at Ovum, who closely follows Cisco, sees this move as the latest front in the war between Cisco and Microsoft over Unified Communications, following last week's announcements by both companies at VoiceCon about enhancements to their UC portfolios. “This announcement allows Cisco to leapfrog into first place in the web conferencing space, ahead of Microsoft in the second spot.” Web conferencing and collaboration are going to be increasingly important elements of unified communications in the future, and close integration between these and other forms of communication will be key to allow enterprise end users to collaborate effectively with their colleagues, partners and clients.

The acquisition also has important implications for service providers. “Recent Ovum research reveals that many providers offering web conferencing are partnering with WebEx to deliver these solutions, but are considering moving to other partners such as Microsoft. Cisco will want to secure these relationships on the carrier side as well as building up WebEx's presence in the enterprise and internationally,” says Dawson.

Here's my other entry on the topic.

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Today, it was reported that Cisco has purchased WebEx.

This is clearly a very interesting development, and part of Cisco's "Web 3.0" collaboration strategy, which also smacks of kinds of things Microsoft's Jeff Raikes was saying yesterday about their acquisition of Tellme. I caught an interview of Raikes on Bloomberg TV, and he said some of things there that he said in this article. Microsoft will certainly not be thrilled to know that a web conferencing leader will be part of Cisco.

From Cisco's Chief Development Officer, Charlie Giancarlo:

Many pundits are trying to define Web 2.0 or even predict Web 3.0. What Web 2.0 means to me is straightforward: Web 2.0 technologies allow users to collaborate directly over the open platform of the Internet …collaborating with video, voice and information 24 hours a day, 24 time zones around the world. Web 2.0 is perhaps most evident in the consumer marketplace with social networking sites, mash-ups and video sharing services. This is the “play” part of Web 2.0.

But this collaborative technology will make huge advances in the business effectiveness with online collaborative tools like WebEx’s. WebEx was one of the early leaders in this market and remains a leader 10 years later, making intercompany collaboration accessible and easy for their customers.

Here is more from the news@cisco blog.

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I said I would expand on what I said earlier about Business Objects. If you were to ask Paul Clark, director of Business Objects ' corporate product marketing, you would think that Business Objects just hates all this acquisition talk. He told me that Business Objects prides itself on its independence, and has no plans to be taken over, not by anyone. No way, no how.

That is not to say that Business Objects isn't partnering heavily with IBM. And you can "learn more about Business Objects solutions from IBM," here. It is nice to see companies partnering so well together, just like kids on a playground.

The fascinating thing is, the more Business Objects protests that it is an independent company that is not interested in being acquired, the more its stock rises on the NASDAQ. And please note, while I heard a lot of buzz on this the week before last, when Oracle bought Hyperion, no less than ten people told me at the Gartner BI Summit that Business Objects is an acquisition target of IBM, though Paul Walker and my contacts at IBM have vociferously denied this.

My question is, if IBM doesn't buy Business Objects, who will get there first?

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John Brkopac, techical product marketing director for Hyperion, explained the attributes of Hyperion's System 9 BI+ offering.

John said that the BI+ offering is the "broadest BI offering on the marketplace. Most companies are happy to just get a report distributed to their audience, but [BI+] offers an interactive BI reporting module, an ad hoc BI environment to change columns or add more sophisticated calculations, for example."

This kind of BI tool can add value to a company by being able to calculate things like profitability, John added. "You can look at revenue, expenses, products, overhead, and use those layers of complexity to determine the company's future growth potential," John said.

Without using business intelligence tools such as these, companies can lose money. "Sometimes the highest revenue-generating customers are the least profitable," John reported.

While the jury is certainly still out on what's going to happen with the Oracle-Hyperion buy, there's no shortage of people talking about it, including Gartner's Nigel Rayner, who discussed it in a session at the Summit. I'll try to reprint some of his analysis about it, but in the meantime, check out AMR's Bruce Richardson on it on ebizQ today.

Incidently, Hyperion's John said, "no comment," when I asked him to say something, anything, about the acquisition. At least he smiled when he totally shut me down.

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I met with Jim Hare, Celequest's VP for business development (who, like me, is a veteran of the military-industrial complex!), to chat about what's been going on with Celequest since it was acquired by Cognos in January of this year. Celequest specializes in streaming data stores, to manage real-time process-related data, intelligently.

Jim said that Celequest has morphed from a business activity monintoring vendor to a BI vendor with its operational dashboards, "that let decision-makers continuously monitor performance, analyze exceptions, and take corrective action for immediate impact."

When ebizQ reported on the Cognos acquisition news just about two months ago, we didn't know too much about Celequest, except that we had interfaced a bit with Celequest's founder, president and CEO Diaz Nesamoney, and chatted with him briefly. We published a feature he wrote in December, which makes the case for real-time dashboards. Read it here.

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Still here in inexplicably sunny Chicago (65 degrees!) at the Gartner BI Summit, and my last blog entry of the day is about the SAP representatives I just spoke with (Don't worry, I'll blog more later or tomorrow about some of the other great meetings I had).

SAP has been working for the last 30 years on developing a process-centric approach for providing the right kind of intelligence to the right people at the right time, and SAP is the fastest growing vendor in the BI space right now, said Lothar Schubert, director of SAP's Netweaver product marketing.

SAP senior vice president Nimish Mehta talked about how SAP seeks to infuse business processes with the intelligence provided by analytics, "to convert these tools into useful insight into the business," he said. An example of this is that SAP can "write software that manages the customer engagement process and then provide exactly the right kind of analytics that support that," Mehta said.

Mindy Fiorentino, SAP's vice president for analytics and performance management, also told me about SAP's extremely recent February acquisition of Pilot Software, which ebizQ covered in our news section. Mindy reported that SAP intends to integrate Pilot Software’s core product, the business analytic application PilotWorks, into its suite of business software products that run on the NetWeaver integration platform. We look forward to hearing more about this exciting product suite, which is rated in the top four of all BI platforms according to Gartner.

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Today I met with Marc Andrews, IBM's program director for data warehousing, about his company's announcement today regarding its new generation strategy of data warehousing.

The annoucement has four parts:

First, IBM plans to provide access to aggregated, clensed data in real time, in the context of business processes. Second, IBM is bringing the analytics capability directly to the warehouse, inside the application, tightly integrated, with analytics, basically providing an analytics-as-a-service feature, Marc said. Third, the strategy seeks to incorporate all types of data into the warehouse, including unstructured data. And fourth, IBM seeks to provide an integrated set of technologies "to support integration on demand, delivered on top of SOA, making BI part of the SOA stack," Marc said.

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I met with Actuate's Nobby Akiha here at the Gartner BI Summit, and I was particularly impressed with how his company entered the BI space simply from the reporting side of the application development paradigm. He said that the goal was to bring information together to make it easily digestible to the end-user. "...to make the information easy to use, easy to grasp and easy to start working with," Nobby said.

Actuate acquired a company about a year ago called PeformanceSoft, and Nobby explained that the Actuate Performancesoft Suite helps high-performing organizations drive strategy at all levels, improve decision making, and ensure better operational performance and execution. Actuate has also been working with IBM's SOA group since late 2006 on its sets of BI initiatives, Nobby added.

Nobby also said that Actuate has been working on Eclipse-based Open Source Business Intelligence tool – "making significant contributions to the Eclipse Foundation’s BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project, integrating BIRT technology within its own product line to deliver added value to users of BIRT and bringing the innovations of Open Source to the BI industry."

As that tool reaches its 1 millionth download within the next couple of months, I asked Nobby if I could follow up with him on it and do another interview then, possibly with Dennis Byron, ebizQ's Open Source blogger and principle analyst at IT Investment Research.

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At the Hyatt Regency where the Gartner BI Summit is being held today, there's a lot of chatter going on about how to define business intelligence. The answer you get, of course, depends on which vendor you're speaking to.

But when I spoke to Paul Clark, director of corporate product marketing for Business Objects, he said that he was particularly pleased that Garter itself has started to talk in sessions and analysis about business intelligence in three parts, in the same way that Business Objects has been thinking for years, Paul said.

The three parts of business intelligence are 1) enterprise performance management, 2) information discovery and delivery and 3) enterprise information management.

Paul said that Business Objects is the only company that offers a best-of-breed offering on all three parts of that stack.

More on this later.

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At the Gartner BI Summit, I met with representatives from Kalido, a vendor which sits squarely in the analytical (versus operational) master data management space. Kalido's goal is to recognize data, map it, and then provide it to business users, said John Evans, the company's director of product marketing.

A few weeks ago, we covered Kalido's release of their third generation MDM solution, which seeks to bring the market a comprehensive, subject-independent, scalable master data management solution.

Brian Hartlen, Kalido's VP of Marketing, told me that Kalido's MDM product, as well as the company itself, was developed entirely as a result of a IT project to create a data warehousing tool for Shell (Royal Dutch/Shell Group).

I read in DM Review magazine that Shell was using Business Objects' business intelligence reporting tools, but they could not find a data warehouse application to provide global views of performance from the multiple systems for BI reporting.

So they decided to build their own data warehouse solution, and Kalido was formed as a result of the product that was created during this project, said Hartlen.

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I'm here in sunny Chicago (yes, it really is sunny!) at the Gartner BI Summit, and just met with Phil Wilmington, the CEO of OutlookSoft, to hear his company's latest news, a debut of a unified application platform for BI. Phil discussed in a bit more detail the news that we reported this morning. The platform is called OutlookSoft BPF Marketplace.

Phil said the product's main attribute is its ability to align financial and operational activities with business performance objectives, using Business Process Flows. "OutlookSoft provides not only the business process, but all the associated tools required to manage and execute the process for optimum performance in one unified application platform," this morning's release said.

Phil explained a bit more: "BPFs support real application intelligence, and with them we are setting the new industry standard for how to best achieve a shared business goal. OutlookSoft BPF Marketplace is the benchmark for the way enterprise software must operate to be truly successful in today’s environment – collaborative, accessible, and agile," he said.

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It's time for the Gartner BI Summit in lovely and chilly Chicago. I've got a jam-packed schedule of interviews and meetings with some real players in the business integration space, which include (but is certainly not limited to) SAP, Cognos, iDashboard, Hyperion, DatAllegro,Teksouth, iNetSoft, OutlookSoft, Kalido, Golden Gate, SAS, Business Objects, Information Builders, and Cartesis. And ooops, one more! LogiXML!

I'm confirming other meetings too, so if anyone is going to be there and wants to chat about business intelligence and get some coverage on ebizQ, then let's meet up.

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The BPM in Action panel today on Human-Centric collaborative processes is the first one to have engaged a fictional character as a speaker. That's right, Dr. Jeffrey Sterllings, is a "mildly eccentric IT and management guru," who happens to be the main character of The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage, a book written by BPM-Blogger Kiran Garimella.

The panel discussion will focus on the differences and similarities among different types of process. How many tools does a company need? Tune in to this panel discussion and learn how to evaluate what you need in a BPM solution. Led by ebizQ's own Beth Gold-Bernstein, and featuring additional appearances by Dr. Bruce Silver, IBM's Stephanie Wilkinson and Global 360's Steve MacDonald.

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Jump in on BPM in Action now to talk about business activity monitoring as a way to secure your business process management system!

The description:

Starting out in BPM can be a daunting task. Over the years the BPM community has been reciting the mantra of "model to measure, and measure to improve", but how do you break into the process improvement lifecycle? Where do you start? Where is the biggest and fastest return going to be? It's not feasible to begin BPM by modeling all of your business processes, but the data you need in order to start is spread across your functional silos. Hear how a webMethods' customer used webMethods Fabric to measure their business processes before they modeled them. Measuring first allowed them to identify the most significant day-to-day problems, discover and analyze their root cause and implement an improvement plan.

In addition, Matt Green of webMethods, will take a look at the role that BAM plays in focusing the initial stages of your BPM implementation and how utilizing the right approach to the process improvement lifecycle can deliver a much faster return with lower associated risks.

Listen or replay here!

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Don't miss the most 'unplugged' panel of the BPM in Action Virtual Conference.

As Column 2's practically legendary blogger Sandy said yesterday:

"We are doing this live on the air with no script and no slides, and the speakers only have a rough idea of the topics that I want to cover, so tune in for some spontaneous talk about where BPM is headed in this strange new world of Enterprise 2.0."

Sure to be exciting. Sign up here!

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The 'always lucid, never stupid,' Tony Baer of OnStrategies offers his view on the Oracle acquisition of Hyperion that took place last week. It's a pleasure for ebizQ to offer it to you here.

Tony's thoughts seem to agree with a shared assessment from Cognos, OutlookSoft, SAS and Cartesis, the gaggle of vendors I spoke with last week.

It seems like absolutely everyone thinks that an IBM buy of Cognos or Business Objects is imminent.

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Tomorrow is the culmination of months of preparation by ebizQ and our partners, to bring together the best and the brightest stars of the BPM landscape at the BPM in Action Virtual Conference.

This means you! We include our readers as part of the BPM galaxy. This is because our virtual conference interface is active AND interactive. As a participant, you will be able to chat with speakers and vendor reps just like you would at a regular conference, except you won't have to wait in line at the airport or rush to catch a cab, or whatever. In fact, you will be able to experience all of BPM in Action from the comfort of your own desk.

BPM in Action follows up on last year's enormously successful SOA in Action show.

Keynote speakers include Forrester's Ken Vollmer (register here,) and Gartner's Janelle Hill (register here).

Also, don't miss the incomparable Column 2 blogger Sandy Kemsley, with her own self-selected panel about BPM and Enterprise 2.0.

A special thanks to all our sponsors for making BPM in Action happen. We really appreciate the support of IBM, Global 360, BEA, Ramco and webMethods, and we look forward to chatting with you at this great conference.

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Business Intelligence/Performance Management vendor Hyperion got bought today by Oracle for $3.3 Billion. Did you know 12,000 companies use Hyperion software including 91 of the Fortune 100?

Raw news here.

Meanwhile, several companies, including Cartesis, SAS, Cognos, and OutlookSoft got in touch today to talk about this deal.

"This is good news for Cartesis, however we are concerned for Hyperion's customers," said Crispin Read, Chief Marketing Officer, Cartesis. "Oracle offers alternative products to Hyperion's entire product line. What will the future bring? Which products will make it past Oracle's "fusion” project?

"We have already started to see Hyperion customers switch from Essbase to Microsoft SQL Server and from Hyperion Enterprise to Cartesis Finance. The question is how much this will accelerate.

"Between Oracle CPM, Siebel Business Analytics and Peoplesoft EPM – what will become of Hyperion System 9 Applications?," asked Read.

Russ Cobb, Senior Director of SAS's global marketing and training programs, said that SAS has been preparing for something like this for a long time, and Cobb reported that SAS sees the acquisition as "one of our smaller niche competitors being taken out of the market."

"Everyone had been seeing a shakout coming in the BI space, whether it was going to be IBM/Cognos, IBM/Business Objects, then most recently, Business Objects and Hyperion. The rumors have been flying and we have been expecting consolidation.

"Both from the Oracle press release and our own assessment, this is the Oracle/SAP battle. This is good news for us. We looked at Hyperion as a competitor in the PM space and to a smaller extent in the BI space. So we will see a lot of openings in current sell cycles.

"More good news for us as well is that we are vendor-agnostic when it comes to database or ERP vendors, so we can work with Oracle's and SAP's database/ERP systems and others, and have been for a long time," said Cobb.

Cognos, whose shares fell 64 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $37.47 today (1:28pm EST), is considered a likely takeover candidate for Germany-based SAP. However, Cognos' Les Rechan, the company's COO, put a positive spin on the news. He said that Oracle's intention to acquire Hyperion is "a game-changing event for our market and opens up a tremendous opportunity for Cognos."

"Our customers are benefiting from many of our “first to market” innovations in our applications, mobile solutions and Services Oriented Architecture – all key enablers of the most encompassing Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution in the market, "said Rechan.

"As an independent Performance Management provider, Cognos customers will continue to receive innovation on a rapid and regular basis – that are based on customer and market needs -- that only an independent leader can provide."

OutlookSoft CEO Phil Wilmington also had a few comments on the acquisition today. “This is an obvious business move for Oracle as they are buying up legacy application maintenance bases. However, for the customers of both companies, it’s potentially a bad move since they have no clear product roadmap. It’s going to take Oracle months to figure out a strategic product plan, and years to deliver on an effective one. Oracle has once again created a quagmire for customers— no one knows which products will ultimately survive the acquisition. Hyperion will likely be absorbed into the financial arena of the Oracle suite while other capabilities will simply fade.

“Consolidation is going to continue to happen this year. We view this as a distinct market opportunity for OutlookSoft to show Hyperion customers what’s available to them NOW in terms of Performance Management innovation – not 12 months from now," said Wilmington.

"Moving forward, customers will continue to demand pure-play BPM and not bolt-on pieces of technology, which presents a major opportunity for pure-play vendors in the space. Two big players will no longer dominate the space.”

Yahoo has an interesting article on the acquisition today too, which quotes our analyst partner AMR's Bruce Richardson. It shares some of his excellent analysis of the situation.

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