Yesterday, I was a juror at a trial about content management. The judge presented the facts of the case, that two companies had lost files that got into the hands of criminals, thus opening up their customers to all sorts of issues, like identity theft and credt card fraud.

The dispute we heard was between the two companies based in the deep south. Allied Claims Processing Services, is a company that processes and stores insurance claims from service providers such as hospitals and pharmacies. Inland Insurance is an insurance company that provides health insurance as well as other things. Inland uses Allied as its claims processor, and Inland sends Allied its paper files for long term storage.

During Hurricaine Katrina, paper files that were stored by Allied, on behalf of Inland, got washed away forever. In the context of the destruction of the entire city of New Orleans, this might seem minor, but there were numerous disputes between the two companies as to how much of the paper got washed away, how well the warehouse had been guarded during the hurricaine, and whether it was possible that some of the files could have been stolen. It was known that some files were certainly compromised, and some credit card and identity theft fraud took place.

And the question was, who is at fault?

Is it the company who was hired to maintain paper files, only to store them and keep them safe and dry? And in the context of a major natural disaster in which significant parts of the warehouse (in which the paper files are stored) are literally washed down the river, is the company still at fault for loss that is incurred beyond the actual paper loss? Or is the company who let the insurance claims information go out of its purview, without proper assurances that the files would be kept safe beyond a shadow of a doubt, liable to its customers for its identity theft and credit card fraud claims?

And here's why I'm not violating the law by talking about it. This all-too-real scenario was not actually a case on the books, but rather a mock trial, put on by IBM and Filenet (an IBM company) and sponsored by HP. The mock trial was presided over by a real judge and two lawyers arguing on behalf of their company clients. Witnesses were called and the case was decided by the jury, the audience.

I'm not going to tell you the outcome of the case, because that's not the point. The point is, that content management needs to be part of an ongoing process management, compliance and risk management strategy. Content management is clearly an essential part of the business process, and safety of documents is a key factor in business success and continuity.

The message of the mock trial was this: What would happen if you lost all your files, paper, digital or otherwise? What would happen if those files got into the hands of someone you don't trust? And... don't you think you'd better have a plan in place to protect yourself from that ever happening?

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Today, Red Hat announced its acquisition of MetaMatrix. Financial details were not disclosed.

In a conference call with analysts and press, Tim Yeaton, Red Hat's senior VP of enterprise solutions, said the company plans to make MetaMatrix's tools fully open sourced and available under an open source license.

Red Hat, an open source solutions provider, acquired JBoss last June, and has been working hard to bring an enterprise class product to the market. But I guess they need a bit more of solid service-oriented data integration technology to provide stability, and therefore announced today this big news along with a larger new enterprise middleware strategy.

Check out the raw news here.

Today, Dennis Byron is blogging on this topic.

Also, Vitria and Red Hat are partnering on SOA platform distribution.

More news as it happens.

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News just came over the wire that French company Cartesis has been acquired by Business Objects. Extremely big news for this space, especially considering the race that pure play BI companies are in to provide a full service solution combining performance management, risk and other key performance analytics for their clients.

From John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects.

"The acquisition of Cartesis will allow us to extend our comprehensive solutions for the office of the CFO by providing critical, cross-application and cross-database line of sight to financial and management reporting, including consolidated statements and budgeting - all on the industry's number one business intelligence platform."

Not to get into a huge fight about which vendor does provide the industry's "number one business intelligence platform," but Cognos does not agree that Business Objects is that provider (surprise, surprise!).

Mychelle Mollot, Cognos' VP of market strategy and strategic communications, said this morning, "Cognos sees Business Objects' acquisition of Cartesis as further acknowledgement that the vision Cognos laid out for customers six years ago - of integrated Performance Management comprised of BI, Planning, Consolidation, and Scorecarding - is the vision that customers want. This acquisition is late to the game as Business Objects must now embark on the long process of rationalizing substantial product overlap, technology and business model differences and integrating Cartesis with their core technology," Mychelle said.

OutlookSoft weighs in: According to CEO Phil Wilmington: "The company [OutlookSoft] has consistently attributed ongoing market consolidation as a sign of the shifting needs of global companies that increasngly require a unified solution that effectively addresses all facets of Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM). Today’s announcement further validates the strength of the PM market, and demonstrates that the direction of Performance Mangement will be driven by application not BI tools. OutlookSoft remains committed to empowering its global customer base to achieve next-generation Performance Management goals and long-term business success."

Andy Hayler, founder of Kalido and author of the blog Andy on Enterprise Software, said the following:

"Not only it is a software company, but the French history of Cartesis should make it an easy cultural fit for Business Objects. With Hyperion disappearing into the maw of Oracle then there were only so many opportunities out there in this space. Business Objects superior sales and marketing should be able to make more of Cartesis than had been done, and strategically this takes Business Objects up-market relative to its core reporting, which makes good sense."

More as it happens...

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Business Intelligence, a totally right now, totally hot topic on ebizQ, now has a home right here!

I am beyond thrilled to tell you that two fantastic, equally good-looking, smart and glittering personality-rich senior-level IT analysts/bloggers, Joe McKendrick and Michael Dortch are leading a team blog on Business Intelligence issues, and you must check it out their most recent entries right now at: http://www.biinaction.com/blog/!

The BI in Action Blog is covering all the topics under the sun to do with Business Intelligence, and we are proud to offer you some of the best resources available on the planet having to do with topics such as BI tools, Business Intelligence/business process convergence, analytics, business activity monitoring, BI/SOA topics, event-driven data monitoring and data integration/EII. And if you have more thoughts on what the blog should cover, feel free to contact me or the almost blisteringly cool blog team at biinactionblog@ebizq.net.

The BI in Action Blog will lead up to the BI in Action Virtual (and free!) conference ebizQ is having in June, which will feature keynote speakers Bill Gassman and Boris Evelson from leading analyst firms Gartner Research and Forrester Research, respectively. Check it all out, and sign up (did I mention it's free, and virtual?) right here.

Next week, we will also debut our BI in Action newsletter, with all the most-talked about BI news, including blog entries, feature articles and podcasts, all in one place, sign up for that newsletter by either going into your ebizQ gold club preferences and tick off BI, or just go here and sign up.

If you are an independent IT analyst covering BI issues and are interested in joining the BI in Action team blog (for money, not just fame), please contact me at editor@ebizq.net.

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Last night, when RIM had a system failure, reportedly cutting off mobile email service to all BlackBerry users in the Western Hemisphere, you can bet I felt it here at ebizQ.

Because I receive a lot of email every day, and because I commute to New Rochelle (37 minutes to and from Manhattan!), I certainly noticed the outage that reportedly started at about 8:15pm Eastern time, and ended sometime this morning, around 10:00am, I think. Ten hours overnight, the New York Times reports.

The outtage was apparently due primarily to a data backlog/system failure, and in this era where data management, integration, backup and recovery really affect our core business dealings, it could have been much worse. This kind of downtime, if it took place during an entire workday, or extended past 24 hours, would have been quite a lot worse.

RIM caught a lot of heat last night and today for not discussing the outtage publicly however, and even now, at 4:30pm, there's nothing on their website that discusses the failure. Following along the line that this is the "data era," it is also the Post-Enron transparency era, and lots of people were quite upset at RIM's lack of palpable response to its user base.

But I guess part of the problem with this situation, and even with the bandwidth problem, is that RIM has done very well lately and is extremely busy dealing with its increasing business, of which reliability is a cornerstone. But, like all large (and not so large) business these days, RIM probably is feeling the heat in terms of junk email. Spam is out of control, as ebizQ's Peter Schooff recently confirmed after he talked to Postini and they told him that spam accounts for something like 95% of all total email. This just goes to show that this kind of thing can happen to any enterprise, anywhere, and we are all potential victims.

According to InfoWorld, the outtage comes at a time of continued rapid growth for RIM:

"It added 1.02 million subscribers in the quarter ended March 3, for a total of approximately 8 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide. Revenue for the quarter was $930.4 million, up 66 percent from a year earlier. Net income for the quarter before adjustments was $187.9 million."

"The rapid subscriber growth, plus the runaway junk e-mail boom, equals a disaster in the making," telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan said in an e-mail analysis [also to InfoWorld]. Networks work fine until they reach their capacity, then all sorts of strange things happen."

I was interviewed about this today, as a CrackBerry user for the New York Times.. The Grey Lady, wow! I told them about how the outtage reminding me of the distant past.... like 2004. I'll link to it if it gets in!

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As you know, I am very interested in Web 2.0 technologies and am watching closely the ideas being batted around by the leaders and visionaries in this space.

To that end, I'd like to strongly recommend the podcast I heard today on PodLeaders, featuring Neville Hobson. It discusses all of the social media and collaboration tools that Neville has been working with, including blogs and podcasts, but also that exciting medium of Second Life that I always get so excited about!

One thing that is fascinating about what Neville has said in his blog recently is in relation to the social media response to the Virginia Tech shootings yesterday. He said that in many ways, facebook and other technologies could have been potentially more responsive and provided more information for students whose lives were at stake that the traditional communication methods utilized by university personnel who are tasked with keeping the students safe.

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Some of you might know that in a previous life, I was a reporter covering the military-industrial complex, and today's news from Appian is right along the lines of the kind of thing I used to write about. Luckily, it's all about enterprise processes, so I can write about it here today too!

Today, Northrop Grumman reported that it had selected Appian to provide business process services to the Army's 'Defense Knowledge Online' program. According to the release, "The task order, with a $267 million ceiling, was awarded under the U.S. Air Force Network-Centric Solutions contract vehicle and is the largest portal task order ever awarded in the federal government."

More from Appian:

"As the key technology provider for the initial Army Knowledge Online (AKO) initiative, Appian is excited by this next stage of implementation as it evolves into DKO to serve the entire Department of Defense,” said Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian. “DKO promises to provide all warfighters with access to the information they need to better do their jobs and complete their missions, and we are actively working to deliver the best possible solution to attain this goal.”

And more info from the release:

Leveraging Appian’s robust platform, DKO will be the single enterprise service portal, serving as the entry point for all U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and authorized users to access DoD and government intranets supporting operations, missions and critical support processes for forces worldwide. DKO will provide relevant information and applications to the warfighter and other government users through a secure service-oriented framework to help them perform their missions more effectively. As the industry’s best-of-breed large-scale knowledge-based portal, Appian’s technology will help enable the DKO enterprise solution to grow from 1.8 million users to possibly eight million users or more, potentially across all federal government agencies.

Here's the link to this news on ebizQ.

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Coming hot on the heels of the Software AG/webMethods deal, we now have "something else entirely!" The IONA buy of LogicBlaze highlights the industry's interest in and need for open source SOA convergence.

Thanks to ebizQ's Gian Trotta, we remember (he remembers!) that last September, we talked to Rob Davies, Logic Blaze's vice president of product development, about FUSE's particular features and the evolving balance between open source and traditional SOA vendors. I know you will immediately want to check it out here!

Dennis Byron, our Open Source blogger and IT Investment Research analyst, has lots to say on this deal. Interestingly enough, it was Dennis' estimate of privately held LogicBlaze of $1 million that was used on the analyst call, which IONA neither confirmed nor denied. Check out Dennis' commentary here.

ebizQ blogger Brenda Michelson also linked to blogger Debbie Moynihan, who works on open source initiatives for IONA. Here's her explanation of the buy and her words welcoming LogicBlaze as an integral part of IONA's Open Source Business.

There will be lots more on this soon.

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Just as the SOA industry stopped reeling from the revelation that Software AG had made plans to acquire webMethods, we were met with more news that IONA was buying LogicBlaze. But let's go one at a time.

ebizQ analysts and friends have had lots to say about the Software AG buy, since it is so squarely in our space and since we've been watching both companies (and their apparently divergent business strategies) for so long.

Our VP Beth Gold-Bernstein said that in light of the Software AG purchase of webMethods, both companies have industry leading next generation technology that has been underappreciated in the market. However, she warns that there are some product overlaps that will have to be reconciled, which are sure to shake things up. Read Beth's analysis here.

Neil Ward-Dutton, on the ebizQ MWD blog, says he was most struck by the fact that the Software AG-webMethods deal was not a behemoth buying a minnow, but just a medium-sized software company buying another medium-sized software company. He also noted "one particular feature of the two companies' income statements which is shared: both companies make more money from software maintenance than they do from selling new product licenses." He points out that the benefit of this buy might be more about the acquisition of customers than about technolody tools. Read Neil's great commentary here.

Sandy Kemsley chalks it all up to competition. Read her always insightful, ever pithy entry here.

Andre Yee, ebizQ's Security Insider blogger, made a few comments because he has some familiarity with Software AG. He sees it as a "bold move," and a clear indication that Germany-based Software AG is staking a claim on the U.S. SOA/BPM marketplace. Read Andre here.

Steve Craggs of Lustratus Research (cohort of our friend Ronan Bradley) goes along the lines of Andre here, indicating that this is the first big foray into SOA for a European vendor. He also does take note that there is lots of product overlap. Steven even goes so far as to suggest that Software AG should take on the webMethods' name. Check out Steve's incisive post here.

I didn't even get to tell you about SOA in Action Blogger/Rock Star Joe McKendrick and this fantastic Tony Baer analysis, because I am in the airport in Amsterdam and can't plug in my laptop, but click on their names to read their pieces. Also, Tony posted a followup last night in response to all of his comments. Here that is.

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