From an ebizQ feature:

Data has never been more plentiful and available. Unfortunately, having access to data is not the same as effectively using it. Users with the opportunity to analyze more data are often overwhelmed and frustrated by the amount of effort required to make sense of it all. Most organizations today use tools that were developed for much simpler times. These applications fail to present information clearly to business users when there are multiple dimensions of data to integrate into a decision.

Check out this great article. I strongly recommend.

Posted by elizabeth in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is with great pleasure that I share the news that ebizQ has welcomed SaaS Week as a premier partner in its network family. Saas Week is a labor of love for a member of our ebizQ team, and I heartily congratulate Prakash Kannoth on his personal and professional insight into this around-the-curve technology set. With the help of SaaS Week, we are looking forward to bringing the ebizQ reader more news about this fast growing 2.0 industry concept, Software-as-a-Service. SaaS Week can be visited now here.

From the ebizQ release on this subject:

"We recognize that companies like Salesforce.com are starting to permeate the market in terms of providing and securing business agility for companies on an ad-hoc basis," said Les Yeamans, ebizQ president and publisher. "Our research team has been involved with SaaS Week since its inception and with its lead, Jayaprakash Kannoth, and we look forward to welcoming SaaS Week to our ebizQ network," he said.

ebizQ.net is a portal for blogs, webinars, podcasts, news, features, white papers, and virtual conferences. The site includes content from the leading industry analysts and experts. ebizQ events including webinars and virtual conferences provide an interactive interface where visitors and ask questions and interact with other visitors. The ebizQ community is over 100,000 strong. All of ebizQ's content through each of its channels is freely available to subscribers.

Posted by elizabeth in SaaS | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ebizQ's BI in Action virtual conference is today, with a full slate of top speakers from Gartner (Bill Gassman), Forrester (Boris Evelson), and some great panels featuring my favorite ebizQ rock star Joe McKendrick, as well as speakers from Business Objects and Savvion.

I know this is repetitive but....

Recently added panel members: Joining ebizQ's Beth Gold-Bernstein will be Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's BI in Action Blogger; Guy Weismantel from Business Objects and Rob Risany from Savvion. Sign up for that one especially here.

All you have to do is sign up and sign in on Wednesday from the comfort of your own desk. No travel required! It will be great. Don't forget to sign up here!

Posted by elizabeth in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm so excited I just can't hide it. ebizQ's BI in Action virtual conference is Wednesday, with a full day of top speakers from Gartner (Bill Gassman), Forrester (Boris Evelson), and some great panels featuring my favorite ebizQ rock star Joe McKendrick, as well as speakers from Business Objects and Savvion.

Recently added panel members: Joining ebizQ's Beth Gold-Bernstein will be Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's BI in Action Blogger; Guy Weismantel from Business Objects and Rob Risany from Savvion. Sign up for that one especially here.

All you have to do is sign up and sign in on Wednesday from the comfort of your own desk. No travel required! It will be great. Don't forget to sign up here!

Posted by elizabeth in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the Gartner Summit last week, I had the special pleasure of meeting Roberto Medrano, EVP of SOA Software. While he did mention that the company had received a $24.9 Million infusion of capital recently resulting from selling their services business to Zensar in India, what was even more interesting to me was the story of Roberto's life, and how he got to be drinking coffee with me at the Gartner "biosphere" in Nashville.

Long before his rise to prominence in the SOA and Web Services space at SOA Software (which owns the SOA.com domain), Roberto arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico with a pair of jeans, two t-shirts, and his guitar. He worked full time tirelessly to earn enough to go to community college. Then he finished up (with a flourish) and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering at USC. But that's not all. Packing his guitar, he went to MIT to get a Master's in electrical engineering, and then double-backed to L.A. to receive an MBA from UCLA.

He is now a recognized executive in the field of Internet security, as he helped to create the firewall, content security and security policy segments of the security market. Medrano has been an active member on President Bush’s National Security Advisory Committee, National Cyber Security Summit, and the White House National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. He also participated in President Clinton’s White House Security Summit. Medrano has extensive experience with both start-ups and large companies, having been involved at the beginning of four IT industries: EDA, Open Systems, Computer Security and now SOA.

Roberto reports that he doesn't have the jeans and t-shirts anymore, but he did keep the guitar. Read more about Robert Medrano's meteoric rise on SOA Software's bio page here.

Truly, this guy is cool. One of the ones that makes the whole Gartner biosphere worth the trip.

Posted by elizabeth in SOA and Web Services | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a really great meeting with former Sun-ite Joe Keller of Kapow Technologies at last week's Gartner Summit.

Kapow has recently rolled out new editions of its mashup server family, which basically extends its already impressive reach into the Enterprise 2.0 mashup space. Joe explained that basically what Kapow's mashup are able to do is nothing less that turning unstructured data into structured.

He's at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week, as is the mashup friendly Sandy Kemsley (which reminds me, I should put them in touch with each other!), but Joe and I are going to throw down a podcast together on this at our next opportunity.

More from the Gartner Conference as I process the 18 meetings I had over the course of two and a half days in Nashville, during which I spent only our hour in Nashville's music city listening to country music. And that's NOT counting other highlights of shooting the breeze with Peter Mollins from Relativity (the owner of the best Bass speaking voice in the Enterprise 2.0 space, and he's agreed to do some podcast intros for us!), the almost alarmingly smart David Linthicum, and up and coming data layer dude Bob Eve from Composite Software. You'll hear lots more on this soon.

Posted by elizabeth in Enterprise and Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been a bit silent this week, but that's because I'm at Gartner's big yearly SOA pow-wow, the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit. I've been crazy busy with meetings, but I'll blog soon about all the breaking news. I've got some good stuff for you!

Posted by elizabeth in SOA and Web Services | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, IBM announced its intention to purchase Watchfire and I threw down a podcast with the very sharp Mike Weider, Watchfire's founder and CTO. It is also transcribed below for your reading pleasure.

Listen to or download the entire 9:49 podcast below:

Download file

Participants of this podcast are ebizQ editor-in-chief, Elizabeth Book (EB); and Watchfire founder and CTO, Michael Weider (MW.)

EB: Hi, this is Elizabeth Book, editor-in-chief of ebizQ. And this is another ebizQ podcast. Today I am honored with the presence of Mike Weider, who is the CTO and founder of Watchfire, which was recently acquired by Big Blue -- that's right, IBM has purchased Watchfire, or has made a move to purchase Watchfire, I should say. So thank you for being with us, Mike.

MW: Thanks for having me!

EB: Basically, I guess all I want to tell our listeners at the moment is that Mike founded Watchfire 11 years ago in 1996, and this is basically a very exciting move, I think. And you probably had a busy day. You're in this acquisition time. Maybe you're busy a few days. So if you could maybe tell us a little bit about Watchfire and tell us a little bit about, you know, what happened to you during this acquisition time?

MW: Sure! So Watchfire -- as you stated -- has been in business for about 11 years. We were founded in 1996. And really our focus is helping customers to evaluate their online Web sites and applications for problems. And these problems fall into the categories of quality issues that could affect the user experience, privacy and compliance issues that could get them into trouble with regulators, and lastly application security issues.

And I think what IBM and Rational saw through this acquisition was that increasingly we're seeing that security and compliance are becoming an integral part of software development processes. And what we're looking to do with this acquisition and the integration of these technologies is that Rational IBM is really the leader in software development tools and Watchfire is the leader in application security and by combining the two things together, we can help customers to build security into their applications from the start, rather than what exists today where applications are being produced in many times with no security and leading themselves wide open to hackers to exploit these issues to perform identity theft, fraud and other horrible things that we read about every day in the press.

EB: Absolutely. I guess, can you just tell me a little bit more about how you see the integration of security into a larger organization and how you think your work with the other security forces at IBM will be working together. I know that it's a little bit forward-thinking but just any thoughts you could share on that would be excellent.

MW:Sure. So, really the acquisition is being sponsored through the Rational group and that's where Watchfire will be integrated into. In that group, we're really again focused on looking at integrating Watchfire's security technology into Rational's tool set so that developers that are creating applications through from requirements to design to coding to testing to deployment can evaluate these applications for security issues throughout the software development lifecycle so that when they get to the production phase, that we know that these have been properly tested and validated and they can demonstrate compliance and good governance internally and externally.

But secondly, there are other areas outside of the Rational group that are very exciting in terms of the potential synergies that we see here. For one, WebSphere is clearly a huge force in the marketplace and integrating application security with the WebSphere tools will enable again customers to create more secure applications. Thirdly, there's the Tivoli Group, who has a number of security management technologies and by integrating these things together, will provide customers with a broader security metrics and dashboards to really understand their overall security posture.

And then the last one, which I'm pretty excited about, which is the ISS group. Where IBM acquired ISS last year, who has a lot of expertise and market presence in the network security space where they are monitoring systems and infrastructures and Web sites for network vulnerabilities and by combining Watchfire's application security scanning technology with ISS' network security scanning technology, we can really create a Best-of-Breed solution for vulnerability assessment and management.

EB: That does sound exciting! I have to say. And we don't get excited that often here…

MW: (laughs)

EB: But it sounds -- we deal with security every day, not just at work, in our coverage of these technologies but also in our own lives, in our email boxes and in denial of service attacks on ebizQ's Web site for example, as an online magazine.

MW: Sure!

EB: So, we totally get the fact that these are really important things for companies, large and small, and this is an exiting deal. So in terms of security vulnerability testing, if I can confirm this -- you're company really is analyzing Web sites as opposed to networks. Is that correct?

MW: Yes. And in general most of the focus in the past on vulnerability assessment has been scanning networks and IP addresses and infrastructure for security weaknesses, making sure that systems are not unpatched and things like that. And that's definitely an important issue and one that we want to continue to focus on. But we have seen in the last several years is the rise of applications security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are operating at layer seven on the applications that are sitting on top of that network and that infrastructure. And their weakness is in the software applications that hackers are utilizing to exploit these defects and to compromise the applications to get access to sensitive data and other things that they shouldn't have.

So, really, this whole area of application security has been a very fast-growing problem and now accounts for about 75 percent of attacks on the Internet are focused on applications as well as we've seen the two most common application security vulnerabilities, namely java scripting and SQL injection. These have risen very rapidly to be the no. 1 and 2 problems that are reported out there on the Net. So this is an enormous problem that is not really being well-dealt with by many companies, because all of the existing security personnel are really focused on the infrastructure.

Software developers have never been trained on security and so this issue has not been dealt with and is sort of falling through the cracks. So what Watchfire really did very well was to create an automated solution to help customers to mitigate the risk of application security by automating the testing and analysis of these applications for these weaknesses. Basically, we are technology simulate hackers attacking your applications and it's used in the software development process to test the applications and to understand what the weaknesses are. So that these defects can be fixed before the application is allowed to go live.

EB: Okay. And if you could tell me -- I mean, maybe I'll make this the last question, I think we're going a little bit over on time, but I'm resisting the impulse to ask you about, you know, to specifically tell you about my security problems at ebizQ (laughs) and asking you for an assessment. But the last question I want to ask is about your customers. I understand you have 800 customers. And if you could tell us about those customers, whether they're large or small, maybe even what's going to happen to them when IBM completes the acquisition and sort of how you'll continue hopefully to provide the excellent service you're providing to your customers that you are at the moment.

MW: Sure. We have about 800 customers. They fall into verticals that you would assume would interested in security like banking, insurance, various types of financial services, media and entertainment, technology companies, government, organizations, utilities and telecommunications companies. These are the companies that are very concerned. They are adopting ebusiness. And building applications to transact data over the Internet and to interact with their customers and building more sophisticated Web applications and so they're most exposed to these sorts of security vulnerabilities.

They also tend to be some of the larger companies we have, nine of the top ten banks as clients. And a lot of Fortune 500 Global 2000 businesses. But increasingly, this is becoming an issue for companies at, you know, the S&B level. You may be familiar with PCI, that payment card industry standard --

EB: Yes --

MW: -- that MasterCard and Visa and other credit card issuers are pushing. That is basically impacting everybody who collects credit cards, which is almost every company in the world. And so security and applications security are becoming very relevant to all companies of different sizes and shapes. You know, our strategy through this acquisition will be too really ensure that we don't disrupt any of the great momentum that we have. And we continue to provide great Best-of-Breed security technology to our customers and great service, but that to augment and add to that with IBM's, you know, presence in the marketplace, as well as the added resources they can bring to really scale our business.

And lastly, the technology that we discussed previously that they have to integrate our software with, to provide customers with a bigger, larger solution that's more integrated vs today -- it's really a point tool in the puzzle. But to make this really part and baked in and built into systems.

EB: Well, thank you so much, really for your time today Mike Weider, the CTO and founder of Watchfire, which has been acquired by IBM, International Business Machines, who have bought a number of companies in the last couple of years. And we're very excitedly watching everything that they do here at ebizQ. This has been an ebizQ podcast and thank you for being with me, Mike.

MW: Thank you!

Posted by elizabeth in Podcast | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Listen to or download the entire 9:52 podcast below:

Download file

Regarding this week's Salesforce.com and Google global sales deal, I spoke with David Bradshaw, principle analyst in software at Ovum. What follows is the very interesting transcript of our conversation. Please enjoy.

The participants of this podcast are Elizabeth Book, ebizQ editor-in-chief (EB); and David Bradshaw, Ovum principle analyst, software (DB).

EB: Hi, this is Elizabeth Book and this is another ebizQ podcast. Today I am speaking with David Bradshaw, who is with Ovum, an analyst firm headquartered in London with offices around the world. Thank you for being with us, David.

DB: You're very welcome, Elizabeth.

EB: Basically, David is principal analyst at Ovum, covering software and has quite a good history and a background in the software industry and has been really covering it, I guess for about 17 years. Is that correct?

DB:Yeah, that's about right, yes.

EB: Okay.

DB: Feels like a long time.

EB: Yes. So, basically -- thanks for being with us. And we're talking today about the Google/Salesforce deal that took place. And we wanted to get your thoughts on the announcement, first of all. And I guess maybe we can start there. And have a discussion about what this means for the industry and what this might mean for lead generation and how people work on the internet, etc.

DB: Okay. Well, let's think of the announcement as actually being in two parts, really. First of all, there's the announcement of global partnership between Salesforce and Google. That's linking up two very well-known companies in the Internet. Google, of course, is very well known for its search platform and the advertising revenue that that brings. Salesforce, of course, very well-known for its leadership of the CRM sector, the Software-as-a-Service CRM sector.

Secondly, we got a specific from that partnership. Which is the random convolutedly-named deliverable from the alliance is Salesforce Group Edition Featuring Google Adwords, or let's just call that Group Edition for short. That enables you to use, use keywords accessing Google and connect them to Salesforce. So let's deal with the specifics first, because that's probably the easiest part to figure out. This is a linking up of the Google advertising platform to Salesforce that enables you to put ads on Google using key words and then track the results of those ads all the way through to sales. And this kind of functionality has been available to large enterprises who have been able to build the pieces for themselves.

What the Google and the Salesforce alliance has made possible through the Group Edition is that this is now available to small businesses with the Sphere's Five CRM users. And from my viewpoint, that's a very positive contribution to small businesses. Because Internet advertising is an increasingly important source of leads. But, you have to be able to measure the results, otherwise you could wind up spending a large amount of money and getting nothing out of it. What this enables you to do is to see which key words and which placements have brought you the best results.

EB: In fact, what you said yesterday about advertising budgets always -- people always think that their advertising budget is only working halfway--

DB: Yeah, it's --

EB: -- but they don't know which half is working.

DB: Yes, one of the widest known pieces of wisdom about the advertising market is that half your advertising budget is wasted. You just never know which half is wasted. This improves that situation by improving the measurability. Once of the advantages of using the Internet for advertising is it gets more measurable. You can measure click-throughs from certain sites. You can track those click-throughs to customers. And you can track those interactions into sales. As I said, that's been possible for quite a while. The big companies have got those facilities and now Salesforce and Google are placing those kinds of facilities in the hands of the small companies and small advertisers, too.

EB: Right! And what we talked about yesterday, I think, when I first discussed this deal was that you had a higher view of this as sort of a way of altering the way people use the Internet.

DB: Yes. I think this is definitely helping to move more commerce onto the Internet than has been in the past. The problem for a lot of people is that they have on-premise systems and so on, that they depend on. One of the ultimate aims is to move more businesses into a flexible sourcing environment on the Internet where people play for what they use.

So the problem has been, for a long time, that people are depending on on-premise based software that, particularly for small businesses, produce a lot of burden in terms of support costs and hardware costs and lack of expertise. What's progressively happening in Salesforce is it has certainly contributed to this in large businesses, but it's becoming more possible to run your business life as well as your personal life on the Internet, using Software-as-a-Service to do that. Of course, it's by no means complete. There's still big gaps in the capabilities but that's changing gradually.

Software-as-a-Service makes available sophisticated facilities to businesses of all sizes. Facilities that in the past have often only been available to larger businesses and so it's beginning to help level the playing field between the large businesses that spend many millions of dollars building sophisticated systems as they need it and the smaller businesses that don't have budgets and nothing like that size. And it also is helping the controllability of costs, by allowing you to only pay for what you need and what you use.

EB: Right. So this is a Software-as-a-Service concept and it's also a Web services concept, where in general, ebizQ has been covering for many years service-oriented architecture and using the Web as a way to produce reusable services for a client. And, as you said, this kind of benefit has really only been available to large companies. So with sort of Software-as-a-Service and pay-as-you-go pricing, it's kind of changing the way people could possibly utilize the Internet for business. And utilize Web services for businesses.

DB: Yes. Services-oriented architecture is by and large, very much the way that people have built the Software-as-a-Service offering that that they have online. So as well as getting the raw functionality out of the software that you are using online, the Software-as-a-Service, you also have potential to connect together that functionality with other vendors functionality comparatively easily. I have to say. Services-oriented architecture doesn't solve all the problems but it certainly removes a good few of them.

And one of the areas of opportunity is for the many smaller players, particularly in the ecosystems of both Google and Salesforce.com to offer products at relatively low cost and in some cases, no cost. But help join together useful functionality into usable chunks for users of all sizes.

EB: One other question that I had, and maybe I will make this the last question for you today, and that is with the -- I think it's called AppExchange portion of Salesforce which I don't know too much about. And this is somehow connected to SOA, I believe. Or for SOA users? Is that correct?

DB: Well! The AppExchange is connected to Salesforce.com at the moment in that a vast majority of applications on the AppExchange are ones that Salesforce users could use to enhance their CRM capability. For example, I was looking on the AppExchange itself just a few minutes ago and what you find there is not just the applications being listed. But you find people's comments on those applications. And believe me -- some of them are very forthright! If an application doesn't work for somebody, they say so! And they make no bones about it.

On the other hand, if the application works well for them and works with their Salesforce implementation, they will say that too. So it makes a very good place for people to go and look and buy applications. Now, Salesforce is extending the capability to use applications that you don't have to be a Salesforce.com user to buy. They have what they call now their platform editions of Salesforce.com, they recently launched. So in the future, you will be able to become a Salesforce.com subscriber and basically get the infrastructure you need to run any of the applications on the AppExchange that aren't connected to Salesforce.com.

EB: So the AppExchange is not the platform for the Enterprise users.

DB: No. The platform is called Apex.

EB: Oh, thank you! Okay.

DB: Salesforce has done some name changes over the past year or so to try to clarify this. Because they used to call everything every thing the AppExchange. It used to be the platform as well as the marketplace.

EB: Oh, okay.

DB: And it is also a development language called Apex code involved in this too. So, what you have increasingly, is an on-demand platform built by Salesforce that started out as a CRM-only platform. And then the extension came along with partners and now most recently, Salesforce is saying "Well, let's open up the platform to anybody, to use it to build their own applications or buy applications from our partners and run them on this on-demand platform."

EB: All right! Well, I think that's about all the time we have with you today, David. I want to thank you so much for your time. David Bradshaw, principal analyst for software at Ovum, based in London. And this has been an ebizQ podcast. Thank you, David.

Posted by elizabeth in Podcast | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Watchfire is a leading provider of web application security and compliance testing solutions. IBM Rational software provides clients with comprehensive software quality management solutions, including the ability to perform functional and performance tests while developing software. With the addition of Watchfire technology, customers will now be able to include security, compliance and quality testing as part of their web application development, which will ensure the business integrity of their applications before they go live. Watchfire technology will also complement existing IBM Tivoli identity, access and compliance management software offerings and ISS by extending security and compliance testing as an integrated element of the application development lifecycle.

Watchfire’s operations will become part of IBM’s Rational software brand, which produced double-digit revenue growth in the first quarter of 2007.

“Web application attacks can expose high-value data such as personal information, customer records and corporate intellectual property, and these attacks are top-of-mind for companies worldwide,” said Peter McKay, Watchfire President & CEO. “Watchfire technology will extend IBM's broad security and compliance product and services offerings to help customers address one of today's most critical and challenging security issues. In addition, Watchfire can seamlessly integrate into IBM's current offerings to provide a more comprehensive solution.”

More as I get it. Will attempt to schedule a podcast with Watchfire's Peter McKay.

Posted by elizabeth in M&A | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just got off the horn with David Bradshaw, principle analyst at Ovum, an analyst firm headquartered in London with offices around the world. Ovum specializes in the software, IT and telcom space.

David was briefed by the powers that be and shared some comments with me on today's global alliance announcement between Google and Salesforce.com.

David explained that the excitement is mixed with a higher degree of anticipation because of the relative position of the two companies in the global marketplace. "The predominent company in the consumer space (though Google is by no means only a consumer company) is linking up with the predominant company in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) space," he said.

"Two strong forces in their separate domains are linking up and aligning themselves together and generating new stuff out of that. A higher view of that is moving lives, the way people work, further online and away from on-premises-type software. The truth of it is, the current state of affairs is very much governed by on-premises, on your computer. And this deal seeks to change that."

David made some additional comments on the first product announcement made by the alliance:

The first fruits of this alliance is an 'edition' of salesforce.com called 'Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google Adwords' (SGEFGA?) that enables its users to make use of keyword ads in Google. From within salesforce, you can bid for keywords in Google and set your budget. Salesforce will automatically generate the HTML for a 'landing page' on your website, so that when a prospective customer arrives on the landing page, it asks them for their details and automatically generates a sales lead in salesforce.com. Additionally, you can track the results for each keyword you have bought in Google via a new dashboard (one of three dashboards added in SGEFGA). This capability comes from Keiden, a company that salesforce bought last year.

SGEFGA replaces salesforce's Team Edition (normal price is $995 per year for five users). All existing Team Edition users gained the functionality in SGEFGA from this morning. The normal price is $1,200/year (UK and European prices have not been set yet), but there is an initial promotional price for new users of $600 per year, including a $50 Adwords promotional credit. Users of Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited editions of salesforce can get the same functionality for free from the AppExchange.

Posted by elizabeth in SaaS | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)