Listen to or download the entire 9:50 podcast below:

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Editor's note: Last week's acquisition of Cognos by IBM continues to fuel discussion about consolidation in the Business Intelligence marketplace, and the large enterprise IT providers now all have a major BI tool in their stack. The following is a transcription of a podcast which discusses this news in the context of the entire market. For questions and comments, and to learn more or participate in ebizQ editorial podcasts, please reach Elizabeth Book at editor@ebizq.net. Participants of this podcast are Beth Gold-Bernstein (BGB); Tony Baer (TB); Michael Dortch (MD); and Marc Andrews (MA.)

BGB: Welcome, everyone, to this ebizQ podcast. I'm Beth Gold-Bernstein, VP of the ebizQ Training Center. With me today on this podcast are Tony Baer, Principle of OnStrategies; Michael Dortch, Senior Analyst at Aberdeen Group and an ebizQ blogger; and Marc Andrews, Program Director of Data Warehousing at IBM. I want to welcome all my panelists. Thank you for joining me.

Today, we're discussing IBM's acquisition of Cognos. Now, Tony Baer pointed out in his excellent blog post, which you can read on our site, ebizQ.net, that barely a month ago, SAP announced that it was buying Business Objects and roughly eight months ago, Oracle announced its acquisition of Hyperion and now, IBM yesterday announced its intention to buy the last independent tier I pure play business intelligence vendor, Cognos.

Now, Tony -- where does this deal place IBM competitively in the market? Is this merely a case of catch-up, or does it give IBM some competitive advantage?

TB: Well, I think the bottom line is that it really fills the hole in the donut for business intelligence for IBM. And that, for the past several years, it seemed that as part of its larger information management strategy that IBM was building a BI strategy, which had everything except BI in it. I mean, originally, IBM had sort of backed into this market with an old OEM deal with Hyperion and back then, we always kept, you know, the conventional wisdom was "Why didn't IBM buy Hyperion?" We're talking about five, six, seven years ago.

To read the rest of this transcript, click here!

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I just threw down a super-cool podcast with our own IT Directions blogger Keith Harrison-Broninski, who doubles as the CTO of UK-based Role Modellers, which is now beta-testing the newest version of HumanEdj, its human-interaction-focused email efficiency tool.

I am actually about to download this thing to use in my own office. It basically promotes efficiency on one's own desktop by organizing it based on the assumption that one might actually need email to accomplish work.

Listen to the podcast here and then DOWNLOAD the free software here. Your employer will thank you!

Listen to or download the entire 9:50 podcast below:

Download file

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There is a complexity in managing "state" in SOA applications, said Oracle's Dave Chapell. Short term SOA is "stateless," if you are building longevity into your SOA, it is "stateful." The more complexity you have, the more "stateful" the SOA.

SOA today requires that people set levels for the state of their SOA, Dave said.

But first, a step back:

What were we supposed to get from SOA?

-- An IT Management paradigm shift

-- Business Agility

-- Flexibility

Dave said an enterprise-class SOA grid provides state-aware continuous availability for serivce-infrastructure, application data and logic.

You need predictable scalability, dramatic overall increase in performance and throughput, and reduced operation cost (less flavors of servers to deploy). An SOA grid provides primary and backup synchronization.

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Why should we invest in SOA, Forrester's Randy Heffner asked?

Randy said (and I have to confirm this) that the SOA adoption rate is 35 to 40 percent for small to medium sized firms and it becomes a higher percentage as the firms get larger.

"Today, SOA is a cost for doing business," Randy said.

You can justify SOA on a strategic level, on a soft money level and on a hard money level.

Foundational (soft money) SOA investments are business sponsored and there is a lot of targeted SOA R&D to build exactly the kind of infrastructure that is needed to optimize the business.

SOA for application integration has more varied costs, from free SOA capabilities of the application platform, like .NET, to custom built SOA repositories and governance monitoriing frameworks, which are likely to result in a 25% reduction in solution cost (hard money).

There's also "pay-as-you-go" optimitzaton (SaaS) that can be deployed, versus packaged applications.

There are also many really important investments needed to attain SOA maturity, such as governance, tooling evaluations, service-delivery lifecycle, service design patterns evaluation and service value measurement.

Some words of wisdom from Randy:

"Remember, SOA is an approach, not the solution. Don't let the tail wag the dog!"

"Focus first on redirected money, for SOA vision and strategy."

"Go as far as you can on solution money. Let the benefits drive more demand. Let the pain drive SOA investment, so you know exactly why you're buying it."

"Be very careful with pure SOA money."

"Don't use lack of funding as an excuse."

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On this crisp Fall day, I'm blogging in Manhattan at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum. Right now, BEA's chief architect Paul Patrick is speaking on how to create a sustaintable SOA infrastructure that will enable simplified, efficient and sustainable innovation. He is working to bring the concepts of "social computing," i.e., Web 2.0, to Web services optimization. He said this is already going on very broadly in a number of industries.

Paul's perspective is that one must build the foundation for continuous change, "...so when, not if, change happens, you're ready for it," he said.

"The reality is we all have a based set of assumptions," Paul said. If we have created a powerful service, and start rolling it out, say in the banking industry, your service is going to get pummeled and your assumptions are shattered, Paul said.

Paul reported that companies have moved beyond the concept adoption phase and are now rolling out SOA in the enterprise. He warns that people are still best suited by evolving their SOA from project to project.

Comcast is one of BEA's customers, and they identified what projects to start building with and went forward with those. Paul said the project-by-project approach involves an "enterprise chassis," which has the SOA initially constructed around the first major project set to deploy.

Paul continued on with some explanations of how process fits into all this. "You can express IT capabilities as business services tied to business processes for flexibility."

He also explained a bit further about how social computing is incorporated into all this. He is saying people are using this "as a way to get closer to their customer. SOA is forming the base foundation for doing this. The SOA remains in charge of the data."

It's a more organic-like thinking, Paul said. "Expand your SOA with a new kind of innovation. Ask yourself, how can I take this social computing which is organically-based and marry it with the standards-based, shared services ecosystems?"

The future, Paul said, indicates that truly global dynamic enterprises are enabled by the fabric that underlies it. "We are already seeing businesses taking advantage of sharing services, like embedding internet services like eBay, so if a company want to sell something but doesn't want to build the underlying infrastructure. This enables for real drag-and-drop enterprise application composition," he said.

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