Stefan Hochuli will regularly respond to any comments posted below.

When you hear the word “dunes,” you probably think of sandy beaches or perhaps someplace like the Saharan desert. But in the e-business world, Dunes is actually a virtualization software vendor and a new entrant to the U.S. market coming from Switzerland.

Dunes co-founder and CTO Stefan Hochuli says the company was looking for something memorable that wasn’t a run-of-the-mill three-letter name and was easy to remember, and dunes offered an interesting metaphor for the virtualization market.

“The dunes are something visually visible, a construct, but they are actually built by millions of grains of sand that need to be assembled to create the dune,” Hochuli explains. “I think this sort of applies to services or virtual services which we try to build tools for. To provide a service, you need to assemble a lot of different components in different orders and ways to create the final service.”

Another aspect is the way that winds constantly shape dunes. Services change from one day or week to the next in much the same manner.

Why companies choose virtualization

Although virtualization as a concept is not new, recent advances are changing the face of IT today, offering new flexibility in allowing companies to create services

“I think what we are trying to do is to create business process information tool that will also change the way people look at business automation today,” Hochuli elaborates. “And that is being able to adapt to rapid changes, conditions, while still providing the benefits of a business process automation tool which is usually reducing time, costs and complexity of using the service.”

How this benefits companies

Hochuli offers an example for how this might benefit a company. If someone new is starting, you need to create an account, introductory service, sign the person into a group, set up an email box, et cetera. The normal way of handling this is to send work orders to the different departments that complete the requests. But virtualization could greatly simplify this process.

“The ideal situation is that the HR person or the secretary at the front desk, could do that,” he says. Allowing a single staff member to enter the name of the person, the starting date in some web front-end page, hit the submit button and then have everything done automatically would greatly simplify the process. “It reduces the complexity so it allows people who are not technical to start those processes, and it allows IT staff to concentrate on more added-values activity than the day-to-day routine of IT administration.”

Deploying virtualization

So how hard is it to deploy that kind of a virtual infrastructure for business process automation?

Dunes hopes to make it easier than ever.

As of the company’s June 25 release, “we now provide the virtual service orchestration platform as a virtual appliance,” Hochuli says. “The effort to put this kind of system in place is reduced to downloading an appliance, starting it and doing maybe five to ten minutes configuration for the envir0.onment-specific configuration and then you're done.”

Easy enough, right?

What’s to come of virtualization

Over the next six months, expect to see the virtualization trend continue, says Hochuli. The technology is becoming more and more mainstream, and companies implementing it are no longer limited to early adopters. Production-grade applications like mail servers and databases are being virtualized alongside testing and development environments.

“I think in the long term, to the contrary of what some analysts think, that the conversion percentage of virtual infrastructure is going to be much higher than what it was predicted,” he says.

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Wikis are a hot thing right now for consumers, as anyone who's ever used Wikipedia knows. You can also add businesses to that list, as evidenced by a Wall Street Journal article that focused on the use of wikis in the enterprise.

The article included quotes from a slew of 'First Look' guests -- MindTouch CEO Ken Liu and Steve Bjorg and the SAP's VP of Community Mark Yolton. Liu and Bjorg detailed at great length how wikis are also playing crucial roles in enterprise integration.

Liu and Bjorg noted how MindTouch recently launched a Web site called WIK.is that aims to provide scalable wikis to consumers and businesses alike. But on the enterprise level, wikis come with their own set of challenges that demand consideration.

Managing Wikis

One concern involved in wikis is that they might lead to undirected collaboration and proliferation of unstructured data. That's a big topic with any new communication technology, says Liu, and wikis fundamentally open communities up and give people a voice -- and that's great, but may call for some adjustments in attitude. Companies will differ greatly in the way they choose to handle it.

"This is a bottoms-up form of communication as opposed to a much more traditional centralized expert driven-down sort of communication," he says.

Bjorg agreed, pointing out that when everyone has a voice, cacophony results if there's no coordination. Companies need to have a common thread for how the wikis are to be used across projects, as is the case for any new tool.

"I think it boils down to this: the wikis for the index information is there. Is it better that you can find information even though sometimes it seems to be not optimally organized, or would you rather have information not available at all to you?" he says.

Horizontal Communication

Wikis have the potential to change corporate communication to a  great degree, similarly to when email first hit the market. Whereas emails tend to just live in a person's inbox, wikis offer the possibility to put information into a central location to revisit in a few weeks or months to see the state of affairs or to polish the information for a project that you're working on.

MindTouch integrates email with wikis, says Liu. "What we've done is to take the main form of corporate communication between people, which is email, and then integrated it with wikis with one click of a button, basically," he explains.

In part, this eliminates some of the multiple point-to-point model of project management, because you can essentially enter a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or similar file and immediately put it into a wiki space for others to access -- almost forming an assembly line of communication.

MindTouch's Deki Virtual Solution

MindTouch's Deki solution was named after the Japanese word for smart or intelligent, and Wiki is Hawaiian for "fast," so Liu felt that the name of the product embodied the spirit of Web 2.0. Deki is an enterprise wiki software solution that works as a virtual appliance to corporate customers.

The interface for Deki is similar to a lightweight word processor in a Web browser with similar icons, along with an Outlook connector, features like page permissions, invitations, and tracking of the entire lifecycle of the document and sharing security permissions.

"It really has all those attributes that make it a collaboration and a repository for people to share documents," said Liu.

Packaging the software as a virtual appliance makes it easier for IT people to deploy it, rather than having to follow a long list of instructions, adds Bjorg. Virtual appliances mean than an IT person can download the software as a single file containing everything, including the operating system, the web server, the SQL database, the indexing engine, and the platform. Updates and upgrades are automatic since the virtual appliance is connected to MindTouch's systems.

Sometimes virtual appliances escape the classic ROI-based IT project model that takes months of calculation and planning before deployment, so some companies are able to go ahead and try applications like MindTouch Deki with minimal planning.

"It takes nothing more than the double-click of the file to basically launch this entire environment on your server," says Bjorg. "There's absolute zero risk of disruption to existing running software because there are no shared parts between the virtual appliance and your physical appliance."

Pricing Model and Updates

MindTouch Deki is free for the first five users, but without support, without the Outlook connector and without software updates.

"If you want to get those things, you have to pay for the full license and we start at $995 for the first five users and then go up from there," says Liu.

Updates are being issued fairly regularly with minor fixes every few weeks and two to three major feature upgrades per year, which are included with the licensed version of the software. So far, market reception is fairly positive.

"We have had hundreds of downloads right now since we've launched the product almost two months ago," says Liu.

Some companies might wonder about the ROI of something like a wiki deployment, but advantages may emerge over time, says Liu. Wikis are a type of management software and may not be compatible with traditional hard dollar ROI calculations, but companies that have deployed them find it saves a lot of time and heartache to be able to find information easily.

"If you want to spend time to document how much time did you save in getting this document, you can guess and do all those calculations," he says. "Nowadays with the fast moving nature of what we have and all the software flying around, I think less and less people are gonna spend time to find out what savings you just made, because you just proved it yourself here."

Rather than focusing on justifying wikis, Bjorg says the right question is how do you justify not having a wiki.

"They're so simple to deploy; they're so useful. Anybody who starts using it, virtually immediately says wow, this makes such a huge difference," he points out. "Any responsible IT manager should be pushing the company to deploy these tools internally. It promotes communication, and it promotes transparency."

Wikis in Five Years

So where will Wikis be in five years? Bjorg says they could evolve in many different directions and foresees that wikis will come together with blogs and forums because they work together well.

"We're already seeing glimpses of that today with mashups and web APIs that are emerging," he says.

Every company should build the best tools that it has set out to build, and MindTouch hopes to build the best wiki tool. Bjorg believes that wikis provide an incredible data mine and will continue to look like they are today but will grow in richness of experience and ease of information retrieval.

"That's where we're going to see tremendous progress still, and that's what's gonna fuel much further adoption of the technology," he predicts.

For much more on the topic – including a case study – listen to the full 29:52 podcast.

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Listen to the entire 22:39 podcast Download file

Many IT companies out there have newfangled, technical sounding names that can often leave you scratching your head and wondering, "is that really a word?" Lombardi Software stands out from the bunch in that it is named after famed football coach Vince Lombardi.

"We've got this notion about coaching people through processes and teamwork, and a lot of people collaborating to get things done," explains Lombardi CTO Phil Gilbert. "There's nobody better to personify that than Vince Lombardi."

In keeping with the football metaphor, Lombardi's initial product was called Teamworks and forms designers and forms were called "coaches." But eventually Gilbert realized that the football metaphor might not carry over well to international markets, where the sport Americans call soccer reigns over the football name domain. Lombardi Software's newest product, which aims to help companies document and map processes across organizations, carries the name Blueprint.

Top-Down Commitment

According to Gilbert, there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace about what BPM is and isn't. He points out that one of Lombardi's biggest Google AdWords hits is "workflow" and that many customers' first experience with BPM is a large workflow project. But there's more to BPM than that.

"Our view is that business process management is a business function and it is something that should be pervasive to your organization," he says. "If you're really going to start viewing your company through the prism of process, this requires top-down commitment."

And there's more to that than just technology. Customers tend to struggle with questions such as how to allocate often scarce resources and how exactly to prioritize what might be a list of 50 projects that might benefit from BPM technology. The prioritization discussion leads to the need for a governance model, and then strategy and top-down thinking come in.

"If you don't do it top-down, if you do it bottom-up -- then you don't really have a scaleable way to ensure that you're doing the right things at the right time," Gilbert says.

How Blueprint Facilitates Planning

Implementation of any solution can be done in a decentralized fashion, but companies need to be able to move through the top-down discussion as quickly and effectively as possible in order to distribute the implementation, says Gilbert. Blueprint aims to aid in that process.

"It helps walk that group of people, senior IT and senior business leadership through that top-down process," he explains. "I'm talking a matter of days and weeks instead of a matter of months and years."

Or, for the football fans, Blueprint would be targeting the company's equivalent of the offensive coordinator up in the box -- the person who surveys the field looking for all the defensive possibilities rather than the ones who implement the plays. Implementation may be decentralized, but it is guided strategically by top-level decision makers.

The Everyday Pains and 'Personal Value Proposition'

You may be thinking that's all fine and good, but what about everyday concerns like documentation and modeling?

Blueprint focuses a lot on aligning the strategic forces in the company in order to have the business conversation, but there's also a strong focus on what Gilbert calls the "personal value proposition." Blueprint has the ability to drive the documentation, to collect process maps to draw to some level of detail, to start diagramming the process, and to collect all of the metadata around all of those process components, answering questions from "who is the process owner?" to "how can I get these inputs and outputs in the language I need?"

Companies tend to already do these things but with numerous disparate and often muddled processes, leading to what Gilbert calls "a confusion of artifacts." With Blueprint, Lombardi wants to make those artifacts centrally accessible, to improve ease of use, and to facilitate collaboration.

"Documentation and just getting the process into one place is important. Making sure that everybody knows where that is and they can get to it and they can use it, is even more important.

Ensuring Collaboration

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