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Q&A With Vishal Sikka @vsikka

Summary of this morning’s keynote (replay available online within 24 hours):

Have seen “HANA effect” over past 2.5 years, and see HANA is being not just a commercial success for SAP but a change in the landscape for enterprise customers. A key technology to help people do more.
Partnerships with SAS, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Cloud Foundry.
Enterprise cloud and cloud applications.
SuccessFactors Learning products.
1000 startup companies developing products on HANA.
Team of 3 teenagers using HANA Cloud and Lego to build shelf-stacking robots.

Q&A with audience (in person and online):

SAP has always had an excellent technology platform for building applications, used to build their core enterprise applications. HANA is the latest incarnation of that platform, and one that they are now choosing to monetize directly as an application development platform rather than only through the applications. HANA Enterprise Cloud and HANA Cloud Platform are enterprise-strength managed cloud versions of HANA, and HANA One uses AWS for a lower entry point; they’re the same platform as on-premise HANA for cloud or hybrid delivery models. I had a briefing yesterday with Steve Lucas and others from the Platform Solution Group, which covers all of the software tools that can be used to build applications, but not the applications themselves: mobile, analytics, database and technology (middleware), big data, and partners and customers. PSG now generates about half of SAP revenue through a specialist sales force that augments the standard sales force; although obviously selling platforms is more of an IT sell, they are pushing to talk more about the business benefits and verticals that can be built on the platform. In some cases, HANA is being used purely as an application development platform, with little or no data storage.
Clarification on HANA Cloud: HANA Enterprise Cloud is the cloud deployment of their business applications, whereas HANA Cloud Platform is the cloud version of HANA for developing applications.
SAP is all about innovation and looking forward, not just consolidating their acquisitions.
Examples of how SAP is helping their partners to move into their newer innovation solutions: Accenture has a large SuccessFactors practice, for example. I think that the many midrange SIs who have SAP ERP customization as their bread and butter may find it a bit more of a challenge.
Mobile has become a de facto part of their work, hence has a lower profile in the keynotes: it is just assumed to be there. I, for one, welcome this: mobile is a platform that needs to be supported, but let’s just get to the point where we don’t need to talk about it any more. Fiori provides mobile and desktop support for the new UI paradigms.

As with the keynote, too much information to capture live. This session was recorded, and will be available online.

SAP TechEd Day 1 Keynote With @vsikka

Vishal Sikka – head technology geek at SAP – started us off at TechEd with a keynote on the theme of how great technology always serves to augment and amplify us. He discussed examples such as the printing press, Nordic skis and the Rosetta Stone, and ends up with HANA (of course) and how a massively parallel, in-memory columnar database with built-in application services provides a platform for empowering people. All of SAP’s business applications – ERP, CRM, procurement, HR and others – are available on or moving to HANA, stripping out the complexity of the underlying databases and infrastructure without changing the business system functionality. The “HANA effect” also allows for new applications to be built on the platform with much less infrastructure work through the use of the application services built into HANA.

He also discussed their Fiori user interface paradigm and platform which can be used to create better UX on top of the existing ERP, CRM, procurement, HR and other business applications that have formed the core of their business. Sikka drew the architecture as he went along, which was a bit of fun:

He was joined live from Germany by Franz Faerber, who heads up HANA development, who discussed some of the advances in HANA and what is coming next month in version SP7, then Sam Yen joined on stage to demonstrate the HANA developer experience, the Operational Intelligence dashboard that was shown at SAPPHIRE earlier this year as in use at DHL for tracking KPIs in real time, and the HANA Cloud platform developer tools for SuccessFactors. We heard about SAS running on HANA for serious data scientists, HANA on AWS, HANA and Hadoop, and much more.

There’s a lot of information pushing out in the keynote: even if you’re not here, you can watch the keynotes live (and probably watch it recorded after that fact), and there will be some new information coming out at TechEd in Bangalore in six weeks. The Twitter stream is going by too fast to read, with lots of good insights in there, too.

Bernd Leukert came to the stage to highlight how SAP is running their own systems on HANA, and to talk more about building applications, focusing on Fiori for mobile and desktop user interfaces: not just a beautification of the existing screens, but new UX paradigms. Some of the examples that we saw are very tile-based (think Windows 8), but also things like fact sheets for business objects within SAP enterprise systems. He summed up by stating that HANA is for all types of businesses due to a range of platform offerings; my comments on Hasso Plattner’s keynote from SAPPHIRE earlier this year called it the new mainframe (in a good way). We also heard from Dmitri Krakovsky from the SuccessFactors team, and from Nayaki Nayyar about iFlows for connecting cloud solutions.

TechEd is inherently less sales and more education than their SAPPHIRE conference, but there’s a strong sense of selling the concepts of the new technologies to their existing customer and partner base here. At the heart of it, HANA (including HANA cloud) and Fiori are major technology platform refreshes, and the big question is how difficult – and expensive – it will be for an existing SAP customer to migrate to the new platforms. Many SAP implementations, especially the core business suite ERP, are highly customized; this is not a simple matter of upgrading a product and retraining users on new features: it’s a serious refactoring effort. However, it’s more than just a platform upgrade: having vastly faster business systems can radically change how businesses work, since “reporting” is replaced by near-realtime analytics that provide transparency and responsiveness; it also simplifies life for IT due to footprint reduction, new development paradigms and cloud support.

We finished up 30 minutes late and with my brain exploding from all the information. It will definitely take the next two days to absorb all of this and drill down into my points of interest.

Disclosure: SAP is a customer, and they paid my travel expenses to be at this conference. However, what I write here is my own opinion and I have not been financially compensated for it.

Still More Conference Within A Conference: ARIS World

The irrepressible Joerg Klueckmann, Director of Product Marketing for ARIS, hosted the ARIS World session, third in the sub-conferences that I’ve attended here at Innovation World.

Georg Simon, SVP of Product Marketing, discussed some of the drivers for ARIS 9: involving occasional users in processes through social collaboration, shortening the learning curve with a redesigned UI, modernizing the look and feel of the UI with new colors and shapes, lowering the TCO with centralized user and license management, and speeding content retrieval with visual and ad hoc search capabilities. There are new role-specific UI perspectives, allowing users to decide what capabilities that they want to see on their interface (based on what they have been allocated by an administrator). There’s a new flexible metamodel, allowing you to create new object types beyond what is provided in the standard metamodel.

He also briefly mentioned Process Live, which moves this newly re-architected ARIS into the public cloud, and went live yesterday, and discussed their plans to release a mobile ARIS framework, allowing some functionality to be exposed on mobile devices: consuming, collaborating and designing on tablets, and approvals on smartphones as well.

Their recent acquisition, Alfabet, is being integrated with ARIS so that its repository of IT systems can be synchronized with the ARIS process repository for a more complete enterprise architecture view. This allows for handoffs in the UI between activities in an ARIS process model and systems in an Alfabet object model, with direct navigation between them.

Klueckmann gave us a demo of Process Live and how it provides social process improvement in the cloud. This is hardly a market leader – cloud-based process discovery/modeling collaboration started with Lombardi Blueprint (now IBM’s Blueworks Live) around 2007 – but it is definitely significant that a leading BPA player like ARIS is moving into the cloud. They’re also offering a reasonable price point: about $140/month for designers, and less than $6/month for viewers, which you can buy directly on their site with a credit card – and there’s a one-month free trial available. Contrast this with Blueworks Live, where an editor is $50/month, a contributor (who can comment) is $10/month, and a viewer is $2/month (but has to be purchased in multiples of 1,000): considerably more expensive for the designer, but likely much more functionality since it brings much of the ARIS functionality to the cloud.

Process Live offers three templates for create new project databases, ranging from a simple one with four model types, to the full-on professional one with 74 model types. Process Live doesn’t provide the full functionality of ARIS 9: it lacks direct support from Software AG, instead relying on community support; it is missing a number of advanced modeling and analysis features; and can’t be customized since it’s multi-tenanted cloud. You can check out some of their video tutorials for more information on how it works. Data is stored on the Amazon public cloud, which might offer challenges for those who don’t want to include the NSA as a collaborator.

We heard from Fabian Erbach of Litmus Group, a large consulting organization using Process Live with their customers. For them, the cloud aspect is key since it reduces the setup time by eliminating installation and providing pre-defined templates for initiating projects; furthermore, the social aspects promote engagement with business users, especially occasional ones. Since it’s accessible on mobile (although not officially supported), it is becoming ubiquitous rather than just a tool for BPM specialists. The price point and self-provisioning makes it attractive for companies to try it out without having to go through a software purchasing cycle.

ARIS World ended with a panel of three ARIS customers plus audience participation, mostly discussing future features that customers would like to have in ARIS as well as Process Live. This took on the feel of a user group meeting, which offered a great forum for feedback from actual users, although I missed a lot of the nuances since I’m not a regular ARIS user. Key topics included the redesigned ARIS 9 UI, and the distinction between ARIS and Process Live capabilities.

OpenText Acquires Cordys And Assure Platform For Cloud-Based Smart Process Apps

I had a briefing two weeks ago with OpenText about their acquisition of Cordys, an interesting move considering their acquisition just a few weeks before that of ICCM, a partner company that created the Assure platform on top of OpenText’s MBPM (hat tip to Neil Ward-Dutton for tying together these two acquisitions). This provides them with two important pillars in their strategy:

A robust cloud platform. Although OpenText Cloud existed, it wasn’t what you’d call industrial strength and it was more of an infrastructure platform: it wasn’t fully multi-tenant, and it’s not clear that they had the skills internally to build out the functionality into a competitive solution-oriented platform as a service (PaaS). Cordys, in spite of being a relative unknown, has a strong cloud and PaaS heritage. They also bring other parts of the infrastructure that are missing or deficient in OpenText – including a rapid application development framework, ESB, rules, analytics and MDM – which should accelerate their time to market for a full cloud offering, as well as benefit the on-premise platform.
A “Smart Process Application factory” for creating vertical process-centric applications. OpenText first announced Assure almost a year ago as a development platform, plus their initial Assure HR application built on the platform, and have since released (or at least announced on their product pages) customer service, ITSM and insurance client management apps on Assure as well. Now, presumably, they own all of the underlying intellectual property so are free to port it to other platforms.

They have immediate plans (for release near the beginning of 2014) for bringing things together, at least on the surface: they are porting Assure to Cordys so that the same development platform and vertical applications are available there as on MBPM, which gives them greatly improved cloud functionality, and will create additional smart process applications along the way. Effectively, they are using Assure as a technology abstraction layer: not only will the user experience be the same regardless of the underlying BPM platform, the Assure application developer experience will also be the same across platforms, although obviously there’s completely different technology under the covers.

There are some obvious issues with this. In spite of OpenText CEO’s claim that this is a “single platform”, it’s not. OpenText was still working out the Metastorm/Global360 picture from earlier acquisitions, and now have the Cordys platform thrown into the mix. In 2011, when IBM pulled Lombardi, WPS and a few other bits and pieces into IBM BPM, some of us called them out for the fact that although it was presented as a single platform, there were still multiple engines with some degree of overlapping functionality. IBM’s response, and I’m sure OpenText would line up behind this, is that it doesn’t matter as long as it’s integrated “at the glass”, that is, there’s a common user interface for business users and potentially some more technical functions. As someone who has designed and written a lot of code in the past, I see a fundamental flaw with that logic: in general, more engines means more code, which means more maintenance, which means less innovation. Hence, I consider refactoring redundant engines into a single back-end as well as a common UI to be critical for growth. Getting Assure in place quickly as a technology abstraction layer will definitely help OpenText along this route, although primarily for existing Assure customers and new customers for whom Assure will be the primary OpenText application development environment; existing MBPM and OpenText customers will likely need to consider porting their applications to the Assure platform at some point in order to get on the main upgrade bandwagon.

Following the Cordys announcement, Gartner released their analysis that casts doubts on whether OpenText can bring together the acquisitions into a coherently unified strategy. Aside from the stunningly obvious point in the summary, “If OpenText’s BPM suites do not fully meet your needs, evaluate other providers” (when is that not true for any vendor/product?), they see that this just makes the OpenText landscape more complex, and goes so far as to wave off prospective customers. As one person who passed on this link said: ouch.

Disclosure: OpenText has been a customer in the past for which I have created white papers, the most recent of which was “Thinking Beyond Traditional BPM” (and a related webinar). I was not compensated in any way for my recent briefing nor for writing this blog post.

SAPPHIRENOW Vishal Sikka Keynote – HANA For Speed, Fiori For Usability

Vishal Sikka, who leads technology and innovation at SAP, followed Hasso Platner onto the keynote stage; I decided to break the post and publish just Plattner’s portion since my commentary was getting bit long.

Sikka also started his part of the keynote with HANA, and highlighted some customer case studies from their “10,000 Club”, where operations are more than 10,000 times faster when moved to HANA, plus one customer with an operation that runs 1 million times faster on HANA. He talked about how imperatives for innovation are equal parts math and design: it has to be fast, but it also has to solve business problems. HANA provides the speed and some amount of the problem-solving, but really good user experience design has to be part of the equation. To that end, SAP is launching Fiori, a collection of 25 easy-to-use applications for the most common SAP ERP and data warehouse functions, supported on phone, tablet and desktop platforms with a single code base. Although this doesn’t replace the 1000’s of existing screens, it can likely replace the old screens for many user personas. As part of the development of Fiori, they partnered with Google and optimized the applications for Chrome, which is a pretty bold move. They’ve also introduced a lot of new forms of data visualization, replacing mundane list-style reports with more fluid forms that are more common on specialized data visualization platforms such as Spotfire.

Fiori doesn’t depend on HANA (although you can imagine the potential for HANA analytics with Fiori visualization), but can be purchased directly from the HANA Marketplace. You can find out more about SAP’s UX development, including Fiori, on their user experience community site.

Returning to HANA, and to highlight that HANA is also a platform for non-SAP applications, Sikka showed some of the third-party analytics applications developed by other companies on the HANA platform, including eBay and Adobe. There are over 300 companies developing applications on HANA, many addressing specific vertical industries.

That’s it for me from SAPPHIRE NOW 2013 — there’s a press Q&A with Plattner and Sikka coming up, but I need to head for the airport so I will catch it online. As a reminder, you can see all of the recorded video (as well as some remaining live streams today) from the conference here.

SAPPHIRENOW Hasso Plattner Keynote – Is HANA The New Mainframe (In A Good Way)?

It’s the last day of SAP’s enormous SAPPHIRE NOW 2013 conference here in Orlando, and the day opens with Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP who still holds a role in defining technology strategy. As expected, he starts with HANA and cloud. He got a good laugh from the audience when saying that HANA is there to radically speed some of the very slow bits in SAP’s ERP software, such as overnight process, he stated apologetically “I had no idea that we had software that took longer than 24 hours to run. You should have sent me an email.” He also discussed cloud architectures, specifically multi-tenancy versus dedicated instances, and said that although many large businesses didn’t want to share instances with anyone else for privacy and competitive reasons, multi-tenancy becomes less important when everything is in memory. They have three different cloud architectures to deal with all scenarios: HANA One on Amazon AWS, which is fully public multi-tenant cloud currently used by about 600 companies; their own managed cloud using virtualization to provide a private instance for medium to large companies, and dedicated servers without virtualization in their managed cloud (really a hosted server configuration) for huge companies where the size warrants it.

Much of his keynote rebutting myths about HANA — obviously, SAP has been a bit stung by the press and competitors calling their baby ugly — including the compression factor between how much data is on disk versus in memory at any given time, the relative efficiency of HANA columnar storage over classic relational record storage, support on non-proprietary hardware, continued support of other database platforms for their Business Suite, HANA stability and use of HANA for non-SAP applications. I’m not sure that was the right message: it seemed very defensive rather than talking about the future of SAP technology, although maybe the standard SAP user sitting the audience needed to hear this directly from Plattner. He did end up with some words on how customers can move forward: even if they don’t want to change database or platform, moving to the current version of the suite will provide some performance and functionality improvements, while putting them in the position to move to Business Suite on HANA (either on-premise or on the Enterprise Cloud) in the future for a much bigger performance boost.

HANA is more than just database: it’s database, application server, analytics and portals bundled together for greater performance. It’s like the new mainframe, except running on industry-standard x86-based hardware, and in-memory so lacking the lengthy batch operations that we associate with old-school mainframe applications. It’s OLTP and OLAP all in one, so there’s no separation between operational data stores and data warehouses. As long as all of the platform components are (relatively) innovative, this is great, for the same reason that mainframes were great in their day. HANA provides a great degree of openness, allowing for code written in Java and a number of other common languages to be deployed in a JVM environment and use HANA as just a database and application server, but the real differentiating benefits will come with using the HANA-specific analytics and other functionality. Therein lies the risk: if SAP can keep HANA innovative, then it will be a great platform for application development; if they harken to their somewhat conservative roots and the innovations are slow to roll out, HANA developers will become frustrated, and less likely to create applications that fully exploit (and therefore depend upon) the HANA platform.

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud

Ingrid Van Den Hoogen and Kevin Ichhpurani gave a press briefing on what’s coming for HANA Enterprise Cloud following the launch last week. Now that the cloud offering is available, existing customers can move any of their HANA-based applications — Business Suite, CRM, Business Warehouse, and custom applications — to the cloud platform. There’s also a gateway that allows interaction between the cloud-based applications and other applications left on premise. Customers can bring their own HANA licences, and use SAP services to onboard and migrate their existing systems to the cloud.

HANA Enterprise Cloud is the enterprise-strength, managed cloud version of HANA in the cloud: there’s also HANA One, which uses the Amazon public cloud for a lower-end entry point at $0.99/hour and a maximum of 30GB of data. Combined with HANA on premise (using gear from a certified hardware partner) and hosting partner OEM versions of HANA cloud that they repackage and run on their own environment (e.g., IBM or telcos), this provides a range of HANA deployment environments. HANA functionality is the same whether on AWS, on premise or on SAP’s managed cloud; moving between environments (such as moving an application from development/test on HANA One to production on HANA Enterprise Cloud) is a simple “lift and shift” to export from one environment and import into the target environment. The CIO from Florida Crystals was in the audience to talk about their experience moving to HANA in the cloud; they moved their SAP ERP environment from an outsourced data center to HANA Enterprise Cloud in 180 hours (that’s the migration time, not the assessment and planning time).

SAP is in the process of baking some of the HANA extensions into the base HANA platform; currently, there’s some amount of confusion about what “HANA” will actually provide in the future, although I’m sure that we’ll hear more about this as the updates are released.

Effektif BPM In The Cloud

No, that’s not a typo in the title: Effektif is the newest cloud BPM offering, and it has some pretty impressive BPM credentials: the newly formed company is led by Tom Baeyens, who created not one, but two open source BPM projects: jBPM (now part of Red Hat/JBoss) and Activiti (now part of Alfresco). It’s funded (and partially staffed) by Signavio, creators of a popular process modeling tool; Signavio is headed up by Gero Decker, who has a strong process modeling background including participation in the BPMN standards. I had a chance to chat last week with Tom and Gero about the market needs that led them to start Effektif, and what it’s going to look like. On Monday this week they launched an information-only Effektif website, and expect to have initial rollout of the prototype product launch by early summer.

The aim of Effektif is to provide a simpler cloud BPM platform than what is currently available, with a lower cost point to reduce the barriers to smaller organizations and non-technical users. It will be completely tooled for the cloud, as simple and streamlined as possible but with more complex functionality available. We talked a lot about that aspect – having a less technical, yet still complete, set of functionality for business people to create their own processes, and more technical perspectives for other personas and uses – and agreed that many existing products don’t do a good job of segmenting into usable layers by complexity or technical ability: typically, there are some required functions that are just too technical for business users, even if the product is billed as such.

They also want to include checklist paradigms for simple task management and case management, some of which can be created and configured on the fly, plus collaboration around the content on checklist forms. I haven’t seen a demo yet, but they described three levels of functionality:

The first level will provide a non-technical way to coordinate people using forms-based processes for tasks with email notification. The idea is to allow these to be implemented in five minutes by a non-technical user, but provide a bit more functionality than simple online task lists like Do or Asana since they will have processes built into them, even if the user doesn’t think of them as processes. Tom compared this level with IFTTT, in that it will have simple business paradigms that create operational processes; I’m looking forward to seeing what this looks like, since this is key to adoption in the consumer cloud.
The second level will provide integration to pre-built services such as Google Apps and Salesforce, with likely Salesforce as a first target for integration since those users already have the right mindset about cloud services. This will be a bit more technical, but still require no coding.
The third level will allow custom code to be developed and run inside a process step, more like the functionality that we see in the process portion of most full BPMS.

The target market is not the same as the heavyweight BPMS being used to create enterprise applications; rather, this is aimed at “end-user computing” that is currently the domain of Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. However, with the planned administration capabilities, this is not just a platform for the business to develop and provision their own applications, but also to allow for IT support and governance. That’s a delicate balance to strike, and one that is often not done very well (think of the rampant SharePoint virus in many organizations), but it is essential to provide some degree of governance before anyone would allow Effektif to be used for anything beyond simple processes, namely, the second and third levels discussed above.

Key to this transition between levels is that even the simple first level task management will be based on processes, even if hidden to the user, which provides the potential to expand to more complex functionality without changing products: a continuum of functionality from a simple to-do list to a full business process. Although some BPMS vendors cover the range of functionality, they often split this up between two or more products, or expose too much of the technical underpinnings at the simplest level.

We spent quite a bit of time discussing the process modeling paradigm throughout the levels:

Starts as simple sequential modeling

Value chain visualization for steps
Bullet list of items within steps
Model individual tasks as (presumably sequential) BPMN activities
Checklist within tasks for to do items: modeled as form data

Guide towards BPMN for more complex implementations, since that is what’s underneath the simpler model view
For less-rigid ACM functionality/flexibility:

Allow adding new items to task list on the fly; switch to form editing view
Allow deviation from downstream process steps in current instance or all new instances
Activity feed shows what is happening, allows social interaction/collaboration
Can deactivate flexibility for more rigid steps/processes, but available by default

As expected, everything is logged in the audit trail, regardless of whether pre-defined or on the fly.

One interesting feature for runtime collaboration will be the ability to allow simultaneous access for multiple users to form-based checklists, so that a single form could be filled out and checked off by multiple participants. I’m not sure what the controls will be for ensuring that these collaborating users don’t overwrite each others changes, but presumably there will be some mechanism.

Mobile apps are not planned for first half-year after release, but are on the radar. The site is created with HTML5 and Javascript, which will allow for mobile websites even before apps have been developed.

Pricing, although likely to based on the number of activity (process) instances, is still to be determined. There may be a free option, although the idea is that the cost is low enough cost that there is no financial barrier to adoption. Hosting will likely be in both central Europe and the US, and you can be sure that I reminded them about issues with data stored on US servers, particularly that owned by non-US companies, and how that would be a complete non-starter for most non-US companies.

I’ve had a lot of interest in what Tom and Gero have been doing separately over the past years; now, I’m very interested to see what they can do together. Looking forward to my first demo of Effektif.

IBMConnect (Lotusphere) 2013 Highlights: Product Updates, Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce

A couple of weeks ago, IBM had two analyst calls about the announcements this week at IBM Connect 2013; since I’m not at the conference, I wrote most of this at that time but only published today due to embargo restrictions. It’s the 20th anniversary of Lotusphere, although the conference is no longer branded as Lotusphere since the “smarter workforce” and “smarter commerce” streams are beyond just products with a Lotus heritage or brand.

The first briefing featured Jeff Schick, who heads up social software at IBM. He discussed new software and cloud services to put social business capabilities in the hands of C-level executives in HR and marketing, covering the dual goals of managing corporate intranets and talent, and managing external marketing campaigns. The catchphrases are “Activate the Workforce” and “Delight Customers”, enabled by IBM social business solutions for Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce, built on the social integration capabilities of IBM WebSphere Portal.

Specific product releases coming up in the next several weeks:

IBM Connections v4.5, with FileNet ECM now available as a native service: documents and their processes (processes within FileNet, I assume, not within IBM BPM) can be integrated into a Connections community, exposing FileNet functionality such as metadata and foldering through Connections, and providing fully integrated social capabilities such as tagging, commenting and liking, making content a first-class social citizen. This is hot. It will not include records management or Case Manager: it appears that these functions would be available on the FileNet side, but not exposed (at this time) through Connections. Quickr customers are being offered a migration path to IBM Connections Content Manager, which is a bundled FileNet repository that can be upgraded to the full ECM suite if you wanted to use it outside the Connections context. Connections can also integrate with SharePoint and Outlook, so is an option even if you’re a Microsoft customer in those areas.
IBM Notes 9 Social Edition, competing against Outlook 2013 with social-enabled email, activity Streams and other social capabilities.
IBM Docs for web-based collaboration, now available on-premise as well as in the cloud. This competes against Office 365 and Google Docs, but offers better collaboration than O365 (which requires passing control of a document between collaborators) and better rendering/conversion of Office documents than GDocs. IBM Docs is integrated with Connections for social features and sharing, in the same sort of way as Content Manager.
IBM Sametime replaces their existing meeting service in the cloud, including iOS and Android support. It uses the Polycom framework for video and audio support.
Deployment of all of this can be public cloud, private cloud, on-premise (not really sure of the distinction there) or a hybrid of these. Their SmartCloud for Social Business provides for the cloud deployment and adds wiki, blogs and other social authoring functionality. SmartCloud has Safe Harbor certification, making it a bit mire immune to government snooping, and can be private-labeled, with two telelcom companies already using this to provide these capabilities to their customers.

Everything is focused on mobile: mobile meetings, chat, Connections including Content Manager access, Docs and more.

Jonathan Ferrar, who heads up strategy for the Smarter Workforce business area, gave us an update on what they’re providing to support attracting, empowering and motivating employees. They have just completed their acquisition of Kenexa, and offer a portfolio of HR and workforce management products that includes behavioral sciences plus the entire platform for social business that Schick talked about, including analytics, collaboration and content management.

There are three main functional areas related to workforce management: attract (including recruitment, hiring, onboarding), empower (including learning and intranet content such as benefits and procedures), and motivate (including surveys, assessments and talent management). An integrated employee and HR portal uses existing IBM portal technology to expose Kennexa functionality and social features. There are also workforce analytics to monitor, provide insight and predict based on demographic, qualitative and social data, using both Cognos for dashboards and SPSS for analysis. There’s also some features related to outsourcing but not a lot of details; I was left with the impression that this was a strong capability of Kennexa prior to the acquisition.

I don’t know a lot about HR systems, although I’m seeing a huge potential to integrate this with operational systems such as BPM to drive analytics from the operational systems to the HR systems (e.g., employee performance measures), and even some from HR to the operational systems (e.g., learning management to push training to people at the point in their work when they need the training).

In the second briefing, we heard from Larry Bowden, VP of Web Experience software at IBM, covering the website building and user experience sides of Smarter Commerce and Social Business. He started out the the same “smarter workforce/exceptional customer experience” catchphrases as we heard on the earlier call, then went on to highlight some of their customers recognized for exceptional web experience awards in 2012. Web experience includes the smarter workforce (employee engagement, workplace social portal) and smarter commerce (web presence and brand marketing, buy, sell, market) areas, but also can include direct business uses (e.g., online banking, claims), engaging a broad variety of constituents (e.g., e-government), and customer self-service. The core of the IBM customer experience suite, however, is on the buy, market, sell and service capabilities under their Smarter Commerce umbrella. They are working at putting the web marketing/commerce capabilities directly into the hands of business users (although if this is anything similar to how most vendors put BPMS capabilities directly into the hands of business users, I wouldn’t be too worried if I were a web developer), including both web content management/analytics and campaign management.

The Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce solutions are built on the IBM Social Business Platform, as we heard from Schick earlier, which includes WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager, Connections, Notes & Domino Social Edition, Sametime, Social Analytics Suite, ECM, Web Experience Factory and Forms. That’s nine products just in the platform, then the Customer Experience Suite and Employee Experience Suite solutions built on top of that. Whew. There are other products that come in at the higher level, such as Worklight for mobile enablement.

There’s been a refresh on all of their web experience capabilities, resulting in a new IBM Web Experience “Next”, providing for faster content creation, social content rendering and multi-channel publishing. This is not so much a product as the list of everything across their product base that is being updated, and a more consistent user interface.

There’s a new digital asset management system for rich media management (part of a WCM Rich Media Edition?), although that’s currently in tech preview rather than released.

They’ve also done some PureSystems updates that make it faster to deploy and optimized complex configurations of the multiple IBM products required to support these capabilities – arguably, they should have spent some time on refactoring and reducing the number of products, rather than working out how to make bigger and better hardware to support these patterns.

As always after an IBM briefing, I’m left with a sense of almost overwhelming complexity in the number — and possible combinations — of products that make up these integrated solutions. Powerful: yes. But expect some rough edges in the integration.

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 2 Keynotes: Consumerization of IT

We’re on the last of the four themes for TUCON, with Matt Quinn kicking off the session on the consumerization of enterprise IT. It’s a telling sign that many vendors now refer to their products as being like “Facebook/Twitter/iTunes/<insert popular consumer software here> for the enterprise” – enterprise app vendors definitely have consumer app envy, and TIBCO is no exception. As we saw in the earlier keynote session about tibbr, TIBCO is offering a lot of functionality that mimics (and extends) successful consumer software, and their providing Silver Mobile Server as a way to put all of that enterprise functionality that you build using TIBCO products out onto mobile devices. We saw a demo of a app that was built using Silver Mobile Server for submitting and managing auto insurance claims, and it looks like the platform is pretty capable both in terms of using the native device capabilities and linking directly to back-end processes.

They showed some new enhancements to Silver Fabric for private cloud provisioning and management, and discussed their public cloud applications (tibbr, Spotfire, Loyalty Lab) and public Silver Marketplace functionality. Today, they announced Silver Integrator, running on Silver Marketplace, providing enterprise-class integration services on the public cloud. We saw a brief demo of Silver Integrator: it launches a cloud version of the TIBCO Designer with some additional palettes for cloud connectors such as Facebook, Salesforce and REST services.

Being able to extend enterprise applications onto mobile devices and into the cloud are critical capabilities for consumerization of IT, and TIBCO (as well as other vendors) are offering those capabilities. The problem of adoption, however, is usually not about product capabilities, it’s about organizational culture: there is a lot of resistance to this trend not in the user community, but within IT. I saw a graphic and blog post by Dion Hinchcliffe of Dachis Group today about the major shifts happening in IT, and one thing that he wrote was especially impactful:

Never in my two decades of experience in the IT world have I seen such a disparity between where the world is heading as a whole and the technology approach that many companies are using to run their businesses.

<p>Cloud, mobile, social, consumerization and big data: we’re all doing it in the consumer space, but IT departments are continuing to drag their feet at bringing this into the enterprise. The organizations that fail to embrace this are going to fall further behind in their ability to serve customers effectively and to innovate, and will suffer for it.</p>  <p>Quinn wrapped up with a list of their product announcements, including two new policy-driven governance products as part of the ActiveMatrix suite: AMX Service Gateway for providing enterprise services outside the firewall, and AMX Policy Director for managing security, auditing and logging rules for services. He covered their AMX BPM 2.0 release announcement briefly, with new functionality for work assignment and scheduling, case management, and page flow debugging, plus some new capabilities in Nimbus Control and FormVine.</p>  <p>That’s it for the keynotes, since the rest of today and all of tomorrow is breakout sessions where we can dig into the details of the products and how they’re being used by customers. I’ll be heading to the BPM product update this afternoon by Roger King and Justin Brunt, and probably also drop in on the tibbr product strategy to see more details of what we heard this morning.</p>  <p>I’ve been asked to step in for a last-minute cancellation and will be <a href="https://column2.com/2012/09/tibco-tucon2012-you-say-you-want-a-process-revolution/">presenting tomorrow morning at 10am on the process revolution</a> that is moving beyond implementing BPM just for cost savings, but looking at new business process metrics such as maximizing customer satisfaction. If you’re here at TUCON, come on out to the session tomorrow morning.