Oh great — two of my domains are listed as expired

Text Technologies and Software Memories are down until I get this sorted out.  And I’m on a plane to Orlando in a few hours …

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Some quick thoughts on SAP acquiring Business Objects

1.  SAP needed outside talent again.   In March I wrote that Shai Agassi’s departure wasn’t as a big a deal as it seemed, because guys like Dennis Moore were still there.  Well, by now Dennis Moore is NOT still there, and rumor had more of the good personnel acquisitions leaving as well.  And unfortunately, my personal experience of some of those remaining is that they’re ethically unfit for their roles (and that’s putting it kindly).

2.  The NetWeaver strategy has been failing.  Does anybody care about NetWeaver any more?  The whole thing includes some great ideas, but implementation has been lacking.

3.  The Business Objects guys are proven successes at integrating disparate BI products suites.  The Crystal Reports acquisition proved that.

Before writing more, I should check the extremely one-sided consulting contract I had with SAP, specifically for the expiration date of the NDA.  How one-sided?  Well, I naively agreed to a clause that I couldn’t sue them under the contract, expecting their concern about their reputation to keep them in line.  Since then, they’ve cheated me out of considerable amounts of money that they owed.  Arggh.  Live and learn. 

Technorati Tags: SAP, Business Objects

Posted in Analytic technologies, Business Objects, Enterprise applications | 2 Comments »

SAP ByDemand could work a lot better than critics think

As I explained in another post, it’s credible that SAP is very serious about its new ByDemand SaaS (Software as a Service) offering. While I haven’t been briefed on the product (er, service), I’m guessing ByDemand is pretty good, or soon will be. I have three major reasons for this opinion.

1. SAP sure has a lot of resources to bring to bear – and as previously noted, I think the company is dead serious about this initiative.

2. On the back end, the business-service granularity SAP has been implementing is well-suited to deal with the unique challenges of SaaS, both the very real (e.g., short upgrade cycles) and the largely imaginary (e.g., multi-tenancy).

3. SAP recently hired Dan Rosenberg away from Oracle to head its UI efforts, and Release 1 of a Dan Rosenberg user interface is likely to be very good. I know Dennis Howlett has a contrary view, and he’s actually seen the product. Even so, I’m optimistic about SAP’s claims to have designed the UI with an open mind, for maximum ease and simplicity, and validated by many rounds of testing.

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Posted in Enterprise applications, SAP, Software as a service | 5 Comments »

The unprofitability of the SaaS business is an illusion caused by growth

There’s a fallacy going around to the general effect:

Salesforce.com is the biggest SaaS company. Salesforce.com is making next to no profit. Therefore, SaaS is currently not a profitable business.

But that’s nonsense. Here’s why.

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Posted in Enterprise applications, SAP, Software as a service | No Comments »

Software Auf Probe

We all know insulting wordplay such as “Windoze,” deserved or otherwise. (Personally, I prefer the more subtle “Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away.”) I just learned one in German, however, that I’m guessing is less familiar to English-speaking readers. “Software auf Probe” translates, roughly, as “Software in test.” Any resemblances to long SAP adoption cycles are purely intentional.

Posted in Enterprise applications, Fun stuff, SAP | No Comments »

Revolutionary trends in the analytics market

I just finished another Monash Letter. It was a follow-up to a previous one that discussed various strategic positioning possibilities in business intelligence. In the prior piece, I pointed out that most leading vendors were pursuing similar strategies — BI as enterprise infrastructure play. In this piece — for Monash Advantage members only — I point out how that sameness allowed for disruption and revolution, and highlight a few trends that are pointing in those directions. Specifically, the trends I cited included:

• New(ish) trends in technology and the marketplace, especially:

1. The return of load-and-go. (A major current trend.)
2. UI diversity. (An accelerating trend.)
3. Analytic business process support. (A huge opportunity for transactional application vendors that they haven’t yet seized.)
4. Expansion from relational/tabular/structured to text/unstructured data. (The biggest opportunity of all, although it’s still in the very early stages.)

• A whole lot of analytics-oriented startups.
• A whole lot of industry consolidation.

Relevant links include:

• My old white paper on analytic business processes.
• A post about BI product segmentation.
• A more recent post on the same subject, with a substantial link list of its own.
• A couple of posts on QlikTech.

My list of potentially major disruptors starts with Endeca, QlikTech, and the open source movement.

Technorati Tags: business intelligence, BI, Endeca, QlikTech

Posted in Analytic technologies, Endeca | 3 Comments »

Guild Wars game notes

I had the opportunity to interview Mike O’Brien and Pat Wyatt, founders and lead developers for ArenaNet, makers of Guild Wars. This led to two lengthy posts on the technology of Guild Wars (overview) and the database technology of Guild Wars. Those were really, as the titles suggest, tech-focused. This post, by way of contrast, is just to share interesting game-related tidbits with fellow Guild Wars players. I came away with three key notes:

1. Don’t hold your breath for an auction house. (The reasons are spelled out near the end of the database post.)

2. Cartographer titles really are calculated based on what fraction of the total possible pixels you’ve opened up, of course with a few grace percentage points so that you don’t need to really open EVERYTHING to get the 100% title. It’s that simple. (And it makes sense. They store the character’s map anyway; there’s little effort in also noting its size.)

3. Persistence (non-instancing) isn’t as hard as they thought, and they didn’t think it would be all that hard anyway. So in Guild Wars 2 they will have “more sense of a world,” even as there are also plenty of instanced areas ala the current Guild Wars.

There also is tons of cool stuff in the tech posts, and I hope you have a chance to look at them!

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Technorati Tags: Guild Wars, ArenaNet, NCsoft, MMORPG, RPG, game

Posted in ArenaNet, NCsoft, and Guild Wars, Fun stuff, Games and virtual worlds | 5 Comments »

The technology of Guild Wars (overview)

Being an analyst has its perks, the main one being that you get to have some really interesting conversations. And so I recently had the chance to interview Mike O’Brien and Pat Wyatt, two of the founders and lead programmers for ArenaNet, makers of the Guild Wars MMORPG (Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Game).

If you play games of this sort, it’s surely obvious to you why you should care. But if you don’t, maybe you should be interested anyway. After all, Guild Wars is a graphics-intensive SaaS offering that easily supports 100,000 simultaneous users, while managing a gig or so of fat client even over dial-up speeds. Every user is a potential hacker, whether for fun or actual real-world cash profit, although we didn’t actually talk about security very much. And ArenaNet provides all this on a relatively shoestring budget; in particular, Guild Wars subscription fees are precisely $0.

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Posted in ArenaNet, NCsoft, and Guild Wars, Fun stuff, Games and virtual worlds, Online and mobile services, Software as a service | 4 Comments »

Don’t use Office 2007. But do steal its ideas.

You probably shouldn’t use Microsoft Office 2007. Even so, you probably should install and look at it, and then rip off its ideas. I’ll explain.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 is, so far as I can tell, seriously flawed. Specifically, it has been eating way too much of my work for me to happily keep using it. This has been going on long enough that I’m convinced the cause is not simple user error. The final straw yesterday was when changes I’d saved in a draft blog post (about Filemaker) weren’t there five hours later, with no intervening crashes, no messages about “Do you want to close w/ unsaved changes?”, and so on. Naturally, Microsoft (or rather the excellent consultant/expert they’ve provided me to talk with) has never heard of these problems before and is highly perplexed. Anyhow, I plan to keep using Word for highly formatted work – i.e., white papers and Monash Letters – but using it for general note-taking and blogging has turned out to be quite the mistake. (I guess I could go back to Word 2003, but now I’m intrigued by testing the cheaper alternative.)

But all glitches notwithstanding — Office 2007’s “ribbon” is one of the five greatest general UI advances in the past 10-15 years*. Just as the traditional Office menu/icon-row look-and-feel dominates business computing, the ribbon is likely to soon take its place. And deservedly so, at least in two broad classes of application: Analytic and composite. And those two, taken together, happen to comprise the vast majority of the innovation going on in enterprise applications today.

*Three of the other four, in my opinion, are:

1. The screen-division aspect of dashboards and portals.
2. Dynamic text-link navigation, also popularized via portals.
3. Search boxes.

The last slot is left open for personal-taste additions to the list.

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Posted in Analytic technologies, Enterprise applications, Microsoft | 1 Comment »

My Network World column and outside links on network neutrality

Oops! It turns out Network World ran my column on network neutrality and Tariff Rebate Passthrough on April 23, not April 30 as I previously believed. So I should have gotten my list of outside links together sooner. Sorry. Confusing matters further, my post on Jeffersonet vs. Edisonet got Slashdotted, without me having provided a link to the column itself. Well, here goes.

• Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC/AT&T, kicked things off in late 2005, arguing that he should be allowed to discriminate between, say, Google and Yahoo based on how much they paid him. He later backed down a bit, but many people are unconvinced as to his sincerity.
• Verizon said similar things around the same time.
• Om Malik made an early attempt to cover all sides of the issue, albeit with a pro-neutrality orientation.
• Jeremy Penston had an article last week arguing that bandwidth is NOT “effectively free,” at least for video.
• Scott Cleland says my thinking is “seriously flawed” because I think there’s any need for neutrality regulation. He thinks no logical case has been made for neutrality whatsoever. Perhaps we need need to spell it out for him in smaller words. Anyhow, his one-pager that is admittedly sponsored by the telecom vendors does a good job of smashing some net neutrality strawmen nobody was talking about anyway.
• Errata Security argues that network neutrality is unworkable on the backbone, and links to my article, which was only about network neutrality on the last mile.
• Richi Jennings argues that we don’t need tiering, because the speed of light has dropped from 300 million meters/second to a mere 80 million or so. Or maybe less. Or something like that … seriously, it seems that he doubts the value of super-high QOS, because latency is an inescapable fact of life.

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Posted in Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | No Comments »