On March 8th MagiQ Technologies announced that, in collaboration with Verizon Communications, Inc., it had successfully demonstrated breakthroughs that overcome the remaining obstacles to wide deployment of quantum cryptography.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Competitors, such as ID Quantique, should leverage these results as readily as MagiQ. These competitors should look to duplicate them, of course, but should look as these results as complementary to the entire industry.

► Competitors, therefore, do not need to respond to this announcement in a competitive sense but should simply make clear that the results demonstrate the soundness of QKD basic principles and are transferable.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Prospects should proceed with cautious optimism. There are certainly some high-end applications for this technology, such as military, intelligence, and financial services. It should be noted, however, that these are applications within organizations that have a handle on the broader security issues associated with secure communications.

► The broader market should take a wait-and-see approach regarding QKD and should not delay purchase decisions of more traditional encryption technology.

BEA Lights a Fire Under BPM with Fuego

On March 1st, in a move aimed at continued market leadership in the SOA software market, BEA Systems, Inc., announced that it has acquired Fuego, Inc. Fuego is a pioneer in the business process management (BPM) software industry.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Competitors in the middleware and integration spaces should seek to improve their BPM capabilities with better modeling, simulation, and BAM capabilities.

► In general, vendors should seek seamless integration between BPM and traditional EAI capabilities that goes beyond simply Web Services and includes common interfaces for development and BAM. However, system-to-system orchestration should remain separately available for pure integration purposes.

► Vendors should seek to integrate their BPM with either their own portals or a third-party portal. This does not just include at the interface/portlet level, but integration with any collaboration/workflow capabilities within the portal.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Fuego end users should welcome BEA’s acquisition, as it will give the company more sales and professional services resources.

► Fuego end users should consider taking on BEA’s portal and other elements as they become better integrated with the technology, as this will offer savings in development time.

► Fuego users, however, should ensure that BEA will maintain support on their particular platforms, especially rival application server platforms.

► New users interested in BPM or composite application development should consider BEA’s new Business Service Interaction product, due to a mature suite of BPM features.

IBM Channels SOA Brand onto Users

On March 13th IBM announced new initiatives to assist customers and partners with the emerging computing trend called “service-oriented architecture” (SOA), which allows companies to streamline their business processes and match them to specific, componentized elements in the IT infrastructure.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► IBM’s bigger competitors, particularly Sun, Oracle, SAP, and BEA, will need to match many of these SOA partner programs and go further than simply offering blueprints and guides.

► Smaller competitors with more limited resources (most integration/ESB competitors, for example) will need to take a two-tack approach. They need to fit into IBM’s definitions and interoperate with various WebSphere elements so they can attract these partners to their solutions as well. However, they need to present their own architectural guides to SOAs, their own certifications and education programs, and their own ROI tools.

► In general, middleware firms should be preparing their own SOA registry/repository and governance strategies.

► Smaller firms with registries (i.e., Software AG, Fujitsu, Mercury Interactive/Systinet, Infravio, SOA Software, etc.) need to prepare to position against IBM, as well as interoperating with it and conforming to new standards in this area.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► IBM partners should keep in mind that these SOA programs are an entry point into selling solutions around integration and information access problems, as well as a way to sell new process-oriented applications.

► End users that are looking for a way to manage highly-distributed SOAs should strongly consider a registry product.

DataFlux Releases Its CDI Solution

On March 2nd DataFlux introduced the DataFlux CDI Solution (customer data integration) that enables companies to synchronize, consolidate and manage customer information from across an enterprise.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► CDI vendors such as Purisma, Siperian, DWL (IBM), Initiate Systems, etc., as well as vendors with MDM solutions (Hyperion, IBM, Informatica, i2 Technologies, Kalido, Oracle, SAP, etc.), should downplay DataFlux’s solution, noting that they can bring a range of capabilities to the issue of master data management, including data quality.

► Data quality vendors that support CDI, such as Innovative Systems and Trillium Software, as well as Firstlogic (Business Objects) and Similarity Systems (Informatica), should highlight their data quality efforts on behalf of CDI, noting the crucial role of data quality in CDI and noting how their own technology provides more or less the same capabilities offered by DataFlux.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Customers and prospects should definitely consider the DataFlux CDI solution. The solution will enable customers to get a 360 degree view of their customers. Significantly, the solution is based on the company’s core data quality technology, which will ensure that the data is complete and accurate.

► Prospects should recognize that the DataFlux CDI solution offers a lot of flexibility in terms of implementing the solution.

► Prospects also should not be concerned that this is a new offering, since the company has been supporting CDI in one form or another for some time. Moreover, this solution is based on market-tested technology, and DataFlux has a number of CDI implementations behind it.

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