SAP Fills out Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management Product Portfolio

On September 6th SAP announced three new governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software products—SAP GRC Repository, SAP GRC Process Control, and SAP GRC Risk Management—which will be generally available in late 2006. It also announced a new GRC partnership with Cisco.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Rival vendors of enterprise applications, SOA platforms, integration middleware, and data management tools must place renewed focus on their GRC strategies. SAP is the clear pacesetter in the GRC space, having the most proactive, coherent, and comprehensive strategy.

► Rivals—especially Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM—should retool their GRC strategies to address the core components that SAP is implementing: repository, process control, and risk management tools.

► Rivals should call attention to the fact that SAP has not provided any details regarding when and how it will integrate its new GRC foundational components into its NetWeaver platform products.

► Rivals should note that SAP did not include partners other than Cisco in the announcement of the GRC foundation products. This fact might indicate that SAP is going it alone in pursuing its GRC strategy, rather than enlisting others from its diverse, global partner ecosystem.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Existing SAP customers should welcome the vendor’s announcement of its GRC foundation components and Cisco partnership. This announcement shows that SAP is making steady progress on its aggressive GRC roadmap.

► Existing SAP customers should demand that the vendor make its new GRC foundational components generally available in the stated timeframes and also deliver the subsequent phases of its growing GRC product family per the previously announced timeline.

► Existing SAP customers must work with the vendor directly and through its partner ecosystem to help develop national, horizontal, and vertical products that leverage and customize its GRC foundation components over the NetWeaver platform.

► Customers of rival vendors of enterprise applications, SOA platforms, integration middleware, and data management tools must insist that their vendors match SAP’s impressive GRC roadmap. SAP has raised the bar for Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and other vendors who are attempting to develop coherent, comprehensive, forward-looking GRC development and partnering strategies.

IBM’s SOA Line

On October 3rd IBM introduced five new products and 23 enhanced products under the banner of service oriented architecture (SOA). The improvements are in products throughout the company’s integration, BPM, Rational, Tivoli, and Lotus product lines. The ones most notably related to SOAs are a new registry and repository, and improvements to the firm’s BPM and integration products.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Competitors in the SOA Integration and SOA platform (middleware) space should expedite their plans for a registry and repository. Since IBM has staked a claim in the ground this will be a checkbox item.

► Competitors, however, should regard this registry and metadata repository as a way to organize an SOA and provide tools to build composite applications. As such, they should expand the repository beyond simply service artifacts and over time should include software assets related to processes and interface.

► Competitors should work to enable federation between repositories. Since there are few standards in this area, this may have to be done on a vendor by vendor basis.

► In general, competitors should point out that IBM has duplicate products in the BPM space, as well as the integration space, and should say that IBM gives out confusing messaging about the appropriate BPM for any given use case.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► End users should welcome the enhancements in 23 products. Many are related to services and SOAs, but others are ease of use or performance improvements.

► Users with several IBM products in house, including WebSphere, Tivoli, and Rational, should look favorably on IBM’s view on SOAs, which does not involve a single product or product suite. Enhancements to these individual products will be enough to ensure proper management of an SOA.

► Users with one or no IBM products in house may want to consider a more unified SOA suite product, where governance, management, integration, and other items are in one suite and there is functional integration between the two.

SPSS Upgrades Its Flagship Predictive Analytics Suite

On September 18th SPSS Inc. released version 15.0 of its flagship predictive analytics and data mining software package, providing enhancements in reporting, data management, statistical analysis, programmability, enterprise-wide predictive analytics, and server-side performance.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► SAS, IBM, NCR/Teradata, and Oracle should position SPSS as a vendor of point solutions for statistical analysis. In contrast, they should present themselves as providers of best-of-breed predictive analytics and data mining tools.

► Rival pure-play vendors of predictive analytics and data mining tools should portray SPSS as trying too hard to be all things to all users. Vendors such as Chordiant Software, Fair Isaac, KXEN, Portrait Software, ThinkAnalytics, and Unica should play up their own focus areas in which they are best of breed.

► Competitors should emphasize and increase the user friendliness of their own statistical analysis, modeling, and mining tools.

► Competitors should emphasize and develop the real-time functionality of their analytics and mining products for CEP, ESP, and BAM. They should note that SPSS has not clearly or convincingly addressed this growing area.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Existing users of SPSS 14.0 and previous versions should upgrade to SPSS 15.0 to take advantage of its broad range of enhancements, which make a best-of-breed tool even better in its core roles of statistical analysis, predictive analytics, and data mining.

► Existing users of rival statistical analysis, predictive analytics, and data mining tools should reassess their commitment to their existing provider in light of the new functionality in SPSS 15.0. However, they should think long and hard before standardizing on SPSS 15.0, simply due to the complexity, cost, technical burdens, and retraining requirements that would come with any migration.

► Prospects who haven’t standardized on an enterprise statistical analysis, predictive analytics, or data mining tool set should seriously consider SPSS 15.0 in the context of SPSS’ other offerings, especially its Clementine data-mining workbench. SPSS is very much the acknowledged industry best-of-breed in these, its core market segments.

webMethods Buys SOA Governance Firm

On September 11th webMethods, Inc., announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Infravio, Inc. for approximately $38 million in cash. With Infravio, webMethods gains Infravio's XRegistry product, which includes tools to build and store policies relating to services, including acceptable performance parameters and rules relating to load balancing, relevant security and access rights, and prioritization of users.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Competitors in the SOA Integration space and middleware space (e.g., TIBCO, Oracle, BEA, Sun, Microsoft, etc.) should introduce SOA governance, defined as policies around the operation and creation of services. These should be organized around a UDDI directory as much as is possible.

► SOA governance should include lifecycle management and tools that automate the approval process around building, or accessing a service.

► At this stage it is not necessary to store policies in UDDI directly (through tModels or other mechanisms), although competitors should conform to WS-Policy, WS-Policy attachment, and other standards as much as is possible.

► SOA Integration vendors should have most SOA management/enforcement functionality in house. Vendors may consider either internal development or an acquisition to gain this. If this is not immediately possible, vendors should closely partner with SOA management vendors (e.g., Amberpoint, etc.).

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Infravio customers should gain more information about the webMethods roadmap, including how/when XBroker/XRegistry functionality will be merged with ServiceNet.

► In general, webMethods customers should welcome this new functionality as it gives them important tools for governing their SOAs. This will become increasingly important as services proliferate and crucial applications are built on top of their SOAs.

► New customers should consider the webMethods Fabric SOA Suite, due to cutting edge functionality not found in larger middleware stacks. They should ensure interoperability with their existing middleware and development tools, however.

► Customers should adhere to standards such as UDDI, WS-Policy, and others as much as possible when constructing their SOA governance and management applications in order to facilitate interoperability now and in the future. However, they should be aware that the standards are often immature and don't cover all aspects of management and governance at this stage.

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