HP Strengthens SOA Management Play with Acquisition of Business Process Monitoring Firm, Bristol Technology

On February 5th HP announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Bristol Technology Inc., a provider of technologies that monitor business transactions, to further enhance HP Software’s leadership in Business Technology Optimization (BTO).

Recommended Competitive Responses

► IBM should continue to market the fact that the company can offer very tight ties between its Tivoli, Rational and WebSphere offerings, giving customers a single point of reference for the entire software lifecycle. Even with the Mercury acquisition, HP lacks a solid development toolset. It also has not entered the SOA infrastructure market, since it partners with many of these players. Obviously, robust mainframe support is a differentiator for IBM here as well.

► Computer Associates should promote its strong IBM mainframe support with its Wily Introscope PowerPacks. The company also has deep middleware support through its pre-built dashboards that give it a competitive advantage with IBM, Oracle, SAP and BEA customers.

► BMC, IBM and CA should market their transaction monitoring solutions as true technology solutions, whereas Bristol, with its primarily financial and insurance client base, can be seen as a vertically-oriented solution right now. That said, HP, which eschews verticalizing applications, will very likely fill in any holes within other vertical industries via its integration services.

► Bristol Technology competitors with strong support for IBM solutions should point out the potential instability between IBM and HP stemming from the acquisition. IBM may continue to work with HP. But it is unclear at this time whether HP will continue the Bristol OEM agreement to distribute DB2 and WebSphere.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Current Bristol TransactionVision customers should welcome the acquisition, as it will only create upgrade/enhancement opportunities through HP’s Mercury and OpenView technologies. It will also lend international customers the support of a worldwide services organization with human capital on the ground in many geographic regions.

► Customers considering Bristol solutions should hold on making any purchasing decisions until HP has fully spelled out its roadmap for rationalizing the Mercury, OpenView and Bristol monitoring solutions.

► Existing HP customers looking to add transaction processing should obviously put Bristol’s solution at the top of their short list of finalists as HP will most certainly create advantageous touch points between the Bristol and existing HP solutions.

► Current Bristol Wind/U customers should press HP for a detailed support path going forward. The company has not indicated that it will terminate Bristol’s development tools, but they do not fit in with HP’s BTO vision and will most likely be put into mothballs.

Oracle Releases Major Upgrade to BI Suite

On January 29th Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3 (Oracle BI EE R3).

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Rival BI vendors should point out that Oracle BI EE R3, though feature-rich, has no clear differentiators. In particular, leading BI/CPM pure-plays such as Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, and SAS should state their products already provide most of the usability, visualization, integration, information delivery, performance, scalability, high-availability, security, and other features found in the latest version of Oracle’s BI suite.

► Rival BI vendors must make sure that their respective product sets match up feature by feature against Oracle’s formidable new suite. In particular, BI competitors that cannot match Oracle’s ability to bundle its BI suite with same-vendor SOA/ESB suites/tools, must ensure that they implement SOA/Web services standards thoroughly and have tight, certified integration with best-of-breed SOA/ESB suites from Oracle, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and others.

► SOA suite vendors that have BI products should revisit their product roadmaps to make sure they are addressing the unified value proposition, platform integration, and the wide range of new functionality available in Oracle BI EE R3. SAP should place a higher priority on enhancing its SAP NetWeaver BI product, which is, due in great part to the vendor’s chronic inattention, seldom on enterprises’ short list of best-of-breed BI products. Microsoft, on the other hand, should accelerate the ongoing field testing of its forthcoming Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, which is not due until later this year. Already, Oracle has stolen much of Microsoft’s thunder with the release of Oracle BI EE R3.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Current users of Oracle BI EE should evaluate the latest version of the suite and consider upgrading as soon as they can justify the migration and set aside the necessary budget allocation. The vendor provides considerable new functionality in Oracle BI EE R3, providing incentives for existing customers to migrate up from prior versions of the suite, as well as from Siebel Analytics and other, legacy Oracle BI offerings.

► Current users of Oracle’s DBMS, portal, application server, integration tools, and other SOA suite components should evaluate the new Oracle BI EE R3 and consider adopting it as their company-standard BI environment. Oracle has integrated the new BI suite tightly with the other components of its best-of-breed Fusion Middleware product family, helping existing Oracle shops to leverage and extend their investments in the vendor’s diverse wares.

► Current users of rivals’ DBMS, OLAP, data warehousing (DW), DI, and other DM offerings should evaluate the new Oracle BI EE R3 and consider adopting it as their company-standard BI environment. Oracle has implemented tighter interoperability between its BI suite and various third-party OLAP, DW, and DI products. This latest release provides increased certification and native, optimized support for the latest releases of IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, NCR Teradata, and SAP Business Information Warehouse.

► Current users of rivals’ BI products should reassess their strategic corporate BI vendor in light of the release of Oracle BI EE R3. Most large enterprises should include Oracle in their short list of strategic BI vendors. Given Oracle’s thorough implementation of SOA in this and other components of its Fusion Middleware product family, prospective customers have considerable flexibility to change over to Oracle BI EE R3 should their current BI vendors not keep up with the industry high bar that Oracle has clearly attained.

Microsoft Converges BI with CRM

On February 12th Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation. This release includes templates, pre-built components, source code, and guidelines for building BI/CPM solutions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► SAP and Oracle should respond by pointing out the extent to they have already integrated their respective BI/CPM tools with their own best-of-breed CRM applications. They should portray Microsoft Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation as a me-too, catch-up exercise by Microsoft that falls short of the B/CPM features that they already provide in their CRM, ERP and other packaged business applications.

► Rival BI/CPM vendors should view this product announcement as serious challenge by Microsoft to push deeper into the enterprise market (by cross-selling its BI/CPM products to Dynamics CRM 3.0 users) and also into the SMB market (leveraging their ubiquity with the Office/Excel desktop applications).

► Rival BI/CPM vendors should download Microsoft Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation as soon as possible and evaluate its features, usability and integration with the growing Microsoft BI/CPM product family. They should strongly consider integrating their own Bi/CPM products more tightly with the Dynamics family, as a basic no-charge upgrade, so as to pre-empt Microsoft’s value proposition with this new product.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Customers of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 should download and evaluate Microsoft Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation, bearing in mind that its a shared-source beta release and that the vendor has not spelled out any ongoing support, service or maintenance offerings.

► Customers of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 should evaluate the new Analytics Foundation on functionality, development tooling, usability, security, platform integration and other features. They should also evaluate it with respect to rival BI/CPM products that integrate with Microsoft CRM 3.0, SQL Server, Excel 2007, SharePoint and other components of Microsoft’s product family.

► Microsoft partners should evaluate Microsoft Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation as an accelerator toolkit for building customized BI/CPM applications—such as reports, dashboards, scorecards, predictive analytics and ad hoc analysis tools—that integrate with Microsoft’s diverse products and are geared to the requirements of diverse vertical and horizontal markets.

webMethods Strengthens SOA Suite with Fabric 7.0 Release

On January 10th webMethods, Inc. formally introduced webMethods Fabric 7.0. Building upon webMethods’ integration and governance capabilities, this latest release of webMethods’ flagship product suite delivers a fully-unified environment for process development, automation, and monitoring.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► The notion of merging BPM and BAM is a hot button among customers, who are keen on understanding how live-time processes are impacted by changes in the market as well as changes in IT infrastructure. BPM and SOA competitors, therefore, should identify and promote points of contact between business process creation and management within their offerings such as process baselines tied to business rules.

► Competitors in the SOA space (IBM, TIBCO, Sun, BEA, and Microsoft) should focus on providing lifecycle governance for business processes, crafting a marketing message that highlights transparency at each stage of the process from design and testing through deployment and monitoring.

► Concerning B2B Integration, SOA suite competitors should aggressively evaluate their target vertical markets and honestly assess their ability to support those markets and present customers with a convincing and cost effective reason to enter into a broader partnership, covering the full spectrum of services SOA entails.

► If they have not done so already, SOA suite vendors must make business process and resulting portlet creation a top priority, embracing open standards for UI environments such as Eclipse and stressing codeless composite application development.

► Vendors should continue to follow evolving B2B integration standards and deepen support in this area as customers seek to simplify existing points of application integration and capture new data points for inclusion within a broader SOA environment.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Existing webMethods customers should openly embrace Fabric 7.0 as it will layer easily on top of their existing Fabric 6.5 installations and because it will greatly improve their ability to both build and manage business processes.

► During Q1 2007, Fabric 7.0 upgrading users should press webMethods for assistance (technically or financially) in creating extraction agents capable of populating Fabric’s metadata library with X-Registry information as this is an “unfinished” capability that should have found its way into the 7.0 release.

► After ensuring compatibility with existing B2B integration systems, new, potential webMethods customers should strongly consider Fabric 7.0 as it represents the cutting edge in SOA, affording them with technologies not present in larger, competing SOA stacks such as the unique ability to automatically identify changes within business and IT environments and then make real-time process modifications in response.

► Potential webMethods customers should inquire about the company’s long term plans concerning the move from the management-centric ServiceNet to Infravio’s broader governance tools, X-Registry and X-Broker. These new products will receive additional functionality over the next six months, deepening their integration with webMethods’ BAM tooling and provide stronger event correlation and statistical analysis capabilities.

► New and existing customers should press all SOA suite vendors on the need for enforceable runtime policies within the broader spectrum of SOA governance. Currently, most vendors focus on enforcing policy during the design and modeling phase of development, allowing users to correct policy infractions during live-time only through manual workflows. As the market matures and more companies embrace strict policy adherence, vendors will need to embrace runtime enforcement.