IBM Significantly Revamps and Repackages Data Warehousing Product Family

On March 13th IBM unveiled its comprehensive new Dynamic Warehousing strategy, under which the vendor is providing new and enhanced data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) offerings. IBM announced DB2 Warehouse 9.1.2, a new version of its DW software suite that includes enhancements to the existing Enterprise and Enterprise Base Editions as well as new Starter, Intermediate, and Advanced Editions geared to small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs). The vendor also launched the new IBM Balanced Warehouse product family, which is the next generation of the DW appliances that it formerly called “Balanced Configuration Units” (BCUs) and addresses scalability from SMB to large enterprise and mainframe requirements.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Rival DW vendors should endeavor to match IBM’s aggressive, tiered, targeted product strategy on all levels. In particular, enterprise DW vendors such as Oracle, Teradata, HP, Informatica, SAP, Microsoft, Business Objects, and SAS should focus on rolling out comprehensive DW appliance product families that range from low-end/SMB to high-end/enterprise in their packaging, pricing, scalability, and professional services components.

► Rival enterprise DW vendors should acquire DW appliance vendors to accelerate the evolution of their software-centric solutions into preconfigured, pre-optimized, bundled hardware, software, and storage solutions. In particular, Netezza, DATAllegro, and Greenplum are the most promising acquisition candidates.

► Rival MDM/DW vendors should expand the range and depth of their prepackaged industry domain models that provide best-practice templates and accelerators for channel partners and customer engagements

► Rival vendors of text analytics products (such as Oracle, Teradata, and Attensity) should closely evaluate the new OmniFind Analytics Edition and publish feature comparisons to demonstrate how they stack up against IBM’s new offering.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Customers of IBM’s BCUs should closely evaluate the new Balanced Warehouse solution classes to determine whether—in terms of improved price-performance, scalability, functionality, ease of deployment, ease of administration, and total cost of ownership—they offer enough of an advantage to merit migration in the near term.

► Customers of IBM’s DW software offerings should evaluate the new Balanced Warehouse solution classes and DB2 Warehouse software suites to determine whether they offer sufficient value-add to merit migrations. At the same time, enterprise customers should consider selective migration of departmental data marts to the new DW solutions if that approach proves cost-effective in terms of TCO.

► Prospective MDM customers in the health plan and insurance industries should evaluate IBM’s new and enhanced industry data models to determine whether they address those organizations’ specific requirements for data schemas, data governance workflows, and so forth. To the extent that these and other pre-built data models still need to be modified to meet specific requirements, customers should engage IBM GBS in MDM projects to tailor those models.

GXS Launches Trading Grid 2007 with Enhanced Failover, Performance and Integration Capabilities

On February 28th GXS announced the launch of GXS Trading Grid 2007. Core to this launch is GXS’ new high availability architecture, Trading Grid Ultra, which provides improved service level commitments as well as greater speed, reliability and security. Trading Grid 2007 also brings to market a new, multi-lingual, Web-based portal; additional Web forms capabilities; and a new messaging gateway enabling multi-protocol and enterprise resource planning (ERP)-system integration..

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Inovis and Sterling should invest in high availability (HA) capabilities within their hosted networks to keep pace with GXS’s TGU solution. As customers move further and further away from the asynchronous nature of VANs to embrace short lived and synchronous transactions required to support loosely coupled service-oriented solutions, hosted services must afford high nines availability, flexible transaction queueing and 24 hour disaster recovery (DR), all of which are available with TGU.

► SEEBURGER should point out that the GXS solution cannot provide paper capture tools or full BPM capabilities. The company should also emphasize its ability to directly assist supply chain partners as they create forms and establish communications through self-guided, solution-specific portal tools.

► All B2B competitors should consider shifting from volume based pricing (a VAN holdover) to a more Software as a Service (SaaS) oriented, flat rate, predictable pricing model where customers pay a flat rate per trading partner. This is a model GXS has begun espousing with TG07.

► To keep pace with GXS, competitors with the ability to tie supply chain processes to line of business applications (particularly ERP solutions) should actively market demand-side B2B commerce such as e-invoicing, where the supplier invoices the buyer directly via the trading grid.

► Inovis should immediately explore SaaS solutions and roll out support for complex event processing at the business process level. These could serve as important differentiators going forward.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Existing GXS Trading Grid customers should feel confident about upgrading to the new TG07 infrastructure as the company already has solid experience bringing over 1,000 companies into the new network. According to GXS, the company is able to migrate customers with zero downtime and full redundancy in case of migration issues.

► Potential customers with low a tolerance for latency and a high need for redundancy should investigate TG07’s 99.9+ capabilities within TGU, noting however, that the company has not set specific pricing guidelines for additional nines, preferring to negotiate on a customer-by-customer basis.

► Potential customers with a strong SOA infrastructure should consider GXS as a means for offloading all B2B integration services. However, customers should press GXS to more fully expose its hosted ESB capabilities and to allow customers to tie their services to those hosted by GXS without professional services contracts.

► Existing customers maintaining on-premise (edge) line of business integration services should strongly consider adopting TG07’s hosted integration support for Oracle and SAP solutions. But customers should beware that the company is just beginning to build out its library of supported messaging and application connectors.

IBM Brings Quality Management to SOA Development

On March 13th IBM announced new software and services to help organizations ensure the quality of their service-oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA is a business strategy that enables a company to more closely align and reuse existing technology to achieve business goals. The new IBM SOA quality management portfolio, which includes Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere software as well as new technology services, will help improve the overall quality of technology in an SOA before it is deployed.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► CA should emphasize its already strong support for business process performance measurement with its Wily Customer Experience Manager, which boasts a more holistic approach to gathering both current and historical data on running services. Short of acquisition, HP must continue to partner aggressively with SOA suite providers (such as its recent agreement with BEA) to position its CA lifecycle, performance, and quality solutions as preferred offerings within SOA solutions by these vendors.

► HP should position IBM’s Rational testing tools as being limited in scope compared with LoadRunner, which can span a wider range of deployment environments and protocols and scale to meet a wide range of customer performance requirements.

► BPM pure play vendors such as HandySoft and Savvion should approach IBM (and its competitors) to form partnerships focused on merging BPM design and development workflows with robust compliance and SLA modeling and test capabilities.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Existing IBM customers with SOA solutions should immediately evaluate the Rational Tester for SOA Quality and Rational Performance Tester Extension for SOA Quality. Customers should note that, to take full advantage of these products, they will also need to invest in WebSpere Business Modeler, Rational ClearCase, and Rational Method Composer.

► IBM customers already employing IBM’s Tivoli Composite Application Manager should consider upgrading, because the current release better supports SOA installations through dashboards designed specifically for WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Process Server. The new version now supports IBM’s DataPower appliance as well. In addition, customers not wishing to upgrade but wanting to utilize the new Rational tools can do so without limiting the scope of those tools.

► Potential customers should press IBM to provide discounts depending upon the number of products purchased from the company’s à la carte portfolio of SOA quality products. Customers should also press IBM to package its professional services offerings as a value-added subscription service on top of licensed software, since most SOA instillations will require such services.

Oracle Acquires Hyperion to Deepen Financial CPM Portfolio

On March 1st Oracle announced that it has agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions Corporation, a global provider of corporate performance management software solutions, through a cash tender offer of approximately $3.3 billion. Hyperion will add complementary products to Oracle's BI/CPM product family, including an enterprise planning system, financial consolidation products, a multi-source OLAP server, operational analytics, and compliance reporting.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Rival SOA suite vendors that lack strong CPM portfolios should consider acquiring best-of-breed BI/CPM pure-play solution providers to gain a swift, significant presence in this growing segment. In particular, IBM, BEA, Microsoft, SAP, TIBCO, and webMethods should engage any of the remaining BI/CPM pure plays (i.e., Business Objects, Cognos, and SAS Institute) in merger/acquisition discussions.

► Rival BI/CPM pure-play vendors should seek out mergers, acquisitions, and/or closer partnerships with any of the SOA suite vendors, in order to be able to present more comprehensive solution portfolios that also include portals, application servers, business process management tools, enterprise service bus (ESB) middleware, DBMSs, and other features of the combined Oracle/Hyperion solution family.

► Rival MDM vendors should counter the increasingly formidable Oracle/Hyperion value proposition by enhancing their packaged offerings and domain data models that address financial data consolidation. At the same time, MDM vendors such as IBM, Teradata, TIBCO, SAS/DataFlux, and SAP should consider acquiring financial CPM vendors and leverage their tools and expertise to make a more aggressive attack on the financial data hub market.

► DQ tool vendors, such as Harte-Hanks Trillium Software, Innovative Systems, and DataMentors, should approach the combined Oracle/Hyperion to propose a merger, acquisition, or partnership that can help the software powerhouse to field a feature-complete MDM product portfolio.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Existing Oracle customers should welcome the Hyperion acquisition as a positive move, in that it deepens Oracle’s product portfolio in financial CPM and MDM. However, customers should not necessarily give any greater weight to Hyperion offerings in BI, CPM, DW, DI, or MDM simply because Oracle has announced an intention to acquire that firm. Oracle will very likely maintain Hyperion as a semi-autonomous product group for several years and only gradually converge that vendor’s offerings into the Fusion Middleware suite.

► Existing Hyperion customers and partners should react to the Oracle acquisition positively, but with their final judgments withheld until the deal closes and the combined vendors announce their joint roadmap. Fortunately, initial indications are that Oracle will assimilate Hyperion without significant disruption to that vendor’s ongoing product family, development plans, sales and support organizations, and partner ecosystems.