AmberPoint Upgrades SOA Management System and SOA Validation System Offerings

On June 11th AmberPoint announced the next release of its industry-leading runtime governance solutions for SOA. The version 6 releases of AmberPoint SOA Management System and AmberPoint SOA Validation System deliver new capabilities for understanding and controlling heterogeneous applications. These new products are outgrowths of AmberPoint's close work with industry partners including BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, TIBCO, and others.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► SOA Software should lead with its support for federated SOA environments, which the company has been working on for the past year. SOA Software should also accelerate its plans to fully integrate with Red Hat’s JBoss ESB product. This partnership will give SOA Software a solid foundation upon which to build.

► All rivals should play down AmberPoint’s announced support of popular ESBs, as the company has supported these products for some time, though the degree of support varied from product to product. In some cases, the company is just now reaching optimum levels of integration.

► IBM’s Tivoli and DataPower groups should continue to identify and act upon points of integration in support of WebSphere. Additionally, IBM’s ability to focus strongly on the design/development side of the software lifecycle will give it an advantage over AmberPoint, which continues to focus on run-time environments.

► Progress Software should continue its push for the integration of its Actional, Apama, and Sonic product lines. The company’s strong standard support and integration across its best-of-breed products will make it a strong competitor for AmberPoint over the long haul, especially as complex event processing (CEP), BPM/BAM, and governance merge into a single discipline.

Salesforce.com Jumps into the Hosted SOA Market

One May 21st Salesforce.com announced Salesforce SOA, taking service oriented architectures on demand for the first time. Salesforce SOA will deliver SOA as a service, seeking to counter complex and expensive software-based SOA solutions for intelligent Web services integration.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Microsoft should see Salesforce.com’s Salesforce SOA announcement as particularly threatening to its recently announced Biztalk Services initiative and overall SaaS efforts with Dynamics Live.

► SAP should also consider Salesforce.com’s commitment to SOA and willingness to move away from its line-of-business CRM application as particularly threatening.

► Oracle, which also has released on demand versions of its line-of-business applications, should watch Salesforce.com closely. Like SAP and Microsoft, Oracle does not have the experience as a hosted, on-demand software vendor.

► Traditional SOA vendors including TIBCO, BEA, Software AG/webMethods, Sun and IONA, should seek a partnership with Salesforce.com, providing core SOA services for its Salesforce Platform Edition foundation.

► All Salesforce.com rivals should position the company’s announcement as being technologically premature with no direct, immediate market impact.

Clarabridge Launches Pioneering On-Demand Text Analytics Service

On June 11th Clarabridge announced the general availability of Content Mining Service (CMS), an on-demand, hosted, subscription-based text analytics/mining service. In addition to providing access to the full functionality of the vendor’s existing premises-based Content Mining Platform (CMP), the new CMS offering adds enhancements in categorization, clustering, sentiment tuning, root-cause analysis, and category-influence reporting.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Rival text analytics/mining vendors should launch on-demand subscription-based versions of their premises-based solutions to match Clarabridge’s new CMS offerings. Rivals such as Attensity, Business Objects/Inxight, Factiva, IBM, Nstein, Oracle, Reuters/ClearForest, SAS, SPSS, and Teragram should use SaaS as a channel for expanding their addressable market to include SMB and consumer applications, as well as the point, transient, departmental, and trial requirements of larger enterprises.

► BI and data mining vendors that have their own text analytics/mining tools should position Clarabridge as a point solution provider. By contrast, these rivals should present their own text analytics/mining solutions as integral components of comprehensive product families that can process structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data.

► BI and data mining vendors that lack their own text analytics/mining tools should either license Clarabridge’s best-of-breed technology or consider acquiring the company itself (or any of its pure-play rivals) outright. Going forward, text analytics is becoming a core BI feature, and is key to integrating ECM, RSS, blogs, wikis, and other unstructured content into enterprise data management (DM) environments.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Enterprises looking for sophisticated text analytics/mining tools to address particular point applications should strongly consider Clarabridge’s CMP (premises-based) or CMS (SaaS). The offerings now provide enhancements in categorization, clustering, sentiment tuning, root-cause analysis, and category-influence reporting.

► Enterprises that are looking for text analytics/mining functionality but do not wish to deploy this functionality in-house (with the concomitant investment in software, hardware, storage, data-center staff, etc.) should consider Clarabridge’s new CMS offering. As an SaaS-based solution, CMS provides a low-risk, low-cost, pay-as-you-go option for enterprises in general, and is well suited to point, transient, departmental, trial, and SMB deployments.

Business Objects Rolls Out Integrated CPM, Acquires Text Analytics, and Previews On-Demand BI-Integrated Commercial Data

On May 22nd Business Objects announced the new BusinessObjects EPM Performance Suite, which integrates the former ALG Software’s cost and profitability analysis offerings onto the BusinessObjects XI platform, introduces new financial analytics features, provides new visualization and data integration capabilities in financial planning, and will be generally available on June 7.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft must aggressively cross-sell their growing CPM product families into their respective packaged-application customer bases, positioning Business Objects’ analytic solutions as redundant with the functionality that customers already access in their existing ERP applications.

► CPM vendors should accelerate development of consolidated families of BI-integrated analytic applications. Oracle and SAP must converge CPM solutions from Hyperion and Outlooksoft, respectively, into their existing CPM and BI platforms. Cognos and SAS must continue to enhance their respective BI and DI offerings, while tightening integration with their own CPM applications. And Microsoft must simply deliver its first BI-integrated CPM platform in order to be considered a credible player in this emerging market.

► CPM rivals must continue to make fill-in acquisitions and engage their partner ecosystems in order to offer a broad variety of targeted horizontal and vertical applications

► BI rivals should acquire and/or merge with text-analytics vendors to fill out their product portfolios and compete head-on with Business Objects, IBM, Oracle, SAS, SPSS, and others in this growing niche.

► BI rivals should beef up their support for integration of third-party commercial business data into their reports, dashboards, scorecards, and other tools.