Software strategies and more…

(Boston, MA) With the formal inclusion of Sybase into the SAP family, SAP’s leadership team outlines their strategy for enterprise mobility and unwired business intelligence.

It’s encouraging SAP will continue with its model of acquiring market leaders, yet rather than ‘shoehorning’ them into their corporate culture it will continue to cultivate the innovation and expertise those organizations developed as a independent units. Its my opinion that given rampant consolidation, shifting market trends, and dynamic customer requirements this model allows broader flexibility for SAP and its functioning sub-brands in developing and delivering relevant enterprise solutions.

In today’s briefing by SAP’s executive team, Bill McDermott, Jim Snabe, John Chen and Vishal Sikka, they unveiled their strategy across three lines of business:

• enterprise mobility,
• business analytics, and
• enterprise information management.

Key components of today’s announcement included:

1. A roadmap for their mobile enterprise platform, due to go live by Summer 2011 and supporting all mobile O/S, market leading devices, and integration with SAP Business Suite and SAP Business ByDesign.
2. An industry portfolio for enterprise information management focusing on broad database support for SAP business applications.
3. An update to their business analytics and business intelligence road map outlined at this year’s SAPphire conference.
4. And, an outline of their advances and proposed solutions in in-memory computing and database technologies.

So why is this all relevant?

In a market that is becoming increasingly mobile and as devices (phones, laptops, slate computers, etc.) are making near quantum leaps in processing power and sophistication the value of enterprise technology is at the highest where it is nearest to the end user. Combine this with on-going globalization of manufacturing, distribution, financial, and retail networks and the ever increasing socialization of customer and market data and SAP is attempting to leap frog its competitors in this space, namely IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

The integration of SAP and Business Objects + Sybase starts to realize the opportunity in the long-tail of decision making. As outlined in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory, and applied to the enterprise, few but high value and broad impact decisions are made at the CxO office but many micro-decisions are then made on the shop floor, customer service engagement, etc. The challenge has been to turn these executive strategies into a profitable business acted on by everyone equally. Today’s announcements are about leveraging the SAP’s solutions in conjunction with Sybase in-memory and mobile information management so that business information can readily be cascaded to end-points across the organization in an increasingly effective manner.

SAP promises to continue to build upon the individual ecosystems of SAP, BOBJ, and Sybase to drive innovation within each company’s ecosystems to create a multiplier effect that will allow SAP to become the premier provider of enterprise information management and delivery. This bolsters their combined ability to address core system differentiation as well as advanced line-of-business solutions and services.

Just reading how Google’s employees are being switched to Google OS and those that aren’t are choosing between Apple or Linux. The article goes beyond just the trials and tribulations between Google and Microsoft and adds additional food for thought with regards to whether Steveb and team can right the listing Microsoft Titanic.

To see the writing on the wall, one only has to look as far as the turmoil currently happening within the Windows Consumer division, a restart with Windows Mobile that leaves Windows Mobile 6.x users (including nearly every MS employee) out in the cold with a dead product, long-time partners jumping ship for new tablet and tablet-like O/S platforms, and its own inability to launch a competitive product in a space it was once the pioneer, not to mention a music player and store that never was…. What is left Live and XBOX? Both which have had and are being challenged by other services that are often seen as easier and more in tune with the needs of their users. It my opinion that without a tangible connection to what people want to do with computing (consume information about their business, their activities, their customers and their friends) tools that Microsoft continues to decrease its own relevance in the modern computing space.

Of course an argument is that Microsoft is tied tightly into business technology and is it’s platform of choice because they offer everything from the data centre to the desktop, but if we look at changes that are now starting to reshape the enterprise (and by this I mean all businesses that transact with customers large and small) market we see the client/server world coming to a end in the not-to-distant future.

Start by looking at the combined Software as a Service offerings and the Platform as a Service offerings that are enabling both traditional and up-start business to manage their financials, customers, inventory as well as computing and processing power you soon can conclude the tools that Microsoft offers for managing, deploying and developing are quickly becoming yesterday’s news. In fact, I would further argue given IBM, Oracle and SAP’s focus on developing in-memory databases, web-based, mobile and business intelligence solutions that these will have an near term immediate impact on sales of Microsoft’s SQL database as instances of this product will be replaced by solutions that can run complex transaction and data mining queries in-memory and report in real-time rather than via traditional I/O coding. If you combine this with the cloud becoming a repository for web-platform tools like AppExchange for the business and Apple’s Appstore or Google’s Apps for business for consumers and businesses alike and you see how on-premise is quickly becoming a model of the past.

It seems that the market also continues to question the relevance of Microsoft in the future. During the past decade there have only been two periods when the stock showed life, those being the end of the dot.com boom cycle and when Microsoft was expected to buy into the search wars by acquiring Yahoo! but failed. The stock market seems to question Microsoft’s future plans since the company is no longer rewarded with a premium multiple that innovative leaders such as Apple receive.

Yes, I know Microsoft has launched its Cloud strategy and has promising applications from Office 2010, SharePoint, Azure, and CRM – but many of these are still tied to heavy enterprise investments in Microsoft’s traditional tools and platform solutions. So for hybrid environments (Software+Services) this may forestall rapid migration, but it doesn’t mean that Microsoft is truly “all-in” in my opinion.

My final thoughts are these:

1. Microsoft has lost its way at the worst time in the consumer space, its customer and its partners are looking to Microsoft’s competitors for innovation and sellable solutions. Dell and HP are the first off the boat, so how will Microsoft shore up the army of independent and small developers that may soon follow. This space is critical because it connects the data, information and systems to the jobs people are doing in and away from the office. Innovation begins with the consumer these days not with corporate IT, even SAP gets this.

2. Ballmer has bet on a long term strategy over short term gains. I agree that technology investments are not something you should tie to quarterly results, but looking at the quarters and yearly figures above. Seems it’s time to put up or shut up about this.

3. The ‘elephants’ Windows, Information Worker Group, and AppPlat are massive parts of the companies ~$60B in revenues. These massive businesses have the company committed to a course that makes innovation hard and political. While there are forces at work (Azure, Office On-line, CRM) that may effect a change of course – it will take significant management and ethos re-direction to make this work. I am not confident Microsoft has the hutspa  to make the bold and risky choices needed for this to happen. As such Microsoft may loose the enterprise market just as it is loosing the consumer market.

* Full disclosure, I worked at Microsoft and had an amazing experience while there, opinions in this blog are based on my person view of the company given the challenges they face in the market and the publicly available sites I have referenced in this blog. I do not hold shares in Microsoft.

Lucky me, I didn’t attend SAP’s Sapphire in Orlando, Florida nor did I have time during the week to watch more than Hasso’s presentation, but I rose early on a Saturday to catch some of the highlights via the videos on Sapphire now. As such, here are some of my thoughts:

Vishal Sikka: ‘Real’ Real Time Computing:

In Mr. Sikka’s presentation he touched on two areas of innovation by SAP, those being:

1. Reach – How can SAP help companies expand their research
2. Real Time – A fundamental shift to real time data

In this post, I’ll take some of his highlights from the second and add some of my own thoughts:

We are currently experiencing a new period of convergence. In the ‘twenty-teens’ we are starting to witness dramatic advances in hardware (both on-premise but mainly mobile) that is spurring a change in how we conduct business and our daily lives. Changes in processing power, architecture, software-as-a-service and how software is being written and deployed is making this possible. Vishal’s keynote at SaphireNOW spent a fair bit of time discussing and postulating what this might mean for business applications and the people that use them.

Some of the points in the keynote included that in 2003 processors “hit a wall”, so Intel and others have focused on multi-core systems and software systems have had to adapt and those that can take advantage are at a tremendous advantage. And, “RDBMS was initially developed when memory was expensive, this is no longer the case… we’ve now used a single blade sever up to 2 TB of SSD.”

He’s correct in stating that this does create incredible speed advantages over disk storage and software that was build with 1960s and 1970s computing architectures that relied on a file and retrieve time of search and access algorithm may not be competitive for much longer. In fact, SAP cited a customer that has over 74k tables, 2.5 TB system, tables, processes across multiple industries and countries was testing their new architecture both software and the hardware partnership with HP. The challenge is that while SAP may be able to optimize solutions that are 100% SAP architecture, how does this impact systems that are not SAPs, data storage tools from other vendors, antivirus, etc.? I am not clear on these capabilities, but I do think that SAP’s long time focus on organic development of tools, may make it easier for the initial investment to realize the gains from optimizing SAP applications and data sets.

Mr. Sikka also discussed a reorganization of some of SAP research departments, “[we] put together teams, SAP’s MaxDB, T-REX (search/in-memory column storage), and Roster tools.” In the key note he stated that this enabled them to develop an in-memory data processing technology that can process 2 megabytes of data in one-millisecond in each core, this scales linearly per core. Because we store data in columns (and compression is better) resulting in 10-15x compression ration per database. Process data in DB in incredibly fast speeds with zero aggregates.

And finally he introduced HANA, or High-performance analytical appliance, a joint product launched by SAP and HP deploy and appliance that can attach to existing ERP R/3. Last time I was at Sapphire there was also a launch of an joint HP and SAP product that also focused on BI. If memory serves this met with moderate uptake, but more importantly it precluded the later announcements of SAP bolstering its BI business with the acquisition of Business Objects. I am not saying that this means that SAP will look at M&A for companies that can do this….rather Hasso infers this in his keynote immediately following Sikka’s.

POV: HANA sounds damn impressive and gives SAP a significant boost in new technology to talk its customers about. Given this will work with older versions of R/3 that are optimized, we can expect that many customers will be very interested taking this for a test drive. Does this alone promise to catapult SAP ahead of competition? I am not sold on that, but I do think that the combination of this plus mobility (in my next post) will make for some very interesting innovation and potentially game changing offerings to new and existing customers over the next 12-36 months.

Not that much of a surprise to those watching SAP‘s moves over the past 5 months. The changing of the guard combined with a big promotions and promises of in-memory based ERP and BI tools meant SAP needed to bolster its assets and the acquisition of Sybase just made sense. In addition, the need for SAP to start building a bit of an empire like nemesis Oracle has done meant that SAP needed to step outside its more traditional lines of business and incorporate adjacent solutions and technologies needed by its customer base.

Make no mistake about this deal though, SAP needed to back its in-memory promises with some substantial clout. Sybase has invested heavily in the development and testing of in-memory databases with its Adaptive Server Enterprise and SQL Anywhere technologies.  With SQL Anywhere this should boost SAP’s ability to deliver functionality its customer needs for transaction, inventory and financial applications across the business more effectively and across more devices and platforms. ASE gives a big boost to SAP Business Suite users and the power they are looking to handle incrementally more and complicated transactions across large office locations. By moving to in-memory and optimizing its ERP applications and BI tools for them SAP is hoping to lure more customers who may be looking to rid themselves of expensive database license and maintenance costs. And by doing so these customers may get significant boost in performance, scalability and reporting flexibility.

As far as the impact on cloud and SaaS business, in-memory tools may have a growing impact on virtualized servers, application and hosted data centers are looking to bring more services into an as a Service model. Also the partnership of SAP and long-time customer Research in Motion (RIM) may get a big boost as SAP (with SQL anywhere) offers a significant boost to business users using RIM’s popular Blackberry mobile devices to augment and deliver business insight.

My point of view: This was as much an needed move by SAP to both aid in business growth as well as deliver the road map its been preaching to its customers for nearly the past year. Its no accident this happens right before SAPphire in Orlando and we can expect even more in-memory news in the coming weeks. I also expect SAP to continue acquiring firms that it can add to its ecosystem, most likely a server virtualization player – and to do so in the next 12 months.

I am not sure.

After hobbling thru the choppy live webcast yesterday and trying to piece together all the PR fluff, blogger commentary and random 140 character posts on Twitter I am still not sure how VMforce will be a monetize-able joint venture between VMware and SFDC.

On the surface it seems to be a great new sandbox for developers to play in to develop future cloud and on-premise applications for their organization and/or for the market at large. Folks that already utilize SFDC’s appexchange and chatterexchange to develop add-ons for SFDC user communities now have access to an even more robust and dynamics infrastructure – but what is VMware’s cut in this?

My gut says VMware is trying to position themselves as a leader in cloud based infrastructure as a service. Potentially even helping companies not only shed business software, but also the hardware needed to support these and other client/server apps. It a bold gambit that vaults them into competing on higher footing with the likes of Amazon’s AWS and both Cisco’s Smart Grid and HP’s Cloud Assure IaaS plans.

Of course the interesting play here is how both of these companies through VMForce are looking to attract the Java developer communities and enable them to create connection across both application and infrastructure software realms. This should further bolster interest in FinancialForce.com, making it easier to build out its core accounting and financial solutions to include industry and role-based users and business processes. Finally this also may allow for BI as a Service to also take off by utilizing virtual machines to power processor hungry analytics, reporting and planning tools.

Personally, I think this makes them a very interesting M&A target for SAP or a merger with SFDC themselves – both to compete more effectively with Oracle. Time will tell as more information and customer adoption of VMforce.com comes to light.

Today I attended Jive Software’s Get Social tour stop in Toronto and left impressed not only with the company’s software and strategy, but with the quality of attendance at the event. The event featured a hour and a bit of keynotes including a look at how Canada’s RIM has used Jive’s SBS to deploy mybackberry.com. What impressed me the most was the level of interest and activity from Canada’s largest companies. In the breakout I attended there was representation from 4 of the 6 largest banks, well known national law firms, ad agencies and professional services companies.

Personally, my interest in attending came from discovering significant interest in the integration of social software tools within business processes. In fact I have touched on this in several blogs already (here, here and here) and have found myself spending an increasing amount of time fielding questions from financial professionals on the topic of how their investments in tools like SAP or Microsoft Dynamics along with SharePoint can be further leveraged to move people from communal watering holes of information (ala SharePoint, Stellent (now part of Oracle), OpenText, etc.) to proactive, automated community distribution networks. All the while business execs these social services/tools to be part of existing business processes and applications from ERP to CRM to BI – and not to have to rip and replace investments they’ve already made.

To address this need Jive has developed its Social Business Software platform. This platform is based on a addressing a need to leverage existing technology investments – both on-premise and software as a service – made by organizations and intertwine social tools which are quickly maturing from the consumer technology world (Facebook, twitter, DIGG, etc.) into the business arena.

The Jive SBS solution should be very interesting to companies who’ve found themselves sinking in email, departmental collaboration websites, individual shared drives with unique folder structures, client-based office productivity tools, or aging client server business applications with little web extensibility. Their idea is to offer software solutions to organizations seeking to bring current consumer focused social features into the context of a secure, robust business processes and integrate these into the existing information and presentation layers used by their employees. Think ‘facebook’ that allows individual users to create ‘friends’ of co-workers, partners, suppliers and also applications – ERP, data repositories, content management systems, etc.

An interesting quote from the Jive Software presenter was that one of their goals is “…to enable the solutions from being ‘place-centric’ (e.g. a data or content repository) to ‘you-centric’.” The promise of this approach is to enable content relevance to the job you and/or your employees are doing – further amplifying the time to value that the business or community can benefit from. This can be achieved by using technology to enable systems to constantly seek information based on your criteria and deliver internal and external content in a timely fashion to the end-user.

I’ll be writing more on this topic, but for now my advice (based on what I have seen so far) for organizations  looking at social technology solutions that can fit into existing business processes is to:

• Plan – Look at (audit) how your employees are communicating in the office versus outside the office. Determine how this may or may not fit into different aspects of your business process and technologies.
• Promote – Promote activities which promote collaboration that benefits the organization, team and individual. Begin to recognize good ideas from individuals and identify who might be a super user by department and even age group (e.g. don’t have a 20 something trying to sell social tools to a 50 something CEO)
• Execute – Pick a part of the business that demand business process rigor, but also has an affinity for new technologies. Obtain the buy-in and support from the executive in charge and pilot a solution that brings together social technologies with financial, customer and partner data. Observe its usage, recognize individual contribution and learn from the effects this has on average and advanced users.
• Deliver – Realize this is a game changer. IT must be involved, but the business user will in some cases control the success of the project based on how they adopt and use the technology in conjunction with their specific needs. Don’t bury the data in a common format you make them adhere to – rather encourage them to rank and promote what they find valuable. Deliver an experience rather than a product.
• Hand over control – The hive of users will self organize around value and efficiencies. This is seen in nature and technology and is paramount to successful social software. In your planning you should have covered the governance and controls needed that are required by your business and ensured these are documented for your users. Now let them drive the interest and improvements of the software going forward.

The last part (IMHO) is the innovation aspect that is key to socializing your business.

Late in 2009 both SalesForce.com and SAP began beta testing social applications that proposed businesses could use social tools within their walls to address a variety of needs from financial management and sales tracking to impromptu group collaboration. Since then both of these solutions have gone live and are beginning to garner much interest in the Enterprise 2.0 communities.

The applications are Chatter and StreamWork, respectively. I blogged about StreamWork before as it occurred how in the business environment we use word processing tools less and less and depend more and more on our email to communicate ideas across departments, teams and amongst individuals.

I have also touched on the incorporation of business intelligence and search (here) and how these could automate the presentation of information in the context of what an individual, team or department is doing at any given time. I talked in my blog about how I saw the trifecta of business intelligence, search and collaboration tools adding previously untapped insight, thus value, to employees in a highly tailored, yet automated way.

Now I am seeing the productization of this in both Chatter (and Chatterbox by Financial Force.com) and StreamWork. Salesforce’s Chatter, “…which has been described by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as a way to make the cloud more collaborative and social.”  adds another dimension to the companies AppExchange so much that the company created ChatterExchange a one stop shop for business grade collaborative tools that can plug-in to the many services and products that businesses are subscribing to from Salesforce.com.

SAP has positioned its self as a thought leader here by doing something completely un-SAP like. By first introducing StreamWork (nee 12Sprints) as a tool to aid in cross organization discussions, decision making and delivery toolkit for organization it took the emerging trends in social collaboration being tackled by the likes of Google Wave and Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and packaged them in context of a business application with integration into business processes.

While there are differences between the products, SAP stays closer to a collaboration tool that connects to popular email, content management and unified communications solutions while Saleforce.com’s Chatter leverages what it has learned from relationships with social media tools like Facebook and twitter. Both address the needs for robust, business grade solutions for collaboration, messaging and workflows. They both advance the enterprise from treating communications as transactional and promote relationships that unleash a community’s ability to work together in real time on topics of interest to bring business and customer value.

The exciting part is both of these tools are open to others to develop on top of and thus create a social network of their own for improvement in a very dynamic fashion. While is is not necessarily new of Salesforce.com, it certainly is not the business norm for SAP.

The potential value for using these applications may be tremendous for their customers who can now stay on top of internal and external events, opportunities and tipping points so that they can participate in conversations that previously they may have not even known were happening. Further by offering social tools in the context of the business they have potentially set their customers up to take advantage of that next big leap in productivity making them more competitive and more agile than other organizations.

I have been thinking of a hybrid cloud for a while.

Over the past several years it was my opinion that certain technologies made sense to offer as a SaaS business model. Tried and true IT services such as datacentre, processing power, storage, application hosting etc. allowed for businesses of all sizes to access infrastructure or platform technologies in a fairly vanilla format to scale their IT capabilities at the rate of business need rather than and invest and wait or wait and invest approach.

Now it occurs to me that many mid and large organizations are better off utilizing a ‘hybrid cloud’ architecture to meet the needs of their employees, business processes and the extended business. This hybrid cloud focuses more on the client side applications and business processes. Yet this model is far from simple.

One article I recommend reading is by Vanessa Alvarez and is called “Management Tools will be the Cloud Glue”. In short, the article talks about new management tools that utilize web and open source tools to address the different workloads and functions that businesses need as their data, applications and business processes – that are enabled by IT travel across mainframe, client/server, and SaaS/PaaS/IaaS models – and make these visible to the IT department. Interesting companies doing this include CloudSwitch , enStratus, and Intelliden (now part of IBM).

Another by Charles Babcock is “Hybrid Clouds Floating to Enterprise Forefront” . In his InformationWeek article Babcock also talks about the challenge of adopting infrastructure and platform as a Server tools while also addressing governance and security requirements. Again the theme here is the need of more complex businesses to manage their data and ensure that custom processes are effectively implemented across the business – whether this is on-premises, hosted, or integrated with a pure cloud solution.

Both of these articles touch on the needs of more mature organizations and their challenge to combine technology that has been customized to meet existing business processes with the scale and availability of cloud services. It has been my opinion, given my experience in the ERP space as an analyst and product manager for Microsoft Dynamics, that partners and ISVs would be well positioned to offer line of business applications as a service. This would allow for organizations that had a stable core ERP (finance, operations, supply chain, etc) environment to implement and grow in a more ‘dynamic’ fashion.

Yet, as I continue to think about why this has been slow to happen it occurs to me these partners and ISVs must still struggling with multitenancy issues. In other words, the line of business processes that I assumed would naturally lend themselves to the cloud are also those that may have been most customized. Thus while they can be hosted, this is typically in isolation (single tenancy). Such a model is not (profitably) scalable the way platform as a service and even ‘office’ as a service is.

So what may be the next step?

I feel the future for many organizations will still be a hybrid cloud model. The maturing of management tools and services will help many organizations focus on managing their data and information security while optimizing its provisioning across on-premise and cloud services. In the case of business applications this may take the form of core accounting tools being brought into the cloud akin to how many HR and payroll apps already are. Through management and security tools more accounting, billing, payable information can be exposed to a greater number of planning, operations and eco-system tools that live both locally and within the cloud.

I am still working collecting more insight on how mid and large organization can successfully adopt a hybrid solution and welcome your point of view.

Woke up to read (amongst a weekend worth of posts) the following article from Information Week’s Global CIO: Oracle’s Larry Ellison Declares War On IBM And SAP.

I must admit it hasn’t been a secret that Oracle has been marshaling for this battle, after all any company that spends approximately $25 Billion in acquisitions since 2005 (source) must start making money back at some point. The ‘billion dollar’ question in my opinion is whether the promised fusion of all its applications really works?

Having worked for a company that at one time stated an intent to unify its ERP code across all of its disparate applications only to find that neither customers or partners wanted this – not to mention the engineering pitfalls that become readily apparent – I doubt whether the current plans for fusion can be met in a way that will appease all the stakeholders Oracle needs to oust IBM or SAP as the respective market leaders in high-end servers and business applications.

In the Global CIO article, “Ellison promised that the second half of 2010 will be a momentous one for not only Oracle but also the entire IT industry and its enterprise customers because that’s when Oracle will roll out its completely reengineered Fusion software lineup along with more integrated and optimized Oracle-Sun systems, along the lines of the wildly successful Exadata 2.” Given this promise happened during the Oracle earnings calls, I cannot see how this is much more than a rally cry to sales that he hopes to the Wall Street will echo in an increase of stock price.

By the way Oracle’s stock price, much like Larry’s bid to win the America’s Cup back for many years prior to this one, has been stuck in the doldrums - neither rising or falling much over the past several years – recently it has grown at market average but still trailed SAP, IBM and Microsoft’s growth. A reflection that while Oracle has been busy amalgamating and consolidating many IT players there has not been an overwhelming belief that will pan out for Oracle or its customers.

One important aspect of fusion that Oracle promises, but again trails some of its immediate rivals, is that Oracle promises many of its fusion application can be run either on-premise or via the cloud. SAP realized the need for this hybrid strategy when it attempted in 2007 to launch Business By Design and Microsoft has been working on this since 2005 with its Software+Services strategy. And IBM has been driving its ability to deliver infrastructure as a service and many of its applications as a service for the past several years as well – these have culminated into its Smarter Planet initiative. So Oracle is far from being a thought leader here.

Personally, I think the most telling quote is at the end of the article, Larry says, “So we’ll be delivering those applications both by selling the software directly, kinda the old way of doing it, which is still the most popular, by the way; we’ll be selling the Fusion applications integrated with our hardware—our servers and our storage and our networks; and we’ll be selling it on the cloud.” He later added, “our cloud or somebody else’s”.

This is worth noting if you read the article on Oracle sniffing (original post by Dennis Howlett). Might one conjecture that by acquiring SUN and (especially)  JAVA that Oracle will start charging customers relentlessly for access to any products Oracle deems ‘fused’ thus boosting revenues at the potential expense of customer privacy and satisfaction? Will customers stand for this (thus allowing Oracle to achieve the stated path of dominating IBM and SAP in their respective markets?) or might their customers seek out comparable solutions from IBM, SAP and others for database, BI, ERP, CRM, etc during their next refresh?

Time will tell.

I am a huge fan of BI as a Service.

I first started thinking about BI-a-a-S when I attended a FAST Search and Transfer analyst conference back in 2005 when they were talking about BI applets rather than search applets. Their vision at the time was that BI needed to be web enabled and customizable by the user of the data and the job at hand. In January 2008, FAST was gobbled up by Microsoft (a BIG SAP miss in my humble opinion) and its enterprise search thought leadership seemed to dissipate.

But the need for web-based enterprise business intelligence has continued to gain momentum. Both the need and opportunity for this technology has recently come back into the limelight with the Economist article Data, data everywhere and has been furthered in blogs like Retention and Compliance: The other side of the big data problem by Ramon Chen. Its my opinion if you combine these with social business trends as cited by Michael Fauscette in his recent blog post Applying social to business , web-based BI is well placed to automate and make search intelligent to hone business and customer experiences - all the while taking advantage of the dynamic storage and processing power coming on-line from a wide variety of infrastructure as a service offerings.

I expect savvy organizations will pay close attention to BI-a-a-S and how it allows them to make sense of their markets, customers and processes. I also foresee BI co-existing as both on-premise solutions and web-based depending on need and scale requirements, thus being more of a software+services solution rather than an either or solution.

Note: Microsoft promises we’ll see much more of FAST technology in the new version of SharePoint which is sorely needed given the poor search in previous versions.