Saturday, May 26, 2007
Links for 2007-05-26
An attendee of EMC World commented on Documentum features. Apparently he is excited about Java APIs in the ECM space and has previously written about them. This begs the question of whether industry analysts who cover ECM should research the quality of APIs exposed by ECM vendors since many customers actually use them. Likewise, this person also comments on SOA which I find interesting. SOA has been talked about for years and I would have at least expected some commentary on why did it take so long and whether it would be proprietary WSDL or something that feels more standards based? Imagine the possibility of all ECM vendors leveraging common WSDL.
If your enterprise architecture team hasn't taken the opportunity to evaluate Liferay Enterprise Portal, you need to get familiar. It is not only 100% open source using the purest of definition, it is also one of two portals certified to scale to 384 CPUs and has been independently certified as the most secure portal software regardless of open or commercial. Anyway, I find it interesting when new versions of products emerge and the documentation of open source projects fall behind. Harri Kaukovuo jumps in and provides solutions to problems others may face. I wonder what it would take for open source industry analyst types like Raven Zachary and Alex Fletcher to comment that the biggest problem with open source is not source code but the lack of high quality documentation which is something that large enterprises should be able to contribute to without getting their legal folks twisted.
Folks know that my frustrations with industry analyst firms runs high but in terms of attacking Gartner is simply unproductive. Could folks not focus on the magic quadrant so much as the conversation seems to be all about the perspectives of software vendors. I wonder if folks think there is merit in understanding the perspective of an enterprise in that they want to see all potential solutions which could even include non-commercial open source offerings. Was it sad, is that I run across so many software vendors who are frustrated with high fees they pay to analyst firms and they acknowledge they would rather have direct access to customers yet when I ask them does their CTO blog, I get a deer in the headlights look. Haven't they figured out that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy?
I was excited to see that Microsoft was going to help enable identity in languages such as Ruby, Java and PHP until I read this phrase: The open-source projects will create code to specify Web sites' security policies and to accept cards in Java for Sun Java System Web Servers . Kim Cameron, please say it aint so. While you are on the campus at Redmonk and are somewhat isolated from us customer types and based on the folks you interact with on a daily basis, the thinking can become somewhat insular, I hope that you understand that while providing support for Cardspace in Java is good, doing so by embedding into Sun products is less good. You are probably aware that folks in large enterprises use J2EE servers such as BEA Weblogic, JBoss and IBM Websphere and that support for Cardspace should either be strongly encouraged by Microsoft by putting it directly into these products and/or making it a component so that it can be easily integrated. By putting it into the Sun product, you will make it difficult for enterprises to use Cardspace without having to drag along things they don't need. I wonder if Pat Patterson could amplify, refine, throw daggers at this thought?
OK, analyst firms influence is being displaced by bloggers and the ability of customers to hyperlink to each other. While I agree that analyst firms should come clean in terms of their sources of revenue, I would like for the blogger community to stop bitching and start proposing actionable solutions. What exactly is it you want from these analyst firms. Are you looking for disclosure in the way the folks over at Redmonk do? Are you looking for the Magic Quadrant to have an indicator next to each vendor as to whether they are a client? The one thing I can say is that Vinnie Mirchandani and Brian Sommer are spot on in terms of analysts covering very mature technology segments while ignoring emerging ones. Wouldn't it be interesting if they talked about how otherwise distinct segments could integrate with each other? Would it be valuable if an analyst firm for example talked about how ECM and BPM could work together vs treating them as standalone topics?
