Veni, Vidi, Wiki

Mike Kavis has been blogging about his experiences and challenges in implementing and leveraging Enterprise 2.0 technologies in his company. His posts got me wondering about how business users could be informed about and trained on these technologies, when I came across Veni, Vidi, Wiki (a play on words Veni, vidi, vici which mean I came, I saw, I conquered in Latin) in Wired magazine. It is quite comprehensive and takes a 360 degree view on wikis.

It is one thing to get IT people excited about having wikis and using them. It is quite another to create awareness among non-technical folk. As I was searching the web to see if I could find any good tutorials on wikis for laypersons, I came across this awesome video called Wikis In Plain English (you can also view it on YouTube). I was amazed by how short and simple it is and how effectively it makes its case. Common Craft who produced this video have another one called RSS In Plain English (also on YouTube) which is just as effective a tutorial on RSS feeds.

On a side note, if you are searching for success stories using Enterprise 2.0 look no futher than this blog post by Bill Ives.

No Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS in the future?

Business Process Management (BPM) products have matured considerably and are now seeing widespread adoption. BPM industry segment has evolved from having standalone products to having full fledged Business Process Management Suites (BPMS). When selecting a BPMS, many organizations rely on reports from leading industry analysts such as Gartner Magic Quadrant, Forrester Wave etc.
I came across this interesting blog post titled BPMS and Gartner’s Quadrant Problem by Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise site. It appears that Gartner may be moving towards a Business Process Platform (BPP) or Integrated Composition Enviroment (ICE) quadrant instead of one for BPMS. BPM is an evolving market and I suppose this is to be expected. This is reflected in the acquisitions of pure play BPMS vendors by more established infrastructure companies: TIBCO’s acquisition of Staffware, BEA buying Feugo and softwareAG acquiring webMethods. All pure play BPMS vendors are potential candidates for acquisition. So does that tilt the balance in favor of infrastructure vendors? It depends on what products are considered to be a part of BPP/ICE – BPMS, middleware, ESB, SOA governance, etc. If it is required that all these be delivered by the same vendor it will favor the heavy weights.

Oracle buys BEA – now what?

The big news in technology last week was Oracle’s purchase of BEA systems. There is a lot of overlap in their product lines, specially in middleware. The general consensus is that BEA’s lineup was superior to competing Oracle products. Although Oracle has revamped its application server in the last few years, it has failed to displace IBM WebSphere and BEA Weblogic from the top two spots. Many analysts believe that this acquisition strengthens Oracle’s middleware portfolio and will allow it to go head on against IBM in that arena. Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise points to a Forrester Research analysis (you made need to register to view this free report) published last year when Oracle announced its bid for BEA. The Forrester report has side-by-side product comparison and pointed out products from either stable that are at risk of being replaced. However, they mention that there is high level of overlap between Aqualogic BPM and Oracle BPEL Process Manager and that there is no BEA product comparable to Oracle BPA Suite. I think it would be more appropriate to put Aqualogic BPM and BPEL Process Manager together with BPA Suite into the same bracket.

Anyway, what does this mean for Oracle and BEA customers? In the short term, probably nothing. Licensing and maintenance revenues from BEA’s existing customers will add to Oracle’s coffers. The last thing it wants is to lose this money by pushing these customers into a rival’s arms. It will continue to support these products for the next few years just like it is doing with Peoplesoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel under its Applications Unlimited promise . However, it may stop enhancing these products and eventually raise costs so much that customers will eventually be left with no choice but to migrate. If Oracle chooses to cherry pick best of breed products for the long run, even customers with some of its existing products may face a potential migration – only in this case it will be an “upgrade”.

For new customers customers this means that there will be one less available option. Forrester’s analysis concludes: “Shops that want to retain an independent middleware vendor as competitive leverage against their major suppliers will now have to look to smaller, more risky suppliers, to open source software, and to second-tier providers like Sun and Software AG.”