LiteBytes from Lustratus Research

SAP buys Business Objects

It was announced yesterday that SAP is acquiring Business Objects for $6.8billion in what is described as a friendly take-over (and leaked out a couple of weeks back as reported here ).  On the product side, the benefits are obvious from SAP perspective - although there will certainly be some integration and overlap issues for SAP to deal with (covered well by Forrester here).  Clearly, it also brings a large number of new customers to SAP - although it will be a long term project to bring them over to other SAP products.

From the vendor perspective, it reduces the choice for ISVs wanting to partner with a Business Intelligence vendor.  This should make Cognos (now the only significant independent BI vendor) in particular happy.  However, the big question is will IBM grab Cognos now to fill its own BI gap before Oracle gets there first.  Of course nothing may happen - Remember the speculation around Informatica and Oracle after Ascential was bought by IBM a couple of years back?
 
And finally... For the customers of BO, it will take a while for the smoke to clear.  However, SAP paying that amount of money should make BO customers very confident that their software has a strong future.  What it means to users of SAP's existing BI product is equally obvious:  While it is very likely the products will be supported for a long time, it is equally very likely that they will not be the basis of SAP's BI strategy going forward. 

Ronan

SOA and its effects on Business Risk

SOA is a Big Thing - it transforms the business, it is a key strategic initiative, it aligns IT more closely with business goals, etc.  But this brings up an important issue for executives. How does SOA affect the business risk picture? Does it drive additional risks? Does it provide any mitigation?

Lustratus has just published a new paper, "The Impact of SOA on Business Risk", that looks at this subject in more detail. The paper does not try to come up with a definitive answer, but instead considers the strategic, compliance, financial and operational areas of business risk and comes up with a grid of effects generated by SOA adoption, providing a framework against which companies can carry out their own risk assessments.

I believe this is an important area for companies to be aware of, with little guidance available. Bearing this in mind, Lustratus has decided to make the paper available at no charge. But for those people who cannot take the time to read the whole paper, the broad conclusion is that although there are areas where SOA drives risk, on balance it mitigates considerably more risk than it drives, and on top of this the new exposures are largely manageable.

Steve 

Morgan Stanley goes SOA

Morgan Stanley was recently talking about its major SOA investment spanning the last 18 months.  Implemented in its Global Wealth Management division , the justification for SOA was to give advisors and clients an integrated view of more accurate information, more quickly.  As with most SOA projects of this scale, SOA isn't the whole story.  Morgan Stanley had to first upgrade the network infrastructure to give its branch network the bandwidth required, then implement SOA on top and finally use ETL to convert the data flowing through their service bus into the dashboards the advisors look at (and a customer portal).

Interesting aspects of the coverage include:

• The programme was a strategic initiative to make this division competitive now and into the future.  Technology is simply the enabler to that goal.
• A best of breed approach was taken to the technology: IBM for the SOA layer, Informatica for the ETL.
• Web Services were used extensively (In the drive to distinguish between SOA and Web Services, it is easy to dismiss Web Services.  They can and often are part of the SOA technology stack)
• The project included major rewrites of existing applications - to consolidate where possible and also to update so that they could be plugged into the SOA framework.
• The common problem of changing the development culture away from write-it-all-ourselves was stressed.

Ronan

SOA programmes are like pregnant elephants

Our friends at Gartner talk about the trough of despondency when the newness wears off an IT trend and the negative press starts. SOA went through this last year to a degree - after the initial waves of vendor driven news and a few early adopter stories things went quieter. However, this was not because SOA was falling off the agenda, rather it reflected the time taken for a serious programme to deliver benefits worth publicising.

Which brought to mind an analogy with elephant pregnancies: SOA programmes - as with most enterprise software programme - are like elephant's famously long pregnancies(which last nearly two years): It can be hard to get one started. Once it starts, it isn't necessarily visible to anyone not involved. However, when it finally emerges it can be big news and likely to grow fast. All just like elephants!

I will give a prize for anybody who can come up with a suitable animal analogy for Enterprise 2.0 projects :-).

Ronan