Got a quick update today from the new co-CEOs of SAP – Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. Jim focused on their innovation strategy – making significant steps into on-demand business applications, aiming to support a hybrid approach allowing customers to mix on-demand and on-premise software. In addition they aim to increase support for running [...]
SaaS
I got a briefing from Quantivo recently. This is a company focused on behavioral analytics – uncovering patterns within the mountains of customer data that companies have – web analytics and point of sale data for instance. They help companies find these patterns, find the insight that they are not seeing with their current tools, [...]
Wolf Frameworks is a USA/India PaaS company started in 2006 as a pure play cloud computing platform. They have a front end (AJAX) using XML to communicate to a .NET backend on C#. They have about 3,000 plus people designing software using the platform and have about 13 plus solution providers covering 7 countries. They [...]
I got a chance to catch up with Aha! recently. Aha! is based in the Denver Tech Center and was founded back in 2006. Aha!’s premise is that it is now possible to build analytics into a platform and to focus on how to operationalize predictive models and deliver analytics within business processes. Initial customers [...]
I got a chance to chat with Data Applied, a new start up that, like Clario (reviewed previously), offers real data mining in the cloud. This product is aimed at business users and is a very data-centric, web-based application for visualization and data mining/deep analysis. They are targeting folks with hundreds of thousands of records [...]
I got a quick overview of TOA Technologies recently. TOA Technologies was founded about 5 years ago to solve “the cable guy” problem – customers waiting at home for hours without knowing when the cable guy, or any other appointment, is going to arrive. Their core idea was that they would predict, with a high [...]
clario Analytics was founded back in 2002 largely by folks from Fingerhut. The team had been working on mailstream optimization – how to manage catalogs. The best customers of a catalog marketer can get literally 100 catalogs per year and this is not good. Initially a consulting company they raised money in 2006 and launched [...]
myDials is a company focused on optimizing operational performance by delivering timely, relevant, actionable performance metrics, contextual information, guidance and “every person” analytics. On June 8th they announced myDials 3.0. myDials is focused on helping all employees focus on the monitor/analyze/adjust cycle that helps ensure that operations remain in synch with company strategies and plans. [...]
Intalio hosted a launch today to position themselves as The Enterprise Cloud Company. Intalio turns 10 years old this year. They remain a privately held company with 500 paying customers and have passed 50,000 deployed sites in 52 countries. 35 employees and 20 contractors across 14 offices worldwide. Customers cover all industries and business is [...]
Gerry Mooney – IBM’s point man for fiscal stimulus and economic recovery. He feels that the Smarter Planet initiative and the current economy/stimulus are closely linked, at least potentially. Stimulus money could be focused on managing the current crisis more effectively but it could also be used to build a 21st Century infrastructure. In addition, [...]
Delta-R‘s product onRules is Java-based, service oriented application. Based on open source like the Spring, Hibernate, Java Server Faces r UI, Groovy for scripting etc. It is fully web based – thin client – and the resulting services are deployed as web services. It is available in English and Spanish. The software starts with a [...]
I got an update from the folks at IDIOM recently. The founders say they got started with data modeling in the early 80s and realized this could not deliver model-driven development because the whole process thing did not work. By the 90s they had found an approach that worked as a model-driven approach but the [...]
I got a chance to see a pre-release demonstration of WorkXpress 2.0, announced today, some weeks back. WorkXpress are focused on customized business application software for large and small businesses. About 7 years ago they started building out what we would now call a Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS offering and have had customers for about 5 [...]
Decision Management Solutions attended the Santa Clara Cloudforce 2009 event yesterday and heard CEO Marc Benioff present “Welcome to the Real-time Cloud” in which he introduced some great features in their spring 2009 release and demonstrated, once again, that salesforce.com is paying attention. Salesforce.com has clearly realized that the next step for enterprise applications like [...]
Jeff Moore from General Electric and Greg Spraker from SAS (see my review of the SAS Warranty product here) spoke on using analytics to find and eliminate fraud in claims. GE’s appliance division dealt with paper claims prior to 2003 and randomly selecting claims for audit. Between 2003 and 2005 they increased the number of [...]
Ed Staats of ServicePower presented on how to use an economic downturn to your advantage, streamline service operations and reduce costs. With the current economic downturn many companies feel they cannot make changes but Ed focused on SaaS and managed services as ways to innovate operations without large investments. SaaS is clearly a focus for [...]
I had an interesting chat with Miko Matsumura VP and Deputy CTO of Software AG the other day. While we ranged widely, the official topic was Software AG’s launch of AlignSpace. AlignSpace is a hosted “Social BPM” solution supporting collaborative process discovery. The idea is that it will combine: Social networking (around process definitions) Collaborative [...]
Last post in my series as I am off to DIALOG next week and will get a chance to meet some of the IBM folks and chat about their plans. Here, then, are some quickie ideas for ways IBM could use rules besides the ones I mentioned already: Modernizing Legacy IBM customers have LOTS of [...]
Jerry Cuomo has been talking about WebSphere in 2009 and he published his top 10 list on his blog WebSphere: Into the wild BLUE yonder!. Business Mash-ups Business Rules Middleware-as-a-Service Rainmaker Extreme Scale WAS.NEXT Restful – Agile DataPower-lution POWERful Middleware Industry-savvy Middleware He expanded this list with some additional thoughts in an article on InfoQ. [...]
I just went back to check and found no predictions on the blog for 2008 (so I get a 100% accuracy rating with no errors) so I thought I would make some for 2009. In no particular order then: Cloud computing will impact decision management. There are already at least two decision management vendors offering [...]

