The User’s Undying Quest for Exploring and Discovering Info – Part 1

SAP AG and Endeca Technologies might not appear to have much in common at first glance, other than occasional partnering in some joint opportunities, and perhaps that SAP Ventures owns a piece of privately held Endeca. In the world of home appliances, SAP would be analogous to a tried-and-true refrigerator, but with the most advanced features in the market, such as a built-in TV set.

Such an appliance stores important food (i.e., data and transactions) and provides some important basic information and entertainment (i.e., news reports) to nearly 90,000 customers in over 120 countries. Indeed, SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software, offering enterprise applications and services to companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries for nearly four decades.

By the same token, the much smaller and younger Endeca would be analogous to a cool smartphone that gives users information and entertainment at the speed of light (or thought, or the speed of computing). The snazzy gadget will not only provide results but also suggest possibilities that users might not be aware of (or that they never thought of) before seeking some information.

Interestingly, Endeca derives its name from the German word “entdecken,” which means “to discover” (perhaps another common thread with SAP). Seriously speaking, Endeca offers innovative information access software that helps people explore, analyze, and understand complex and constantly changing information, guiding them to often unexpected insights and better decisions.

The Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP), built around a new class of access-optimized semi-structured database, powers applications that combine the simplicity of searching and browsing with the analytical power of business intelligence (BI). Since the company’s inception in 1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (US), over 600 leading global organizations including ABN AMRO, Boeing, Cox Newspapers, the (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, ESPN, Barnes & Nobles, Dell, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, The Library of Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com have been relying on Endeca’s platform.

The Tale of Two Events (with Similar Messages)

In mid-2009, these two quite different vendors (in terms of stature and target audience) had their own separate user conferences. Still, those two events revolved around similar themes. I attended Endeca Discover 2009 in person, since it took place in my neck of woods (Boston).

Endeca’s early start was with information discovery projects in the public sector (the less we know, the better), and while today the vendor also targets manufacturers and distributors (as can be seen from the abovementioned representative client roster), the lion’s share of Endeca customers are online retailers and the Internet media & publishers. The Endeca Discover conference is traditionally focused towards those electronic commerce-oriented companies.

Against the backdrop of a dour economic situation everywhere, this love-fest event was contrarily buzzing with fervent activity and interest from existing and prospective customers. I even overheard some of Endeca’s professional services staffers commenting amongst themselves during the break: “if this attendance is an epitome of recession (or even depression), then how are we going to be able to deliver mushrooming projects when the economy improves?” Although privately held, the company is not that tight-lipped about its rapidly growing revenues, which are reportedly estimated at over US$ 100 million.

Endeca has pioneered a new software category that enables users to not only easily find what they are looking for, but also to discover insights, information, and relationships across data they never knew existed along the way. There will be a separate series of in-depth articles on Endeca and its platform, but for now it suffices to say that Endeca’s “secret sauce” is its proprietary semi-structured database called MDEX (meta-relational index engine).

Comparing Software Comparison Sites

A few online tools make it easy to compare criteria about software, side-by-side. Of course, you probably expect that I think TEC provides the mother of all evaluation tools for comparisons (true). But this is about some of the other guys. Two sites I like, which I recently came across might be useful to you if you’re scanning the horizon for high-level comparison info. The first is Opteros’s EOS Directory and the second is ITerating. Both approach the issue in different, complementary directions to TEC’s. Here’s a bit of what’s interesting about their approaches and why I think they can offer valuable supplementary information.

The EOS Directory is, as the name implies, a directory of enterprise open source products much more so than a full-on comparison tool. Nevertheless it’s a pretty smart directory. It features high-level comparison information. It lists software in a few general categories and alongside the listings, provides four types of software/project comparison criteria.

The first criterion is the Optaros rating, geared toward open source software projects. The Optaros four-star rating system purports to show how well-suited an open source project is for the enterprise. It appears to be based on at least four considerations: the project’s functionality, maturity, community, and a progress trend, which I believe are necessary paths into research on open source solutions. Plus, as I said previously, this information nicely supplements what TEC’s open source evals cover (feature comparisons or analyses of service characteristics).

Most EOS Directory ratings are indicated through lime-colored pie symbols, which are easy to understand. For example, the more green in the pie, the more apt a project’s functionality is to include what a midsize or large enterprise might need. The more lime in the community, the more active and numerous it is (and so I’d believe a safer choice in terms of future development). The trend indicator is interesting because it represents an expectation of how the project will progress in importance and improvement for the given criteria.

Say you’re not sure which open source content management system to spend time researching, at a glance the EOS Directory informs you that Alfresco provides a pretty decent and mature feature-set, has an active community, bright future, and as an added bonus, 23 user votes determined a user rating of three out of four stars (the linked user forum might show why people felt that way). My sole criticism about these ratings is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to figure out how the ratings were derived for the project–I’m not sure if the criteria are determined by the open source project, by Optaros staff, or some combination. Then again, I suppose asking that question means I’m looking for something that’s probably outside the scope of how the directory is intended to be used.

What about ITerating? I’m fascinated by this site because a few years ago I was imagining what a wiki-based evaluation system might be like. I was surprised that one didn’t already exist. Something wiki-esque could provide insight from vendors, analysts, consultants, users, and developers alike. There was an open source project called WikiLens, which enables its users to rate things like movies or music. I played around with those scripts for a short time, curious to see what it would be like to adapt to user-based software comparison and analysis. Now, there is ITerating, which is doing quite an impressive job wikifying a software comparison methodology.

ITerating lists a fairly extensive directory of software types. You can add features and group them in higher-level categories of functionality, which appear to support a few different sorts of ratings. The ratings are summarized with a weighted average of bars, stars, and values. ITerating adds something of a meta-rating system too, letting you vote on whether you think a review is useful or not. An important feature is that users add the functions/criteria on which to rate software, meaning a potentially wide group of people could be contributing their knowledge to the comparison.

There is a lot to like in the ITerating wiki. It opens up a comparison process to a wide and possibly unexpected audience. This could be a strength, helping visitors gain a variety of data but it could also prove a weakness. I’d love to see ITerating provide more background about the perspectives of each set of user ratings. Perhaps delineate and weight user scores based on whether the users are vendors, consultants, analysts, developers, clients, etc. I think this would help mitigate bias issues that could otherwise arise.

ITerating offers quick comparisons but sometimes doesn’t seem to have fully articulated feature-sets for making the comparison. It also doesn’t seem to allow you to do custom analyses based on the importance of your most valued criteria. Not knowing how complete the data is for a particular type of software makes it a bit difficult to truly depend on the site for an entire selection process (though mileage may vary based on the software you’re considering). Perhaps this is a growing pain for the young site–I’ll be curious to see how it evolves. This criticism may also be unfair in the sense that ITerating is a “directory and review” site, which it accomplishes without wading deep into the complexity of individual analyses or selection guidance.

Finally, both the EOS Directory and ITerating offer the possibility for a lot of great, user-based, real world feedback. That’s an exciting extra perspective. Their broad scope may also be more ambitious than matrix sites (for example, CMS Matrix or WikiMatrix). I’d recommend browsing ITerating or the EOS Directory if you want to do some high-level research from an enormous sea of open source projects and other commercial software.

From the perspective of a company trying to understand its needs, the software vendors able to meet them, and decide on the best solution, I think using multiple user comparison and directory sites could help inform your decisions and evaluation stance. These sites make useful supplements to the comparison analyses and needs-prioritization of TEC’s evaluation systems.

Software Implementation Gone Awry—As Depicted in These 15 Oscar-nominated Films for Best Picture

As a research analyst for TEC and a contributor to its Blog, I sometimes get the opportunity to mix business-related issues with common everyday pleasures. This past weekend (that incidentally turned out to be a complete write-off weather-wise), and being the movie buff that I am, I decided to sit back and watch a few classic films. After having done so, I was curious about what some of the past Oscar winners were for Best Picture. So I sauntered over to my computer and printed out the list. Reading through it, I just had to laugh, because many of the titles struck a chord with me in terms of some of my experiences with software implementation projects.

So, to add a little humor to your day—especially if you’re from the upper northeast of the United States or eastern Canada where the rain may be finally “getting to you”—I’ve added a little of my own take on what these movies would be about if they were written with enterprise software implementations in mind.

Even if you’re not a movie buff, but know a little about the trials and tribulations of software deployments, I’m sure you’ll get a kick outta these! For true movie fans, I’ve even added the years these films won.
1) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-1930) – the hopeful outcome of your enterprise software implementation.
2) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) – users, users everywhere, and not a computer in the place working properly!
3) It Happened One Night (1934) – yeah, the evening of “Go Live”.
4) Gone with the Wind (1939) – that’s what happened to the money that we spent on this “piece-of-crap” system.
5) The Lost Weekend (1945) – that’s how long it took for us to recover the data and get the system up and running again.
6) From Here to Eternity (1953) – the hope for our future with our new 1.6-million-dollar enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
7) In the Heat of the Night (1967) – as the servers overheated and the smoke thickened, I decided if I made it to the airport fast enough, I could get out of the city before sunrise!
8) One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – yeah, the project implementation manager! He’s spending some time at Betty Ford.
9) Rocky (1976) – need I say more?
10) Dances with Wolves (1990) – really more of what happens prior to implementing the software whilst whittling your long list down to a mere few.
11) Unforgiven (1992) – this is what’s going to happen if we don’t get this working soon.
12) Titanic (1997) – the ship is sinking, but as captain of this ship, I will make sure it goes all the way to the bottom.
13) Million Dollar Baby (2004) – that’s how much we spent on the new system!
14) Crash (2005) – not necessarily the way I wanted “Go Live” day to end.
15) Slumdog Millionaire (2008) – the vendor from whom we purchased this wonderful application is laughing all the way to the bank.

…and a Few Honorable Mentions

Although they never won an Oscar, here are a few great old (and some new) films that I felt were worth mentioning.

* The Way We Were – can’t we just go back to our old system? I know it was a dinosaur, but at least it worked!

* The Sting – kinda the way you’ve been feeling since you were selected to be the project manager—“Stung!”

* Heaven Can Wait – …because I’ll get this mess sorted out before the boss gets back and kills me!

* 12 Angry Men – the project champion, the subject-matter expert (SME), the company president, the board of directors, the chief financial officer (CFO) …

* Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – the individual responsible for this nightmare (the software implementation project manager) has just been renamed “Garfield”

* The Longest Day – waiting for things to go from bad to worse.

* Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – unless that happens to be the name of your chief technical officer (CTO).

* Deliverance – Something you’ll certainly hope for after you’ve signed on the dotted line.

* Network – without it, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog!

* As Good as It Gets – considering that our controller wanted to save a lot of money on this project…

* Lost in Translation – “You forgot to do what?”

To ensure your company’s software selection project events won’t end up on my next Oscar list of Best Pictures (or worst implementation nightmares), I suggest taking a look at TEC’s Evaluation Centers. This will help put you on the path to what will be your best performance yet!