Q&A: Informatica CEO details competitive data integration market
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Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi discusses his company's goals and the competition in the data integration services market.
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Knightsbridge specializes in helping IT clients deploy technologies for business intelligence, data warehousing and data integration.
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Industry heavyweights snap up business intelligence players in ever-growing market.
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Jim Baum, president and chief operating officer of Netezza Corp., talked with Computerworld about the growing market for data warehouse appliances that bundle hardware and software into a single system that's easy to set up and run.
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At a time of dramatic consolidation in the enterprise BI (business intelligence) market, MicroStrategy sees great opportunities as an independent vendor, the company&#39;s chairman, president and CEO Michael Saylor said Wednesday.
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At Connect conference, customers will hear about the progress of its Total Cost of Ownership initiative, as well as upgrades to its HR and JD Edwards&#39; manufacturing software.
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(InfoWorld) - Midmarket applications vendor Infor Global Solutions Inc. sees challenges for companies like SAP AG and Oracle Corp. to adapt their enterprise software products for small and medium-size business. Earlier this month, SAP announced plans to establish a dedicated SMB unit and expand the company's footprint in the huge midmarket, a move that Infor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jim Schaper thinks is easier said than done. In an interview with IDG News Service, Schaper talked about Infor, a relatively young provider of business applications that has grown through acquisitions and now generates more than US$2 billion in annual sales, and discusses growth markets and competition with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Corp.. The following is an edited transcript. IDGNS: The midmarket means different things to different people. How do you define it? Schaper: Midmarket customers are typically independent businesses that range in revenue from $25 million to $2 billion. We believe that somewhere between 60,000 and 62,000 customers of our total 70,000 customer base are in the midmarket. If we compare that with SAP, which estimates that 65 percent of their 36,000 customers are SMBs or little more 23,000, we are clearly twice the size of SAP in the midmarket. IDGNS: How large is the market you're going after? Schaper: Our market is globally 1 million prospective customers, including the plants and divisions of large enterprises. IDGNS: Why do you include these? Schaper: A number of very large global enterprises run our applications on a decentralized plant or division basis. That's why, for Infor, a classical view of an SMB definition doesn't work. IDGNS: Why should a midmarket company choose Infor and not SAP or Oracle, which have substantial expertise in business software and have stepped up efforts to target SMBs? Schaper: We fill a hole in the market. We have maximized on what smaller niche providers provide -- namely business-specific solutions with domain expertise to implement them -- and on what the large players have to offer: global distribution. We provide our customers with global reach, alternative channels and products built for their markets at the lowest total cost of ownership. IDGNS: SAP would argue that it also offers products with deep industry-specific functionality. Would you disagree? Schaper: If they're digging down deep, then they've just started because that hasn't been their business model in past. They said they will do this primarily through partners. IDGNS: SAP does offer different versions of its software for different markets. Could this provide a competitive edge? Schaper: They've attempted to take a tier 1 product and move it down market. You don't leave the complexity of the product behind, or the cost or length of time it takes to implement. IDGNS: And Infor has a different approach? Schaper: Our products were built for the markets they're serving. We're not attempting to take a product that was built for large enterprises and cram it down into the midmarket. We're equally not trying to take something that is prepackaged for mass consumption and move it up market as Microsoft is trying to do. There are inherent complexities that are built into a product to serve large enterprises. IDGNS: So what do SMBs want? Schaper: They want very specific functionality at the lowest total cost of ownership with the least amount of complexity. IDGNS: Where are your customers? Schaper: Fifty percent of our revenues come from the Americas, 41 percent out of Europe and 9 percent out of Asia Pacific region. IDGNS: How important is China? Schaper: Not unlike every other software company, including SAP, it is our highest growth area. We have typically looked at the Chinese market, earlier in the evolution of Infor, as a market where we wanted to go after multinationals, whether U.S. or European-based. We have now moved with some new product capabilities into the mainland Chinese market, which is a much lower-end market but one where we believe we're perfectly positioned IDGNS: And what challenges do you face in this particular market? Schaper: You start small but your products must be able to scale quickly because what today is a local Chinese auto supplier, for example, is likely to become in a few years a global supplier as China exports automobiles to the U.S. and Europe. This is coming in the next 18 months. IDGNS: Do you offer any on-demand or hosted services? Schaper: We do but not for all applications. Most of what we build is at the request of customers. They have a lot of influence in our long-term development plans. But there are components that can be provided on either a hosted or on-demand model. Asset management is one, customer relationship management is another. But when you get into the extended supply chain, like warehouse management, planning and scheduling -- all core ERP applications -- we just haven't seen customer demand for that. Our products are capable of being hosted and we will host them as we see customer demand. IDGNS: What about open source? Schaper: Open source is a key contributor to Infor and we will be a key contributor to open source over time. It is one of the critical differentiators in our business strategy of how we will SOA-enable our applications.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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(InfoWorld) - Two months after theÂ resignation of Shai Agassi, a driving force behind SAP's product strategy, the German software vendor on Wednesday announced the appointment of its first chief technology officer. Vishal Sikka, formerly senior vice president and chief software architect at SAP, will head the company's newly created Office of the CTO, responsible for ensuring a "clear and harmonized roadmap" for SAP's products, the company said. He will report to CEO Henning Kagermann and be based in the U.S. SAP felt it needed a CTO to oversee some broad changes that are underway at the company, including its renewed focus on the midmarket, the introduction of new on-demand products, and the continued rollout of NetWeaver and its SOA strategy, said SAP spokesman Frank Hartmann. "We thought it was necessary bearing in mind the strong strategic focus of such a role and the responsibilities he is going to bear," Hartmann said. Sikka shouldn't be seen as a replacement for Agassi, whose responsibilities have been divided among several executives who report directly to Kagermann, although part of his job will overlap with Agassi's former duties, Hartmann said. Agassi had been president of SAP's product and technology group and was credited with spearheading its NetWeaver and on-demand strategies. Once tipped as a future SAP CEO, he resigned April 1 after SAP voted to keep Kagermann in that position until 2009. SAP also recentlyÂ lost another senior executive, Aliza Peleg, managing director of SAP Labs in the U.S., who will leave the business applications company by the end of June. It wasn't immediately clear how Sikka's responsibilities as CTO will differ from those of his previous job, where he was responsible for SAP's roadmap and software architecture. Before joining SAP, he was responsible for application development technologies at Peregrine Systems. He holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and is based in SAP's office in Palo Alto, California.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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(InfoWorld) - In search of new markets and customers, SAP AG is developing a new breed of hosted, on-demand products and looking at ways to make its complex business software easier to use. Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, talked about one of the company'sfirst on-demand offerings, its software-as-a-service philosophy, search functionalities in enterprise software, Web service standards and more in an interview. The interview comes ahead ofÂ next week's Cebit trade show where customers will have an opportunity to see a brief 15-minute demonstration of SAP's planned new suite of hosted, on-demand midmarket applications, known internally as A1S. The Walldorf, Germany, vendor hopes to launch the product later this year. IDGNS: What is so different about designing an on-demand product, such as your new CRM offering? Sikka: There are a few things that are fundamentally interesting. One is the better economics you can offer by hosting. This is more a function of how much you can leverage the underlying stack technologies -- the different hardware -- below the application layer. Another aspect is the time to get up and running. This a matter of how closely you can get the software to reflect the way customers do their business. A CRM on-demand solution for an insurance company in the U.S. is very different from a CRM on-demand solution for a company in Thailand. IDGNS: What specifically is so different in the design of an on-demand product? The level of prefiguration, number of functions, ease of use? Sikka: Exactly. What you see in our CRM on-demand offering is a significantly easier product to use through ways such as preconfiguration, fewer functions and taking massive advantage of underlying infrastructure. You'll see us do things that go far beyond Salesforce.com. You'll see us starting to work with some of the "cloud" platforms like Amazon and Google. We haven't yet announced any relationships but you'll start to see us doing things of this sort. IDGNS: What role will the software-as-service model play in SAP software across the board? Sikka: We look at it as another deployment option. When you look at SAP, the breadth of functionalities that we offer across our customers, industries and nationalities is very vast. One size doesn't fit all. We're using a wide variety of deployment options. For a certain class of processes, it is advantageous to offer that software as a service. For other processes, it may be better to offer our software as an on-premise model. IDGNS: Are there any limitations in designing software-as-a-service products? Sikka: You have to look at the trade-off between the ability to customize and share data. IDGNS: Will your vertical applications disappear as you move toward intelligent xApps? Sikka: No. Our xApps augment vertical applications. They give companies the ability to build the last mile; they're more narrowly defined applications that tend to leverage existing applications. IDGNS: What about your proprietary programming language ABAP? Will it fade away soon? Sikka: I want to take this opportunity to demystify something. In the age of the enterprise service-oriented architecture, the whole programming-language debate is a very big red herring. Programming languages are an area of constant innovation. Interestingly, what we find in our world is that applications live a lot longer than programming languages do. For instance, Sabre, the application used for airline reservations, is still written in Cobol, even though the last compiler was written over 20 years ago. IDGNS: So ABAP is here to stay? Sikka: You won't see ABAP going away anytime soon. Why? Because a lot of the application code that our customers use is in ABAP. It has a very, very reliable, high-performance underlying platform that is far better than anything we have seen in the market. You'll see ABAP for a long time, but you'll also see more Java because certain applications are best written in Java. And you'll see us using other languages. We do a lot of work in Microsoft programming models. Our approach toward programming languages is to make the programming language distinction irrelevant. IDGNS: How about enterprise search? Do you have any new developments in the pipeline? Sikka: This is an ongoing development. What you have seen from us so far is early thinking in this area. A lot more is to come. You will see enterprise search evolving around different fronts, such as contextual searching. We own the application so we know who the user is, what the user's role is and what the user is authorized to see. IDGNS: What about the cooperation between Microsoft and SAP? What are next steps with Duet and what are the challenges? Sikka: The challenges are always there when you bring two big companies together, like Microsoft and SAP. We have different development philosophies. Microsoft is much more volume oriented and more consumer focused. But we have a great relationship with them. The Duet product is an example. Over time, you'll see Duet expanding in many interesting ways to cover a much wider set of scenarios. You'll see us bringing it closer to our xApp composition platform, so it will be much easier for customers to add on to it. You'll see us working even more closely with Microsoft moving ahead. IDGNS: What about Muse. Any new developments on the user interface front? Sikka: This is an ongoing effort toward rethinking our UI approach. To understand the overall user experience and direction, you have to step back and look at the context in which customers use SAP applications. This is very broad. There are people who are on the factory floor. There are truck drivers, mobile phone users, notebook users and desktop users. We're reaching out to end-users in whatever context they're in. Duet is example. A lot of work happens inside Microsoft Office. Of course, a big area where SAP users -- whether a payroll clerk or an accounting manager -- spend a lot of time is in front of a SAP screen. We want to expose those users to a rich client. This is what Muse is. IDGNS: How are your efforts moving ahead to create a developer community as passionate as the one driving the development of open-source software? Sikka: Having a passionate developer community is something we're extremely interested in. The SAP ecosystem has been around for a long time. Thousands of companies have developed add-ons and we're encouraging this. Beyond that, we're extremely interested in developing efficiencies. We have distributed labs across the world. We have done a lot of thinking in how to optimize the benefits you get from a distributed, decentralized development network like the one we have. IDGNS: Do different regions bring different expertise to the picture? Sikka: Yes, across the board. We see a lot of Linux expertise in China, a lot of mobile expertise in India and Windows expertise in Israel. I don't want to stereotype areas but you see a natural coalescing of skills in different areas. It makes sense to have development in those areas. Â
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Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, describes the company's software-as-a-service approach.
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Stephen M. Bennett, Intuitâs chief executive, discussed forays into online banking, health care expense-management software and tax software.
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Salesforce.com's CEO is due to talk up the analytics customization capabilities of the next release of the vendor's hosted CRM software.
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Oracle at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco next week plans to focus on its âData Hubâ technology for business intelligence, content management for the masses, grid computing, and integration, an Oracle official said on Thursday.
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Oracle introduced a new BI platform yesterday, Business Intelligence 10g that rolls up into one solution all of their BI tools. However, more interesting than the nitty-gritty details of what is included is the back story taking place at the same time.
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CHARLOTTE - In a move it says will strengthen its bid to dominate information integration markets, IBM announced Thursday that it was acquiring Venetica, a Charlotte-based developer of database integration tools.
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(InfoWorld) - Dr. Ambuj Goyal is one of IBMâs heavy hitters. A 25-year IBM veteran who joined the company as a researcher at the T. J. Watson Research Center, Goyal did early work in scalable databases that laid the technology groundwork for DB2, then led the research effort to create the Deep Blue chess computer. In 1996, Goyal was elevated to be vice president, servers and software, and director, computer sciences, where he set IBMâs long-term research direction and oversaw the work of 1,500 researchers worldwide. Now, as general manager of information management in the IBM Software Group, Goyal ensures the success of IBMâs Information On Demand initiative and its constellation of products. But in a recent interview with InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr, Goyal still sounded like a scientist, expounding on the nature of information vs. data and the unique position IBMâs new Information Server occupies in the history of computing. InfoWorld: Consolidating, reconciling, and delivering information strikes me as one of the most difficult problems in IT.                                                     AmbujGoyal: This problem has existed for 20 years. When I was doing the announcement for Information Server last October, I talked about an inflection point that has come in information management. This is similar to an inflection point that occurred in 1996 when there were many techniques to create Web sites or do Web-based business: Java Virtual Machines, HTTP servers, commerce engines. There were many different techniques. A few companies created a concept called a Web application server, IBMâs being WebSphere. So if you wanted to leverage Web technologies to improve your business or do Web programming, you just get started with a Web application server. We are at a similar inflection point in 2006. We have myriads of techniques â metadata management, ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools, data creation tools, Federation tools, cleansing tools, profiling tools. People use these tools to solve the information challenge. The application server had a foundation, which was JVM. Information Server now has a foundation, which is a metadata repository, or metadata bus. And we have restructured all the tools to come up with an information server, so companies donât need to decide whether they need this piece of technology or that piece of technology. They have an information challenge â they just start with an information server. IW: What about the skills to work with an information server? It seems a little difficult to find people who understand this area. Is that a problem in the market now? AG: It actually simplifies the problem because people were doing manual stuff around metadata. So what we have done is helped the business user say, âThis is how I define my customer and attributes of that customer.â They can talk business language. And then an information architect, who typically used to do ETL or SQL, can take the same business language and convert it into an appropriate information infrastructure programming tool. In the past they could never do that, and governance became a huge problem. The businessperson really meant X, and the information architect implemented Y. IW: But in all of these solutions, somebody is still sitting down in a meeting room, going through the incredibly tedious task of saying, âOK, weâre going to use this field and not that field, weâll express this value this way and not that way.â AG: Right, but our view is, over decades, this is how software and middleware have evolved. There was tedious work going on connecting system A to system B. You repeated it over and over again. Then out came a product that is an outgrowth of a repeated piece of work captured into a software product. In the late â90s, people used to use the WebSphere application server and would build customer portals. Many customers built and said, âLook, this is a waste of time. I would just like to have the base infrastructure to be able to do that.â So portals as a category evolved. We believe that people are still doing tedious work when dealing with information. Information Server and its tools are converting that tedious work into an information server category. Even analysts are starting to talk about this as a category because it is solving that tedious work, and tedious work has always resulted in a new category of software.
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A new report by IDC finds that A fluid and tightly integrated partner ecosystem will be one of the key drivers behind any enterprise software vendor's ultimate success in the marketplace.