Entries from December 2009 ↓

In addition to the 451 Group’s own data warehousing webinar on Thursday I will also be taking part in a webinar on Wednesday with EnterpriseDB on the subject of open source database adoption in the enterprise.

During the webinar we will provide recommendations for how organizations can effectively leverage open source software. Attendees will learn about open source software trends for 2010, top considerations when using open source databases, and best practices for successful deployments of open source software.

I’ll be providing some data points from our recent surveys on database adoption and open source adoption while EnterpriseDB’s Larry Alston will also showcase successful enterprise deployments of Postgres Plus.

The open source database webinar is Wednesday, December 16, at 1 pm ET. To register, visit this link.

The data warehousing webinar is Thursday, December 17th, at 1 pm ET. To register, visit this link.

I got the chance to attend several sessions at the New York IQPC e-discovery event this week for some interesting perspectives on bringing e-discovery to the enterprise.

Recommind’s Craig Carpenter hosted a panel on Information Governance featuring Scott McVeigh, Director of RM at Aramark and Dawson Horn, Senior Litigation Counsel of Tyco, focusing on the benefits of litigation preparedness and getting organizational support from management and stakeholders. This issue came up more than once during the conference – the challenge of obtaining executive approval and participation from IT, legal, HR, compliance, procurement, RM and other stakeholders in planning, designing and deploying comprehensive information systems. McVeigh encouraged users to be vocal about the need for change, (over the course of several years if necessary), and to invoke C-level names to achieve organizational buy-in.

Autonomy’s Deborah Baron interviewed Karla Wehbe, Senior Information Resources Manager at Bechtel, for a case study of how the company is promoting document re-use by collaborating with outside counsel on a new methodology for ediscovery review. After parting ways with its prior law firm and losing access to previously reviewed documents, Bechtel established an information-centric approach to the process, facilitating re-use of reviewed documents through additional coding from outside counsel. The company claims that 5-75% of reviewed documents are now reusable.

Benefits include better control of document categorization and retention policy, as well as the ability for the company to “tell a story” with its evidence that can be communicated across cases. Wehbe acknowledged an initial “identity crisis” from outside counsel as the corporation established more control, but claims that they are now advocates of the process, and it has built trust and cooperation between them. An interesting example of the changing nature of the attorney-client relationship in corporate law. I am curious as to what their billing arrangement is.

Ian Campbell of iConect was joined by Kurt Michel of Content Analyst, VP of litigation for Phillips North America Timm Miller and Morgan Lewis Associate Denise Backhouse for a discussion of collecting ESI internationally, including EU data privacy regulations, the Hague evidence convention, blocking statutes, and the precedent set by the 1987 Supreme Court case Aerospatiale v. United States for requiring discovery even in defiance of blocking statutes from the jurisdiction of the data.

The difference in global collection philosophy is staggering (at least to this provincial American). Backhouse was asked (facetiously we hope) if it wasn’t enough for both parties just to agree “not to tell” about breaking regulations during discovery, and responded that that would violate the fundamental human right to privacy – literally a foreign concept to those of us accustomed to living under the Patriot Act. Not only could a company not access or even put a litigation hold on employee email in many EU countries, according to Backhouse even board meeting notes would be forbidden since they would identify attendees, potentially revealing where they were employed at the time.

The panel concluded that international e-discovery is not a checklist, but a carefully-negotiated balance between compliance and avoiding sanctions. We continue to follow this with interest, particularly the pending updates from the UK Civil Procedure Rules Committee, as Nick reported from the Thomson Reuters E-disclosure Conference in London.

Unfortunately I missed the judges’ panel, but the sessions I did attend were informative and underscored some of the trends we’ve been seeing in the market. Namely: the rise of Information Governance, the shifting of roles between e-discovery vendors, service providers, general counsel and law firms as technology moves in-house, and the increasingly (complicated) global nature of e-discovery.

We’re now hard at work on our 2010 long-form report on E-discovery and E-disclosure, featuring 25+ vendor profiles and comprehensive coverage of this fast-paced market – publication is slated for late Q1 2010, after Legal Tech. Stay tuned.

Following the recent publication of our special report, Warehouse Optimization – Ten considerations for choosing/building a data warehouse, I will be presenting an overview of some of the key findings in a webinar on December 17.

The report provides an overview of the data-warehousing vendor landscape, as tracked by The 451 Group, and examines the business and technology trends driving this market. It identifies 10 key technology trends in data warehousing and assesses how they can be used to choose the technologies and vendors that are best suited to a would-be customer and its specific application.

During the webinar I will present some details of those ten key trends and how we see consensus forming around some technologies that have previous divided the industry, enabling the conversation to move on to business-oriented issues. As the market continues to mature, differentiation among vendors will shift from a focus on specific technologies to a reflection of various business processes.

The webinar is scheduled for Thursday, December 17th, at 1 pm ET. I will present for about 30 minutes, followed by Q&A.

If you are interested you can register for the event, and download an executive summary of the report, here.

Such a busy three days at Gilbane Boston this year, I hardly had time to even follow the tweet stream from the event.  I was involved in four sessions and best I can do at this point is to recap a few of the key highlights from each.

The open source session I presented with Seth Gottlieb got some good response and was apt I think given the much larger presence of open source at the show overall this year.  Someone told me (but I didn’t confirm) that last year there were two open source booths on the show floor and this year there were six (dotCMS, Hippo, Nuxeo, Magnolia and Plone were the ones I counted – who am I missing?).  Alfresco and Acquia were notably absent I thought, though were both were represented on a couple of panels.

Open source also came up in the panel I moderated on portals, as we had Chris Stavros from LEVEL Studios there and Chris has done a lot of work with the Liferay portal.  We also had Glenn Mannke, Director of Intranet Development at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, talking with us about how they use Oracle Portal and how embedded this is in their overall infrastructure.  Russ Edelman lent his SharePoint perspective as did John Petersen from Sutro Software who has worked with the Vignette (now Open Text) portal for a number of years.  I’ll sum up the key takeaways from this panel as:

• Portals never went away, even though the marketing died down.  They were victims of the hype earlier in the decade.  Glenn in particular emphasized how portals are only becoming more important in his organization as the number of tools and apps they manage proliferate.
• John and Chris likened portals to a new Web OS that delivers application and infrastructure services.
• We spent some time talking about what those services are exactly and the panelists agreed that identity management and SSO are crucial.
• There was also some interesting discussion about client-side vs. server-side portals.  Is an app that can aggregate little windows on a screen a portal?  The panelists gave a resounding “no” to this question, given the lack of infrastructure services noted above.
• And portal standards (e.g., JSR 286) weren’t noted as being particularly important.

I thought portals might also come up on the panel I hosted on social publishing.  This brought WCM vendors together with pure social software plays for a discussion about where these two market sectors are headed.  It was perhaps not quite as heated as I’d hoped, but there was a bit of controversy.  David Carter, CTO from Awareness and Adam Mertz, Product Marketer at Jive, admitted that their systems don’t do WCM and that many customers still need that function (I think particularly for external sites), but that social is important enough to warrant its own layer in the stack.  They argued that WCM systems aren’t architected to support the dynamic nature of social media.  Lars Trieloff from Day Software and Dmitri Tcherevik of FatWire definitely didn’t agree.  Bryan House of Acquia (Drupal) argued that open source does the best job blending the two.

In general though, I think the panelists agreed that social is becoming part of so many other things (there was some discussion of CRM + social as well).  That still leaves me scratching my head as to the future of the pure social software vendors (I asked if Jive might also get into WCM, but, not surprisingly, didn’t get a direct answer).

SharePoint came up in all of these sessions, as it also did on the analyst panel, not surprisingly as SharePoint has an impact in social, portals, WCM and just about every other aspect of ECM.  Microsoft had a big presence at Gilbane this year, a little surprising to me since Gilbane is generally a pretty WCM-focused show. I had the chance to sit down for about an hour with Ryan Duguid, a Microsoft product manager for ECM in the SharePoint group.  He insisted SharePoint plays in .com-type WCM scenarios and pointed me to this list, which I have seen before.  It’s just doesn’t seem to come up much though in talking with clients and vendors about WCM.  And I don’t see too much in the 2010 release that looks to change that.  Am I missing something?

Overall, a good lively show.  I heard attendance was up and the exhibit hall was full of vendors – there never seems to be a lull in the influx of new vendors to this space.  Lots of interesting conversations about social, open source and online marketing, which all bodes well for a continued vibrant market in 2010.