Beware the Business Intelligence Bigot

January 3, 2013 By

Today’s guest post was contributed by Steven Schneider who is the contributor to Slinging Software, a blog focused on the adventures in scaling a business, selling software, and the business intelligence market.  To read further contributions, check out the blog at SlingingSoftware.com

One of the key successes in working with large enterprises is understanding the different types of prospects that one encounters, and segmenting them based on the level of experience with BI products.

Through this effort, we have developed a system that will tell us, in the early stages of an opportunity, if we have a good fit, if it is going to take some work, and when it might make sense to walk away from an opportunity.

Check out the rest of Slinging Software’s blog here.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: , , ,

Simplifying SaaS and Multi-Tenant Application Developmnet

January 3, 2013 By

Today’s guest post was submitted by SIIA member Techcello, which helps you build multi-tenant applications 30-40% faster and 50% cheaper.

e-Book Part 1 : Simplifying SaaS & Multi-tenant Application Development

A lot has been written about SaaS as a business model for monetizing software applications. But there is another dimension to SaaS – which is the technical and architectural dimension. If we have to host a separate server instance for each customer, if we have to maintain a separate code base for each customer, it still remains an ASP model not SaaS.

So SaaS automatically implies Multi-tenancy, Configurability, Scalability and a distributed Data Architecture. And a tenant need not mean a customer. Countries, Distributors or SBUs could be virtual tenants with a hierarchical relationship with the actual customers / user groups using the application. Whether it is for an ISV, Enterprise or Government, whether it is for hosting on-premise, private cloud or public cloud, techcello understands the real challenges of engineering a Multi-tenant SaaS application in all its depth and complexity.
Like we have productized the engineering and architectural expertise in the form of a platform, Techcello is proud to share this expertise in the form of an e-book.

Click here to download a full copy of the e-book.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Software Tagged With: , , ,

Interview with New Member: Techcello

December 28, 2012 By

SIIA is delighted to welcome our newest member Asteor Software. I had a chance to sit down with Shankar Krishnamoorthy to learn more about their application development platform.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA. Tell me a little bit about Techcello and what makes your solutions unique.

Shankar: Techcello is a cloud ready, multi-tenant application development platform – used by ISVs and Enterprises to build their products and applications faster and better.  We are featured as Gartner Cool Vendor and Nasscom Emerge League of 10 company.   ISVs who are looking at building green-field SaaS products or migrating their existing on-premise products to SaaS look at using Techcello as the platform for building their SaaS products.  And, large enterprises use our Techcello platform to build their applications such as dealership management system, benefits management systems, etc. because of our strong security engine, tenant hierarchy capabilities, business rules & workflow features, developer productivity  components, etc.  Invision, Secova, Duosoft, Roferez, Sutherland Global Services are some of our prestigious customers who have used Techcello extensively for building their applications.

Approach to application development on top of .NET is unique in Techcello.  We have productized the complex portions of building software (architecture, plumbing, data security, etc.) into Techcello and let the developers focus on building their business specific functionalities rather than bogged down by engineering complexities.  They consume the API/Webservices provided by Techcello for these complex functionalities.  While developers will stay with their usual development style and approach for building the software, it will be governed by Techcello so that complexities are taken care by Techcello and also the developers are lot more productive.  This saves anywhere between 90 to 150 people months of effort in application development on a typical large project.   So, time to market is faster.  Apart from saving cost and effort, the fact that our customers use .NET technology, which gives them the complete control and flexibility in their technical approach/decisions. We believe this provides a very unique advantage for Techcello.

Rhianna: This past year you conducted a survey on SaaS/Cloud Multi-Tenancy. Can you tell us a little about your findings?

Shankar: We asked ISVs “Where are you on the road to Cloud, SaaS and Multi-tenancy”.  We mapped Cloud adoption (Current and Planned), SaaS adoption (Current and Planned), Multi-tenancy adoption (Current and Planned), Development Approaches and Platforms. The responses show that there is a positive trend across the industry towards Cloud, SaaS and Multi-tenancy in that order.  Most companies understand the challenges, skills and investments required to build Configurable, Multi-tenant applications for a scalable Private or Public Cloud.  They recognize that shifting to SaaS requires different kind of approaches both towards software development and operationalization.  And, they prefer to stick with 3GL platforms such as.NET and J2EE for such development.   This is more towards getting freedom, flexibility and talent.  The results can be viewed here : http://blog.techcello.com/2012/04/cloud-saas-multi-tenancy-techcello-survey-2012/

Rhianna: What are some of the biggest challenges that companies face when engineering a Multi-tenant SaaS application?

Major challenge is the need of understanding multi-tenancy holistically.  Each tenant data has to be secured at all levels – whether it is user data, business rules, workflow, extension fields, etc.  Application architecture has to be built on top of data security considerations.  This also leads to several non-functional requirements.  People often underestimate the effort here. Overheads can be as high as 30%.  For example, Multi-tenant SaaS implies a single code base for 1000s of customers.  That brings in a lot of other implied needs such as the ability to customize the data models, views, rules and workflows at the end user / tenant level.  The set-up as well as enforcement of “Who sees / does what” in the system, should also be dynamically managed during run time as it may vary depending on the region / vertical / customer. Many products are designed for global use and hence we need a layered hierarchy of tenants and users.  Add to these, the obvious challenges of performance and scalability on the Cloud.   Building all these capabilities is not rocket science.  But the expertise and experience required is not easy to find; plus, it consumes good amount of time.  Developers often prefer to focus on the business functionalities and rightfully so.  But it is too risky to leave these critical engineering aspects to be closely coupled with business features.  Even for customers who want to build the whole stack ground up, we always recommend that they create a separate framework team internally to build and maintain the engineering stack.

We have written an ebook on Simplifying multi-tenant application development and it is available for you to download from our website, www.techcello.com.  We have covered all aspects of engineering a multi-tenant application development and it has received rave reviews from some of the readers/customers.

Rhianna: I saw a white paper you published on Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). How do you define the NFRs and why is it critical to do so?

Shankar: Non-functional requirements are something which you may not define explicitly in your product specifications, but, expect that the product should have these.  Performance, Security, Scalability, Configurability, etc. will generally come under NFR as these are not generally spelt out explicitly.  If the NFRs of a custom .NET solution built for a specific customer consumes 10-15% of overall effort, the NFRs of multi-tenant SaaS products could take as high as 30%.  If the product does not meet NFRs expected by a customer, it can lead to several issues (eg. Unsatisfactory performance of the software, unsatisfied customers, revenue loss, etc.).  Thinking about them in the form of a productized framework (whether it is built in house or bought from outside), is critical for the long term TCO and maintainability.   Many people have gone to the market with Multi-tenant products thinking that it is nothing more than adding tenant ID to the database tables. And they often have to re-engineer / re-build as they go along or compromise on their competitive advantage. CEOs and CTOs should take an active role in evaluating the NFR Check list.  Based on the positive feedback we got for our white paper, we have now built an excel sheet that helps CEOs and CTOs think and choose what NFRs are needed now and in the future and calculate the effort and money that needs to be invested on them.  Please write to info@techcello.com to get more details on this ROI calculator.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Meet the Previews Presenting Companies

December 26, 2012 By

The previews judges, consisting of a team of SIIA members specializing in identifying industry start up companies, have selected a show stopping lineup of companies to present at SIIA Previews 2013. If you are unfamiliar with Previews, it showcases the most innovative B2B content companies – publishers, content aggregators, and technology plays – with under $10M in revenue, that are currently transforming the information industry.

Each presenting company will give a 5 minute presentation at IIS Breakthrough, January 30-31 in NYC, and will have 5 minutes for audience Q&A. Additionally, IIS attendees will vote on the company “Most Likely to Succeed” and will have the opportunity to meet with the companies during the Previews & CODiEs Showcase & Networking reception.

Meet the Class of 2013

Automated Insights

Automated Insights is the leading provider of high-quality, real-time content automation services. Automated Insights’ technology can automatically transform raw data into narratives (articles, summaries, headlines), visualizations (charts, tables, graphs) and interactive applications (mobile and Twitter/Facebook based social applications). We help companies in a variety of markets (such as finance, real estate and sports) realize the full monetization potential of their data assets. In essence, we use technology to humanize big data, and automate knowledge and insight at scale. Our work with Yahoo! Fantasy Football represents the largest and most complex automated content initiative to-date. Over the course of this football season we will produce over 50 million fully personalized fantasy football recaps. And in addition to our work with outside clients, we also own and operate the StatSheet Sports Network (www.statsheet.com). As such, we now own and operate 417 fully automated web sites, 500 + Android, iPad and iPhone mobile apps, 2000+ Twitter accounts and 400 Facebook pages covering every team in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NCAA Division I College Basketball and Football. The StatSheet Sports Network is comprised of more than 1.5 million pages of high-quality content all of which is written by our software and powered by a proprietary database of over 3.5 billion sports statistics.

Buzzient, Inc.

Buzzient provides Software as a Service (SaaS) that enables F5000 companies to leverage social media (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook) for improved customer service. The problem Buzzient addresses is that with the rapid growth of social media, consumers now go first to the social channel for registering complaints. F5000 companies are unable to support their customers on this channel unless they can integrate social with their existing customer service, marketing, sales and supply chain applications. The Company’s flagship application, Buzzient Enterprise, is a SaaS application that enables a F5000 company to (1) directly support customers on social media channels, or (2) integrate social data with existing customer service applications from Oracle, Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and others. The market for Enterprise Social Software exceeds $1.1B in 2012, and will exceed $4.5B in 2016(IDC). The TAM is the about 80% of the market in North America, of which over 90% use a CRM solution supported by Buzzient (Forrester). The TAM for Buzzient is therefore $792M in 2012, growing to $3.2B by 2016. The vertical markets where Buzzient applies include High Tech, Retail, Consumer Financials, Travel/Leisure, and Telecom.

Consensus Point, Inc.

Business Description: Consensus Point is a social analytics software company revolutionizing market research with Huunu, our new prediction market research platform. By bringing the thrill of gaming techniques, crowdsourcing and our prediction market algorithm to research, Huunu creates more value from communities and new revenue to market research companies. With traditional research methods, 20% of research respondents are undesirable because they are rewarded only for participation. Huunu rewards accuracy and participation to engage the community. Benchmarks have proven Huunu accurately predicts future outcomes, such as concept testing and product sales forecasts, and is more efficient and valuable than conventional market research methods, such as surveys, polls, or focus groups. Competitive Advantage: Consensus Point provides our cloud-based software as a service platform, Huunu, exclusively to our partners to maximize the value of their established communities for their clients. Using our unique partner administrator, market research and expert network firms provide both qualitative and quantitative results within their solution portfolios. Huunu brings gamificiation and social techniques, along with the proven science of our prediction market algorithm, to market research and market intelligence. Target Market: Market research was a $31.2 billion industry last year, which was a 5.2 percent increase over the previous year, according to the latest Global Market Research report from ESOMAR. Consensus Point goes to market through partnerships with market research firms with strong customer relationships to enhance their revenue through our new Huunu market research platform.

Datamyne, Inc.

Datamyne is a top-ranked provider of international trade intelligence, designed for companies that conduct business on a global basis. Our data – sourced from manifests, bills of lading and other official government documents – covers the import and export transactions of some 50 countries across 5 continents, including the US, and key markets in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the European Union. Our database is updated each day with the latest available data. Our online search and analysis tools make it easy to capture multiple perspectives on trade, from the details of individual shipments, to the size and direction of trade flows, to multi-faceted profiles of buyers and sellers. Our clients use this data to identify and gauge market opportunities, locate and qualify sources of supply, benchmark supply chain performance, and outmaneuver their competitors. Access to Datamyne is by subscription. Access to the most recent three months of data is available at our website via pay-as-you-go (by credit card) On Demand. Soon-to-be released Datamyne for Mobile can be used to find product markets and connect with qualified traders. Datamyne Profiles (summaries of companies trading activities over the past year) is available for integration via an API. What sets us apart from other trade data providers? Size, speed, simplicity, service and market savvy. We build and maintain the world’s largest searchable database of import-export trade. Our US import data is first to the marketplace, delivered within 24 hours of receipt from US Customs and Border Protection. Our easy-to-use interface makes it simple to do complex market and sourcing research. Each customer gets one-on-one, personalized support from one of our team of experts. The people who work with our customers, our trade data specialists, combine on-the-ground knowledge of markets here and abroad with professional experience in key industry verticals. To learn more, visit us at www.datamyne.com

Delve

Each day, news is shared across organizations in scattered, haphazard ways that fail to inform employees and educate teams. Enormous amounts of knowledge are frittered away due to a lack of proper tools. Delve offers a powerful alternative: a personalized, curated news reader for each employee, and a simple social layer to share relevant stories with colleagues. It saves professionals time and turns news into knowledge inside organizations.

Enlyton

Enlyton is the first cloud-based enterprise search and content discovery company. Organizations that need to manage diverse digital assets rely on Enlyton to inventory, organize, connect and present creative search-based applications. Unlike legacy and open-source solutions, Enlyton allows you to keep content where it is and make it searchable in days, not months. Enlyton’s mathematical semantic technology enables discovery of both internal AND third-party content, regardless of structure or location. With no burden on storage or processing infrastructure, enterprises get a flexible, lower cost solution, and digital asset managers get a simple interface to organize and create search-based applications for their audiences.

Gust

Gust is the global, secure, infrastructure platform for the early stage entrepreneurial finance ecosystem. It provides investors, entrepreneurs and all the organizations that support them, with everything needed to connect and collaborate on funding decisions and investor relations from pitch to exit. Investors on Gust find new investment opportunities, connect with entrepreneurs, and manage their deal flow. Entrepreneurs use Gust to find the right investors and manage all their investor and mentor relationships. Accelerators, incubators, business plan competitions, universities and governments use Gust for applications, Demo Days, collaboration and regional portals. With over 160,000 early stage companies and 40,000 accredited early stage investors actively engaged, Gust is the official platform of over 1,000 angel groups and venture funds worldwide, and is the official national entrepreneurial finance platform of 15 countries.

Movable Media

MovableMedia is focused on “opening the author channel” for brands and publishers. Our insight is that authors recruited for custom content can be a major source of distribution and audience, when their contributions are measured and compensated properly. MovableMedia has developed a unique technology solution (the “Author Tag”) to help authors move their audiences. We work with a number of major brands such as General Mills, P&G, and Williams Sonoma.

PublishThis

PublishThis is a cloud-based content marketing platform that enables brands, retailers, media companies and trade associations to more easily publish fresh, compelling content across all of their marketing channels at scale. Powerful search and curation solutions help businesses better engage their customers, build thought leadership, improve competitive intelligence, increase lead conversion, and reduce digital publishing costs. WHAT SETS PUBLISHTHIS APART PublishThis has developed a unique content discovery engine that marries next-generation semantic search technology, social monitoring and human curation tools to deliver brands and business a faster, more efficient, technology driven solution to scale their content marketing and publishing efforts. Content feeds can be curated in minutes, mixing a company’s own library of content with the real-time web for any topic, and easily published to websites, microsites, newsletters, tablets and social pages with little or no IT support.

Visual Revenue Inc.

Visual Revenue is the leading provider of real-time, content placement recommendations for online publishers. We help editors and producers across the globe by providing them with up to the second suggestions on the optimal layout for their content throughout their online publication based on audience interest, publisher objectives and editorial tone. We report on the real-time performance of the Homepage, Section Front Pages and Article pages, identify exactly how each piece of content is performing right now and model how that content will perform about 30 min into the future. We then provide a very specific set of recommendations on what item of content will perform best in which position. The Visual Revenue platform also provides editorial teams the ability to instantly A/B test story headlines as well as manage their social media strategy; from real-time reporting to recommendations on which content to tweet/post and at what time. Our platform results in an average 30% increase in engagement, enables editors to act faster and with more confidence and helps publishers work towards their given objective e.g. increase time spent, App downloads or paywall subscriptions.

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

December 21, 2012 By

OMB Delays Passback Creating Uncertainty for CIOs:The ongoing debate on Capitol Hill over how to resolve the looming fiscal cliff has delayed OMB’s budget guidance, also known as passback, making it difficult for agencies to plan expenditures for the remainder of FY2013 and budgets for FY2014.  Particularly in limbo, according to this Federal News Radio article are agency CIOs who have been tasked with modernizing IT systems, enhancing network security and moving commodity IT to shared service centers but feel they haven’t been provided enough information to effectively plan.  Further complicating this is that once the situation is resolved, the timeframe for requests, negotiations and appeals related to the FY2014 budget cycle will be compressed.

DHS Releases Continuous Monitoring RFQ:  In cybersecurity news, DHS, working through GSA, released a final RFQ this week seeking bids to meet requirements  of the new Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation program and for continuous monitoring as-a-service.  The BPA includes 15 tools and 11 task areas aimed at improving DHS’s IT security.  The BPA has an estimated value of $6 billion and responses are due January 28, 2013. Federal News Radio has the details.

PSIG Members Featured in 10th Anniversary of the E-Gov Act Event:  This week marked the 10th anniversary of the E-Gov Act and SIIA PSIG Members Doug Bourgeois of VMware, Mark Forman of Government Transaction Services and David Mihalchik of Google all were featured prominently in the event marking the anniversary.  Other SIIA members were included as well, including Dan Chenok of IBM and former Congressman Tom Davis, now of Deloitte.  C Span covered the event, which focused on the advances made in government technology since passage of the E-Gov Act.  See the video here.

 Appian Receives FISMA Moderate Certification from GSA:  Appian announced this week that it had received FISMA moderate certification from the General Services Administration for a major business process management application, built on Appian Cloud.  Appian Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services.  See the press release for more information.

Federal News Radio to host live chat with CBP CIO:  Our friends at Federal News Radio are hosting a live chat on January 3rd at 11am with DHS Customs and Border Protection CIO Charlie Armstrong and are encouraging interested parties to submit questions in advance.  See the link for more details.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, Government, Policy, Policy - Cloud Computing, PSIG, Software, Software Events, Uncategorized

CNSX Markets Named Outstanding Data Provider by FISD

December 21, 2012 By

FISD presented the 2012 Outstanding Data Provider Award to CNSX  Markets Inc.,  operator of the Canadian National Stock Exchange and Pure Trading. The award was presented at the FISD General Meeting in New York on December 18.

This award was created by the FISD Service Level and Communications Working Group to recognize the exchange or data provider that most closely adheres to the Working Group’s Best Practice Recommendations. These recommendations are guidelines for communication and notification sent by exchanges and information providers to their customers and downstream distribution partners for events such as system upgrades, administrative and policy changes, new product introductions, and unplanned interruptions.

Other nominees for this year’s award were BATS Chi – X Europe, Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and Oslo Bors.

Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team at @SIIAPolicy.

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Filed Under: FISD Blog Tagged With: ,

Innovation and Growth Diagnostic Exclusively for IIS Registrants

December 20, 2012 By

How do you facilitate heightened, sustainable performance from your team to achieve innovation and breakthrough ideas?

Whether you lead a multi national information company or a midmarket to early-stage content company, you’ll gain tremendous value from a presentation on this very topic at IIS 2013: Breakthrough on January 30 by Gifford Booth of the Tai Group.

I encourage you to register now to catch Gifford’s presentation and to join the impressive roster of media, publishing, and information services executives already confirmed to attend.

If you register by January 15, you’ll be invited to take your own performance diagnostic that will provide you with an immediate personal profile on your behavior and skills around innovation and risk. (Note: instructions for taking the diagnostic will be sent on January 21 and you will have until January 25 to complete it. The process should take no longer than 15 minutes.)

Background on The Performance Diagnostic

Breakthrough ideas, innovative products, and new ways of doing things don’t happen by accident. They’re the result of teams working in purposeful, collaborative, risk-taking ways. As leaders of an industry that relies critically on the speed and quality of innovation, it’s your job to create the chemistry, direction, and guidance to make this happen.

Take advantage of this diagnostic to experience how you can get a new line of sight into your organization and how ready you are to innovate in ways which can change your business. Based on critical factors of business purpose and risk-The Performance Diagnostic is a simple online tool that quickly reveals the innovation environment in which you and your team are operating. The tool is designed to give you insight on how you can change your team’s behavior to achieve sustained performance and innovation.

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: , , , ,
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