OpenText Bucks Financial Trends With Sterling Cloud Computing Performance

You may recall a couple of weeks ago we reported a pretty black week in terms of financial results with Microsoft, IBM and Google all putting in a miserable show for their respective financial quarters. Well, it took Canadian EIM Company OpenText to buck the trend, and it has done so in spectacular fashion given the poor state of developed economies.

Obviously OpenText is not as hefty as the other three information management gorillas we mentioned here, but the way they bucked the trend is instructive, and a lesson in how adaptability can make a big financial difference to the bottom line.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for OpenText; its net income fell to US$ 19.4 million in spite of a 10 percent revenue increase, due to an income tax provision of US$ 16.2 million.

But even after profits were adjusted, it easily beat Wall Street expectations by a spectacular performance in the cloud computing space.

OpenText Cloud Computing

Keeping in mind that OpenText did nothing in the cloud computing space in the same quarter last year, of the company’s total revenue of US$ 326.2 million for this, its first quarter, US$ 44.9 million of this came out of cloud computing this year.

Clearly, OpenText, which has been developing its cloud offerings for a while, has built them up in such a way so as to ensure that even when economies around the world are still looking sickly, it can still turn a profit.

This is particularly telling when you consider the cloud offerings of Google, IBM and Microsoft and the fact that their cloud offerings couldn’t provide them with better quarters.

It may be that it is just taking longer for these companies to turn the cloud into money just because of the sheer scale involved, but even still, this shows OpenText as an agile company that is able to respond to not just technology challenges, but also to business challenges.

But enough plaudits here; this is not an advertisement for OpenText, but just an observation on the value of cloud computing done well to the overall health of a company.

OpenText Licensing

To underline that it is worth noting that OpenText’s licensing revenue fell 14 percent to US$ 55.7 million in the quarter, with its overall performance boosted by the cloud elements. This follows similar patterns with other IT companies as corporation’s hold off buying, and reflects possible problems with future demand here. License revenue broken down by vertical was a follows:

• 18% financial services,
• 18% services,
• 17% from technology,
• 12% from basic materials,
• 12% from consumer packaged goods,
• 9% from public sector

There are also a number of other verticals that are less well represented, which goes to show that information management is something that runs right across the board, with CEO Mark J. Barrenechea expecting demand to pick up here in the second half of the 2013 financial year.

OpenText’s Future

With a build up of steam around cloud computing, it is interesting to see what Barrenechea is expecting to happen in the coming quarters in this regard; after all, if it ain't broke, don’t fix it!

Just a quick aside in relation to future plans. Barrenechea also mentioned in the analysts call following the results that OpenText will also be investing heavily in developing its sales teams throughout the year. He said they will be building a multichannel sales organization, a direct sales force, a partner sales force, a telesales organization and even a self-service store over time.

But back to the real meat, which in this quarter and in the immediate future is going to be in cloud computing.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

GRC Roll-up: TransPerfect Buys Digital Reef, Guidance Upgrades EnCase e-Discovery

There have been a number of announcements in the GRC space in recent weeks, including the acquisition of Digital Reef by TransPerfect. Varonis has also upgraded DatAdvantage, while Guidance has upgraded its e-Discovery product. There is also a new resource for e-Discovery documentation.

TransPerfect Buys Digital Reef

We’ve been talking about Digital Reef since it opened in 2006, particularly its e-Discovery software, which it has been delivering as an on-premises solution since the start, and as SaaS a bit later.

One of its really attractive components for enterprises in recent times has been its ability to process Big Data. In fact, that ability has been such a pull that TransPerfect Legal Solutions, a US-based legal services provider, has decided not just to invest in the Big Data capabilities, but to buy out Digital Reef completely.

For those who think this might be an extreme way of developing Big Data abilities, consider how quickly this IT area is developing and how much the demand for Big Data processing is going to grow in coming years — especially around the compliance and regulatory space. 

Already, for legal service providers, it is almost mandatory to be able to provide this ability, and TransPerfect can now do it through the Digital Reef buy.

No details of the deal were released, but the idea appears to be to provide early case assessment and large-scale e-discovery to TransPerfect clients as soon as possible. It should also help TransPerfect with its marketing initiatives, as Digital Reef has been known for its ability to scale up or down easily, making it a runner for companies of all sizes.

Guidance Upgrades EnCase

Guidance Software has also been busy in recent days with the announcement that it has just upgraded EnCase e-Discovery to version 5. Guidance strengthened its position in Gartner’s MQ for e-Discovery this year, and it says that with this release its position should be strengthened even more.

EnCase v5 offers seamless integration with Guidance’s other product CaseCentral, the cloud-based e-discovery review and production application. The result is that EnCase now offers in-house counsel control and oversight of the entire e-discovery process — from hold to collection to review and production.

Apart from the CaseCentral integration, there are a number of significant improvements with this version, Guidance says, particularly its parallel processing capabilities and enhanced search and indexing algorithms.

Overall, it provides integrated e-discovery as well as security and risk management to ensure enterprise compliance, regardless of the vertical.

It also comes with early and continuous case assessment, enabling legal teams to quickly obtain necessary facts at any time from pre- through post-collection phases.

Varonis Releases Varonis DatAdvantage v5.8

Meanwhile, Varonis has announced the release of Varonis DatAdvantage v5.8, which, it says, will make data governance not only more flexible and easier to manage, but also cheaper.

DatAdvantage manages both unstructured and semi-structured data while reducing network overheads. The latest enhancements offer better audit and data access control, as well as the ability to identify and classify data owners and oversee entitlement and authorization processes.

Varonis also says that this version has added some considerable improvements to the architecture, particularly the introduction of internally developed collectors that can operate in tandem or as an alternative to Varonis probes running Microsoft SQL. This enables data collectors — a component used for metadata collection — to compile the information with a SQL server. If you want to try it out, there is a 30-day free trial available.

eDJ e-Discovery Resources

Also in the e-discovery space, the eDJ Group has just launched the e-DiscoveryMatrix. The subscription research site is aimed at companies that are considering implementing an e-discovery solution, or those that have a solution, but are not sure they are getting everything they should out of it. 

eDJ, which is the company behind the e-DiscoveryJournal, says that the site will offer information governance professionals completely unbiased information about e-discovery best practices, trends and technologies along with research and information about more than 250 e-discovery applications, and 150 feature articles submitted by solution providers and e-discovery experts.

In addition to research reports and data analysis, the eDiscoveryMatrix offers a comprehensive analysis of the eDiscovery solutions marketplace.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Document Management Roll-up: Alfresco Hints At New Release, Google Drive Editing For iOS

Now that Labor Day weekend is over, companies are shifting into high gear to prepare for the holiday push. Among the document management products being released in the next two weeks the general release of M-Files v9.0 and something new from Alfresco. This past week, Google Drive editing capabilities for iOS were upgraded, while enterprise content management looks set to grow in the EMEA region.

Alfresco Moves

Alfresco is due to make an announcement early next week about a new product that will offer businesses syncing simplicity between the cloud and on-premise content.

In the meantime, anticipating increased business interest in the US, Alfresco has announced plans to expand both its management team and Atlanta headquarters. The new appointments are focused principally on building the sales team — specifically, by appointing someone to chase federal sales and consulting initiatives, as well as beefing up its sales department generally. More on this next week, when we can take a look at Alfresco’s new release.

Enterprise CMS in EMEA

Even in the current economic circumstances, Enterprise CMS is set to grow, according to new research by TechNavio. In particular, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region is set to grow between now and 2015, which may come as a surprise to some in light of the difficulties in many European economies.

In fact, it won’t just grow. According to the report, Enterprise Content Management Market in the EMEA Region 2011-2015 ,  growth in the enterprise CMS space will be in the region of 13.8% compounded annually between now and the end of 2015.

This period will likely be marked by an increasing number of mergers, of which there is ample evidence already. The report also identifies OpenText, IBM, EMC and Oracle as the big players, but there will still be considerable activity from smaller players like Hyland, Laserfiche and Newgen.

In fact, looking at the brief summary of the report at hand, it looks like a profitable three years with growth expected across the entire EMEA region.

M-Files v9.0

As the end of the month approaches, M-Files is getting ready to offer M-Files v9.0 on general release. At the core of this release, the company says, is advanced support for customer deployments that require multiple document repositories, or vaults.

Multiple repositories can create considerable problems, as we have seen in the past. M-Files president Greg Milliken says that v9.0 offers better interaction and cooperation between these repositories. Using new replication abilities, V9.0 aims to streamline the process of dealing with one of the main problems of multiple repositories — relating data to other relevant data in other repositories.

While an exact date for the general release hasn’t been given, it will be available by the end of the month. More on this then.

Google Drive Improvements

Finally, if you missed it earlier this week, Google has announced that it is expanding the functionality of Google Drive for iOS and Android users.

Already up and running, users of the new iOS Drive app have the same document-editing ability that users of the Android Drive app already possess. They can also create new documents and format text as well as view other people edits.

In fact, there is a whole range of functionality that has just come on line that will make working in Drive on iOS considerably easier.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

IBM Offers Social Learning Capabilities With the Release of Kenexa Learning Suite 3.0

So IBM snapped up Kenexa a couple of weeks ago for US$ 1.26 billion in deal that will expand its enterprise social networking footprint, but it didn’t say a lot about what it was hoping to do, nor what it was buying until this week’s release of Learning Suite 3.0.

Had it not been for the IBM buy this might have slipped under the radar as Learning Suite appears to operate principally in the very focused human resources space. However, looking at what it does, the possibilities for IBM are quite broad given the amount of business Big Blue does through its services portfolio.

Social Learning

Not that Learning Suite is a service.  It's a training tool that appears to be in the process of expanding its role in knowledge sharing and collaboration as well as acting as a training tool.

Among the social features that come with Learning Suite 3.0 are networking, interactive elements, knowledge sharing and collaboration along with a Learning Content Management system and, most importantly, mobile learning capabilities.

According to Rudy Karsan, CEO and co-founder of Kenexa, social learning now accounts for 80% of the learning that takes place inside the enterprise.

He doesn’t cite where that figure comes from and it seems a tad high, but there is no doubt that, increasingly, social tools are being used in the learning and training processes across companies, and any learning suite that is not completely up to speed with social tools is not going to make the cut in the market.

Learning Suite v3.0

Seems this won’t be a problem with v3.0:

Our new Kenexa Learning Suite with a Social LMS fuses social capabilities with the formal learning process, adding networking, collaboration and knowledge sharing to the online formal learning process. This fusion helps employees perform better in their roles, and provides greater job satisfaction as well as better overall performance for the company,” Karsan said. Among the new features in this version are:

Features of the latest version include:

• New interface that manages all student content
• Newly designed homepage that provides access to all course, assignments, groups, workspaces and search
• Quick links to detailed assignment views
• Explore tabs for all documents, files, expertise exchanges and postings, as well as teaching videos

And there’s a lot more. Kenexa’s Learning Suite 3.0, however, is not just an interdepartmental tool. It is capable of providing training to Fortune 1000 companies – companies with more than 10,000 employees, and with the social features expanded it will be able to offer knowledge-sharing over dispersed geographies.

Kenexa also points out that it is easy enough to customize the suite and set up multiple levels of review and approvals for it, as well as offer support for virtual classrooms through Adobe Connect integration.

When IBM bought Kenexa it said it would be integrating Kenexa's recruitment and talent management functionality into its existing social business technology offerings.

It didn’t say then, and there is no indication with this release how it is going to do this. However, US$1.26 billion is too much of an investment to be left idle for too long. Let’s see where Big Blue goes with this.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

A Little Birdie Told me Twitter was Doing Product Strategy via API

Late last week, Twitter announced a series of API changes that it plans to launch in the upcoming weeks. The changes covered several different areas including changes to authentication requirements, changes to number of calls an end-point can make to Twitter in an hour (both up and down) and creating a series of binding agreements that developers and applications must adhere to. While the API will be released shortly, developers will have a migration period of 6 months before the old API is retired.

We Are The Knights Who Say Tweet!

While the individual changes themselves are indeed interesting, the fun stuff lies just beyond the surface in what the changes mean to both Twitter's business strategy and to its overall approach to product strategy and development as well. These changes are not random demands for "shrubberies" but rather a fully acknowledged attempt to encourage and discourage specific partner and developer behaviors when integrating with and leveraging Twitter's platform. In other words, Twitter has fully embraced the idea that its API is a product to be designed for a specific set of consumers along with a specific strategy in mind (something predicted in these pages earlier this year).

Twitter is still in the throes of figuring out how to fully monetize its immensely popular micro-blogging platform and has made these changes with an eye towards furthering its profitability goals. By throttling smaller apps and unleashing larger ones, twitter has furthered its ability to charge enterprise media partners for access to the firehose of tweets in search results and also for trending topics.

The authentication, partnering and rate limiting changes will directly go after data scrapers in two ways (also predicted in these pages earlier this year):

1. The lower rate limit (more than five times less than its current amount) will make it harder to do mass scraping and will force any programmatic scrapers to identify themselves with a license key.
2. The upper rate limit (just over twice the currently supported amount) will give scrapers a legitimate opportunity to abandon scraping and legitimize their use of twitter data.

No One Expects The Twitter Inquisition!

Another big shift is Twitter's move from display guidelines to display requirements along with a certification requirement for certain Twitter apps. Twitter will now require its developers to adhere to a specific set of rules to standardize appearance and functionality. Twitter has justified this change by citing that it will give a better, and more standard, interface to its end users and has reserved the right to revoke license keys from any non-conformists. Some developers have cried foul citing that this will limit the individual Twitter-client developers ability to differentiate their user experience and their overall ability to make money. Well duh! Twitter basically said that in its blog post by specifically saying that it was trying to discourage developers from making new differentiated client apps for consumers.

In case it is not obvious to the solo developer community, Twitter really does not care whether you make money. Twitter cares whether Twitter makes money. In order for Twitter to make money, Twitter needs consumers to engage with Twitter on the Twitter site as much as possible. Twitter's value prop to developers is a free, functional and highly available micro-bloging platform that can easily be integrated into your site. If that is not good enough, build and market your own platform and see how much money that makes you.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Twitter Tightens API Rules: Increases Authentication, Decreases Requests Per Hour

Twitter plans to release version 1.1 of the Twitter API in the coming weeks, and it involves a number of new user restrictions. Changes will include required authentication on every API endpoint, a new per-endpoint rate-limiting methodology, and tighter “Developer Rules of the Road,” especially around applications that are traditional Twitter clients.

Seeking Authenticity

In version 1.0 of the Twitter API developers have access to certain API endpoints without requiring their applications to authenticate, essentially enabling them to access public information from the Twitter API without Twitter knowing who they are other than their IP addresses. To prevent what Twitter calls “malicious” use of the Twitter API and to gain an understanding of what types of applications are accessing the API, in version 1.1 the company will require every request to the API to be authenticated.

For developers who are already using OAuth when making API requests, Twitter says all authentication tokens will transition seamlessly from v1.0 to v1.1. If an application is currently using the Twitter API without using OAuth, developers will need to update it before March 2013.

Rate-Limiting Endpoints

Twitter will cut the number of authenticated requests applications can make from the current 350 calls per hour to 60 calls per hour per-endpoint. According to Twitter, analysis of current use of its API shows this rate limit “will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications.”

There will also be a set of high-volume endpoints related to Tweet display, profile display, user lookup and user search where applications will be able to make up to 720 calls per hour per endpoint.

The Rules of the Road

Changes to Twitter’s official developer “Rules of the Road” will include a shift from display guidelines to display requirements (such as linking @usernames to the appropriate Twitter profile), requiring developers that are building client applications that are pre-installed on consumer electronics devices to have their application certified by Twitter and requiring developers to work with Twitter directly if they need a large amount of user tokens.

Bloggers Voice Displeasure

In addition to preventing misuse and gaining a better understanding of the API environment, Twitter says its new API guidelines are designed to encourage application development activity in areas such as social CRM, social analytics and social influence ranking, while limiting certain use cases for traditional Twitter cases and syndication.

However, not all observers are quite so positive about these planned changes. Computerworld compiled a list of negative postings from IT bloggers about the changes. Comments included: “[It's] disappointing to see Twitter turning its back on the…community that played such a large role in its…expansion”; “the new requirements…may make it more difficult for third-party clients to differentiate themselves” and a “translation” of Twitter’s “weaselese” that boiled down to “We look forward to forcing you to build a service, then destroy any chance of making money from it.”

Not every blogger was negative, however. One blogger wrote, “I was left thinking a lot of the changes were reasonable and made sense…With concrete rules we can always ensure we are in compliance.” There was a caveat of “My only request to Twitter is that they keep the lines of communication…very open.”

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com