Industry Research

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May 29, 2007

The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Management Software, Q2 2007

Forrester evaluated leading customer service management software vendors across approximately 180 criteria and found that Entellium, Microsoft, Oracle Siebel CRM, Oracle Siebel CRM On Demand, salesforce.com, and SAP are Leaders for customer record-centric products; eGain, KANA Software, RightNow Technologies, and Talisma are Leaders for customer interaction-centric products; and Graham Technology, Onyx, and Pegasystems are Leaders for business process-centric products. Within the customer record-centric category, Infor, Maximizer Software, NetSuite, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Peoplesoft Enterprise CRM, SageCRM, Sage SalesLogix, and SugarCRM are Strong Performers. Among interaction-centric products, ATG, FrontRange Solutions, KNOVA, and Numara Software are Strong Performers. Amdocs and Chordiant are Strong Performers within the process-centric category. Differing requirements within an individual company necessitate a careful evaluation of the specific capabilities and individual strengths of each product and probably require the use of more than one tool to solve the full range of customer service management needs.

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May 24, 2007

Business Performance Matches Regulatory Compliance in Driving Enterprise Risk Management

Chartis Research and SAS study shows data integration is still top challenge in risk management programs.

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May 17, 2007

Segmenting Healthcare Consumers By Cost Sensitivity

Marketers who understand the cost sensitivity of prospective customers have a leg up in targeting their messaging to tempt bargain hunters with incentives or tout lower prices to the most cost-sensitive. With healthcare consumerism on the rise, marketers need fresh insights into the cost sensitivity of buyers specific to health products and services. To help healthcare marketers, we used the results from Forrester's North American Consumer Technology Adoption Study Q2 2006 Survey to identify six segments of healthcare buyers defined by consumers' sensitivity to healthcare costs and then examined the demographics, technology adoption, health attitudes, and research tendencies of these groups.

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May 16, 2007

iWay Software Is A Strong Performer In Enterprise ETL With Broad Connectivity

iWay Software, a subsidiary of Information Builders, is best known for its world-class information connectivity and also leads all vendors in its platform support and real-time connectivity options. iWay Software's ETL product, DataMigrator, offers a less functional tooling environment and offers little in information management compared with other ETL vendors. iWay Software is most widely known and adopted by organizations that have standardized on Information Builder's WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) solution.

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Analyst Report Rates LogiXML as Best in Class for Web-Based Business Intelligence

According to a report released today by Technology Evaluation Centers, Inc. (TEC), LogiXML's Logi 8 BI Platform rates best in class as the only fully Web-based business intelligence suite. The report rates the industry's top ranked BI offerings from Business Objects, Information Builders, LogiXML and Microsoft.

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May 15, 2007

Sybase Enters The Enterprise ETL Market As A Contender

Sybase's Sybase ETL product can be a useful project- or departmental-based ETL tool for easy to moderate integration challenges as an alternative to custom code. But the product does not yet offer the necessary scalability, connectivity, user friendliness, and information management capabilities required for an enterprise ETL standard. While less expensive than many of the ETL leaders, the product carries a high average sales price, considering its current gaps in capabilities — especially when compared with the free ETL solutions offered by Oracle and Microsoft, two of Sybase's database platform competitors. While experienced and successful in the data replication market, Sybase recognizes that it is new to ETL and the broader data integration market. Sybase's challenge lies in determining how it wants to differentiate from the variety of options already in this crowded space.

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May 14, 2007

SAS Institute: A Strong Performer In Enterprise ETL With A BI And Analytics Focus

SAS Institute's Data Integration Studio (SDIS) remains a Strong Performer with good server capabilities, strong connectivity, user-friendly tools, and a world-class support and training organization. SAS ETL adoption remains primarily within its SAS business intelligence (BI) and analytics installed base and has not yet been widely utilized as an enterprise standard crossing both SAS BI projects and non-SAS operational initiatives.

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May 13, 2007

Pervasive Software: A Strong Performer In Enterprise ETL Targeted At ISVs And Integrators

Pervasive Software's Business Integrator Pro and Data Integrator products do not compete head to head on scalability, user friendliness, and feature richness compared with most of the other enterprise ETL vendors we evaluated, but that is in line with Pervasive's strategy — it doesn't target the same end users. Pervasive's primary competitor is custom-coded integration solutions, and its primary customers are not enterprise and integration architects, but instead independent software vendors (ISV) and systems integrators (SI). These partners seek a data integration solution with a small footprint that is easily and seamlessly embeddable in more complex information management solutions.

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May 12, 2007

Oracle Is A Leader In Enterprise ETL With A Free, Bundled Solution For Its DBMS

With the long awaited "Paris" release of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (OWB) finally available, Oracle has delivered a scaleable, user-friendly, and feature-rich ETL solution at a much more attractive price than its competitors: Free! Base OWB functionality is bundled at no charge with the purchase of an Oracle Standard Edition One, Standard Edition, or Enterprise Edition database. That's great news for enterprises already using — or planning to use — Oracle databases in their environment, but you can't purchase OWB without an Oracle DB, which is a limiting factor for some enterprises. OWB also offers improved connectivity to non-Oracle source platforms and applications, but target load and connectivity is still optimized for Oracle database and data warehousing environments.

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May 11, 2007

Microsoft Is A Strong Performer In Enterprise ETL When Targeting Microsoft Shops

With the release of SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS), Microsoft has significantly improved on its previous Data Transformation Services (DTS) ETL offering as a valuable data integration tool for homogeneous Microsoft platform customers. While SSIS does offer decent scalability with user-friendly development and administration tools, it significantly lacks heterogeneous platform support and the extract and load connectivity options provided by its competitors. Microsoft also lacks the embedded integration of data quality management and data profiling technology.

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May 10, 2007

Informatica: A Leader In Enterprise ETL, With A Pure-Play Solution

Informatica holds the second-place spot, following IBM, in the Leaders category with a highly scalable and user-friendly enterprise ETL integration suite of its own, with its PowerCenter product at the core and popular add-ons such as Data Quality and its Unstructured Data option. Informatica's primary differentiation from IBM and the other leaders is its pure-play focus on data integration. By focusing specifically on the data integration (DI) market, Informatica leverages its platform and application neutrality to attract a wide variety of partners and customers who may choose to bypass vendors focusing on larger architectural footprints.

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May 9, 2007

IBM Leads In Enterprise ETL With A Comprehensive Information Management Suite

IBM leads the way in the next evolution of the enterprise ETL market with its introduction of IBM Information Server (IIS), which embeds comprehensive data integration and data management capabilities into a suite enabling seamless collaboration between data stewards, architects, and developers. While continuing to support complex heterogeneous environments, IBM's strategy will increasingly bridge IIS capabilities with IBM's metadata, master data, content, and other complementary information management solutions.

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May 8, 2007

Business Objects: A Leader In Enterprise ETL, With A Strong Focus On Information Management

Business Objects' Data Integrator is a relatively affordable enterprise-class ETL solution that incorporates comprehensive information management capabilities — further enhanced by its acquisition of data quality management vendor Firstlogic. Data Integrator adoption is still heavily weighted toward data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) initiatives to complement Business Objects BI solutions but has not been able to prove through referential customer case studies that Data Integrator can be successful in supporting operational data integration solutions.

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May 7, 2007

How Consumers Use Social Computing For Health

Health marketers are used to waiting out technology trends, but Social Computing is making them nervous. While disease is more prevalent among older consumers, one in four Gen Xers and Gen Yers with medical conditions use Social Computing for health today. New forms of Social Computing are emerging for healthcare, from expert health blogs that turn medical information into conversation to social networks that inspire with personal stories and progress trackers. Result: more transparency in healthcare, a trend that health plans and pharmaceutical companies must prepare for. Marketers should move now to monitoring, planning for, and, when possible, participating in Social Computing activities.

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Industry IT Spending Profile 2007: Insurance

With the 2007 business environment for North American insurance carriers looking relatively good for the second year in a row, insurance carriers have become slightly more generous in their IT spending. We anticipate that IT spending in 2007 in the insurance industry will increase by 7%, compared with 5% growth in 2006. The highest priority will be efficiency, and the second highest, innovation. The initiatives to support these priorities are utility-oriented projects such as infrastructure consolidation and disaster recovery. However, competitive pressures and technology-enabled opportunities will drive the need for innovation in Internet and mobile applications as well as the replacement of legacy applications. Underpinning these changes will continue to be a drive toward service-oriented architecture (SOA) for internal integration of systems, usage of services firms for transformation, and greater focus on process standardization.

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