The Foundation for WAM Solutions: Speed and More…

Economic indicators may be down, but business is not slowing down. Global 2000 customers still have aggressive deadlines. They still value speed. They even want previously unachievable, next-generation solutions, and they want them faster than ever.

The need for speed, and more, is especially strong for Web and Marketing (WAM) solutions. WAM solutions are essential for bringing new products to market and strengthening relationships with customers. There’s a need for speed associated with WAM solutions, because time to market is as important as it ever was. Speed alone is not enough, because products need a marketing program that is sharper and stickier than the competition on the first day to market and every day.

“Web speed” means delivering solutions so fast that old standards for schedule are meaningless. Web speed is exciting, but if the result is a static solution that requires ongoing technical investment to keep it up-to-date, then the excitement is short-lived. What if you could have speed and more? What if you could have a solution deployed with web speed AND you could refresh and expand your e-marketing programs on a continuous basis without ongoing technical investment? You want both. You need both.

From the Crown point of view, speed-and-more is based on a “need it yesterday” mentality, “instant” translation of experience into re-usable intellectual property, and harnessing progressive software technology and economics. Speed and more is about making strategic e-marketing gains routine. For large-scale product-launch or customer-relationship initiatives where the stakes are high, why settle for anything else?

(Note: In Crown’s early days, “Expect More…” was a company tag line that inspired customers and employees. The inspiring open-ended nature of that tag lives on in “Speed and More…”)

What Did They Say at the Crown Forum?

The summary report on the Crown Forum in November 2008 in Prague, Czech Republic is complete. At the forum, 30 business and technology leaders provided input on their priorities for content management and especially for Extract Transform and Load (ETL). As a sequel to last week’s post, the report reinforces the trend toward consolidation of content and the need for universal ETL.

From the input gathered at the Forum, 23 perspectives have been distilled and are included in the summary report. Those 23 perspectives support these five strategic trends:

• Information technology organizations are moving toward a centralized, scalable content management backbone as a foundation for content management across the enterprise.
  
• There is a strong and growing need to move and transform content via a standard process and technology to increase flexibility and reduce cost.
  
• Large scale adoption of collaborative content management products, such as eRoom, Lotus Notes, and SharePoint, has given rise to greater need for administration and control capabilities.
  
• Regardless of the content management and collaboration technology employed, the trend is toward globalized business process and workflow and away from departmental business process and workflow.
  
• Businesses have growing needs, both strategic and tactical, to move and adapt content fluidly according to changing business and technology contexts.

Crown uses results from its Forums to guide its investments in products and solutions. Results from the November 2008 forum have reinforced and guided us in bringing Buldoser Center to market sooner, in December 2008, rather than sliding the release date into 2009. The November 2008 Forum has guided us in considering features for future releases -- we will prioritize support for a wider range of departmental content sources such as eRoom, Lotus Notes Data Base, SharePoint, and Application Xtender. At the same time, these results have steered us to narrow the field of targets to enterprise-capable repositories.

Crown plans additional Forums for 2009. If you’re interested in future Crown Forums or reports from past Crown Forums, please e-mail info@crownpartners.com or call +1-937-723-2300.

Enabling Consolidation with Universal ETL

How to do more with less? That’s a popular question, and “consolidation” is a popular answer. In recent years, consolidation initiatives have often been deferred. They’ve been passed-over in favor of business expansion initiatives. This year, there are fewer promising expansion initiatives, and the cost-saving possibilities of consolidation look more attractive.

Crown’s Budoser, Buldoser Center, and RedCarpet products support consolidation efforts by moving unstructured information. If you have unstructured information in distributed or far-flung repositories, these products can help you move the information into centralized repositories. Buldoser has been moving content since 2003. Buldoser Center and RedCarpet are more recent additions to Crown’s Extract-Transform-and-Load (ETL) family of products.

Crown’s ETL family of products is part of Crown’s continuing investment to enable Universal ETL for unstructured information. Universal ETL is a vision for free flow of unstructured information from one repository to another. Doing more with less by consolidating requires a flow of information from a larger number of repositories to a smaller number of repositories. Crown’s ETL products and the vision for Universal ETL are in direct response to this requirement.

Consolidation is an immediate need. Crown’s ETL products provide immediate value, and pave the way toward the vision for Universal ETL. Let me or my colleagues at Crown know if you’ve been thinking about consolidating unstructured information or if you want to know more about our vision for Universal ETL.

Keep Bucking Bearish Economics in 2009

We at Crown Partners have been fortunate in 2008. Our customers’ confidence and ability to invest in our offerings not only allowed us to continue operating profitably as we have done since inception in 2001, but also drove growth in our software business.

In 2009, our commitment to providing value through market-focused initiatives will continue to overcome bearish economics. Customers have responded favorably to our investments, and we will continue to broaden and deepen market-focused initiatives in:
· Web-and-Marketing
· Extract-Transform-and-Load
· Enterprise Performance Management
· Standalone Software Products
· Strategic Account Operations

Crown leverages scale economics of enterprise software from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft to produce measurable gains for our customers. Crown unlocks value from enterprise software by focusing professional services and developing complementary software products through the market-focused initiatives. We are already at work doing more of the same in 2009 so that we can help our customers thrive in the New Year.

Visit this space for news and opinion about Crown’s investments, market and technology trends, and in-the-trenches experience creating value through Crown products and services.