Going from Good to Great on the Fifth Anniversary of Buldoser Accreditation

Crown’s Buldoser product is celebrating its fifth anniversary of accreditation awarded by Documentum and EMC. Having been in commercial use as a Crown project utility since 2001 and licensed as a supported software product since 2003, Buldoser was first accredited as Designed for Documentum in 2004. It has been continuously accredited during the five intervening years.

Much has changed during Buldoser’s life, and much has stayed the same. Crown’s Buldoser initially became popular as an alternative to “Dump and Load” and home-grown approaches for moving content. In the early days, Buldoser moved content among Documentum repositories, file systems, and ODBC-compliant information stores. The changes in Buldoser’s life have occurred via four major releases and supporting minor releases. Now Buldoser has broadened into a family of extract, transform, and load (ETL) products. The family includes Buldoser, Buldoser Center, and RedCarpet. These products each have a distinct and complementary purpose. As a family, they address a wide range of use cases such as migration, archiving, synchronization, and others. Beyond the traditional Buldoser source environments, additional source environments have been added, including FileNet, Lotus Notes, SharePoint, ApplicationXtender, and eRoom. (For a more detailed review of the current evolved state of the products, reference “The Critical Role of Extract Transform and Load Solutions for Enterprise Content Management” in the Crown resource library at http://www.crownpartners.com/home/login.jsp)

Crown’s consistent investment in ETL products is based on the flywheel concept presented in Jim Collins’ “Good to Great”. Using the concept, Crown’s ETL products have gained maturity and momentum through steady, sustained investment over a period of years. Crown has made the investments in much the way one would apply consistent force to accelerate the spin of a heavy flywheel. Like the optimal force applied to a flywheel Crown’s investments have been a steady vector, always aligned toward a single direction, always continuing to accelerate the fly wheel.

Most important in the life of Crown’s ETL products have been the experience and loyalty of Crown customers. The passion they share for Crown products and their collaborative engagement with Crown has brought the ETL products to the milestone of the five year anniversary of Buldoser’s accreditation. The partnership around the ETL products continues, and as more a more customers join in that partnership, the flywheel of these products accelerates from good to great and beyond.

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.