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Briefing Notes 2005
Briefing Notes 2004
At-a-Glance Decks
Market Trends
DMReview.com
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Briefing Notes - 2005
The following
reports are write ups from the more interesting vendor briefings. Put another way,
not every product is written up; only those with an intriguing
twist/viewpoint. A Briefing Note gives a short description
of the state of the relevant market, how the vendor's product fits into that
market, some background on the vendor and/or where the product is most
appropriate, and ultimately finishes with Ballardvale Conclusions. Note that
the full reports are accessible only to Ballardvale clients.
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Briefing Notes:
StreamServe's Enterprise Document Presentment*,
October 19, 2005. Enterprises often communicate inconsistently with their
customers because they don’t manage the "last communications mile.” That is,
they (1) use separate systems (2) to output different information (3) on varied
media. By pulling data from these stovepiped systems, transforming it, and then
presenting it in paper and electronic formats, StreamServe helps companies bring
order to their back-end confusion and achieve consistent and personalized
messaging across all channels.
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Briefing Notes: JumpTap's Mobile
Search*, October 10, 2005.
Consumers have had a decade of experience using search to find and buy items on
the Web. JumpTap is now bringing that same search-and-action process to
cellphones with its mobile search product. By designing the software
specifically for the cellphone UI and including support services such as
advertiser billing, JumpTap offers ease-of-use for cellphone users and
ease-of-revenue for wireless carriers.
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Briefing Notes: Index
Engines' Enterprise Search Appliance*, September
27, 2005. Enterprise search imposes a quiet tax on IT: search engine
crawlers can consume CPU cycles and network bandwidth as they index content.
Looking to lower that tax and make search indexing less of a hassle, Index
Engines is offering an appliance that indexes content as part of the backup
process. With minimal overhead, the solution helps enterprises slipstream search
into their IT processes.
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Briefing Notes:
Clay Tablet’s CT Web Content Management System*,
September 15, 2005. Web site translation has always been project-based and
labor-intensive — and hence difficult to do. Clay Tablet is looking to change
that. By integrating outsourced translation services with its Web content
management solution, the company shrinks translation times to days and cuts
translation costs in half — enabling small/medium-sized multinationals to
field multi-language Web sites without breaking the bank.
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Briefing Notes:
SiteSpect's
SiteSpect ASP and SiteSpect Enterprise*,
September 8, 2005. Leading edge companies are now using automated testing (e.g., A/B,
multivariate testing) as a way to optimize their Web site design and content.
SiteSpect’s novel entry, based on a network appliance, lets companies test
content -- no matter where it resides on the page -- without requiring IT to
alter the page template. Companies running complex Web sites will appreciate
this many-option, low-impact solution.
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Briefing Notes:
ClickTracks’ BidHero*, August 25, 2005.
Noting that continually jockeying for ad prominence on search engine sites can
be a daunting task, ClickTracks has released BidHero to make the job easier.
From one streamlined interface, this bid management software lets analysts
edit ads on Google and Yahoo!, suggests the best prices to pay, and monitors
the ads’ effectiveness, so that enterprises can get the most out of their
search engine marketing budget.
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Briefing Notes:
Omniture’s Site Catalyst 12 and Discover*, July 19, 2005.
Web analytics vendor Omniture has put a set of valuable tweaks into
SiteCatalyst 12. These help enterprises define the right objectives, gather the
right data, and distribute it to the right people. However, its biggest
breakthrough is Discover: “OLAP on steroids.” This enables analysts to gain
insights by going wherever their curiosity takes them, rather than being
constrained by a pre-built data model.
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Briefing Notes:
Business Signatures' Customer Intent Suite*, July 11, 2005.
Online businesses don’t “know” their customers like the neighborhood store --
and so over- or under-sell. Striving to restore this lost intimacy, Business
Signatures offers software that instantly profiles the HTTP stream, quickly
discerning visitor intent as well as abnormal behavior. Thus armed, companies
can act in real-time to increase their profits, improve their infrastructure,
and defeat fraud.
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Briefing Notes:
Eloqua's Eloqua Conversion Suite*, July 8, 2005. Enterprises want to spot prospects early and then close the hot ones --
without a lot of wasted effort. The Eloqua Conversion Suite aims to solve that
problem. A mix of hosted software and outsourced services, the solution helps
companies generate prospects, measure their interest, and pass the results to
CRM systems. By focusing on interested buyers, Eloqua’s clients can make more
sales with less effort.
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Briefing Notes:
Offermatica's Multivariate Testing*, July 7, 2005. In order to increase sales via effective target marketing, companies cannot
guess at what will work, but must continually test and execute. Offermatica is
making that task easier with a hosted service that lets marketers test a wide
variety of offers without IT involvement. Consequently, Marketing’s imagination
can run wilder and what works is apparent sooner -- ultimately increasing site
conversions and sales.
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Briefing Notes:
WebTrends' WebTrends 7.5*, May 27, 2005. WebTrends 7.5, the
latest software/on-demand release from Web analytics vendor WebTrends,
promotes the get-down-to-business features of data accuracy, report
personalization, and best practices knowledge transfer. By offering support
for first-party Web cookies, an interactive Reporting Console, and free
Web-based training, the company is recognizing the drive towards discipline in
Web analytics.
- Briefing Notes:
Manticore Technology's Virtual Touchstone*, May 24, 2005.
Manticore Technology’s Virtual Touchstone ASP-based service takes three
disparate technologies -- ad tracking, e-mail, and Web analytics -- and
harnesses them to improve sales lead generation. By monitoring how prospects
move through a Web site -- as well as integrating with Salesforce.com -- the
solution helps companies fill in prospect tracking and information gaps and go
after those most inclined to buy.
- Briefing Notes:
X1's Enterprise Search*, May 9, 2005. X1’s Enterprise Search
software increases corporate productivity by going the extra step -- enabling
“search and action.” Using bi-directional connectors to link to enterprise
applications, the software lets users pull information and then act on it --
e.g., booking the order -- within the X1 interface. X1 makes enterprise
information not only easier to find, but easier to act on: a productivity
two-in-one.
- Briefing Notes:
Attensity's Attensity Workstation*, May 3, 2005.
Attensity is making it easier for companies to mine the treasure trove of
facts and trends hidden in their unstructured data by offering Attensity
Workstation. A text mining workbench, the software lets subject matter experts
train the system on what to look for via a point-and-click interface. By
simplifying the initial training step, Attensity Workstation makes it easier for
analysts to find the pattern of the day.
- Briefing Notes:
BeatBox Technologies' BeatBox Replay*, April 22, 2005.
Recognizing that “the devil is in the details,” BeatBox Replay lets
enterprises dissect the Web customer experience by replaying customer sessions
at will — “TiVo for the Web,” if you will. An easy-to-install
hardware/software solution, BeatBox Replay enables companies to zero in on
online trouble spots, thereby helping combat fraud, debug system problems, and
ultimately optimize the online experience.
- Briefing Notes:
Contact Network's Contact Network 3.0*, April 20, 2005.
Contact Networks 3.0 helps employees explore their company’s extended network
of contacts via natural language search. By mining repositories such as e-mail
and contact lists, the software can generate a list of people to contact in
response to questions such as, “Does anyone here know the CFO at IBM?” In
short, the software helps companies streamline internal knowledge sharing with
minimal additional work.
- Briefing Notes:
iUpload's Perspectives*, March 8, 2005.
Companies interested in using Web logs, or blogs, to distribute content to
communities beyond the corporate Web site now have iUpload’s Perspectives to
handle the task. This on-demand solution saves time and makes it easy to enlist
a wide range of contributors, including partners and customers. As such,
Perspectives helps companies participate in the many corporate conversations
outside their walls.
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Briefing Notes:
Interwoven's LiveSite*, March 7, 2005.
Enterprises looking to combine code and content as a way to create dynamic
Web sites now have a shortcut: Interwoven’s LiveSite. Rather than waiting for
custom code from IT, business users can drag and drop pre-built code/content
components within a WYSIWYG interface to quickly create Web sites, intranets,
and extranets. With LiveSite, the Web site can now be as dynamic as the business
wants it to be.
- Briefing Notes:
Endeca's Latitude*, January 4, 2005. Endeca’s Latitude gives
enterprises the ability to query a wide variety of repositories -- databases,
data warehouses, content management repositories, flat files, etc. -- from one
interface. As such, it allows the majority of employees (who are not BI gurus)
to retrieve text, find numbers, view charts and otherwise find the information
they need quickly and easily. In short, it offers information retrieval for
the many.
* requires client logon
Additional Briefing Notes:
2004.
For further information, contact Ballardvale
Research at
info@ballardvale.com.
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