Monthly Market Research Digest - Oct 2002

Weekly Digests

Overview

(6 Nov 02)

Progress acquires eXcelon for $24 million, in one stroke doubling the turnover of Sonic Software and extending its reach into object persistence and caching (with eXcelon's Javlin product).

SwiftMQ enters the US market for mid-price JMS software with 24/7 support offering from a Colorado based partner; mainly aimed at smaller enterprises and departmental systems.

Partnering is still in vogue (CapeClear with SoftWired, ChutneyTechnologies, and ChoreologyInc; SystinetInc with Mercator; SiebelSystems with MicroSoft; XMLGlobal and Metaserver). As always, try telling the real relationships from the promiscuous flirtations!

WebMethods bundles the JBoss application server, reducing webMethods development and integration costs and increasing JBoss's credibility, as webMethods seems to begin turning into a one-stop "application infrastructure" vendor. webMethods was the only big EAI vendor to see a significant increase in Q3 revenues (Ascential also saw a small rise, but Iona, SeeBeyond, Tibco, Vitria and Mercator have all seen revenues decline or collapse).

A spate of announcements (Vignette acquisition of Epicentric, Sybase "Ohio" roadmap, IBM's inclusion of workflow in WebSphere, and news from Corechange, Metaserver and others) suggests that Business Process Management is starting to take serious hold. CSC CTO Howard Smith claims this is "the third wave" of BPM (see http://www.bpm3.org), and represents a seismic shift to process orientation from the data-centric systems of the last 50 years. Increasingly BPM is also being associated with Portal technology (why choreograph processes if you can't present data entry steps to the end user?).

Analysts signal a worse than expected 2002, and uncertainty about 2003; Forrester says US tech sector will be down 7.9%, but will grow 5.6% next year. Gartner sees a similar 5.4% growth in 2003. Tripletree says the average price/revenue ratio for enterprise software companies has decreased 16% in September. Meanwhile Merrill Lynch says European CIOs are budgeting for flat or declining IT spend next year, and IDC says that economic conditions are inhibiting spending on even "high priority" projects like STP.