Autonomy announced today that it plans to acquire CA Technologies’ Information Governance business. The deal, expected to close in Q3, focuses on archiving, records management, and eDiscovery. Given overlaps in the vendors' offerings, I see this as a somewhat surprising move and suggest that customers keep a close watch on how this plays out.

With this purchase, the major offerings that Autonomy picks up are CA Records Manager (which stems from CA’s 2006 acquisition of MDY Group International) and CA Message Manager (which comes from CA’s 2005 acquistion of iLumin). In 2009, I evaluated records management offerings and rated CA Records Manager as a leader in this category. Forrester clients can access the June 23, 2009, “The Forrester Wave™: Records Management, Q2 2009″ report for further details.

From its prior acquisitions of Interwoven in 2009 and Meridio in 2007, Autonomy has two existing records management applications. Largely leveraging its 2007 purchase of ZANTAZ, Autonomy also currently markets several message archiving solutions including Digital Safe (cloud-based archiving solution), Enterprise Archive Solution (on-premise archiving software), Arcpliance (on-premise archiving appliance), and more. After it completes the acquisition of CA Technologies’ Information Governance business, Autonomy will have three distinct offerings for records management and over four for message archiving.

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Like many OpenOffice.org adopters, Forrester's enterprise clients are starting to wonder what's going on with the once-promising open source alternative to Microsoft Office. As one chief technology strategist posited last week: "Oracle has made several strong public pronouncements that their support for OpenOffice.org will continue abated. This, however, begs the question of the increasing functional and technical gap between standard programs like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations and the new, all-encompassing view of the desktop being adopted by Microsoft in Office 2010. That being so, is there really any future for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org within the enterprise, except as an ever-shrinking niche to support basic, ultra low-cost office document capability on home-use platforms?"

Great question. After 10 years, Open Office hasn’t had much traction in the enterprise – supported by under 10% of firms, and today it’s facing more competition from online apps from Google and Zoho. I'm not counting OpenOffice completely out yet, however, since IBM has been making good progress on features with Symphony and Oracle is positioning Open Office for the web, desktop and mobile – a first. But barriers to Open Office and Web-based tools persist, and not just on a feature/function basis. Common barriers include:

 by Sheri McLeish

The new European browser menu launched this week, and Microsoft in many ways faces a no-win situation. These past few years have been a doozy for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. After extricating itself from a legal mess with Netscape, its IE6 browser braved on and captured more than two-thirds of the market at its height in the fall of 2003. While unbundled, IE’s fortunes remained closely tied the operating system, and so Vista’s failure to displace XP as the standard image for many enterprises around the world also impacted IE7 and IE8’s uptake. Even with the well-received launch of Windows 7, IE’s overall erosion accelerated this past year.

When AOL stopped development of the Netscape browser, it left Mozilla’s Firefox to challenge IE’s dominance. And it’s put up a good fight. Firefox today can claim browser market leadership for tech enthusiasts, with 46.5% of the market compared to 35% for all IE versions combined, according to the latest WC3Schools data. Google also started muscling in with Chrome. After a year-and-a-half on the market, Google finally took Chrome to the people, delivering a marketing onslaught in Europe to coincide with the new browser menu. It seems to be paying off: In January, Google’s Chrome cracked double digits and crept further up in February to 11.6% of the market share. Other market data sources like Netmarketshare aren’t quite as bad for IE, placing all versions of IE combined at 62% of the market versus 24% for Firefox and 5.6% for Chrome. Opera, which initiated the European litigation, only captures 2% of the market but said it’s already feeling the benefit of the browser menu.

But who really cares about browser market share other than the vendors and web developers? I mean, really, they seem to be free and plentiful. Consumers and information workers want web sites to work correctly, for their activities to be secure, and to have features that improve their web browsing experience like speed, add-ons, and customization. But despite improvements on all of these fronts with IE8, particularly around security, Microsoft’s IE6 remains entrenched in many global enterprises, because choice is often dependent on customizations with third-party apps, operating system upgrades, or security/compliance concerns. In these cases, European browser menu choice matters little.

Microsoft has been trying to clean up its web browser mess for enterprises by reaffirming its commitment to interoperability and standards for web browsers and ensuring compatibility between IE7 and IE8. It’s been advocating for more than a year for customers to upgrade to IE8, even if it’s obligated to continue support of IE6 until 2014. But it now seems the acrimony over IE6 is reaching near-hysterical levels, from an online petition in the UK for the British government to ditch IE6 to the revelation that the recent Google hacker attack in China exploited a vulnerability in IE6. (Yes, you read it right: Google was using IE6.)

All of this puts Microsoft in a no-win situation where IE6 remediation is needed. Every client I have spoken with in the past months facing this issue is either staying on IE6 or just letting users download an alternative browser, most often Firefox. Virtualization tends to be assessed and dismissed. Most customers say they will eventually upgrade IE, just as they will move to Windows 7. The effort and aggravation of IE6 application remediation may make more enterprises want to make a clean break from IE. But we don’t think they will. And Microsoft doesn’t want them to be swept away that easily either. Early indications show Microsoft is bucking up with IE9, adding HTML5 support and providing even more standards support. Now, if 6 turned up to be 9, Microsoft would definitely not mind. But for now, it remains a fine mess.

The new European browser menu launched this week, and Microsoft in many ways faces a no-win situation. These past few years have been a doozy for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. After extricating itself from a legal mess with Netscape, its IE6 browser braved on and captured more than two-thirds of the market at its height in the fall of 2003. While unbundled, IE’s fortunes remained closely tied the operating system, and so Vista’s failure to displace XP as the standard image for many enterprises around the world also impacted IE7 and IE8’s uptake. Even with the well-received launch of Windows 7, IE’s overall erosion accelerated this past year.

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  by Brian W. Hill

Iron Mountain announced today that it has acquired privately-held archiving vendor Mimosa Systems. The approximately $112 million deal significantly bolsters Iron Mountain’s archiving portfolio with on-premises software for email, file and SharePoint archiving. With the purchase, Iron Mountain also picks up just over a thousand existing Mimosa customers and a good talent pool with expertise in archiving and eDiscovery.

My preliminary perspective is that this acquisition will entail some near- and mid-term bumps for Iron Mountain customers and prospects, but will ultimately prove positive. The three main reasons:

• Message archiving remains critically important. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of organizations have adopted message archiving solutions. An array of vendors, providing archiving offerings for Exchange, Notes Domino, and other messaging systems, have helped these buyers comply with regulations, mitigate legal risk, and improve operational efficiency. While the message archiving market is mature, it’s changing and growing at a rapid clip. Although Mimosa made an impressive initial entry into SharePoint archiving last year, message archiving accounts for most of new customers the vendor signed in the last 12 months. With this acquisition, Iron Mountain demonstrates that it understands how important message archiving is to prospective buyers and its strong intent to capitalize on the opportunity.
• Functionality delivered as on-premises software (as opposed to SaaS-based solutions) matters to many archiving buyers. With the promise of lower total cost of ownership, more rapid deployments, and other advantages, message archiving vendors providing SaaS-based solutions report strong customer growth. In announcing its April 2009 partnership with Mimecast for SaaS-based message archiving, Iron Mountain sought to take advantage of this market growth. While the vendor has had some traction with this partnership, prospective buyers with a preference for on-premises solutions due to privacy, security, legal, and other concerns remained out of reach. Now, with Mimosa’s on-premises message archiving software, Iron Mountain can more effectively target these buyers as well as organizations interested in exploring hybrid solutions, combining a mix of on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based services.
• Message archiving buyers struggle with eDiscovery challenges. From a series of podcasts I’ve recorded with message archiving customers (e.g., Canaccord, Media General, and Rohm and Haas) over the past few months and from ongoing exchanges with enterprise buyers, it’s clear that many are achieving legal risk mitigation objectives but most organizations struggle. Interestingly, top challenges typically don’t include issues with insufficient message archiving features or other application-specific factors. Instead enterprises report difficulties in synchronizing eDiscovery, archiving, and records management efforts along with issues in establishing policies for retention management and legal hold as key challenges. Effectively incorporating Mimosa’s archiving products and expertise into the broader Iron Mountain portfolio holds potential to ease these difficulties. For example, a solution that tightly integrates message archiving, preservation, and legal review along with solid best practices guidance would go a long way in easing enterprise eDiscovery pain.

Enterprises report frustrations in integrating applications that support disparate steps of the eDiscovery process. If Iron Mountain successfully incorporates the Mimosa product set into its portfolio, the vendor has good potential to address enterprise legal risk mitigation headaches. This is a considerable effort, however, and success is certainly not assured. I’ll be monitoring Iron Mountain’s execution on this deal and will be looking for examples of customers leveraging multiple Iron Mountain archiving, records management, and eDiscovery offerings in production environments. If your organization fits this description, please send me a note at bhill@forrester.com.

What do you think the acquisition means for the message archiving market? I welcome your comments here. Also, Forrester is currently conducting research on message archiving trends, budgets, and user expectations. We’re wrapping up an online survey now and value your message archiving insight. If you would like to participate in an online survey to support this research, please click on this link. (No vendors please.) We plan to publish key summary findings in early 2010.

Iron Mountain announced today that it has acquired privately-held archiving vendor Mimosa Systems. The approximately $112 million deal significantly bolsters Iron Mountain’s archiving portfolio with on-premises software for email, file and SharePoint archiving. With the purchase, Iron Mountain also picks up just over a thousand existing Mimosa customers and a good talent pool with expertise in archiving and eDiscovery.

My preliminary perspective is that this acquisition will entail some near- and mid-term bumps for Iron Mountain customers and prospects, but will ultimately prove positive. The three main reasons:

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by Sheri McLeish

First, thank you IBM/Lotus for getting me out of Boston before the snow. I know that has something to do with my good mood. But that aside, what Lotus unveiled at its 17^th annual Lotusphere in Orlando this week warms my heart in another way. For all the advancements in its product portfolio and technologies, the real accomplishment is Lotus’ keen focus on people, context, and simplicity.

IBM wants us to have a Smarter Planet, and Lotus "Knows" how to get there. Its vision for collaboration is deeply connected to personal productivity. With LotusLive, launched just a year ago, the effort is to allow people to be able to stay in their in-box and bring work tasks, information, and people together, in context. It has 18 million users today compared to just about 1 million each for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and Google Premier Apps. It’s landing more huge enterprise accounts, including the just announced more than 150,000 seats with Panasonic. Yet it still seems that many people don’t know Lotus, because most of my inquiries continue to ask about Microsoft or Google. Let me share.

So much of the iWorker’s day is spent searching for information, toggling between applications, and pulling content together from various sources to support a business activity or process. Unlike Google Wave, which does try to innovate to accomplish similar collaborative experiences, LotusLive doesn’t require radically altering behavior to get there (see Ted Schadler’s related Lotus blog). Email is an hourly addictionfor iWorkers, so LotusLive starts there and integrates Web conferencing, social networking, and collaboration within the environment.

Symphony, Lotus’ free Open Office productivity suite, will soon also be integrated to provide a web-based document document editor for creating and sharing (which surprisingly drew spontaneous cheers from the crowd).

Critical mass matters for the success of social networking and collaboration. So does trust and track record. IBM/Lotus meets the security litmus test because of its proven ability to support enterprise needs across its product portfolio. Google has yet to earn that trust. Microsoft engenders the same level of trust and is hot on the heels of Lotus with its 2010suite of products, slated to be launched midyear. But in the cloud, Lotus is way ahead and offering the kind of ease of access to people and content in context that Microsoft has yet to master. Consider:

• iWorkers suffer from ADD. With plenty to distract iWorkers from their task at hand, people increasingly need help to compartmentalize their work to stay the course. Need to locate the latest sales numbers to put in your presentation to the board? This can trigger a investigation to find who has the latest information, how to best reach them, or perhaps to try and discover if the information is already documented elsewhere. LotusLive addresses these challenges by enabling easier connections to people and content through searching and social networking that don’t require switching applications. You can contact someone based on information published, through integration of a “business card” fed from Connections/SameTime, and escalate from a threaded discussion to voice, video, a meeting, and presence.
• iWorkers need context. We know that information taken out of context is misleading. Value comes from understanding the genesis of information as well as its application in a given scenario. Because of the ability to filter by a lot of work dimensions, such as people, projects, time/date, or specific keyword searches, it’s much easier to surface content and people in relation to what your information needs are. With the ability to find sales numbers and also view related discussion threads or additional presentation materials or documents, greater understanding of the data is possible because more context is provided.
• iWorkers want simple. Ok, I admit it, I am the epitome of the KISS principle. I really don’t adjust well to new technology. I’m lucky to have a husband that manages all of the electronics at home. But I do know good design. It’s simple. It’s clean. I don’t have to think about it. It’s intuitive. What LotusLive accomplishes is a strikingly simple UI that doesn’t force me to change my behavior. iWorkers will relish being able to do what they’ve always done and delight in the ease of discovering more content, more people, and ultimately, be more productive.

Given the concerted effort to solve iWorker pain points through actual use cases, within their core customer industries like banking and healthcare, Lotus is able to deliver what Google Wave fails to address: providing a solution that improves personal productivity without forcing a change in work behavior. The “build it and they will come” approach generally fails. Just look at any efforts around document collaboration and team sites usage. Incrementally improving upon the investments that you already have without forcing a cultural change, however, will be a powerful differentiator. Who knew? Lotus.

First, thank you IBM/Lotus for getting me out of Boston before the snow. I know that has something to do with my good mood. But that aside, what Lotus unveiled at its 17th annual Lotusphere in Orlando this week warms my heart in another way. For all the advancements in its product portfolio and technologies, the real accomplishment is Lotus’ keen focus on people, context, and simplicity.

 by Sheri McLeish

The EU’s decision this week to accept Microsoft’s proposed browser menu means in March European consumers purchasing or upgrading their operating system will be presented a choice of browser. Beyond that, the acceptance means little for enterprises. Businesses in Europe will be able to bypass the menus for enterprise installation and the menu will not extend beyond the European Union. What matters more for Microsoft will be innovating Internet Explorer to enable better web experiences, from security and administration to personalization and productivity.

After 10 years and more than $2 billion in fines, Microsoft needs to put issues of technical transparency and monopolistic practices to rest, especially in the browser market, because:

• Browsers are everywhere. A decade ago Microsoft did own your browser. But now there are rivals like corporate giants Google and Apple trying to level the field and a nonprofit organization in Mozilla Foundation keeping it honest. Browser choices abound and they are freely available for download. Hence comments like: “People in the EU should be embarassed (sic) about this. Basically it says that they admit that the people are too stupid to download their own browser of choice.”
• Internet Explorer needs to win with innovation, not just Windows. Everyone expects to get online when they fire up their computer. Along with email and word processing, Web browsers are a killer app in the information workday. The reason Mozilla’s Firefox continues to slowly and steadily increase its market share among general users (nearly 50%) and enterprises (20%) isn’t simply because it’s an alternative; it’s because it offers features and performance that draw users through word of mouth. You may be able to get users by packaging your browser and operating system together, but that won’t keep them. Microsoft must offer more compelling reasons why IE8 becomes the default browser of choice.
• The browser’s potential remains untapped. We know Google’s not stupid, and there’s a reason it’s developing its own browser and operating system. Calling them both Chrome probably merits a taunting penalty … but, the point is: We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The way the Web, SaaS, cloud, and online apps are changing the way we work, iWorkers and consumers will benefit from more intuitive user interfaces, fast support for complex online computing tasks, and strong security to protect content. We can already see new use cases driving design: the “social networking” browser Flock from Mozilla is intended to keep users in tune with friends and their activities. So in this way, the browser market of the future can be anyone’s to own.