Forrester Research rates Papyrus a ‘Strong Performer’!

I this post I want to comment a bit more on ‘The Forrester Wave – Document Output for Customer Communications Management’.

Overall, Analysts Sheri McLeish and Craig Le Clair set a fairly high goal to analyze the current market offering in document output management. Only vendors with enterprise class functionality in interactive, on-demand and structured document creation were analysed. The ISIS Papyrus Platform was positioned as a strong performer in the same league as all the large vendors. No overall leader emerged.

“ISIS Papyrus by far owns the broadest vision for DOCCM in the industry,” stated The Forrester Wave™: Document Output For Customer Communications Management (DOCCM), Q2 2009. Forrester defines DOCCM as software used to compose, format, personalize and distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications and improve the customer experience.

The ISIS Papyrus Platform v7 was reviewed in The Forrester WaveTM as follows: “ISIS scored well as a Strong Performer across all segments and as a well-balanced product with enterprise potential. ISIS Papyrus has the broadest and most unique vision for DOCCM in the industry, supporting ECM, CRM, analytics, event processing, and BPM. It has a modular and easy-to-configure system based on patented technology that combines with innovative post composition, output management, and production management.”

Forrester also reviewed reference installations and stated: “Customers are committed to the ISIS vision and feel passionate about this vendor.”

I am pretty satisfied with the report but it obviously is highly subjective how the functionality, strategy and market presence is rated. If you purchase the report you can change the weightings in the spreadsheet to find your own leader. What comes out of these reports has a lot to do with how clever the vendor positiones features in relationship to buzzwords and trends at the analyst firm. As Papyrus is always against the current trend we usually do not too well in such reports except when a more detailed comparison and an in-depth evalutaion of long term benefits is made. Butler Group did that excellently.

Also at Forrester marketshare and business size is still number one. Therefore a fairly weak strategy and little innovation goes a long way with a huge vendor. A smaller vendor who is very innovative is seen at risk because of that. So you cannot expect that small innovative businesses are at the forefront in terms of ratings, except if once again you hit one of the buzzwords that matches the analysts predictions! There is kind of a commonality between IT and stock market analysts and it is related to self-fulfilling prophecies.

I noticed a lack of understanding in what the various product functions actually are supposed to do. The true complexity of structured output functionality was underrated with fairly basic documents being considered as the norm. For interactive output Forrester mostly rated forms filling applications that in most cases are not enough for the most basic requirements. The document generation with such vendors is then always additional hardcoding in Java or similar. OnDemand generation is defined as document request from other application and widely underestimates the need for interactive text editing as well. Do not forget that you also need the ability to collate, bundle, sort and resend those documents either on paper and electronically and that this ability is neatly integrated with the Papyrus Platform.

What Forrester considered as being ‘Workflow’ or ‘process’ for document application cannot really be taken into account. Only the large BPM setups of either EMC or Oracle would come close to what customers are asking and getting today from a Papyrus Platform. What Papyrus EYE offers in terms of GUI not even Adobe FLEX can come close, but how would Forrester understand that? Therefore if you need highly user-customizable content, free-text editing, dynamic processes for creation and production, powerful color charts, image and graphics you better make sure that you do a proof of concept before signing a contract.

Analysis, Fact and Prediction

I am sitting here sipping my morning coffee in the Tradewinds Resort in St. Pete Beach, in Tampa Bay, Florida. I flew in to attend the XPLOR conference from snowed-in Boston last night where I had another fairly tiring meeting with Forrester Research.

By chance I had arrived when Forrester’s Andrew Bartels just held a presentation on the economic outlook. Following current industry estimates he believes that the IT industry will start to see growth again from the 4th quarter 2009. Well, could be. If nothing happens in between. I found more interesting that he proposes that we are at the beginning of new cycle of IT spending for applications that are ’smart‘. I am in principle agreement because we started that with our User-Trained Agent, but the term ’smart’ has been so oversold that it will be hard to use it that way. He then suggested that the ’smartness’ would have to be focused on certain market verticals and here my question was why? If the software was smart enough it would adapt to the needs of the vertical. He said, it would not be that smart. But after a little discussion I came to agree that some knowledge acquired by our User-Trained Agent could be valuable within the vertical – if the business is willing to share it. Another subject to be clarified in the near future …

I have said previously that I prefer Forrester over many other analysts because they are attentive. I have met with Craig LeClair and Sheri McLeish to discuss an upcoming report on customer communications or CCM, which is an expansion of the previous DOM Document Output Management field. Craig and Sheri are very knowledgable in this arena and it was still extremely difficult to get the functionality of the immense spectrum of Papyrus across. I was my second visit because during the first one hour session there was not enough time to discuss the Papyrus Interactive and On-Demand functions. It will be very interesting to see what comes of this resarch. As we are covered by Forrester for the first time (because I had not bothered before) my expectations are low. I cannot imagine that they will let us leapfrog the ‘established’ players on our first participation no matter how good we are.

A couple of discussion points are worth sharing with you. First, Craig did say that he considers the number of installs in the US as a measure of product quality. Well, if that turns out to be true then Forrester just slipped in my rating. Papyrus rating of Forrester is limited by a lower number of customers and customers won’t buy it because it is not well rated? A classic Catch22 and hen or egg paradox. So now you know why you will find the large players up front and it is not because they have the better product. When analysts consider market share and revenue, they rate advertizing budgets and sales tactics but not how good the product is for the user!

One point of poor rating was my sceptic stance towards the use of ’standard’ XML. Craig in my mind fell for the empty claim of vendors that native use of XSL-FO ensures higher quality and accuracy of processing than conversion to an internal format. Excuse me Craig, but there is no logic in that statement. According to Information Theory the functionality of a language such as XML is not intrinsic but defined in how the tag structure is interpreted and executed in the code. There is no difference between a conversion to internal formats or mapping one XML to another. As the meaning of XML tags is never fully defined (try to look up and understand XSL-FO descriptions!) the quality of interpretation is always limited. This is proven by the available open source XSL processors which are not compatible in function. Therefore all software vendors have their own special versions. Conditional processing, resource management, font support, multiple codepage support and external SVG charts make the use of XSL-FO a propietary affair. XML and ‘open standards’ is no more than buzzword marketing.

There is one acceptable XML benefit that is obvious, when you are transforming into a web document. But for any serious business application you have to create an electronic original (sometimes even digitally signed) that you need to present and transmit. It is a grave mistake to accept the limitations of XML for transactional business documents for this tiny benefit. Additionally the presentation of XSL into web browsers is not standardized either. An enterprise user only gets controllable document quality by presenting to either image, AFP or PDF. I will need cover the subject of XSL-FO on my Real World blog soon.

On top of that it would require twenty different XML structures to create a fully functional customer communications application. Where is all the other functionality outside of XSL-FO? Exactly, it is hardcoded. Can you take the complete application of one XSL-FO vendor to run on another?  NO! I rest my case.

Another point Craig made was that only Adobe gets the highest mark on PDF support. I see. Thank you for admitting that PDF is still a proprietary format. Why do we not get the highest mark for being best in supporting the Papyrus Repository?

Craig also took issue with our Papyrus EYE user interface, saying the FLEX is better because there are more developers for FLEX on the market. What? I do not get it. We do not need programmers with EYE but FLEX is better because there are more programmers for it? A FLEX programmer would be five times more productive to do your EYE application but when he leaves you are still in control of your final GUI that you can maintain with a non-programmer. If you have a hard-coded FLEX GUI and the hacker leaves … have fun with maintaining your frontend. I am now worrying that they will rate our repository poorly because it does not require Java programmers, when there are so many on the market. Right, so why are we outsourcing to India?

In these areas Forrester analysts have to step away from their technological shadow and past. George Colony, Forresters President, focuses on the other hand on a Business Architecture as the basis for tomorrows applications. Yup, that is the way to go and that’s what we supply with the UML2 models in our Papyrus WebRepository. I am bracing myself against the disappointment of Forrester rating us poorly because they can’t understand the power of our repository that are also valid for a seemingly simple communications application. But then all formatting vendors claim to have a repository, because they just call it that. AIA ITP has a directory with a couple of configuration files and a few tables with text and letter structures and they call that repository??? Get real, please. Seriously, I would expect that the ananlyst community sees through those marketing ploys and properly informs their clients about the true capabilities of products. Sofar, that is not happening.