Organisations have faced significant challenges when implementing enterprise-wide business intelligence environments. Those that have succeeded are now setting their sights on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) to improve corporate decision making and governance. At the same time Integrated Portfolio Management (IPM) is on the rise as the defacto standard for governing project and asset investment. The reality is that IPM is not offered by business intelligence vendors, but has emerged instead from IT management vendors in response to investment governance issues around ICT project, asset, and service management. As the need for project, asset and service governance bleeds out of the ICT area into mainstream business units, firms will be faced with two very similar solutions. In the absence of peripheral planning by both buyers and sellers of these technology solutions, early adopters of EPM and IPM will miss initial alignment opportunities to establish a single corporate decision making environment.

IT Management is a growth market showing signs of increasing user demand. Players of all sizes and specialisations have emerged from both ends of the ICT spectrum. Everyone from large independent software vendors such as IBM and CA; through to hardware vendors such as HP are trying to tackle the management complexity problem their own products have brought about. Symantec's announcement of the Altiris acquisition represents the first significant move by a security vendor into the IT management market. The announcement comes at a time when pressure is mounting on Symantec, McAfee, Sophos and Trend Micro as their traditional consumer security market continues to mature; a fact brought home by the release of Vista. A move into the IT management space is not only necessary for security vendors, but welcomed. Driven by the need for IT management solutions to incorporate aspects of security such as identity and access management, offerings from vendors with a strong history of security will be a better match for future corporate user requirements. It is the corporate market that will ultimately determine the survival of companies like McAfee and Symantec as demand in consumer security is eroded by commodity offerings within the operating system.

Longhaus interviewed a cross-section of Australian ASP and SaaS providers including the following technology companies: Web Central, Emantra, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, IBM and SAP. Amongst all respondents the message was clear; "We have SaaS offerings in production and will expand." Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) may not simply be a rebranding of the familiar hosted Application Service Provider (ASP) model. In fact, the ASP market has bifurcated into companies that offer SaaS, and traditional ASPs that function as resellers for large software vendors such as IBM and Microsoft who themselves are pursuing direct subscription-based hosted application models. While this divergence will initially provide a boost to the local ASP market by maturing the utility nature of IT procurement for SMBs, subtle differences in the business models of direct- and indirect-SaaS will also deliver unseen challenges and potential benefits for "early adopters" to this new model across the Enterprise and ISV markets.

With the recent release of the SoftwareAP.net initiative in conjunction with Intel, Red Herring, Group Intelligence, and Asia Venture Capital Journal, Microsoft is aiming to take the lead in incubating emerging independent software vendors (ISVs) across Asia Pacific. Previous .Net initiatives, such as Victoria.net, have offered application developers training and a market for the commercial purchase of their technologies. In contrast this latest incarnation offers advice and partnering with VC's and regional governments. As Asia Pacific continues to develop as a service dominated market, Longhaus undertook to evaluate this latest effort towards the development of a local software economy. The conclusion? A market of global incubators is emerging each striving to establish mind-share and opportunity akin to the speculative nature of resource mining. This trend recognises the future value of software solutions set to underpin a new breed of foreign policy style investments by the worlds' largest software companies. For ISVs the challenge will be in signing the right vendor treaties to maximise their access to early stage funding from both the venture capitalists and governments.

The social computing revolution has proven what every major organisation has known for years; information is an important currency. While the sorts of information that social computing has brought to the enterprise front line have always existed - views, opinions, desires and needs - before now it has been undervalued or difficult to tap. When uniquely harnessed, like the power of the atom, this sort of social information can make the seemingly insignificant artefact a most powerful and valuable asset that collective groups will pay dearly to own and consume. Corporate social computing seeks to harness the power of this new currency, transpose it into organisational culture, and infuse partner networks, and customer groups. The aim - to capture the knowledge of the corporate network and thereby deliver information-based competitive advantage to major companies. In 2007 major information technology vendors such as IBM believe that they have developed the technology tools to split the information atom. Those companies that use it, they say, will devastate competitors where they stand. Best of all, they say we can all own one.