Application Landscaping

I’ve been tracking the market response to our recent MindManager Accelerator for Salesforce product launch at Demo this year. One of particular interest is Stewart McKie’s (Ventana Research) Application Landscaping – Enterprise Applications Have a New Visual Front-end article.

"It’s easy to see how this application landscaping paradigm could be applied to CRM, project systems and functional domains within an ERP system such as inventory management and procurement. Ventana Research believes this kind of visual landscaping of existing enterprise data has a big future ahead of it. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would not prefer to navigate data through this kind of visual landscape rather than through layers of hierarchal menus. Ventana Research recommends organizations already leveraging mindmapping consider Salesforce.com for their next sales automation project and that existing Salesforce.com users investigate this powerful and compelling new way to leverage further ROI from their application. ERP vendors looking for a way to jazz up their applications and deliver real value to their customers may want to look at Mindmapping as their next front-end"

In summarizing Stewart also says:

"Ventana Research believes that content and context visualization is an important way for businesses to extract higher ROI from existing enterprise applications. But there are obstacles to overcome when dealing with content and context visualization including identifying an appropriate visualization paradigm and automating the process of visualizing data sourced from existing enterprise applications. MindJet MindManager’s new ability to landscape sales data from the popular Salesforce.com application (an online sales force automation solution) may be the first of a whole new kind of visual enterprise application front-end."

Overall this synopsis is very synergistic with IDC’s views in their Enterprise Workplace: How It Will Change the Way We Work report.

"The convergence between collaborative applications, content management, and retrieval software as well as enterprise portals and business process management capabilities is a step toward realization of the enterprise workplace. With new strides in interoperability standards, the software industry is moving closer to delivering new business value to corporate customers in a unified way, rather than in a multitude of disjointed applications."
Brian McDonough, research manager, Enterprise Portal Software and Packaged Composite Applications

Chris Holmes, Vice President of Business Development