SAIC/Forterra acquisition: what it means for the enterprise immersive software market
by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.
On February 1, 2010, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) announced that it had acquired the OLIVE product line from Forterra Systems. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SAIC had been working with Forterra on and off for the past six years and SAIC had been working with OLIVE internally for the past year and a half. Moving forward, the company plans to offer OLIVE solutions to customers, as well as to use it internally.
On February 4th, we spoke with executives at SAIC about the acquisition. Our takeaways are:
- SAIC’s industry focus for OLIVE will be government, energy, health, and other commercial markets. SAIC’s focus on these industries closely mirrors the industry focus Forterra had — so we don’t expect the OLIVE customer mix to change much in 2010. SAIC also says it will continue to work with channel partners with whom Forterra had relationships. Forterra had regional resellers in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as associations with companies like ACS Learning Services, Lockheed Martin, and Carahsoft.
- The primary internal and external use cases will be training and business activity rehearsal. SAIC has a long history in modeling and simulation, going back two decades. The company’s primary customer, the US government, has been putting increasing training emphasis on the interpersonal realm. OLIVE fills a gap in SAIC’s existing modeling and simulation offerings: strong support for interpersonal interaction. OLIVE gives SAIC a collaborative, multiuser 3D immersive environment. SAIC has already integrated OLIVE with systems like the US Army’s OneSAFTM (One Semi Automated Forces) simulation solution. The company is likely to integrate OLIVE with additional systems moving forward.
What it means for business decision makers
As we have detailed in the past here and here, the enterprise immersive software market is still emerging and 2010 will be a year of churn. We see the acquisition of Forterra Systems by SAIC as a positive step in the maturation of the market. While it is difficult for those who are personally involved, the industry will benefit from having a smaller number of stable, well-capitalized technology providers.
- OLIVE just gained momentum in government and military and has promise in health and energy. Now offered by SAIC, a Fortune 500 company, OLIVE has a better shot than ever of penetrating the government and military sectors. If SAIC chooses to fully develop market opportunities in the energy and health sectors, OLIVE will remain a formidable competitor to products like American Research Institute’s PowerU, Linden Lab’s Second Life Enterprise, Teleplace’s Teleplace, and ProtonMedia’s ProtoSphere
- As with any acquisition, change is inevitable. Given that the acquisition just closed this week, many open questions remain. Existing and prospective OLIVE customers should keep an eye out for changes to product pricing, packaging, and status (e.g., Meeting Labs was a new hosted offering from Forterra and its future is unclear), as well as SAIC’s relationships with Forterra’s channel partners (some of which compete directly with SAIC).
© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.
Video: ThinkBalm analyst Sam Driver’s guest appearance on Metanomics
by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.
On February 3, 2010, Sam Driver was a guest on the Metanomics show, hosted by Robert Bloomfield. Sam was invited onto the show to discuss social networking, immersive media and the importance of community in a digital world. A large focus of the interview was on the research reports ThinkBalm publishes — in particular our most recent report, The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide. Sam also discussed the ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which has a mission of advancing adoption of work-related use of the Immersive Internet — virtual worlds and campuses, virtual event platforms, immersive learning environments, and 3D collaboration tools. The ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which now has nearly 420 members, has evolved into a mix between a social network, collaborative laboratory and guild.
Here’s the video recording of Sam’s interview.
© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.
Images from ThinkBalm Innovation Community’s un-lecture no. 6
by Erica Driver.
On January, 29, 2010 we held a ThinkBalm Innovation Community event titled ”Un-Lecture no. 6.” An un-lecture is an event during which four ThinkBalm Innovation Community members deliver 10-minute presentations about an Immersive Internet project on which they have been working. These events are a terrific way for enterprise immersive software early adopters to learn about possibilities and good practices, and to network. For more insight into the un-lecture format, see the January 14, 2009 ThinkBalm Storytelling Series report, End Death-by-Lecture: Tours, Not Speeches.
Click here for more images from this event
We held Un-Lecture no. 6 in ThinkBalm’s Avaya web.alive environment, at thinkbalm.projectchainsaw.com. Our presenters were:
- Joe Rigby, market manager, MellaniuM Inc. While this un-lecture utilized just the basic meeting functionality of Avaya web.alive, the technology can be used to create graphically rich scenes and environments. Joe Rigby showed examples his organization has built, leveraging content created outside web.alive, and shared insights into what was involved.
- Ariella Furman, CEO and machinimatographer, ALM Productions. Ariella is starting to see corporate clients using machinima as an alternative to traditional film production. She took us through the steps of creating corporate movies in a virtual world, highlighting the ways machinima allows film makers to do things they can’t do in the physical world — like imitate complicated camera moves and create visual effects. Here is a link to a commercial ALM Productions created for There.com and here is a link to a short movie for IBM.
- Ann Cudworth, production designer and virtual world creator, CBS Television and principal and lead designer with VSETS. Ann shared her career experiences transitioning from traditional set design to virtual set design. You can see examples of her work at Alchemy Sims in Second Life.
- John Kinsella, VP with PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors). John is a vice president at PADI, where he is responsible for – among other things – Dive World, which is PADI’s Immersive Internet presence in Second Life. John told us about his current project, which ties Dive World to scuba diver education (PADI’s core mission). PADI has created an accurate and realistic simulation of a scuba diving decompression computer. Participants can use it to learn what to expect on an actual scuba dive. Here is a link to a video about this new PADI project.
To attend future ThinkBalm Innovation Community events, please join our group on LinkedIn.
Thanks to Chris Hardy of Avaya for these snapshots.
© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.
ThinkBalm publishes immersive software decision-making guide
by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.
Today ThinkBalm published The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide, a powerful tool for business decision makers selecting immersive technology for use in the workplace. To view or download a PDF version of this 29-page report, click this link or the image below.
Enterprise immersive software is a collection of collaboration, communication, and productivity tools unified via a 3D or pseudo-3D visual environment. In this computer-generated environment, one or more people engage in work activities like meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The software provides a shared, interactive, multichannel experience through presence awareness, voice chat, active speaker indication, text chat, and many other features, often including avatars.
The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present “if/then” scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The report offers guidance on how to: 1) ask core business questions to frame the discussion, 2) choose a research-and-demo, do-it-yourself, or combination approach, 3) identify requirements based on your use case, and 4) filter your options based on important limiters.
The following vendors are covered in this report:
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To develop this report, ThinkBalm analysts held structured briefings with nineteen enterprise immersive software vendors and conducted interviews with fifteen early adopters who were involved in the technology selection process. Some of the briefings took place directly in the vendors’ immersive environments. We combined our insights from these discussions with our hands-on experience using immersive software and our interactions with our clients and members of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community. The ThinkBalm Innovation Community currently numbers more than 400 Immersive Internet advocates, implementers, explorers, and technology marketers.
This research was made possible by sponsorship from Linden Lab, ProtonMedia, Teleplace, and Virtual Italian Parks.
© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.
Highlights from “Learning in 3D” book: steps to successful adoption
by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.
Karl Kapp, professor and consultant at Bloomsburg University, and Tony O’Driscoll, professor of the practice at Duke University, have a new book out titled Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration. ThinkBalm contributed an essay to Chapter 8, which is all about steps to successful enterprise adoption. We’d like to call out and comment on a few points from this chapter.
First: mainstream adoption is not a matter of if, but when. Kapp and O’Driscoll write, “There was a time when computers themselves were thought of as toys or novelties; now these devices are indispensable business and education tools. There was a time when the Internet was not a part of our daily lives. It’s hard to reach back and remember the time before these technologies became ubiquitous — when the same type of implementation and adoption concerns existed for those technologies [as for the Immersive Internet].” ThinkBalm’s prediction is that in three years’ time, adoption of immersive software in the workplace will have reached the early majority adoption phase. (See the November, 2008 ThinkBalm report, The Immersive Internet: Make Tactical Moves Today for Strategic Advantage Tomorrow). To be sure, the path to mainstream adoption is marked by barriers — but early adopters are finding springboards for overcoming hurdles. (See the September, 2009 ThinkBalm report, Crossing the Chasm, One Implementation at a Time.)
Second, Kapp and O’Driscoll offer great advice to early adopters in this chapter and we’d like to call out a couple of highlights:
- Focus on compatibility with existing technology and modes of work. In a discussion about how to make immersive technologies attractive to target stakeholders and users, Kapp and O’Driscoll say, “Positioning virtual immersive environments as a natural extension and convergence of existing technologies such as synchronous learning tools, video games, Web 2.0, and social networking — and not as a science-fiction-dream-come-to-life will go a long way toward the concept of compatibility.” Think of immersive software for meetings or learning and training as expansions of the worker’s toolkit. Immersive software will extend the reach of current investments with new features and functionality. One of the ways this will occur is through integration with existing communication and collaboration tools. (See the January 6, 2010 ThinkBalm blog post, “Immersive software for meetings will expand the information worker toolkit.”)
- Choose the right group of people to participate in a pilot. An immersive software pilot project is a test run during which people conduct real business activities in the environment and report feedback about their experiences to the project team. Kapp and O’Driscoll offer good advice about how to assemble the right pilot group. They recommend choosing a relatively small group; creating a mix of people who are comfortable with technology and those who are less comfortable; involving people from IT as well as legal and regulatory departments from the beginning; selecting people who are interested in the potential of virtual worlds; and focusing on people who will be willing to share their feedback with the project team.
This blog post is part of the Learning in 3D blog book tour. Book publisher Wiley is offering a 20% discount to blog book tour attendees. To buy the book and get your discount, click here and enter the code L3D1.
© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.
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