"aha" moment

Yesterday’s post about MyWorkLight and unlocking enterprise content via RSS generated a great deal of interest. A couple of the emails I received made me take a step back and look at the Latigent product offering with a fresh set of goggles.

As I’ve mentioned before, BlueVue has an integrated RSS Reader in it, not a very good one, but its functional. To be completely honest, it’s actually just more of a way to stick an XSLT on top of an RSS feed’s XML. For obvious reasons we never emphasized this as a core part of our suite.

However about a year ago, at a customer’s request, we stuffed in the ability for our scheduled reports to be syndicated as RSS feeds. No one ever really figured out anything clever to do with this feature (even the customer) because most of the world still doesn’t understand what to do with RSS.

So fast forward to today and let me paint a new picture for you. BlueVue is a Business Intelligence Suite. Which by definition means we consolidate and normalize data from across the enterprise; then push that out to consumers as customized reports, scorecards and dashboards. As I mentioned, these reports can be scheduled to either update dashboards, email HTML, or update an RSS feed.

“Business Intelligence is no longer just data warehouses, reporting, analytics and dashboards; it’s the art of harvesting information from a mass array of sources and distributing what’s relevant to the right people at the right time and in a way that’s tailored to each consumer”

– Chris Crosby,
President/CEO Latigent International

This is a quote from the press release we did in December 2005 when BlueVue II was first released. However, the full magnitude of that vision didn’t hit me until about 1:00 PM yesterday afternoon… This was one of those “aha” moments for me.

All a customer would need to do is take those RSS feeds and plug them into a real Enterprise RSS tool and… wallah! the power of business Intelligence and RSS converge.

Forget “Web 2.0″, we’ve just introduced the next generation of Enterprise Information Distribution. So 18 months from now when the industry analysts and pundits catch-up remember you read it here first…

Ironically enough, the entire time I’ve been ranting about enterprise content needing to be available via RSS it was right under my nose in my own product. Talk about a giant smack to the forehead… doh!

-Chris