Intelligent Enterprise

Bashing Gartner's Magic Quadrants seems to be a popular industry pastime, but in truth, I kind of like the quadrants. My biggest gripe is in how the quadrants are used, not necessarily the quadrants themselves.

There are several positionings I could find fault with in the latest BI platforms Magic Quadrant (MQ). That both Microsoft's and Oracle's "ability to execute" is higher than IBM Cognos' and SAP BusinessObjects' would be two; I say that in terms of their BI-specific offerings, not their overall ability to execute. Vendors are very much at the mercy of the Magic Quadrants, when in reality, positioning in the MQ says little about how well a particular company or product will meet a customer's needs. And therein lies the problem.

Add "customer" to Jimi Hendrix' song title and you have a question central to last week's Clarabridge Customer Connections (C3) conference, Are You Customer Experienced?

Clarabridge is a leading text-analytics vendor, delivering voice of the customer and related business solutions. The C3 conference's Orlando-Disney venue lent itself to a bit of Goofy-ness, and CEO Sid Banerjee indeed riffed off the magical journey theme in his post-conference write-up. Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who titled his conference summation It's Time For Text Analytics, used a different magical kingdom, that of the Wizard of Oz, to illustrate a customer-experience voyage of discovery in his conference keynote, although a panel he later moderated wasn't immune to an intrusion of Disneyicity.

Sybase announced an asset purchase that amounts to a takeover of CEP (Complex Event Processing) vendor Aleri. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sybase already had technology under the hood from Aleri predecessor/acquiree Coral8, for financial services uses (notwithstanding that between Aleri Classic and Coral8, Aleri Classic was the one of the two more focused on financial services). Quick reactions include:

The best BI visualizations bring out essential information that might otherwise remain hidden in data. A Washington Post visualization of President Obama's proposed $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2011 does just that. The Post's viz tells a complete story: Budgets include both expenditures and revenues and this viz counter-balances the two. Contrast with other budget views, such as one that appeared in the February 1 New York Times, that focus solely on spending, telling only half the story, albeit with a much deeper level of detail. There's much to be learned from the Times example as well, in particular about visualizing change.

In late 2008, OASIS (OASIS Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards--the not-for-profit consortium that drives open standards) announced a committee that would standardize a Web services interface specification that would enable interoperability of enterprise content management (ECM) systems. EMC, IBM and Microsoft lead the way by developing the initial draft for the standard. Other ECM vendors, like Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and others, participated and provided comments on a draft standard. OASIS put the v1.0 standard out for public comment through the end of last year and received a flurry of feedback.

CMIS, the resulting standard, stands for Content Management Interoperability Services. The goal of CMIS is to make sure content repositories and solutions are able to interoperate by being independent of operating systems and architectures. It focuses on the basic content functions such as creating, reading, writing, deleting and searching for content across repositories.

Every year or two, I get back on my soapbox to say:

• Database and analytic technology, as they evolve, will pose tremendous danger to individual liberties.
  
• We in the industry who are creating this problem also have a duty to help fix it.
  
• Technological solutions alone won't suffice. Legal changes are needed.
  
• The core of the needed legal changes are tight restrictions on governmental use of data, because relying on restrictions about data acquisition and retention clearly won't suffice.

In a move that will send (pleasant) tremors in the world of data management, Informatica snapped up leading MDM vendor Siperian. I'm excited by this event, and here's why.

Informatica's acquisition of Siperian is far from unexpected. Not too long ago, I posed the following question: "What's stopping Informatica from acquiring an OEM partner like Siperian?" Others too would have had the same thought. Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi (indirectly) explains the delay in acquiring Siperian by stating that they are following a roadmap (read here for more). Well, ok, maybe. At this point, that's irrelevant.

So why is this great for Informatica and for customers and IT practitioners?

I want to respond to a few comments/suggestions I received about my recent Intelligent Enterprise story, Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search -- it also ran in InformationWeek -- regarding semantic-search definitions and examples.

My article gained hundreds of page views and a couple of dozen tweets, but there was only one suggestion of a semantic-search approach I'd missed, "real-time search with some sort of filtering," that from Jim Hendler, who is certainly an authority on semantics, more on which later. I'll start, however, by elaborating on points raised by NLP/semantics researcher Tom O'Hara in an e-mail message.

Among the various categories of content technologies that CMS Watch evaluates, Oracle has been very quiet over the past year. For the past two years, actually, Oracle has urged customers and partners to look forward to the "11g" series of upgrades across its various application sets. In certain cases, various 11g-labelled capabilities have been slipstreamed into existing versions, especially on the ECM and WCM side. But overall, the major 11g-branded upgrades have created enormous expectations among Oracle customers.

There was record attendance at MicroStrategy's annual conference in Las Vegas this week, with more than 1,500 customers and partners attending. While a conference in Las Vegas may have the perception of extravagance, in reality, the hotel and flight were the cheapest I can recall.

As is this vendor's tradition, the general session kicked off with a rock impersonator, this year, Gwen Stefani. The performance wasn't particularly memorable, in contrast to last year's Tina Turner ("we're simply the best…") or to the both daring and amusing Kinks' Lola in 2008 ("BI bake off…"). (Truly, if there were a YouTube clip of this rendition, I know BI teams around the world would be playing it at their selection kick offs.)

As I previously complained, last week wasn't a very convenient time for me to have briefings. So when Netezza emailed to say it would release its new entry-level Skimmer appliance this week, while I asked for and got a Friday afternoon briefing, I kept it quick and basic.

That said, highlights of my Netezza Skimmer briefing included:

Sentiment analysis is one of my favorite topics: one of the most challenging and one of the most interesting uses of text technologies. News and social media, e-mail, surveys -- the gamut of text sources -- are full of subjective information: opinion, attitudes, emotion, and mood, with a wide variety of current and possible business uses. Application areas include customer satisfaction and support, marketing, financial markets, media and publishing, and politics and policy: essentially any computing application sourced from human communications.

Sentiment analysis represents a huge opportunity and it presents technical and solution challenges. That's why I've created a new conference, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, slated for April 13 in New York.

I'll present the results of the latest Intelligent Enterprise business intelligence survey and Donald Farmer of Microsoft will surely talk about the new PowerPivot add-ins for in-memory analysis in Excel. That should be enough to attract more than a few registrants to this week's "BI Agenda for 2010" webinar. But there's more...

After several months of careful optimization, Oracle managed to pick the most inconvenient* day possible for me to get an Exadata update from Juan Loaiza. But the call itself was long and fascinating, with the two main takeaways being:

• Oracle thinks flash memory is the most important hardware technology of the decade, one that could lead to Oracle being "bumped off" if they don't get it right.

• Juan believes the "bulk" of Oracle's business will move over to Exadata-like technology over the next five to ten years. Numbers-wise, this seems to be based more on Exadata being a platform for consolidating an enterprise's many Oracle databases than it is on Exadata running a few Especially Big Honking Database management tasks.

At CMS Watch we frequently have to explain to people why we have separate research streams for WCM (Web Content Management) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management). The explanation is frequently a response to the question, "aren't they just the same thing?" The simple answer is no, they are not.

Last week, Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion for $49 Million. On the heels of last month's acquisition of Lombardi by IBM, I think it's safe to say this marks a real turning point in the market for BPMS. To me it is a disquieting one, as it suggests the failure of BPM's "business empowerment" promise to translate into sustainable revenue for the platform vendor. The transaction price here is kind of shocking, surely a sign of the shaky current economy, but the larger trend is also disturbing.

You would have to be living under a rock not to hear the news that China, and I'm talking the government, attempted to hack into several Gmail accounts of human rights activists. The sophisticated attack, in which the invading code actually covered its own tracks, has caused Google to rethink its relationship with China. This includes pulling out altogether.

The Google attacks from China are a bit different than past attacks in that it's pretty clear where they came from. Moreover, instead of attacking government organizations, the perpetrators chose to lay into a U.S. corporation. Thus, this is perhaps the first well-documented case of a government attacking a U.S. company, which is very scary.