Intelligent Enterprise

BI for the Masses is overused marketing-speak meant to suggest that Vendor X's break-out Product Y is going to enable/deliver business intelligence beyond the 15%-20% of knowledge workers who currently do BI. (I got that estimate from a chat with industry veteran Dave Wells, who says the figure becomes 40% if you include Excel.) Well, I have my own notion of BI for the Masses, and it is NOT:

• Some slick, supposedly easier-to-use dashboard
• Reports routed to mobile devices.
• Excel, no matter how many new capabilities Microsoft and third parties stuff in there.

Enterprises are facing something of a recruitment dilemma at the moment; one HR professional at a major healthcare firm told me this week that enterprise content management (ECM)-skilled applicants are looking for approximately 40% more in base pay than their peers with a background in CRM or ERP. This healthcare firm simply doesn't have budget to make the required hires, and that is not an uncommon situation.

Truth is, ECM professionals have been in short supply for a long time -- and even mediocre people can demand and receive decent money in this sector. This of course is a real challenge for employers.

It's been a long, slow process, but I am pleased to say BI Scorecard has begun adding open source BI to its product evaluations! I actually blogged on this topic a few weeks ago, when Pentaho announced the acquisition of Lucid Era OLAP viewing technology, but editor Doug Henschen wanted more details and conclusions (demanding, isn't he?!) that I hadn't yet formulated.

I've been collaborating with open source and BI experts Jos van Dongen and Mark Madsen in this process. Jos is the founder of Tholis Consulting in the Netherlands and co-author of the recently published book Pentaho Solutions. Mark is the founder of Third Nature and a fellow instructor at TDWI.

The (excellent) Enterprise 2.0 Conference concluded last week in San Francisco. Here are some thoughts on several of the key issues bandied about, including ROI, adoption, usability, SharePoint, and the evolving industry.

My first observation is that the conference vibe was much more practical, and much less like a religious revival meeting than previous Enterprise 2.0 events. Some gurus complained about a lack of passion and energy, but I think Andrew McAfee set a great tone in his keynote when he exhorted the audience to replace liberation theology with more realistic goals.

Today Informatica released version 9 of its flagship data integration suite, which it calls as the "single most important release" in its history. Informatica 9 undoubtedly packs quite a punch, yet I'm not satisfied.

First, let us give Informatica its due credit. To quote the company, Informatica 9 "uniquely delivers a comprehensive platform by combining products in six categories: enterprise data integration, data quality, B2B data exchange, application information lifecycle management, complex event processing and cloud computing data integration," and can be deployed "on-premise or in the internet cloud."

At last week's Business Rules Forum, I attended James Taylor's keynote on the role of decision management in agile, smarter systems. Much of this is based on the book he co-authored with Neil Raden, Smart (Enough) Systems, which I reviewed shortly after its release.

Our systems need to be smarter because we live in a time of constant, rapid change -- regulations change; competition changes due to globalization; business models and methods change -- and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It's not enough to be a smarter organization, however: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today, the need to respond in real time, and the complexity of the network of systems by which products and services are delivered to customers.

A startup called SnapLogic is poised to challenge incumbent Informatica with an approach that seems to combine data integration -- Informatica's forté -- with online app stores (think Apple). Things are poised to get interesting.

The idea behind the SnapStore, now thrown open for a 100-day beta test by SnapLogic, is similar to the Apple application store: developers can load their applications on a storefront hosted by SnapLogic; when a sale is made, they receive 70% of the price while SnapLogic retains 30%. The difference is that these applications – called Snapps – are in fact data integration (i.e. ETL) components such as connectors, transformations and pipelines (i.e. programs). These components will all need to use the DataFlow API ("SnAPI"); in turn, this ensures that components can be build on top of, and together with, each other. But does this imply vendor lock-in? Nope. SnapLogic Chairman/CEO Gaurav Dhillon tells me (via email) developers are free to write the components in a popular Web language like Java or Python and then isolate the SnAPI dependencies. In many cases, existing libraries can easily be wrapped with a SnAPI wrapper.

I'm just back from sunny, warm Florida, venue for TDWI's conference. The brightest spot from this conference is that it was one of the best attended of the year. I hope it's a sign of recovery, at least in the BI world!

I had the honor of delivering the keynote on Monday, with new findings on secrets to successful BI (details to follow next week), but I first wanted share some insights from my "Cool BI" course.

The Business Rules Forum has started here in Las Vegas, and I'm here all week giving a presentation in the BPM track, facilitating a workshop and sitting on a panel. James Taylor and Eric Charpentier are also here presenting and blogging, with a focus more purely on rules and decision management; you will want to check out their blogs as well since we'll likely all be at different sessions. I'm really impressed with what this conference has grown into: attendance is fairly low, as it has been at every conference that I've attended this year due to the economy, but there is a great roster of speakers and five concurrent tracks of breakout sessions including the new BPM track. As I've been blogging about for a while (as has James), process and rules belong together; this conference is the opportunity to learn about both as well as their overlap.

You heard about Microsoft's Kilimanjaro and Madison projects last year, but these code names are going away now that the company is getting closer to releasing new versions of Microsoft SQL Server. Microsoft announced today that a community technical preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available this month that will include in-memory analysis capabilities. It also announced what will be called the Parallel Data Warehouse edition of SQL Server, which is set to debut in the first half of next year. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that IBM will be a hardware partner on Microsoft's Fast Track Data Warehouse reference configurations and the coming data warehouse edition.

First let's detail the news everyone expected. The "November CTP," as it's called, will let people try out two new in-memory analysis capabilities:

The Los Angeles City Council voted 12 to 0 last week to outsource its e-mail system to Google. The largest city in the country will make the cloud a home for its enterprise e-mail with a $7.2-million contract that will move all 30,000 city employees to Google. This might be the most significant win to-date for SaaS, a win that could drive others to cloud computing.

L.A. mediated security risks by placing a clause in the contract that requires Google to compensate the city in the event that the Google system is breached and city data exposed or stolen. That is something that every major SaaS contract should include, if you ask me. Also, this is not the free Gmail everyone knows. This is an enterprise version of their cloud-delivered software that comes without the ads, and with technical support.

I recently hosted a panel for ARMA that discussed compliance and records management issues related to Cloud Computing. It proved to be one of the most thought-provoking sessions I have been involved in for a long time. What became abundantly clear very early on was that records managers and compliance officers really need to get their head around cloud computing, and fast.

In the session we spent some time explaining that for every vendor out there that claims to have a cloud solution, only one in ten really has. That "cloud" relates to a virtualized world utilizing the Internet as a network -- whereas hosted and SaaS options (the nine out of ten) almost always have a specific data center location that they operate from.

Last May I complained that the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release announced at Sapphire wasn't everything I expected from the big, splashy product launch. As of November, however, the missing ingredients -- namely the combination of system-agnostic data integration and acceleration -- will finally be in place along with interface improvements and new hardware partnerships. Here's the scoop on the second wave on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer announced this week.