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Data Warehouse Appliances? Me too!

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, February 29, 2008
8:34 PM

Just as every presidential candidate this cycle is the candidate of Change, it seems that all the DBMS vendors offer the preferred data-warehouse appliance solution. That's the message I heard from appliance panelists at today's TDWI Washington DC chapter meeting. For a couple of them it was a real stretch, which in one case wasn't a bad thing. The net take-away is that we are seeing Change in the DBMS world, even if for the politicians that word is still only a promise.

TDWI-DC's panel consisted of Doug Cardin from IBM, Victoria Eastwood from Infobright, Phil Francisco of Netezza, Foster Hinshaw of Dataupia, and Rita Sallam of Oracle. Now my definition of DW appliance is a packaging of processor, storage, operating system, and DBMS that is optimized for data warehousing. A scalability model is essential. And only one of the represented companies hits the mark: Netezza, with an asterisk for IBM.

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Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, February 29, 2008
9:07 AM

Philip Bierhoff, Systems Manager at Procter & Gamble, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference about strategies to increase user adoption as business intelligence goes mainstream [Editor's note: it's a topic very much at the center of Cindi Howson's recent feature on "Pervasive BI"]. P&G's Symphony project creates "decision cockpits": dashboards based on specific roles and corporate divisions, and including information ranging from traditional BI reports to documents to news.

The underlying data landscape has moved from their first iteration of a common data warehouse in the mid-'90s with regional servers plus ETL, storage and aggregation, where BI was driven by stored aggregations; to the current atomic data warehouse with a central server plus ETL and storage, where BI is driven by query rewrite — effectively, aggregation on the fly. They also have SAP generating data into SAP/BW; altogether, they have about 65 TB in the data warehouse and 50 TB in SAP/BW.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, February 28, 2008
5:58 PM

The subprime lending crisis offer fresh evidence that we're in the bear-skins-and-stone-knives era of understanding risk and making good decisions based on data. That's one of the key points I heard yesterday at an IBM Data Governance Council meeting in New York. As sophisticated as predictive models and enforcing business rules may seem, the technology is limited by a lack of best practices and standards and by the sheer scale and complexity of enterprises and financial markets. A first step toward avoiding such calamities, say Council members, is an integrated, overarching data governance program that addresses data security, data privacy and data quality so that risks can be better understood and outcomes anticipated.

"When the subprime loan scandal broke, a lot of people said, 'how could they not have known that they were sitting on billions of dollars of bad debt?'" says IBM's Steve Adler, who founded the 50-member Data Governance Council back in 2004. "The problem is that nobody really knows how to look at assets and liabilities and how decisions affect individual performance, the performance of divisions and the performance of companies. That level of institutional awareness about risk-based decision making does not exist."

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
3:39 PM

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference (ostensibly the user conference for FAST Search & Transfer) about the power of digital disorder, and how we need to unlearn what we think that we know about the best ways to organize information. He feels that we're approaching the end of the age of information — by which he means a focus on rigidly structured information — and a move away from being "informationalized," where we consider everything to be information even if they're just symbolic representations of reality.

He looked at how many projects, typically physical projects, require a much greater degree of control as they increase in size, but contrasts that with the web, which has growth only because of the lack of control. Control doesn't scale; we just thought that it did, and managed to scale with control by eliminating information.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
9:31 AM

The CMS Watch Web CMS Report, calls out MOSS 2007 as having "perhaps the highest fee structure in its class," — by which we mean among mid-market and departmental solutions — particularly when used as a Web CMS for a public site. Seems others agree.

Posted by Nelson King
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
2:20 PM

Some day we will stop talking about RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) and Web 2.0 apps and Web apps; they will all just be apps. The same goes for "desktop applications." They will just be apps too. In fact, I wish we had a simple name for all these flavors of apps right now. Thankfully, I can see the horizon of that "some day."

Adobe is not the only company working toward that time when we can build rich, interactive, and data-filled applications for the Web or the desktop with equal aplomb. However, making a big step of its own yesterday (January 25, 2008), Adobe released three products: Adobe Flex 3 Framework, Adobe Flex Builder 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0. A fourth related product, Adobe BlazeDS, was also recently announced. Collectively these products move Adobe and its band of developers further in the direction of the seamless Web/desktop application development system.

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
9:43 AM

If you ever spend time as an administrator or even an editor on Wikipedia, you find that your initial enthusiasm for the concept wanes pretty quickly. I thought Wikipedia was a forum for interested people to present their knowledge in an open and influence-free environment, to be vetted by like-minded, optimistic people. As it turns out, it became a dumping ground for every crackpot, agenda, vendetta and misinformation-broker on the planet, which in turn, spurned a dizzying collection of Wikipedia policies and a subculture of enforcers of the policies. Obviously, there was a need to enforce these policies to eliminate all but the most carefully crafted articles, free of conflict-of-interest, lies, libel, etc., but the net result is that discussion of policy far exceeds discussion of substance today.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, February 25, 2008
9:34 AM

The buzz in the local Indian trade magazines is about IBM recently grabbing a multi-year outsourcing deal from the Indian operations of Vodaphone, the global communications giant. Deals like these demonstrate that countries like India and China are more than merely the source of competition for US-based IT firms (and US-based consultants), they offer a solid opportunity for those willing to brave the geographical and culture gap.

As I pick my way through Indian news and newsmakers during my visit here, it's becoming abundantly clear that looking at India as a source of competition for the West is only half the story. Consider the following major outsourcing deals struck in 2007, all happening in India:

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, February 22, 2008
10:07 AM

This week's TDWI World Conference turned out to be one of the biggest, with more than 1,000 attendees and another 200 executives at the BI summit.

A highlight from the Executive Summit was hearing Michael Masciandaro, BI Director at Rohm and Haas, provide practical tips on where to start with BI. He presented all the lofty goals often discussed at this conference — great data quality, robust architecture — and advocated not to start there. Instead, start with something "embarrassingly small," with a subject area or application that has no competition.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Thursday, February 21, 2008
9:14 AM

If your vendor is a public company, listening to the quarterly earnings calls are a great way to get some insight into what to expect from the vendor in the short and long term -- something you won't hear from your account manager.

Take the recent Omniture Q4 Earnings Call.

To the investor community, Omniture portrays itself, (rightly so, I think) as a marketing machine — company that is poised to sell you on its growing product suite. Not just analytics, but behavioral targeting and search engine marketing management, as well as its Genesis integrations.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
2:47 PM

One of the more engaging presentations at this week's TDWI Executive Summit was a helpful session entitled "The Yin and Yang of Implementing Predictive Analytics," presented by Matt Schwartz of Corporate Express and John O'Carroll of Capital One Auto Finance. Schwartz was the Yin, presenting on the office supply company's 18-month entry-level foray into prediction. O'Carroll was the Yang, a seasoned developer of highly complex models around customer segmentation, marketing campaigns and lending risk.

Despite his focus on beginners, Schwartz engaged everyone, particularly the retailers and online marketers present, with a tutorial based on a Corporate Express market basket application.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
12:57 AM

The saying "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" is attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, and it's nicely illustrated in a couple of Intelligent Enterprise reality-check photos from this week's TDWI conference.

Check out the TDWI Image Gallery photos posted by Intelligent Enterprise Editor-in-Chief Doug Henschen. Executive Summit attendees used the "dots method" to identify Important BI Technologies and Biggest BI Challenges. You get simple histograms showing what's hot and what's not. And you get clear illustrations of "selection bias": not TDWI's fault, but an effect to keep in mind when you assess formal and informal research findings.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
9:37 AM

To develop effective business intelligence programs, lead with organization, not technology. That's the consensus advice from many of the speakers here at the TDWI World Conference and Executive Summit here in Las Vegas this week. I spent most of Monday at the Summit, a conference within the conference aimed at the higher-level executives, and I was most impressed with a kickoff presentation entitled "BI From the Top," by Tracy Austin, former CIO of Mandalay Resort Group and former VP of IT at Harrah's Entertainment, one of the most celebrated BI-driven enterprises in the world.

Her IT credentials notwithstanding, Austin said "BI is not implementing tools and it's not an IT initiative. IT does not have the empowerment to make end users turn information into strategic actions."

Speaking with the authority of someone who has learned from years of experience what works and what doesn't, Austin presented 10 principles for guiding "BI From the Top:"

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, February 15, 2008
8:40 AM

My last blog article relayed key points about e-discovery and potential knowledge-discovery (KDD) applications in the legal sector that were reinforced by my participation in the recent LegalTech conference. A LegalTech exhibitor I spoke to mentioned his company's discussions with IBM, so I dropped IBM text-technologies researcher Aaron Brown a note to learn his company's side of the story.

Aaron is program director, Content Discovery and Search, IBM Information Management Software. His thoughts on legal-sector KDD were very much in line with mine. He graciously gave me permission to share his response, which I'll post verbatim —

Posted by Nelson King
Thursday, February 14, 2008
4:55 PM

Companies that have been around a while have legacy software. Every new piece of software has to be considered in light of existing software, even if the latter is ultimately replaced or ignored. This is also true of companies that make software development products; all of the big ones have been around a while and have their own legacy software.

But what about new companies; can they really start from scratch? Specifically I'm thinking about a company like Nexaweb Technologies, whose flagship product, Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite, I recently reviewed for Intelligent Enterprise. Here's a company formed in 2000 that has bitten off a very large chunk of enterprise software development turf. They aim to make Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) fit for the enterprise.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
6:29 PM

What's now called "Business Objects, an SAP company" yesterday announced a major new BusinessObjects XI 3.0 platform, but I, for one, had zero advanced notice. Judging by the dearth of coverage until today, other journalists were in much the same position. And this is an announcement that clearly deserves a bit of time to digest!

What's in store in BusinessObjects XI 3.0? Only the integration of text mining and information management capabilities, the incorporation of third-party Web-based data sources and the addition of a search-based interface for exploring structured information. These developments represent the fruition of long-planned strategic directions for Business Objects and, indeed, the wider BI community.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
5:04 PM

"Discovery" is a legal process whereby parties to a lawsuit request and provide documents and information that may be pertinent in litigation. "Discovery" also describes an analytics goal that has nothing to do with the court system: extraction of useful information — data, facts, and rules, which together constitute knowledge — from databases and textual sources.

I had expected the December 2006 federal rules amendments on discovery of electronically stored information — "discovery" here in the legal sense — to open new vistas for application of knowledge-discovery technologies: data mining, machine learning, visualization, and the like. The reasoning is simple. Corporations must now retain vast volumes of electronic records including e-mail and information from enterprise operational systems. To comply with e-discovery mandates, they must be able to "produce" records in response to discovery processes, and that means metadata-management, classification, search, and similar systems.

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
9:27 AM

I figured we would see a few of these. As SaaS takes off, major software vendors who were slow in the SaaS uptake may find that others do it for them, whether or not they have agreements. Microsoft is first to toss a punch at their partner Fasthosts, whose new product, Office SaaS, is a bit too similar to Office Client, according to Microsoft.

From this article:

"Microsoft has said that the Internet service provider Fasthosts, which has started offering a subscription-based version of Microsoft Office 2007, is infringing on the software giant's license regulations — but Fasthosts has denied this claim."

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
9:12 AM

At last week's Gartner BPM Summit, Elise Olding moderated a panel on weaving BPM into the enterprise, with Eric Abecassis, Architecture and Integration Manager with Schlumberger, Jim Boots, Enterprise Architect at Chevron, and Kevin Morgan, Program Manager at Dolby.

Abecassis started with the process-related problems that they had at Schlumberger: processes had to be standardized in order to effectively manage growth and improve execution, reduce the administrative burden on the field people, and improve alignment between business and IT. Their approach was to focus on three main types of activities:

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
10:18 AM

In this article in CRMBuyer, "Compensating SaaS Sales: Turning Hunters Into Farmers," it's becoming clear that SaaS is not only changing the way we use software but also how vendors sell software.

"Things aren't the way they used to be in software sales departments. Traditionally, salespeople relied on hefty commission checks after landing big deals. Now, with the widespread adoption of SaaS products, vendors are adjusting their compensation models and salespeople are seeing smaller, but more regular, commission payouts."

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Monday, February 11, 2008
6:08 PM

Companies now have many options when it comes to the design and implementation of a data management strategy to support business intelligence initiatives. AberdeenGroup's hypothesis is that the predominant pressure driving companies to adopt new data management strategies for BI applications is the need to reduce time-to-information for end-users, but it's surveying end users to develop definitive answers…

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, February 11, 2008
8:22 AM

Harvard Business Review recently hosted a two-day conference in Miami called Think!Analytics (not to be confused with the firm with the same name sans the exclamation point) featuring Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris, co-authors of the current best-seller, Competing on Analytics. Some of you may remember that I was pretty tough on Tom when the article of the same name came out in the Harvard Business Review in January, 2006, but we've since mended our fences; so much so that I went to Miami to join the festivities and Tom has agreed to keynote the Enterprise Decision Summit in October which James Taylor and I are co-chairing.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, February 8, 2008
1:29 PM

Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas, Jay Simons, VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and geographies. They've also gathered information through their online BPM Lifecycle Assessment.

The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the next three years.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, February 7, 2008
9:44 AM

With IBM's acquisition of Cognos completed last week, the merged companies were quick to tout their joint product offerings and future plans at a press/analyst conference yesterday. Given IBM's role as both a data warehouse platform and a services power house, the acquisition clearly impacts existing partnerships in which IBM moves from partner to competitor. The question in this new landscape: who wins, who loses?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
5:57 AM

I'm here in Vegas for Gartner's 5th BPM Summit, and they're reporting about 1,000 attendees (though I'm not sure if that includes Gartner and vendors). For those of us who attend business process management events religiously, I'm hoping it's not a complete replay of September's BPM Summit in Orlando.

Janelle Hill gave us Gartner's big-picture view of BPM, which will be covered in detail in other sessions throughout the conference. Hill seems to be hitting her stride as Gartner's face of BPM since Jim Sinur left almost a year ago. She started with the now-familiar view of process improvement over the ages, from Deming and Taylorism through TQM, BPR, Six Sigma and a variety of other methodologies and tools since the 1920's. This has changed from a focus on scientific management, to computerized process flow, to package applications as best practice, to flexible and adaptive process.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
1:32 PM

Gartner late last week issued its 2008 Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms in which it placed five companies roughly on a par in the prized upper-right quadrant: Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle, SAS and Microsoft. As you'll see when you download the report, none of the top five seem to stand out; you could draw a straight line from SAS, on the "Completeness of Vision" axis, to Microsoft on the "Ability to Execute" axis and touch all five vendors.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
9:28 AM

I guess I could point to all of the press releases and blog posts, but there are thousands at this point and you already know what's going on. Indeed, as many expected, Microsoft is looking to purchase Yahoo for $44 billion, this to better compete with the pressure coming from the Google Juggernaut that's now removing some of the office automation business from Microsoft. Google is going to counter, for sure, and the bidding war could drive the price up — that is, if the government does not step in and stop the deal over antitrust concerns. You've got to love this business.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, February 4, 2008
10:02 AM

The signs are familiar and worrying: a US economy that cannot seem to rebound, job losses on the rise, and consumers getting increasingly jittery. Will US companies, in a desperate bid to cut costs, intensify their push to send work offshore? Not so fast.

As I land in India's economic capital Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) on a work and personal trip, headlines in The Economic Times — India's answer to The Wall Street Journal — present a contradictory picture about the opportunities for the Indian offshore industry. Here are some representative news items.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Saturday, February 2, 2008
3:38 PM

Curt Monash shares my disdain for PowerPoint: not the software per se but rather the rigid communication dysstyle (="dysfunctional style") it encourages. Seeming solutions such as pecha-kucha — "a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each" — are seductive. You pick up the pace and limit the text that can appear on a slide, which seem like pluses. Per Daniel H. Pink's description in Wired, you "say what you need to say... and then sit the hell down." On the other hand, you’re still locked in that rigid PowerPoint sequence. Just think of that stereotypical image of the American tourist abroad: If foreigners don't understand English, speak slower and louder and maybe they'll get it. It doesn't work of course. Similarly, faster, simpler presentations aren't necessarily better presentations.

The same principle applies to communicating analytical results.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Friday, February 1, 2008
3:41 PM

Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is certain to shake up the online advertising, Web 2.0 and open-source markets. Yahoo has been on the path to being a real player in the Web and open source world. They've released tons of code via their developer programs and pushed some really innovative services aimed at Web developers. Being absorbed into Microsoft could actually hurt the industry in these areas. I'd expect less open source support out of them for a start.

There's definitely going to be cost-cutting after the deal is done. There are some specific quotes from Microsoft's offer worth highlighting.