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Ingres and Alfresco Offer an ECM 'Appliance'

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, February 27, 2009
3:22 PM

This week Alfresco, together with Ingres, announced the release of an ECM "appliance."

Well, one thing we can say for sure is that Alfresco is never out of the trade press, and always seem to have something interesting to announce to the world. Overall that's a good thing as innovation can sometimes be in short supply. It's nice to see somebody bucking the trend. However, this particular announcement left me a bit befuddled. Mainly because it is not really an appliance as such, rather it's a software bundling of sorts.

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Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, February 26, 2009
2:02 PM

This week has seen not one, not two, but three fairly significant data-warehouse-related product announcements at this week' TDWI event in Las Vegas. That's a testament to the pace of innovation in data warehousing and to the insatiable demand for better, faster, cheaper ways of crunching more numbers.

The first of this week's announcements came from Microsoft with its release of its Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architectures. These preconfigured, SQL Server-ready 4-terabyte to 32-terabyte server-and-storage bundles are akin to Oracle's Optimized Warehouses and IBM's Balanced Configuration Units. But in Microsoft's case they're also billed as a stepping stone to Microsoft's Project Madison release, which will take SQL Server into the hundreds of terabytes with massively parallel processing (MPP) and scale-out architecture.

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
1:04 PM

InformationWeek's Charles Babcock writes about the upsides in cloud computing that many of the analyst firms see coming in this article.

Indeed, cloud computing represents 25% of the net new growth in IT spending, versus spending for on-premises IT, the article goes on to say. Just SaaS by itself is projected to nearly double from $9 billion to $17 billion.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
7:56 AM

I have been following the recent implosion and regeneration of text-analytics, document-management, and Sharepoint services provider Infonic. The company recently went into administration in the United Kingdom due to insolvency. (I reported on the impending train wreck last month.) Infonic was reconstituted under new-old ownership of, reportedly, a couple of its executives. Many (former) shareholders are upset. I feel like a voyeur because this imbroglio affects Infonic subsidiary Lexalytics, which doesn't deserve the taint of guilt by association. I've concluded that the story bears exploring and that Lexalytics, given what I know of its products and management, should come out fine.

The Company X that I wrote about last month was Lexalytics. It should have been, directly, Infonic, given that Infonic is and was the troubled partner in the merger of the two companies, which was announced last summer. The merger terms called for Infonic to own "between 70% and 75% of the issued share capital of the Vehicle (Infonic's percentage being dependent on certain conditions)." I critiqued the valuation of the deal in a July blog article.

Posted by Curt Monash
Monday, February 23, 2009
3:31 PM

Stuart Frost of Microsoft (nee' DATAllegro) checked in, with Microsoft's TDWI-timed announcements. The news part was something called "SQL Server Fast Track," which is the Microsoft SQL Server equivalent to Oracle's "recommended configurations" or IBM's "BCUs." SQL Server Fast Track is further being portrayed as an incremental step toward Madison, Microsoft's future high-end data warehousing offering.

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The Answer to Pervasive BI: the Fed

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, February 20, 2009
9:31 AM


"Mainstream BI," "pervasive BI" and "BI for the masses" have been the rallying cry for BI vendors for nearly a decade now. Some thought Microsoft could do it with an Excel interface. Others think Google will be part of the answer. I am looking to the Fed.

No, it's not that I am on the bandwagon for the stimulus being the answer to all the world's woes. However, when President Obama first mentioned a website (recovery.gov) as a way of ensuring full disclosure for stimulus spending, I got as excited as anyone can amid this economic crisis.


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Making Simulation Useful

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, February 19, 2009
8:52 AM


Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" -- one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick off the Gartner checklist but that don't do anything useful. Since then the situation has not improved to any great degree. This is too bad, because, as Keith suggests, simulation can be of great value in projecting the expected performance improvement from a process change before committing the resources needed to make that change.

But it would be better to say it could be of great value, if the tools were any good. I recently did a small consulting project for a BPMS vendor on what was good and not so good about their product. They really hyped their simulation tool, but I had to tell them it was, in my opinion, mostly useless, because it did not distinguish between the active time of a process activity, which consumes the assigned resource, and wait time (sometimes called lag time), which does not. It considered the total time to be active time.



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Slicing Up The BI Market

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
11:30 AM


Analyst Lyndsay Wise recently published a useful BI demand-side analysis, Redefining the Mid-Market and Its Business Intelligence Requirements. Her thesis is that "small and mid-sized organizations seem to get the short end of the stick when it comes to their software needs" based on IT infrastructure she sees as needed to support BI and related technology. Yet I wonder if segmenting BI-user enterprises by gross revenue is the best way to look at the BI demand-side market. Let's consider other, more refined approaches.


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Berkeley Talks Cloud: Should We Listen?

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
9:04 AM


The Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at The University of California at Berkeley has just published "A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing." The report has 11 authors, includes good information and is a clear attempt to solidify the emerging cloud computing market. When you do a report like this, you first need to put forth your definition of cloud computing:

"Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds."


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Data Validation Can't Be Overlooked

Posted by Dave Stodder
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
7:26 AM


Bad data problems can grind business intelligence or data warehouse systems to a halt - or at least they should, because the alternative is inflicting upon users incorrect or inconsistent information. Adding urgency is concern today about transparency, which is sure to get even more intense as government and other regulatory bodies attempt to correct defects in financial systems and processes. Thus, it is not a bad time for organizations to review their procedures and technology options for data quality, profiling and validation.


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Microsoft Details (FAST) Search Strategy

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Monday, February 16, 2009
8:23 AM


At Microsoft's FASTForward event in Las Vegas last week, Kirk Koenigsbauer outlined Microsoft's enterprise search vision and roadmap. These days, no one is making a lot of $1.2B technology acquisitions, but at last year's conference, the FAST acquisition was in progress; now they've had a year to work out where they're going with it.

Microsoft is keeping a significant engineering team focused on enterprise search, as well as a global sales and support organization. They've doubled the number of partners, and there's been 100,000 downloads of Search Server Express, the free, low-end enterprise search product. Koenigsbauer's point was that they're committed to the enterprise search market, and he stated that search is central to Microsoft's overall strategy of "creating experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of internet services across a world of devices."


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Picking the Right Supplier in a Recession

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, February 13, 2009
9:19 AM


"Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" -- so the saying goes. And in tough times there is, without a shadow of a doubt, a tendency for procurement and IT buyers in general to lean heavily toward very large (or incumbent) vendors, on the assumption that they represent a lower risk. But consider the following examples based on real vendors CMS Watch covers in its evaluation services:


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How Sweet is SAP Business Suite 7?

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, February 12, 2009
9:08 AM


Just in time for Valentine's Day and your C-Suite of CEO, CFO, COO and CIO budget review, SAP has announced SAP Business Suite 7, which is the latest version of the company's on-premise enterprise-level application suite. This application suite, which encompasses CRM, ERP, PLM, SCM and Supplier Relationship Management, is now brought out in a uniform product release that include everything from a newer version of their SAP NetWeaver application and integration platform and user interface capabilities in their applications that can support their vertical industries and demands of line of business. Now SAP has worked for many years to bring this major version to market but of course the economic environment and difficult time by companies using SAP has complicated the usual opportunity for organizations to upgrade. There are many business technology priorities for 2009 that have to be reconciled with the examination of SAP Business Suite 7 as a purchase this year and next. At the same time SAP is also trying to advance separately new solutions for priorities in business like enterprise performance management and for finance, risk management, and governance, risk and compliance with BI and information management that are also key priorities for many organizations using SAP today.


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Interoperability is Key in the Cloud

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
10:28 AM


I spoke at the Open Group's Cloud Computing Summit last week in San Diego, a conference that focuses on where cloud computing meets enterprise architecture. Presenters from Amazon, Cisco, HP, IBM, and a few other vendors spoke one right after the other, and it was interesting to hear how cloud providers are positioning cloud computing.

The big push right now is around interoperability among cloud providers, or the notion of cloud vendors offering built-in communications -- as well as application and data portability -- among suppliers. Core to this concept was a buzzword I've been hearing the last few months, and many times at the event: Intercloud.


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Semantic Web: Snake Oil or Balm for What Ails Us?

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
2:56 PM


This blog is in response to Seth Grimes' recent post "Semantic Web Snake Oil."

Our Business Intelligence industry is held back by a chronic lack of techniques to unify information. I saw in semantic Web technology a means to address that. I don't know if the Semantic Web will ever happen. I watch it very closely and report when I find something that looks like it might work. It's sort of a lonely outpost. I do know that ontologies appear to be a superior way for representing information, sharing it, reasoning from it and avoiding lots of duplication of effort. I call this making the data smarter so the applications can be dumber.


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Analytics' Role in a Frightening Economy

Posted by Curt Monash
Monday, February 9, 2009
2:41 PM


I chatted the other day with an executive on the general business side (as opposed to the trading operation) of a household-name brokerage firm, one that's in no immediate financial peril. It seems their #1 analytic-technology priority right now is changing planning from an annual to a monthly cycle.* That's a smart idea. While it's especially important in their business, larger enterprises of all kinds should consider following suiy.

*By the way, they seem to want use Applix technology, now owned by IBM/Cognos, to do it, more for the planning tools than for the cool in-memory OLAP engine itself. Your mileage may vary.


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IBM-Cognos One Year Later

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, February 6, 2009
12:47 PM


It was one year ago that IBM completed its acquisition of Cognos, and Big Blue is making it known that it's happy with the results. Cognos is now one of four parts of its "Information On Demand" strategy, and IBM says revenue growth for the business in 2008 was a healthy 18%. I wanted to know how much of that growth was organic, versus fueled by IBM's acquisitions, so I interviewed two top executives. I didn't get any facts breaking out those numbers, but I did hear a few interesting tidbits.

The four segments of the Information Management business are Data Management (databases), Enterprise Content Management, InfoSphere (information integration), and Business Intelligence and Performance Management. This vast portfolio is chocked full of bits, pieces and huge chunks acquired from independents including Informix, FileNet, Ascential, DWL, Trigo and, of course, Cognos. Dissecting the performance must be hard even for IBM's bean counters, but I thought it might be easier to looking at a discreet, recently added chunk like Cognos. Unfortuntely, Tom Inman, Vice President of IOD Acceleration (how's that for a title?), just wouldn't go there.


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The Case Against Flex-Based App UIs

Posted by Tony Byrne
Thursday, February 5, 2009
2:15 PM


We're starting to see more vendors coming out with Flex-based user interfaces, sometimes extending them as full-blown desktop applications using the AIR runtime. For example, Documentum's D6 Web Publisher comes with a standalone Flex interface for certain tasks.

To me, turning to Flex for a content management interface is a cop-out. It creates nice demoware for the vendor, but long-term problems for you. I can see why Flex is alluring for vendors: maintaining consistent, cross-browser compatibility (especially with AJAX) is hard and expensive. But why does that mean that you the customer must give up the simplicity and supportability of a native browser-based interface?


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TIBCO's New Appliance Competes With IBM's

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
5:04 PM


As explained in this story, TIBCO today made a splashy announcement about its first-ever hardware offering, the TIBCO Messaging Appliance P-7500. Well detailed are all the important facts about this appliance-based implementation of TIBCO's venerable Rendezvous messaging software: 10 times higher message volume capacity, a 50-percent reduction in message latency, and better predictability than message bus deployments on general-purpose hardware. What's more, the 4U box will bring data centers comparable message processing capacity with one tenth the physical footprint and one tenth the power consumption of conventional deployments (and even better if you're replacing really old servers).

What's missing from the story is competitive context. To wit, TIBCO's biggest competitor, IBM, entered the appliance-based message bus market way back in 2006. But that's not to say that TIBCO doesn't have something to crow about – at least for now.


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Semantic Web Snake Oil

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
12:49 PM


The Gospel of Matthew says, "by their fruits ye shall know them." Judging by their work, some of the biggest Semantic Web proponents are snake-oil salesmen. What else are we to conclude when academics and industry figures who fervently boost the Semantic Web can't be bothered — or are unable — to publish their own Web materials with semantic mark-up? The day they get their own acts together, that's the day the Semantic Web will emerge as more than just a questionable, always-just-over-the-horizon panacea for whatever ails Web users, as more than a justification for academic conference junketing, to solve real-world information findability problems. Who knows when we'll see that day, which is why, when it comes to semantics, my bet is (and has long been) on analytics.


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Private Cloud Technology Doesn't Exist

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
1:02 PM


If you think that private clouds are just doing public cloud-like things within the data center, you're dead wrong. As the hype builds up around private clouds, the approaches to building these yet-to-be-defined virtualized systems are really left up to who's building them. There is no one approach, nor is there a killer technology in this space as of yet.

Let's take a look at a few major reasons why we'll build private clouds. First, we love to control things and we can't directly control the existing public cloud providers. Second, we may have some special security and legal issues that prevents us from placing our information outside of our firewall. Finally, we can't sell all our existing hardware and software on Craig's List, so we might as well figure out something to do with it.


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Microsoft and IBM Love Their Spots

Posted by Dave Stodder
Monday, February 2, 2009
12:52 PM


Vendors, like leopards, feel most comfortable in their own skin – warts, spots and all. Recent developments with IBM and Microsoft prove this adage. Despite the economy, both have enormous resources to avoid existential crises; in fact, a bigger concern could be that their employees are too insulated from reality. The layoffs each announced recently were comparatively minor, leading some analysts to view them more as "wake up calls" to their employees. Their enduring spots, though, have become apparent in how they are adjusting products and services.


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