Posted by Seth Grimes Tuesday, March 31, 2009
6:03 PM
Open-source BI and I have come to a parting of ways. OS-BI capabilities, reliability, and support have matured. Commercial OS-BI vendors now compete with BI market leaders. That competition now appears to focus primarily on solutions and on the cost and community advantages open-source-reliant business models can (and do) offer enterprises of all sizes. In the end, for me as a technology analyst, OS-BI is simply boring. I will, however, take one last look, a snapshot of the state of the market, before I take my leave of the topic.
The SAP Insider conference is different from many of the BI conferences in that a media company, rather than the vendor, runs the event. I had last attended an SAP Insider conference shortly after the Business Objects acquisition was announced. Then and now, I noticed a stark contrast between the former Business Objects' conferences and these SAP Insider ones. I would have liked more enthusiasm and certainly less emphasis on legacy products.
Posted by Neil Raden Sunday, March 29, 2009
11:11 PM
A lot of bloggers are writing about SAS' newly launched marketing campaign called "business analytics," which positions business intelligence as a subservient tool. I was there in Washington, D.C., last week at the SAS Global Executive Forum when Jim Davis gave his much-talked-about, business-intelligence-is-dead, business-analytics-is-the-future presentation. "I don't believe (business intelligence is) where the future is; the future is in business analytics," he said. I thought at the time that it was a little silly.
Posted by Bruce Silver Friday, March 27, 2009
10:08 AM
BPMN 2.0 is almost here. If all goes as planned, it will be voted on by OMG members in June. Assuming it passes, that doesn't mean BPMN 2.0 is officially adopted and available in commercial tools, just that it has entered the "finalization" phase when tool vendors can start building it in. Even though the diagram notation of BPMN 2.0 appears little changed from previous versions, it represents a big step forward.
Most of the effort put into BPMN 2.0 has focused on making the diagrams executable on a process engine. That will be huge for customers of Oracle, IBM, SAP, and other vendors who elect to go that route. But even for the majority of today's process modelers, who are just thinking about BPMN as a diagramming tool for documenting, analyzing, and improving – not necessarily executing – their business processes, version 2.0 offers a lot to love.
'Fewer Measures, Better Results' and Other Advice for the Times
Posted by Doug Henschen Wednesday, March 25, 2009
12:08 PM
If your enterprise is focusing on more than, say, a dozen key performance measures, you are probably not seeing the forest for the trees. This is just one bit of advice delivered in one of nearly a score of articles we've published on the theme of adjusting your plans and approaches to combat the downturn. Next week we'll roll the best of that advice into a one-hour Webinar entitled "Resetting Information and BI Priorities for a Challenging Economy."
The case for KPI/Dashboard restraint is well illustrated by Shari Rogalski, Executive Director, Accenture Information Management Services. Rogalski shares a story about a large retailer that was reporting literally hundreds of "key metrics" to run the business. When the company decided to focus strictly on customer satisfaction and profitability, they ended up with just 15 key metrics.
Posted by Phil Kemelor Wednesday, March 25, 2009
10:15 AM
Like the month of March, software vendors will go into markets like a lion and out like a lamb. Such was the case with Microsoft's longtime adAnalytics project (originally codenamed "Gatineau") to deliver hosted Web analytics.
The adAnalytics beta service originally launched with great expectations of duking it out with Google Analytics -- only to be quietly shelved earlier this month. (Current customers will receive support through the end of this year.) While Redmond didn't give an official reason, it's apparent it couldn't find a really big following for the solution. Indeed the lack of response to a feedback request on the adAnalytics blog back in July makes you wonder whether adAnalytics garnered much of a clientele.
Posted by Curt Monash Wednesday, March 25, 2009
9:48 AM
The Register has a fairly detailed article about SAS expanding its cloud/SaaS offerings. I disagree with one part, namely:
SAS may not have a choice but to build its own cloud. Given the sensitive nature of the data its customers analyze, moving that data out to a public cloud such as the Amazon EC2 and S3 combo is just not going to happen.
And even if rugged security could make customers comfortable with that idea, moving large data sets into clouds (as Sun Microsystems discovered with the Sun Grid) is problematic. Even if you can parallelize the uploads of large data sets, it takes time.
But if you run the applications locally in the SAS cloud, then doing further analysis on that data is no big deal. It's all on the same SAN anyway, locked down locally just as you would do in your own data center.
I fail to see why SAS's campus would be better than leading hosting companies' data centers for either data privacy/security or data upload speed. Rather, I think major reasons for SAS building its own data center for cloud computing probably focus on:
Posted by Sandy Kemsley Tuesday, March 24, 2009
10:11 AM
I pledged to write a blog post for today, Ada Lovelace Day, in honor of a woman in technology who I admire. Although there have been some great women in technology throughout history -- Grace Hopper comes to mind, and is the subject of many blog posts today -- I wanted to write about someone who I know personally, and who I feel has contributed to my personal or professional development.
I didn't have any women mentors in the early part of my technology career. I went to a high school in suburban Toronto during the mid-70's where I had to fight to be admitted to the technical courses, and my mentors there were two male teachers who helped get me gain entry into the courses, then taught me the right (and wrong) way to wire circuits and design mechanical gearboxes. I moved on to engineering at University of Waterloo, where I recall one female professor and one woman teaching assistant during the entire time, neither of whom had a lasting impact. I did my work terms at mines, pulp mills and oil companies in northern Ontario and Alberta: again, not many women around. I came to believe that I didn't need to have other technical women in my life, since I was doing just fine with male mentors (a convenient belief, consider that was my only choice).
Key Differences Between Data Integration and App Integration
Posted by Mark Madsen Monday, March 23, 2009
8:12 PM
There's been a blurring of the lines between data integration in the BI environment and in the operational environment. It used to be that you bought ETL tools for the DW, and mostly hand-coded data integration for OLTP projects.
The problems come when vendors obscure the differences between data and application integration to broaden the appeal of their tools. You'll find EAI and messaging vendors tout their tools for DI, and ETL vendors talk about operational DI.
When evaluating tools, it's important that you realize that data integration and application integration are not the same thing.
Posted by David Linthicum Friday, March 20, 2009
8:51 PM
Amazon has introduced "reserved instances," a new Amazon EC2 pricing option that lets businesses claim a part of the Amazon cloud as their own.
"Amazon Web Services is introducing Reserved Instances, an additional pricing option for Amazon EC2 that extends the current on-demand, pay-as-you-go pricing by giving customers an option to make a low, one-time payment to reserve capacity and further reduce hourly usage charges. As with On-Demand Instances, customers will still pay only for the compute capacity that they actually consume, and if they do not use an instance, they will not pay usage charges."
Posted by Tony Byrne Friday, March 20, 2009
9:43 AM
The reports that IBM will buy Sun Microsystems are still just rumors with no confirmation. Might not happen. Still interesting to think about. I'll leave it to other analysts to discuss potential overlap in the areas of hardware, operating systems, and databases. Instead I'll focus on the platforms of greatest interest to content technology people.
Posted by Curt Monash Thursday, March 19, 2009
10:14 AM
Reported or rumored merger discussions between IBM and Sun are generating huge amounts of discussion (some links below). Here are some quick thoughts around the subject of how the IBM/Sun deal — if it happens — might affect the database management system industry.
IBM is already serious about supporting multiple database management systems. DB2 on open systems is IBM's flagship DBMS. But DB2 on mainframes and at least one flavor of Informix seem to be getting maintained and enhanced fairly seriously as well. And IBM has further DBMS products as well (e.g., DB/2 on the AS/400). There's little reason to think IBM would orphan MySQL or any other DBMS product.
IBM is very open-source-friendly. For a company that grew up for decades on proprietary software — and still is a huge software products vendor — IBM is very serious about open source. If you doubt that, I have two words for you: "Linux" and "Eclipse." Continue reading "Database Implications if IBM Acquires Sun " Comments
IBM Would Do Everybody a Favor by Buying Sun
Posted by Rajan Chandras Wednesday, March 18, 2009
3:41 PM
Sun's been getting battered in the high seas of technology for a while now. Who else but IBM could find value in this flotsam and jetsam?
There's an easy way to find out if a company has lost its way: try to define the company in one, reasonably compact sentence. For example, how would you describe Sun and CA, without tying the sentence up in multiple, complex subclauses?
Posted by Sandy Kemsley Tuesday, March 17, 2009
10:59 AM
Gartner's had a good webinar series lately, including one last month with Alexa Bona on software licensing and pricing (link to "roll your own webinar" download of slides in PDF and audio in mp3 separately), as part of its series on IT and the economy. As enterprises look to tighten their belts, software licenses are one place to do that, both on-premise and software-as-a-service, but you need to have flexible terms and conditions in your software contract in order to be able to negotiate a reduction in fees, particularly if there are high switching costs to move to another platform.
For on-premise enterprise software, keep in mind that you don't own the software, you just have a license to use it. There's no secondary market for enterprise software: you can't sell off your Oracle or SAP licenses if you don't need them anymore. Even worse, in many cases, maintenance is from a single source: the original vendor. It's not that easy to walk away from enterprise software, however, even if you do find a suitable replacement, you've probably spent three to seven times the cost of the licenses on non-reusable external services (customization, training, ongoing services, maintenance), plus the time spent by internal resources and the commitment to build mindshare within the company to support the product. In many cases, changing vendors is not an option and, unfortunately, the vendors know that.
Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe Monday, March 16, 2009
12:53 PM
Here in the US, the topic of electronic medical records has popped back to the top of the agenda, due to an impending mass injection of government money. Long talked about, long promised and long mandated (remember HIPAA?) -- electronic medical records in the US are for all intents and purposes still a pipedream. Yet as a late adopter (to put it politely) the US can potentially benefit in part from experiences in UK and Europe in general.
The UK has long been pushing the benefits of and investing heavily in electronic medical records -- yet the slam dunk that the new administration seems to expect in terms of benefits has yet to be realized elsewhere. To explore why takes us into a range of big and complex enterprise content management (ECM) topics, but we can focus in on two key areas that will, without doubt, tax the new administration it moves forward with this initiative:
Posted by Rajan Chandras Friday, March 13, 2009
9:40 AM
Microsoft recently announced plans to enable direct access to SQL Server databases in the cloud using Tabular Data Stream (TDS), the native SQL Server network protocol. This is exciting news for Microsoft developers, and just the kind of thing that Microsoft competitors wouldn't want to happen too soon...
The Microsoft announcement makes it clear that Microsoft wants to move away from the current ACE data model and toward a TDS-based model. The ACE model uses the concepts of Authority (e.g. user space), Containers (e.g. tables) and Entities (e.g. rows) to allow access to SQL Server databases in the cloud. Interestingly, there's nothing wrong with the ACE model -- in one form or the other, it is the dominant data access model for databases in the cloud. (For more information, check out this article I wrote nearly a year ago on Microsoft's foray into database clouds).
Self-Service BI: Let Users Get on the (Soccer) Ball
Posted by Cindi Howson Thursday, March 12, 2009
7:36 AM
You know that I am a big football fan, Packers in particular, because of my son, but everything I know about soccer (a.k.a. European football), I have learned from my English husband.
What does this have to do with BI? Information Builders just launched this cool new soccer dashboard of the 2009 Champions League. As I wrote about rich reportlets in this Cool BI article, such an interactive report is what most users envision for self-service BI. Users don't want "ad hoc," as in starting at a blank screen with 1,000 possible data elements to choose from. No. Most information consumers want to interact with an existing report or dashboard as a starting point. Self-service BI means users don't have to go to IT for a relatively simple enhancement request to get a sort, filter, chart or new calculation added to the report.
Diversity Rules At Gartner's 'Megavendor' Comparison
Posted by Doug Henschen Tuesday, March 10, 2009
5:47 PM
With a show of hands at the "Comparing the Megavendors" presentation yesterday at the Gartner BI Summit, attendees made it clear that giants IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have their collective tentacles into nearly every enterprise. Attendees also made it clear that those tentacles are often intertwined and that they are in no rush to consolidate on just one vendor.
The Maryland Ballroom here at the Gaylord National Harbor conference center was pretty much full for the Megavendor presentation, with many people standing at the back and along the sides of the room -- a good indication of the popularity of this topic. (Gartner says 730 people registered for this event, but my count of seats in the lunch and breakfast hall would put the figure closer to 500.) Aptly named analyst Bill Hostmann served as emcee of the session, and his colleagues James Richardson, Neil Chandler, Donald Feinberg and John Van Decker presented vendor assessments of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP Respectively.
Posted by David Linthicum Tuesday, March 10, 2009
1:05 AM
In this Wall Street Journal blog post it's clear that new White House appointee Vivek Kundra is part of a "new generation of CIOs" that consider cloud computing as a viable architectural option.
"I'm a big believer in disruptive technology," he said. To him, following the traditional approach of only investing in tried-and-true systems is a sure way to become outdated. "If I went to the coffee shop, I would have more computing power than the police department," he said. "Consumers had better technology than the government did."
As state, local, and the Federal government look to improve the way they do information systems going forward, clearly the cloud option will be on top of their list. While that's clearly the case now, until recently most government organizations considered cloud computing "politically incorrect," mostly around myths such as "you can't secure it," or "it's proprietary," or "it will cost jobs." None of that is really true when you look at the realities.
Posted by Doug Henschen Monday, March 9, 2009
11:52 AM
I'm here at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Washington D.C. this week, and opening keynoters John Van Decker and Kurt Schlegel kicked things off talking about the "BI"g discrepancy. That gap is between expectations for and investments in BI and the value that the technology is actually delivering to business users. The talk closely paralleled my Q&A interview with analyst Donald Feinberg, but Van Decker and Schlegel did break fresh ground in laying out these five reasons for the discrepancy:
Posted by Doug Henschen Friday, March 6, 2009
9:36 AM
The stock market reaches a 12-year low... GM threatened with bankruptcy... this week's news presents fresh evidence of the fragile state of the US and global economies. But it has been abundantly clear since late last year that companies need to hit the reset button when it comes to setting enterprise information management and applications priorities. In the face of new economic realities, what would you still cite as top priority?
In an Intelligent Enterprise/InformationWeek Analytics survey conducted in January, we surveyed more than 300 information technology and business professionals about their attitudes and imperatives in five key areas of enterprise technology: information management, business intelligence, enterprise applications, performance management, and process management. In this post-economic-meltdown survey, readers shared their opinions on the squeakiest wheels requiring continued investment over the coming 12 to 24 months.
Posted by Seth Grimes Thursday, March 5, 2009
12:09 AM
A January New York Times article on the R open-source statistical programming environment catalysed a change in attitude at SAS, the largest independent BI and analytics vendor. In just one month, SAS's position swerved from disdain -- the Times quoted Anne H. Milley, SAS director of technology product marketing, as opining, "We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet." -- to embrace with an admission that "both R and SAS are here to stay, and finding ways to make them work better with each other is in the best interests of our customers." And that's good news, for SAS and for R.
Posted by David Linthicum Wednesday, March 4, 2009
11:42 AM
A core value of cloud computing is the ability to shift the risk from your enterprise to the cloud computing provider. Since it's up to the cloud provider to handle the computing processing load and you'll pay by use, it's possible to reduce the risk that you'll run out of capacity to support your customers and core business processes. The burden of scaling shifts to the cloud provider, which is in business to accept such risks.
So, while you reduce your risk as computing needs go up, you also reduce the risk that you've purchased excess capacity that you don't need. In short, you've outsourced your data center to those who will manage it, keep it healthy, and only charge you for what you use over time. Thus, an organization (such as yours) that is not in business to provide computing resources can sidestep that challenge and transfer the risk to cloud providers that are in the computing resources business.
Posted by Mark Madsen Wednesday, March 4, 2009
8:48 AM
The biggest patent lawsuit ever to hit the ETL market is probably one you never heard of: JuxtaComm versus virtually every company in the market – a total of 16 defendants at the time. Teilhold Technologies, a subsidiary of JuxtaComm, filed the patent infringement claim late last year in the Texas Eastern District Court, a favorite of patent trolls because the courts there favor patent trolls.
The lawsuit is based on a 1998 patent (6,195,662) fpr ETL:
A system and method is described for importing data from a source computer system, manipulating and transforming of that data, and export the data to a target computer system under control of a script processor using stored metadata definitions.
Posted by Tony Byrne Tuesday, March 3, 2009
10:05 AM
Skittles -- a brand in the Mars candy conglomerate -- set off a small tornado in social media land yesterday by nearly completely turning over its Web site to Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (see it here).
Posted by Seth Grimes Sunday, March 1, 2009
10:30 AM
The February 26 Economist looks at the state of prediction markets, a tool for turning collective human insights into forecasts. The title and subhead capture the reporter's take: "An Uncertain Future," "A novel way of generating forecasts has yet to take off."
Prediction markets rely on broad participation to generate likelihood profiles for a variety of foreseeable outcomes. The short, anecdotal Economist article, by contrast, cites only one trading-platform provider and experiences at three user organizations. Those experiences are nonetheless telling. "Koch Industries, an American conglomerate in a range of businesses including chemicals,... says the results so far have been pretty accurate compared to actual outcomes, but stresses that markets are complementary to other forecasting techniques, not a substitute for them." On the down side, a couple of banks found that "a big hurdle facing managers using prediction markets is getting enough people to keep trading after the novelty has worn off" and "another reason prediction markets flop is that employees cannot see how the results are used, so they lose interest."
Cindi Howson on Business Intelligence
