Posted by David Linthicum Thursday, April 30, 2009
9:54 AM
The world of cloud computing was shocked last week with the release of the McKinsey report on cloud computing, entitled "Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing." You can think of the report as a quick assessment of the value of cloud computing; however, as with any of the thought-leadership pieces pushed out around cloud computing, it was quickly picked apart by the pundits.
The report dared put forth the following definition of cloud computing:
"Clouds are hardware-based services offering compute, network and storage capacity where:
Hardware management is highly abstracted from the buyer
Buyers incur infrastructure costs as variable OPEX
Infrastructure capacity is highly elastic (up or down)"
Posted by Doug Henschen Tuesday, April 28, 2009
11:05 AM
The new alliance between Teradata and SAP announced yesterday is first and foremost about making life easier for joint customers. I certainly acknowledged this fact in yesterday's blog post (despite my dark headline), and, in fact, I was surprised to learn, in an interview with executives from both companies, that SAP didn't previously support the Teradata database. So joint customers -- and SAP says close to half of its top 100 customers also run Teradata -- were making do with no connections or customized integrations.
"Some customers were using SAP NetWeaver BW in stand-alone fashion, say just for finance coming out of ERP or another module," explains Tim Lang, VP of product management, SAP BusinessObjects. "Other customers were extracting and moving some data from NetWeaver to Teradata, but there was no standardized, bi-directional connection. The big news here is that Teradata will [soon] be a supported database underneath BW, so customers can take advantage of all the standard development-test-to-production lifecycle management as well as support services."
Analyst Curt Monash may have had my post in mind when he wrote that he doesn't see any "joint mission to smite Oracle, IBM, and/or Microsoft" in this alliance, but that's where my second question from yesterday's post comes into play. So "to what extent [will] SAP BusinessObjects software be integrated with Teradata?" The possibilities go well beyond SAP BW and the DBMS, and it's not so much a matter of smiting the competition as keeping up!
Candid Thoughts About Recent Gartner & Forrester Research
Posted by Seth Grimes Monday, April 27, 2009
6:01 PM
My reaction to recent Gartner and Forrester analyst reports, as covered in Intelligent Enterprise articles, is that the firms are tarting up a couple of instances of questionable research.
A Gartner report urges us to "Reduce Costs of Data Integration by Rationalizing Tools and Infrastructure, and Centralizing Skills." According to Gartner's press release, "organizations can save up to $500,000 annually by rationalising tools in the short term and adopting a shared-services model in the longer term," a simplistic statement to say the least, more on which in a moment.
Forrester's report, "Voice of the Customer: The Next Generation," does not seem simplistic, but I do get to wondering when Voice of the Customer research is based on interviews with "more than 20 companies" and at least 17 of the ones listed are VOC solution providers. I asked lead author Bruce Temkin, "How did you confirm their assertions with user organizations?" He did not respond.
Posted by Doug Henschen Monday, April 27, 2009
12:27 PM
Data warehousing vendor Teradata today announced a new partnership with enterprise applications and business intelligence vendor SAP. On the surface, the deal is about helping joint customers by integrating SAP NetWeaver BW (Business Warehouse) and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence software with Teradata's Active Data Warehouse solutions. Below the surface, the pairing brings closer together two vendors that both compete head on with Oracle and (with some coopetition) IBM.
Posted by Shawn Shell Friday, April 24, 2009
10:45 AM
Microsoft has recently announced that the new SharePoint version will be called "Microsoft SharePoint 2010." The announcement had lots of other goodies in it, but I was particularly interested in the name change.
Microsoft will often change product names from version to version; clearly to create distinction in the market, but occasionally as the result of moving products from one Microsoft team to another (as happened with SharePoint).
Posted by Doug Henschen Thursday, April 23, 2009
9:21 AM
The good news is that most business execs and IT professionals we recently surveyed are supportive of business intelligence (BI) initiatives. The bad news is that many of these respondents also say their enthusiasm isn't universally shared. What's more, quite a few BI watchers report that the technology just isn't living up to its potential. Here are a few thoughts on these latest bits of BI intelligence.
Posted by David Linthicum Wednesday, April 22, 2009
9:42 AM
Those who push back on SaaS and cloud computing typically site security, privacy, and legal issues, but they almost never talk about connectivity. Perhaps they should. In the recent shenanigans surrounding cut fiber lines in Silicon Valley, those affected quickly understood that the Internet, which is required to gain access to your SaaS provider, can be gone in an instant. With their Internet connection down for most of a day, the affected businesses that use SaaS could not access any SaaS-delivered applications, including ERP, CRM, and Sales Force Automation.
For those of you who still believe that the Internet was and is designed by the military to get around the destruction of major nodes and will save you from situations like this, you are just plain wrong. If the fiber going from the back-bone is cut, not only is your connection lost, but any cell towers hooked up to the same fiber are lost as well, thus no air cards as an option.
Posted by Curt Monash Tuesday, April 21, 2009
11:51 AM
As my firstthreeposts on the Oracle/Sun merger suggested, I think Oracle will do a better job with MySQL product development than Sun has. But of course that's a low hurdle. And so it leaves open the questions:
What should and/or will be the most widely adopted code lines of MySQL (or other open source DBMS), especially for the types of users and vendors who are engaged with MySQL (as opposed to principal alternative PostgreSQL) today?
Posted by Cindi Howson Monday, April 20, 2009
12:54 PM
When MicroStrategy first floated the idea of a free version of its software several months ago, my gut reaction was not positive. I kept looking for the catch. I also was imagining the inevitable competitive FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that ensues in a cut throat market place. "The product is so weak, so hard, so niche, they have to give it away."
So far, I can't find the catch. Given the product capabilities, migration path, and support, it seems like a deal too good to be true.
In the must-read slide presentation, Oracle's says all the right things about being committed to all product lines and technologies. On the whole, this is believable.
Oracle says it's focusing Sun hardware sales on existing Oracle/Sun customers. Makes sense.
Posted by Seth Grimes Sunday, April 19, 2009
12:12 AM
I was quite disappointed to discover that IBM has cut off free access to historical IBM Journal articles. Decades of valuable, industry focused computing literature is now behind a "paywall." Gone is open availability of seminal material that establishes the foundations of business intelligence, data warehousing, text analytics, and more. For what? IBM earned $12.3 billion on sales of $103.6 billion in 2008. If IBM makes $1 million yearly selling journal access, that would represent less than one-hundredth of one percent of annual profit. Let's look at what we in the data business have lost.
Posted by Cindi Howson Thursday, April 16, 2009
8:42 AM
It's April 16, the day after tax day in the U.S. Will you be getting a refund or have to pay up? The same question applies to the new SAP BusinessObjects pricing announced yesterday.
I have often said BI pricing is a buyer's nightmare. No two vendors package products the same way, so defining requirements and evaluating alternatives can be a painful process. You would think that procuring the software is relatively easier, but it's often not.
Posted by Doug Henschen Tuesday, April 14, 2009
8:16 PM
I'm just back from IBM's Research center in Hawthorne, NY, where company officials today announced a new "IBM Business Analytics & Optimization Services" practice. The name and formalized organization are new, but executives took pains to explain that today's event was more of an unveiling of an initiative that has been in the works –- across IBM Global Business Services (GBS), the IBM Software Group and IBM Research -- for at least a few years. What's more, it's "hitting the ground running" with more than 4,000 consultants dedicated to the practice across the globe.
I didn't detect any rumblings about this "a few years" back, but I have consistently heard IBM underscoring the word "analytics" since the coronation of the Cognos acquisition back in February of 2008. It was there that Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group, declared, "we've not been seen as a company that was doing business intelligence [before acquiring Cognos]... but IBM has been a leader in delivering unique, sophisticated analytic capabilities."
Posted by Neil Raden Tuesday, April 14, 2009
8:21 AM
When James Taylor and I wrote Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions we knew it was going to be a lonely outpost for a while. It isn't easy for two guys to insert such a big idea into the collective consciousness. We didn't really have a natural sponsor for the whole picture to walk with us. The business rules community more or less understood it as a Business Rules Management System, which is a key component of the architecture. The predictive analytics crowd was interested as PA was prominent in the architecture, but in reality, very few really grasped EDM in its entirety. It was certainly easy to describe:
Focusing on operational decisions, it develops decision services using business rules to automate those decisions, adds analytic insight to these services using predictive analytics and allows for the ongoing improvement of decision-making through adaptive control optimization.
Posted by David Linthicum Monday, April 13, 2009
7:09 AM
I'm not sure if you've been paying attention to the cloud computing news over the last few weeks, but the most recent dust-up and silliness came from IBM and a few others, and it's centered around this "Open Cloud Manifesto."
The "Open Cloud Manifesto" proposes rules for cloud computing, including the use of open standards. I found it to be more about "motherhood, apple pie, and open standards," with no concrete anything in the document that would lead to anything of value. In essence it was a mission statement, or, at best, an opinion piece. We have plenty of those already.
It's Time for Seat-Based Software Licensing to End
Posted by Kas Thomas Friday, April 10, 2009
10:32 AM
Economic downturns tend to accelerate change in the IT world: People with budgetary authority find themselves taking a fresh look at what they're spending money on, how and whether IT investments are paying off, why bad investments are not paying off, and what to do differently going forward.
Given the situation we're in, now might be as good a time as any for potential buyers of software systems -- and licensees whose contract renewals are coming up -- to declare war on per-seat pricing.
Yes to Open Source, No to SaaS: Which IT Alternatives Will You Adopt?
Posted by Doug Henschen Thursday, April 9, 2009
10:01 AM
Open source software is the most accepted among five IT alternatives -- already in use by 42% of those surveyed -- while cloud computing is at the bleeding-edge -- in use by 14% of respondents. What's a bit surprising, however, is that software as a service (SaaS) is on more "not likely to consider" lists (49%) than is the cloud (47%). These are just a few of the findings of our "Attitudes and Priorities" survey, which is based on interviews with more than 300 readers with responsibility for enterprise IT purchases.
Joining open-source software, SaaS and the Cloud on our list of five IT alternatives are social networking tools (blogs, microblogs, wikis, RSS, etc.) and rich Internet applications (mashups, Ajax, Flash/Flex, Silverlight, etc.). As you can see (click on the thumbnail image below), we asked 305 respondents to tell us which ones they are using, which ones they're considering and which ones are on the "don't go there" list. (In case you were wondering, 54% of the respondents were from companies with 1,000 or more employees, and 30% were from firms with 10,000 or more employee. Job titles broke out as follows: 60% IT, 17% business, 8% consultant, 15% "other" or unspecified.)
Posted by David Linthicum Wednesday, April 8, 2009
9:48 AM
Remember SaaS integration? It was all the rage when SaaS started to rise, but has since fallen off the radar screen. That is, unless you're using SaaS.
This Computer World article, by Robert L. Mitchell highlights the need for SaaS integration.
"It's the SaaS twist: Add too many applications, and you might to find yourself back in the bad old days, when the various applications in the corporate infrastructure wouldn't talk to one another."
Actually, I would argue that most on-premise applications still don't talk to one another, even though my integration book, and a bunch of pretty good integration technologies have been around for some time.
Posted by Bruce Silver Tuesday, April 7, 2009
2:40 PM
Thus, with unintended irony, did our former president illustrate the consequences of low expectations in the debate over No Child Left Behind. No Child's insistence on achieving a minimum competence in reading and arithmetic was scorned by many as too demanding, even "elitist," even though we all know that without those things both the child and the nation as a whole will suffer.
Today, as BPMN 2.0 rumbles toward finalization, we're seeing the same bogus charge again from those who should know better. This time it's posts from assorted dead-enders saying that BPMN is too complicated for business analysts. Usually they have their own proprietary notation which they say is far superior. They invariably take comfort from the conclusion by Michael zur Muehlen and Jan Recker, based on their survey around a year ago, that "all the BPMN you need" is the part that is unchanged from 1990s-era swimlane flowcharts. The rest, they say, is overkill.
Posted by Shawn Shell Tuesday, April 7, 2009
8:53 AM
Microsoft recently announced that it is releasing SharePoint Designer (SPD) for free. This announcement has generally be heralded as a positive step: as SharePoint licenses grow, Microsoft can only help itself and its clients by enabling SharePoint customization and usage. However, I've had two conversations with SharePoint customers who are deeply concerned by the announcement. What's more, a company called Portalogiks, maker of a Virtual Training Center for SharePoint, released a newsletter with the title "SharePoint Designer Infection."
The Portalogiks newsletter asked both an implicit and explicit question: what if the average end-user downloads, installs, and begins using SharePoint Designer on their sites? Could this create a mess for the IT departments of these affected companies? The answer is: very probably. The customers I spoke to were nervous even without the benefit of reading any third-party warnings.
Posted by Curt Monash Monday, April 6, 2009
10:27 AM
I keep not finding the time to write as much about business intelligence as I'd like to. So I'm going to do one omnibus post here covering a lot of companies and trends, then circle back in more detail when I can. Top-level highlights include:
Jaspersoft has a new v3.5 product release. Highlights include multi-tenancy-for-SaaS and another in-memory OLAP option. Otherwise, things sound qualitatively much as I wrote last September.
Inforsense has a cool composite-analytical-applications story. More precisely, they said my phrase "analytics-oriented EAI" was an "exceptionally good" way to describe their focus. Inforsense's biggest target market seems to be health care, research and clinical alike. Financial services is next in line.
Tableau Software "gets it" a little bit more than other BI vendors about the need to decide for yourself how to define metrics. (Of course, it's possible that other "exploration"-oriented new-style vendors are just as clued-in, but I haven't asked in the right way.) Continue reading "Notes On Inforsense, Tableau, Jaspersoft and More" Comments
Who's Buying What in BI?
Posted by Doug Henschen Thursday, April 2, 2009
3:47 PM
What are firms in your industry buying? What are firms of your size buying? What are IT types using and and what are business types using? When it comes to business intelligence software, you'll find answers to all these questions in Nigel Pendse's "The BI Survey 8."
As I explain in this article, there are more than 350 charts and 490 pages in "The BI Survey 8." As one of a handful of media sponsors to the survey, Intelligent Enterprise is entitled to share just a peek at the report. To give you some sense of where the more than 2,600 respondents stand on the best-known BI product out there, I obtained approval to share these four charts:
Posted by Seth Grimes Thursday, April 2, 2009
12:07 PM
Our Sentiments, Exactly in the April issue of the Communications of the ACM tackles sentiment analysis. The subhead: "With sentiment analysis algorithms, companies can identify and assess the wide variety of opinions found online and create computational models of human opinion." (I suppose that last bit, the geek-speak, suits the audience. The Association for Computing Machinery is, after all, essentially an industry association for computer scientists.)
Author Alex Wright interviewed me for the article, and with his permission, I'll share our conversation...
Posted by David Linthicum Thursday, April 2, 2009
11:51 AM
One could view SaaS as a legacy technology when considering the number of years it's been out there and how it has become part of the modern enterprise. However, when looking at SaaS, or, in most instances, considering more SaaS, it's a good idea to put things into clear perspective.
For those tasked with maintaining existing IT infrastructure, including major systems and information stores, the subject of SaaS can be a bit scary. Typically they talk about "replacement," and how all things bad will be solved by all things SaaS. Having gone through one IT revolution or another, you know better.
Posted by Dave Stodder Wednesday, April 1, 2009
11:03 AM
From my hotel room at the Gaylord National, I could just make out the tip of the Washington Monument. That was about as close as I got to the center of government power, where momentous decisions are being made these days about nearly everything. The Gaylord is in National Harbor, a self-contained new development down on the Maryland side of the Potomac, and therefore at some distance from the heart of D.C. My purpose was to attend the SAS Global Forum, formerly called SUGI, which annually attracts several thousand BI, data mining and statistical analysis experts –- people we may now call "the Numerati" thanks to Stephen Baker's book by that name (he spoke at the conference). Jim Davis, SAS senior vice and chief marketing officer called it "dumb luck" that the Forum happened to be scheduled for inside the Beltway this year, but it sure seemed propitious. There are a lot of big numbers being crunched in and around Washington, D.C., and no doubt some of those in charge could use the "stimulus" that analytics might provide.
Cindi Howson on Business Intelligence
