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The Cloud Reality Is Setting In

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, August 31, 2009
12:31 PM

Now that I work almost exclusively in the world of cloud computing, including SaaS, I see a much higher level of skepticism out there around cloud computing. This is best reflected by this recent CIO.com survey, which highlights the fact that reality is setting in.

"The June 2009 survey, 'CIO On-Demand Services Survey,' reveals that cloud computing fears regarding security, data management, total cost of ownership, regulatory and compliance issues, and vendor lock-in have actually increased as compared with results from a similar survey in August 2008."

Continue reading "The Cloud Reality Is Setting In"

Comments

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, August 28, 2009
8:10 AM

One of my favorite technology terms is "Shadow IT." The term is not employed often enough, and its role in undermining good information management should be more widely broadcast, because Shadow IT represents a plague on content management.

For those of you that don't know, Shadow IT refers to the technology that has been deployed (and once in a while maintained) outside of the formal IT organization. Commonly it refers to teams or groups who figure they can do things better and cheaper than by going through the normal IT channels.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
8:06 AM

I recently advised a global consumer goods firm about how to integrate their various Social Software implementations and where to place SharePoint in that mix. This was that rare company who had not yet implemented SharePoint hardly at all, beyond a few WSS pilots. In other words, that mythical "greenfield" environment that consultants can dream about, but rarely exist in real life.

The firm is considering expanding their investment, including licensing MOSS. We discussed how they have a tremendous opportunity to do SharePoint "right" from the beginning, and avoid some common critical mistakes.

It occurred to me later, though, that the same advice I gave them could be taken to heart by existing SharePoint customers. Sure, it might mean "undoing" some work, but it's never too late to obtain better value from any SharePoint investment. Here are six basic things you can do:

Posted by Curt Monash
Monday, August 24, 2009
8:04 AM

Teradata used to tell a one-size-fits-all Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) story. That's no longer the case. Last year, Teradata introduced a range of products. I think Teradata is serious about selling its full product range, and by now has achieved buy-in from its sales force for that strategy. I base these beliefs on data points such as:

• Teradata says so, repeatedly and persuasively
  
• At least in passing, Teradata cites non-trivial sales figures for the appliance product lines
  
• Competitors are less unanimous in asserting that Teradata's lower-end products are presented on just a bait-and-switch basis

But that raises the question: How does Teradata pitch the advantages of its top-end product line these days? At least at the corporate level, the answer seems to focus less on the "EDW" concept than it used to, and more on "Active." Teradata -- which actually has been talking about "Active Data Warehousing" for about a decade — indeed calls its top-end 55xx series the "Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse."

Posted by David Linthicum
Thursday, August 20, 2009
4:42 PM

It's clear that hype-driven cloud computing translates into dollars given to consultants who promise to lead enterprises to the Promised Land of "as-a-service." The coordinates being set by some consultants could lead enterprises to the wrong clouds with the wrong applications, and cost enterprises millions more than expected with no savings and increased risk.

So, what are they doing wrong? The key issues include:

• Following the hype.
  
• Picking the wrong battles.
  
• Not considering the business.
  
• Being a bit too chummy with providers.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
12:41 PM

I am a big fan of OMG's Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0, which has passed its first approval hurdle and is now in the Finalization Task Force stage. A major reason I'm a fan is that for the first time, BPMN has standardized the schema for XML interchange of process models. That means you will be able to create a BPMN model in one tool with confidence you can open it in a different tool. I think that's what every user expects from a "standard," but BPMN never had it until v2.0. There is one part of the standard that the team messed up big time: Diagram Interchange (DI), meaning the graphical layout of the shapes and symbols.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
7:40 AM

Gartner's hype cycle for 2009 was released last week, and there was a webinar with Jackie Fenn to walk through it. The actual diagrams are not working on their press release at this writing, but ReadWriteWeb is hosting its own copy of the emerging technologies hype cycle (which was in the press release originally) if you want to take a look.

Gartner has 79 different hype cycles focused on individual technologies, rolled up in this special report that is free but doesn't contain the meat: for that, you need to click through to the hype cycle for the technology in which you're interested and purchase that report.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, August 17, 2009
10:40 PM

What's the opposite of open source? Hint: The answer is quite straight-forward. And it's not what some analysts and insiders would have you believe.

The definition of "open source" (as applied to software) is almost universally accepted as that of the Open Source Initiative. Per the OSI, "open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with [certain] criteria" that are outlined on the OSI's Web site. Open-source software, per the OSI, is free, "free" as in "free beer" rather than necessarily as in "free speech," which latter usage of "free" carries with it certain responsibilities. Those responsibilities are "vitally important" according to Richard Stallman and other free-software movement proponents.

Posted by Dave Stodder
Friday, August 14, 2009
9:08 AM

In these recessionary times, giant convention hotels can feel like empty cathedrals. At the recent TDWI World Conference (August 2-7), the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego looked as though it could have benefited from a little religious exhortation to draw people inside its halls. Of course, with the city and its surrounding waters basking in the bright summer sunshine, some might have entered, checked in and slipped out the back way to enjoy an ice cream in Seaport Village rather than settle in for some data warehousing instruction. However, they would have missed not only TDWI's expanding educational offerings -- from the "soup" of technical data warehouse design to the "nuts" of how executives can use information for business leadership -- but also evidence of significant shifts going on in the BI and data warehousing market.

From its appearance, the TDWI exhibition show floor looked pretty much as it always has. Familiar faces were in place at many of the booths, although not necessarily in the same booths as before. There was the usual contest to get your card stamped by the exhibitors; this time, if you got them all, you were entitled to a trip inside a little booth full of money being blown around by air hoses. You could keep what you caught: Not a bad deal in these tight times. If you're ever in one of those, from my observation the most effective ways to trap bills were to press them into your underarms, use your forearms to squeeze them against your chest and pinch bills against your collarbone with your chin. Yes, you look ridiculous, but you must be ready to hold that pose until the assistant plucks the bills off of you. Teeth were ineffective. I would not recommend trapping bills between the knees: someone fell over trying to do that.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, August 13, 2009
9:31 AM

The door burst open and the client rushed in, pale and delirious. "Mr. Holmes, the worst thing has happened -- EII has vanished!" "Come, come," smiled Holmes, as he put his finger tips together. "Enterprise Information Integration is too valuable to go away. Here, sit down and let us analyze the situation."

The client rocked back and forth, and put his head between his hands. "Nimble, Avaki, MetaMatrix -- gone, all gone!" he moaned. "I tell you, Mr. Holmes -- it's a conspiracy. They're after us all!"

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
3:21 PM

There is little question that since Oracle's acquisitions of Hyperion and Siebel, the vendor has evolved into a major BI player. Its core BI revenues grew 17% last year, and it has gone from a second-tier player three years ago to now a solid number three (according to IDC figures). Its analytic applications -- which offer prebuilt dashboards, reports, and data models for E-business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and, recently introduced, J.D. Edwards -- are unmatched by its three closest competitors. While everything would seem to look rosy in Oracle's BI world, two blemishes are its complex BI tool portfolio and a delay in OBIEE 11g.

Oracle has a "protect, extend, evolve," policy, meaning if you were on Hyperion System 9 prior to the Oracle acquisition, you can safely continue to expand your deployment on that platform. The vendor has announced lifetime support for all the Hyperion and Oracle Standard Edition BI products. In fact, the "plus" in "OBIEE Plus" is that it includes Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly known as Brio) and Production Reporting (formerly known as SQR); Essbase meanwhile is a separate license (see this evaluation for clarification on modules and strengths and weaknesses).

Posted by Kas Thomas
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
10:45 AM

There's a saying in Hollywood, made famous by screenwriter William Goldman, that "nobody knows anything." It's a lament that sometimes seems to apply to the IT world as well. There are counterexamples for every rule, and every time you think you know something, circumstances find a way to humble you. Pretty soon you realize it's impossible to make any generalizations, except that you can make no generalizations.

Consider the RFP process. Mind you, I'm no expert on Requests for Proposals (or tenders, as they're also known), but after you read enough of them, it's clear that nobody else is, either. Every RFP is different, and almost all are seriously flawed in one way or another. No one seems to know how to write a "good" RFP, perhaps because "nobody knows anything."

Posted by Curt Monash
Monday, August 10, 2009
7:32 AM

Netezza recently announced a new generation of data warehouse appliance called TwinFin. TwinFin's clearest stated list price is "a little under $20,000 per terabyte of user data," which in my opinion immediately became the new industry reference point for discussing prices in the data warehouse appliance category. Vigorous discussion ensued, especially in the comment thread to the first of the two posts linked above. Here's some followup.

Netezza should not have claimed a "10-15X price/performance improvement," based on a 3-5X performance improvement and a 3X decrease in price/terabyte, and I should have grilled Netezza harder when it first made the claim. In fact, there is no unit of performance that you can, in a reasonable blended average, get 10-15X more of per dollar in TwinFin than you can in the predecessor NPS series.

To look at it another way, multiplying 3-5X by 3X would only make sense if 3-5X were a measure of something like "terabytes/unit of performance." But in fact the 3-5X is a blended average of something more like "units of performance/unit of time"; i.e., you can do 3-5X more calculations or queries in a unit of time over the same database (of the same size*) on the new machine as you can on the old.

Posted by Shawn Shell
Friday, August 7, 2009
3:47 PM

As many blog posts have noted (including the SharePoint Team Blog), Microsoft has released the "technical preview" of SharePoint 2010. What's significant though is a new graphic (shown below) for the famous six pillars of SharePoint.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, August 6, 2009
4:01 PM

As business process management (BPM) begins to expand beyond isolated projects to mainstream programs at the division or enterprise level, there is a need to engage a far greater number of business people in the effort. That's not easy, and achieving it is going to require significant change in the way BPM is practiced.

The most important role for business is probably documenting current-state business processes and analyzing them for possible improvement. But conventional practices in this area are inefficient and inherently small-scale.

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
2:07 PM

I'm consistently hearing that cloud computing is the "data center killer." That sentiment typically comes from cloud computing providers, but now it's coming from some in the press and analyst community as well. I figured I would set the record straight here, and reflect upon some of the key issues.

So, will cloud computing kill the data center?

Probably not. While cloud computing is a great fit for some applications, and/or other architectural components, it typically won't be a fit for all applications and/or architectural components. There will always be some data, services, processes, and complete applications that you want to keep within your firewall for a number of reasons, including: Compliance, privacy, fear, control, and cost.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
12:25 PM

Michele Cantara and Janelle Hill hosted a Webinar last week on the timely topic of surviving and thriving with aid of business process management (BPM). Cantara started by talking about the sorry state of the economy, complete with a picture of an ax-wielding executioner, and how many companies are laying off staff to attempt to balance their budgets. Their premise is that BPM can turn the ax-man into a surgeon: you'll still have cuts, but they're more precise and less likely to damage the core of your organization. Pretty grim start, regardless.

They showed some quotes from customers, such as "the current economic climate is BPM nirvana" and "BPM is not a luxury," pointing out that companies are recognizing that BPM can provide the means to do business more efficiently to survive the downturn, and even to grow and transform the organization by being able to outperform their competition. In other words, if a bear (market) is chasing you, you don't have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun the person running beside you.

Posted by Curt Monash
Monday, August 3, 2009
3:28 PM

Last October I wrote about the Teradata 13 release of Teradata's database management software. Teradata 13, which will be used across the various Teradata product lines, has now been announced for GCA (General Customer Availability)*. So far as I can tell, there were two main points of emphasis for Teradata 13:

• Performance (of course, performance is a point of emphasis for almost any release of any analytic DBMS product), especially but not only in the areas of aggregates, ETL (Extract/Transform/Load), and UDFs.
  
• UDFs (User Defined Functions), especially but not only in the areas of data mining and geospatial analysis.

To put it even more concisely, the focus of Teradata 13 is on advanced analytic performance, although there of course are some enhancements in simple query performance and in analytic functionality as well.