Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe Friday, October 30, 2009
9:27 AM
I recently hosted a panel for ARMA that discussed compliance and records management issues related to Cloud Computing. It proved to be one of the most thought-provoking sessions I have been involved in for a long time. What became abundantly clear very early on was that records managers and compliance officers really need to get their head around cloud computing, and fast.
In the session we spent some time explaining that for every vendor out there that claims to have a cloud solution, only one in ten really has. That "cloud" relates to a virtualized world utilizing the Internet as a network -- whereas hosted and SaaS options (the nine out of ten) almost always have a specific data center location that they operate from.
Posted by Doug Henschen Thursday, October 29, 2009
11:27 AM
Last May I complained that the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release announced at Sapphire wasn't everything I expected from the big, splashy product launch. As of November, however, the missing ingredients -- namely the combination of system-agnostic data integration and acceleration -- will finally be in place along with interface improvements and new hardware partnerships. Here's the scoop on the second wave on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer announced this week.
Posted by Tony Byrne Wednesday, October 28, 2009
12:55 PM
It's tough to get your mind completely around SharePoint 2010 -- an even bigger and more all-encompassing platform than 2007. Over the coming months, CMS Watch will offer plenty of advice on how to develop effective strategies. In the meantime, I can't overstate the enthusiasm for the new platform at last week's SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas.
But here's a question for you the enterprise customer: is all this enthusiasm always in your best interest? Are we just seeing a repeat of all the early hype around MOSS 2007? Let's dig a bit deeper.
Posted by Doug Henschen Tuesday, October 27, 2009
5:16 PM
What were the odds we'd hear all about analytics at this week's IBM Information on Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas? I wish I could have placed that bet, as it seems analytics is all IBM is talking about these days. (I agree with Neil Raden's "whatever that means" comment in this blog, which suggests that the term is ill defined and over used.) "Analytics" was in the very name of two out of four new products announced. Here's my quick take:
Posted by Curt Monash Tuesday, October 27, 2009
9:06 AM
In my opinion, the most important takeaways about Teradata's hardware strategy from the Teradata Partners conference last week are:
Teradata's future lies in solid-state memory. That's in line with what Carson Schmidt told me six months ago.
To Teradata's surprise, the solid-state future is imminent. Teradata is 6-9 months further along with solid-state drives (SSD) than it thought a year ago it would be at this point.
Short-term, Teradata is going to increase the number of appliance kinds it sells. I didn't actually get details on anything but the new SSD-based Blurr, but it seems there will be others as well.
Teradata's eventual future is to mix and match parts (especially different kinds of storage) in a more modular product line.Teradata Virtual Storage is of pretty limited value otherwise. I believe Teradata will go modular more emphatically than Teradata itself does, because I think doing so will meet users needs more effectively than if Teradata relies strictly on fixed appliance configurations.
Posted by Neil Raden Monday, October 26, 2009
9:29 AM
Analytics, whatever that means, has emerged as the hot topic all over our industry. Gartner seems to have bolted from Business Intelligence and placed "Advanced Analytics" in the firmament of must-have technologies for 2010 (I guess everyone followed their lead and implemented BI last year so there is nothing else to talk about). The problem with analytics is, who can do it? Numerate people in organizations are as scarce as hen's teeth. According to the conventional wisdom, very special experts, quants we'll call them, are needed because mere mortals can't handle this stuff. But you can't buy quants like muskmelons on the road to Bettendorf in July, and even if you could, a muskmelon would be less troublesome.
Commercial and Community Open Source and Pentaho BI
Posted by Seth Grimes Thursday, October 22, 2009
1:56 PM
Last week, I offered the opinion that BI software publisher Pentaho has moved beyond a commercial open source business model. When "strategic" software components such as the new Pentaho Analyzer interface are not open source, having a "core open" suite like Pentaho's seems no longer enough to define the vendor as an open source company. I held up EnterpriseDB as a company that went down a similar route just last year.
While what counts most is great, affordable software, an understanding of market trends helps everyone concerned make strategic choices. In this spirit, I'll present perspectives that complement mine, from Pentaho and from the Pentaho community, regarding the importance of the open source base to Pentaho and the company’s users and regarding a new community development, the open source Pentaho Analysis Tool (PAT).
Posted by Doug Henschen Wednesday, October 21, 2009
1:11 PM
I was already in Washington D.C. for the Teradata Partners user conference this week, so I figured I'd stop in at the Predictive Analytics World event in nearby Arlington, Virginia. Tuesday morning's keynote by event chairman and founder Eric Siegel, pictured below, offered a nice primer on "Five Ways to Lower Costs with Predictive Analytics."
Siegel's presentation offered a primer on five popular forms of predictive analytics: response modeling, response uplift modeling, churn modeling, churn uplift modeling and risk modeling. In the process of describing each approach for segmenting customers and improving marketing performance, Siegel offered the following tips:
More on Teradata's SSD Speedster and (Cautious) Public-Cloud Offering
Posted by Doug Henschen Wednesday, October 21, 2009
11:24 AM
Coming into this week's Teradata Partners user group conference in Washington D.C., I wanted to know more about the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance 4555. As the first-ever solid-state-disk (SSD) data warehouse appliance, this speedster is worth crowing about. But as I reported in this article, the announcement was only mentioned in passing during Monday's keynote. It was a dim bulb compared to the bright spotlights IBM and Oracle trained on their recent IBM Smart Analytic System and Exadata 2 launches, respectively.
Perhaps Teradata execs thought it would be best to lay low on salesmanship at a user-group event. And what I'm talking about here is the style of the announcement, not the substance. But, honestly, this is a battle for the top spot in data warehousing! Instead of having a Partners-emblazoned Camaro burst onto the stage, as happened during the opening keynote, I would have had the 4555 burst onto the stage and then offered comparisons of SSD vs. conventional-disk performance on complex, real-world queries.
For those who wanted to learn more about the 4555, there was a working demo in the exhibit hall. Scott Gnau, Chief Development Officer and head of Teradata Labs, also offered a briefing for analysts and media. Here are few highlights of what he had to say:
This Week at the Teradata Partners User Conference
Posted by Curt Monash Tuesday, October 20, 2009
11:18 AM
Here are some highlights of what's going on, although names, dates, and details will have to await conversations and press releases this week.
Teradata is productizing "private cloud," under names including "Teradata Enterprise Analytics Cloud," "Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud," and "Teradata Elastic Mart Builder." I.e., Teradata hopes to leapfrog Greenplum in its "Enterprise Data Cloud" strategy. This is only fair, in that Greenplum lifted the idea from Teradata and eBay in the first place. It also provides major support for what I think is an extremely sensible trend. Give or take issues of who announces and ships what a couple months before or after a competitor, my early thinking is that the main differences between Greenplum and Teradata in this regard will be:
T-Mobile Data Loss Falsely Reflects on Cloud Computing
Posted by David Linthicum Monday, October 19, 2009
6:47 AM
Hopefully you don't have a T-Mobile Sidekick. If you do, you'll be disheartened to learn that your contact data could be gone after a SANS upgrade that went sideways. Failing to backup the data before the upgrade has lead to the loss of contact information for that older brand of cell phone. Thus Sidekicks that need to reload their contact information are out of luck.
So, let's see, data was lost. It was remote data. So, cloud computing failed again, correct?
Posted by Doug Henschen Thursday, October 15, 2009
12:16 PM
This week at the Open World event in San Fransisco, Oracle put a bit more flesh on the bones of last month's Sun Oracle Exadata 2 announcement. It also offered a peek at Oracle Fusion Applications, touting its inseparable embedded BI and collaboration capabilities. It was an impressive and tantalizing event (complete with a surprise visit from CAHL e FOUR knee uhhh Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), but it was a still a bit long on speeds, feeds and promises.
To back up the cryptic Exadata 2 claims issued last month, Oracle offered a wave of press releases and presentations. First up, Oracle and Sun aired the results of a TPC-C benchmark showing Exadata 2 to have achieved the fastest scores yet on that lab-based test. Next, details were shared on the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, the turbo charger inside Exadata 2. A long list of Exadata customers was shared, several of whom reportedly presented during the event. Finally, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took the stage late yesterday to reiterate Exadata 2 top-speed and low-cost claims (he also introduced next-generation tech support, as explained here). Then he threw down the gauntlet to IBM, saying, "if you can find an application running on an IBM computer that we can't run at least twice as fast on a Sun/Oracle machine, we'll give you $10 million.
Posted by Doug Henschen Wednesday, October 14, 2009
11:16 AM
Karl Heinz Streibich, the CEO of Software AG, is in New York this week, checking in on the North American sphere of the company's growing global empire. Software AG acquired WebMethods back in 2007, and it's about to complete its acquisition of IDS Scheer, which was announced in July. The deal that will increase the company's revenue and customer count considerably. IDS Scheer has been a pioneer in business process management, but Streibich told me yesterday that Software AG has its sights set on a bigger market:
"Let's not call it the 'business process management' market. Let's call it the enterprise process market. The enterprise process market is much, much bigger than the ERP market, and it's just at the beginning. Customers are migrating away from application silos or they are adding enterprise processes to those application silos. We're going to focus on enterprise process excellence, and that requires BPM, just as one part, it requires the [process models] that companies define, and it requires middleware to integrate everything together."
Posted by Seth Grimes Monday, October 12, 2009
5:21 PM
Companies adapt their business models to changing business conditions and emerging opportunities. For BI software publisher Pentaho, the demise of as-a-service BI provider LucidEra created an opportunity that was too good to pass up. LucidEra's Clearview interface, acquired and rebranded Pentaho Analyzer, fills a product-line gap by providing pivot analysis for non-technical business users. That this centerpiece Enterprise Edition component was not and is not open source invites a question. Is Pentaho, founded as a "commercial open source" BI vendor, still defined by open source? Pentaho itself seems unsure.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley Monday, October 12, 2009
9:05 AM
Forrester's Business Technology Forum, held last week in Chicago, focused on Lean as the new business imperative: how to use Lean concepts and methods to address the overly complex things in our business environment.
Forrester's Mike Gilpin opened the conference with a short address on how our businesses and systems got to be so bloated that Lean has become such an imperative. Then Connie Moore took over for the keynote. From the keynote's description on the event agenda site:
Posted by Tony Byrne Thursday, October 8, 2009
10:44 AM
Last week I heard Marko Hurst give a nice talk on search analytics, the topic of a forthcoming book he's co-authoring with Lou Rosenfeld. Marko emphasized the importance of integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis in any user experience effort; Lou made a similar case at J Boye Philadelphia earlier this year. It makes great sense.
But before you even get to that point, though, I think the two domains of search analytics and traditional Web analytics need closer alignment in most enterprise Web operations.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley Wednesday, October 7, 2009
1:26 PM
At this week's Gartner BPM Summit, Bill Rosser presented a decision framework for identifying when to use BPA (business process analysis), EA (enterprise architecture) and BPM modeling tools for modeling processes: all of them can model processes, but which should be used when?
It's first necessary to understand why you're modeling your processes, and the requirements for the model: these could be related to quality, project validation, process implementation, as part of a larger enterprise architecture modeling effort and many other reasons. In the land of BPM, we tend to focus on modeling for process implementation because of the heavy focus on model-driven development in BPMS, hence model within our BPMS, but many organizations have other process modeling needs that are not directly related to execution in a BPMS. Much of this goes back to EA modeling, where several levels of process modeling that occur in order to fulfill a number of different requirements: they're all typically in one column of the EA framework (column 2 in Zachman, hence the name of this blog), but stretch across multiple rows of the framework such as conceptual, logical and implementation.
Posted by Seth Grimes Tuesday, October 6, 2009
2:20 PM
BI has crossed a cultural threshold. Data visualization forms have become a tool of pop culture. Witness a pseudo-infographic published in the Arts & Leisure section of this last Sunday's New York Times. (The broadsheet page reduces surprisingly well to a computer screen.) The BI forms are there, absent the usual, numerical BI content. "He Came, He Heard, He Shared" subverts familiar graphics -- pie, line, and area charts, a horizontal bar chart, a pair of linked timeline charts -- to deliver social/media commentary. Artist and blogger Andrew Kuo substitutes qualitative text for numerical scales in using those BI forms to present personal commentary on music industry changes in the last ten years.
Posted by Curt Monash Tuesday, October 6, 2009
10:20 AM
Analyzing Oracle Exadata pricing is always harder than one would first think. But I've finally gotten around to doing an Oracle Exadata 2 pricing spreadsheet. The main takeaways are:
If we believe Oracle's claims of 10X compression, Exadata 2 costs more per terabyte of user data than Netezza TwinFin -- $22-26K/TB vs. TwinFin's <$20K -- but less than the Teradata 2550.
Posted by David Linthicum Monday, October 5, 2009
2:29 PM
On Twitter, my fellow cloud guy and twitter buddy, James Urquhart of Cisco, and I were kicking around the notion that few cloud horror stories have yet to emerge. I've seen a few, but most of those who have problems with cloud computing are reluctant to go on record... That is, until this story by Tony Kontzer, who does a great job highlighting some issues that Pulte Homes had with cloud computing, in this case, issues with a SaaS vendor.
"Well over a year ago, Batt told me that his confidence in the cloud had been destroyed. He'd made an aggressive leap by deploying a large IT vendor's on-demand CRM application, imagining all the benefits he'd been told about, both by the vendor and his peers at other companies. He and his staff spent weeks ironing out all the integrations between the CRM application and several other IT systems, a process that proceeded smoothly. But when it came time to make changes to the CRM configuration, all the other applications went down, forcing Batt to uncouple everything and rethink things. It was easy to understand his frustration."
Posted by Doug Henschen Friday, October 2, 2009
4:31 PM
There's a revolution underway in the use of big data, and Hadoop, the open-source distributed computing system, is at the center of it. Apache Hadoop is most often associated with MapReduce data processing, but it also includes a distributed file system and subprojects including the Hive data warehouse. All of the above were at the subject of success stories, accolades and palpable excitement at today's Hadoop World in New York City. Executives from Yahoo!, Facebook, eHarmony, IBM and JP Morgan Chase were here offering insight into how Hadoop is changing expectations for analysis of big data.
Sharing a few highlights from today's presentations, here's what these organizations are doing with Hadoop:
Posted by Seth Grimes Friday, October 2, 2009
1:36 PM
The relaunched recovery.gov government-transparency site no longer supports automated data feeds. These feeds had allowed users of the 1.0 site to perform their own valued-added analyses, "the whole point of accountability and transparency," according one site user, an executive with a large, government systems integrator. According to that user, who asked not to be named, referring to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) and lead contractor Smartronix, "from a software architecture standpoint, they seem to have missed a key principle here: backward compatibility."
RATB spokesperson Edward Pound confirmed that the relaunched site no longer offers the feeds. Pound did not know if notice had been provided to users, on-site or through another mechanism, of the discontinuation of the data-feed interface. He stressed that the Recovery Board is working hard to meet emerging user needs and improve site capabilities in furtherance of its non-political mission of promoting open government.
Posted by Doug Henschen Thursday, October 1, 2009
1:57 PM
You probably heard that Oracle plans to acquire HyperRoll's key assets, but IBM was pretty quiet about selling off its U2 databases (UniData and UniVerse) to Rocket Software. Here's a bit more context behind both of these moves.
As InformationWeek reported yesterday, Oracle is on track to acquire key assets from HyperRoll, namely its Data Performance Management Suite, which speeds up reporting of financial results. The technology can draw data out of leading databases, including Oracle, IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, Teradata, and Sybase. It can also aggregate data from BI systems, including SAP Business Objects, MicroStrategy, Cognos, and other OLAP systems.
Cindi Howson on Business Intelligence
