IntelligentEnterprise Information Management Weblog

5 Opportunities and 3 Threats for Oracle

By Rajan Chandras — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:39:37 -0500

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle now has a few things going for it, including something no other IT giant has -- not IBM, not Microsoft and not SAP. And lurking also are a few challenges.

So, that loud burp we heard was Oracle swallowing Sun with joy (although not, perhaps, with Joy -- Bill Joy, that is). Oracle paid a hefty price for Sun, but that's no great shakes compared with all the goodies Oracle gets from Sun's basket of gifts. Here are five them that stand out in particular, and which present Oracle and Oracle customers with unprecedented opportunity.

Clarabridge Asks, Are You Customer Experienced?

By Seth Grimes — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:08:00 -0500

Add "customer" to Jimi Hendrix' song title and you have a question central to last week's Clarabridge Customer Connections (C3) conference, Are You Customer Experienced?

Clarabridge is a leading text-analytics vendor, delivering voice of the customer and related business solutions. The C3 conference's Orlando-Disney venue lent itself to a bit of Goofy-ness, and CEO Sid Banerjee indeed riffed off the magical journey theme in his post-conference write-up. Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who titled his conference summation It's Time For Text Analytics, used a different magical kingdom, that of the Wizard of Oz, to illustrate a customer-experience voyage of discovery in his conference keynote, although a panel he later moderated wasn't immune to an intrusion of Disneyicity.

CMIS is Here: What Does it Mean for You?

By Ruth Blanco — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:41:31 -0500

In late 2008, OASIS (OASIS Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards--the not-for-profit consortium that drives open standards) announced a committee that would standardize a Web services interface specification that would enable interoperability of enterprise content management (ECM) systems. EMC, IBM and Microsoft lead the way by developing the initial draft for the standard. Other ECM vendors, like Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and others, participated and provided comments on a draft standard. OASIS put the v1.0 standard out for public comment through the end of last year and received a flurry of feedback.

CMIS, the resulting standard, stands for Content Management Interoperability Services. The goal of CMIS is to make sure content repositories and solutions are able to interoperate by being independent of operating systems and architectures. It focuses on the basic content functions such as creating, reading, writing, deleting and searching for content across repositories.

Database Snooping Threatens Liberty - And We're All Making Matters Worse

By Curt Monash — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:30:56 -0500

Every year or two, I get back on my soapbox to say:

Database and analytic technology, as they evolve, will pose tremendous danger to individual liberties.
We in the industry who are creating this problem also have a duty to help fix it.
Technological solutions alone won't suffice. Legal changes are needed.
The core of the needed legal changes are tight restrictions on governmental use of data, because relying on restrictions about data acquisition and retention clearly won't suffice.

But this time I don't plan to be so quick to shut up.

Informatica Starts 2010 with a Bang

By Rajan Chandras — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:58:48 -0500

In a move that will send (pleasant) tremors in the world of data management, Informatica snapped up leading MDM vendor Siperian. I'm excited by this event, and here's why.

Informatica's acquisition of Siperian is far from unexpected. Not too long ago, I posed the following question: "What's stopping Informatica from acquiring an OEM partner like Siperian?" Others too would have had the same thought. Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi (indirectly) explains the delay in acquiring Siperian by stating that they are following a roadmap (read here for more). Well, ok, maybe. At this point, that's irrelevant.

So why is this great for Informatica and for customers and IT practitioners?

Semantic Search Footnotes: Concepts, Ontologies & Real Time

By Seth Grimes — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:59:22 -0500

I want to respond to a few comments/suggestions I received about my recent Intelligent Enterprise story, Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search -- it also ran in InformationWeek -- regarding semantic-search definitions and examples.

My article gained hundreds of page views and a couple of dozen tweets, but there was only one suggestion of a semantic-search approach I'd missed, "real-time search with some sort of filtering," that from Jim Hendler, who is certainly an authority on semantics, more on which later. I'll start, however, by elaborating on points raised by NLP/semantics researcher Tom O'Hara in an e-mail message.

Oracle on SharePoint: Waiting for Answers

By Tony Byrne — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:09:33 -0500

Among the various categories of content technologies that CMS Watch evaluates, Oracle has been very quiet over the past year. For the past two years, actually, Oracle has urged customers and partners to look forward to the "11g" series of upgrades across its various application sets. In certain cases, various 11g-labelled capabilities have been slipstreamed into existing versions, especially on the ECM and WCM side. But overall, the major 11g-branded upgrades have created enormous expectations among Oracle customers.

Netezza Skimmer Joins the Short List

By Curt Monash — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:14:27 -0500

As I previously complained, last week wasn't a very convenient time for me to have briefings. So when Netezza emailed to say it would release its new entry-level Skimmer appliance this week, while I asked for and got a Friday afternoon briefing, I kept it quick and basic.

That said, highlights of my Netezza Skimmer briefing included:

Sentiment Analysis, Enterprise Content, and Social Media, Year 2010

By Seth Grimes — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:24:36 -0500

Sentiment analysis is one of my favorite topics: one of the most challenging and one of the most interesting uses of text technologies. News and social media, e-mail, surveys -- the gamut of text sources -- are full of subjective information: opinion, attitudes, emotion, and mood, with a wide variety of current and possible business uses. Application areas include customer satisfaction and support, marketing, financial markets, media and publishing, and politics and policy: essentially any computing application sourced from human communications.

Sentiment analysis represents a huge opportunity and it presents technical and solution challenges. That's why I've created a new conference, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, slated for April 13 in New York.

Two Cornerstones of Oracle's Database Hardware Strategy

By Curt Monash — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:41:49 -0500

After several months of careful optimization, Oracle managed to pick the most inconvenient* day possible for me to get an Exadata update from Juan Loaiza. But the call itself was long and fascinating, with the two main takeaways being:

Oracle thinks flash memory is the most important hardware technology of the decade, one that could lead to Oracle being "bumped off" if they don't get it right.
Juan believes the "bulk" of Oracle's business will move over to Exadata-like technology over the next five to ten years. Numbers-wise, this seems to be based more on Exadata being a platform for consolidating an enterprise's many Oracle databases than it is on Exadata running a few Especially Big Honking Database management tasks.

Forget ECM: It's Document Management From Here On In

By Alan Pelz-Sharpe — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:46:13 -0500

At CMS Watch we frequently have to explain to people why we have separate research streams for WCM (Web Content Management) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management). The explanation is frequently a response to the question, "aren't they just the same thing?" The simple answer is no, they are not.

How to Develop and Drive an ECM Strategy

By Ruth Blanco — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:19:50 -0500

One of the toughest parts of enterprise content management is developing an overall strategy. The key is to have a holistic strategy that sets forth a vision for all aspects of ECM. The strategy must be driven by the business, not left solely to IT. Strategy is also a living process, and not a one-time event. With all this in mind, here's a four-step approach for developing an effective ECM strategy:

Will Oracle Kill MySQL?

By Rajan Chandras — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:25:44 -0500

MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius is spearheading an energetic attempt to stall Oracle's acquisition of Sun. His concern is that once Oracle buys Sun, it will decimate MySQL. Should we be worried?

Concerned about the anti-competitive impact of Oracle's acquiring MySQL as part of the Sun takeover, European Union (EU) regulators have held up the stop sign on the merger while they investigate the matter. EU regulators tend to come down forcefully on any perceived indiscretions in mergers and acquisitions, so Oracle knows that this isn't something to wish away and is scrambling for damage control, including a series of commitments aimed at MySQL customers and developers. Chances are, Oracle will prevail and the EU will approve the merger.

The Lighter Side of Consulting

By Rajan Chandras — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:51:38 -0500

The other day I ran into an old Consulting mentor of mine. Smooth, superior and self-assured, the man was Consulting Personified. But now gone were the suit and smirk, replace by sneakers, stubble and a sullen look. Could it be The Curse of the Consultant?

"What happened?" I asked, as I guided him to a table and ordered us coffee.

Looking slightly desperate, he ran his hands through his thinning hair -- slick no more, I noticed -- then grabbed my hand and held it tightly, as if afraid I would vanish.

"You remember the good old days?" he asked plaintively. I nodded, trying to gently shake my hand off.

Oracle Lifts Cloud Over MySQL Storage Engine Vendors

By Curt Monash — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:50:30 -0500

Earlier this month, Oracle put out a press release promising to play nicely with MySQL if its Sun takeover is approved. The parts in italics below are quotes. My comments are in plain text.

1. Continued Availability of Storage Engine APIs. Oracle shall maintain and periodically enhance MySQL's Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture to allow users the flexibility to choose from a portfolio of native and third party supplied storage engines.

MySQL's Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture shall mean MySQL's current practice of using, publicly-available, documented application programming interfaces to allow storage engine vendors to "plug" into the MySQL database server. Documentation shall be consistent with the documentation currently provided by Sun.

Well, duh.

Integration: ECM Curse and Opportunity

By Ruth Blanco — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:33:01 -0500

With the proliferation of enterprise content management (ECM) vendors at many organizations, a new challenge is developing around managing federated ECM systems. Can the content management applications within an organization be integrated to help users find the information they need?

Google and the Meaning of Half Open

By Seth Grimes — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:59:25 -0500

Google is half open: the conclusion I draw after reading product management SVP Jonathan Rosenberg's long, rambling essay, "The Meaning of Open," a seeming apologia pro vita sua posted December 21 to the Official Google Blog. Rosenberg and Google get it -- open source software creates value for everyone and give-back is essential; open information creates choice and engenders trust among individuals who engage in the Internet ecosystem -- but for all the pride and confidence and even wisdom conveyed in the essay --

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these.

-- the repeated assertions of Google's openness only reinforce that Google's core, its strategic direction -- Rosenberg's own product management brief -- is closed rather than community-driven. In the end, for Google, (updating a Vulgate translation of a phrase of Isaiah's, adding tech-marketing talk), "my secret [sauce] is my own."

Intelligent Enterprise Top Blog Posts of 2009

By Doug Henschen — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:37:30 -0500

News coverage gives you one version of the truth, but there's nothing like the instant expert analysis blogs can bring to breaking stories. Here are the top-15 posts of the year from the Intelligent Enterprise blogosphere:

1. Serious Design Failure at USAspending.gov It was hailed as ushering in a new era of open government, but Seth Grimes uncovered plenty of data-analysis and data-visualization flaws at USAspending.gov.

2. Microsoft's Big Change on Performance Management (and BI) Cindi Howson was among the first to report on Microsoft's move to dump PerformancePoint Server and move most -- but not all -- of its functionality into the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint.

How Did Our 2009 Predictions Fare?

By Tony Byrne — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:06:02 -0500

This week CMS Watch issued its twelve predictions for 2010. In this post, I look back at our 2009 predictions to see how we did. The 2009 predictions were:

1. Open source ECM players get an initial boost. Yes, the recession gave them a boost, though smart customers are still asking tough questions about multi-year total cost of ownership.

2. Office 14 casts long shadow on SharePoint. Yes, and no. SharePoint 2010 has energized Redmond's consulting channel. The new version is mostly casting a long shadow on 3rd-party SharePoint add-ons and some enterprise procurement teams looking to delay strategic decisions.

Data Architecture? What's That?

By Rajan Chandras — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:25:39 -0500

Data architecture has always been a topic close to my heart. "Overloaded and overlooked" is how I define a data architect's role. Has anything changed over the past decade? Yes, but possibly for the worse.

Years ago, I wrote an article in Intelligent Enterprise on the dot-com data architect. It was very well-received and also was the beginning of a long relationship with IE. Some DAMA (Data Management International) chapters invited me to speak on the topic. I accepted the offer from the Washington DC chapter (less travel) and was presenting to the audience near Union Station in DC... even as an airplane loaded with innocent passengers overhead was being coerced into a steep dive into the Pentagon. Then, everything changed.

Overlooking Problems with Oracle's Exadata

By Neil Raden — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:26:03 -0500

I can't quite figure out where IDC's review of Exadata V2 ends and Stephen Swoyer's opinion begins, but in the latter's article "Why Oracle's Exadata May Attract CXO's," some questionable suggestions are offered.

At one point, Swoyer writes, "many of the largest data warehousing or OLTP systems in the world continue to run on Oracle," and adds further that, "many of the biggest combined DW and OLTP configurations also run on Oracle." While this may be true, the key word here is "run." I know of no "combined" OLTP and data warehouse instances that actually perform. There are a myriad of reasons for this, such as:

ECM Features to Look for in 2010

By Ruth Blanco — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:15:31 -0500

Over the last several years, there has been a lot of consolidation among enterprise content management (ECM) vendors. Still, enterprise organizations have a lot of vendor from which to choose, and the competition remains fierce.

There are five areas that we hope vendors will explore in 2010, and as buyers, we hope that you will press for roadmaps on these fronts prior to making a purchase.

Three Reasons to List CMIS in Your Document Management RFP

By Alan Pelz-Sharpe — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:41:48 -0500

First off let me state boldly and clearly CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standard) is an important document management (a.k.a., ECM) standard -- the most important standard. But if your world is solely one of HTML and CSS then you can stop reading right here...

CMIS was recently ratified by OASIS and is already appearing in many RFPs. Nevertheless, it is a little misunderstood by some, and at times gets overlooked or misplaced. So here are three concise and valid reasons for putting CMIS on your list of RFP requirements.

Unlocking Value in Content Management

By Andrew Conry-Murray — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:00:50 -0500

ECM systems often become content silos, accessible only by a limited set of applications and users. Organizations want to break open those silos, according to a new reader survey by InformationWeek Analytics.
We asked if ECM systems would play a greater role in the enterprise if applications could be more easily integrated. Thirty-two percent say yes, they'd like their apps and users to be able to get content out of ECM platforms. Another 27 percent want to put more content into ECM systems for compliance and retention purposes.

Stop Blaming IT!

By Tony Byrne — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:25:25 -0500

"IT is the problem." I heard this epithet issued by a cloud computing guru at last month's Interop conference. But you could replace "cloud computing" with nearly any emerging technology and hear the same thing. Enterprise IT just doesn't adopt new technologies as fast as many consultants and analysts would wish.