Intelligent Enterprise | In Context by Doug Henschen

Hear BI Survey Results, Plus Donald Farmer

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:07:23 -0500

I'll present the results of the latest Intelligent Enterprise business intelligence survey and Donald Farmer of Microsoft will surely talk about the new PowerPivot add-ins for in-memory analysis in Excel. That should be enough to attract more than a few registrants to this week's "BI Agenda for 2010" webinar. But there's more...

SAP Stacks Deck For Enterprise Support

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:25:47 -0500

I'm not as down on SAP as my colleague Bob Evans when it comes to the company's new two-tiered support plan. After all, SAP could have ignored the complaints and stood pat with a five-year plan to ramp up to Oracle support rates of 22% (a fee schedule that isn't uncommon in the industry). But I do see elements of the plan that protect the company and stack the deck in favor of the Enterprise Support choice.

Davenport On Analytics Buzz and Bravado

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:35:21 -0500

A few days before Christmas I recieved an advance copy of Tom Davenport's new book, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results". I managed to score this interview with the author and college professor over the holidays, but I thought I'd add a bit of interesting context in this post.

I was keen to interview Davenport in part because his name has been popping up on Intelligent Enterprise of late. As Cindi Howson recounted in this blog post, for example, it was Davenport who questioned John Schwarz (former Business Objects CEO and now member of the SAP Executive Board) about strategy when he was using the term "analytics" quite liberally at last month's SAP Influencer Summit in Boston.

Intelligent Enterprise Top Blog Posts of 2009

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.

Turn Content Challenges Into Opportunities

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:57:50 -0500

There are plenty of parallels between business intelligence (BI) and enterprise content management (ECM). For starters, the leading vendors in both markets (in terms of software revenue) were snatched up by the technology giants, yet plenty of best-of-breed players, upstarts and open source alternatives remain. But there is one key difference that has kept BI in the limelight while content management has often languished on IT to-do lists.

I'm drawing parallels between BI and ECM because today we're launching the Intelligent Enterprise ECM TechCenter, a mini-site aimed at helping you to treat documents, e-mail messages, forms and collaborative content like valuable assets. Enterprises have done a fairly good job of treating data as assets, thanks to information-rich, well-maintained data warehouses. But those seeking to make the most of content have not had as much success in building comprehensive ECM repositories. If you want some insight as to why ECM deployments fail or fail to get off the ground, download the In-Depth Report "10 Gotchas that Derail ECM Initiatives" and you'll find a detailed explanation of each of the following mistakes:

Text Mining: The Intersection of Content & BI

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:46:56 -0500

I was in NYC at TechWeb's Interop event today and I just happened to run into Harvey Spencer, an old friend from my days as editor-in-chief of Transform Magazine. Until it was folded into Intelligent Enterprise way back in late 2004, Transform focused on enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) challenges. Harvey was a contributing editor from the publication's start as Imaging Magazine, and he taught me everything he could about document capture when I joined the staff in 1998.

It was a nice coincidence seeing Harvey given that Intelligent Enterprise is about to launch a Tech Center (mini site) focused on ECM. I was keenly interested in hearing his take on how the world of content management is colliding with the world of business intelligence.

CEP for ETL: Next-Generation Tech for Low-Latency Data Warehousing

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:46:43 -0500

Complex event processing (CEP) is the next big thing in data integration. At least that's the game plan at Microsoft and Informatica. Given that IBM and Oracle also have CEP available on their technology toolbelts, there's little doubt that success will breed more adaptations of CEP for low-latency data integration.

In case you're not familiar with CEP (also known as stream processing), it's a technology that has matured out of rarified use in financial trading and government intelligence gathering scenarios. Today CEP is being employed for real-time network threat detection, transportation optimization, online commerce and smart grid power management. For CEP, "real time" means processing capacities and speeds ranging anywhere from thousands to millions of events (or patterns) detected within sub-seconds or even milliseconds.

Here's how Tom Casey, General Manager, SQL Server Business Intelligence, describes how Microsoft intends to exploit CEP technologies set to debut in next year's planned SQL Server 2008 R2 launch (and set to debut this month in a community technology preview release):

Microsoft Previews SQL Server Upgrades, In-Memory Analysis

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:25:46 -0500

You heard about Microsoft's Kilimanjaro and Madison projects last year, but these code names are going away now that the company is getting closer to releasing new versions of Microsoft SQL Server. Microsoft announced today that a community technical preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available this month that will include in-memory analysis capabilities. It also announced what will be called the Parallel Data Warehouse edition of SQL Server, which is set to debut in the first half of next year. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that IBM will be a hardware partner on Microsoft's Fast Track Data Warehouse reference configurations and the coming data warehouse edition.

First let's detail the news everyone expected. The "November CTP," as it's called, will let people try out two new in-memory analysis capabilities:

SAP Upgrades BusinessObjects Explorer

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:27:47 -0500

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.

Analytics Aplenty at IBM's IOD Conference

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:16:37 -0500

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:

5 Ways to Cut Costs with Predictive Analytics

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:11:45 -0500

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

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:24:53 -0500

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:

Oracle's Exadata Redux and Fusion Apps Plug

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:16:28 -0500

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.

Prediction: Process Market Will Surpass ERP

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:16:36 -0500

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."

Hadoop and the Big-Data Revolution

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:31:52 -0500

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:

Oracle Taps HyperRoll, IBM Sells U2 Databases

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:57:14 -0500

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.

More on 'The Next Big Reporting Challenge'

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:27:39 -0500

"The carbon-based free lunch is over. Breakthroughs on climate change and improving our society's energy efficiency are within reach."

Would you guess this quote is from A.) A na�ve, tree-hugging environmentalist B.) Paul Dickinson, CEO of the global, non-for-profit Carbon Disclosure Project (quoted in this week's in-depth feature) or C.) John W. Rowe, chief executive of Chicago-based utility company Exelon?

I was shocked to read in an article in today's New York Times that it was Rowe of Exelon. In fact, Rowe is pulling his company out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to protest the pro-business group's stance on climate change regulation. And Exelon is not alone. The Times reports that Pacific Gas & Electric of Northern California and PNM Resources of New Mexico have also threatened to quit the Chamber. But before you conclude that hard-nosed capitalists are turning into altruists, read on. The story explains that Exelon, PG&E and others may stand to gain if greenhouse gases are regulated because they are less dependent upon coal than their competitors.

Oracle Should Back Up its Exadata V2 Claims

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:26:31 -0500

Yesterday reporters were treated to an unusual product introduction from Oracle -- at least as the event was experienced via the Webcast. For about 30 minutes it was steaming along like a vintage Oracle product launch. Larry Ellison took the stage first and delivered a long list of impressive claims about Oracle Exadata Version 2, a new Sun-hardware-based data warehousing AND OLTP (transaction processing) appliance described as beating every alternative on the face of the planet in terms of performance, price, capacity and every other parameter Ellison came up with. Next, Sun executive vice president John Fowler presented deeper detail on the hardware, which, to nobody's surprise, happens to come from a vendor Oracle is busy attempting to acquire.

Normally such a presentation would close with reflections from a few beta customer and/or analysts before going into a Q&A (either during or soon after the main event). Instead the Webcast abruptly ended without so much as a goodbye. When that happened I asked public relations reps what happened and told them I had plenty of questions (and I'm sure plenty of other reporters did the same). "We don't know what happened," the PR rep replied, "but here's the press release." And that was that!

IBM Cognos Express Hits and Misses

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:03:30 -0500

I'm glad to see that IBM Cognos is making the most of good assets. Rather than introducing a light version of Cognos enterprise technologies to meet the needs of midsize companies, IBM yesterday bowed an IBM Cognos Express offering that is really one part Cognos and two parts Applix TM1.

I have not heard much about Applix since it was acquired by Cognos way back in 2007. Apparently it's going strong as a stand-alone product, but it should have been sharing in all the attention QlikView and Spotfire have been getting these past two years. The speed and ease of in-memory-based "what-if" analysis has helped make QlikView one of the fastest-growing products in BI for the past few years.

More On '4 Technologies Reshaping BI'

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:41:24 -0500

Last week's in-depth feature, "4 Technologies That Are Reshaping Business Intelligence," generated a number of comments and questions. Here are three of the deeper musings and inquiries along with my thoughts on parallel processing vs. in-memory technology, uses of stream processing/complex event processing, and growing demand for predictive analytics...

Comment on massively parallel processing (MPP) vs. in-memory technology:

I enjoyed reading your August 31 story "4 Technologies That Are Reshaping Business Intelligence." I regularly hear the MPP database vendors bat down in-memory solutions as a transitory bump-up in scalability and performance, effective for now, but not on a long-term roadmap. They contend that when the data volumes and analytics workloads inevitably grow, in-memory hardware becomes less practical and economic, and ultimately has scalability limits. Of course, as SSDs become more economical and replace conventional disk drives, then MPP database vendors will become on a larger scale closer to what in-memory solutions provide now on a smaller scale. -�Mike

Oracle Database R2 Adds In-Memory Query

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:18:51 -0500

Oracle seems to be making big announcements in the quietest of news periods lately. A big Oracle Fusion 11g Middleware announcement was made earlier this summer on July 1, just two days before the Independence Day three-day weekend. Yesterday it was the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (R2), announced in the doldrums of August just days before Labor Day weekend.

There didn't seem to be many of us reporters dialed into the conference call during the Q&A session; there were several long pauses while the operator waited for next questions. And only a handful of questions were ultimately asked. Granted, this is an R2 announcement, with mostly refinements rather than new features, but it's still an important release.

Prediction Meets the People Problem

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:34:58 -0500

Are you ready for analytics? As I point out in this week's in-depth feature on "4 Technologies that Are Reshaping Business Intelligence," analytic skills and, particularly, the math skills used in predictive analytics are in high demand. Rising ambitions and investments in related software could bring about an analytic renaissance, with deep insight and prediction reaching mainstream use. Or, if it turns out organizations can't muster the talent needed to analyze and predict, we might see a classic Gartner Hype Cycle "trough of disillusionment."

Lots of vendors now offer (or are scrambling to offer) analytic software, but the question is, how much expertise will you need to make productive use of the software? As The New York Times recently reported, statisticians and other math whizzes who can handle these techniques aren't having any trouble finding work:

IBM Takes SPSS for $1.2 Billion

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:50:49 -0500

I'm at IBM's research center in Hawthorne, NY, today where a presentation is about to take place on the IBM Smart Analytics System, which is a comprehensive new take on the InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse solutions with prepackacked content such as vertical domain modules and solution accelerators. The bombshell announcement that everybody wants to hear about, though, is IBM's $1.2 acquisition of Chicago-based SPSS. That news was broken this morning by the Wall Street Journal.

Extra, Extra: Wall Street Uses Technology to Make Money

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:19:01 -0500

The New York Times today uncovered what it calls "high frequency trading" in a page-one story that paints a picture of big Wall Street firms taking unfair advantage with the aid of technology. The story is really about complex event processing, or CEP technology, something that has been operating behind the scenes on Wall Street for years. But now that TARP-money-taking financial firms are facing public scrutiny, suddenly the CEP "technological arms race" is being cast in a harsh light.

Here's a sampling of the article's take on high-frequency trading ills:

Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Should Customers Be Concerned?

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:03:44 -0500

Another independent gets taken over by the big boys. That's the good-for-Oracle, possibly bad-for-the-industry news today with Oracle's acquisition of GoldenGate Software, the San Francisco-based data integration, replication and synchronization vendor. The deal is good for Oracle because it gives it change data capture and other low-latency data integration options it previously lacked. But what of GoldenGate's many technology-agnostic tools and industry partnerships?

Intelligent Enterprise has covered GoldenGate's data quality, disaster recovery and "transactional data management" software over the years, but the latter appears to have motivated today's announcement, as indicated here: