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?

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 story of VMware is a minor variation on the classic story of the rock band: A little-known but daring group produces new and exciting sound that captures the audience's attention, and a nice little share of their wallet too. They get very successful. Then things begin to fall apart and the group splits, the lead singer going his (or her) own way. (Beatles? Check. Eagles? Check. The Police? Check. Genesis? Check. Chicago? Check. Wham? Check. Very dated examples? Check). The privately held VMware arrived to a sensational debut on the New York Stock Exchange in August 2007 with an IPO which was reportedly the strongest since Google (read my blog) -- a resounding success for President & CEO Diane Green, who had co-founded VMware some ten years earlier.

"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.

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.

Browsing the local papers during my trip to India last week, I came across a news item (based on a PR release) about Pervasive that caught my attention. Pervasive has partnered with a US-based firm (but having Indian roots & operations) to market and deliver data integration solutions in India. That's a smart move -- clients will be much more inclined to consider Pervasive solutions if there's someone local they can rely on for support. Also, India is rapidly growing market; the Indian economy grew at 7.9 percent annually last quarter -- no small accomplishment in a tough worldwide recession -- and is expected to grow at upwards of 10 percent next year.

First, let us give Informatica its due credit. To quote the company, Informatica 9 "uniquely delivers a comprehensive platform by combining products in six categories: enterprise data integration, data quality, B2B data exchange, application information lifecycle management, complex event processing and cloud computing data integration," and can be deployed "on-premise or in the internet cloud."

The idea behind the SnapStore, now thrown open for a 100-day beta test by SnapLogic, is similar to the Apple application store: developers can load their applications on a storefront hosted by SnapLogic; when a sale is made, they receive 70% of the price while SnapLogic retains 30%. The difference is that these applications – called Snapps – are in fact data integration (i.e. ETL) components such as connectors, transformations and pipelines (i.e. programs). These components will all need to use the DataFlow API ("SnAPI"); in turn, this ensures that components can be build on top of, and together with, each other. But does this imply vendor lock-in? Nope. SnapLogic Chairman/CEO Gaurav Dhillon tells me (via email) developers are free to write the components in a popular Web language like Java or Python and then isolate the SnAPI dependencies. In many cases, existing libraries can easily be wrapped with a SnAPI wrapper.

Not too long ago, I wrote about a Federal IT spending dashboard created by the US Government that represented an unprecedented attempt at bringing transparency to federal IT spending, simultaneous demonstrating a federal desire of using modern technologies for a greater and common good.

Not content with this remarkable initiative, the US Government seems to have taken on another solid challenge: leading the charge for deeper and wider adoption of cloud computing across government agencies. Make no mistake: this is an extraordinarily ambitious initiative, but one whose benefits should (with some luck) eventually widely surpass the challenges.

Dell and Perot Systems have been "weekend lovers" for a long time -- Dell is based at Austin, TX, while Perot Systems is based near Dallas, a mere 200 miles away. Some analysts have seen this as a compatible consummation long in the making. Nonetheless, it's always satisfying when things happen as expected.

The acquisition price has been set at $3.9 billion -- a nearly 70% premium over market value. Combined sales will be around $57 billion, but the more pertinent number is as follows: the combined services revenue for Dell and Perot Systems will be about $8 billion.

The McKinsey findings appear, at first glance, very optimistic for offshore outsourcing in general and India in particular. Out of a total of $80 billion worldwide revenues for providers of offshore services in business and technology, India leads by a wide margin, garnering $58 billion -- a market share of over 70%. The future looks good too -- McKinsey estimates that the global "offshoring" market could grow to about $500 billion by 2020.

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!"

How is Chrome OS different from Google's Chrome browser... or is it?

The fact is, operating system aficionados (I count myself in that group) have had very little to celebrate over the past many years. VMS? Gone. Unix? Gone. Linux? Very much there -- robust, capable and popular -- yet continues to underperform expectations. Ironically, the most exciting OS news in recent times has been the OS-killer concept of "virtualization", which is a strange beast indeed -- on one hand, it seems to have the power to make operating systems vanish... yet the closer you look at it, the more it looks like an operating system itself.

As reported in The New York Times, the so-called IT Dashboard was put together by the US government in a remarkably short six weeks, and will "track and analyze the more than $70 billion a year that the federal government spends on information technology."

The T.S.A Secure Flight program has been developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a key 9/11 Commission recommendation for improving the effectiveness of watch lists at our airports, in order to enhance the security of domestic and international commercial air travel. As reported in The New York Times and on the TSA Web site, the Secure Flight program will improve upon current practices in matching passenger identities to watch lists in many ways. At first glance, this appears to be a well thought-out program that conforms to several basic tenets of Master Data Management (in bold below), in this case for the "Customer" entity.

Analyst Jeffrey Hammond, co-author of a recent Forrester Research report on the data modeling market, finds that organizations aligned more traditionally -- with clearly delineated database administrator and data modeling/architect roles -- tend to favor classic data modeling tools like CA ERwin. Organizations with an emphasis on integrated enterprise architecture are more likely to favor tools like Sybase PowerDesigner, with its integrated modeling platform that goes beyond data. For organizations looking to empower developers, Hammond recommends tools like Embarcadero ER/Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Data modeling is a niche discipline and a small software market with consistent if unspectacular growth -- Forrester Research puts the current market (including sales and support) at about $165 million, growing to about $290 million over the next four years. But what this market lacks in terms of size it more than makes up in terms of business impact; data modeling is at the heart of every custom application development, data integration and data warehousing effort.

• The PMBOK organizes "project knowledge" in the form of processes (42 in all) categorized into process groups and knowledge areas. Every process falls into one (and only one) process group, and one (and only one) knowledge area. PMBOK lays out five process groups (Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing) and nine knowledge areas (Integration, Scope, Time, Cost, Quality, Human Resources, Communications, Risk, Procurement – add the word "management" after each).
  
• There are two roadblocks to getting PMP certified: getting qualified for the PMP examination, which requires that you demonstrate substantial, real-life experience across the five process groups; and the four-hour PMP examination itself, which requires that you answer 200 questions covering the process groups.

Here, at last, is my follow-up post about PMP training and certification.

]]> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chandrasv2.html/blog/archives/2009/05/pmp_certificati_1.html /blog/archives/2009/05/pmp_certificati_1.html Information Management Mon, 11 May 2009 12:12:13 -0500 I recently took some time off from my moonlighting activities (e.g., writing for IE) to get my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute. I then sat down to analyze myself. Why did I do the PMP certification? How can it be helpful for me (and others like me)? If it's something you, too, are pondering, read on for my experiences and thoughts...

What drove me to getting the certification is a three-part answer: partly curiosity, partly certification value, and partly "Why not me?"

]]> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chandrasv2.html/blog/archives/2009/05/pmp_certificati.html /blog/archives/2009/05/pmp_certificati.html Information Management Tue, 05 May 2009 16:49:39 -0500 Sun's been getting battered in the high seas of technology for a while now. Who else but IBM could find value in this flotsam and jetsam?

There's an easy way to find out if a company has lost its way: try to define the company in one, reasonably compact sentence. For example, how would you describe Sun and CA, without tying the sentence up in multiple, complex subclauses?

]]> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chandrasv2.html/blog/archives/2009/03/ibm_does_sun_an.html /blog/archives/2009/03/ibm_does_sun_an.html Information Management Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:41:57 -0500 Microsoft recently announced plans to enable direct access to SQL Server databases in the cloud using Tabular Data Stream (TDS), the native SQL Server network protocol. This is exciting news for Microsoft developers, and just the kind of thing that Microsoft competitors wouldn't want to happen too soon...

The Microsoft announcement makes it clear that Microsoft wants to move away from the current ACE data model and toward a TDS-based model. The ACE model uses the concepts of Authority (e.g. user space), Containers (e.g. tables) and Entities (e.g. rows) to allow access to SQL Server databases in the cloud. Interestingly, there's nothing wrong with the ACE model -- in one form or the other, it is the dominant data access model for databases in the cloud. (For more information, check out this article I wrote nearly a year ago on Microsoft's foray into database clouds).

]]> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chandrasv2.html/blog/archives/2009/03/database_in_the.html /blog/archives/2009/03/database_in_the.html Information Management Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:40:53 -0500 I was disappointed to find Apple missing from the IE Editors' Choice list. There's a "perfect storm" brewing that just might elevate the iPhone as the tool of choice for corporate types, not just for e-mail but for BI on the go.

Apple has, of course, long been the consumer's delight and the corporation's despair. Apple leads digital convergence in our personal lives – the iPod, iPhone and Mac work together like no other set of these technologies and are beautiful to boot (pun unintended) – but is still a rarity on the corporate landscape. This is partly because for years, Apple has maneuvered itself out of corporate reach (price uncompetitiveness being no small a factor) and partly because Microsoft Windows and Windows applications are so firmly entrenched on the corporate desktop.

But it looks like things might be about to change, with a groundswell led by the acclaimed iPhone.

]]> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chandrasv2.html/blog/archives/2009/01/mobile_bi_with.html /blog/archives/2009/01/mobile_bi_with.html Business Intelligence Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:49:54 -0500 In news that is still unfolding, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest offshore services vendor, has made a stunning admission of massive financial fraud. Are you impacted? If so, how do you react?

First, the event, in case it's news to you: Satyam co-founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju has just admitted to cooking the books... for years. In his words...

"What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of company operations grew. It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten."

]]> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chandrasv2.html/blog/archives/2009/01/satyams_stunnin.html /blog/archives/2009/01/satyams_stunnin.html Enterprise Applications Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:18:02 -0500 Searching for BI. MDM is for real. Multi-flavored data warehouses. It's why we love Google. As the title suggests, these are truly meanderings...

Searching for BI

Sitting in on a Cognos event recently, the speaker, a Cognos global marketing manager, asked the attendants how many people used the Go! Search feature (which lets users search up, down and across BI content and other corporate information). Nobody seemed to raise their hand — which had the presenter scratching his head: "Maybe we need to look into the pricing," he quipped...

]]> http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chandrasv2.html/blog/archives/2009/01/new_years_meand.html /blog/archives/2009/01/new_years_meand.html Information Management Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:10:27 -0500