Intelligent Enterprise

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:

>>Continue reading "More on Teradata's SSD Speedster and (Cautious) Public-Cloud Offering"


Posted Wednesday, October 21, 2009
11:24 AM
>>Comments


Oracle's Exadata Redux and Fusion Apps Plug

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.

>>Continue reading "Oracle's Exadata Redux and Fusion Apps Plug"


Posted Thursday, October 15, 2009
12:16 PM
>>Comments


Prediction: Process Market Will Surpass ERP

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."

>>Continue reading "Prediction: Process Market Will Surpass ERP"


Posted Wednesday, October 14, 2009
11:16 AM
>>Comments


Hadoop and the Big-Data Revolution

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:

>>Continue reading "Hadoop and the Big-Data Revolution"


Posted Friday, October 2, 2009
4:31 PM
>>Comments


Oracle Taps HyperRoll, IBM Sells U2 Databases

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.

>>Continue reading "Oracle Taps HyperRoll, IBM Sells U2 Databases"


Posted Thursday, October 1, 2009
1:57 PM
>>Comments


More on 'The Next Big Reporting Challenge'

"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 naïve, 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.

>>Continue reading "More on 'The Next Big Reporting Challenge'"


Posted Tuesday, September 29, 2009
12:27 PM
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Oracle Should Back Up its Exadata V2 Claims

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!

>>Continue reading "Oracle Should Back Up its Exadata V2 Claims"


Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009
8:26 AM
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IBM Cognos Express Hits and Misses

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.

>>Continue reading "IBM Cognos Express Hits and Misses"


Posted Tuesday, September 15, 2009
1:03 PM
>>Comments


More On '4 Technologies Reshaping BI'

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

>>Continue reading "More On '4 Technologies Reshaping BI'"


Posted Thursday, September 10, 2009
12:41 PM
>>Comments


Oracle Database R2 Adds In-Memory Query

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.

>>Continue reading "Oracle Database R2 Adds In-Memory Query"


Posted Wednesday, September 2, 2009
10:18 AM
>>Comments


Prediction Meets the People Problem

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:

>>Continue reading "Prediction Meets the People Problem"


Posted Tuesday, September 1, 2009
8:34 AM
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IBM Takes SPSS for $1.2 Billion

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.

>>Continue reading "IBM Takes SPSS for $1.2 Billion"


Posted Tuesday, July 28, 2009
9:50 AM
>>Comments


Extra, Extra: Wall Street Uses Technology to Make Money

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:

>>Continue reading "Extra, Extra: Wall Street Uses Technology to Make Money"


Posted Friday, July 24, 2009
11:19 AM
>>Comments


Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Should Customers Be Concerned?

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:

>>Continue reading "Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Should Customers Be Concerned?"


Posted Thursday, July 23, 2009
4:03 PM
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Software AG to Acquire IDS Scheer

In a Teutonic transaction not likely to be surpassed unless applications giant SAP is ever acquired, Software AG announced today that it has issued a tender offer for IDS Scheer AG, the business process modeling and optimization vendor. Software AG and IDS Scheer have much in common, including their roots in Germany and their common focus on business process management. Both companies have also sought to gain marketshare in the vast North American market; Software AG made headway in 2007 by acquiring WebMethods while IDS Scheer has favored organic growth.

>>Continue reading "Software AG to Acquire IDS Scheer"


Posted Monday, July 13, 2009
6:21 PM
>>Comments


What Will Drive Next-Era BI? Take the Survey!

Our "Next-Era Business Intelligence" Tech Center has been a big hit since it was launched in April, drawing more than 40,000 unique visitors and hundreds of downloads of insightful reports. We're now getting ready to launch more reports, but we'd like your feedback on the topics you'd be most interested in reading about.

When you think about BI innovation that would make a difference to your enterprise, do you think about predictive analytics, embedded BI, text mining, or perhaps social networking? Tell us more about what interests you by taking this InformationWeek Analytics /Intelligent Enterprise BI survey.

>>Continue reading "What Will Drive Next-Era BI? Take the Survey!"


Posted Monday, July 13, 2009
1:40 PM
>>Comments


Beware: Dynamic Analytics and Static Social Networking May Not Mix

As recently reported by Mary Hayes Weier, the enterprise 2.0 social networking geeks at Jive Software (the folks behind the Clearspace wiki platform) have partnered with SAP to make use of BusinessObjects BI on demand offerings. Thus, Jive will enable anyone to embed dynamic analytic widgets into blogs, wikis and discussion forums as shown in this video from the Wolfe's Den vlog...

>>Continue reading "Beware: Dynamic Analytics and Static Social Networking May Not Mix"


Posted Monday, July 6, 2009
4:22 PM
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Mulling the Mystery of Microsoft's BI Market Share

How do you gauge Microsoft's business intelligence market share when it gives BI functionality away for free? That was a bit of a puzzle even before Microsoft's January announcement that it would end development of the PerformancePoint Server, the one and only entirely BI-focused product the company had. As part of that move, Microsoft now bundles what it calls "PerformancePoint Services" -- dashboarding, scorecarding and analytic capabilities -- into the enterprise edition of SharePoint. That's bundled as in free, just as Reporting Services and Analysis Services have long been bundled with Microsoft SQL Server. Microsoft's BI front end is Excel, the general-purpose spreadsheet tool that's part of the Office suite -- seldom purchased separately or used exclusively for BI.

So now if you own Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint (Enterprise) and Office, you already own Microsoft BI, and these days, Microsoft executives take every opportunity to point that out. In an interview earlier this month, Kristina Kerr, group product manager of Microsoft BI told me, "the move we made in January has definitely spurred on a lot of growth and a lot of interest in BI among SharePoint Enterprise customers. These are tough economic times, so a lot of customers are looking internally to see what they already own and see how they can make the most of it."

>>Continue reading "Mulling the Mystery of Microsoft's BI Market Share"


Posted Wednesday, July 1, 2009
8:47 AM
>>Comments


Is the LucidEra Over?

Chris Kanaracus of The Industry Standard reported yesterday that SaaS-base BI vendor LucidEra is set to shutter the business and put all assets up for sale. The story named only "a person familiar with the company's situation" as the source. There's no official word on the Web site and all my attempts to reach the company have failed thus far.

[Update: Darren Cunningham, LucidEra's VP of Marketing, responded to inquiries 6/23 at 3:40 pm ET with the following e-mail message:

All that I can say at this time is that our product and pipeline were both stronger than they'd ever been. Customer adoption was growing, which was reflected in the 20+ 5-star reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange since January. We got hit by just really, really bad timing to have to be raising our next round of funding in this economic climate.

Right now, various options are being looked at in the best interest of our creditors, customers, employees, and shareholders. There should be resolution for everyone involved soon so there is an orderly transition.]

>>Continue reading "Is the LucidEra Over?"


Posted Tuesday, June 23, 2009
2:46 PM
>>Comments


IBM Taps SPSS Analytics Software

IBM has been putting a full-court press on analytics in recent months, and it's pretty clear it will do whatever it takes to prevail in a field in which it currently has more depth than breadth. In a deal that will bolster IBM's ability to bring analytics to the enterprise masses, it was announced yesterday that the IT giant has licensed PASW Statistics software from Chicago-based analytics vendor SPSS.

IBM has deep thinkers, promising research and development, hundreds of high-end custom projects under its belt, and more than a score of new analytic applications available. Analytics has become so important a hot button that IBM has also reassigned more than 4,000 consultants from its BI, information management, performance management, content management and enterprise integration practices into a new Business Analytics & Optimization Services practice. (No doubt these folks will be doing much the same sorts of work, but under the banner of analytics.)

>>Continue reading "IBM Taps SPSS Analytics Software"


Posted Thursday, June 4, 2009
4:15 PM
>>Comments


Risk Technology Comes Up Short on Wall Street

I was interested to hear Bank of America/Merrill Lynch executive Jay Morreale talk about next-generation BI at last week's IDC Business Intelligence and Analytics Forum in New York. But when he started talking about his 20 years of experience "building risk-analysis applications and business decision-support tools" in the financial services industry, I was thinking, okay, so was he part of what went wrong on Wall Street?

I'm no financial reporter, but who isn't familiar with some of the details of what has happened to Merrill Lynch over the past year? When AIG, Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers hit the skids last fall, Merrill fell prey to the market gyrations and was quickly ushered into the hands of Bank of America with encouragement from the Bush Administration. When Merrill later reported some $15 billion in losses, BofA shareholders were more than a little upset, leading to the ouster of CEO Ken Lewis. (Let's not even get into the claims and counter claims by Lewis and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as to how that shotgun marriage came about). Long story short, it has been a big mess.

>>Continue reading "Risk Technology Comes Up Short on Wall Street"


Posted Thursday, May 28, 2009
11:48 AM
>>Comments


Explorer Seems Too Little, Too Late

So this is a Sapphire-worthy announcement? That SAP BusinessObjects still doesn't have the integration of Polestar and Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) quite ready and that it won't go beyond SAP Business Warehouse (BW) until late this year or early next year?

This news may dazzle the business intelligence neophytes who don't know in-memory technology from a hole in the ground, but plenty of people inside BI know that QlikTech, TIBCO Spotfire, IBM Cognos TM1 (formerly Applix), SAP BWA (formerly BI Accelerator) and other examples of in-memory have been around for quite a while. And maybe changing the name of the search-meets-BI Polestar interface to Explorer will beguile some into thinking there's actually a new product here.

>>Continue reading "Explorer Seems Too Little, Too Late "


Posted Tuesday, May 12, 2009
4:27 PM
>>Comments


SAP Will Bow In-Memory Technology at Sapphire

Two colleagues at TechWeb have learned from high-level sources that SAP will introduce this week at Sapphire something called SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. There's little doubt that this is a combination of the SAP BusinessObjects Polestar interface and Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) in-memory database technology. The vendor has been talking about this combination for some months and it even demonstrated it last year.

The benefit of BWA (formerly BI Accelerator) is fast querying powered by in-memory database technology. Polestar is an easy-to-use interface that lets you query data with the ease of an Internet search engine using natural language rather than SQL statements. As I described in this post from just over a year ago, the combination is compelling:

>>Continue reading "SAP Will Bow In-Memory Technology at Sapphire"


Posted Monday, May 11, 2009
4:49 PM
>>Comments


Microsoft BI Team Gears Up for 2010

Microsoft announced last week that its next Business Intelligence Conference, originally slated for October 2009 in Seattle, has been pushed back one full year to October 2010. I thought this event was on an 18-month cycle to begin with, so I wasn't disappointed. I also wasn't surprised given that Microsoft BI exec Guy Weismantel shared that news with Intelligent Enterprise earlier in the week as part of a press tour. Weismantel also said the much-anticipated Gemini (in-memory technology) and Kilimanjaro (scale-out data warehousing) releases are on track for the first half of 2010. So won't a Fall 2010 event be anti-climactic?

Microsoft' s explanation for the change in event plans was as follows:

Through 2009 and 2010 we will see more news and advancements around Microsoft BI as we lead into the launches of the next versions of Office and SQL Server. Due to this flurry of activity, and the global economic constraints on travel budgets worldwide, we are moving the BI conference to a bi-annual event. The next BI Conference, scheduled for October 2009, will be moved to October 2010 in Seattle, WA, and all further BI Conferences will be held every second year on an ongoing basis.

>>Continue reading "Microsoft BI Team Gears Up for 2010"


Posted Tuesday, May 5, 2009
11:11 AM
>>Comments


SAP-Teradata Alliance Goes Beyond the Database

The new alliance between Teradata and SAP announced yesterday is first and foremost about making life easier for joint customers. I certainly acknowledged this fact in yesterday's blog post (despite my dark headline), and, in fact, I was surprised to learn, in an interview with executives from both companies, that SAP didn't previously support the Teradata database. So joint customers -- and SAP says close to half of its top 100 customers also run Teradata -- were making do with no connections or customized integrations.

"Some customers were using SAP NetWeaver BW in stand-alone fashion, say just for finance coming out of ERP or another module," explains Tim Lang, VP of product management, SAP BusinessObjects. "Other customers were extracting and moving some data from NetWeaver to Teradata, but there was no standardized, bi-directional connection. The big news here is that Teradata will [soon] be a supported database underneath BW, so customers can take advantage of all the standard development-test-to-production lifecycle management as well as support services."

Analyst Curt Monash may have had my post in mind when he wrote that he doesn't see any "joint mission to smite Oracle, IBM, and/or Microsoft" in this alliance, but that's where my second question from yesterday's post comes into play. So "to what extent [will] SAP BusinessObjects software be integrated with Teradata?" The possibilities go well beyond SAP BW and the DBMS, and it's not so much a matter of smiting the competition as keeping up!

>>Continue reading "SAP-Teradata Alliance Goes Beyond the Database"


Posted Tuesday, April 28, 2009
11:05 AM
>>Comments


Teradata, SAP Forge Enemy-of-an-Enemy Alliance

Data warehousing vendor Teradata today announced a new partnership with enterprise applications and business intelligence vendor SAP. On the surface, the deal is about helping joint customers by integrating SAP NetWeaver BW (Business Warehouse) and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence software with Teradata's Active Data Warehouse solutions. Below the surface, the pairing brings closer together two vendors that both compete head on with Oracle and (with some coopetition) IBM.

>>Continue reading "Teradata, SAP Forge Enemy-of-an-Enemy Alliance"


Posted Monday, April 27, 2009
12:27 PM
>>Comments


Mind the Gaps in BI Support and Value

The good news is that most business execs and IT professionals we recently surveyed are supportive of business intelligence (BI) initiatives. The bad news is that many of these respondents also say their enthusiasm isn't universally shared. What's more, quite a few BI watchers report that the technology just isn't living up to its potential. Here are a few thoughts on these latest bits of BI intelligence.

>>Continue reading "Mind the Gaps in BI Support and Value"


Posted Thursday, April 23, 2009
9:21 AM
>>Comments


IBM Takes On Analytics and Optimization

I'm just back from IBM's Research center in Hawthorne, NY, where company officials today announced a new "IBM Business Analytics & Optimization Services" practice. The name and formalized organization are new, but executives took pains to explain that today's event was more of an unveiling of an initiative that has been in the works –- across IBM Global Business Services (GBS), the IBM Software Group and IBM Research -- for at least a few years. What's more, it's "hitting the ground running" with more than 4,000 consultants dedicated to the practice across the globe.

I didn't detect any rumblings about this "a few years" back, but I have consistently heard IBM underscoring the word "analytics" since the coronation of the Cognos acquisition back in February of 2008. It was there that Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group, declared, "we've not been seen as a company that was doing business intelligence [before acquiring Cognos]... but IBM has been a leader in delivering unique, sophisticated analytic capabilities."

>>Continue reading "IBM Takes On Analytics and Optimization"


Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009
8:16 PM
>>Comments


Yes to Open Source, No to SaaS: Which IT Alternatives Will You Adopt?

Open source software is the most accepted among five IT alternatives -- already in use by 42% of those surveyed -- while cloud computing is at the bleeding-edge -- in use by 14% of respondents. What's a bit surprising, however, is that software as a service (SaaS) is on more "not likely to consider" lists (49%) than is the cloud (47%). These are just a few of the findings of our "Attitudes and Priorities" survey, which is based on interviews with more than 300 readers with responsibility for enterprise IT purchases.

Joining open-source software, SaaS and the Cloud on our list of five IT alternatives are social networking tools (blogs, microblogs, wikis, RSS, etc.) and rich Internet applications (mashups, Ajax, Flash/Flex, Silverlight, etc.). As you can see (click on the thumbnail image below), we asked 305 respondents to tell us which ones they are using, which ones they're considering and which ones are on the "don't go there" list. (In case you were wondering, 54% of the respondents were from companies with 1,000 or more employees, and 30% were from firms with 10,000 or more employee. Job titles broke out as follows: 60% IT, 17% business, 8% consultant, 15% "other" or unspecified.)

>>Continue reading "Yes to Open Source, No to SaaS: Which IT Alternatives Will You Adopt?"


Posted Thursday, April 9, 2009
10:01 AM
>>Comments


Who's Buying What in BI?

What are firms in your industry buying? What are firms of your size buying? What are IT types using and and what are business types using? When it comes to business intelligence software, you'll find answers to all these questions in Nigel Pendse's "The BI Survey 8."

As I explain in this article, there are more than 350 charts and 490 pages in "The BI Survey 8." As one of a handful of media sponsors to the survey, Intelligent Enterprise is entitled to share just a peek at the report. To give you some sense of where the more than 2,600 respondents stand on the best-known BI product out there, I obtained approval to share these four charts:

>>Continue reading "Who's Buying What in BI?"


Posted Thursday, April 2, 2009
3:47 PM
>>Comments


'Fewer Measures, Better Results' and Other Advice for the Times

If your enterprise is focusing on more than, say, a dozen key performance measures, you are probably not seeing the forest for the trees. This is just one bit of advice delivered in one of nearly a score of articles we've published on the theme of adjusting your plans and approaches to combat the downturn. Next week we'll roll the best of that advice into a one-hour Webinar entitled "Resetting Information and BI Priorities for a Challenging Economy."

The case for KPI/Dashboard restraint is well illustrated by Shari Rogalski, Executive Director, Accenture Information Management Services. Rogalski shares a story about a large retailer that was reporting literally hundreds of "key metrics" to run the business. When the company decided to focus strictly on customer satisfaction and profitability, they ended up with just 15 key metrics.

>>Continue reading "'Fewer Measures, Better Results' and Other Advice for the Times"


Posted Wednesday, March 25, 2009
12:08 PM
>>Comments


Diversity Rules At Gartner's 'Megavendor' Comparison

With a show of hands at the "Comparing the Megavendors" presentation yesterday at the Gartner BI Summit, attendees made it clear that giants IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have their collective tentacles into nearly every enterprise. Attendees also made it clear that those tentacles are often intertwined and that they are in no rush to consolidate on just one vendor.

The Maryland Ballroom here at the Gaylord National Harbor conference center was pretty much full for the Megavendor presentation, with many people standing at the back and along the sides of the room -- a good indication of the popularity of this topic. (Gartner says 730 people registered for this event, but my count of seats in the lunch and breakfast hall would put the figure closer to 500.) Aptly named analyst Bill Hostmann served as emcee of the session, and his colleagues James Richardson, Neil Chandler, Donald Feinberg and John Van Decker presented vendor assessments of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP Respectively.

>>Continue reading "Diversity Rules At Gartner's 'Megavendor' Comparison"


Posted Tuesday, March 10, 2009
5:47 PM
>>Comments


Gartner Cites Five Reasons for 'BI'g Discrepancy

I'm here at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Washington D.C. this week, and opening keynoters John Van Decker and Kurt Schlegel kicked things off talking about the "BI"g discrepancy. That gap is between expectations for and investments in BI and the value that the technology is actually delivering to business users. The talk closely paralleled my Q&A interview with analyst Donald Feinberg, but Van Decker and Schlegel did break fresh ground in laying out these five reasons for the discrepancy:

>>Continue reading "Gartner Cites Five Reasons for 'BI'g Discrepancy"


Posted Monday, March 9, 2009
11:52 AM
>>Comments


Resetting Priorities For New Economic Realities

The stock market reaches a 12-year low... GM threatened with bankruptcy... this week's news presents fresh evidence of the fragile state of the US and global economies. But it has been abundantly clear since late last year that companies need to hit the reset button when it comes to setting enterprise information management and applications priorities. In the face of new economic realities, what would you still cite as top priority?

In an Intelligent Enterprise/InformationWeek Analytics survey conducted in January, we surveyed more than 300 information technology and business professionals about their attitudes and imperatives in five key areas of enterprise technology: information management, business intelligence, enterprise applications, performance management, and process management. In this post-economic-meltdown survey, readers shared their opinions on the squeakiest wheels requiring continued investment over the coming 12 to 24 months.

>>Continue reading "Resetting Priorities For New Economic Realities"


Posted Friday, March 6, 2009
9:36 AM
>>Comments


Microsoft, Sybase and Vertica Raise Data Warehouse Ante

This week has seen not one, not two, but three fairly significant data-warehouse-related product announcements at this week' TDWI event in Las Vegas. That's a testament to the pace of innovation in data warehousing and to the insatiable demand for better, faster, cheaper ways of crunching more numbers.

The first of this week's announcements came from Microsoft with its release of its Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architectures. These preconfigured, SQL Server-ready 4-terabyte to 32-terabyte server-and-storage bundles are akin to Oracle's Optimized Warehouses and IBM's Balanced Configuration Units. But in Microsoft's case they're also billed as a stepping stone to Microsoft's Project Madison release, which will take SQL Server into the hundreds of terabytes with massively parallel processing (MPP) and scale-out architecture.


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Posted Thursday, February 26, 2009
2:02 PM
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IBM-Cognos One Year Later

It was one year ago that IBM completed its acquisition of Cognos, and Big Blue is making it known that it's happy with the results. Cognos is now one of four parts of its "Information On Demand" strategy, and IBM says revenue growth for the business in 2008 was a healthy 18%. I wanted to know how much of that growth was organic, versus fueled by IBM's acquisitions, so I interviewed two top executives. I didn't get any facts breaking out those numbers, but I did hear a few interesting tidbits.

The four segments of the Information Management business are Data Management (databases), Enterprise Content Management, InfoSphere (information integration), and Business Intelligence and Performance Management. This vast portfolio is chocked full of bits, pieces and huge chunks acquired from independents including Informix, FileNet, Ascential, DWL, Trigo and, of course, Cognos. Dissecting the performance must be hard even for IBM's bean counters, but I thought it might be easier to looking at a discreet, recently added chunk like Cognos. Unfortuntely, Tom Inman, Vice President of IOD Acceleration (how's that for a title?), just wouldn't go there.

>>Continue reading "IBM-Cognos One Year Later"


Posted Friday, February 6, 2009
12:47 PM
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TIBCO's New Appliance Competes With IBM's

As explained in this story, TIBCO today made a splashy announcement about its first-ever hardware offering, the TIBCO Messaging Appliance P-7500. Well detailed are all the important facts about this appliance-based implementation of TIBCO's venerable Rendezvous messaging software: 10 times higher message volume capacity, a 50-percent reduction in message latency, and better predictability than message bus deployments on general-purpose hardware. What's more, the 4U box will bring data centers comparable message processing capacity with one tenth the physical footprint and one tenth the power consumption of conventional deployments (and even better if you're replacing really old servers).

What's missing from the story is competitive context. To wit, TIBCO's biggest competitor, IBM, entered the appliance-based message bus market way back in 2006. But that's not to say that TIBCO doesn't have something to crow about – at least for now.

>>Continue reading "TIBCO's New Appliance Competes With IBM's"


Posted Wednesday, February 4, 2009
5:04 PM
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Making Sense of Gartner's '09 BI Magic Quadrant

I'm a bit perplexed by the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, released last week and made accessible to all by SAS, which purchased the rights to post it online. SAS, of course, is in the prized upper-right quadrant along with IBM (Cognos), SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Information Builders and Microstrategy. I was surprised by the disappearance of the name "Business Objects" from the Quadrant (even within parentheses, as used for "(Cognos)"), and I was even more mystified by the second-tier placement of SAP (which now stands for the combined SAP-Business Objects portfolio). Also curious was the hit Microsoft took on its "Ability to Execute" while its "Completeness of Vision" stayed put.

Let's take on these open questions one by one:


>>Continue reading "Making Sense of Gartner's '09 BI Magic Quadrant"


Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2009
2:17 PM
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SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects

Earlier this week, I joined a few colleagues at InformationWeek to take part in an exclusive interview with SAP's Bill McDermott, President and CEO of Global Field Operations and an Executive Board Member. The two-hour discussion was broad ranging, but I honed in on the state of Business Objects and demand for performance management and process management. McDermott called the Bobj acquisition "one of the greatest moves that SAP ever made," and he also detailed a few ways in which the business intelligence vendor is being more closely integrated into SAP.

Never one to sound downbeat, McDermott said the acquisition has "turned out so well" because "Business Objects is platform agnostic, so when you're operating in a heterogeneous environment and you want to unify a management team on a common platform approach, you have to be able to extract data from any source. You have to be able to process that data very quickly and you have to be able to pop that data up to each role in the value chain based on the attributes that they care about. Before Business Objects, we couldn't talk to CEOs, CFOs and other executives about that as intelligently as we can today."

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Posted Thursday, January 8, 2009
10:47 AM
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HP Says It's 'All in' On BI and Neoview

In case you missed the front-page story in the New York Times business section last week, HP wants the world to know that it's serious about business intelligence and that it's standing behind Neoview as a cornerstone of its future in that business. The Times spun it as a story about HP CEO Mark Hurd taking on his old employer, NCR-Teradata, along with the other leaders of data warehousing, but that's old news to those in the BI and data warehousing industry. The new news is that HP has reorganized the formerly separate Neoview product organization and the business intelligence services group that had its roots in the acquired Knightsbridge consulting business.

HP Business Intelligence Solutions is the newly unified, worldwide business dedicated to BI and data warehousing, and to underscore its importance to the company, HP has put executive Kristina Robinson, a Teradata veteran, in charge. Her bio is impressive:

>>Continue reading "HP Says It's 'All in' On BI and Neoview"


Posted Monday, January 5, 2009
9:59 AM
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Intelligent Enterprise Top-Ten Blog Posts of 2008

What did you, the readers of Intelligent Enterprise, like most on this site in 2008? When it comes to our weekly feature articles, practical how-to stories are most popular, and as you see from this year's top-ten list, favorite topics include business intelligence, data warehousing and business process management. As for the IE blogosphere, the three keys to popularity are controversy, controversy, controversy, whether it has to do with vendor support issues, analyst rankings, or notable acquisitions. Here's a list of our top-ten blog posts of 2008:

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Posted Monday, December 29, 2008
12:50 PM
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Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?

The gist of Ambuj Goyal's message in this Q&A interview is that predictive and statistical modeling — key offerings for the likes of SAS and SPSS — are overrated. IBM has what Goyal describes as better, cheaper alternatives in a mix of techniques developed for industry- and domain-specific challenges. Okay, I'm fine with challenging conventional wisdom and seeking the simplest possible solutions, but I also believe there's good reason SAS, SPSS, and a few other analytics specialists have grown large and stable businesses. What's more, I won't be surprised if and when IBM acquires one of these analytics vendors.

>>Continue reading "Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?"


Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008
12:30 PM
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Oracle Customers: Want More Detail on the Oracle Database Machine?

Oracle made a lot of tantalizing claims when it introduced the HP Oracle Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server at October's Oracle OpenWorld. Still, there were plenty of questions in the wake of the event. What are the configurations? What are the costs? How does licensing work? When does it make sense to switch from conventional warehousing to the "machine" approach?

>>Continue reading "Oracle Customers: Want More Detail on the Oracle Database Machine? "


Posted Monday, December 15, 2008
9:29 AM
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Why BI Vendors Won't Drive Mobile BI

Author David Hatch of Aberdeen Group didn't underscore this point in this week's feature on "Best-in-Class Secrets to Mobile BI Success," but it's pretty clear that the Mobile offerings from the major business intelligence vendors won't end up driving anywhere near the lion's share of mobile BI adoption. The evidence, as well as common sense, tells us that mobile applications with embedded intelligence will be the locus of most mobile BI.

That's not to say that the likes of Business Objects Mobile, Cognos Go!Mobile, Information Builders Mobile Favorites and Microstrategy Mobile won't see demand. It's just that there are only so many situations in which dashboards, scorecards and reports built on the parent platforms need to be mobilized. In our own poll, posted on our home page, the readers of Intelligent Enterprise didn't exactly place mobile BI as a high priority when asked, Which best describes your status/attitude toward mobile (smart phone) delivery of business intelligence?:


>>Continue reading "Why BI Vendors Won't Drive Mobile BI"


Posted Thursday, December 11, 2008
8:31 AM
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Making Money With Mashups

I'm back from Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, and I came away impressed with both the event and my first real "unconference" experience. The 300 or so (mostly) developers attending were not only passionate and engaged, they drove much of the content, and at least 14 whipped up entries for the climax of the event, the Best Mashup Contest.

So what's an unconference? The basic definition is that it's participant driven, but can you imagine telling your boss you're going to a conference that has nothing on the agenda? That's where things stood (by design) on Tuesday morning, but at least a score of "campers" lined up after the morning keynote to present their ideas for discussion topics. Within 15 minutes, they nearly filled the schedule, and the remaining open slots were filled with discussions (not sales pitches) proposed by event-sponsors including IBM, AOL Developer Network, Google, JackBe, wetpaint, Yahoo Developer Network and Zembly.


>>Continue reading "Making Money With Mashups"


Posted Friday, November 21, 2008
10:20 AM
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'Soul of the Web' At Stake

I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup, which Camp co-founder David Berlind predicted will "trump all other development ecosystems" because it's focused on quickly and easily knitting together the meat of the functionality rather than all the system-level code required in conventional development and computing.

"Just as the spreadsheet enabled all sorts of people to become number crunchers, mashups are going to enable a much larger community to become Web developers," Berlind said in his kickoff keynote.

The battle for the Web is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other. The topic came up during a panel discussion on "Why Ajax Standards Matter," which didn't sound too promising going in. Things started getting really interesting when Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, warned, "there's a struggle for the soul of the Web," where rich Internet and Web application development is concerned, and "proprietary engines like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are coming on strong."


>>Continue reading "'Soul of the Web' At Stake"


Posted Monday, November 17, 2008
5:08 PM
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IBM, Oracle and the Appliance Campaign Trail

Perhaps I've been watching too much political coverage on TV lately, but at one point during IBM's Information On Demand (IOD) press conference yesterday, it struck me like a campaign stop. To set the scene, the first question during the post-announcement Q&A session came from Forrester Research analyst Jim Kobielus, who cited the recent "pretty significant" announcements by Oracle and Teradata in the area of data warehousing and appliances. Noting the lack of warehouse- and appliance-related announcements at IOD, Koblielus asked, "what is IBM's strategy, going forward, to make your InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse portfolio ever most cost-effective and ever more scalable?"

Rather than responding directly to the question, Arvind Krishna, Vice President Data Management and Worldwide Information Management Development, first took on the role of Oracle attack dog. "The only pricing Oracle has provided [on the Oracle Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server] is for the hardware," Krishna challenged. "When you actually add in the pricing of the software, it's significantly higher than our pricing — more than three times as much. If you add in the price of the software to the $40,000 per terabyte that they claimed, the price is closer to $300,000 per terabyte."


>>Continue reading "IBM, Oracle and the Appliance Campaign Trail"


Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008
12:57 PM
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Data Warehousing Takes Center Stage

The story of the year in information management is clearly data warehouse scalability. Against a backdrop of about a dozen or so alternative database/data warehouse appliance vendors emerging over the past 18 months, Oracle and Microsoft both recently threw their hats into the ring of scale-out architecture. The two database giants are finally acknowledging that the scale-up approach that they have touted for years only goes so far. As data volumes and demands keep growing, that's often not far enough.

The question for practitioners is, which architecture and approach will meet your long-term data warehousing needs? As Richard Winter explains in this week's in-depth feature, proper data warehouse planning is not just a matter of estimating data volumes; you also have to assess query volumes, query complexity, the number of users, and data latency and availability demands. Only then can you truly prepare for the workloads likely to be experienced three to five years down the road.

>>Continue reading "Data Warehousing Takes Center Stage"


Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2008
2:19 PM
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Microsoft's Rationale for Code Name Hell

Kilimanjaro, Gemini, Madison... what's with all the code names and why does Microsoft need so many to describe developments that are all expected to bow in the first half of 2010? Herain Oberoi, group product manager of the SQL Server Business Group, cleared up a few questions for me here at the Micosoft's BI Conference 2008, but it took an outsider (from Teradata) to reveal another possible rationale for the confusing naming conventions.

The clear headliner in Kilimanjaro is "Project Gemini," which will bring in-memory, on-the-fly sorting, filtering and slice-and-dice analysis of massive (millions of rows) data sets to Excel with the aid of a client plug-in, controlled storage and sharing through integration with Sharepoint, and behind-the-scenes modeling by Analysis Services. So why two separate names? Well, Oberoi stressed that Kilimanjaro also includes self-service reporting extensions to Report Builder that will enable users to create, store and share report components that can be mixed and matched for what's described as rapid, grab-and-go reporting.


>>Continue reading "Microsoft's Rationale for Code Name Hell"


Posted Tuesday, October 7, 2008
10:58 AM
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Waiting for Answers From Oracle

As I wrote last week, the information available on the HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server is incomplete. Pertinent questions are on the table, but I've been unsuccessful, thus far, in getting answers. Maybe the right people are taking a few well-deserved days off after Oracle Open World or maybe they're observing Rosh Hashanah. Nonetheless, I've not heard back on requests made Friday and again yesterday. I have, however, talked to HP about the fit between this new product and Neoview.

To review, the key questions about the HP-Oracle offering get into the nuts and bolts of the hardware. Is it shared-nothing architecture through and through, and, if not, how does the optimizer negotiate between the two sides of the devise (database and storage)? Second, if it's built on "industry standard" hardware, just how does it put query processing power "on each and every disk," as suggested by Larry Ellison? Netezza, for example, gains its performance by putting query processing power on a Field Programmable Gate Array on each and every disk, but that's proprietary hardware.


>>Continue reading "Waiting for Answers From Oracle "


Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008
12:33 PM
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Questions Emerge On HP-Oracle Device

The whole concept of the data warehouse appliances has gone from "an interesting niche in the market to something that's smack dab in the middle of the mainstream market." That's how Jim Baum, president and COO of Netezza, sized up the importance of this week's announcement of the HP Oracle Database Machine. That's the big picture, but having interviewed Netezza and Teradata executives thus far, it's clear that they, along with analysts and potential customers, are still struggling to size up the actual product. I'm still gathering opinions, but here's a short list of questions raised thus far:

>>Continue reading "Questions Emerge On HP-Oracle Device"


Posted Friday, September 26, 2008
10:46 AM
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The Technology Behind Wall Street's Meltdown

Could technology have saved Wall Street from its current financial crisis? That's something I've been thinking about over the last few days as I've scramble to move at least some of my money into FDIC-insured accounts at multiple institutions. From my perspective, the Fannies, Freddies, Lehmans and AIGs of this world no doubt had plenty of risk analysis, predictive analytics, and business rules technology to see and avoid the risk. They just ignored the danger signs or, worse, used the technology to paper over the risks.


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Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008
11:14 AM
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Rethink Web Analytics For the '2.0' World

"If your Web site sucks, it's your own fault." That's the tough love Avinash Kaushik shared today here at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference in New York in a presentation entiled "Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a '2.0' World." Kaushik offered a bunch of great advice on how to better measure site performance and he also listed a handful of free tools. "So there can be no more excuses" like not having enough data, not having the right data or not having enough money for Web analytics, he concluded.

>>Continue reading "Rethink Web Analytics For the '2.0' World"


Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2008
4:12 PM
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Dashboards, Decisions and Wall Street

Today I'm at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, Conn., and much of the buzz here is about what's going down on Wall Street. That's no surprise given that about 70 percent of the attendees here are from financial institutions. There have been plenty of jokes about not being able to buy paper clips, let alone enterprise technology. That said, I did see at least some tire kicking in the exhibit hall, and among the 15 vendors exhibiting at this smallish, 150-attendee hotel event, almost every one of them seemed to be showing off a dashboard-style interface.

As Gartner analyst Roy Schulte's observes in this week's in-depth Q&A interview, dashboards showing current (or at least near-real-time) business metrics have never been hotter. We're seeing these types of interfaces from BI vendors, BAM vendors and complex-event-processing (CEP) vendors alike. It's a healthy sign of a meeting of the minds between business and IT.


>>Continue reading "Dashboards, Decisions and Wall Street"


Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2008
2:12 PM
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What's at the Top of Your BI Wish List?

"Better, easier, lower-cost" and "more flexible." These were the adjectives respondents to a recent InformationWeek / IntelligentEnterprise survey used most often when asked "what's at the top of your business intelligence wish list?" The survey was conducted this summer and is behind this week's in-depth feature "Special Report: BI Gets Smart," as well as a full report with the complete survey results. The words "better, lower-cost," and "more flexible" applied to a range of wishes, but here are the top "must haves":

>>Continue reading "What's at the Top of Your BI Wish List?"


Posted Tuesday, September 9, 2008
8:55 AM
>>Comments


BIScorecard Rates Eight Leading Products

When it comes to IT research, Gartner's "Magic Quadrants" and Forrester's "Wave" rankings carry a lot of weight with would-be technology buyers, but these reports lean more toward assessing vendors rather than products. Granted, when you're spending six or seven figures with a vendor, things like "completeness of vision" and "ability to execute" certainly matter a great deal, but most would-be buyers are equally hungry for hands-on analysis of the software they might end up using every day. In the business intelligence market, that gap is filled by Cindi Howson's BIScorecard. Here's a peek at the top-level scores, plus a link to five helpful recommendations.


>>Continue reading "BIScorecard Rates Eight Leading Products"


Posted Wednesday, August 6, 2008
12:16 PM
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Behind the Business Objects-Oco SaaS Deal

Earlier this month I saw a press release with the headline "Oco and Business Objects Sign Deal... " Vendor partnerships don't usually float up to my must-cover list, but this one peaked my interest. After all, what does Business Objects, an SAP Company, the world's largest BI vendor and a software-as-a-service (SaaS) force in its own right, have to gain from Oco Inc., an upstart SaaS vendor that's a fraction of Business Object's size? Business Objects executive Mani Gill filled me in on the details.

>>Continue reading "Behind the Business Objects-Oco SaaS Deal"


Posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008
9:26 AM
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Five Key Questions About the IBM-ILog Deal

With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there's not enough "there" there in the business rules management system market, what with only a handful of players, but yesterday's announcement by IBM that it will acquire ILog will certainly spark aftershocks. I came across a few particularly keen questions from a former industry insider.

To go straight to the source, I first spoke to an ILog exec yesterday who shared this bottom-line assessment of why the timing for this deal: "The market is maturing, and business rules are taking a legitimate position in infrastructure," said Jean-François Abramatic, Chief Product Officer. "It's clear now that business rules are an essential part of business process management/services-oriented architecture platform."


>>Continue reading "Five Key Questions About the IBM-ILog Deal"


Posted Tuesday, July 29, 2008
12:50 PM
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Two Years to Integrate DatAllegro? I Doubt It

In my interview of Fausto Ybarra, Microsoft's director of SQL Server product management, I certainly didn't get the idea (suggested in these separate posts by Seth Grimes and Mark Madsen) that the integration of DatAllegro's software for shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) will take an eternity. Granted, Ybarra wouldn't comment on timing and said details won't be forthcoming until the October Microsoft BI Conference. But he did say Microsoft chose DatAllegro over other products considered specifically because it was the best fit, architecturally, and would be the easiest product to integrate.

>>Continue reading "Two Years to Integrate DatAllegro? I Doubt It"


Posted Friday, July 25, 2008
10:29 AM
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MicroStrategy Previews Next Release

I attended MicroStrategy's Business Intelligence Symposium this week in New York and I sat in on a preview of what promises to be a blockbuster release this fall. The list of upgrades is long, and the headliner in MicroStrategy 9 will certainly be 64-bit in-memory analysis capabilities. MicroStrategy isn't pioneering here, and plan to add it has been public knowledge for months. Nonetheless, successful delivery will put pressure on the few vendors that have yet to deliver this technology.

MicroStrategy's tech preview was delivered by Mark LaRow, vice president of products, who began by laying out the long-term goal of supporting expected super-scale deployments of the future involving as much as 10 petabytes of accessible data, 100,000 users and 1 million reports per week. That's all brainstorming work that's still in the labs, but LaRow then offered a lot more concrete detail on what to expect in the MicroStrategy 9 release in Q4. The list includes:


>>Continue reading "MicroStrategy Previews Next Release"


Posted Thursday, July 24, 2008
9:55 AM
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BI Integration Will Continue After Oracle EPM

I covered most of the bases on Oracle's release of its Fusion Edition Enterprise Performance Management (Oracle EPM) release last week, but here's a bit more detail, as well as some interesting insight, on the integration of Hyperion Essbase with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). For instance, Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel says vendors are often guilty of referring to their products as "integrated" as if that's a binary variable.

The nitty gritty detail — the stuff that legacy customers are most interested in — was delivered last week by Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of server technologies, who explained that that there are two styles of integration. "Essbase can be a source to OBIEE, so you can combine relational, OLAP and ROLAP analysis," he said. "One the financial side, you can source OBIEE relational data into Essbase, so the Oracle BI Server can become a source under Essbase."


>>Continue reading "BI Integration Will Continue After Oracle EPM"


Posted Monday, July 21, 2008
5:02 PM
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Oracle EPM System Integrates with ERP, BI

Oracle made big news today introducing the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Fusion Edition (Oracle EPM). The release marks both the final integration of Hyperion and Oracle technologies following last year's acquisition as well as a bold statement as to the future direction of enterprise performance management as a kind of ERP system for corporate management.

"We see businesses going beyond operational excellence they've achieved over the last 15 years and moving on to management excellence," said John Kopcke, senior vice president of enterprise performance management. "The Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System will allow companies to do from the management side of the business the same things that organizations have done from an ERP perspective."


>>Continue reading "Oracle EPM System Integrates with ERP, BI"


Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2008
5:09 PM
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Who's Hot and Who's Not in BI, Analytics?

Everyone loves a horse race, so it's no surprise that industry insiders and practitioners alike want to know which BI vendors are on top, which ones are growing and which ones are losing ground. That's what made this story on IDC's 2006 BI sales stats one of the most popular articles on this site last year, and it's why this week's top story recaps IDC's BI sales stats for 2007. The biggest surprise is that software sales seemed to hold up well, despite the bad economic news that started with last year's subprime meltdown.

>>Continue reading "Who's Hot and Who's Not in BI, Analytics?"


Posted Tuesday, July 8, 2008
11:56 AM
>>Comments


My Five Favorite Videos on IE.com

Did you notice the new video player (top right) on our home page? This isn't just a better user interface, it's connected to a all-new video delivery infrastructure for TechWeb (the parent company of IntelligentEnterprise.com). This service, from an outfit called Brightcove, brings you a higher-quality viewing experience as well as faster and easier control over what you're watching.

I've sometimes gritted my teeth as TechWeb (formerly CMP) has evolved its video capabilities over the last few years. Do you remember "The News Show" with John Soat? That was our first foray into video, and I managed to contribute about a dozen segments to that show before we moved on to the next-generation initiative. Many people loved that daily program, but what people don't like, regardless of the content, is the push approach in which videos automatically start playing with audio on. This new player puts all the control in your hands. There's still room for improvement (we could use longer descriptive headlines, for example), but I think we're getting better and better at delivering thoughtful and informative content in video form. With this is mind, I thought I'd share my top-five list of IE-reader-relevant videos:


>>Continue reading "My Five Favorite Videos on IE.com"


Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008
12:03 PM
>>Comments


Experiment Finds Web 1.0 Beats Web 2.0

Last week I shared a post about an AIIM study that revealed (among many points) that receptivity to Web 2.0-style social networking is highest among "Knowledge Management-Inclined" organizations. The study didn't say what percentage of firms fit that description, so I tried to get in touch with one of the report authors to find out. As an experiment, I tried Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 tools for this bit of collaboration, and good old e-mail, a decidedly Web 1.0 tool, won the race.

I wouldn't have thought of this experiment had I not been practically goaded into it. You see, AIIM's Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen had this Odd Couple repartee going throughout their presentation. Wearing a suit and tie, Carl said, "As a Baby Boomer, I have very carefully established, serious online communities where we can collaborate… but you can also reach me via email."

Dan, wearing an un-tucked shirt and jeans, said, "I’m a Millennial… If you insist, I suppose I will take an e-mail address from you, but I'd rather that you use Twitter."


>>Continue reading "Experiment Finds Web 1.0 Beats Web 2.0"


Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2008
6:33 PM
>>Comments


Is Social Networking KM All Over Again?

I didn't attend this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference (E2C) to spend lots of time hearing about wikis, blogs, bookmarking, expertise discovery and so on (I focused instead on cloud computing). I think social networking technologies are reaching maturity, and now that the likes of IBM and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft and (to an even lesser extent) Oracle are onto the most proven and popular capabilities, this is looking like another market set for consolidation.

Yes, pioneers and best-of-breed players will continue to innovate, and, yes, adoption will continue to grow. As evidence, there were plenty of success-story presentations at E2C from blue-chip outfits ranging from the CIA and Sony to Pfizer and Wachovia. So my question is, what's the next chapter?


>>Continue reading "Is Social Networking KM All Over Again?"


Posted Thursday, June 12, 2008
5:53 PM
>>Comments


Demystifying Cloud Computing

Will large enterprises embrace cloud computing? A telling point during an "Evening in the Cloud" panel discussion at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference came when a member of the audience (an employee of integrator CSC) said, "I know of plenty of European companies that wouldn't touch you guys with a ten-foot pole if it means putting data in an American data center. The "you guys" in question were the executives representing Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. The objection cited was the Patriot Act, which has stoked plenty of fear about U.S. Government meddling in private data, but let's not get side-tracked on that issue. The point is that there are plenty of reasons why corporations won't move into the cloud until they can know more about where the data will reside and how it will be protected.

>>Continue reading "Demystifying Cloud Computing"


Posted Wednesday, June 11, 2008
10:46 AM
>>Comments


Why Not Data Warehouse Appliances?

In my book, it's time to stop thinking of data warehouse appliances (including those powered by column-store databases) as experimental devices for pioneers and performance nuts. Having personally interviewed more than a handful of appliance customers, my sense is that we're on the cusp of a broad adoption phase. Will these devices simply compliment conventional data warehouses as the foundation for data marts and non-mission-critical apps? Or will they also start replacing conventional enterprise data warehouses (EDWs)? I haven't heard many solid arguments against the appliance approach.

>>Continue reading "Why Not Data Warehouse Appliances?"


Posted Wednesday, May 28, 2008
1:01 PM
>>Comments


Link: Microsoft Excel as 3D Gaming Engine!

Hey all you spreadsheet jockeys; want to do something creative (if a little crazy) in Excel? Today I was trolling Omniture (our Web Analytics suite) and I noticed an article on our sister site, Gamasutra, that is hugely popular. It's a primer on creating 3D games in Excel, and it includes demo programs and videos of games created with the Excel 3D engine.

>>Continue reading "Link: Microsoft Excel as 3D Gaming Engine!"


Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008
6:09 PM
>>Comments


The IT Pro's Guide to Better Business Skills

Whether you want to advance your career or just improve your team's chances of success, IT professionals would do well to read this week's installment of "Kimball University," entitled "Better Business Skills for BI and Data Warehouse Professionals". The title notwithstanding, it's a great guide for any IT pro who wants to better understand the business, improve interactions with colleagues and superiors, and develop better communication skills. I can personally vouch for several of the 12 resources author Warren Thornthwaite suggests.

>>Continue reading "The IT Pro's Guide to Better Business Skills"


Posted Monday, May 12, 2008
10:09 AM
>>Comments


BI (Nearly) MIA at SAP's SAPPHIRE Event

The topic of business intelligence was largely missing in action at this week's SAPPHIRE event, though John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, an SAP Company, did give a keynote address today (albeit at 4:30 pm — not exactly prime time). One of the highlights of the presentation was a demo of Polestar running on top of the SAP BI Accelerator. Polestar is Business Object's search-style interface for BI while BIA is SAP's in-memory analytic appliance. The demo presented more evidence that in-memory technology will get fast-track attention in the SAP/Business Objects integration.

>>Continue reading "BI (Nearly) MIA at SAP's SAPPHIRE Event"


Posted Tuesday, May 6, 2008
11:41 PM
>>Comments


What's Your Opinion on Performance Management?

It's your last chance to "Take The Poll" on our home page (left column below the blog). I'm wrapping up this month's interactive poll on performance management and will post a new poll for May. So... Which of the following best describes your top performance management priority?

>>Continue reading "What's Your Opinion on Performance Management?"


Posted Wednesday, April 30, 2008
2:36 PM
>>Comments


Teradata Fights Fire With Fire

Tired of giving up sales to upstart appliance vendors, Teradata yesterday announced its own lineup of appliances spanning data warehousing needs from departmental warehouses and analytic marts up to entry-level warehouses and large-scale enterprise-class warehouses.
The price-per-terabyte figures are newly aggressive for Teradata, the performance looks promising and, most important, they all run on the Teradata 12 database. That last point is crucial because most customers would rather not have to run multiple DBMS environments.


>>Continue reading "Teradata Fights Fire With Fire"


Posted Tuesday, April 22, 2008
9:29 AM
>>Comments


Leading Lights vs. 'Four Bright Bulbs'

This week's in-depth story on "How to Choose Among the Four Bright Lights of BI" offers a good example of provocative story packaging meant to get people to click and read. This also happens to be the cover story of this week's issue of InformationWeek magazine. The cover line read "And Then There Were Four," and the cover image (also used on our home page) shows four brightly burning lights among a bunch of burned-out, broken and missing bulbs. That combo has succeeded in getting people to turn the page, but, ouch, it has to hurt if you're one of the leading lights among the remaining independent BI vendors.

I've been in publishing for a couple of decades, so I defend the right of writers and editors to stir emotions to get people reading, clicking and talking. Through acquisition, SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft now claim roughly half the existing BI installs out there, but there are plenty of other leading lights out there that will help define a bigger market that has yet to emerge.


>>Continue reading "Leading Lights vs. 'Four Bright Bulbs' "


Posted Wednesday, April 16, 2008
5:32 PM
>>Comments


'Salesforce for Google Apps' Takes on Microsoft

"Pinch me, I'm dreaming!" This is the line Salesforce.com is using to promote today's announcement of "Salesforce for Google Apps," a pairing of the software-as-a-service-based sales force automation offering with Google Apps. The New York Times had a scoop on the story this morning, and they pegged it with this quote from Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend."

The enemy in question is Microsoft, of course, and Salesforce for Google Apps will be going up against Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The twist here is that Salesforce and Google say they'll be able to mash up their SaaS-based apps so you can, for example, keep track of e-mails sent (through Gmail) to a particular customer right on that customer's sales record...


>>Continue reading "'Salesforce for Google Apps' Takes on Microsoft"


Posted Monday, April 14, 2008
1:38 PM
>>Comments


Are You Struggling With Database Scalability?

Judging by the fact that this article is among the top five on our site thus far this year, I know for a fact that database/data warehouse scalability is a hot topic with the readers of Intelligent Enterprise. With this in mind, I'm hosting a Web seminar tomorrow entitled "Database Scalability: How to Plan for the Long Haul." The star attraction is none other than database/data warehouse guru Richard Winter, principal of WinterCorp and director of the Winter TopTen program.

>>Continue reading "Are You Struggling With Database Scalability?"


Posted Monday, April 7, 2008
1:05 PM
>>Comments


Ian Ayres: Success Starts With Random Tests

"If you're not relying on the twin pillars of regression analysis and random tests, you're making a big mistake." This was a key point delivered this morning at the Gartner BI Summit by keynoter Ian Ayres in his talk on "Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart." Drawing from his book "Super Crunchers," Ayres said random testing, in particular, is the best way to get into statistical algorithms, and he guaranteed the measure will give you "at least a 5 percent to 10 percent improvement in any measure you care about."

>>Continue reading "Ian Ayres: Success Starts With Random Tests"


Posted Wednesday, April 2, 2008
1:40 PM
>>Comments


Schlegel on Search, Analytics and Visualization

I'm here in Chicago at the Gartner BI Summit, but the opening keynote is still hours away. In the meantime, here are few tangential-but-nonetheless-interesting comments I edited out of my Q&A interview with Gartner's Kurt Schlegel. On the combination of BI and Search, for example, Schlegel admits there's much more potential than real adoption at this point. And on consolidation, he says visualization and predictive analytics technologies will be next on the acquisition hit list.

There was plenty of hype last year about making BI analysis Google easy, but I just haven't come across a lot of customer success stories. "I don't think [Business Objects] Polestar has any customers yet," says Schlegel, "and between FAST and Endeca, they may have a dozen or two customers. If you compare that to what's out there, it's a tiny fraction of the market."

>>Continue reading "Schlegel on Search, Analytics and Visualization"


Posted Tuesday, April 1, 2008
12:24 AM
>>Comments


Routine Fraud Detection Fingered Spitzer

"Follow the money." This approach to investigation, applied by criminal prosecutors going back before Eliot Ness and made famous as a line in the movie "All the President's Men," is exactly how soon-to-be-ex New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was tied to a high-end prostitution ring. In this case it was fraud detection technology, of the kind routinely applied by banks in money laundering investigations, that led directly to Spitzer and to his resignation.

"Internal Revenue Service investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor," reported the New York Times in this story. "The transactions, officials said, suggested possible financial crimes — maybe bribery, political corruption, or something inappropriate involving campaign finance. Prostitution, they said, was the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators."


>>Continue reading "Routine Fraud Detection Fingered Spitzer "


Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008
2:23 PM
>>Comments


SAP Claims Performance Management Gains

"Over the past several months, more than 100 customers worldwide purchased SAP solutions for enterprise performance management with the intention to replace Hyperion solutions from Oracle." SAP heralded this announcement late last month as a big milestone, but after reviewing the facts, I'm thinking the number sounds low. I'd also observe that it's a bit too early to be talking about "unifying the full range of financial and operational processes in a single stack," as claimed in the press release.

As for the facts, Hyperion, which was acquired by Oracle last year, is the acknowledged market share leader in performance management with more than 12,000 customers. Given Hyperion's long history, plenty of these customers have aging legacy products and are or will soon be facing upgrade decisions. Oracle was quick to point out when it made the deal that many Hyperion customers are also SAP customers (4,000 according to one press release), but perhaps it didn't anticipate that SAP would buy its way into performance management in such as big way last year. Having acquired Pilot, Outlooksoft, Business Objects and, through the latter, Cartesis, how could SAP help but rack up 100 performance management wins against Hyperion? Throw in SAP's preexisting performance management technologies, and you begin to wonder if the win figure shouldn't be higher.


>>Continue reading "SAP Claims Performance Management Gains"


Posted Monday, March 10, 2008
5:59 PM
>>Comments


Did Poor Data Governance Spark the Subprime Crisis?

The subprime lending crisis offer fresh evidence that we're in the bear-skins-and-stone-knives era of understanding risk and making good decisions based on data. That's one of the key points I heard yesterday at an IBM Data Governance Council meeting in New York. As sophisticated as predictive models and enforcing business rules may seem, the technology is limited by a lack of best practices and standards and by the sheer scale and complexity of enterprises and financial markets. A first step toward avoiding such calamities, say Council members, is an integrated, overarching data governance program that addresses data security, data privacy and data quality so that risks can be better understood and outcomes anticipated.

"When the subprime loan scandal broke, a lot of people said, 'how could they not have known that they were sitting on billions of dollars of bad debt?'" says IBM's Steve Adler, who founded the 50-member Data Governance Council back in 2004. "The problem is that nobody really knows how to look at assets and liabilities and how decisions affect individual performance, the performance of divisions and the performance of companies. That level of institutional awareness about risk-based decision making does not exist."


>>Continue reading "Did Poor Data Governance Spark the Subprime Crisis?"


Posted Thursday, February 28, 2008
5:58 PM
>>Comments


Predictive Analytics 101: The Limits of Intuition

One of the more engaging presentations at this week's TDWI Executive Summit was a helpful session entitled "The Yin and Yang of Implementing Predictive Analytics," presented by Matt Schwartz of Corporate Express and John O'Carroll of Capital One Auto Finance. Schwartz was the Yin, presenting on the office supply company's 18-month entry-level foray into prediction. O'Carroll was the Yang, a seasoned developer of highly complex models around customer segmentation, marketing campaigns and lending risk.

Despite his focus on beginners, Schwartz engaged everyone, particularly the retailers and online marketers present, with a tutorial based on a Corporate Express market basket application.


>>Continue reading "Predictive Analytics 101: The Limits of Intuition"


Posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008
2:47 PM
>>Comments


TDWI Insight: Guiding BI From the Top

To develop effective business intelligence programs, lead with organization, not technology. That's the consensus advice from many of the speakers here at the TDWI World Conference and Executive Summit here in Las Vegas this week. I spent most of Monday at the Summit, a conference within the conference aimed at the higher-level executives, and I was most impressed with a kickoff presentation entitled "BI From the Top," by Tracy Austin, former CIO of Mandalay Resort Group and former VP of IT at Harrah's Entertainment, one of the most celebrated BI-driven enterprises in the world.

Her IT credentials notwithstanding, Austin said "BI is not implementing tools and it's not an IT initiative. IT does not have the empowerment to make end users turn information into strategic actions."

Speaking with the authority of someone who has learned from years of experience what works and what doesn't, Austin presented 10 principles for guiding "BI From the Top:"


>>Continue reading "TDWI Insight: Guiding BI From the Top"


Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008
9:37 AM
>>Comments


Business Objects' Stealthy XI 3.0 Announcement

What's now called "Business Objects, an SAP company" yesterday announced a major new BusinessObjects XI 3.0 platform, but I, for one, had zero advanced notice. Judging by the dearth of coverage until today, other journalists were in much the same position. And this is an announcement that clearly deserves a bit of time to digest!

What's in store in BusinessObjects XI 3.0? Only the integration of text mining and information management capabilities, the incorporation of third-party Web-based data sources and the addition of a search-based interface for exploring structured information. These developments represent the fruition of long-planned strategic directions for Business Objects and, indeed, the wider BI community.


>>Continue reading "Business Objects' Stealthy XI 3.0 Announcement"


Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2008
6:29 PM
>>Comments


Gartner 2008 BI Magic Quadrant Plays it Safe

Gartner late last week issued its 2008 Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms in which it placed five companies roughly on a par in the prized upper-right quadrant: Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle, SAS and Microsoft. As you'll see when you download the report, none of the top five seem to stand out; you could draw a straight line from SAS, on the "Completeness of Vision" axis, to Microsoft on the "Ability to Execute" axis and touch all five vendors.

>>Continue reading "Gartner 2008 BI Magic Quadrant Plays it Safe"


Posted Tuesday, February 5, 2008
1:32 PM
>>Comments


Liautaud Takes the Money and Runs

Business Objects announced today that its founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, Bernard Liautaud, has resigned from those roles and will join SAP's supervisory board in June. With the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP all but complete and the BI agenda being set, at best, by committee, Liautaud is heading for the exit (a well-trod path for executives in his shoes), free to enjoy the well-earned spoils of his success.

>>Continue reading "Liautaud Takes the Money and Runs"


Posted Wednesday, January 30, 2008
9:54 AM
>>Comments


The Money Is On Appliances, CEP, MDM

Despite this country's credit crisis, it appears there are still plenty of big-money bets being placed on emerging information technologies. This morning alone I've seen hefty sums put into data warehouse appliances, complex event processing (CEP) and master data management (MDM). Knowing a thing or two about each market, I'd say they are far from subprime investments.

>>Continue reading "The Money Is On Appliances, CEP, MDM"


Posted Wednesday, January 23, 2008
11:12 AM
>>Comments


Forrester Makes Sense of the Oracle-BEA Deal

Are you an Oracle or BEA customer trying to make sense of the combination? Forrester's John Rymer and Mike Gilpin have written an extensive analysis of the overlaps and of which products are likely to prevail. Oracle is promising long-term support for BEA products whether they're continued or not. But eventually, say the authors, "carrots and sticks" are likely to prod customers toward the preferred, go-forward products.

>>Continue reading "Forrester Makes Sense of the Oracle-BEA Deal"


Posted Friday, January 18, 2008
12:16 PM
>>Comments


Cognos Talks Performance Management, Walks BI

All the talk was about performance management, performance management, performance management at yesterday's Cognos 8.3 launch in New York, but most of the upgrades are about good old business intelligence. There were a few notable performance management-oriented tidbits, but the real appeal of Cognos 8.3 is in a handful of business-user-friendly upgrades aimed at democratizing reporting and analysis.

>>Continue reading "Cognos Talks Performance Management, Walks BI"


Posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008
12:11 PM
>>Comments


BPMS and Gartner's Quadrant Problem

As 2007 came to a close, Gartner issued its long-awaited 2007 Magic Quadrant on Business Process Management Suites (BPMS). Gartner's previous BPMS Quadrant was issued in June 2006, so nearly 18 months had lapsed in its review cycle. No matter, 22 BPMS vendors — or at least the ten in the top-right quadrant — now had reason to celebrate. Or did they? It wasn't long after the Dec. 14 publication of the report (available from Quadrant leaders Pegasystems and Lombardi) that I received a call from an irate vendor.

>>Continue reading "BPMS and Gartner's Quadrant Problem"


Posted Monday, January 7, 2008
11:48 AM
>>Comments


Intelligent Enterprise Top-20 Blogs of 2007

As the year winds down I'm in a reflective frame of mind. Today I posted the list of IE's Top 20 Articles of 2007. It's an interesting indication of reader interest, but being measured in page views, the list doesn't do justice to all the single-page blogs we publish. (On the other hand, if a reader clicks to the very last page of a multi-page article, they're truly engaged!) Thus, for those who follow our blogosphere, here are the Top-20 Intelligent Enterprise Blogs of 2007:

>>Continue reading "Intelligent Enterprise Top-20 Blogs of 2007"


Posted Monday, December 17, 2007
12:32 PM
>>Comments


Welcome to the New IntelligentEnterprise.com

"As you may know, Intelligent Enterprise ceased print publication with the January 2007 issue, but rest assured that the mission lives on and is being reinvigorated here at IntelligentEnterprise.com… "

I posted these words nearly a year ago, and I'm happy to report that we've delivered on what we promised — up to a point.

>>Continue reading "Welcome to the New IntelligentEnterprise.com"


Posted Wednesday, December 12, 2007
6:45 AM
>>Comments


Top-Ten Secrets of Successful BI Revealed

My first Christmas present arrived the other day: a copy of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App. Author Cindi Howson sent it to me in part as thanks for Intelligent Enterprise's help in getting more than 500 BI professionals to complete a 30-question survey that provided insight into the best practices detailed in the book.

True to its name, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App is a 244-page guidebook that will help beginners get off on the right foot while guiding veterans toward more successful approaches. The book is geared, as Cindi explains, to "businesspeople who feel their organizations are not making the most optimal decisions," as well as to executive sponsors, BI program/project managers and technical experts who design and implement aspects of the BI solution.


>>Continue reading "Top-Ten Secrets of Successful BI Revealed"


Posted Friday, December 7, 2007
11:06 AM
>>Comments


IBM Nabs The Last Best Choice in BI

Mark Smith's Friday blog post was just the latest in a chorus of calls for IBM to drop the above-it-all attitude and jump into the business intelligence market. Well, the company has finally responded, announcing this morning that it will acquire Cognos for $5 billion in cash.

What gets me about IBM is that it is such a cool cucumber. Here it is, the last to act with few good choices left, yet it manages to come up with a winner, painting it as a carefully considered deal it came up with after scouring a vast array of choices.


>>Continue reading "IBM Nabs The Last Best Choice in BI"


Posted Monday, November 12, 2007
10:15 AM
>>Comments


Editor's Log: HP, SAP, Cognos, IBM and More

It has been a busy month, so I've decided to blog journal style this week, sharing snippets and scuttlebut picked up here and there…

Early this week one member of our blogophere passed along the rumor that Wal-Mart didn't actually pay for its license of NeoView, HP's new data warehouse appliance. The rumor has it that it's a gratis co-development project. There's no doubt it was a cozy deal given that HP CIO Randy Mott was 22-year Wal-Mart veteran and former CIO.

I asked for comment from HP, and here's what John
Miller, Senior Director, Business Intelligence Marketing, had to say: "Wal-Mart is a customer that has purchased HP Neoview but the terms of HP's contractual agreements are not for public disclosure."


>>Continue reading "Editor's Log: HP, SAP, Cognos, IBM and More"


Posted Friday, October 26, 2007
10:33 AM
>>Comments


What Do You Mean When You Say 'BI'?

Amid all the mega deals and consolidation in the greater business intelligence market this year, I'm seeing a lot of bending of terminology and twisting of meanings. It's getting downright confusing for existing BI practitioners, let alone the first-time buyers out there.

I used "greater business intelligence market" above because to some, BI means just query and reporting while others would lump in analytics, dashboards and even scorecards and performance management (the last term could spark a terminology debate on its own, but let's not go there just yet). To me, the greater BI market includes all of the above.

To get some idea what the originator of "business intelligence" had in mind when he coined the term way back in 1989, I called up Howard Dresner to talk about terminology.

>>Continue reading "What Do You Mean When You Say 'BI'?"


Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007
9:17 AM
>>Comments


Office Politics

Way back in the '80s (or does it date all the way back to the '70s?), a popular maxim had it that "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM." An IBM salesman probably came up with that one, but in any case it stuck. Reflecting on last week's announcement about the new IBM Lotus Symphony desktop suite, based on OpenOffice.org technology and available as a free download, I'd say it's time for a new maxim: "Nobody ever got fired for perpetuating the Microsoft Office monopoly."

>>Continue reading "Office Politics"


Posted Tuesday, September 25, 2007
3:15 PM
>>Comments


Process, Prediction and Icahn's Interest in BEA

It's pretty clear to me that the business-process- management and operational-performance- management camps are singing from the same hymn book these days. Throw in the business-rule and predictive-analytics camps and you've got a quartet singing in four-part harmony. The question is, when and which vendors will move beyond marketing deals and start putting this stuff together? Could Carl Icahn's interest in BEA spark some serious deal making?

>>Continue reading "Process, Prediction and Icahn's Interest in BEA"


Posted Monday, September 17, 2007
11:04 AM
>>Comments


Why Info Management is the First Priority

I had the privilege of attending an eye-opening event in New York recently that featured Citigroup executive Bill Sweeney as a keynote speaker. The Managing Director, Global Risk, Compliance and Technology, Sweeney sees to it that the banking giant meets myriad regulatory requirements around reporting and record-keeping as well as rigorous rules around assigning reserves against market, credit and operational risks. On all these fronts, the biggest challenge, he says, is enterprise information management — getting a handle on the disparate data stores that are growing like weeds within just about every organization.

>>Continue reading "Why Info Management is the First Priority"


Posted Thursday, September 6, 2007
2:25 PM
>>Comments


Stonebraker Raises Vertica's DW Profile

I had a long briefing with database legend Michael Stonebraker today, and I feel compelled to share a few highlights of the conversation. Stonebraker is known as a visionary, and he has consistently turned those visions into long-term bets through commercial startups. Today's prediction? "Sooner or later, the entire data warehousing market is going to move to column-store solutions," Stonebraker asserts, column-store being the architectural basis of his latest venture, a startup called Vertica.

For those who don't know of Stonebraker, here’s a short bio. He was the main architect of the Ingres relational DBMS and the object-relational Postgres DBMS, both of which were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a computer science professor for 25 years. More recently at MIT, Stonebraker was a co-architect of the Aurora stream processing engine as well as the C-Store high-performance read-oriented database engine. He is the founder of four startups that have commercialized these prototypes: Ingres Corp., Illustra (acquired by Informix before the latter was acquired by IBM), StreamBase and, most recently, Vertica.

>>Continue reading "Stonebraker Raises Vertica's DW Profile"


Posted Thursday, August 30, 2007
6:05 PM
>>Comments


It's Hard to Avoid BI Complexity

I've probably seen more than a hundred press releases promising products that will "put powerful yet intuitive reporting and analysis in the hands of business users." When I covered the content management market on a daily basis (a few years back), the PR mantra was "make everyone in the organization a content contributor." All too often, these types of products aren't all that easy or intuitive.

I was reminded of these promises as I researched this week's " In-Depth Analysis story, centered around an AberdeenGroup BI study released last week. The baseline assumption of the study is that companies want to improve access to actionable information, but the 370 study respondents reported these top-five obstacles:


>>Continue reading "It's Hard to Avoid BI Complexity"


Posted Tuesday, August 7, 2007
5:51 PM
>>Comments


Oracle's 11g Launch Impresses

I'm just back from Oracle's 11g launch event in midtown Manhattan, and I have to say I came away impressed. The database is at the center of Oracle's world, and company president Charles Phillips strutted the vendor's stuff — with his usual low-key swagger — on topics ranging from the firm's 30th anniversary to its 47-percent marketshare ("more than IBM and Microsoft combined" he asserted) to the long list of 11g upgrades and new features.

I lost track of how many of those features Phillips claimed to be unique to Oracle (and I'm following up with analysts to verify), but a few of the more impressive ones included OLAP cube-based management of materialized views and the use of standby servers to drive testing and performance improvements.


>>Continue reading "Oracle's 11g Launch Impresses "


Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007
6:43 PM
>>Comments


Enterprise 2.0 Won't Fix 'Broken E-mail Culture'

I'm still thinking about last week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, which ranks as the most exciting and thought-provoking event I've attended thus far this year. I'm not just saying that just because it's a CMP-produced event (okay, there's the disclaimer). There was a palpable sense of promise and limitless possibilities for new technologies and approaches.

Enterprise 2.0 was launched three years ago as "the Collaborative Technologies Conference," so it's no surprise that blogs, wikis, text messaging, presence awareness and all things social networking received a lot of attention. In fact, show manager Steven Wylie opened the event talking about the need to "fix our broken e-mail culture."

>>Continue reading "Enterprise 2.0 Won't Fix 'Broken E-mail Culture'"


Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007
1:05 PM
>>Comments


Enterprise 2.0: Making the Business Case

The Enterprise 2.0 movement gets an "A" for awareness and technology development, but a sorry "C" for communicating business benefits and results. This report card, offered today by Harvard Business School professor and keynote speaker Andrew McAfee, sums up the mix of enthusiasm and hunger for practical applications in evidence here at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

>>Continue reading "Enterprise 2.0: Making the Business Case"


Posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007
5:27 PM
>>Comments


Event Processing: The Next Disruptive Technology

Complex event processing (CEP) technology is aimed at many of the same challenges as conventional BI technology, it's just that the frame of reference is real-time analysis rather than a separate reporting loop built on historical data. Thus, CEP is another threat to BI as we know it, and it's pretty apparent that this will be one of the next competitive battlegrounds for the big infrastructure players.

As I detailed in this week's top story, CEP spots patterns in high-volume data streams while they're still streaming, rather than after the fact. Latency is measured in milliseconds or microseconds, and the volumes of data can exceed 50,000 messages per second. You build models or queries and the CEP system spots the related patterns as they emerge. You can respond while the activity is still in process rather than after the fact.


>>Continue reading "Event Processing: The Next Disruptive Technology"


Posted Friday, June 15, 2007
11:40 AM
>>Comments


IBM and Business Objects Forge Closer Ties

IBM and Business Objects announced on Tuesday that the two companies will deepen the strategic alliance they announced last November. They'll do so by developing joint solutions for the Asia Pacific market, extending already close ties in the North American and European markets. It's an indication that IBM does not discount BI – contrary to some suggestions – as just the tip of the iceberg. Okay, so IBM doesn't own a major BI/performance management player, as Oracle now does with its Hyperion purchase, and it's not offering its own reporting and analysis technology, as is Microsoft, but IBM does have partnerships with both Business Objects and Cognos, and it's free to work with others as well (as it does with Information Builders in the iSeries server market).

>>Continue reading "IBM and Business Objects Forge Closer Ties"


Posted Friday, June 1, 2007
12:20 PM
>>Comments


Business Objects Deal Advances BI-Search Combo

Business Objects announced this morning its intent to acquire Inxight Software, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company specializing in search technology including federated search, entity extraction, natural-language processing, text analytics and data visualization software. The deal, if closed as planned in July, will advance Business Objects' efforts to gain "streamlined access to both structured information within databases and data warehouses, and unstructured information such as e-mails, documents, notes fields, and Web content."

>>Continue reading "Business Objects Deal Advances BI-Search Combo"


Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007
8:34 AM
>>Comments


Was Outlooksoft the Best Choice for SAP?

Saugatuck Technology really went out on a limb last week characterizing SAP's planned purchase of Outlooksoft as a reaction to Oracle's recent acquisition of Hyperion. What's next, a stunning revelation that Microsoft is using enterprise software strategies, including its BI strategy, to help drive sales of Office 2007 and Windows Vista?

Saugatuck's sense that "the integration of OutlookSoft should significantly improve SAP's positioning and ability to sell enterprise-enabled BI and performance management" is far less obvious to me. I mean, it's certainly positive and Outlooksoft is an innovative and fast-growing company, but I don't know that I'd use the word "significant" to describe the boost it will give SAP.


>>Continue reading "Was Outlooksoft the Best Choice for SAP?"


Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007
9:29 AM
>>Comments


What Wasn't Discussed at Microsoft's BI Conference

Microsoft has every reason to be pleased by the results of its first BI Conference. It was well organized, closely watched and, most importantly, well attended, with more than 2,800 making their way to Seattle for the May 9-11 event. It was really a coming-out party of sorts for Microsoft as a credible, large-enterprise-ready BI vendor. But in addition to those wowed by the presentations and wooed by the breadth of offerings, I did encounter a few critics who raised legitimate questions.

Microsoft has gone out of its way to answer its detractors at the event, starting by leading with the news that SQL Server will see its next major refresh in 2008 and promising to stay in a 24- to 36-month refresh cycle. Keynote speaker Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division, offered a deeper dive on "Katmai," the code name the next version of SQL Server, but more than half his presentation emphasized achievements to date and the scalability of SQL Server 2005.


>>Continue reading "What Wasn't Discussed at Microsoft's BI Conference"


Posted Friday, May 11, 2007
1:33 PM
>>Comments


Capture and BPM: Final Reflections on AIIM 2007

If John Mancini mentioned business process management (BPM) once in his keynote address at last month's AIIM Expo he mentioned it a dozen times. Then there were the enterprise content management (ECM) vendors themselves talking up the connection with BPM. To me, the combination is a natural as good old document management, imaging and workflow, so I won't be surprised to see a big BPM push at AIIM 2008.

>>Continue reading "Capture and BPM: Final Reflections on AIIM 2007"


Posted Thursday, May 10, 2007
2:04 PM
>>Comments


Should BI and Performance Management Be a Single Platform?

A couple of weeks ago - long before Business Objects announced it will acquire Cartesis - I had an interesting chat with Cognos- and Outlooksoft-veteran Ben Plummer, who is now vice president of marketing at Applix. It was a routine update on the company's latest release, Applix 9.1, but Plummer started by commenting that the company is positioning itself "in the convergence between BI and performance management… we're calling it 'Business Analytics.'"

>>Continue reading "Should BI and Performance Management Be a Single Platform?"


Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007
10:32 AM
>>Comments


Information Convergence Is a Work in Progress

John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, yesterday gave a keynote address at AIIM Expo entitled "The Parallel Evolution and Convergence of Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence." The title notwithstanding, I didn't hear a lot of concrete examples of convergence in the speech, but there are signs the worlds of structured data and less-structured content are slowly coming together.

>>Continue reading "Information Convergence Is a Work in Progress"


Posted Thursday, April 19, 2007
10:32 AM
>>Comments


Fear and SharePoint: Trends Seen at AIIM Expo

Compliance mandates and legal risks are a big focus here at the AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston. Also everywhere - the keynote lineup, the press room, the collateral material, etc. - are presentations, announcements and references to Microsoft SharePoint. I'll get to SharePoint and parallels between Microsoft's BI and content management thrusts in a moment, but first a few thoughts on fear mongering.

>>Continue reading "Fear and SharePoint: Trends Seen at AIIM Expo"


Posted Wednesday, April 18, 2007
5:54 AM
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In Defense of Hype

As a writer and editor, I felt a twinge of guilt when I read Seth Grimes' blog on hyperbolic PR and "writers and editors who don't have the time, knowledge, and/or judgment to ask the right questions." Seth's last two blogs came about because a SaaS-model BI vendor served up what he felt was self-conscious PR overstating the market significance of the company's actual accomplishments. I guess I've read so many press releases -- and so few that tow the sober, responsible line that Seth puts forth -- that I've developed a permanent BS filter (and after rereading my own blog on said vendor, I don't feel guilty).

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Posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007
3:54 PM
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Behind IBM's 'Dynamic Data Warehousing' Jargon

You might get lost in buzzwords if you read this week's press release on IBM's "Dynamic Warehousing" strategy. Antone Gonsalves did a great job of boiling it all down, but here's a bit more insight gained in an interview with an IBM executive at the Gartner BI Summit.

"Real-time" showed up at least a couple of times in the release, but just what does it mean? "It means supporting decisions while a salesperson or a customer service rep is on the phone with a customer or while you're processing a claim," says Marc Andrews, program director, data warehousing.

>>Continue reading "Behind IBM's 'Dynamic Data Warehousing' Jargon"


Posted Friday, March 16, 2007
3:17 PM
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What's Your BI Competency Center Quotient?

Competency centers -- a.k.a. councils or centers of excellence -- are making headway in the BI arena, and they grabbed a lot of attention at this week's Gartner Business Intelligence Summit. BI competency centers (BICCs) are typically cross-functional teams (architects, developers, support, analysts, line-of-business managers, etc.) that develop frameworks of metrics, goals and best practices that can then be shared with business units and departments throughout the organization. Ideally, they also ensure that goals are aligned with corporate strategy.

>>Continue reading "What's Your BI Competency Center Quotient?"


Posted Thursday, March 15, 2007
9:12 AM
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Make the BI/Business Process Connection

"Process-driven BI" has been a big theme at this week's Gartner BI Summit, so I sat in on a presentation by Gartner analyst Gareth Herschel on "Integrating Business Insight With Business Processes." Great presentation, overall, but those familiar with business process modeling and management might have been disappointed to hear little about the connection with those technologies. The performance management and process management camps share the whole idea of a "continuous circle of improvement," but perhaps Gartner knows that the BI crowd just doesn't get involved in the nuts and bolts of process management.

>>Continue reading "Make the BI/Business Process Connection"


Posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007
2:47 PM
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Microsoft Spotlights PerformancePoint

Day Two at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit was nonstop, with wall-to-wall sessions and appointments with industry's blue-chip and challengers. IBM, Microsoft, HP, SAS, SAP, Cognos and others weighed in the direction of their products, the direction of the industry and their take on customer wants and needs. You can visit our photo gallery to get a sense of the event, but I'll drill down on some of the bigger deals here in my blog… starting with Microsoft.

Tuesday's "Driving Pervasive BI and Performance Management" offered Microsoft's vision of taking these technologies and applications enterprisewide. Reflecting on his 13 years at Microsoft and status as "employee one" in the company's BI group, Bill Baker, GM of Office Business Intelligence, said "we're at a tipping point."


>>Continue reading "Microsoft Spotlights PerformancePoint"


Posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007
12:25 PM
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Gartner BI Market Assessment

The Hyatt Regency Chicago is sold out and the ballrooms, breakout sessions and exhibit hall are seeing heavy, heavy traffic here on the first day of the Gartner BI Summit. I would say it's standing room only, but nor are there lots of empty seats available. This conference is clearly well past the hype cycle and rising on Gartner's proverbial "slope of enlightenment" phase of market maturity."

If you read our "Summit Preview" there weren't a lot of surprises in Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's opening keynote, but he did share some new market analysis that he didn't talk about in that Q&A interview. Hostmann said things like ETL, reporting, query and analysis and even data mining are well past the hype cycle and are moving up on the "plateau of productivity." Corporate performance management and business application data warehouses are just coming out of the "trough of disillusionment" whereas things like dashboards are just heading into the trough.

>>Continue reading "Gartner BI Market Assessment"


Posted Monday, March 12, 2007
3:05 PM
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Will BI Wax, Content Management Wane at EMC?

I was surprised to read this week that Dave DeWalt, one-time EMC rising star and former Documentum CEO, is leaving EMC to take the reigns at McAfee as CEO and president. DeWalt headed Documentum during its most innovative and aggressive years, and he spearheaded the sale of the company to EMC in 2003. He subsequently spearheaded EMC's fast-growing software division, but last year he took a less visible role as President of Customer Operations. In the same vein, long-time Documentum marketing executive David Milam left EMC last fall to join Zantaz.

>>Continue reading "Will BI Wax, Content Management Wane at EMC?"


Posted Friday, March 9, 2007
2:53 PM
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BI On Demand: The List of Options Grows

Business intelligence on demand for $3,000 per month for 100 users? That sounds pretty attractive, but LucidEra is not your typical BI suite that lets you build any application you want, now in a SaaS environment. It's specifically a BI-based forecast-to-billing application that includes data connectors (CRM, accounting, etc.), ETL, data cleansing, data warehousing, OLAP and a Web-based user interface.

But isn't BI supposed to be an all-purpose suite?

>>Continue reading "BI On Demand: The List of Options Grows"


Posted Wednesday, March 7, 2007
12:49 PM
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Hyperion Deal Puts Pressure on SAP and IBM

Every BI and performance management vendor has come out of the woodwork to offer an opinion on the Oracle/Hyperion deal. I'm gathering those comments and will share a few soon enough, but the companies I'm really anxious to hear from are SAP and IBM (and maybe HP belongs on that list as well). Consolidation happens in every technology market. It only goes one way, and every big, stand-alone vendor ultimately has a price.

>>Continue reading "Hyperion Deal Puts Pressure on SAP and IBM"


Posted Thursday, March 1, 2007
4:26 PM
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How Rich Internet Apps Will Improve BI, ERP

Do you think rich Internet apps (RIA) are just a concern for developers of consumer Web sites? Think again. RIAs will soon make their mark on the enterprise, making complex software such as ERP and BI systems more accessible and understandable to ordinary business users.

>>Continue reading "How Rich Internet Apps Will Improve BI, ERP"


Posted Friday, February 23, 2007
12:25 PM
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Lombardi, Appian Take BPM On Demand

Business process management suite vendors are embracing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model with not one but two announcements today around on-demand BPM. Lombardi, for one, introduced Blueprint, a SaaS tool intended to bring process modeling to the masses. I knew about that one weeks in advance thanks in part to Derek Miers' in-depth Put-to-the-Test review of Lombardi Teamworks, posted this morning. Then Appian announced an ambitious (though not-yet-ready-for-prime-time) plan to deliver its entire BPM suite on demand.

>>Continue reading "Lombardi, Appian Take BPM On Demand"


Posted Monday, February 12, 2007
2:50 PM
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The Good, Better, Best Among BI/Search Combos

Not all combinations of search and BI technology are created equal, but most do have one thing in common -- they're not ready yet. We've been pining for an interview with an end user with first-hand experience with the combination, but Business Objects, Cognos, IBI and others couldn't point us to anyone. I'm told such customers exist, but I'm guessing they're finding it's really hard to use search-style queries to uncover structured information that's on target.

Most of the Google/BI integrations announced last year will deliver what IDC search expert Sue Feldman calls "Beginner BI." "What they're doing is using search to pull specific information out of databases into the Google interface," she says. "That requires a certain amount of work for each query"


>>Continue reading "The Good, Better, Best Among BI/Search Combos"


Posted Friday, February 2, 2007
10:52 AM
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Linking Insight to Action: The Next Big Goal

I've had a number of conversations in recent days around the theme of linking analysis to action. There's lots of frustration out there, understandably, because managers and executives increasingly have plenty of tools that spot problems -- reports, alerts, dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, etc. -- but they're not connected to levers that enable them to take action.

>>Continue reading "Linking Insight to Action: The Next Big Goal"


Posted Thursday, January 25, 2007
1:55 PM
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A Long-Term View on the Cognos/Celequest Deal

Everyone agrees that Cognos' purchase of Celequest, announced yesterday, will broaden the BI vendor’s footprint. But the true value of the deal will hinge on how transferable and how integrated Celequest's real-time technology and appliance/SaaS model will be with the Cognos 8 BI platform.

Yes, Celequest gives Cognos a real-time, operational BI/performance management play it lacked, and that's important (see trend six in "Seven Trends for 2007.") Celequest's Lava appliance is designed to monitor transactional systems (as well as data warehouses) and instantly display key metrics within user-customizable dashboards. That will bring Cognos into operational settings -- in financial services, risk management, manufacturing and supply chains -- in which insight is only of value if it's immediate, delivered through real-time dashboards and alerts.


>>Continue reading "A Long-Term View on the Cognos/Celequest Deal"


Posted Thursday, January 18, 2007
5:33 PM
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Will Your SaaS Provider be a Survivor?

In the heady, pre-dot-bomb buzz of early 2000, I edited a feature by my long-time colleague Penny (Lunt) Crosman on “21 ASPs and What They Can Do For You.” They were called "application service providers" back then, but that term was displaced, first by “hosted,” then by “on-demand” and most recently by "Software as a Service" (SaaS).

The focus of Penny’s article was document management, a topic I revisit in today’s story on SaaS as a Stepping Stone to Conventional Software. I was surprised when a quick Web tour turned up only about a third of these vendors still very visibly in the hosted/on-demand document management business.

>>Continue reading "Will Your SaaS Provider be a Survivor?"


Posted Friday, January 12, 2007
1:24 PM
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We Haven’t Heard the Last Word on Teradata

Monday’s announcement by NCR that it will spin off its Teradata Data Warehousing business comes as the latter faces increased competition from the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAS Institute at the high end. Meanwhile, upstarts such as Netezza and DATAAllegro are picking off data-mart and focused-data-warehouse implementations with their low-cost, high-performance appliances. Hewlett-Packard is also joining the fray with its emerging Neoview portfolio.

>>Continue reading "We Haven’t Heard the Last Word on Teradata"


Posted Tuesday, January 9, 2007
9:24 PM
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Mainstream BI May Bring Failed Apprentices

Way back in the mid 1990s, I had the pleasure of hearing Louis Rossetto, co-founder and then editor of Wired Magazine, speak in New York about the future of the Internet and its impact on more-established media. The Internet, he said, would not kill older media, just as radio had not brought an end to newspapers nor television the demise of radio or cinema. The Internet would, however, have an indelible impact, he reasoned, freeing each form of media to evolve to exploit its natural strengths.

Here we are ten years later with divisive talk radio dominating the air waves, Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) and American Idol dominating the TV ratings and YouTube and MySpace taking mind share on the Internet. Okay, so Rossetto was talking about an evolution, not a renaissance, but somehow I don’t think he expected us to be slouching toward mediocrity on all fronts.


>>Continue reading "Mainstream BI May Bring Failed Apprentices"


Posted Wednesday, January 3, 2007
12:25 PM
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Three Ways BI and BPM Will Work Together

No doubt you’ve heard about the trend toward operational business intelligence. The idea is to democratize BI, liberating it from the gurus in the ivory tower and sharing it with the masses of business users so everyone can make smart decisions. Well, you can’t get more operational than core business processes, so there has been a lot of talk about the combination of BI and business process management (BPM).

Will these two systems become one some day, or are they merely complementary technologies? I’d lean toward the latter, viewing them as separate disciplines and technologies, but here are three ways they’re likely to complement each other.

>>Continue reading "Three Ways BI and BPM Will Work Together"


Posted Thursday, December 14, 2006
1:49 PM
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Strike Before Mandates Level XBRL Playing Field

If all companies published and analyzed financial reports in extensible business reporting language (XBRL), the emerging standard wouldn’t offer the competitive advantage that it presents today. According to a report issued this week, early adopters who integrate XBRL data with performance management applications can expect to more easily:

• Leverage benchmarking for competitive analysis
• Identify internal areas for improvement
• Simulate mergers and acquisitions and other financial impacts
• Unify reporting in a single environment to increase data accuracy

>>Continue reading "Strike Before Mandates Level XBRL Playing Field"


Posted Friday, December 8, 2006
11:24 AM
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Behind Business Objects’ Latest SaaS Deal

Yesterday’s announcement by Business Objects that it has acquired software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Nsite was as remarkable for what it didn’t say about the company as what it did say.

Yes, Nsite is a SaaS vendor, and that should sound good to Wall Street. As I point out in “SaaS and SOA: Together Forever,” SaaS is one of the hottest categories in IT, expected to account for 25 percent of the business software market by 2011, according to Gartner, up from 5 percent last year. And yes, Nsite provides “an on-demand applications platform” as described in the press release, but that’s about as generic as saying “Nsite is an information technology company.”


>>Continue reading "Behind Business Objects’ Latest SaaS Deal"


Posted Friday, December 1, 2006
12:25 PM
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As ECM Consolidates, the Focus Turns to Content Applications

FileNet is now part of IBM, Hummingbird has been acquired by Open Text and Stellent will soon be part of Oracle. This trio of announcements, all within the last month, marks a turning point for enterprise content management (ECM).

>>Continue reading "As ECM Consolidates, the Focus Turns to Content Applications"


Posted Thursday, November 9, 2006
4:47 PM
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