|
IBM is announcing enhancements of the products within the InfoSphere family, along with sharpening the branding of InfoSphere, which will definitely alleviate customer confusion about their product offerings.
Enhancements falls into four categories:
- Global support: new languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) and multi-cultural names/addresses
- Administration tools: deployment, QualityStage, business glossary, FastTrack for managing corporate naming standards
- SOA/Grid: added JMS, REST, RSS bindings, Oracle as data provider, managing the deployment and execution across grids
- Mainframe Data: access to non-relational data sources, PL/1 metadata, JDBC connectivity, native VSAM-VSAM replication
In an outstanding research article, Jure Leskovec of Carnegie-Mellon and Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research analyzed 30 billion IM conversations among 240 million people during the month of June 2006. This resulted in a network graph with 180 million nodes (a person who sent a message during that month) and 1.3 billion undirected edges (two persons exchanged messages) - by far the largest data set for social networking. In fact, the authors described their investigation as being 'planetary-scale'!
A key result was the confirmation of Stanley Milgram's popularized hypothesis that any two persons in the world are, on the average, separated by six degrees. That is, only four other persons are needed to form a path between those two persons. Leskovec and Horvitz found that the average degree of separation was 6.6 with a median of 6. The longest paths had lengths of under 30, which is still amazing. In contrast, if one person wanted to find another person among a group of 180 million, you would expect to search through half of that group. Right? Correct if you were searching randomly for that person.
This is called the Small World phenomenon where the interconnections of a social network are much more strong than one would expect based on random networks. In other words, we as social beings have a strong affinity for selectively connecting to others, even using Microsoft Messager.
The above result about six degrees was only one of dozens. The results of the research article go on and on! The reader is forewarned that the article is slow reading, but only 10 pages.
I wrote an article entitled The Link is the Thing in August of 2003, in which I applied the Small World phenomenon to enterprise data warehouses. We may have small worlds lurking in our EDW! I encourage you to apply network analysis techniques to EDW as I suggested. I obviously would be very interested in what you find.
At TechWave, Sybase reannounced today the Sybase Analytic Appliance, which is their packaging of Sybase IQ with the IBM Power platform, along with a 10-user license for MicroStrategy tools. The appliance is sold and supported by systems integrator mLogica.
Sybase is offerings various configuration ranging from 3 TB with 40 users to 48 TB with 160 users. The average cost per terabyte is around $27,000, although specific pricing on these configurations was not given.
With the Microsoft acquisition of DATAllegro, the DWA market has become a interesting place to watch! I wonder whether Sybase's new offering will have the MPP-power to compete.
With Microsoft's announcement today of their acquisition of DATAllegro, the marketplace for data warehouse appliances (DWA) jumps to the central stage of IT drama. What began as a few emerging start-ups challenging a few big DW vendors has morph into industry game-changer.
I can grasp why Microsoft would sell a wireless mouse here and there. However, a high-end MPP DWA puts Microsoft into the center of the appliance business by delivering soup-to-nuts solutions for large corporations. I never thought that Microsoft would ship real 'iron'. Well, I am now wrong. Perhaps a corporate name change is in order. How about Microhard? (Actually, there are several 'Microhard' companies: one that does OEM wireless modems, and another that does certification training of Microsoft networks.)
I would also imagine that this action will solidify the definition of 'appliance' to mean a real end-to-end solution, which will require a mixture of hardware and software. Thus, product positioning as a software-only appliance will likely to be an endangered species.
In his blog, Stuart Frost notes that acquisition will revitalize the venture capital industry to fund emerging database technology, as was the case two decades ago. This will make the small innovative start-ups more viable, and their conversations with larger corporations more interesting.
In a phone interview, Stuart elaborated on several aspects of the acquisition. Although avoiding any actual amounts, he said that it was a 'very strategic price' that Microsoft paid for DATAllegro. They were initially approached by Microsoft to do a partnership. DATAllegro responded with ideas of putting SQL Server inside, instead of Ingres. The acquisition discussions proceeded from there.
Stuart was excited to start a new life as part of the Microsoft team. He said that he was 'been there & done that' with several start-ups, and it was time to move into different challenges, such as guiding Microsoft into EDW. He emphasized that Microsoft is taking the long-term view of this endeavor and will be flushing out whatever capabilities are required for the EDW marketplace. Stuart was pleased that Steve Ballmer mentioned the acquisition in the context of Microsoft's initiative with enterprise search, a mixture that is quite exciting to large enterprises. More will be discussed at the Microsoft BI Conference in October.
So, is Netezza next to be acquired? ...by Oracle?
Related blogs by colleagues: William McKnight, Colin White, Krish Krishnan
Tags: Business Intelligence, Datallegro, Microsoft
I attended a two-day briefing at the Rancho Bernardo facility of Teradata. We had a full schedule of talks by cross-section of marketing and technology people. Here are a few glimpses of the event...
Randy Lea, VP of Products and Services, started by sketching their corporate marketing message. We had a good discussion about the concept of Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Teradata has argued that all analytic data should be centralized into a single EDW and then leverage the biz value embedded in the cross functional relationships. While that goal is still valid, it must 'bend' to the realities within all businesses, even to the extreme of having independent data marts to support applications required NOW. See the TDWI BI Journal article on Agile DW using an integrated sandbox within the EDW.
Dave Schrader, Director of Marketing and Strategy, give a spectrum of business examples focusing on the front-line, back-office, middle management. It was a fascinating tour of innovations that are dramatically changing some industries.
Dan Graham, Enterprise Integration Program Manager, drilled into the cloud of technical pieces of an EDW environment. Think PPT slides filled with hundreds of acronyms; however, think about the importance of executives to understand the biz implications of this swirling cloud.
Dave Klumb, VP of Global Field Operations, gave an overview of the Professional Services organization at Teradata. It was interesting to see what their emphasis
Todd Walter, CTO, took us a quick walk through new product features and ended with a great group discussion on 4-5 industry issues. For instance, we kicked around the biz tradeoffs of integration versus flexibility in the EDW.
Tom Russell, VP of Data Architecture and Modeling Solutions, spoke on an 'integrated' data architecture for EDW. He reminded us that the original goals of data warehousing has been independence of data from application, logical centralization of data, and timely acquisition of data. In large DW shops, there are many BI tools, which should be integrated into the same base tables. The focus is the mapping between the usual logical/physical database design (e.g., ER diagram in ERwin) and the semantics of the BI applications (e.g., specfic star schema).
Mike Goul, a professor at the Arizona State University, described the Teradata University Network (TUN). Teaching Info Sys requires a 'touch of reality' inserted into the classroom. TUN has over 2,000 faculty from 900 universities in 70 countries. There are case studies, BI tools like MicroStrategy, and million-row data warehouse. I wished other vendors were as receptive to the tangible support for universities.
Mark Shainman, Senior Program Manager for Master Data Management (MDM), explained the nature and importance of MDM, along with Teradata's MDM offering. He argued that MDM is a critical piece of the EW infrastructure, which most do in a fragmented way. Mark urged that relationships among and within products, customers, suppliers, and other master data should be managed by a single infrastructure.
Ron Swift, VP of Cross Industry Solutions, gave an overview of the horizontal offerings of Teradata, which has traditionally been vertically oriented (e.g., telcom, financial, retail). Ron noted that past innovations in an industry are now being applied in other industries. The common aspects of those innovation become the seeds for horizontal solutions, such as financal performance, customer mgt, and demand chain mgt. Ron shared some wisdom with the statement "all the reporting does not change our decisions", implying that learning from the past does not change how we react to the decision of today.
Reflection... Teradata continues to be the major EDW vendor to large global firms. With their new lower end offerings, Teradata has the challenge of balancing their thrust toward centralized EDW with responsiveness to new biz requirements. There is sufficient maturity with EDW that there is increasing pressure to extend EDW with more agility, flexibility and responsiveness. Now that is a glimpse of the future for EDW!
Shawn Rogers blogged about Wordle.net and gave a word cloud of his blogs. This is what I got when I submitted my collection of blogs. So, if you want to know what the Independent Analysts Platform did this last week, just ponder the following illustration.
That was quite an experience! Doing 20 blogs in 3 days about the one-hour presentations delivered by 18 BI/DW vendors. The 'real-time' blogging has the advantage of focusing your attention, but it has the disadvantage of reducing your ability to reflect on and analyze the content. The result is that the blogs often had a 'vendor hype' tint to them. Perhaps I can do better next time...
What stood out? The presentations where the CTO (or equivalent) cuts out the marketing pitch and clearly tells what was happening internally, who was pushing the limits, and where there were gaps. Several vendors displayed this candor. Most unfortunately did not. Some notable highlights were:
+ Composite Software with their Discovery Appliance. David Besemer gave an insighful demo.
+ Progress Software with their latest SOA offerings. Hub Vandervoort and his pipes and side-pipes.
+ Kalido with their metadata mgt. Bill Hewitt and Robert Dickson did well with a tough concept to motivate and demonstrate.
+ HP with Neoview. The one-liners from Greg Battas cut to the chase.
+ Dataupia with Satori Server. John O'Brien sliced and diced thru the architecture.
Rick van der Lans did a super job herding us cats and bringing all the logistics together. For a glimpse at the cast of characters, view our homemade video that congratulated Rick on the event.
My blogs about IAP are collected here.
There was definitely synergism flowing among this group of 'independent' analysts. If you are an analyst with similar interests, please contact us. The analysts attending are:
Peter Aiken, VCU & Data Blueprint
Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting
Jos van Dongen, Tholis Consulting
Clive Finkelstein, Information Engineering Services
Mike Ferguson, Intelligent Business Strategies
Beth Gold-Bernstein, ebizQ
Richard Hackathorn, Bolder Technology
Jan Henderychx, Brainware
Claudia Imhoff, Intelligent Solutions
Bill Inmon, Inmon Data Systems
Krish Krishnan, Sixth Sense
John Ladley, IMCue Solutions
Rick van der Lans, R20 Consultancy
Stan Locke, Zachman Framework Associates
David Loshin , Knowledge Integrity
Mark Madsen, Third Nature
David McGovern, Alternative Technologies
William McKnight, Conversion Services International
Shawn Rogers, Powell Media
Alec Sharp, Clariteq Systems Consulting
Gwen Thomas, Data Governance Institute
Nancy Williams, DecisionPath Consulting
Lyndsay Wise, WiseAnalytics
John Zachman, Zachman International
Mike Boyarski, Director of Product Mgt of Ingres, talked on Appliance-Based Computing for BI. He has working at Oracle for eleven years and then to On-Demand.
Mike mentioned the long history of Ingres. However, the current goal is to be the enterprise-class open source database. A number of companies are contributing to the open-source base, such as DATAllegro contributing hash key encoding, sort performance and partitioned indexing. The academic institutions are doing significant database research on the code base.
He remarked that the market fits better with the mid-market companies. When compared with MySQL, Mike inserts that Ingres is better in performance.
Companies that are basing products on the Ingres codebase are: Pentaho/JasperSoft, Business Objects, DATAllegro, GoldenGate. Ingres tends to be a good technology alternative for the SaaS market. The rapid innovation of open-source software has become a problem for most data centers that require more stability.
Mike defined Appliance-Based Computing as a “complete pre-integrated and standardized BI software stack”. He asserts that hardware is not part of the appliance, despite the sensitivity of a BI system to processor/network balance.
The Ingress Icebreaker BI Appliance consists of the following stack: Jasper, Apache/Tomcat, Java, Ingres 2006, Linux. Mike characterizes that this system results in a capability similar to Business Objects two years ago.
John O’Brien, CTO and co-founder of Dataupia, and Samantha Stone, VP of Marketing, remarked that their tag line is to 'free your data' to provide open access to data for everyone. The goal is unlocking the power of data for business users. Dataupia has just experienced the one-year birthday from their first product shipment.
Their product is the Satori Server, which John asserts is a true DW appliance, since it is shipped as a hardware/software integrated product. He said that their product is non-disruptive because their product brings the power of a MMP database to Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2 (called OMI as a shorthand for the three database engines). It works with the customer’s existing applications and existing databases.
Pushing toward core IT processing, John said that their target market is the data warehouse mainstream that consists of:
+ long term data archiving
+ routine BI using massive data sets
+ ODS
John gave the example of the Dataupia architecture as being the backend to OMI to provide the parallelism to existing applications without changes. Their storage is custom designed based on records, rather than blocks. It is record-oriented data store. John asserts that their record-orient database has the same performance levels as column-oriented databases. They are not using compression at the data item level, but do utilize it for aggregations, which often result in 80% compression.
John outlined the requirements of several current customers, such as Subex, Sendio, Tektronix (network traffic ) and Focus (teleco).
The main advantage of Dataupia seems to be their transparency at the application level by being a backend to OMI database engines. They have extended their SQL functionality to correspond to the uniqueness of the front-end.
Dave Schrader, director of Strategy and Marketing at Teradata, returned for a second hour and give an overview of what is new at Teradata. He quickly focused on what was new with Teradata, which he was divided into the following seven areas:
1) Data mart consolidation: emphasized the value of cross function data, so combining data marts has great value potential than separate ones.
2) New Platforms: quick overview of the product family: 550, 2500, and 5550 (A side remark was that Teradata now has three customers that have over a petabyte of data.)
3) Database Improvements: moving more functionality into the parallel database,
4) Master Data Management: i2 capability was folded into the MDM product.
5) Application Extensions:
+ Teradata Relationship Manager added AssetLink to support Market Resource Mgt (where are the dollars going), extended campaign mgt with an arbitrary number of steps, and support of mobile marketing/sales.
+ Financial and Performance Management partnered with Hyperion for more metrics, integrated with SAP,
6) Partnerships: The big 3 for Teradata are SAS, Microsoft, and SAP. SAS partnership focused on consolidation of their data sources and embedded SAS analytical processing into the Teradata database. SAP partnership focused on keeping the SAP interface but using Teradata for the larger cube creation and other analytics. Microsoft partnership focused on using Microsoft analytical services on top of Teradata, to provide high end solutions.
7) Education and Services: reaching out to various groups more.
|
