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Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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January 23, 2008

Data Warehouse Appliances - Where Art Thou?

As an analyst, it is fun to investigate a well-defined product area with vigorous competition. The positioning statements by vendors are often content-free and even humorous, reflecting many intense hours of debate. I understand; I have been there.

Data Warehouse Appliances (DWA) has been one of those well-defined areas. They are SQL boxes. Feed SQL statements in one end, and results stream out the other end. They are able to leap wide tables in a single scan, faster than a speedy join path, and so on. You get the point.

The marketplace has changed in the last few years. Those simple DWA products are not so simple, stretching our notions of SQL boxes. This category burring is a healthy reaction to market pressures.

In our DWA research study of 2007, Colin White and I recognized this trend toward higher and diverse functionality within the DWA marketplace. We create a new category called Data Management Appliance, which we defined as offloading data intensive operations from a host computer, such as operational, specialized analytics, or archival processing. Looking back, this was a bandaid on a much deeper issue.

That research did contributed the concept of an appliance as requiring:

* One Purpose – clear purpose
* One Package – tested, ordered, and delivered as a single system
* One Install – installed and maintained as a single system
* One Support – single point of service provided by a single vendor

This was amplified into the 9 dimensions of an appliance in a later article.

I am currently starting on the 2008 DWA Research Study, which will use this revised definition of an appliance. However, will the DWA label survive our scrutiny?

I doubt it at the conceptual level. DWA has historical value, popular recognition, and partial validity. However, the marketplace is definitely moving into an era of enterprise appliances that are evolving beyond SQL boxes.

The deep issue is how modular elements, like appliances (or whatever you wish to call them), should fit into the enterprise architecture. For several decades, enterprise systems were architected in an artistic fashion…a little piece here and another there. Some were truly works of art that even work sometimes. The world is changing too quickly to have that kind of artistic luxury. Besides the artists are getting old and retiring.

Data warehousing fits as a module (appliance) within the enterprise architecture. The challenge is to delineate the other modules (appliances) that will also fit into that enterprise architecture of the future.

Should I change the title of our research study to Appliances as Modules for Building Enterprise Systems? What do you think?

Posted by Richard Hackathorn at 4:33 PM | | Comments (0)

July 27, 2007

Why did Business Objects Buy Inxight?

An interesting development in the Business Intelligence (BI) marketplace was the acquisition of Inxight by Business Objects (BOBJ). As a spin-off of Xerox PARC, Inxight has been noted for its deep technology in text analysis and visualization. Although it sold packages to many corporations, the primary business model was based on OEM technology licensing to larger software vendors who then incorporates juicy tech-tidbits into established product lines.

What is the leverage of these tech-tidbits for BOBJ? Adam Binnie, Senior Director of Product Management, explained that a key tech-tidbit is Awareness Server, which has been part of Inxight’s SmartDiscovery line.

The capabilities are impressive! Using a federated search across internal/external and structured/unstructured information, Awareness Server compiles the results in a meaningful manner using content filtering and relevance ranking. As an impressive addition, the View by Concept display organizes search results into a visual tree structure of matching categories.

It is obvious that the text analysis capability of Awareness Server is world-class. There is a lot of potential here to enhance the BOBJ product line with a unified search tool, making this powerful technology pervasive within corporate BI.

Many vendors have attempted to incorporate text analysis into mainstream BI tools but often with disappointing outcomes. What will be different about BOBJ’s effort? Or, will these gems gather dust in the bottom levels of some menu selection? A key issue is the degree of deep integration of Awareness Server into the Universe metadata. Will I be able to search (query) into my data warehouse as a big semantic web using the BOBJ infrastructure?

We should watch these developments at BOBJ.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn at 10:58 AM | | Comments (0)