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Look at the market, as I'm writing this blog, the DOW is below 10,000 points and there is a widespread fear on the global credit crisis. We (a few independent industry analysts) have been saying that BI is relatively on safe ground till this point. Now it is time to stop, take a deep breath and then start moving, that is this mantra that all companies are beginning to take as a step.
On Wall street we have seen the fall of major investment banks and the big brands have now been bought out or merged into other entities. The spate of M&A activities is not all said and done. With all these turbulent times, the need for a lower cost data integration service is becoming a thought that will cross many minds.
Continue reading "DaaS - Data integration simplified" »
The BI market is being flooded with a plethora of options to enable high performance analytics. A new entrant to this market is a definitive "disruptive" technology startup, Kickfire. I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with the Kickfire team and have come to the learn that their approach to the "need for speed" is a new way to solve the speed issue and overall the goal of the founders is to enable "BI to the masses" at an affordable price without breaking the bank.
Continue reading "BI Analytic Appliances - Kickfire has a difference" »
Now that Oracle has announced (Larry's keynote yesterday) that it is a "hardware" player and a "storage" player, where does this lead us to. If you have been following the trend, Oracle now has a direct face-off with IBM. Both the companies have been going through acquisitions and growth to capture the ever-growing BI market. A key question that still remains is - "leaving the big customers aside, do the solutions offered help small and midsize customers". The second question is "how cost effective is Oracle's newest offering - HP Oracle Database Machine and the Exadata Storage ".
Continue reading "After the hype.." »
I'm watching Larry Ellison on stage in SFO, he has just announced Oracle's Data Warehouse Appliance, called as Oracle Exadata - built jointly with HP. The numbers that Larry has presented for performance are good, but not "mind blowing". I see there are a number of similarities with the data warehouse appliances, and the real challenge is being thrown to Teradata and IBM, in terms of customer studies and data volumes being discussed.
According to Larry, the new appliance will be 10 to 50 times faster than current Oracle data warehouses.
Continue reading "Oracle Announces Its "DATA WAREHOUSE APPLIANCE"" »
Later this afternoon we are all very eager to hear Larry Ellison on stage. A big announcement is in the wings on "Data Warehouse Appliance". While I'm not surprised by this, it is definitely worthwhile to watch the traditional players start warming up to the Appliance. More on this to follow after Larry's keynote address.
With Oracle' s announcement on "cloud computing" yesterday and appliances today, we now see a clear landscape on where all the players are aligned.
Maybe Gartner and Forester will now start the "DW Appliances" sections of their quadrants and waves.
I have been drumming the fact that for any business intelligence or data warehouse project to be successful, you need a good and robust infrastructure. This means that you will need a robust team that can design, build and support that infrastructure. Just having a good team will not mean a good foundation for infrastructure. You will need a strong and visionary leader that can lead the infrastructure strategy and provide thought leadership for the solution.
Continue reading "Infrastructure - A key success factor" »
This week has seen a significant announcement from Aster Data Systems, an upcoming data warehouse appliance (implemented as a software appliance on commodity hardware, website www.asterdata.com). Aster announced the implementation of the famed Google MapReduce framework into is architecture.
Continue reading "An interesting move...." »
In my opinion the most overlooked team in any project is the infrastructure team. This is very true of data warehouse initiatives. Most often the infrastructure team is taken for granted as the "in guys" who know how to put together machines, storage and databases. This kind of an assumed role and responsibility often leads to missed opportunities to communicate clearly and then there is a lot of rework or redesign etc.
Continue reading "The importance of Infrastructure teams" »
Whatever may be your technology and architecture, there are the layers of infrastructure that continue to worry us about the performance of your data warehouse and business intelligence solutions.
Broadly classifying the infrastructure, you have the hardware, network and storage. Though each individual layer has had commendable improvements, the holistic solution is still weak. How can we achieve the optimization across the network layers?
Continue reading "All said and done" »
A question that has been asked by many of the data warehouse community is, with the advent of near real time data integration into the data warehouse what is the "business value" for building an ODS. I would like to see your comments on this topic. A new article on the same subject us underway and will be published in the next month.
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