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Krish Krishnan

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein.

Hello, and welcome to my blog.

I would like to use this blog to have constructive communication and exchanges of ideas in the business intelligence community on topics from data warehousing to SOA to governance, and all the topics in the umbrella of these subjects.

To maximize this blog's value, it must be an interactive venue. This means your input is vital to the blog's success. All that I ask from this audience is to treat everybody in this blog community and the blog itself with respect.

So let's start blogging and share our ideas, opinions, perspectives and keep the creative juices flowing!

About the author >

Krish is a recognized expert worldwide in the strategy, architecture and implementation of high performance data warehousing solutions. He is a visionary data warehouse thought leader and an independent analyst, writing and speaking at industry leading conferences, user groups and trade publications. He has authored two eBooks, more than 75 articles, viewpoints and case studies on business intelligence, data warehousing, and data warehouse appliances and architectures. In his 19 plus years of professional experience, he has been solving complex architecture problems spanning all aspects of data warehousing and business intelligence for Fortune 1000 clients. He has designed and tuned some of the world’s largest data warehouses.

The Vice President of Strategy at Chicago Business Intelligence Group, Krish teaches regularly at TDWI, DAMA, IRM UK and other conferences, and is helping drive and mature the data warehouse appliance market. Krish also serves as Associate Vice President of Programs for DAMA Chicago and is Ethics and Governance Advisor to DAMA International.

Editor's Note: More articles and resources are available in Krish's BeyeNETWORK Expert Channel. Be sure to visit today!

May 2008 Archives

Data Warehouse with a "Google" like scalability

AsterData a company based out of the Bay area, announced their "go live" and the availability of the first platform release of their flagship product Aster nCluster. The area of computing that Aster solves in their approach to data warehousing architecture is "network optimization", which is their differentiator in the marketplace.

What is interesting here is the fact that in their announcement this week, we see two customers who have large implementations - MySpace.com is running a 100TB data warehouse on Aster nCluster. In conversations with the CEO of Aster Mayank Bawa, he mentioned that in the past two weeks, an upgrade was performed on this 100TB data warehouse by Aster and the entire process was glitch free, you can read more at www.asterdata.com

In my perspective there are several ways to scale a data warehouse architecture. Aster has selected the first approach to be network optimization. Another interesting fact that piqued my interest is the "Google" like scalability that Aster promises to bring to the marketplace. Their website has a few interesting notes on their architecture and the CEO and CTO have presented compelling arguments on how they can achieve this scalability. While it is to early to predict anything, it is certainly exciting to see more offerings in the market to address the ever growing and demanding DW/BI market.

In the same breath, it is also interesting to see that the current vendors have started coming out with the next releases of their product, which focuses on scalability from a different angle and provides another compelling reason to look and compare.

As always, you will need to evaluate your needs and see whose architecture suits your problem. I'am currently working on a methodology for selecting and evaluating DW Appliances, if interested, drop an email.

Have a great memorial day weekend !!!


Posted May 23, 2008 2:40 PM
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HP to Buy EDS!

Wow, the acquisition spree is well on into Q2 of 2008. HP has just announced that it will be buying EDS for $12.6 billion. Leaving the cash aside, it creates a strong professional consulting services arm for HP, which probably had been lately looking to find such an acquisition.

What does this mean to the industry
1. The concept of "big 4" in the consulting industry is still on for sure.
2. The smaller fish in the pond now can be the big fish, if they can compete on all grounds equally
3. SAP, Microsoft and Oracle will now probably look for more acquisitions.

As we move along to the next quarter, we will need to wait and watch what will happen. It is an interesting time for the industry and BI is still going like the "energizer bunny", which is good for everybody.


Posted May 13, 2008 6:50 AM
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Why do BI projects suffer?

In any given organization, there are a few BI projects that are marked as "suffering." I have been asked many a times as to why some projects in the BI psace are very successful and others suffer? The answer is very simple in my opinion. If your BI project is owned and driven by the business, the project has a potential to be very successful, on the other hand if your IT owns and drives the BI projects, chances of business aligning to use the end solution and adopt to it are not very high. Is organizational alignment the only answer?.

Not at all. The key to getting a successful BI implementation lies with both Business and IT teams. But the underlying goal is to identify the business pain of the organization as related to BI and then implementing a solution to address that pain. But it does not stop there, you need a strong business sponsor and a strong technical sponsor to go toe to toe on solving the problem. I'm seeing certain large corporations fail because of issues from Business or IT communities within the organizations. My thought for these companies is to get your internal act together with a steering committee, sort out the issues and establish the goals of how your BI projects will succeed. Without a shared vision and a joint ownership of the solution architecture, the BI project will definitely suffer before it becomes successful.

While organizational alignment and project governance are enablers to these goals, the people from the different parts of the organization coming together is the fundamental key to ensure success. I wish all the projects in the BI space to be a success and raise a toast in this anticipation.


Posted May 7, 2008 8:03 PM
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Why - Unstructured Data Integration

Over the past years we have all been using the structured data content in the data warehouse to perform BI activities. But is that all the intelligence about a business there is? No, there is a lot more to the intelligence factor in the form of unstructured data.

Unstructured data is embedded in documents, reports, emails and notes. It is knowledge capital that is very useful when integrated for use in the data warehouse. Why do we need to wake up to this requirement? Consider an example scenario: there are hundreds of applications processed everyday in credit cards and consumer credit, insurance, etc. Not all of the decision-making notes are captured to the application. If this data was available for data mining and analysis purposes, we could build smarter decision-making engines since more pattern data is available. This is just a scratch of the surface, and there are more useful things that can be accomplished with unstructured data in the data warehouse.


Posted May 1, 2008 6:12 AM
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