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This presentation by Roger Hodskins from Lumigent focused on their AppGRC product, and Roger discussed their value propostion of monitoring database access logs to observe compliance to specified policies. The Lumigent product seems to be a good hook to include with ERP applications, and might be an interesting acquisition target by an Oracle- or IBM-style company.
Informatica's IAP presentation focused on the evolution of the data quality technology plus the capabilities obtained from the Itemfield acquisition into an "extra-enterprise" data governance and process orchestration offering.
A welcome and interesting trend is the introdution of business process modelng into the data management operations silo.
First of all, the canonical example of the power of data mining and preditive analytics, the correlation of purchasing beer and diapers, is widly misused. The notion is that that through analysis, one data miner discovered that males typically buy diapers along with beer, and this is typically followed by explaining why males buy beer with diapers, and then saying that putting beer and diapers together will increase overall sale of both items.
Anyone familiar with urban legends would immdiately be dubious, and so I did a quick search and found a http://www.dssresources.com/newsletters/66.phpgood analysis of the history (and relevance) of diapers and beer.
Yet another quickie from the Independent Analyst Plaftorm in Phoenix. I am listening to the Informatica presentation by Karen Hsu, and she is discussing the introduction of orchestrating buiness process and workstreaming into Informatica's support platform. I could see an interesting workflow integration impact for extra-enterprise information quality management and information integration.
Something to explore a little more: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).
Next up at IAP: Composite Software, introducing a combination of a search capability and the use of a relatively sophisticated approach to profiling across federated data in order to present a portal for searching though collections of data and prioritizing views that can be materialized in real time. Noted expert Clive Finkelstein commented on the similarity with what used to be the Axio product from Evoke (now part of Informatica), but the interesting part is their use of the relationship discovery purely for searching.
Also: the product is an "appliance," meaning that it is packaged software on top of hardware. No details of the hardware were presented, but it probably uses a number of multi-core CPUs with a lot of memory (how else could they do the analysis?).
Seems like an extremely interesting product, especially in the context of supporting e-discovery.
The second set of presentations at the Independent Analyst Platform was by Kevin Quinn and Vincent Lam, representing Information Builders and iWay Software, an owned subsidiary of Information Builders. Kevin's presentation screamed through the extremely versatile organization and presentation of reporting, analysis, and some of the ways that Information Builders' product landscape feeds into an organizational business productivity and improvement activity. Reliance on data integration that has evolved over 30+ years from within lends a degree of credibility to the claims of pervasiveness and scalability.
Vincent's presentation on iWay spanned the capability spectrum of numerous abilities for data integration. One interesting note: many other BI vendors have recognized the need for a data integration (or ETL) capability, then went out and bought a vendor or two to fill that void, then wriggled and writhed through the process of making the purchased tools work together. Information Builders has grown their own internal data integration suite, which obviates that need to make things work together, and that is an extremely appealing notion.
I am at the IAP, Independent Analyst Platform, in sunny (and hot) Phoenix AZ, and the first set of presentations came from folks at Business Objects, an SAP company. I mention it this way since it seemed pretty clear that the presenters were coming from the BOBJ point of view, looking at where Business Objects fits into the SAP strategy.
One thing that looks clear: the objective in maintaining Business Objects as a separate division focusing on being "open and agnostic" as to the platforms to be supported (aside from SAP) may allay fears of existing customers of being forced into the newly created "mega-stack."
I do wonder, though, about the extent to which there is cross-pollination between the product suites of SAP and Business Objects; there may be some nice chunks in NetWeaver that could be siphoned off and offered as part of a Business Objects Enterprise Information Management suite.
Another interesting point with respect to MDM: Aaron Mahimainathan, who is the Senior Director, Platform Marketing SAP, did admit the challenges in synchronizing master data between the BI environment and the operational SAP applications.
Just heard through the rumor mill that Microsoft is "thinking about acquiring Zoomix." It would make sense that Microsoft might consider bulking up in its capability to support a potential MDM offering (note last year's acquisition of Stratature). I would look forward to seeing something official, though...
I have been tinkering with some of the blogging tools out there (so far I like wordpress a lot). One nice aspect of the blogging framework is the expectation of meta-tagging of your content that helps in organization and presentation, which is quite nice because the system does some of the work that I have always been loathe to do (that is, "organizing things").
One way to do this is by categorizing your entries as well as adding additional tags. I was pondering this at some point, thinking that it should be possible at this point to use text mining tools to scan your content and pull out the "statistically improbable" phrases (as our friends at Amazon like to say) to be used as tags.
But what about non-text content? I can think of three commonly used content types that are growing in popularity yet require some extra thought for assigning meta-tags: pictures, voice recordings, and video recordings. As more of this unstructured stuff comes down the pike, we metadata folks should think hard about how to assess and capture semantics associated with these objects for the purposes of organization.
A few years back my friend Greg Elin put together a system for selectively annotating pictures. Check out his fotonotes web site. Perhaps there is some future in this for video?
Strolling around the exhibit floor at the TDWI conference in Chicago the past few days provided an interesting look into a rapidly evolving trend in data warehousing applicances. Of the 30 or so vendors exhibiting, I counted at least 7 that would be considered appliance vendors:
DATAllegro
Dataupia
Kognitio
Netezza
ParAccel
Sybase
Teradata
I might throw Oracle, HP, and Sand Technology in there as well, but I think you see my point - there seems to be the perception that there is a market for high performance "plug-in" systems to deploy data warehouses. What is perhaps even more interesting is that half of these vendor offerings are not specifically hardware appliances, but rather software database systems that can be deployed on top of different hardware systems - in other words, they are "software appliances" (!?)
In essence, many of these approaches, along with some from other vendors as well (Vertica was notably absent from this crowd, but showed up at the previous Las Vegas TDWI) focus on structural optimizations (such as columnar-oriented databases) that are very well-suited for loading into core memory and providing very fast read access, making it especially nice for query/reporting clients. The realization that the database system can be optimized and parallelized in a way that is decoupled from the hardware makes these software-only approaches look very cost-effective, especially when considering sizing a warehouse to meet current needs while considering future growth. Not only that, these systems are finely tuned for performance, (see Mark Madsen's comments about ParAccel's TPC-H benchmark scores).
The common theme with the software appliance crowd is lowering the barrier of entry to Small/Medium businesses seeking to jump on the BI bandwagon. WIth a variety of operational modes that span full-blown deployments (with hardwre purchase and integration) down to a service-based hosted model, this platform enables data warehousing at a fraction of the cost. This concept in its own right is worth some more exploration, and I think I may try to address that in an upcoming column.
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