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I'll be presenting " Operational Business Intelligence, Making information active" at the Operational Business Intelligence Seminar in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 18.
I'm back from my 5th year at the Pacific Northwest Business Intelligence Summit and what a summit it was. It's very difficult to put it into a category. Representatives from HP, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Teradata, Composite Software, InfoCentricity, DataFlux, PivotLink, Eyeris and ParAccel were on hand along with media coverage from the B-eye-network to visit with Claudia Imhoff, Jill Dyche, Colin White and myself. As always, it was a stimulating and educational experience, as well as fun. Put on by our friend Scott Humphrey and taking place at the historic Weasku Inn in Medford, OR on the Rogue River, the environment lent itself to open discussion and idea generation.
The 4 of us took up relevant topics and lead discussions. Jill did CRM, Claudia did SaaS, Colin did operational business intelligence and I did information management leadership. Podcasts from each vendor plus the topic introductions are available here at the network.
As for operational business intelligence, I observed that we (people of traditional BI legacy) are calling it BI, but it can be quite different. As Colin pointed out, there's real-time traditional BI, which is arguably OBI and then there's BI with business processes as the end user, which is where BI is going. That's real OBI. Eventually we may ask "If I have lots of OBI, why do I need other BI?'. It's a process-driven paradigm shift.
We had a strong vendor in EII, an enabler of OBI, represented - Composite Software. A good way to think about EII in this context today is it is for requirements that are wide, but not deep.
Software as a Service is an important part of BI's future. It was surprising to sit back and look at the list of players in that market now. As a testament to its progress, it seems some clients are at the point of discussing bringing SaaS solutions in-house and there was quite a bit of discussion about that.
CRM is really about differentiating customers based on behavior and preferences and therefore differentiating treatment. The rise of social networking was discussed as a significant new medium to include in CRM efforts. The CRM example used was the Jack Daniel's club membership, which some of group were members of.
And, as for leadership, well, I just thought it was high time to tackle this important subject in context of information management and leadership. We used this subject to also talk about the state of IT (decentralizing again, patchwork architectures, lots of money to maintenance, etc.)
I'll be speaking on "Understanding Master Data Management and the Benefits" at the TDWI Dallas chapter meeting on August 14 at 9:00. Link.
In a very strategic move for Microsoft’s enterprise goals, they have just announced the purchase of data warehouse appliance vendor Datallegro!
While Microsoft has significantly expanded SQL Server’s scale over the past few years, the perception of its limitations has been somewhere below the “big guys” of Oracle and IBM. And, wherever you believe the scalability of SQL Server has grown to, now undoubtedly the scale of Microsoft solutions goes beyond 100 terabytes. This is the scale that many, myself included, believe accessible data management capabilities need to get to in order to manage the future of telecommunications, retail, healthcare and other transactions and make them available.
Look for Microsoft, and others like myself, to publish reference architectures and guidance on the changeover point from SQL Server to Datallegro (or should we start calling it Microsoft MPP?) as well as integration points.
I have found Microsoft’s integration of its acquisitions to be very above average in terms of making the most of the acquired products. There are too many data appliances and Datallegro was caught up in this frenzy. It has found its way to be a long-term appliance play.
The open source DBMS that Datallegro was using, Ingres, will be scrapheaped over time and replaced by SQL Server. This will take some time, but Microsoft has that. Its customers now can see a plan in action and that will hold them over for a while. Many customers have settled into the “Microsoft zone” of pricing, which is more than open source (duh), but less than its big competitors. Look for Datallegro, likewise, to be in the low (but not “no”) cost points for its capabilities.
Congratulations to the respective teams.
Continue reading "Microsoft buys Datallegro!" »
Some of you have noticed that my bio, above, has changed. Yes, I have completed my employment agreement with Conversion Services International and I have joined Lucidity Consulting Group to lead their information management practice.
A little about my new company and endeavor...
Lucidity has been around for 8 years and has built a solid consultancy based on relationships and results. I've found the people extremely professional and dedicated. Lucidity was rated #8 “Best Companies to Work For” in Texas earlier this year. With over 100 consultants and offices in Dallas, Chicago, Denver and St. Louis, and existing, strong practices in Oracle applications, JD Edwards, Hyperion and Siebel, I have the foundation of a strong team for expansion of the information management capabilities.
My practice will be one that you can count on that can partner with your organizations and I am eager to engage a new set of client challenges. I will have a broad range of full lifecycle skills on board that are needed to assess, plan, analyze, design and build best practices information strategy, data warehouse, business intelligence or master data management environments and, as always, from a vendor-neutral, methodology- and architecture-base.
I'm going to stop here because the blog is not where I have historically got salesy. I know some of you were interested in knowing more about Lucidity.
Continue reading "William McKnight, Lucidity Consulting Group" »
I was looking forward to this presentation. However, I must admit, with the plethora of appliance vendors who have hit the market lately and made their way onto client short-cum-long lists, I was more than happy to dismiss NeoView if this data point did not move the story forward several paces. However, Greg Battas addressed NeoView's lack of market penetration and their 'soft roll out' up front. They spent a full year with customers before the announcement in 2007.
HP, as a company, was losing big deals to IBM and Oracle since those 2 had full suites. Back in 2004/2005, Tandem (now part of HP) had built an earlier form of NeoView, but ultimately didn’t go to market with it because they didn’t want to compete with Oracle. That's not an issue now.
The first place to test NeoView was at HP itself, where they have, according to Greg, shut down 500 internal databases in a consolidation project.
HP still lacks in the data access space. Obviously, they were looking at BO and Cognos as well as SAP and Oracle did. They are working closely with Ab Initio for ETL although they're philosophy is less 'load and analyze' and more 'ingest and do things inline.' The philosophy, supposedly manifested in the architecture, is very Operational BI-centric.
NeoView is meant to be a "Teradata killer." However, as Greg pointed out, the road is littered with those who claimed to be "better than Teradata" and still, there's Teradata.
Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, HP, NeoView
Microsoft has so many components to their SQL Server family, the standard pitch on SQL Server never gets old. Awareness is paramount to Microsoft's success as it tries to integrate acqusitions (latest: Tetris, FAST) and keep spreading its wings within existing clients and, really, aren't we all Microsoft clients at some level?
Microsoft's philosophy is "BI should be like electricity, it's just there" and "integrating bi into the world in which people work." This philosophy makes sense in Microsoft's world because Microsoft products are like electricity (i.e., Office). Therefore, BI will surface within the Office environment. For example, there are users of Performance Point who don't know they're using it and think they're just using Excel.
Furthermore, they promote BI in 3 contexts: personal (built by me, used by me), team (built by team, for team) and organizational BI (built by IT for use in company) whereas most vendors only focus on the last context.
Sharepoint is going to be increasingly important for BI. Kristine put it this way: Sharepoint is for delivery, Office/Office PPS 2007 is for end user tools and performance management applications and SQL 2005 is for the RDBMS, ETL, OLAP and reporting.
Finally, I was glad to see some emphasis on, and apparent uptick in usage of, data mining in SQL Server, which could be instrumental in taking information exploitation to new levels.
Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, Microsoft, SQL Server
What I liked about the Kalido presentation was that a demonstration was given (that worked) in a short amount of time. I think Bill Hewitt, CEO, has an excellent grasp of the market. Like many of the products at the IAP, I have worked with Kalido.
The modeling tool is very intuitive and graphical and a contrast to ErWin, which is entrenched in our culture. You can download it for free at www.kalido.com/bmcf. Kalido also has a community (http://groups.google.com/group/bmcf), where you can find a number of pre-built models and join the discussion about business-model-driven BI.
In addition to the modeling tool, Kalido has its Dynamic Information Warehouse which, to me, is the backside of the modeling tool - the implementation side, the Universal Information Director, and a Master Data Management tool.
Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, Kalido
This one was mostly an overview of recent incremental updates to Informatica's main product, now at version 8.6. This included one platform for structured and unstructured data, on demand job streams, and real-time integration with a real-time authoring package with Orchestration and Human Workflow managing the overall business process.
Those were great enhancements, but there was more! The Identity Systems acquitision allows Informatica to match names with multiple languages. The Identity systems product is called by IDQ (Informatica Data Quality) but it’s a separate product. This will help identify people at the beginning of processes.
The Itemfield acquisiton allows for conformance to industry standards, i.e., HIPPA, for partner interchange.
The presentation gave a strong nod of acknowlegement to data governance. There's no specific product here, but they are advocating a certain approach. I found it quite complex, however, and could not imagine any of my clients going to such lengths of process.
Overall, Informatica is doing quite well serving their clients with their complete focus on data integration.
Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, Informatica
Composite Software is rolling out their EII appliance, called the Composite Discovery Appliance. It's for enterprise search and utilizes indexes and discovered relationships in the data sources that you train it on. The appliance is actually a blade. Composite Software is embedded into some other more popular large-vendor stack EII products in the market.
Composite attempts differentiation from enterprise search (i.e., Fast and Endeca) through its focus on structured data and their focus on unstructured data.
This is EII and subject to all the pros and cons of that method.
One thing I really liked about this presentation was that they shared the price! Sure, most of the vendors have good and interesting technology, but it's all only worthwhile at a price.
The Composite Discovery Appliance is $150,000 for full use or you can pay $7,500 up front plus $4,000 per month.
I find it interesting that data access is now getting wider. Different methods are emerging with ample, but not obscure, access capabilities. Whereas data access had been an inch wide and a mile deep, now I see some balance emerging in the marketplace (i.e., Composite, IBI) that are balancing that out.
Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, Composite Software
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