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March 5, 2008

Is Greenplum caught in Network Appliance Lawsuit of Sun Microsystems?

Greenplum's current main strategy is its bundling with Thumper, a product line from Sun Microsystems.

Network Appliance has sued Sun Microsystems for intellectual property infringement, specifically related to ZFS, the zettabyte file system that Thumper utilizes.

Dave Hitz, Founder and Executive Vice President of Network Appliance, explains their position here and Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems replies in his blog here.

In triangulating this, it could be a problem for Greenplum.

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Posted by William McKnight at 9:07 AM | | Comments (0)

December 19, 2007

The Best of Business Intelligence 2007

It’s year-end and time for year-end awards. There seem to be awards for just about everything already, but I’ve come up with some unique (I think) categories to share some vendors and products with you that are on my mind. My diverse client needs have led to some far and near corners of the vendor community for solutions. I’ll start on the business intelligence side. Drumroll, please.

Best tool for working with Microsoft Excel
1a. Xcelsius from Business Objects.
1b. Actuate 9 e.Spreadsheet

Yes, 2 winners. Xcelsius brings Excel spreadsheets to life with its incorporation of live data as well as predictive analytics into robust gauges. It’s a great tool for “what if” and the best accessible development tool for creating user understandable analytics.

Actuate 9 e.Spreadsheet similarly can work on live data. Its distribution capabilities for actual Excel spreadsheets makes it a winner. Live formatting, pivot tables, filters, 3D charting and calculations are rich capabilities for making Excel actionable. It’s quick to learn and takes spreadsheet development (yeah, I know it’s easy for us IT people) off of end user hands who don’t want (or have time for) that task.

Best workflow for contact centers
AIM Performance Suite 6.5 – from the founders of Crystal Enterprise

Best business intelligence appliance
Not to be confused with data warehouse appliance, this award goes to Cognos Now! Version 4.3. This is one way to get operational business intelligence – with operational dashboards. Now! works nice with streaming data. Caching keeps performance high and the price makes it very accessible.

Best BI tool integration with Blackberry
Cognos 8 Go! Mobile – This tool actually understands the thumbwheel roll that Blackberry users are prone to do. Combine with Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Excel 8.2 and you’re looking at your BI content on your PDA in Word, Powerpoint or Excel format.

Best BI library metadata

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Posted by William McKnight at 2:12 PM | | Comments (0)

May 29, 2007

Danish Business Intelligence: Omikron and timeXtender

Denmark is actually becoming an interesting area for business intelligence development, led by the consulting firm Platon. I just wanted to give some visibility to a couple of vendor products I encountered while there last week at the Information Management Conference 2007 in Copenhagen.

Omikron is a Data Quality vendor, providing functionality not unlike a Trillium or FirstLogic (Business Objects) in the states – data enrichment, postal address correction, duplicate checking, sanction listing and so forth. However, implementing many of these functions with US-based tools has limitations for European data since address structure is quite unique to the address country. Omikron, based in Germany, specializes in European data quality.

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Posted by William McKnight at 5:46 AM | | Comments (0)

April 25, 2007

Fields of Study for Careers to Come

This is a little off-topic, but last week, I was asked what profession I thought a colleague’s teenager should begin preparing for in order to be successful. My friend was looking for a technology or two in information management. However, I found myself going off in a variety of directions, even though I am not so afflicted as to have teenagers yet. I’ll try to recreate, and reduce, my diatribe here…

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Posted by William McKnight at 1:27 PM | | Comments (0)

November 18, 2005

Gartner Clients Consider BI to Be a Major Priority

Garner came out with a research paper today titled "Clients Consider Business Intelligence to Be a Major Priority" that states "business intelligence jumped from the No. 10 slot to the second-highest priority on CIOs' agendas."

Some observations:

· Small-medium businesses (SMBs) make up a large growth market for BI software

· In the key verticals of manufacturing and financial services, BI accounts for the highest share of software budgets — 18 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

· The education market is a growth market for BI - projecting that BI will make up approximately 10 percent of the total software budget, mainly as a result of recent laws and regulations involving education, such as the "No Child Left Behind" policy in the United States.

· Other markets that are just beginning to adopt BI on a larger scale include healthcare and government.

Drivers of BI growth:

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Posted by William McKnight at 8:27 AM | | Comments (0)