Embarcadero announced the release of ER/Studio XE, which will make it easier for data architects responsible for data warehousing and business intelligence. The importance of data modeling for data warehousing and business intelligence could not be more important. Data modeling must be easier for business analysts to be able to convey DW/BI requirements to business stakeholders, creating and articulating corporate classifications and collaborative data modeling. The new release also includes an improved and more scalable server-side repository for model management and allows users to share, document and publish models and metadata to distributed teams. It also provides for a unified window to support all databases: Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Teradata, etc. The need to reduce the burden on IT is really critical for business agility and is even more important for all enterprises regardless of size. Another key feature is its ToolCloud technology for centralized license management and on-demand tool access. They also announced an easy upgrade path to Embarcadero All-Access XE.

Embarcadero also announced a partnership with Netezza with this release and is supporting Netezza's TwinFin appliance 5.0 and 4.6 customers, helping them to more accurately document, engineer and manage BI-focused data. It will also help those customers to better understand their data and provide even more meaningful information to their business users with business intelligence and analytics. "With a faster and more highly scalable repository, and by expanding ER/Studio's DMBS support for Netezza, our customers can better manage and reuse their existing data assets and ultimately optimize internal processes to save time and money," said Jason Tiret, director of modeling and architecture solutions for Embarcadero Technologies.

The findings from a "Big Data" survey conducted by Kelton Research on behalf of Avanade shows that many respondents are being overwhelmed by this "data deluge," Some of the surprising findings in this study were: The key finding is that companies are drowning in data and only a part of that data is relevant for them. But they want to get more data - they are addicted to it. They are being underserved in getting actionable data to make decisions. Executives at small companies are nearly 10%  more likely to view data as a strategic differentiator than their counterparts at large enterprises. The ability of a small company to execute with big data is due to more to agility. Two major conclusions from the study are that businesses must employ  a holistic approach to data management that focuses on all stages of a data lifecycle and that they must develop a "data culture" where executives and strategic participants are active participants in managing a meaningful data lifecycle.

Read the executive summary:
Big Data Executive Summary.pdf

Just announced - the winners of our Vision Award for Business Impact. These winning solutions show the breadth of success that can be achieved with the implementation of a variety of software solutions from mature products to disruptive technologies. Here's a list of the winners, and links to excerpts from their winning submissions:

ADVANCED ANALYTICS
Whirlpool Corporation submitted by Attensity
View submission excerpt

ANALYTIC DATABASES/APPLIANCES
Bango submitted by Infobright
View submission excerpt

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Segmetrix submitted by Kognitio
View submission excerpt

ENTERPRISE DATA WAREHOUSE
Goodyear Tire submitted by Teradata
View submission excerpt

DATA INTEGRATION
Compassion International submitted by Composite Software
View submission excerpt

DATA INTEGRATION
Smith & Nephew submitted by Informatica
View submission excerpt

OPERATIONAL BI
Farmers Insurance submitted by Confirmit
View submission excerpt

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Steadman Hawkins Clinic submitted by River Logic
View submission excerpt

Congratulations to each of the winners for a job well done, I'd like to also thank the judges who thoughtfully reviewed more than 60 submissions, bringing objectivity and expertise to the judging process. The judges this year were as follows:

Michael Brooks, Dearborn Advisors
Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting
Michael Jennings, Daugherty Business Solutions
William McKnight, McKnight Consulting
John L. Myers, Blue Buffalo Group
James Taylor, Decision Management Solutions
Nancy Williams, DecisionPath Consulting
Lyndsay Wise, Wise Analytics
Editorial Team, BeyeNETWORK

Informatica 9 MDM product release takes aim at the business user across all industries. The new release incorporates the master data management (MDM) capabilities acquired through the acquisition of Siperian with Informatica's unified open data integration platform, making it one of the leaders in MDM. 

The key highlight for me in the release is the MDM-aware business application capability that provides for plug-and-play Data Controls that enable business users to directly access master data, hierarchies and relationships within their existing applications, such as Siebel or salesforce.com that they are trained and familiar with. This has obvious implications implications as we continue to see companies move to virtual environments and the cloud. 

Other key areas within this release include continuous availability support for mission-critical business processes, which is key for all industries. As we have seen with the merging of operational processes with business intelligence, the need for high availability is obvious. Another key area is integrated workflow/business process management that supports workflows for enterprise-wide data governance.

According to Informatica, it has increased its MDM customer base by 50% this year. Customers span a wide range of industries globally including life sciences, retail, healthcare, aerospace and defense, agriculture, education, hospitality and the public sector.

Informatica has already broken into the Leaders Quadrant for Gartner's MDM of Customer Data Magic Quadrant. Informatica MDM's differentiators include managing multiple data domains in a single system and complex hierarchy and relationship management capabilities.

Pervasive Software strives to continually make innovations in data integration that push the envelope of what is possible. Pervasive does this by spending more than 25% of its top-line revenue on R&D, which is why they just reported their 39th straight quarter of profitability.

Yesterday at IntegratioNEXT, Pervasive's user conference, they announced their latest release: Pervasive Data Integrator v10, Cloud Edition running on the new Pervasive DataCloud2. Their goal is to provide universal connectivity for cloud-computing to any endpoint via their wide-range of connectors. They have created a new user interface that is browser-based for all platforms with a common look and feel, is easy-to-use and stresses reusability. As part of the offering, Pervasive also allows for unlimited connectivity with no incremental per-connector fees.

The other major area of focus for Pervasive is DataRush. DataRush is for "Big Data" data integration efforts that require the movement of terabytes of data. DataRush provides the ability to develop massively parallel and scalable applications by fully leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of multi-core processors and SMP systems. Benchmarks conducted by Pervasive deliver record-setting throughput for integration applications. They are currently able to load over 2 terabytes of data per hour on a 32-core Intel Xeon processor 7500 series-based server. DataRush is a parallel dataflow platform that eliminates performance bottlenecks in big data preparation and analytics.