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I have several vices in life. Cigars and Wine are two of them. My wife and I throw an annual holiday wine party thats attended by over 60 people. And all I can say is I hope the cartoon below is not a good descriptor of me.
This is a must read for anyone who is still trying to figure out what the heck Web 2.0 is. Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger all take sections of the book and rant and rave about the way the world is changing, how business as usual is evolving and how it will not wait for you.
As I mentioned above this is a must read for any executive thats in charge of marketing or branding at small or large companies. Sift through the ranks and open you eyes to the interesting changes that citizen journalism and other forms of empowered media are effecting the way the world interacts with companies.
I won't lie, I did skip a few paragraphs here and there, many of the points that are made can be absorbed quicker than the authors thought. I do recommend the book.
More information on the Clue Train Manifesto
On Monday the servers that host BeyeNETWORK were hit by a denial of service attack. It caused short term outages to our services but in the end the entire system was back at 100% in less than 90 minutes. The interesting thing for me was that I was in Dallas and the symptoms seemed worse there than my team in Boulder was experiencing. I couldn't see the site but the team could, plus my friend Stephen Pace twittered me to say he couldn't see the sites. So I had to wonder if it was down for everyone or just me?
I mentioned it to a friend at the event I was speaking at and they suggested the following site:
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
I guess its true the coolest things are often the simplest. I now have it bookmarked.
I think this one was more about wishful thinking than anything else. I am a classic workaholic I work 8:30 a.m.- 6:30 p.m. every work day, followed by 9 p.m.-12 a.m. most evenings and I generally put in between 5-15 hours over the weekends. So when I met Timothy Ferriss the author I was sold just on the title alone. Its an interesting book, a little impractical but once you get into it you will become jealous of the lifestyle he leads.
I think the best take away from the book was how Tim handles email. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. He turns it off the rest of the time thus eliminating the distractions that come with that annoying little pop up window. Try it for a week and see if it helps.
Kickfire launched this past week and jumped into the already deep waters of the appliance space. They have not yet gone GA but are working towards a fall release and are presently in beta with several clients. A couple interesting things about their approach is they are focusing on MySQL and they have added a hardware chip component to the appliance the is especially designed to supercharge SQL.
To make sure they are seen as the real deal they joined forces with MySQL parent company Sun to set a new TPC-H benchmark. They set a new Dollar Barrier mark as well as setting a new performance record in the non-clustered category for 100GB. The overall price performance of this system was $0.70/QphH@100GB USD, which is the best in the industry.
Kickfire seems to be getting the performance from a combination of column store format, intelligent indexing and the SQL Chip I mentioned above. They feel they have made important steps towards reducing the effects of the Von Neumann bottleneck.
Tags: Data warehouse appliance, business intelligence, Kickfire
Teradata announced today that they are now offering a new family of platforms designed to address needs from entry level to active enterprise level. This is a significant move on Teradata's part and it's aimed directly at the appliance market that has been nibbling away at Teradata's market share over the past few years.
I grabbed a piece of the press release below, the biggest thing here is that you can get into Teradata for $67K per terabyte!!!
• Teradata 550 SMP (symmetric multiprocessing), with a price of $67,000(1) per terabyte, a departmental data warehouse.
• Teradata 2500, priced at $125,000(1) per terabyte, an entry-level data warehouse for companies that are just starting out or for those with other analytical platform requirements in their enterprises.
• Teradata 5550, an active data warehouse-class platform, starts at $200,000(1) per terabyte depending on the performance and availability needs of the customer. The Teradata 5550 and Teradata 12 provide up to two times the system performance over their respective predecessors.
Looks like Teradata is having fun with their new found corporate freedom, great move!
Tags: Teradata, data warehouse appliance
I get asked from time to time about what books or resources I use to keep up on technology. I thought it might be fun to share them here in my blog so moving forward I will try to add books that I am reading or have read.
I'm presently finishing up The Big Switch by Nick Carr. It a great book and does a wonderful job of helping you understand how computing is becoming just like electricity. There's a lot to this theory and if you run a company or are a software or systems providers you had better have your mind wrapped around where computing is going.
I talked a little about this topic in a post earlier this week so check that out too.
Tags: Nick Carr, The Big Switch,
Generally when we use the term stack in the business intelligence world we are talking about the big 4: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP along with all their recent acquisitions Cognos, BO etc. All of these companies claim to provide a platform to enable every type of business intelligence you might need to have. It's interesting to me that one of the largest platforms out there is often ignored but continues to grow into our business world through the internet.
Google is much more than a search engine. Over the past couple years the company has branched out to become a business solution platform. Some of the players in the BI space are already taking advantage of it. From a recent PR email I received -
Panorama Software, a leader in the Proactive Business Intelligence solutions space, recently launched the Beta version of a new analytics, reporting and data visualization solution for Google applications: Panorama Analytics for Google Docs. Panorama’s Software as a Service solution integrates with Google to provide Google Docs users with new capabilities for advanced analytical, reporting and data visualization functions, all at no cost. Focused on pivot table and charting functionality, Panorama’s solution is a high-value capability that makes spreadsheets in Google Docs and dashboards in iGoogle even more useful.
Another door Google recently opened into the enterprise is their announcement this week to enable SalesForce with the Google Docs solution. Read more here.
And lastly, Google launched Big Table two weeks ago positioning itself to go head to head with the cloud utility system that Amazon has had so much success with.
Bottom line....the platform we know today isn't the one we will be using in a couple years. I wonder how today's business intelligence companies will react?
Tags: Business Intelligence, Google, Platform, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle
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