Intelligent Enterprise

As a very large technology and services organization, HP continues to invest in new opportunities. Of course a centerpiece of its investment has been in software, server and storage technologies, including its focus on data warehousing. HP has for many years capitalized on the data warehouse industry through its server technology, but in recent years has launched the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse solution to play in the software and appliance aspect of the industry. While HP was out of the gate in 2007 with Neoview and appeared to have a rosy future, much has changed in the last year.

The initial set of HP Neoview customers that brought momentum has not increased a lot, and the future of the product is not clear. There's significant competition from the likes of Teradata, newly confident and competitive, IBM, with its advances in appliances announced at the IBM IOD conference, and Oracle, which announced a data warehouse appliance with HP at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference. Other competitors, like Greenplum, Infobright, Kognitio, Netezza and Vertica, have also inserted themselves into the ring for your data warehouse business, making things even more interesting with specialized database and appliance technologies.

Well, I knew this announcement was going to happen.

I have no issue with IBM driving into the world of cloud computing — I figured it would. But just think about the larger hardware and software players — such as IBM and Microsoft, who are now moving toward the cloud — and the potential conflicts that could occur. In essence, your cable TV provider is offering to show you how to move to Satellite TV.

SAP CEO-in-waiting Leo Apotheker's recent comments on the company's SaaS ERP solution were very illuminating, and highlight one of the key challenges ahead for cloud computing vendors (and hence customers).

SAP's Business ByDesign, the newly introduced SaaS version for ERP, is "ready and done" and "the coolest app ever written," according to Apotheker. Yet, he admits, it's a bad time, financially, for doing a big market push — "hurting our margin, and hurting our stock," is how he describes it.

It's time for the BI community to treat social networks as the business-intelligence resource they are. (BI is more than reports, dashboards, and OLAP!) The recent "Motrin moms" clamor and response to Mumbai terrorism prove networks' value. Both cases involved twitter, the first as a conduit for advertising-prompted outrage and the second for early and rapid news dissemination. It has become clear that twitter and the rest of a broad set of social networks &mdash as messaging / blogging / microblogging channels and as a means of publishing and finding personal and corporate information — hold immense business value. The value of the information that flows through these networks is indisputable. A deeper challenge is next on the agenda: optimizing that flow by better understanding the networks themselves.

I hope you will excuse a departure from my BI-focused blogs to a more personal one, but on this Thanksgiving eve, I find myself thinking more about freedom and how fragile it is right now. If you are one of the many foreign-born BI product managers, software developers, or BI specialists I have met over the years, then you will want to read this story.

A recent press release concerning ArnoldIT's Google monitoring service piqued my interest. It turns out to be a nicely formatted aggregation page for Google blogs. The most recent five blog entries (or titles therefrom) are grouped together by category. Google has over 70 different blogs (for everything from Gears and Gadgets to OpenSocial and Chrome). Keeping up with them all is nearly impossible. Hence the ArnoldIT aggregation service, dubbed "Overflight."

While handy in its own right, Overflight is not available as an RSS feed. It also doesn't seem to be searchable. So I decided to see if I could mash together my own version of Overflight (tailored to my own research needs), using Yahoo Pipes, the visual Web-app builder.

I'm back from Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, and I came away impressed with both the event and my first real "unconference" experience. The 300 or so (mostly) developers attending were not only passionate and engaged, they drove much of the content, and at least 14 whipped up entries for the climax of the event, the Best Mashup Contest.

So what's an unconference? The basic definition is that it's participant driven, but can you imagine telling your boss you're going to a conference that has nothing on the agenda? That's where things stood (by design) on Tuesday morning, but at least a score of "campers" lined up after the morning keynote to present their ideas for discussion topics. Within 15 minutes, they nearly filled the schedule, and the remaining open slots were filled with discussions (not sales pitches) proposed by event-sponsors including IBM, AOL Developer Network, Google, JackBe, wetpaint, Yahoo Developer Network and Zembly.

For more than thirty years, Information Builders, led by its founder and CEO, Gerry Cohen, has been focused on solving the tough challenges in accessibility and integration of data for business. Over the last decade I have personally witnessed the company's evolution to provide robust tools for IT and business. Last month Information Builders released its latest product, called WebFocus InfoAssist, which brings a range of BI capabilities for business and IT for easily accessing, analyzing and publishing data across the enterprise.

If you read my blog on the latest from Microsoft at its BI conference in October, where it accurately describe the dilemma of "Excel Hell" created from the misuse of Microsoft's spreadsheet tool for storing and analyzing data across business. Unfortunately, Microsoft's prescribed antidote, called Project Gemini, won't be available until at least 2010 or beyond. The challenge with Microsoft's announcement is not just the promise of the release in the future, but the estimated requirements for the version of Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server and operating systems. Why wait years to evaluate a product when there are solutions today?

You know something is getting hot when it's picked up by the larger business press. That's the case with cloud computing, which seems to be all that and a bag of chips, if you ask the business journalism powerhouse "The Economist."

Specifically I'm referring to this recent article, which examined the rise of cloud computing. The Economist did a much better job of explaining its rise than most of the technical publications that I read.

I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup, which Camp co-founder David Berlind predicted will "trump all other development ecosystems" because it's focused on quickly and easily knitting together the meat of the functionality rather than all the system-level code required in conventional development and computing.

"Just as the spreadsheet enabled all sorts of people to become number crunchers, mashups are going to enable a much larger community to become Web developers," Berlind said in his kickoff keynote.

The battle for the Web is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other. The topic came up during a panel discussion on "Why Ajax Standards Matter," which didn't sound too promising going in. Things started getting really interesting when Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, warned, "there's a struggle for the soul of the Web," where rich Internet and Web application development is concerned, and "proprietary engines like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are coming on strong."

Information Week has published my article on open source business intelligence (OSBI), Open Source BI Still Fighting For Its Share, a title that applies both to the BI software market and to IW column inches. (The article is now also an Intelligent Enterprise feature.) I'll share with readers material I wrote, cut by IW's editors, on open-source data-integration vendor Talend and on Eclipse BIRT, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools.

For the past few months, I've collected a lot of data points to the effect that high-performance analytics – i.e., beyond straightforward query — is becoming increasingly important. And I've written about some of them at length. For example:

• MapReduce — controversial or in some cases even disappointing though it may be — has a lot of use cases.
• It's early days, but Netezza and Teradata (and others) are beefing up their geospatial analytic capabilities.
• Memory-centric analytics is in the spotlight.

Ack. I can't decide whether "analytics" should be a singular or plural noun. Thoughts?

Another area that's come up which I haven't blogged about so much is data mining in the database. Data mining accounts for a large part of data warehouse use. The traditional way to do data mining is to extract data from the database and dump it into SAS. But there are problems with this scenario, including:

I spent a worthwhile day last week at Clarabridge's inaugural user conference. The company is a leading text analytics vendor, and the opportunity to catch up with staff and users and (it turned out) prospects and partners, without having to travel far from home, was too good to pass up.

Clarabridge is different from many other text analytics vendors in its singular focus on customer-experience management (CEM). This isn't to say that you can't license and use Clarabridge's Content Mining Platform (CMP) for other applications, and it's not to say that the company doesn't have strong technical capabilities. It's a matter of market positioning that concentrates on a defined set of business users, across a broad spectrum of business sectors, with market messaging that focuses on business benefits rather than on technology. The approach seems to work. Clarabridge CEO and co-founder Sid Banerjee says "the business impact and deployability/usability of our solutions seem to be resonating with our customers and prospects."

Cloud computing is one of those buzz phrases that, like "redistribution of income," seems to make otherwise dispassionate people hyperventilate. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, speaking at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, raised quite a few eyebrows when he derided "cloud computing" as "complete gibberish" in an extended on-stage rant before an audience of financial analysts. A few days later, Free Software Foundation patriarch Richard Stallman (never one to mince words) called cloud computing "worse than stupidity" in a highly critical interview with The Guardian.

Don't be fooled, though. Cloud computing is not just a catchphrase. Like REST, it's a style of doing things that doesn't seem particularly profound at first glance, but has important implications for certain problem-spaces. What the skeptics need, perhaps, are a few real-world case studies in cloud computing, to understand what the hubbub is about.

I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and an enterprise service bus (ESB). ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There's a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though the company only really does two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — it had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do it. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint's systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only three to four months, and provide visibility into the processes.

TDWI hosted its first conference in New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina, last week. I admit, I was both worried and curious about the location, still reading regularly about how certain parts of the city have never recovered. And yet, after walking along Bourbon Street, with its diversity, old French buildings, and intricate beads galore, I can see why people are passionate about rebuilding and why TDWI picked it as a conference location.

Back to BI, I taught a new course at the event, the theme of which is highlighted in this week's Intelligent Enterprise In-Depth feature article, "Cool BI: Rating the Innovations." Those who know me know that I am anything but cool. Conservative, yes. Serious, yes. Cool, no. So I was catching some flack about the course title from colleagues, and well, my very cool kids. Trying to get into the spirit of things, I kicked the course off donning a cool '70s dress with Cold Play blasting in the background (guess who picked that music!).

I had the pleasure the other day of listing to a Webinar from Embarcadero that featured the Global Data Architect for a very large, global energy company, and I feel compelled to share three points that struck me as particularly sapient.

Enterprise data modeling is a formidable task, as those who have attempted or witnessed it will vouch. Difficulties begin right from the outset: what, exactly, do we mean by Enterprise Data Model (and Modeling)? Is it one large model, or a set of models? If the latter, are these models required to conform/share (entities, standards etc.)? Is it another name for the canonical data model? Who is responsible for building the model(s) — is it one person, one central team, or diverse project teams all contributing to it? Where do we start? How do we start? How do we maintain momentum?