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Sybase, DBMS Clusters, MPP, and DATAllegro

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, July 31, 2008
2:05 PM

Sybase is a DBMS stalwart that gets far less attention than deserved. The company recently beat financial-performance estimates and has raised its 2008 sales estimate to $1.11 billion. Sybase's on-going success — the company's DBMS is much more than the parent of Microsoft SQL Server — earns the company a closer look, in its own right and as an excuse for one last comment on Microsoft's planned acquisition of DATAllegro.

Continue reading "Sybase, DBMS Clusters, MPP, and DATAllegro"

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Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, July 31, 2008
8:57 AM

Instead of just making a broad set of statements on the recent Oracle announcements made on July 16th, this is a little more depth and perspective that might be useful for you as you think about Oracle and their BI and performance management approach to the market. Oracle updates on the market in their EPM and BI product areas were delivered by their key executives Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, Thomas Kurian SVP Server Technologies and John Kopcke, SVP and GBU of EPM and BI. Oracle rolled out their last product strategy over a year ago after their acquisition of Hyperion and portfolio of BI and performance management technologies. The last major update to customers from Oracle was at Oracle OpenWorld in fall of 2007, where there seemed to be more confusion than actual answers, as pointed out in this previous blog - Oh Oracle Let's Be Honest Now.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
9:26 AM

Earlier this month I saw a press release with the headline "Oco and Business Objects Sign Deal... " Vendor partnerships don't usually float up to my must-cover list, but this one peaked my interest. After all, what does Business Objects, an SAP Company, the world's largest BI vendor and a software-as-a-service (SaaS) force in its own right, have to gain from Oco Inc., an upstart SaaS vendor that's a fraction of Business Object's size? Business Objects executive Mani Gill filled me in on the details.

Posted by Shawn Shell
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
5:06 PM

Over the last few weeks, I've had the opportunity to speak to various customers about SharePoint licensing. The common theme is that most don't understand Microsoft licensing in general and SharePoint licensing specifically. In fact, most customers are pretty confused by the dizzying array of options, choices, and requirements Microsoft has constructed.

In particular, some customers got a nasty shock when they realized the (potentially expensive) difference between an Enterprise Agreement and an Enterprise License in MOSS.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
12:50 PM

With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there's not enough "there" there in the business rules management system market, what with only a handful of players, but yesterday's announcement by IBM that it will acquire ILog will certainly spark aftershocks. I came across a few particularly keen questions from a former industry insider.

To go straight to the source, I first spoke to an ILog exec yesterday who shared this bottom-line assessment of why the timing for this deal: "The market is maturing, and business rules are taking a legitimate position in infrastructure," said Jean-François Abramatic, Chief Product Officer. "It's clear now that business rules are an essential part of business process management/services-oriented architecture platform."

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, July 28, 2008
12:19 PM

IBM today announced that it plans to acquire ILog, an unquestionable leader in the business rules engine marketplace. The acquisition comes at a time when ILog seemed to be faltering, with declining profitability and reliance on a troubled financial sector, but there's no doubting the tremendous value to IBM and customers.

IBM is not new to business rules engines (BRE). WebSphere has a rules component, and IBM has experience with various other rules integration models (e.g. PegaSystems, Haley etc.) as well as with in-house experimentation. Yet, IBM has always lagged in its BRE capabilities. In contrast, ILog is a known market leader with formidable capabilities and established market presence – Forrester ranks ILOG and Fair Isaac as the top two BRE vendors. Pegasystems and Corticon are the next largest competitors, while Haley was recently acquired by Australian company RuleBurst.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, July 28, 2008
8:44 AM

Whenever the subject of business requirements for data warehousing and BI comes up, I try to bite my tongue because it's always at a time in the project when expectations are high and people are hopeful. I hate to rain on their parade, but this is one of those areas where best practices are often worst practices.

The idea that you can go "do" requirements gathering is canonical, but it's surprising and ironic how few practitioners actually believe in its value. This isn't a bias you want to expose to your clients, though. I find it particularly vexing that training sessions and conferences on data warehousing and BI usually have requirements gathering classes, taught by people who really ought to know better. I guess that's a subject for another day — why industry "experts" are content to disgorge training, for a fee, that they know is misleading, but is widely accepted.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, July 25, 2008
10:29 AM

In my interview of Fausto Ybarra, Microsoft's director of SQL Server product management, I certainly didn't get the idea (suggested in these separate posts by Seth Grimes and Mark Madsen) that the integration of DatAllegro's software for shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) will take an eternity. Granted, Ybarra wouldn't comment on timing and said details won't be forthcoming until the October Microsoft BI Conference. But he did say Microsoft chose DatAllegro over other products considered specifically because it was the best fit, architecturally, and would be the easiest product to integrate.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, July 24, 2008
11:00 PM

I learned of the Microsoft-DATAllegro deal from DATAllegro e-mail sent at 12:57 pm EDT on July 24. Ten hours later, at 11:11 pm, I thought I'd see what others had to say. The search for views was more illuminating than any additional analyses I found. Take a look... if you don't mind snarky blog articles —

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, July 24, 2008
5:06 PM

My first thought on learning of Microsoft's plan to acquire DW appliance vendor DATAllegro is that MS is buying the wrong company. Yes, DATAllegro's parallelized database technology will fill a big gap in Microsoft's DW product line, namely that SQL Server doesn't scale to the top end, but the technology isn't compatible and will take years to build into SQL Server. I'd think it's Dataupia that would, without disruption, close the gap. No, this deal is about gutting the DATAllegro appliance. Look at the details —

Posted by Mark Madsen
Thursday, July 24, 2008
3:04 PM

By acquiring DatAllegro, Microsoft is filling a performance and scalability gap that has kept them from consideration in larger data warehouse deals. Microsoft announced the acquisition today but has not yet disclosed the terms of the deal. DatAllegro just completed a series D funding round of $19.6 million in May, bringing the total funding over their five years of existence to roughly $63 million.

DatAllegro has been secretive over the past few years about its customer base, leading some analysts (including me) to wonder how well they're doing in the highly competitive data warehouse platform and appliance market. They have only three customers that I know of, but they say that the largest of these sites are storing hundreds of terabytes. This offers a compelling scalability story for Microsoft once the DatAllegro technology is merged into SQLserver.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, July 24, 2008
9:55 AM

I attended MicroStrategy's Business Intelligence Symposium this week in New York and I sat in on a preview of what promises to be a blockbuster release this fall. The list of upgrades is long, and the headliner in MicroStrategy 9 will certainly be 64-bit in-memory analysis capabilities. MicroStrategy isn't pioneering here, and plan to add it has been public knowledge for months. Nonetheless, successful delivery will put pressure on the few vendors that have yet to deliver this technology.

MicroStrategy's tech preview was delivered by Mark LaRow, vice president of products, who began by laying out the long-term goal of supporting expected super-scale deployments of the future involving as much as 10 petabytes of accessible data, 100,000 users and 1 million reports per week. That's all brainstorming work that's still in the labs, but LaRow then offered a lot more concrete detail on what to expect in the MicroStrategy 9 release in Q4. The list includes:

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
2:23 PM

One week later it seems the support situation at Business Objects is settling down, although customers remain miffed and a handful still do not have access to support. There are lessons for customers and vendors alike from this situation, and a question of how the BI vendor will make amends to those most adversely affected.

For most customers, the issue of not accessing support was one primarily of inconvenience and frustration. As of mid last week, according to Business Objects, about 20 percent of customers lacked the ability to logon to the site to open or track existing cases. However, for some, the disruption in support service meant a delay in production implementations.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
4:13 PM

I was going to just link to Mike Kavis' post on the Top 10 Reasons Why People Are Making SOA Fail, but I wanted to added some of my own comments. By the way, he's talking primarily about IT people, not business people, in the fail part of the equation.

Number 1 reason: they fail to explain SOA's business value. Kavis recommends (and I completely agree) starting with business problems first, specifically using BPM as the "killer app" to justify the existence of SOA.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, July 21, 2008
5:02 PM

I covered most of the bases on Oracle's release of its Fusion Edition Enterprise Performance Management (Oracle EPM) release last week, but here's a bit more detail, as well as some interesting insight, on the integration of Hyperion Essbase with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). For instance, Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel says vendors are often guilty of referring to their products as "integrated" as if that's a binary variable.

The nitty gritty detail — the stuff that legacy customers are most interested in — was delivered last week by Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of server technologies, who explained that that there are two styles of integration. "Essbase can be a source to OBIEE, so you can combine relational, OLAP and ROLAP analysis," he said. "One the financial side, you can source OBIEE relational data into Essbase, so the Oracle BI Server can become a source under Essbase."

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, July 21, 2008
11:00 AM

That's right. We read this all the time: In order to succeed, CIO's should be business leaders. But the fact is, leading the business is not the CIO's business. Yet that's not bad news... in fact, it actually makes the CIO more influential.

The fact is, heads of Marketing, Operations, Procurement etc. lead the business. The head of IT does not, by definition, lead the business. And this is true even the business is information or technology. For example, the CIOs of CA, Forrester, Gartner, Google and Microsoft — to name just a few information/technology providers — do not lead their businesses; their counterparts in sales & marketing and operations do. (Interestingly, the CTO for an information technology firm is much closer to being a business leader, because the CTO owns or advises the product strategy.)

Posted by Shawn Shell
Friday, July 18, 2008
5:12 PM

Through the SharePoint product team's MSDN blog, Microsoft announced that it had released a significant infrastructure update for SharePoint (and related technologies like Project Server that leverages SharePoint components). The update seems to primarily address three areas:

Search functionality and search-related performance (like index performance).

Content Deployment bug fixes (which hopefully will correct a series of irritating bugs related to deploying content from one SharePoint environment to another in web content management scenarios). These are include the hotfix packs Microsoft released for content deployment back in May of this year.

General interface and performance improvements. In reading the three or four pages in Microsoft's site that aimed to describe what was actually included, it was difficult to pinpoint what these "improvements" actual mean to SharePoint administrators. However, Microsoft describes them as "...fixes and product performance updates driven by customer feedback which have resulted in significant platform performance improvements..." Again, I was unable to nail what precisely has changed or how significant the improvements were.

Posted by Neil Raden
Friday, July 18, 2008
11:05 AM

Gary Cokins of SAS and James Taylor, my partner at Smart (enough) Systems, in an admirable attempt to disambiguate the terms Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) and Performance Management have, unfortunately, both gotten it wrong.

Gary claims that James "marginalizes Performance Management as being too narrow." Instead, he (Gary) suggests that "Performance Management and EDM are arguably very similar." James claims that EDM "goes one step further."

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, July 17, 2008
6:44 AM

AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management, has been bombarding me with e-mail promoting Dan Keldsen's and Carl Frappaolo's sponsored study, Findability: The Art and Science of Making Content Easy to Find. While I wonder what "findability" offers beyond buzzword differentiation for a few search vendors, even after learning that "findability is the art and science of making content findable," I do understand the distinction that "under findability, the burden of intelligent content processing is placed on the content itself." I'm tempted to say that's hokum — in keeping with my amity for automated knowledge discovery in text, a.k.a., text analytics — except that supporting examples are easy to come by. Here are a few, inadvertently provided by a leading enterprise-search vendor.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
5:09 PM

Oracle made big news today introducing the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Fusion Edition (Oracle EPM). The release marks both the final integration of Hyperion and Oracle technologies following last year's acquisition as well as a bold statement as to the future direction of enterprise performance management as a kind of ERP system for corporate management.

"We see businesses going beyond operational excellence they've achieved over the last 15 years and moving on to management excellence," said John Kopcke, senior vice president of enterprise performance management. "The Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System will allow companies to do from the management side of the business the same things that organizations have done from an ERP perspective."

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
4:18 PM

I've written about the "category error" of looking at open source primarily as targeting end-user replacement of BI applications and established data warehouse platforms. I've long seen that OS's greatest BI/DW has instead been in enabling developers to build BI into line-of-business applications and create specialized analytical tools. I'm more convinced than ever of this assessment, even as OS-BI vendors have launched improvements that target enterprise end users. On the DW front, the launch of Aster nCluster supports my point.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
12:12 PM

When SAP acquired Business Objects early this year, it committed to keeping Business Objects as a separate company. As a separate company owned by SAP, it could better execute on its leadership in the BI market and remain open and agnostic to non-SAP customers and systems. Both also wanted to tap into any potential joint customers and synergies. One of those synergies is support.

Naturally, there are economies of scale in sharing support systems to track cases, provide searchable content, and so on. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that support is one of my hot buttons and one I consider to be a critical factor for evaluating BI vendors. When things go wrong with software — and they will — it's the quality of support that is the difference between success and frustration and failure.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Monday, July 14, 2008
2:36 PM

Gartner's recent "MarketScope for Web Content Management" has predictably garnered a lot of attention from vendors happy with their position in the ratings chart. I have a mixed reaction.

Specifically, I'll take issue with Interwoven's "Strong Positive" rating. I've been following the company for ten years now, and this is what I think. Interwoven as a company and the extended TeamSite product management team in particular are still some of the best briefer/demo-givers in the industry. They perpetually tell what analysts call a "great story." What we've uncovered on the ground is a rather different story: a set of very expensive WCM tools running off a highly dated technology platform, often requiring excessive customization that can be detrimental to your longterm website health. For a complete scrub of Interwoven's TeamSite/LiveSite line, check out this free sample evaluation from the CMS Watch Web CMS Report 2008.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, July 11, 2008
10:27 AM

Here's a company that gets how marketing 2.0 works: Metastorm is publishing podcasts on iTunes (that is, you can get them without providing your personal information to Metastorm) as well as having a YouTube channel and customer success stories on their own site that don't require registration.

I posted a while back about how Active Endpoints is publishing webinar replays (video) as well as audio podcasts and product release information (PDF) all in an RSS feed that I subscribe to in iTunes, no signup required. IDS Scheer has ARIS TV, also on YouTube. More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, July 10, 2008
11:03 AM

Are you as sick as I am of so-called "architects" swiftboating BPM with phony strawman arguments? Here's the latest, from blogger Nick Malik:

I like point out really nutty ideas, even when a lot of people have spent a lot of time investing in them... [BPM] created pretty languages for describing business processes, and we started telling the business that once business processes are described using these languages, then you can push a button and "viola" the process becomes automated. According to the 'true believers,' we can give end users one of our pretty languages (BPMN or BPEL) and they will write their own software, and we can fire all the IT developers.

Posted by Kas Thomas
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
12:05 PM

Over at the Adobe Developer Connection Web site, Belgian developer Sébastien Arbogast has posted an interesting article (a tutorial of sorts) on how to write next-generation Web apps in Flex. What's interesting isn't the Flex part (or the demo app itself, which is rather uninspired) but the underlying stack, which gives some hint, I think, of what Adobe's Flex evangelistas may be envisioning as LAMP-Next. It's a combination of Flex (for the presentation layer), BlazeDS (for messaging and presence), Spring (the runtime framework), Hibernate (for persistence), and MySQL (data layer). The application server used in Arbogast's example happens to be JBoss, but it could just as easily be something else.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
11:56 AM

Everyone loves a horse race, so it's no surprise that industry insiders and practitioners alike want to know which BI vendors are on top, which ones are growing and which ones are losing ground. That's what made this story on IDC's 2006 BI sales stats one of the most popular articles on this site last year, and it's why this week's top story recaps IDC's BI sales stats for 2007. The biggest surprise is that software sales seemed to hold up well, despite the bad economic news that started with last year's subprime meltdown.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Monday, July 7, 2008
9:48 AM

I thought the billion-dollar FAST deal Microsoft made was crazy based on my conversations last year with FAST about their products and prospects. The Microsoft presentation at the Independent Analyst Platform in Phoenix last week reminded me to follow up on things that have been sitting in the queue for a couple months.

Posted by Nelson King
Monday, July 7, 2008
9:23 AM

The Apple rumor mills, always busy grinding out compote, turned their attention to SproutCore in mid-June. SproutCore is Apple's almost-official JavaScript framework of choice for developing Rich Internet Applications. The open source creation of Charles Jolley at SproutIt, SproutCore has an independent Web site, and it's affiliation with Apple is hardly a well guarded secret; but its further delineation under non-disclosure at the Worldwide Developer's Conference set off a buzz.

It's long been known that Apple (that is Steve Jobs) doesn't want to work with Adobe Flash to develop Apple's RIAs, and that Apple was searching for alternatives in the Ajax/JavaScript camps. SproutCore is a JavaScript framework, one of scores, in part distinguished by being modeled after Apple's Cocoa development environment. SproutCore code executes completely within a browser (most browsers anyway), although Apple has already needed to hitch the SquirrelFish JavaScript Interpreter to its Safari browser to boost performance.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, July 3, 2008
9:53 AM

The whole issue of E-mail Archiving and Management (EAM) has come under the spotlight recently, triggered by a ruling by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco — a ruling that touches on the Fourth Amendment "Protection from unreasonable search and seizure." Plaintiffs argued that when employers read the content of text messages sent by their employees — text messages that were held by a hosted vendor, Arch Wireless — that the employees' fourth amendment privileges were breached. In other words, even though the employees were using company-paid messaging systems, the employer should still respect their privacy and the confidential nature of personal message exchanges.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
12:03 PM

Did you notice the new video player (top right) on our home page? This isn't just a better user interface, it's connected to a all-new video delivery infrastructure for TechWeb (the parent company of IntelligentEnterprise.com). This service, from an outfit called Brightcove, brings you a higher-quality viewing experience as well as faster and easier control over what you're watching.

I've sometimes gritted my teeth as TechWeb (formerly CMP) has evolved its video capabilities over the last few years. Do you remember "The News Show" with John Soat? That was our first foray into video, and I managed to contribute about a dozen segments to that show before we moved on to the next-generation initiative. Many people loved that daily program, but what people don't like, regardless of the content, is the push approach in which videos automatically start playing with audio on. This new player puts all the control in your hands. There's still room for improvement (we could use longer descriptive headlines, for example), but I think we're getting better and better at delivering thoughtful and informative content in video form. With this is mind, I thought I'd share my top-five list of IE-reader-relevant videos:

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
9:58 AM

Yesterday, Oracle lifted the veil on its plans for BEA. Naturally, Oracle said the acquisition as a whole was not just for market share, but for BEA's technology, which would all become part of the Fusion middleware platform. There was a lot of material presented, but I'll focus on the product convergence plan as it relates to business process management suites (BPMS).

To rationalize the product set, Oracle first sorted the BEA product catalog into one of three buckets: 1) strategic, where BEA was considered superior to existing Fusion components or a new capability; 2) continue and converge, where BEA component would be positioned as secondary, maintained but eventually merged into the current Fusion offering; and 3) maintenance, mostly OEM offerings, which it seems Oracle wants to walk away from as soon as they can. The BEA installed base was reassured that all BEA current products would continue to be "supported," although those that are not "strategic" would not be enhanced.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
8:50 AM

I was at last week's Open Source BI Summit hosted by Sun and it was interesting to see a presentation by Mark Madsen asserting that Open Source is taking hold due to the commoditization of software in the market. Using BI as one example that has hit the mainstream and peaked, his observation is that Open Source is spawning more rapidly as the commercial on-premise software is generally the same across BI vendors. Let me take the contrarian position. Maybe a lot of core BI functionality is similar, but a lot of other capabilities are still very different.