Intelligent Enterprise

Kilimanjaro, Gemini, Madison... what's with all the code names and why does Microsoft need so many to describe developments that are all expected to bow in the first half of 2010? Herain Oberoi, group product manager of the SQL Server Business Group, cleared up a few questions for me here at the Micosoft's BI Conference 2008, but it took an outsider (from Teradata) to reveal another possible rationale for the confusing naming conventions.

The clear headliner in Kilimanjaro is "Project Gemini," which will bring in-memory, on-the-fly sorting, filtering and slice-and-dice analysis of massive (millions of rows) data sets to Excel with the aid of a client plug-in, controlled storage and sharing through integration with Sharepoint, and behind-the-scenes modeling by Analysis Services. So why two separate names? Well, Oberoi stressed that Kilimanjaro also includes self-service reporting extensions to Report Builder that will enable users to create, store and share report components that can be mixed and matched for what's described as rapid, grab-and-go reporting.

As I wrote last week, the information available on the HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server is incomplete. Pertinent questions are on the table, but I've been unsuccessful, thus far, in getting answers. Maybe the right people are taking a few well-deserved days off after Oracle Open World or maybe they're observing Rosh Hashanah. Nonetheless, I've not heard back on requests made Friday and again yesterday. I have, however, talked to HP about the fit between this new product and Neoview.

To review, the key questions about the HP-Oracle offering get into the nuts and bolts of the hardware. Is it shared-nothing architecture through and through, and, if not, how does the optimizer negotiate between the two sides of the devise (database and storage)? Second, if it's built on "industry standard" hardware, just how does it put query processing power "on each and every disk," as suggested by Larry Ellison? Netezza, for example, gains its performance by putting query processing power on a Field Programmable Gate Array on each and every disk, but that's proprietary hardware.

The whole concept of the data warehouse appliances has gone from "an interesting niche in the market to something that's smack dab in the middle of the mainstream market." That's how Jim Baum, president and COO of Netezza, sized up the importance of this week's announcement of the HP Oracle Database Machine. That's the big picture, but having interviewed Netezza and Teradata executives thus far, it's clear that they, along with analysts and potential customers, are still struggling to size up the actual product. I'm still gathering opinions, but here's a short list of questions raised thus far:

Could technology have saved Wall Street from its current financial crisis? That's something I've been thinking about over the last few days as I've scramble to move at least some of my money into FDIC-insured accounts at multiple institutions. From my perspective, the Fannies, Freddies, Lehmans and AIGs of this world no doubt had plenty of risk analysis, predictive analytics, and business rules technology to see and avoid the risk. They just ignored the danger signs or, worse, used the technology to paper over the risks.

"If your Web site sucks, it's your own fault." That's the tough love Avinash Kaushik shared today here at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference in New York in a presentation entiled "Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a '2.0' World." Kaushik offered a bunch of great advice on how to better measure site performance and he also listed a handful of free tools. "So there can be no more excuses" like not having enough data, not having the right data or not having enough money for Web analytics, he concluded.

Today I'm at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, Conn., and much of the buzz here is about what's going down on Wall Street. That's no surprise given that about 70 percent of the attendees here are from financial institutions. There have been plenty of jokes about not being able to buy paper clips, let alone enterprise technology. That said, I did see at least some tire kicking in the exhibit hall, and among the 15 vendors exhibiting at this smallish, 150-attendee hotel event, almost every one of them seemed to be showing off a dashboard-style interface.

As Gartner analyst Roy Schulte's observes in this week's in-depth Q&A interview, dashboards showing current (or at least near-real-time) business metrics have never been hotter. We're seeing these types of interfaces from BI vendors, BAM vendors and complex-event-processing (CEP) vendors alike. It's a healthy sign of a meeting of the minds between business and IT.

"Better, easier, lower-cost" and "more flexible." These were the adjectives respondents to a recent InformationWeek / IntelligentEnterprise survey used most often when asked "what's at the top of your business intelligence wish list?" The survey was conducted this summer and is behind this week's in-depth feature "Special Report: BI Gets Smart," as well as a full report with the complete survey results. The words "better, lower-cost," and "more flexible" applied to a range of wishes, but here are the top "must haves":

When it comes to IT research, Gartner's "Magic Quadrants" and Forrester's "Wave" rankings carry a lot of weight with would-be technology buyers, but these reports lean more toward assessing vendors rather than products. Granted, when you're spending six or seven figures with a vendor, things like "completeness of vision" and "ability to execute" certainly matter a great deal, but most would-be buyers are equally hungry for hands-on analysis of the software they might end up using every day. In the business intelligence market, that gap is filled by Cindi Howson's BIScorecard. Here's a peek at the top-level scores, plus a link to five helpful recommendations.

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.

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."

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.

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:

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."

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."

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.

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:

Last week I shared a post about an AIIM study that revealed (among many points) that receptivity to Web 2.0-style social networking is highest among "Knowledge Management-Inclined" organizations. The study didn't say what percentage of firms fit that description, so I tried to get in touch with one of the report authors to find out. As an experiment, I tried Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 tools for this bit of collaboration, and good old e-mail, a decidedly Web 1.0 tool, won the race.

I wouldn't have thought of this experiment had I not been practically goaded into it. You see, AIIM's Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen had this Odd Couple repartee going throughout their presentation. Wearing a suit and tie, Carl said, "As a Baby Boomer, I have very carefully established, serious online communities where we can collaborate… but you can also reach me via email."

Dan, wearing an un-tucked shirt and jeans, said, "I’m a Millennial… If you insist, I suppose I will take an e-mail address from you, but I'd rather that you use Twitter."

I didn't attend this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference (E2C) to spend lots of time hearing about wikis, blogs, bookmarking, expertise discovery and so on (I focused instead on cloud computing). I think social networking technologies are reaching maturity, and now that the likes of IBM and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft and (to an even lesser extent) Oracle are onto the most proven and popular capabilities, this is looking like another market set for consolidation.

Yes, pioneers and best-of-breed players will continue to innovate, and, yes, adoption will continue to grow. As evidence, there were plenty of success-story presentations at E2C from blue-chip outfits ranging from the CIA and Sony to Pfizer and Wachovia. So my question is, what's the next chapter?

Will large enterprises embrace cloud computing? A telling point during an "Evening in the Cloud" panel discussion at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference came when a member of the audience (an employee of integrator CSC) said, "I know of plenty of European companies that wouldn't touch you guys with a ten-foot pole if it means putting data in an American data center. The "you guys" in question were the executives representing Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. The objection cited was the Patriot Act, which has stoked plenty of fear about U.S. Government meddling in private data, but let's not get side-tracked on that issue. The point is that there are plenty of reasons why corporations won't move into the cloud until they can know more about where the data will reside and how it will be protected.

In my book, it's time to stop thinking of data warehouse appliances (including those powered by column-store databases) as experimental devices for pioneers and performance nuts. Having personally interviewed more than a handful of appliance customers, my sense is that we're on the cusp of a broad adoption phase. Will these devices simply compliment conventional data warehouses as the foundation for data marts and non-mission-critical apps? Or will they also start replacing conventional enterprise data warehouses (EDWs)? I haven't heard many solid arguments against the appliance approach.

Hey all you spreadsheet jockeys; want to do something creative (if a little crazy) in Excel? Today I was trolling Omniture (our Web Analytics suite) and I noticed an article on our sister site, Gamasutra, that is hugely popular. It's a primer on creating 3D games in Excel, and it includes demo programs and videos of games created with the Excel 3D engine.

Whether you want to advance your career or just improve your team's chances of success, IT professionals would do well to read this week's installment of "Kimball University," entitled "Better Business Skills for BI and Data Warehouse Professionals". The title notwithstanding, it's a great guide for any IT pro who wants to better understand the business, improve interactions with colleagues and superiors, and develop better communication skills. I can personally vouch for several of the 12 resources author Warren Thornthwaite suggests.

The topic of business intelligence was largely missing in action at this week's SAPPHIRE event, though John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, an SAP Company, did give a keynote address today (albeit at 4:30 pm — not exactly prime time). One of the highlights of the presentation was a demo of Polestar running on top of the SAP BI Accelerator. Polestar is Business Object's search-style interface for BI while BIA is SAP's in-memory analytic appliance. The demo presented more evidence that in-memory technology will get fast-track attention in the SAP/Business Objects integration.

It's your last chance to "Take The Poll" on our home page (left column below the blog). I'm wrapping up this month's interactive poll on performance management and will post a new poll for May. So... Which of the following best describes your top performance management priority?

Tired of giving up sales to upstart appliance vendors, Teradata yesterday announced its own lineup of appliances spanning data warehousing needs from departmental warehouses and analytic marts up to entry-level warehouses and large-scale enterprise-class warehouses.
The price-per-terabyte figures are newly aggressive for Teradata, the performance looks promising and, most important, they all run on the Teradata 12 database. That last point is crucial because most customers would rather not have to run multiple DBMS environments.

This week's in-depth story on "How to Choose Among the Four Bright Lights of BI" offers a good example of provocative story packaging meant to get people to click and read. This also happens to be the cover story of this week's issue of InformationWeek magazine. The cover line read "And Then There Were Four," and the cover image (also used on our home page) shows four brightly burning lights among a bunch of burned-out, broken and missing bulbs. That combo has succeeded in getting people to turn the page, but, ouch, it has to hurt if you're one of the leading lights among the remaining independent BI vendors.

I've been in publishing for a couple of decades, so I defend the right of writers and editors to stir emotions to get people reading, clicking and talking. Through acquisition, SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft now claim roughly half the existing BI installs out there, but there are plenty of other leading lights out there that will help define a bigger market that has yet to emerge.

"Pinch me, I'm dreaming!" This is the line Salesforce.com is using to promote today's announcement of "Salesforce for Google Apps," a pairing of the software-as-a-service-based sales force automation offering with Google Apps. The New York Times had a scoop on the story this morning, and they pegged it with this quote from Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend."

The enemy in question is Microsoft, of course, and Salesforce for Google Apps will be going up against Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The twist here is that Salesforce and Google say they'll be able to mash up their SaaS-based apps so you can, for example, keep track of e-mails sent (through Gmail) to a particular customer right on that customer's sales record...

Judging by the fact that this article is among the top five on our site thus far this year, I know for a fact that database/data warehouse scalability is a hot topic with the readers of Intelligent Enterprise. With this in mind, I'm hosting a Web seminar tomorrow entitled "Database Scalability: How to Plan for the Long Haul." The star attraction is none other than database/data warehouse guru Richard Winter, principal of WinterCorp and director of the Winter TopTen program.

"If you're not relying on the twin pillars of regression analysis and random tests, you're making a big mistake." This was a key point delivered this morning at the Gartner BI Summit by keynoter Ian Ayres in his talk on "Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart." Drawing from his book "Super Crunchers," Ayres said random testing, in particular, is the best way to get into statistical algorithms, and he guaranteed the measure will give you "at least a 5 percent to 10 percent improvement in any measure you care about."

I'm here in Chicago at the Gartner BI Summit, but the opening keynote is still hours away. In the meantime, here are few tangential-but-nonetheless-interesting comments I edited out of my Q&A interview with Gartner's Kurt Schlegel. On the combination of BI and Search, for example, Schlegel admits there's much more potential than real adoption at this point. And on consolidation, he says visualization and predictive analytics technologies will be next on the acquisition hit list.

There was plenty of hype last year about making BI analysis Google easy, but I just haven't come across a lot of customer success stories. "I don't think [Business Objects] Polestar has any customers yet," says Schlegel, "and between FAST and Endeca, they may have a dozen or two customers. If you compare that to what's out there, it's a tiny fraction of the market."

"Follow the money." This approach to investigation, applied by criminal prosecutors going back before Eliot Ness and made famous as a line in the movie "All the President's Men," is exactly how soon-to-be-ex New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was tied to a high-end prostitution ring. In this case it was fraud detection technology, of the kind routinely applied by banks in money laundering investigations, that led directly to Spitzer and to his resignation.

"Internal Revenue Service investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor," reported the New York Times in this story. "The transactions, officials said, suggested possible financial crimes — maybe bribery, political corruption, or something inappropriate involving campaign finance. Prostitution, they said, was the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators."

"Over the past several months, more than 100 customers worldwide purchased SAP solutions for enterprise performance management with the intention to replace Hyperion solutions from Oracle." SAP heralded this announcement late last month as a big milestone, but after reviewing the facts, I'm thinking the number sounds low. I'd also observe that it's a bit too early to be talking about "unifying the full range of financial and operational processes in a single stack," as claimed in the press release.

As for the facts, Hyperion, which was acquired by Oracle last year, is the acknowledged market share leader in performance management with more than 12,000 customers. Given Hyperion's long history, plenty of these customers have aging legacy products and are or will soon be facing upgrade decisions. Oracle was quick to point out when it made the deal that many Hyperion customers are also SAP customers (4,000 according to one press release), but perhaps it didn't anticipate that SAP would buy its way into performance management in such as big way last year. Having acquired Pilot, Outlooksoft, Business Objects and, through the latter, Cartesis, how could SAP help but rack up 100 performance management wins against Hyperion? Throw in SAP's preexisting performance management technologies, and you begin to wonder if the win figure shouldn't be higher.

The subprime lending crisis offer fresh evidence that we're in the bear-skins-and-stone-knives era of understanding risk and making good decisions based on data. That's one of the key points I heard yesterday at an IBM Data Governance Council meeting in New York. As sophisticated as predictive models and enforcing business rules may seem, the technology is limited by a lack of best practices and standards and by the sheer scale and complexity of enterprises and financial markets. A first step toward avoiding such calamities, say Council members, is an integrated, overarching data governance program that addresses data security, data privacy and data quality so that risks can be better understood and outcomes anticipated.

"When the subprime loan scandal broke, a lot of people said, 'how could they not have known that they were sitting on billions of dollars of bad debt?'" says IBM's Steve Adler, who founded the 50-member Data Governance Council back in 2004. "The problem is that nobody really knows how to look at assets and liabilities and how decisions affect individual performance, the performance of divisions and the performance of companies. That level of institutional awareness about risk-based decision making does not exist."

One of the more engaging presentations at this week's TDWI Executive Summit was a helpful session entitled "The Yin and Yang of Implementing Predictive Analytics," presented by Matt Schwartz of Corporate Express and John O'Carroll of Capital One Auto Finance. Schwartz was the Yin, presenting on the office supply company's 18-month entry-level foray into prediction. O'Carroll was the Yang, a seasoned developer of highly complex models around customer segmentation, marketing campaigns and lending risk.

Despite his focus on beginners, Schwartz engaged everyone, particularly the retailers and online marketers present, with a tutorial based on a Corporate Express market basket application.

To develop effective business intelligence programs, lead with organization, not technology. That's the consensus advice from many of the speakers here at the TDWI World Conference and Executive Summit here in Las Vegas this week. I spent most of Monday at the Summit, a conference within the conference aimed at the higher-level executives, and I was most impressed with a kickoff presentation entitled "BI From the Top," by Tracy Austin, former CIO of Mandalay Resort Group and former VP of IT at Harrah's Entertainment, one of the most celebrated BI-driven enterprises in the world.

Her IT credentials notwithstanding, Austin said "BI is not implementing tools and it's not an IT initiative. IT does not have the empowerment to make end users turn information into strategic actions."

Speaking with the authority of someone who has learned from years of experience what works and what doesn't, Austin presented 10 principles for guiding "BI From the Top:"

What's now called "Business Objects, an SAP company" yesterday announced a major new BusinessObjects XI 3.0 platform, but I, for one, had zero advanced notice. Judging by the dearth of coverage until today, other journalists were in much the same position. And this is an announcement that clearly deserves a bit of time to digest!

What's in store in BusinessObjects XI 3.0? Only the integration of text mining and information management capabilities, the incorporation of third-party Web-based data sources and the addition of a search-based interface for exploring structured information. These developments represent the fruition of long-planned strategic directions for Business Objects and, indeed, the wider BI community.

Gartner late last week issued its 2008 Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms in which it placed five companies roughly on a par in the prized upper-right quadrant: Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle, SAS and Microsoft. As you'll see when you download the report, none of the top five seem to stand out; you could draw a straight line from SAS, on the "Completeness of Vision" axis, to Microsoft on the "Ability to Execute" axis and touch all five vendors.

Business Objects announced today that its founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, Bernard Liautaud, has resigned from those roles and will join SAP's supervisory board in June. With the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP all but complete and the BI agenda being set, at best, by committee, Liautaud is heading for the exit (a well-trod path for executives in his shoes), free to enjoy the well-earned spoils of his success.

Despite this country's credit crisis, it appears there are still plenty of big-money bets being placed on emerging information technologies. This morning alone I've seen hefty sums put into data warehouse appliances, complex event processing (CEP) and master data management (MDM). Knowing a thing or two about each market, I'd say they are far from subprime investments.

Are you an Oracle or BEA customer trying to make sense of the combination? Forrester's John Rymer and Mike Gilpin have written an extensive analysis of the overlaps and of which products are likely to prevail. Oracle is promising long-term support for BEA products whether they're continued or not. But eventually, say the authors, "carrots and sticks" are likely to prod customers toward the preferred, go-forward products.

All the talk was about performance management, performance management, performance management at yesterday's Cognos 8.3 launch in New York, but most of the upgrades are about good old business intelligence. There were a few notable performance management-oriented tidbits, but the real appeal of Cognos 8.3 is in a handful of business-user-friendly upgrades aimed at democratizing reporting and analysis.

As 2007 came to a close, Gartner issued its long-awaited 2007 Magic Quadrant on Business Process Management Suites (BPMS). Gartner's previous BPMS Quadrant was issued in June 2006, so nearly 18 months had lapsed in its review cycle. No matter, 22 BPMS vendors — or at least the ten in the top-right quadrant — now had reason to celebrate. Or did they? It wasn't long after the Dec. 14 publication of the report (available from Quadrant leaders Pegasystems and Lombardi) that I received a call from an irate vendor.

As the year winds down I'm in a reflective frame of mind. Today I posted the list of IE's Top 20 Articles of 2007. It's an interesting indication of reader interest, but being measured in page views, the list doesn't do justice to all the single-page blogs we publish. (On the other hand, if a reader clicks to the very last page of a multi-page article, they're truly engaged!) Thus, for those who follow our blogosphere, here are the Top-20 Intelligent Enterprise Blogs of 2007:

"As you may know, Intelligent Enterprise ceased print publication with the January 2007 issue, but rest assured that the mission lives on and is being reinvigorated here at IntelligentEnterprise.com… "

I posted these words nearly a year ago, and I'm happy to report that we've delivered on what we promised — up to a point.

My first Christmas present arrived the other day: a copy of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App. Author Cindi Howson sent it to me in part as thanks for Intelligent Enterprise's help in getting more than 500 BI professionals to complete a 30-question survey that provided insight into the best practices detailed in the book.

True to its name, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App is a 244-page guidebook that will help beginners get off on the right foot while guiding veterans toward more successful approaches. The book is geared, as Cindi explains, to "businesspeople who feel their organizations are not making the most optimal decisions," as well as to executive sponsors, BI program/project managers and technical experts who design and implement aspects of the BI solution.

Mark Smith's Friday blog post was just the latest in a chorus of calls for IBM to drop the above-it-all attitude and jump into the business intelligence market. Well, the company has finally responded, announcing this morning that it will acquire Cognos for $5 billion in cash.

What gets me about IBM is that it is such a cool cucumber. Here it is, the last to act with few good choices left, yet it manages to come up with a winner, painting it as a carefully considered deal it came up with after scouring a vast array of choices.

It has been a busy month, so I've decided to blog journal style this week, sharing snippets and scuttlebut picked up here and there…

Early this week one member of our blogophere passed along the rumor that Wal-Mart didn't actually pay for its license of NeoView, HP's new data warehouse appliance. The rumor has it that it's a gratis co-development project. There's no doubt it was a cozy deal given that HP CIO Randy Mott was 22-year Wal-Mart veteran and former CIO.

I asked for comment from HP, and here's what John
Miller, Senior Director, Business Intelligence Marketing, had to say: "Wal-Mart is a customer that has purchased HP Neoview but the terms of HP's contractual agreements are not for public disclosure."

Amid all the mega deals and consolidation in the greater business intelligence market this year, I'm seeing a lot of bending of terminology and twisting of meanings. It's getting downright confusing for existing BI practitioners, let alone the first-time buyers out there.

I used "greater business intelligence market" above because to some, BI means just query and reporting while others would lump in analytics, dashboards and even scorecards and performance management (the last term could spark a terminology debate on its own, but let's not go there just yet). To me, the greater BI market includes all of the above.

To get some idea what the originator of "business intelligence" had in mind when he coined the term way back in 1989, I called up Howard Dresner to talk about terminology.

Way back in the '80s (or does it date all the way back to the '70s?), a popular maxim had it that "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM." An IBM salesman probably came up with that one, but in any case it stuck. Reflecting on last week's announcement about the new IBM Lotus Symphony desktop suite, based on OpenOffice.org technology and available as a free download, I'd say it's time for a new maxim: "Nobody ever got fired for perpetuating the Microsoft Office monopoly."

It's pretty clear to me that the business-process- management and operational-performance- management camps are singing from the same hymn book these days. Throw in the business-rule and predictive-analytics camps and you've got a quartet singing in four-part harmony. The question is, when and which vendors will move beyond marketing deals and start putting this stuff together? Could Carl Icahn's interest in BEA spark some serious deal making?

I had the privilege of attending an eye-opening event in New York recently that featured Citigroup executive Bill Sweeney as a keynote speaker. The Managing Director, Global Risk, Compliance and Technology, Sweeney sees to it that the banking giant meets myriad regulatory requirements around reporting and record-keeping as well as rigorous rules around assigning reserves against market, credit and operational risks. On all these fronts, the biggest challenge, he says, is enterprise information management — getting a handle on the disparate data stores that are growing like weeds within just about every organization.

I had a long briefing with database legend Michael Stonebraker today, and I feel compelled to share a few highlights of the conversation. Stonebraker is known as a visionary, and he has consistently turned those visions into long-term bets through commercial startups. Today's prediction? "Sooner or later, the entire data warehousing market is going to move to column-store solutions," Stonebraker asserts, column-store being the architectural basis of his latest venture, a startup called Vertica.

For those who don't know of Stonebraker, here’s a short bio. He was the main architect of the Ingres relational DBMS and the object-relational Postgres DBMS, both of which were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a computer science professor for 25 years. More recently at MIT, Stonebraker was a co-architect of the Aurora stream processing engine as well as the C-Store high-performance read-oriented database engine. He is the founder of four startups that have commercialized these prototypes: Ingres Corp., Illustra (acquired by Informix before the latter was acquired by IBM), StreamBase and, most recently, Vertica.

I've probably seen more than a hundred press releases promising products that will "put powerful yet intuitive reporting and analysis in the hands of business users." When I covered the content management market on a daily basis (a few years back), the PR mantra was "make everyone in the organization a content contributor." All too often, these types of products aren't all that easy or intuitive.

I was reminded of these promises as I researched this week's " In-Depth Analysis story, centered around an AberdeenGroup BI study released last week. The baseline assumption of the study is that companies want to improve access to actionable information, but the 370 study respondents reported these top-five obstacles:

I'm just back from Oracle's 11g launch event in midtown Manhattan, and I have to say I came away impressed. The database is at the center of Oracle's world, and company president Charles Phillips strutted the vendor's stuff — with his usual low-key swagger — on topics ranging from the firm's 30th anniversary to its 47-percent marketshare ("more than IBM and Microsoft combined" he asserted) to the long list of 11g upgrades and new features.

I lost track of how many of those features Phillips claimed to be unique to Oracle (and I'm following up with analysts to verify), but a few of the more impressive ones included OLAP cube-based management of materialized views and the use of standby servers to drive testing and performance improvements.

I'm still thinking about last week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, which ranks as the most exciting and thought-provoking event I've attended thus far this year. I'm not just saying that just because it's a CMP-produced event (okay, there's the disclaimer). There was a palpable sense of promise and limitless possibilities for new technologies and approaches.

Enterprise 2.0 was launched three years ago as "the Collaborative Technologies Conference," so it's no surprise that blogs, wikis, text messaging, presence awareness and all things social networking received a lot of attention. In fact, show manager Steven Wylie opened the event talking about the need to "fix our broken e-mail culture."

The Enterprise 2.0 movement gets an "A" for awareness and technology development, but a sorry "C" for communicating business benefits and results. This report card, offered today by Harvard Business School professor and keynote speaker Andrew McAfee, sums up the mix of enthusiasm and hunger for practical applications in evidence here at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

Complex event processing (CEP) technology is aimed at many of the same challenges as conventional BI technology, it's just that the frame of reference is real-time analysis rather than a separate reporting loop built on historical data. Thus, CEP is another threat to BI as we know it, and it's pretty apparent that this will be one of the next competitive battlegrounds for the big infrastructure players.

As I detailed in this week's top story, CEP spots patterns in high-volume data streams while they're still streaming, rather than after the fact. Latency is measured in milliseconds or microseconds, and the volumes of data can exceed 50,000 messages per second. You build models or queries and the CEP system spots the related patterns as they emerge. You can respond while the activity is still in process rather than after the fact.

IBM and Business Objects announced on Tuesday that the two companies will deepen the strategic alliance they announced last November. They'll do so by developing joint solutions for the Asia Pacific market, extending already close ties in the North American and European markets. It's an indication that IBM does not discount BI – contrary to some suggestions – as just the tip of the iceberg. Okay, so IBM doesn't own a major BI/performance management player, as Oracle now does with its Hyperion purchase, and it's not offering its own reporting and analysis technology, as is Microsoft, but IBM does have partnerships with both Business Objects and Cognos, and it's free to work with others as well (as it does with Information Builders in the iSeries server market).

Business Objects announced this morning its intent to acquire Inxight Software, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company specializing in search technology including federated search, entity extraction, natural-language processing, text analytics and data visualization software. The deal, if closed as planned in July, will advance Business Objects' efforts to gain "streamlined access to both structured information within databases and data warehouses, and unstructured information such as e-mails, documents, notes fields, and Web content."

Saugatuck Technology really went out on a limb last week characterizing SAP's planned purchase of Outlooksoft as a reaction to Oracle's recent acquisition of Hyperion. What's next, a stunning revelation that Microsoft is using enterprise software strategies, including its BI strategy, to help drive sales of Office 2007 and Windows Vista?

Saugatuck's sense that "the integration of OutlookSoft should significantly improve SAP's positioning and ability to sell enterprise-enabled BI and performance management" is far less obvious to me. I mean, it's certainly positive and Outlooksoft is an innovative and fast-growing company, but I don't know that I'd use the word "significant" to describe the boost it will give SAP.

Microsoft has every reason to be pleased by the results of its first BI Conference. It was well organized, closely watched and, most importantly, well attended, with more than 2,800 making their way to Seattle for the May 9-11 event. It was really a coming-out party of sorts for Microsoft as a credible, large-enterprise-ready BI vendor. But in addition to those wowed by the presentations and wooed by the breadth of offerings, I did encounter a few critics who raised legitimate questions.

Microsoft has gone out of its way to answer its detractors at the event, starting by leading with the news that SQL Server will see its next major refresh in 2008 and promising to stay in a 24- to 36-month refresh cycle. Keynote speaker Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division, offered a deeper dive on "Katmai," the code name the next version of SQL Server, but more than half his presentation emphasized achievements to date and the scalability of SQL Server 2005.

If John Mancini mentioned business process management (BPM) once in his keynote address at last month's AIIM Expo he mentioned it a dozen times. Then there were the enterprise content management (ECM) vendors themselves talking up the connection with BPM. To me, the combination is a natural as good old document management, imaging and workflow, so I won't be surprised to see a big BPM push at AIIM 2008.

A couple of weeks ago - long before Business Objects announced it will acquire Cartesis - I had an interesting chat with Cognos- and Outlooksoft-veteran Ben Plummer, who is now vice president of marketing at Applix. It was a routine update on the company's latest release, Applix 9.1, but Plummer started by commenting that the company is positioning itself "in the convergence between BI and performance management… we're calling it 'Business Analytics.'"

John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, yesterday gave a keynote address at AIIM Expo entitled "The Parallel Evolution and Convergence of Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence." The title notwithstanding, I didn't hear a lot of concrete examples of convergence in the speech, but there are signs the worlds of structured data and less-structured content are slowly coming together.

Compliance mandates and legal risks are a big focus here at the AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston. Also everywhere - the keynote lineup, the press room, the collateral material, etc. - are presentations, announcements and references to Microsoft SharePoint. I'll get to SharePoint and parallels between Microsoft's BI and content management thrusts in a moment, but first a few thoughts on fear mongering.

As a writer and editor, I felt a twinge of guilt when I read Seth Grimes' blog on hyperbolic PR and "writers and editors who don't have the time, knowledge, and/or judgment to ask the right questions." Seth's last two blogs came about because a SaaS-model BI vendor served up what he felt was self-conscious PR overstating the market significance of the company's actual accomplishments. I guess I've read so many press releases -- and so few that tow the sober, responsible line that Seth puts forth -- that I've developed a permanent BS filter (and after rereading my own blog on said vendor, I don't feel guilty).

You might get lost in buzzwords if you read this week's press release on IBM's "Dynamic Warehousing" strategy. Antone Gonsalves did a great job of boiling it all down, but here's a bit more insight gained in an interview with an IBM executive at the Gartner BI Summit.

"Real-time" showed up at least a couple of times in the release, but just what does it mean? "It means supporting decisions while a salesperson or a customer service rep is on the phone with a customer or while you're processing a claim," says Marc Andrews, program director, data warehousing.

Competency centers -- a.k.a. councils or centers of excellence -- are making headway in the BI arena, and they grabbed a lot of attention at this week's Gartner Business Intelligence Summit. BI competency centers (BICCs) are typically cross-functional teams (architects, developers, support, analysts, line-of-business managers, etc.) that develop frameworks of metrics, goals and best practices that can then be shared with business units and departments throughout the organization. Ideally, they also ensure that goals are aligned with corporate strategy.

"Process-driven BI" has been a big theme at this week's Gartner BI Summit, so I sat in on a presentation by Gartner analyst Gareth Herschel on "Integrating Business Insight With Business Processes." Great presentation, overall, but those familiar with business process modeling and management might have been disappointed to hear little about the connection with those technologies. The performance management and process management camps share the whole idea of a "continuous circle of improvement," but perhaps Gartner knows that the BI crowd just doesn't get involved in the nuts and bolts of process management.

Day Two at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit was nonstop, with wall-to-wall sessions and appointments with industry's blue-chip and challengers. IBM, Microsoft, HP, SAS, SAP, Cognos and others weighed in the direction of their products, the direction of the industry and their take on customer wants and needs. You can visit our photo gallery to get a sense of the event, but I'll drill down on some of the bigger deals here in my blog… starting with Microsoft.

Tuesday's "Driving Pervasive BI and Performance Management" offered Microsoft's vision of taking these technologies and applications enterprisewide. Reflecting on his 13 years at Microsoft and status as "employee one" in the company's BI group, Bill Baker, GM of Office Business Intelligence, said "we're at a tipping point."

The Hyatt Regency Chicago is sold out and the ballrooms, breakout sessions and exhibit hall are seeing heavy, heavy traffic here on the first day of the Gartner BI Summit. I would say it's standing room only, but nor are there lots of empty seats available. This conference is clearly well past the hype cycle and rising on Gartner's proverbial "slope of enlightenment" phase of market maturity."

If you read our "Summit Preview" there weren't a lot of surprises in Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's opening keynote, but he did share some new market analysis that he didn't talk about in that Q&A interview. Hostmann said things like ETL, reporting, query and analysis and even data mining are well past the hype cycle and are moving up on the "plateau of productivity." Corporate performance management and business application data warehouses are just coming out of the "trough of disillusionment" whereas things like dashboards are just heading into the trough.

I was surprised to read this week that Dave DeWalt, one-time EMC rising star and former Documentum CEO, is leaving EMC to take the reigns at McAfee as CEO and president. DeWalt headed Documentum during its most innovative and aggressive years, and he spearheaded the sale of the company to EMC in 2003. He subsequently spearheaded EMC's fast-growing software division, but last year he took a less visible role as President of Customer Operations. In the same vein, long-time Documentum marketing executive David Milam left EMC last fall to join Zantaz.

Business intelligence on demand for $3,000 per month for 100 users? That sounds pretty attractive, but LucidEra is not your typical BI suite that lets you build any application you want, now in a SaaS environment. It's specifically a BI-based forecast-to-billing application that includes data connectors (CRM, accounting, etc.), ETL, data cleansing, data warehousing, OLAP and a Web-based user interface.

But isn't BI supposed to be an all-purpose suite?

Every BI and performance management vendor has come out of the woodwork to offer an opinion on the Oracle/Hyperion deal. I'm gathering those comments and will share a few soon enough, but the companies I'm really anxious to hear from are SAP and IBM (and maybe HP belongs on that list as well). Consolidation happens in every technology market. It only goes one way, and every big, stand-alone vendor ultimately has a price.

Do you think rich Internet apps (RIA) are just a concern for developers of consumer Web sites? Think again. RIAs will soon make their mark on the enterprise, making complex software such as ERP and BI systems more accessible and understandable to ordinary business users.

Business process management suite vendors are embracing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model with not one but two announcements today around on-demand BPM. Lombardi, for one, introduced Blueprint, a SaaS tool intended to bring process modeling to the masses. I knew about that one weeks in advance thanks in part to Derek Miers' in-depth Put-to-the-Test review of Lombardi Teamworks, posted this morning. Then Appian announced an ambitious (though not-yet-ready-for-prime-time) plan to deliver its entire BPM suite on demand.

Not all combinations of search and BI technology are created equal, but most do have one thing in common -- they're not ready yet. We've been pining for an interview with an end user with first-hand experience with the combination, but Business Objects, Cognos, IBI and others couldn't point us to anyone. I'm told such customers exist, but I'm guessing they're finding it's really hard to use search-style queries to uncover structured information that's on target.

Most of the Google/BI integrations announced last year will deliver what IDC search expert Sue Feldman calls "Beginner BI." "What they're doing is using search to pull specific information out of databases into the Google interface," she says. "That requires a certain amount of work for each query"

I've had a number of conversations in recent days around the theme of linking analysis to action. There's lots of frustration out there, understandably, because managers and executives increasingly have plenty of tools that spot problems -- reports, alerts, dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, etc. -- but they're not connected to levers that enable them to take action.

Everyone agrees that Cognos' purchase of Celequest, announced yesterday, will broaden the BI vendor’s footprint. But the true value of the deal will hinge on how transferable and how integrated Celequest's real-time technology and appliance/SaaS model will be with the Cognos 8 BI platform.

Yes, Celequest gives Cognos a real-time, operational BI/performance management play it lacked, and that's important (see trend six in "Seven Trends for 2007.") Celequest's Lava appliance is designed to monitor transactional systems (as well as data warehouses) and instantly display key metrics within user-customizable dashboards. That will bring Cognos into operational settings -- in financial services, risk management, manufacturing and supply chains -- in which insight is only of value if it's immediate, delivered through real-time dashboards and alerts.

In the heady, pre-dot-bomb buzz of early 2000, I edited a feature by my long-time colleague Penny (Lunt) Crosman on “21 ASPs and What They Can Do For You.” They were called "application service providers" back then, but that term was displaced, first by “hosted,” then by “on-demand” and most recently by "Software as a Service" (SaaS).

The focus of Penny’s article was document management, a topic I revisit in today’s story on SaaS as a Stepping Stone to Conventional Software. I was surprised when a quick Web tour turned up only about a third of these vendors still very visibly in the hosted/on-demand document management business.

Monday’s announcement by NCR that it will spin off its Teradata Data Warehousing business comes as the latter faces increased competition from the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAS Institute at the high end. Meanwhile, upstarts such as Netezza and DATAAllegro are picking off data-mart and focused-data-warehouse implementations with their low-cost, high-performance appliances. Hewlett-Packard is also joining the fray with its emerging Neoview portfolio.

Way back in the mid 1990s, I had the pleasure of hearing Louis Rossetto, co-founder and then editor of Wired Magazine, speak in New York about the future of the Internet and its impact on more-established media. The Internet, he said, would not kill older media, just as radio had not brought an end to newspapers nor television the demise of radio or cinema. The Internet would, however, have an indelible impact, he reasoned, freeing each form of media to evolve to exploit its natural strengths.

Here we are ten years later with divisive talk radio dominating the air waves, Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) and American Idol dominating the TV ratings and YouTube and MySpace taking mind share on the Internet. Okay, so Rossetto was talking about an evolution, not a renaissance, but somehow I don’t think he expected us to be slouching toward mediocrity on all fronts.

No doubt you’ve heard about the trend toward operational business intelligence. The idea is to democratize BI, liberating it from the gurus in the ivory tower and sharing it with the masses of business users so everyone can make smart decisions. Well, you can’t get more operational than core business processes, so there has been a lot of talk about the combination of BI and business process management (BPM).

Will these two systems become one some day, or are they merely complementary technologies? I’d lean toward the latter, viewing them as separate disciplines and technologies, but here are three ways they’re likely to complement each other.

If all companies published and analyzed financial reports in extensible business reporting language (XBRL), the emerging standard wouldn’t offer the competitive advantage that it presents today. According to a report issued this week, early adopters who integrate XBRL data with performance management applications can expect to more easily:

• Leverage benchmarking for competitive analysis
• Identify internal areas for improvement
• Simulate mergers and acquisitions and other financial impacts
• Unify reporting in a single environment to increase data accuracy

Yesterday’s announcement by Business Objects that it has acquired software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Nsite was as remarkable for what it didn’t say about the company as what it did say.

Yes, Nsite is a SaaS vendor, and that should sound good to Wall Street. As I point out in “SaaS and SOA: Together Forever,” SaaS is one of the hottest categories in IT, expected to account for 25 percent of the business software market by 2011, according to Gartner, up from 5 percent last year. And yes, Nsite provides “an on-demand applications platform” as described in the press release, but that’s about as generic as saying “Nsite is an information technology company.”

FileNet is now part of IBM, Hummingbird has been acquired by Open Text and Stellent will soon be part of Oracle. This trio of announcements, all within the last month, marks a turning point for enterprise content management (ECM).