SAND Technology Starts 2010 Well After Flat 2009

January 14, 2010 by Leave a comment

ADBMS vendor SAND Technology’s report on its 2009 fiscal year seemed to offer little reason to change my earlier skeptical position on the firm. Its 2009 revenue was essentially flat at $7 million (Canadian dollars throughout). Cost of sales, R&D, and SG&A – and the firm’s net loss – were also nearly unchanged. And yet, there are changes going on, and they are positive signs, especially for a year in which the IT market will rebound. Net income for SAND’s fiscal 2010 first quarter was $553,253 on revenues of $2,485,464 – a substantial turnaround from a net loss of $989,850 on revenues of $1,223,928 for fiscal Q1 2009. One quarter is not a trend, but it is a good sign. Read more of this post

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Xkoto’s Database Virtualization Expands Cloud Opportunities

November 30, 2009 by 1 Comment

Xkoto, the database virtualization pioneer, has generated substantial interest since its first deployments in 2006. Still privately held and in investment mode, Xkoto sees profitability on the horizon, but offers no target date, and appears in no hurry. Its progress has been steady: in early 2008, a B round of financing led by GrandBanks Capital allowed a step up to 50 employees as the company crossed the 50 customer mark. 2008 also saw Xkoto adding support for Microsoft SQL Server to its IBM DB2 base. Charlie Ungashick, VP of marketing for Xkoto, says that 2009 has been going well, and the third quarter was quite strong. And at the end of September 2009, Xkoto announced GRIDSCALE version 5.1, which adds new cluster management capabilities to its active-active configuration model, as well as Amazon EC2 availability. Read more of this post

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Will AEP Replace RDBMS? A Dialogue With Charles Brett

November 4, 2009 by 23 Comments

Analytic Event Processing (AEP) is hot. But does it mean RDBMS begins to decline in importance? Charles Brett of C3B Consulting and I recently had a quick dialogue about it and came up with different conclusions. That conversation is reproduced here. It’s only the beginning – l hope you will weigh in with your thoughts. Read more of this post

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Meanwhile, At The Low End, Infobright is in Transition

October 30, 2009 by 2 Comments

I’ve been busy with the big boys for the past few weeks, but open-source offerings are in the news and demand comment. Open source DW software provider  Infobright has a new CEO, Mark Burton  and though he’s an “interim,” he’s hands-on and has the pedigree to help get some traction. Read more of this post

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Pentaho Goes “Open Core” With Lucidera OLAP Viewer

October 11, 2009 by 12 Comments

Open-source BI vendor Pentaho has purchased technology rights from failed BI SaaS vendor LucidEra, and plans to combine LucidEra’s Clearview, a reporting and analysis OLAP front end for non-technical users, with the Mondrian open source OLAP engine used by Pentaho Analysis,  in a new offering called Pentaho Analyzer Enterprise Edition, available both on-premise and on-demand. Clearview will not be available in the free community edition of Pentaho. Existing Pentaho Analysis Enterprise Edition and Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition customers will not be charged additional fees. Clearview adds substantial value to the priced portion of Pentaho’s portfolio – another example of the “open core” business model. Open core is not without its detractors, and a brief flurry of chatter erupted about it in the blogosphere. Read more of this post

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Kalido Virtual Conference Scores Big

October 8, 2009 by 12 Comments

I’ve been critical of virtual conferences in the past, but I just saw the future, and it works. Kalido, a relatively small vendor, has demonstrated that careful preparation, serious commitment, and the right team can allow smaller firms to “punch above their weight,” putting on an event that captures great leads, promotes and sustains community, collects requirements for future product development in a participatory model, and satisfies partners with an event that costs a fraction of the in-person kind.  If you’re not familiar with Kalido, they deliver what they like to call a fully governed data warehouse, a suite of modeling, governance (including MDM) and model-driven DW automation tools that have been adopted by over 85 enterprise customers.
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Netezza Still Tops ADBMS Insurgents

October 1, 2009 by 5 Comments

Netezza’s 2009 so far has demonstrated that its ADBMS leadership is firming up. Several vendors have navigated a difficult year in the general economic sphere and in their own market’s quest for visibility, and Netezza has pushed forward with some aggressive moves from atop the pack. Phil Francisco, Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing, has just come off an event swing (with Curt Monash as a keynote speaker at most.) Phil reports that the decision to take the story to the customers, instead of relying on their vanishing travel budgets to come to a centralized event, paid off well, with over 1500 interactions.
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TDWI Disappoints, But There is Hope Ahead

August 7, 2009 by 8 Comments

Few events offer as much promise as The Data Warehouse Institute World Conferences. With a deep educational focus, TDWI provides important opportunities for users. For vendors, the event offers one of the most focused, serious prospect audiences possible. My expectations, tempered though they were by economic realities, were still fairly high for this year’s San Diego event. Unfortunately, the drop in volume was greater than all of us expected, the number of announcements from the vendor community was low, and the content focus seemed a bit out of date.

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TDWI and Wi-fi on San Diego Bay

August 3, 2009 by 3 Comments

The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) came to San Diego this year, with a sharply reduced crowd but a few intriguing announcements and a crew of attendees determined to get value out of a rich set of educational offerings and informal and formal discussions. I had the privilege of sitting on a panel with analyst and consultant Mark Madsen and Ken Hausman of SAS, hosted by Gaurav Verma, also from SAS, and discussing doing more with less. We did some flash polling using technology provided by Turning Point and gained a few insights from several dozen attendees in the room. Read more of this post

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Informatica, Strong Through Tough Times, Looks Ahead

July 23, 2009 by 1 Comment

Not everyone in the software industry is suffering. Informatica Q2 revenues were $117.3 million, up 3% year over year, and license revenues for the second quarter were $48.7 million, relatively flat. That makes 19 quarters in a row – very impressive. Informatica added 65 customers in the quarter and now claims nearly 3800, with wins in multiple geographies.  Read more of this post

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