Programmers: Pervasive’s Parallelization Provides Punch, Profit

January 19, 2010 by 1 Comment

After 27 years of steady growth, Austin, Texas-based Pervasive (PVSW) has become a $47M annual run rate software provider. Its portfolio includes a “zero admin, light footprint database” (the former BTrieve, now PervasiveSQL), data integration software (for SaaS and on premises applications), and data synchronization products for such apps as salesforce.com, Quickbooks and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In 2009, it began leveraging its DataRush processing engine as a product, providing a solution for companies that want to take advantage of multicore architectures to drive dramatically enhanced performance on much smaller footprints, for programming data services tasks such as aggregation, de-duplication, cleansing, integration, matching and sorting, as well as data mining and predictive analytics. Read more of this post

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Microsoft and HP Announce New Application-to-Infrastructure Model/Partnership [Yawn]

January 13, 2010 by 4 Comments

(Co-authored with Charles King of PUND-IT, Inc.)

Microsoft and HP announced a new investment of $250M into their Frontline Partnership, designed to deliver integrated stacks supporting applications from Microsoft’s Exchange and SQL Server and beyond into the cloud. As part of this effort, the companies plan to deliver solutions built on what they defined as a “next generation infrastructure-to-application model” which will help speed implementation, eliminate IT management complexities and lower overall costs by automating manual processes. With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft will also collaborate on an engineering road map for joint products including data management machines using the new SQL Server MPP database option when it is announced, pre-packaged application solution bundles, comprehensive virtualization offerings and integrated management tools. Read more of this post

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Additional Caveats Obscure Oracle’s TPC Benchmark

December 23, 2009 by 2 Comments

Since my piece on Oracle’s recent TPC-C was posted, interesting emails have pointed me to additional price/performance data, and I thought I’d offer a bit of that to my readers. One of the more interesting came from the admittedly biased Conor O’Mahony, a DB2 product manager for IBM. In his blog, Conor points out some interesting elements to Oracle’s pricing and support for the system tested. To wit: “the IBM result includes pricing for 24×7 support, upgrade protection, and perpetual licenses; the Oracle result does not include any of these features.” It turns out that Oracle uses a less costly, 3 year term license for the benchmark. After 3 years, the user has to re-up (or just buy a regular license.) The support piece is equally interesting; Oracle’s Incident Support offering – with up to 10 Web-based incident requests per server and no phone support or future upgrades – is used for the benchmark system pricing. Read more of this post

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IBM’s “Smarter Planet” Will Capitalize on HW, Analytics

December 15, 2009 by Leave a comment

Rod Adkins, the SVP and Group Executive of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group (STG) took the time to engage the influencer community quite early in his tenure for a well-run event at the Watson Research Lab in Yorktown Heights. “I’ve been in this position for 38 days,” he  reminded us, as STG’s AR team widened the usually hardware-focused invited audience to include generalists and more software-focused folk like me.  IBM execs from IBM’s Software Group, its Research organization and corporate, joined us  for a look at the science behind the systems, a compelling addition to the agenda. And another pitch for IBM’s analytics thrust was a scene-stealer. Read more of this post

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SAP Promises Acceleration on a “Clear Path” – Will it Be Enough?

December 10, 2009 by 7 Comments

The economic slowdown was not kind to SAP in 2009, and as it launched the annual Influencer Summit on December 8th, change was in the air. Messages were shifting. ”Sustainability” got a big push, and there was a ringing commitment to substantial, dramatic product change to be delivered in 2010. Different faces were on display: there was no Leo Apotheker or Bill McDermott on the stage, although Board members Jim Hagemann Snabe and John Schwarz held down the fort with new Marketing EVP Jonathan Becher and CTO Vishal Sikka in key speaking slots. Like the dances I went to in high school, the event was mostly date-free, but direct questions elicited some specific, though uncommitted, statements about deliveries in 2010, especially from Marge Breya. Read more of this post

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Oracle Touts Cost Savings With New RAC, Storage Features

November 24, 2009 by Leave a comment

Oracle has high expectations for its newest release (Oracle Database 11g R2.) “We expect 45-50% adoption of R2 by next year,” said Mark Townsend, Vice President of Product Management, at the database analyst day during Oracle Open World recently. Such a rate would be unprecedented, but Oracle has good reasons for its optimism. Many new features target extending cost-effective use of the systems (server, storage and software) in place, and the financial drumbeat was clear and consistent. Many of these benefits are due to Oracle’s increasing ability to leverage organizations’ architectural tiers: smarter use of  interconnected servers, storage, and memory are driving performance improvements at many levels. Should Oracle’s acquisition of Sun win through, one can expect to see an acceleration of this trend. Read more of this post

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Sybase Rolls On – Make Some Noise!

November 11, 2009 by 5 Comments

Sybase has announced yet another record revenue result for the third quarter of 2009.  Like other leading data management firms, its database business demonstrated continuing vitality in a difficult economic period. With 32% growth in database licensing revenues against a strong year over year comparison, the venerable DBMS provider continued a string of recent strong results.

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Oracle on Database: It’s On. And They’re Not Kidding.

November 5, 2009 by 4 Comments

Oracle is the company that led the industry into making RDBMS the data persistence vehicle of choice, and though its flagship is still Number One, many other topics floated around as 35,000 people attended Oracle Open World (OOW) in San Francisco recently. The spotlight stayed firmly planted: “What will Larry say about clouds/IBM/Fusion apps?”; Marc Benioff and Larry; Arnold and Larry. But if there’s anything Larry Ellison is passionate about, even as he sets his sights on IBM (hardware) and SAP (apps) – his two most important competitors, he said at the Churchill Club recently – it’s database, and he’s energized by the appliance opportunity. Andy Mendelsohn, SVP of Database Server Technologies put it simply in a conversation: “the only product Larry has spoken of in the last 3 earnings calls is Exadata.” He is more involved than in recent years, and that means one thing: everyone else had better watch out. What analysts learned about the new release makes that very clear: Oracle has been busy, and there is a lot of exciting new technology coming. Read more of this post

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More From The Low End: DynamoDB is the New Lucid

October 30, 2009 by 2 Comments

LucidDB (aka “the best database for BI you don’t know about”) has a commercial version on the way at last. Nick Goodman, a longtime user active in the Eigenbase and other related open source communities, has stepped in. Nick has a consulting practice that builds BI implementations (many using Lucid and Pentaho), and he’s now spun out a firm called Dynamo Business Intelligence to issue and support a product to be called DynamoDB. He often  found his BI clients asking what to use for a database – the default was MySQL, but he loves Lucid’s features and performance, and so it seemed like time. Nick’s blog can be found here.

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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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