Guest Post: Leading the Logical Data Warehouse Charge Has its Challenges

February 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

From my colleague Mark Beyer, who speculates about how leadership in moving toward the logical data warehouse (LDW) will be received: 

The logical data warehouse is already creating a stir in the traditional data warehouse market space. Less than 5% of clients with implemented warehouses that we speak with are pursuing three or more of the six aspects of a logical warehouse: 

  • repositories
  • data virtualization
  • distributed processes
  • active auditing and optimization
  • service level negotiation
  • ontological and taxonomic metadata

That means we are in a very early stage regarding the adoption trend, and vendors who are aggressively moving toward it are ahead of their customers.

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Apache Hadoop 1.0 Doesn’t Clear Up Trunks and Branches Questions. Do Distributions?

January 22, 2012 by Leave a comment

In early January 2012, the world of big data was treated to an interesting series of product releases, press announcements, and blog posts about Hadoop versions.  To begin with, we had the announcement of Apache version 1.0 at long last, in a press release. Although there were grumblings here and there in the twittersphere that changes to release numbers are meaningless, my discussions with Gartner’s enterprise customers indicate otherwise. Products with release numbers like 0.20.2 make the hair on Procurement’s neck stand on end, and as Hadoop begins to get mainstream attention (Gartner’s clients, see Hype Cycle for Data Management 2011), IT architects and executives find such optics quite important. Hadoop is moving beyond pioneers like Amazon, Yahoo! and LinkedIn into shops like JP Morgan Chase, and they pay attention to such things.

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IBM Fills Out Netezza Lineup With High Capacity Appliance

June 23, 2011 by Leave a comment

In the months since IBM closed its Netezza acquisition, the data warehouse appliance pioneer has been busy, if the announcements at this week’s Enzee are any indication. An enthusiastic crowd – 1000 strong – heard CEO Jim Baum deliver the news: new hardware, software and partnerships.The biggest news was The Appliance Formerly Known As Cruiser, now known as the Netezza High Capacity Appliance (HCA). A wag made up some t-shirts bearing the acronym TAFKAC and did quite well. IBM is aiming to push the size perception for Netezza higher. How high? Half a PB in a rack. You can scale it to 10PB.

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Going to Gartner

November 19, 2010 by 81 Comments

This is a personal note about a professional decision. You might not be interested. If you are, read on. I’ll try to be brief.

I’ve had a very fulfilling two years as an independent analyst, succeeding beyond my expectations. I established (or continued) a respected brand, gathered several thousand twitter followers, drew 80,000 blog views in 18 months, wrote a number of well-regarded papers, keynoted events, conducted webinars and interviews, and was consulted by the largest companies in our industry as well as emerging, exciting smaller ones. I collaborated with other independents and made new friends everywhere. Financially, I had the two best years of my career. Valley View Ventures, my business agent, has made it smooth and painless on every side, and Fred Abbott is a great friend, mentor and business partner.

Whew. All that said, it surprises a lot of my friends and colleagues that I have decided to accept a position as a Vice President in Research for Gartner effective January 3, 2011. So: Why? Read more of this post

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Decoding BI Market Share Numbers – Play Sudoku With Analysts

July 21, 2010 by 2 Comments

In a recent post I discussed Oracle’s market share in BI, based on a press-published chart taken from IDC data – showing Oracle coming in second. As often happens in such discussions, I got quite a few direct emails and twitter messages – some in no uncertain terms – about why the particular metric I chose was not sufficiently nuanced or representative of the true picture. I freely admit: that’s true. In general, market observers know Oracle is not typically placed second overall – but the picture is more complex than a single ranking. My point was, and is, that it’s too easy to slip into a “who’s on top” mentality that obscures true market dynamics. In this post, I’ll dig a bit deeper, and describe what different approaches or categorizations show us – and what they don’t. Finally I’ll talk about how much this matters – and to whom. Read more of this post

Filed under Analyst Relations, Data Management, Data Warehousing, On Business Intelligence, Research Industry, Vendor image and communications Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oracle’s High BI Bar: Managed, Multifaceted and Actionable

July 14, 2010 by Leave a comment

Oracle’s newest BI release is massive, spans multiple product categories, and raises the bar for competitors in dramatic fashion. In my prior post I focused on its rollout and competitive posture. The market has waited a long time as the reconciliation of many moving parts was accomplished – most notably the convergence of the Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) offering and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). Hyperion integration with its Essbase acquisition was not complete. In 2007, OBI’s newest release (10.1.3) was most notable in many eyes for its new Microsoft Office support. PeopleSoft and Siebel had been acquired some two years before that, and Master Data Management was already a topic of discussion then (2005). There was a long way to go. And analysts? Well, think of us as the kids in the back: “Are we there yet?”

Oracle has used its time, and its $3B per year investment in R&D, well. OBIEE 11g delivers a strong base for its customers to build upon, and for its own teams to continue fleshing out a very coherent vision of ready-to-consume, actionable analytics suitable for multiple roles, on multiple platforms, across the breadth of information available. Although there is much left to do, Oracle has laid out a clear path and articulated a differentiated message that offers ample reasons for anyone on other platforms to consider OBIEE, whether or not they are an Oracle customer. For this analyst, the big wins are the Common Enterprise Information Model, The Action Framework, the strong manageability focus, unified and enhanced user interaction for report and other forms of design and delivery, and BI applications.

Read more of this post

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Tibco Silver Spotfire – Social BI? Why Not?

July 14, 2010 by 1 Comment

Tibco, fresh from a Q2 with license revenue up 23% over last year’s, continuing a two year run of beating consensus earnings estimates, has stepped up and out ahead to pursue the long-coveted mid-market customers who don’t use BI but find that spreadsheets don’t do enough.  Tibco believes, like Microsoft, that many are social technology users: they have blogs and use other channels available to them, and they will build and share reports given the chance. So, says Tibco, here it is: building on the Silver cloud platform it’s had in beta for about a year, Tibco is introducing Silver Spotfire, with an offer tuned to the cloud user – a no-cost, no-obligation, no-risk 1-year trial of a Spotfire play in the cloud requiring no IT involvement. “All you need is a browser,” is the pitch, and this is not from a new company you don’t know, but an established  player with a sizable roster of enterprise BI customers. [Edit 8/27 - Tibco has put up a Wiki on "what is Social BI".] Read more of this post

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Oracle Sets Sights on BI Leadership. Has it Picked the Right Target?

July 13, 2010 by 6 Comments

Oracle is not first in BI, and wants to change that – that was the clear message of a well executed, multi-site “real plus virtual” event with top executives showing off the result of a multi-year effort to rationalize and integrate a set of leading but overlapping components into a seamless suite. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (OBIEE) deserves the accolades it has already received from analysts who welcomed its announcement – it makes bold and serious bets on effective centralized metadata administration, data integration/ unification and optimized analytic architecture, collaboration, globalization, mobile device support, and a powerful link to action that will be most effective (unsurprisingly) with its own business applications. While it misses some pieces – fully integrated in-memory processing, SaaS and cloud support among them – these will be forthcoming, and Oracle is clearly committed to a quicker release cycle now that the thorny internal politics around legacy products seem to be resolved. But its competitive focus may be misdirected; while SAP is still ahead in market share, IBM is the bigger threat in the marketplace.

Read more of this post

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Migrate From Mainframe? To What?

June 24, 2010 by 16 Comments

From Joe Clabby, www.clabbyanalytics.com

Gartner, the industry’s preeminent information technology (IT) research and analysis firm, has published several reports and case studies over the past few years that promote the idea that IT buyers should migrate their applications off of mainframes and move them to other, more “modern platforms”.  Part of Gartner’s logic, it appears, is that there is an impending-doom shortage of mainframe managers that is about to occur as elderly mainframe managers retire — so Gartner implies that moving applications to other “more modern” platforms might ensure the long term viability of enterprise applications on those platforms.

I have two major issues with Gartner’s perspective and its recommendation:

  1. Where is the proof that mainframe skills will decline to critical levels over the next several years?  And,
  2. Which “modern platform” is Gartner advocating? Read more of this post

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The Mainframe Skills Shortage Urban Myth

June 22, 2010 by 7 Comments

Contributed by Joe Clabby (www.clabbyanalytics.com)

In this CounterOpinion, we challenge the advice and opinions of the Gartner Group, a well-known and highly respected IT research and analysis firm, on the subject of IBM System z (mainframe) migration. In March, 2007, Gartner put forward research suggesting that, due to the aging of the current generation of System z managers, mainframe customers might someday find themselves short of the skilled labor they need to manage their systems.  As a result, Gartner recommended that organizations might want to consider moving from mainframes to other, “more modern” platforms. (This opinion is still available on the company’s web site — search for the “Impact of Generational IT Skill Shift on Legacy Applications” [document ID number: G00146492]). Since that first report, Gartner has published other reports suggesting that enterprises reevaluate their application portfolios — and move various applications to (again) “more modern” platforms. (Note: Gartner never quite articulates which more modern platforms it is talking about…).

Clabby Analytics has two major issues with Gartner’s perspective and advice:

  1. Where is the proof that there has been/will be a major decline in mainframe skills that should cause IT executives to abandon their mainframe platforms? And,
  2. Which “more modern” platform(s) does Gartner have in mind? Read more of this post

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