IT Industry trends: technology, products, competition and the research industry.
April 24, 2009 5 Comments
Poll results for soft copy survey
This is the third and final post on the topic of which format is best for providing soft copy of briefing material to analysts. After a few more votes were added, the combined total of PDF and annotatable PDF formats got closer to Powerpoint in our survey. The final total was PPT 29, PDF13, annotatable PDF 10. (See chart at right.) Read more of this post
April 24, 2009 Leave a comment
The Boulder BI Braintrust hosted Confio this week. Confio is fairly small (25 people focusing on product development sales and support, with most other infrastructure outsourced), and privately held with angel and operating revenue funding it. The value proposition of their product, Ignite Performance Intelligence, (I’ll call it IPI from here) is to deliver information about database performance using a more BI-like interface. Prospective buyers (and today’s customers, who number in the hundreds) are DBAs and application performance specialists. Read more of this post
April 23, 2009 1 Comment
IBM has announced, a bit earlier than originally planned, DB2 9.7 as well as InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 (we’ll cover the latter in another post). A steady 3rd place in the DBMS market behind Oracle and Microsoft, DB2 nonetheless continues to make gains. IBM claims that its non-mainframe (IBM calls it “distributed”) DB2 revenue grew at a compounded 14% rate for the last 12 quarters. And in the face of a very difficult economic environment, IBM claims 30% growth for distributed DB2 in Q408. Read more of this post
April 23, 2009 Leave a comment
On my last trip, I was delighted to see that American Airlines had added Gogo Inflight Internet on my plane. I’ve seen the occasional story about it, being the traveling dweeb that I am, but this was the first direct encounter. The flight attendant gave me a discount coupon! Read more of this post
April 23, 2009 Leave a comment
EnterpriseDB has had a steady build as an Oracle-compatible alternative DBMS. IT Market Strategy had a chance to catch up with Andy Astor, co-founder and EVP of business development, in the midst of the frenzy around the launch of IBM’s DB2 version 9.7 (discussed here). Andy was gracious enough to make himself available late (very late) in the evening to clarify a few questions about the IBM licensing and use of EnterpriseDB’s technology, and cleared up a few points of confusion we had. Read more of this post
April 22, 2009 2 Comments
Today IBM announced new features, products, and solution packages in its DB2 9.7 (Cobra ) release. And a new version of InfoSphere, including Informix and z versions. I’ll post about those later, but here I’d like to just highlight a buried item that got little play: DB2 can now run PL/SQL.
Natively.
In the engine. Read more of this post
April 22, 2009 2 Comments
Birst 
CEO Brad Peters checked in with IT Market Strategy to update us on the most recent developments in the on-demand BI market. They’ve been busy; when we last talked in January, Birst had just hired Randi DiPrima to head up a global partners program, and a significant new round of financing was freshly deposited. Read more of this post
April 19, 2009 2 Comments
Data visualization specialist Tableau Software spent some time with us this week talking about where they’ve come from and where they are going. After early project work for the DoD, founder Pat Hanrahan and his PHD student Chris Stolte joined forces with Jock MacKinlay, who spent some time at Xerox PARC. They spun out of Stanford in early 2003, and launched into a steady run of growth. With $5m in early funding, they’ve run conservatively – “cash flow even,” Marketing VP Elissa Fink calls it – ever since, and just celebrated 16 straight quarters of beating the prior quarter’s number. Read more of this post
April 19, 2009 1 Comment
IBM Global Business Services (GBS) has added its first new service line since IBM acquired PWC and launched itself into the services business. GBS generated nearly $20B in revenue in 2008, a few hundred million more than the hardware side of IBM. Two other units, the software group and IBM Research, have joined with GBS to create the Business Analysis and Optimization line, intended to make IBM the dominant player in advanced analytics focused on optimizing business outcomes. GBS has pursued the capture and reusable packaging of intellectual property and methodologies in its engagements for some time, encapsulating business processes and industry requirements, standards and regulations. IBM proposes to combine those assets with software components and advanced work done in IBM Research to deliver a “predict and prescribe” approach to its customers’ business challenges.
This is a formidable array of assets, aligned into a 4000-person organization, and pursuing a carefully targeted set of competencies:
All the contributors bring substantial skin to the game. Ambuj Goyal, who heads the information management portfolio for IBM Software Group (SWG), has assembled an array of data management and data warehousing tools, BI, content management, and other components, and told me, “We’re harnessing everything we’ve built.” He’s been hammering on the notion of an information agenda as part of IBM’s Information on Demand strategy, and driving awareness of the need for data quality and stewardship to attack the need for executives to feel they can trust the data they get. One in three today say they don’t, even for the relatively mundane types of reporting that are commonplace.
In IBM Research, Brenda Dietrich heads a team of 150 mathematics PhDs, many of whom have been working directly with customers to build predictive models in numerous industry contexts that will underpin some of the early projects. Three key plays are in the first round: risk and fraud analytics; analytics and data optimization; and advanced customer insight, which draws upon BAO head Fred Balboni’s recent successes driving GBS business in the retail sector.
The new organization model, in typical IBM fashion, will be rolled out on a massive scale. Of course, most of the people in the organization are being “re-badged;” they aren’t new, dedicated assets just yet, but they are experienced in many facets of the problems to be tackled and are in an accelerated program designed to bring them up to speed to meet an expected demand curve that IBM believes will be very steep. I would not bet against them.
Still, this new effort is only a step on a journey the information technology industry needs to travel. “Predict and prescribe” is necessary but not sufficient to achieving true analytics-based automation, where the “prescription” is applied to operations within policy- and rules-based guidelines, reserving the delivery of guidance to decision makers for the exceptional cases. Some advanced organizations have already built such applications, and they will have a leg up. If you are among them, IT Market Strategy would like to hear your story. Please contact us – leave a comment here, or email merv@itmarketstrategy.com.
April 18, 2009 10 Comments
In April, Expressor Software visited the Boulder BI Braintrust (BBBT) and spent a few hours taking us through their story. Positioning themselves as a provider of high performance semantic data integration software, Expressor shipped their first commercial release in May of 2008 and are targeting Global 2000 and government entities in the US and EMEA. With $16M in funding, and an executive team with experience in the market from firms such as IBM, BEA, Informatica, Knightsbridge and Ab Initio, Expressor has built a foundation that will allow them to attack the market aggressively, selling price performance for data integration .
Read more of this post
Recent Comments - Keep 'Em Coming!