Confio Tries to Apply BI to DB Performance – Needs Work

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 usingContinue reading “Confio Tries to Apply BI to DB Performance – Needs Work”

Birst Hopes to Ride On-Demand BI Wave

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.

Tableau Software: Visibly Catching On and Catching Up

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 earlyContinue reading “Tableau Software: Visibly Catching On and Catching Up”

IBM’s BAO Initiative Will Change the Landscape, But More Is Needed

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 theContinue reading “IBM’s BAO Initiative Will Change the Landscape, But More Is Needed”

Kognitio Targets US Market, Bags Award

Kognitio, a UK-based player, has set its sights (and funded some moves) on the US market with its WX2 data warehouse offerings and is beginning to gain some traction here. If you’ve been around a while, you may remember White Cross, an appliance vendor before they were called that – it’s not much of a stretchContinue reading “Kognitio Targets US Market, Bags Award”

SAP Needs A Clear Message For Business Objects

In late March, over 1000 people attended the SAP Insider Business Intelligence (BI) and Portals conference. Most were customers of SAP products who were not (yet) using the products SAP acquired with Business Objects. Enthusiasm was high for the demos of  text and predictive analytics, event processing and more. But to carry this story to market, especially to the newContinue reading “SAP Needs A Clear Message For Business Objects”

Dataupia – Optimism for 2009

I recently had the chance to chat with John O’Brien, CTO and co-founder of MPP data warehouse appliance vendor Dataupia (pronounced like “utopia”). He was in an upbeat mood, as the company leverages the recent addition to its B round of financing secured late last year to drive business to the next level. With aContinue reading “Dataupia – Optimism for 2009”

BI Should Be Tense: Future Perfect Progressive, to be Exact

Business intelligence thinkers can take a leaf from the books of grammarians, who speak of “tense” as defining the time over which an event occurs. And as someone who has long criticized BI for being mostly concerned with predicting the past, I thought it would be instructive to consider the convoluted way we often find ourselvesContinue reading “BI Should Be Tense: Future Perfect Progressive, to be Exact”