Oracle, Sleeves Rolled Up, Flexes EPM Muscles

It’s been a while since Oracle made the series of acquisitions that redrew the map on applications software, and they have been fairly successful there. The broadening of the portfolio created considerable challenges for the rationalization of Oracle’s BI strategy, and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Paul Rodwick and Bill Guilmart,Continue reading “Oracle, Sleeves Rolled Up, Flexes EPM Muscles”

Vertica Projects Leadership, Embraces MapReduce (Sorta)

With the August announcement of Vertica Analytic Database 3.5, Vertica is laying claim to leadership of the new ADBMS vendors. With its most recent numbers – several dozens of customers are now in production and the company expects to pass 100 this year – the assertion bears thinking about. Driving forward with an aggressive releaseContinue reading “Vertica Projects Leadership, Embraces MapReduce (Sorta)”

YouCalc Launches into Bubbling SaaS Analytics Space

The land rush into the SaaS analytics space continues; Danish startup Youcalc is seeing solid results from its December 2008 commercial launch. Its value proposition: create custom analytics applications on live data from SaaS systems. Rasmus Madsen and Henrik Kjaer co-founded Youcalc with the idea that a community-based approach to creating analytics applications and sharing them in theContinue reading “YouCalc Launches into Bubbling SaaS Analytics Space”

Sybase’s DBMS Business Shows Sea Legs – But Challenges Lay Ahead

Sybase has rolled out a good Q2 in difficult times, reflecting once again the steady, effective management that has characterized the past few years. All-time highs in margins, earnings, and cash flow – coming at the bottom (one hopes) of the current recession – are nothing to sneeze at. The first highlighted item in chairmanContinue reading “Sybase’s DBMS Business Shows Sea Legs – But Challenges Lay Ahead”

iLuminate Aims To Enable Exploratory Analytics

iLuminate 4.0 has just been released, and its parent firm, Illuminate, is ramping a campaign to join the “new analytic DBMS” party. With a very different architecture based on storing and indexing values in an inverted-list like model, the “correlation database” or CDBMS has been winning some traction with a powerful value proposition: shorter “timeContinue reading “iLuminate Aims To Enable Exploratory Analytics”

Aster Data Systems: Specialty DBMSs Will Change the Market

In a market suddenly awash with new analytic DBMS entrants, Aster Data Systems differentiates itself with an aggressive posture: in-database computations, MapReduce integration and commodity hardware. Like several other firms I’ve talked to recently, the San Carlos-based vendor has a Big Customer (mySpace), a Recent Launch (May 2008) and a Core Team of Hotshots with industryContinue reading “Aster Data Systems: Specialty DBMSs Will Change the Market”

Greenplum – Reaching Escape Velocity

Greenplum is one of several companies who have defied the notion that “RDBMS has been done,” and one of the most successful of late on the high end (of scale, but not necessarily price.) The argument goes that it’s a waste of time to build a new enterprise class RDBMS – kernel, optimizer, and associated feature set  –Continue reading “Greenplum – Reaching Escape Velocity”

Sybase Delivers Another Strong Quarter, Rep Server Refresh

Sybase is celebrating. Let everyone else complain about the bad economy; the perennial “Tier 1A” database, mobility and analytics vendor just had its best quarter ever to kick off 2009 – its 6th consecutive record quarter. With 14% growth in license revenue (31% in database) and a margin of 21%, there is certainly much toContinue reading “Sybase Delivers Another Strong Quarter, Rep Server Refresh”

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”