Microsoft Briefs On SQL Server R2 – Confusion, Questions Result

April 18, 2010 by 3 Comments

SQL Server 2008 R2 is near release. Briefings for analysts are underway, and right now the picture is a mess. Although seemingly relegated to an adjunct position compared to Office in Microsoft’s thinking, R2 adds a great deal (source:softwarekeep.ca):

  • CEP, although tools and integration are unclear;
  • Master Data Management (MDM), although apparently Microsoft believes end users will do it;
  • the long-awaited Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) – but not yet (release date TBD.)

Many other features are in there too – but the briefing I attended last week didn’t discuss them much. Read more of this post

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Talend Uses Open Source and Community to Transform Data Integration

July 3, 2009 by 37 Comments

Talend, a California-based  open source data integration vendor with a development center in China, first shipped product in late 2006, and two and a half years later has established a strong, growing business as more and more firms attempt to build a relatively complete stack of open source data management software. With a recent $12M round of financing, Talend continues to build out its commercial infrastructure, and can be expected to raise its profile and continue its growth in a conservative market that nonetheless is aggressively pursuing information management technologies. Open source, tight economics, prohibitively expensive licensing models based on data volume, and huge maintenance costs are transforming buyers’ thinking about these products and opening the door for Talend and others. Read more of this post

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Balanced Insight – Automating BI Design to Deployment

May 12, 2009 by 9 Comments

Balanced Insight, a small startup founded as a consultancy in 2003, sees a market opening in automating and speeding up the beginning stages of BI projects. They are not alone in thinking so: AMR has asserted that 43.7% of typical BI project cost is labor (approximately $250k to $500k.) False precision aside, the argument that the requirements, analysis and design stages are underserved by current products is a reasonable one. Balanced Insight’s product, Consensus, has a very specific, targeted ambition: enable the stakeholders to decide on the meaning of data they want for BI projects, and then automate the generation of metadata, cubes, and other artifacts and reuse the definitions in other BI projects. Balanced Insight asserts they can reduce project time and people costs by half or better; they think the time is right to launch their product more widely.   Read more of this post

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Marge Breya: NetWeaver + BI Forms a New Layer

May 11, 2009 by Leave a comment

In the final excerpt from our interview with Marge Breya, we discuss the role of NetWeaver in SAP’s product strategy. Breya, Executive Vice President & GM Intelligence Platform & NetWeaver of SAP BusinessObjects, oversees full product line responsibility for BI and information management  solutions, as well as the company’s OnDemand business. In addition, Breya is responsible for solution management of SAP NetWeaver within the Technology Group at SAP AG. We discussed business strategy and the data warehouse and BI tools in our previous excerpts. Read more of this post

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Expressor Software Hits the Complex Data Integration Market Running

April 18, 2009 by 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

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IBM’s Optim Will Deliver Data Management Improvements in 2009

March 30, 2009 by 1 Comment

When IBM completed its acquisition of Princeton Softech in September 2007, the picture seemed bright for such relatively niche applications as test data management, data growth management and archiving. Optim filled some gaps in IBM’s portfolio and promised to grow share of wallet in the IBM customer base. But there were awkward overlaps with products in the InfoSphere and Rational product lines, and some integration needed to be done. Read more of this post

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