Oracle Idol: Screven Delivers on MySQL Promises, But Judges’ Votes Uncertain

Larry Ellison did not speak at the O’Reilly MySQL event.  While the Register was correct to say “Oracle executives are fanning out to woo open sourcers,” in its sharp-tongued review, Larry was not among them.  Perhaps he saw what was coming. Neither the audience nor the event tweetstream was friendly. Twitter descriptions suggested that theContinue reading “Oracle Idol: Screven Delivers on MySQL Promises, But Judges’ Votes Uncertain”

IBM Gets Feisty — Mobilizes Analytics for Oracle Battle

In July 2009, IBM announced the Smart Analytics System 7600, a workload-optimized, pre-integrated bundle of hardware and software targeted at the business analytics market. Included in that package are an IBM POWER 550 running AIX, storage, plus InfoSphere Warehouse Enterprise Edition (which consists of DB2, Warehouse design and management tools + Cubing, Data Mining andContinue reading “IBM Gets Feisty — Mobilizes Analytics for Oracle Battle”

VDI Market Heats Up – and So Do Vendor Rivalries

I’m pleased to welcome Laura DiDio of ITIC as a contributor. ITIC is a rich source of data and insightful commentary. This piece originally appeared in the PUND-IT newsletter. There’s no hotter market in high tech this year than Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and you don’t need sales and unit shipment statistics to prove it.Continue reading “VDI Market Heats Up – and So Do Vendor Rivalries”

New TPC-H Record – Virtualized by ParAccel, VMware

You can set performance records in a virtualized environment – that’s the message of the new 1 Tb TPC-H benchmark record (scroll down to see the 1Tb results) just released by ParAccel and VMware. Running on VMware’s vSphere 4, the ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB) delivered a one-two punch: not only the top performance number forContinue reading “New TPC-H Record – Virtualized by ParAccel, VMware”

Microsoft Ends Itanium Support — Parsing the Clues

By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. – I’m delighted to welcome Charles as a contributor. This piece was published in the PUND-IT newsletter. In a blog, Dan Reger, senior technical product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server group, announced that Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 will be the last MicrosoftContinue reading “Microsoft Ends Itanium Support — Parsing the Clues”

Oracle Ups EPM Ante

After a 2 year wait, Oracle is rolling out some fruits of its daunting integration efforts in enterprise performance applications. New suite bundles, an Essbase connector and Hyperion uplift are highlights of its Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) 11.1.2 release. The numbering scheme, evidently constrained by the overall Oracle level 11 nomenclature, drove the understated “11.1.2”Continue reading “Oracle Ups EPM Ante”

Tableau Breaks Out With Advanced Visualization

When I last spoke to business analytics vendor Tableau Software in April 2009, the company had run off a string of uninterrupted growth. In a  challenging 2009, Tableau continued to grow, and in our most recent conversation the team was upbeat. Q1 was looking very good, and the company has over 4000 named accounts now.Continue reading “Tableau Breaks Out With Advanced Visualization”

IBM Software Results Continue To Validate Strategy

Another strong year from IBM demonstrates that its relentless software portfolio build-out has succeeded in its goal of grabbing ever more customer logos, share of wallet, and partners. Growth is a complex challenge at this scale – every acquisition brings revenue, but also staff and technology integration challenges, more complexity for Marketing and Sales to dealContinue reading “IBM Software Results Continue To Validate Strategy”

IT Marketers: Oversold Announcements Weaken Your Story

Microsoft and HP’s recent announcement highlighted some of the ways in which poor announcements strain credulity and make it harder to get attention when you do have something worthwhile to talk about. Some errors crop up repeatedly in IT marketing communications, and this one suffered from several of them.

Microsoft and HP Announce New Application-to-Infrastructure Model/Partnership [Yawn]

(Co-authored with Charles King of PUND-IT, Inc.) Microsoft and HP announced a new investment of $250M into their Frontline Partnership, designed to deliver integrated stacks supporting applications from Microsoft’s Exchange and SQL Server and beyond into the cloud. As part of this effort, the companies plan to deliver solutions built on what they defined asContinue reading “Microsoft and HP Announce New Application-to-Infrastructure Model/Partnership [Yawn]”