IBM STG Trip Report: Hardware-Software Synergy Yielding Dividends

November 30, 2010 by 2 Comments

Every year in the fourth quarter, IBM assembles its Systems & Technology Group (STG – the hardware guys) executives for discussions with the analyst community to review results and discuss the year ahead. STG’s Senior VP Rod Adkins teed up this year’s meeting with a reminder that STG and Software Group (SWG) both now report to Steve Mills, SVP and Group Executive – Software & Systems. This change naturally suggests the possibilities for increased synergies between the two parts of IBM, and although much collaboration has been in place over the years, IBM’s attention to leveraging the opportunity has clearly come into sharper focus. The interaction was a recurrent theme. Read more of this post

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Oracle Touts Cost Savings With New RAC, Storage Features

November 24, 2009 by Leave a comment

Oracle has high expectations for its newest release (Oracle Database 11g R2.) “We expect 45-50% adoption of R2 by next year,” said Mark Townsend, Vice President of Product Management, at the database analyst day during Oracle Open World recently. Such a rate would be unprecedented, but Oracle has good reasons for its optimism. Many new features target extending cost-effective use of the systems (server, storage and software) in place, and the financial drumbeat was clear and consistent. Many of these benefits are due to Oracle’s increasing ability to leverage organizations’ architectural tiers: smarter use of  interconnected servers, storage, and memory are driving performance improvements at many levels. Should Oracle’s acquisition of Sun win through, one can expect to see an acceleration of this trend. Read more of this post

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IBM’s Smart Analytics System: More Than An Appliance?

July 29, 2009 by 4 Comments

When is an appliance not an appliance? When it’s more. On July 28, IBM’s Software Group and Systems and Technology Group (i.e., the hardware folks) hosted an analyst event to introduce the Smart Analytics System.The discussion began with a series of conversations about the value of “workload optimization,” or the effective tuning of processors, storage, memory and network components with software used for information management.  Not controversial, but hardly news. IBM claims to be raising the bar, though, with the promise of a system that is already tuned, and attuned to the needs of its purchaser, at a level far beyond appliances that other vendors have delivered: appliances, if you will, not only predesigned for specific use cases, but customized for specific instances of those use cases. It’s no accident that IBM never called the Smart Analytics System an “appliance.” Extending the Smart brand here is a powerful move, and IBM appears poised to make good on its promise. Read more of this post

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Multi-Tenant DWs: Sybase IQ Defends its Analytic DBMS Turf

May 10, 2009 by 1 Comment

Sometimes Sybase IQ seems like the Rodney Dangerfield of analytic DBMSs (ADBMS) – no respect. The pioneering column-based DBMS first shipped in 1995, shipped release 15 at the end of Q1, and has 1650 customers. But all the noise seems to be about more recent entrants these days, and Sybase is stepping up to change that. The market is moving into their sweet spot, Sybase believes, as Web 2.0 applications routinely bypass the traditional RDBMS technology leaders in favor of specialized alternative approaches. [disclosure: 15 years ago, I was involved in the launch of IQ.]

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