Intelligent Enterprise

I heard about an interesting presentation planned at the EMC World conference in May. According to this talk, EMC will introduce another entry into the warehouse appliance market via a partnership, this time with ParAccel:

"EMC and ParAccel have jointly engineered and developed a highly scalable and performant analytic appliance. This solution is built on EMC CLARiiON midrange CX-3 UltraScale networked storage and ParAccel's analytic columnar data store. Customers can deploy the EMC/ParAccel analytic appliance by simply extending their existing EMC footprint on enterprise ready storage while leveraging EMC's proven solutions."

Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is certain to shake up the online advertising, Web 2.0 and open-source markets. Yahoo has been on the path to being a real player in the Web and open source world. They've released tons of code via their developer programs and pushed some really innovative services aimed at Web developers. Being absorbed into Microsoft could actually hurt the industry in these areas. I'd expect less open source support out of them for a start.

There's definitely going to be cost-cutting after the deal is done. There are some specific quotes from Microsoft's offer worth highlighting.

The reasonable-sounding CRM conventional wisdom is that you should "fire your low-value customers," but it turns out to be not so reasonable after all. The theory is that low (or negative) value customers are a drain on limited resources, so getting rid of them should raise margins and make the company more profitable. Except it doesn't, according to a recent study by two Wharton marketing professors.

ParAccel announced top TPC-H benchmark performance numbers with Sun at the end of October, beating out the former leaders in both the price and price-performance. Not by a little, but by four times in performance with a big drop in cost. I haven't seen much discussion of these results.

The fact that a little startup like ParAccel can enter the market with a database to support business intelligence that beats the TPC-H results of all the major vendors on both performance and price should wake people up. Particularly when the performance increase is so large while significantly decreasing cost.

People are acting surprised because IBM bought the last of the big BI platform vendors. I can't figure out why. The marriage of IBM and Cognos has been whispered about for several years. IBM kept saying "we don't want to be in the application business," but they also weren't in the ETL business or the content applications business either.

As a software vendor, IBM is all about enterprise infrastructure. BI as it's talked about today is mostly reporting infrastructure, and as such has become mainstream infrastructure — exactly the sort of thing IBM does.

Last week I attended the Teradata partners conference, one of the best events to go to if you want to see some of the leading-edge things people are doing. Unlike many conferences, this one has a lot of case studies, and they set a high bar for quality. Since Teradata sits at the core of the warehouse, they get a broader range of speakers, so I always find something of interest.

SAP and Business Objects are calling the acquisition of the latter a friendly takeover, although I wonder how many employees will view it that way. With this purchase, the BI market now looks a lot like the ETL market. There's only one large independent vendor in each market - Informatica for ETL and Cognos for BI - and a bunch of mostly smaller companies left.

This is a great thing for SAP since they can now start taking in sales for BI where once it all went to third parties. They also get a decent set of data integration and data quality products to complement SAP's sore applications. It's good for Business Objects too, since this opens up the market for all those SAP accounts.

Web 2.0 technologies are going to change BI, possibly undercutting demand for conventional BI software. People wonder why I keep saying this. Here's a great example: real estate search.

Not that long ago, you would look at listings in your price range and try to work out where they were and whether they were in nice neighborhoods. More likely, a real estate agent would do this for you. Their value was almost entirely access to information and knowing how to get at it via the multi-list service.

None of the shopping sites with which I'm familiar truly take advantage of the presentation opportunities offered by the Web. They still merchandise online in the same way they lay out shelves in a store. So you filter by type of clothing, style, gender and size.

Speaking at the recent TDWI Executive Summit, I talked about Web mashups, BI and the blurring between the two. One of the mashups I showed was ColorPickr, a nifty app that pulls images from photo site Flickr based on your choice of color from a palette.

Every TDWI conference leaves me with insight into what to expect during the next year. At last month's World Conference in San Diego we had both the regular conference and a two-day executive summit. The main trends I saw:

Predictive Analytics still hot — Predictive analytics (a.k.a. data mining) seems to be the topic most people are interested in hearing about. A lot of the engineering problems we faced with data mining in the '90s have been solved and cheap computing power makes broader use more feasible. The catch is that it still takes expertise to understand which techniques work best for different problems. Expect a new subclass of BI professionals who know PA tools and techniques, just as we have BI tool and design experts now.

Lots of people talking about data governance — There seem to be two threads driving this: