July 23, 2010
Some interesting links
In no particular order:
- Neil Raden points out that business intelligence dashboards can be dangerously misleading. His reasoning (sound) is that whatever you measure is apt to be distorted by the fact people know they’re being measured. His solution (implied) is to hire a good-looking consultant like himself to do it right.
- I’ve had my issues with Fred Holahan, who was VP of Marketing when I posted that EnterpriseDB was not to be trusted. (That said, Fred is long gone from EnterpriseDB and my opinion hasn’t changed.) But he’s put up a good series of posts on the basis of the open source “progressive engagement” marketing funnel, including this gem on why you shouldn’t count on monetizing your community/free users.
- Oracle plans to increase its acquisition budget. The figure given is $70 billion over the next 5 years. Edit: But see this funny Register followup.
- Clayton Christensen wrote a phenomenal article on how to live a good life, from a very business-y perspective. (Only in one anecdote was it too religiously-oriented for my tastes.) Takeaways include:
- Your core goals probably revolve around something other than business success. (E.g., family.) Don’t lose sight of that.
- To the extent you’re a manager or leader, you may have a huge impact on other people’s lives. Use that power in admirable ways.
- Teach people how to fish for answers, rather than just giving them answers. They’ll probably come to better conclusions than you would have anyway. (This is a core principle in my own consulting.)
- Take time to reflect. And by the way, the same techniques you use for strategic analysis in business can be applied to your life as well.
- Mark Suster has a pretty good post expanding on my first Christensen takeaway, highlighting a point too often missing from articles in that genre: It’s not just family; it’s also all the cool things around us.
- I haven’t gone through the Hadoop Summit archives yet, but it looks as if there’s a lot of insight there about current Hadoop application activity.
- If you’re a cat lover and don’t hate simple/traditional music, check out Marc Gunn’s cat filksongs, especially the infectious “What Shall We Do With a Catnipped Kitty?” and “Lord of the Pounce”, both playable from the right sidebar of that page (#13 and #15 respectively). Gunn is also a chief perpetrator of the justly (in)famous Do Virgins Taste Better? cycle of filksongs.
- Former SAP exec Dennis Moore offers a theory as to why SAP cares so much about in-memory DBMS. It’s to integrate business processes, because SAP has no other software layer good at doing same. Interestingly, Dennis originated SAP’s previous attempt at meeting a similar need via its composite applications initiative. However, in Dennis’ view this benefit would only be achieved by a major rewrite of SAP’s applications.
Categories: Business intelligence, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Fun stuff, Hadoop, Humor, In-memory DBMS, MapReduce, Memory-centric data management, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG
Subscribe to our complete feed!
Comments
2 Responses to “Some interesting links”
Leave a Reply
[…] It’s to integrate business processes, because SAP has no other software layer good at doing same (via RDBMS2). If […] SAP were to undertake a rewrite of its application server tier to replace all calls to a […]
[…] Fred Holahan is now VP of Marketing at VoltDB, which is a lesson to me about giving free consulting … Anyhow, Fred tells me that VoltDB has about a dozen users on their way to production, some of whom are headed to being VoltDB paying customers, some of whom are not. Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Cloudera, Greenplum, Hadoop, IBM and DB2, In-memory DBMS, Liberty and privacy, Market share, Netezza, Open source, Oracle, ParAccel, Petabyte-scale data management, SAS Institute, Teradata, VoltDB and H-Store, eBay Subscribe to our complete feed! […]