Business intelligence
Analysis of companies, products, and user strategies in the area of business intelligence. Related subjects include:
- Data warehousing
- Business Objects
- Cognos
- QlikTech
- (in Text Technologies) Text mining
- (in Text Technologies) Text analytics/business intelligence integration
- (in The Monash Report) Strategic issues in business intelligence
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on business intelligence
Clearing some of my buffer
I have a large number of posts still in backlog. For starters, there are ones based on recent visits with Aster, Greenplum, Sybase, Vertica, and a Very Large User. I suspect I’ll write more soon on Oracle as well. Plus there’s my whole future-of-online-media area. And quite a bit more will grow out of planned research.
So there are a whole lot of other worthy subjects I doubt I’ll be getting to any time soon. In some cases, of course, other people are doing great jobs of writing about same. Here are pointers to a few links that I am glad to recommend:
- I wrote recently that I’ve discovered a number of different in-memory OLAP engines. Cindi Howson far outdid that, writing at length for Intelligent Enterprise on in-memory analytics, in an article that seems to itself be a teaser for a longer, free white paper on the subject.
- CouchDB posted an eye-catching, risque slide presentation promoting CouchDB and, more generally, key-value stores, at least for internet applications. And yes, they’ve integrated MapReduce.
- Merv Adrian posted favorably about Birst, with special reference to its OEM efforts. As previously noted, I was highly unimpressed with Birst’s end-user BI story at the time of its September roll-out, and Jerome Pineau’s recent examination did nothing to reassure me. But perhaps OEM is a different matter.
- Merv also offers an interesting post about data integration upstart Expressor, and a highly favorable one about “visualization” vendor Tableau.
- Ann All interviewed Nigel Pendse, who grumped that BI features are overrated, and what end users really want is great query performance. I’m not so sure about the features side of that, but I’m hugely in agreement about the performance. That’s a big part of why the analytic DBMS industry is so vibrant. It’s also why in-memory OLAP is suddenly so hot.
Donald Farmer knocks the April Fool 8-ball out of the park
Donald Farmer has an excellently-crafted April Fool post about a revolution in business intelligence. Look at the character names, for example.
I wonder whether Donald learned operations research from that textbook where two main decision-making characters were Mark Off and his father Pop, an example company was Edifice Wrecks, and an example CEO was Dawn Shirley Light …
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Humor | 1 Comment |
Business intelligence notes and trends
I keep not finding the time to write as much about business intelligence as I’d like to. So I’m going to do one omnibus post here covering a lot of companies and trends, then circle back in more detail when I can. Top-level highlights include:
- Jaspersoft has a new v3.5 product release. Highlights include multi-tenancy-for-SaaS and another in-memory OLAP option. Otherwise, things sound qualitatively much as I wrote last September.
- Inforsense has a cool composite-analytical-applications story. More precisely, they said my phrase “analytics-oriented EAI” was an “exceptionally good” way to describe their focus. Inforsense’s biggest target market seems to be health care, research and clinical alike. Financial services is next in line.
- Tableau Software “gets it” a little bit more than other BI vendors about the need to decide for yourself how to define metrics. (Of course, it’s possible that other “exploration”-oriented new-style vendors are just as clued-in, but I haven’t asked in the right way.)
- Jerome Pineau’s favorable view of Gooddata and unfavorable view of Birst are in line with other input I trust. I’ve never actually spoken with the Gooddata folks, however.
- Seth Grimes suggests the qualitative differences between open-source and closed-source BI are no longer significant. He has a point, although I’d frame it more as being about the difference between the largest (but acquisition-built) BI product portfolios and the smaller (but more home-grown) ones, counting open source in the latter group.
- I’ve discovered about five different in-memory OLAP efforts recently, and no doubt that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- I’m hearing ever more about public-facing/extranet BI. Information Builders is a leader here, but other vendors are talking about it too.
A little more detail Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Business intelligence, Information Builders, Inforsense, Jaspersoft, QlikTech and QlikView, Scientific research, Tableau Software | 8 Comments |
Independent CEP vendors continue to flounder
Independent CEP (Complex/Event Processing) vendors continue to flounder, at least outside the financial services and national intelligence markets.
- StreamBase once planned to conquer the world, making an impact as big as database management’s. Now it has retreated into niche markets.
- Progress Software, a decent-sized company, put a large fraction of its energy into Apama. Little has happened outside the financial service sector.
- Coral8 has some great-sounding ideas. But Coral8 now has merged into Aleri, basically a financial-markets specialist.
- Mike Franklin says some ambitious things on behalf of Truviso, but I haven’t noticed much traction there either.
CEP’s penetration outside of its classical markets isn’t quite zero. Customers include several transportation companies (various vendors), Sallie Mae (Coral8), a game vendor or two (StreamBase, if I recall correctly), Verizon (Aleri, I think), and more. But I just wrote that list from memory — based mainly on not-so-recent deals — and a quick tour of the vendors’ web sites hasn’t turned up much I overlooked. (Truviso does have a recent deal with Technorati, but that’s not exactly a blue chip customer these days.)
So far as I can tell, this is a new version of a repeated story. Read more
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, StreamBase, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP), Truviso | 12 Comments |
Ideas for BI POCs
Kevin Spurway of Altosoft has a post up offering his suggestions on how to do business intelligence POCs (Proofs-of-Concept). Among the best ideas in his post are:
- Do POCs.
- Don’t let the vendors prepare the details of the POCs in advance.
- Get your hands on the actual SQL generated in the queries.
- Try to understand the actual development and deployment processes.
The post’s worst, or at least most self-serving, idea is:
- Restrict POCs to single-day toy projects.
Of course, he didn’t phrase it exactly that way, but that was the gist.
Actually, the more realistically your POC models:
- Full query workloads and throughput
- Repositories jammed full with a lot of messy detail
the more reliable it will be.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Business intelligence, Buying processes | 1 Comment |
HP and Neoview update
I had lunch with some HP folks at TDWI. Highlights (burgers and jokes aside) included:
- HP’s BI consulting (especially the former Knightsbridge) and analytic product groups (including Neoview) are now tightly integrated.
- HP is trying to develop and pitch “solutions” where it has particular “intellectual property.” This IP can come from ordinary product engineering or internal use, because HP Labs serves both sides of the business. Specific examples offered included:
- Telecom. Apparently, HP made specialized data warehouse devices for CDRs (Call Detail Records) long ago, and claims this has been area of particular expertise ever since.
- Supply chain – based on HP’s internal experiences.
- Customer relationship – ditto
- The main synergy suggested between consulting and Neoview is that HP’s experts work on talking buyers into such a complex view of their requirements that only Neoview (supposedly) can fit the bill.
- HP insists there are indeed new Neoview sales.
- Neoview sales seem to be concentrated in what Aster might call “frontline” applications — i.e., low latency, OLTP-like uptime requirements, etc.
- HP says it did an actual 80 TB POC. I asked whether this was for an 80 TB app or something a lot bigger, but didn’t get a clear answer.
Given the emphasis on trying to exploit HP’s other expertise in the data warehousing business, I suggested it was a pity that HP spun off Agilent (HP’s instrumentation division, aka HP Classic). Nobody much disagreed.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, HP and Neoview, Telecommunications | 4 Comments |
Microstrategy tidbits
I chatted with Microstrategy Wednesday in a call focused on the upcoming Microstrategy 9. There wasn’t a lot of technical content, but I did glean:
- In Microstrategy 9, virtual ROLAP cubes will be able to draw on multiple relational databases, not just one. (Frankly, I’ve never understood why BI vendors are so slow to put in features like that.)
- Actually, in Microstrategy 9 cubes won’t just be virtual. You’ll be able to instantiate parts of them in memory.
- The in-memory part requires manual intervention. However, that intervention can be as minor as pushing a button to accept the recommendations of a Cube Advisor.
- The Microstrategy Cube Advisor will examine workloads for a month or so to see which queries chew up the most resources.
- Another new feature is “complete” OLAP drilldown from any point in any chart or graph, without pre-programming or pre-specification.
- Microstrategy’s favorite DBMS partners are, in some order, Netezza and Teradata.
- Microstrategy 9 is currently scheduled for March 23 release.
Analytics’ role in a frightening economy
I chatted yesterday with the general business side (as opposed to the trading operation) of a household-name brokerage firm, one that’s in no immediate financial peril. It seems their #1 analytic-technology priority right now is changing planning from an annual to a monthly cycle.* That’s a smart idea. While it’s especially important in their business, larger enterprises of all kinds should consider following suit. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Application areas, Business intelligence, Cognos, Data warehousing, IBM and DB2, MOLAP | Leave a Comment |
Introduction to Pentaho
I finally caught up with Pentaho, which along with Jaspersoft is one of the two most visible open source business intelligence companies, Actuate perhaps excepted. Highlights included:
- Much like Jaspersoft, Pentaho’s initial focus was mainly on embedded, operational BI.
- However, Pentaho now feels it has a decent end-user GUI as well, and traditional-BI is a bigger part of sales.
- Also, some sales are focused on data integration, perhaps in support of more traditional BI products. Pentaho has even had an Ab Initio replacement in data integration. (Can there be any change more extreme than going from Ab Initio to open source?)
- As an example of technical breadth, Pentaho says that its Mondrian OLAP engine is used by Jaspersoft.
- Pentaho has Excel output, but not in the form of live formulas.
- Pentaho does XQuery.
- Industries with more Pentaho adoption than average include:
- Financial services (traditionally open-source-friendly, according to Pentaho)
- Government (ditto)
- Web 2.0 (obviously ditto)
- Travel/transportation (cash-strapped)
- Frontier Airlines is a Pentaho/Greenplum customer.
- TradeDoubler is a Pentaho/InfoBright customer. (Pentaho thinks that TradeDoubler reloads its warehouse every day, which if true frankly casts some doubt on InfoBright’s architecture.)
- Data mining is something of a Pentaho sideline. There’s some university in New Zealand that built data mining capabilities in Pentaho, and some data mining research is done in that. Separately, Pentaho has been integrated with R.
- Community contributions are concentrated in the areas you’d expect — features some user or system integrator needs for a specific project, connectors, bug reports, and the like.
| Categories: Ab Initio Software, Application areas, Business intelligence, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Greenplum, Infobright, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Pricing | 7 Comments |
Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence
A few days ago I tore into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS. Well, the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms is out too. Unlike the data warehouse MQ, Gartner’s BI MQ clusters its “Leaders” together tightly. But while less bold, the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant’s claims are just as questionable as those in data warehousing.
February, 2011 edit: Here’s a partial link that works right now.
Of course, some parts do make sense. E.g.: Read more