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
iLuminate’s correlation/associative approach to data warehousing
illuminate Solutions (small “i”) is an interesting little company, still rough around the edges. (E.g., the Press Release Archive page at i-lluminate.com says, in its entirety, “We are in the process of loading our historical press releases. Please check back the second week in March!” And I only got that much when I corrected an obvious typo in the URL in the menu bar.) According to CTO Joe Foley, illuminate has 37 or so employees, and 40+ customers, ¾ of whom are in their home country of Spain and ½ the rest of whom are in Latin America. Now they’re entering the US.
illuminate’s basic idea is one I’ve heard before, but mainly from companies with more of a search orientation*, such as Attivio: Take a collection of tables, create a big inverted index on all the values in all columns at once, and do queries on that. This, illuminate claims, obviates all sorts of database design problems and similar hassles you otherwise might have. illuminate’s buzzword for all this is “CDBMS”, where the “C” stands for correlation. The actual CDBMS product is called iLuminate; related business intelligence tools are called iCorrelate and iAnalyze. What iLuminate actually indexes is a token that holds four pieces of information: Instance identifier, table identifier, column identifier, and value. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, illuminate Solutions | 2 Comments |
CEP is entering BI
I talked with both Coral8 and Truviso this afternoon. They both have their financial services efforts, of course. Coral8 also continues to get business doing data reduction for sensor networks — mainly RFID and utilities, I think. Coral8 is working on some really cool and confidential other stuff as well.
But my biggest takeaway from this pair of calls was that Coral8 and Truviso are penetrating general BI. Read more
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP), Truviso | Leave a Comment |
Load speeds and related issues in columnar DBMS
Please do not rely on the parts of the post below that are about ParAccel. See our February 18 post about ParAccel instead.
I’ve already posted about a chat I had with Mike Stonebraker regarding Vertica yesterday. I naturally raised the subject of load speed, unaware that Mike’s colleague Stan Zlodnik had posted at length about load speed the day before. Given that post, it seems timely to go into a bit more detail, and in particular to address three questions:
- Can columnar DBMS do operational BI?
- Can columnar DBMS do ELT (Extract-Load-Transform, as opposed to ETL)?
- Are columnar DBMS’ load speeds a problem other than in issues #1 and #2?
Forrester collects business intelligence buzzwords
Forrester says “It’s time to reinvent your BI strategy.” No argument there. And they have an article, charts, and a white paper to back it up. A lot of the details are quite dubious, like the chart in which they declared that columnar RDBMS aren’t relational. Still, the article is worth surveying to see if you have any “I hadn’t thought of that!” moments.
I particularly like this diagram, which has 27 layers, containing approximately 2 1/2 BI-related buzzphrases each.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence | 3 Comments |
One of the coolest visualizations I’ve seen
An obscure little company called Ward Analytics was displaying a Teradata performance management tool at the recent Teradata Partners conference, and I just found the visualization to be very cool. Yes, it’s full-screen, but there’s a LOT of information on the screen — basically, what amounts to about four graphs or charts, each of them complex. Plus there are lots of widgets to adjust what you see. And I actually don’t think full-screen is much of a drawback; you just have to be smart about the simpler elements you put in a portal-based UI that then blow up into complex full-screen ones on demand.
This screenshot doesn’t do the product — called Visual Edge — full justice, but it gives a pretty good taste. The weirdest part is that Ward rolled its own technology to create Visual Edge, feeling there were no generally suitable visualizations out there in the market for it to adopt.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Teradata | 5 Comments |
Coral8 highlights some key issues with dashboards
Coral8 today is rolling out the Coral8 Portal, offering some BI basics for CEP (Complex Event Processing) filters and queries. In Release 1, this is primitive compared with other BI portals, and of direct interest only to organizations that have already decided they’re using CEP technology. Even so, it serves as a useful illustration of several important issues in dashboarding.
The simplest is that real-time dashboards require different visualizations than others. Most obvious is the ever-popular graph marching from right to left across the screen as time advances along the x-axis. There also are difference in styles between reports and tables that you actually read, vs. read-outs that you merely watch for flickers of change. (Of course those two examples hardly make for a complete list.)
More interesting is the flexibility and parameterization. While Coral8 sells to multiple markets, the design point for the portal is clearly financial trading. So, for example, a query may be registered with one ticker symbol, and an end user can easily customize it to slot in another one instead. In a way, this is a step toward the much greater flexibility that dashboards need overall.
Truth be told, if you put all such Coral8 flexibility features together they’re not yet very impressive. So what’s even more interesting is the overall architecture that could support much greater flexibility in the future. If dashboards gain the flexibility they need, and queries continue to be done in the conventional manner, query volumes will increase enormously. If it further is the case that they are upgraded in some near real-time manner, that’s another huge increase.
How huge? Well, I can make a case that it could be well over three orders of magnitude: Read more
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP) | 3 Comments |
The key problem with dashboard functionality
I keep hinting – or saying outright 🙂 — that I think dashboards need to be revolutionized. It’s probably time to spell that point out a little further.
The key issue, in my opinion, it that dashboards need to be much more personalizable than they are now. This isn’t just me talking. I’ve raised the subject with a lot of users recently, and am getting close to 100% agreement with my viewpoint.
One part of the problem is personalizing what to see, how to visualize it, and how all that’s arranged on the screen. No one product yet fully combines best-of-breed ideas from mainstream BI, specialized visualization tools, and flexible personalized web portals. But that’s not my biggest concern, as I think the BI industry is on a pretty good path in those respects.
Rather, the real issue is that dashboards don’t adequately reflect personal opinions as to what is important. Indeed, that lack is often portrayed as virtue, because supposedly top management can dictate through a few simple metrics what a whole company of subordinates will think and think about. (Balanced scorecard theology is a particularly silly form of this.) But actually that lack is a serious impediment to dashboard success, or indeed to a general analytic/numerate enterprise culture overall.
“One version of the truth” can be a gross oversimplification. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, OLTP | 6 Comments |
An interesting claim regarding BI openness
Analyst conference calls about merger announcements are generally pretty boring. Indeed, the companies involved tend to feel they are legally barred from saying anything interesting, by mandate of both the antitrust regulators and the SEC.
Still, such calls are joyful events, full of strategic happy talk. If one is really lucky, there may a virtuouso tap dancing exhibition as well. On today’s IBM/Cognos call, Cognos CEO Rob Ashe was asked whether he thought Cognos’ independence or lack thereof was as important today as he said it was after SAP announced its BOBJ takeover. Without missing a beat, he responded that there were two kinds of openness:
- Database openness (not important)
- ERP/business process openness (indeed important)
Hmm. I’m not so sure I agree. To begin with, there aren’t just two major points of potential integration. There’s also a whole lot of middleware: obviously data integration, but also app servers, portals, and query execution acceleration as well. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos, IBM and DB2, Memory-centric data management, ParAccel, SAP AG | 1 Comment |
IBM is buying Cognos – quick reactions
Some quick thoughts in connection with IBM’s just-announced plans to acquire Cognos.
1. Ironically, IBM just put out a press release describing a strong-sounding reseller partnership with Business Objects. The deal specified that
Business Objects will begin distributing and reselling IBM DB2 Warehouse with Business Objects XI and CFO Performance Management solutions. In addition, IBM will include a starter edition of Business Objects XI with DB2 and DB2 Warehouse.
Jeff Jones of IBM told me that they also had a partnership with Cognos, but with different details. I guess Cognos will eventually take over that deal, which is an obvious negative for Business Objects.
2. More generally, I can see where Cognos will now likely gain share at DB2 sites, and IBM/Ascential at Cognos sites. I can’t as easily see why Cognos would now lose share at Oracle or Teradata or Netezza sites, or why Ascential would lose share at SAP/BOBJ sites. So there seem to be some genuine synergies here, albeit perhaps modest ones.
3. Thus, I think the negatives in this deal for the remaining independents (Microstrategy, Information Builders, Informatica, etc.) will somewhat outweigh the positives.
4. I’m not a big fan of Cognos’ management, former CEO Ron Zambonini and a few other freethinkers excepted. So from that standpoint I don’t think they have a lot to lose being taken over by Big Blue.
5. Obviously, with most of the dominoes now fallen, the big question is about the future of BI as it – potentially – gets integrated into much larger enterprise technology suites. And I think the answer to that depends a lot more on technology than most people seem to realize. More on that subject later, but here’s one hint:
I think fixing the disappointment that is dashboards will involve taking query volumes up by at least 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. So as great as recent innovations in analytic query performance have been, I hope and trust that so far we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Links:
1. eWeek on the IBM/Business Objects deal.
2. Press release on the IBM/Business Objects deal.
3. Press release on the IBM/Cognos deal.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos, IBM and DB2 | 5 Comments |
SAP is losing crucial managerial talent
In the past month or so, both Dennis Moore and Nimish Mehta have left SAP. Their reasons are well-known among Oracle alumni to be — at least in large part — discomfort with SAP’s direction. (My unnamed sources on that are highly reliable.) And of course Shai Agassi left earlier this year. It now looks as if my contrarian viewpoint pooh-poohing the importance of Shai’s departure was probably wrong.
Based on all that, I don’t think there’s much reason for optimism about SAP’s system software futures, except perhaps for those that are placed wholly under the control of the Business Objects division. NetWeaver? Already a creaking omnibus. MaxDB? They didn’t get it right the first time around; what will be different now? BI Accelerator? That one actually could do well under Business Objects. The dream of other kinds of appliances? Not likely to achieve take-off. TREX? They weren’t really enhancing that much anyway. The rest of the search-related vision Dennis outlined for me? That’s another one that actually could thrive under Business Objects, but I expect a considerable number of false starts at best before they work out a coherent new strategy.
The high-end app business, the new SaaS business, the new Business Objects subsidiary — any and all of those could do well. But the attempts to become a broad-based system software player rivaling Oracle, Microsoft, and/or IBM are looking a lot less healthy than they used to.
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Technorati Tags: SAP, NetWeaver, Business Objects, TREX, BI Accelerator
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, SAP AG | 1 Comment |