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
Another firm that never sees DB2 in data warehousing
At the Teradata show today, I talked with Mike Weber of Scorecard Systems Inc. Scorecard’s business is vertical BI for telecommunications companies to analyze call data. They support Teradata (obviously), Oracle, and Microsoft SQL*Server, with Netezza coming soon. But not DB2.
Mike says that, in ten years in this business, he’s never seen DB2. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, IBM and DB2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, Teradata | 2 Comments |
The era of memory-centric BI may have finally started
SAP is acquiring Business Objects. There’s nothing inherent in BI Accelerator’s design that ties it to NetWeaver, SAP star schema InfoCubes, or any other particular current implementation detail. So BI Accelerator could become a lot more than an afterthought.
Combine that with Cognos’s acquisition of Applix and the continued success of upstart QlikView, and we could finally see a general memory-centric BI boom.
Maybe. There have been a lot of false alarms before.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP AG | 3 Comments |
The four horsemen of data warehousing
I’ve been talking a lot to text mining vendors this week, as per a series of posts over on Text Technologies. Specifically, I’ve focused on the two with exhaustive extraction strategies, namely Attensity and Clarabridge. (Exhaustive extraction is Attensity’s term for separating the linguistic-analysis part of text mining from the DBMS-based BI/analytics part.)
So I asked each of Attensity and Clarabridge the side question as to which data warehouse software or appliances they were seeing. The answers were almost identical — Oracle, Microsoft SQL*Server, Teradata, and Netezza. One also mentioned MySQL and 2 HP prospects — but the HP sites were running NonStop SQL, not NeoView. Amazingly, there were no mentions of DB2. There also weren’t any mentions of the smaller specialist startups, such as DATAllegro, Greenplum, or Vertica.
A negative take on QlikView
Apparently, one user isn’t happy with QlikView at all. The main problem seems to be, in effect, frequently-repeated bulk loads from disk into the in-memory structures. (Obviously — at least absent more information — that could be an artifact of a stupidly ignorant installation, rather than a fundamental problem with the technology itself.) He’s also not at all enamored of QlikView’s app dev tools.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView | 2 Comments |
Applix – Three huge opportunities Cognos will probably ignore
If I weren’t on a snorkeling vacation,* this might be a good time to write about why I once called Cognos “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” how Ron Zambonini used that label to help him gain the company’s top spot, why he’s such a big fan of mine, why I got my highest ever per-minute speaking fee to attend a Cognos sales kickoff event, why I went for a midnight touristing stroll in downtown Ottawa in zero degree Fahrenheit weather, or how I managed, while attending the aforementioned Cognos sales kickoff, to get snowed in for three days in, of all places, Dallas, Texas. But the wrasses and jacks await, so I’ll get straight to the point.
*Albeit fairly snorkel-free so far, thanks to Hurricane Felix. 🙁
As I discussed at considerable length in a white paper, Applix’s core technology is fully-featured, memory-centric MOLAP. This is certainly cool technology, and I think it is actually unique. That it’s historically been positioned as the engine for a mid-range set of performance management tools is a travesty, a shame, the result of a prior merger – and also the quite understandable consequence of RAM limitations. However, RAM is ever cheaper and Applix’s technology is now 64-bit, so the RAM barriers have been relaxed. Cognos can take Applix’s TM1 engine high-end if it wants to. And boy, should Cognos ever want to. Indeed, there are three different great ways Cognos could package and position TM1:
- As a no-data-warehouse-design quick-start analytics engine analogous to QlikView (the fastest-growing and most important newish BI suite, open source perhaps excepted);
- As the most sophisticated and versatile planning tool this side of SAP’s APO (and while APO’s sophistication is not in dispute, its versatility is questionable anyway);
- As the processing hub for dashboards-done-right.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Cognos, Memory-centric data management, MOLAP | 6 Comments |
QlikTech – flexible, memory-centric, columnar BI
QlikTech has a pretty interesting story, and a number of customers seem to agree. Their flagship product QlikView is a BI suite that runs off an in-memory copy of the data. Specifically, that copy is logically relational and physically columnar. In an important feature, QlikView is happy to import data from multiple sources at once, such as a warehouse plus an operational data store.
So the QlikTech pitch is essentially “Buy our stuff, and you can start doing BI immediately, running any queries and reports you want to. No reason to limit your queries to any kind of dimensional model. No need to prepare the data.” More precisely, QlikTech claims to do away with some kinds of data preparation; obviously, cleaning and so on might still be necessary. Indeed, they describe their classic use case as being the combination of data partly from an operational store and partly from a pre-existing warehouse. Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP AG | 1 Comment |
QlikTech numbers update
I chatted with QlikTech again yesterday. The update on their numbers is that they ended 2006 with 5,436 customers in 68 countries. Of those, 3,200 were added over the year. (I.e., they only had 2,200 or so at the end of 2005.) Revenue growth was slightly more than 80% for the year, for the third straight year over 80%. (I think their real goal is to double.) That should put them at $40 million or so in license fees, for classical BI only. (Budgeting/planning features are apparently slated for QlikView Release 8 in May.) Read more
SAP’s BI Accelerator
I wrote about SAP’s BI Accelerator quite a bit in my white paper on memory-centric data management, but otherwise I seem not to have posted much about it here. In essence, it’s a product that’s all RAM-based, and generally geared for multi-hundred-gigabyte data marts. The basic design is a compression-heavy column-based architecture, evolved from SAP’s text-indexing technology TREX. Like data warehouse appliances, it eschews indexing, relying instead on blazingly fast table scans.
I asked Lothar Schubert of SAP how BIA was doing in the market in its early going. This was his response:
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Memory-centric data management, SAP AG | 8 Comments |
Business Objects on EIM, ETL, etc.
I chatted with some Business Objects ETL/EIM (Enterprise Information Management) folks today, in a call that was a direct response to what I heard from and posted about Informatica. The core of the Business Objects story can be summarized (albeit brutally!) like this:
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
QlikView – a leader in memory-centric BI
QlikTech — the vendor of QlikView — contacted me to tell their memory-centric BI story. A Swedish company with >$23 million in estimated license revenue last year and a 100%ish growth rate, they claim to be the leader in that space, pulling ahead of Applix. But for now, I’ll call them “a” leader, and say that their story sounds like a hybrid between those of Applix (TM1 product) and SAP (BI Accelerator).