Software as a Service (SaaS)
Analysis of software-as-a-service offerings with a database or analytic focus, or data connectivity tools focused on SaaS. Related subjects include:
- Data mart outsourcing
- (in Text Technologies) Text analytics SaaS
- (in The Monash Report) Strategic issues in SaaS
Multitenancy hype is getting out of control
I posted recently on SaaS-data-integration-in-the-cloud, and a couple of vendors stopped by the comment thread to shared what they do. One was Boomi, which has a blog that does a good job of spelling out its opinions. What the Boomi blog is not so good at, however, is giving any good reasons why one should share those opinions.
I refer specifically to a couple of posts claiming that multitenancy is somehow crucial for SaaS data integration to work. To this I can only say — huh? A decent data integration system should be able to handle many parallel threads at once, connecting many pairs of databases at once. So the hard part of multitenancy is pretty much “free.” If, even so, the integration provider chooses not to go fully multitenant, whose business is it but theirs? Read more
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 7 Comments |
Everybody’s putting integration services in the cloud
Both Pervasive Software and Cast Iron Systems told me recently of fairly pure cloud offerings. In this, they’re joining Informatica, which started offering Salesforce.com integration-as-a-service back in 2006. So far as I can tell, the three vendors are doing somewhat different things. Read more
| Categories: Cast Iron Systems, Cloud computing, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica, Pervasive Software, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 8 Comments |
The essence of the Oracle Amazon cloud offering
OK. The press release adds color to what I previously posted about Oracle’s new Amazon cloud offering. Read more
| Categories: Cloud computing, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
Oracle announces an Amazon cloud offering
Per the Amazon Web Service Blog, Oracle announced that Oracle can be run in the Amazon cloud (i.e., on EC2, with EBS for persistent storage). Clustering is probably weak, however — e.g., there’s no RAC support, as per Oracle’s well-written FAQ. Perhaps not coincidentally, the FAQ seems to suggest that the primary use case at this time is for backup, and backup is generally a major point of emphasis on Oracle’s cloud computing page.
Of course, another use case could be development, but that depends in part on pricing. Of course, whether Oracle’s offering seems attractively priced compared with, for example, a similar one from EnterpriseDB and Elastra depends a lot on whether you’ve already negotiated an unlimited-use license for Oracle.
James Kobielus, who presumably was pre-briefed, has more to say.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Some Elastra numbers
GigaOm reports that Elastra just raised $12 million, and that it has 40 paying customers, up from 13 around the time of Elastra’s March launch.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Elastra | Leave a Comment |
Project Cassandra — Facebook’s open sourced quasi-DBMS
Edit: I posted much fresher information about Cassandra in July, 2010.
Facebook has open-sourced Project Cassandra, an imitation of Google’s BigTable. Actual public information about Facebook’s Cassandra seems to reside in a few links that may be found on the Cassandra Project’s Google code page. All the discussion I’ve seen seems to be based solely on some slides from a SIGMOD presentation. In particular, Dare Obasanjo offers an excellent overview of Cassandra. To wit: Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, Cloud computing, Data models and architecture, Facebook, NoSQL | 11 Comments |
Jerry Held on cloud data warehousing and how business intelligence will be transformed by it
Vertica Chairman Jerry Held has a pair of blog posts on analytics and data warehousing in the cloud. The first lays out a number of potential benefits and consequences of cloud data warehousing, under the heading of “Transforming BI”: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Cloud computing, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehousing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Vertica Systems | 7 Comments |
Vertica in the cloud
I may have gotten confused again as to an embargo date, but if so, then this time I had it late rather than early. Anyhow, the TDWI-timed news is that Vertica is now available in the Amazon cloud. Of course, the new Vertica cloud offering is:
- Super-easy to set up
- Pay-as-you-go.
Slightly less obviously:
- Vertica insists its software was designed for grid computing from the ground up, and hence doesn’t need Elastra’s administrative aids for starting, stopping, and/or provisioning instances.
- This is a natural fit for new or existing Vertica customers in data mart outsourcing.
Other coverage:
Related link
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Cloud computing, Data warehousing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
Outsourced data marts
Call me slow on the uptake if you like, but it’s finally dawned on me that outsourced data marts are a nontrivial segment of the analytics business. For example:
- I was just briefed by Vertica, and got the impression that data mart outsourcers may be Vertica’s #3 vertical market, after financial services and telecom. Certainly it seems like they are Vertica’s #3 market if you bundle together data mart outsourcers and more conventional OEMs.
- When Netezza started out, a bunch of its early customers were credit data-based analytics outsourcers like Acxiom.
- After nagging DATAllegro for a production reference, I finally got a good one — TEOCO. TEOCO specializes in figuring out whether inter-carrier telcom bills are correct. While there’s certainly a transactional invoice-processing aspect to this, the business seems to hinge mainly around doing calculations to figure out correct charges.
- I was talking with Pervasive about Pervasive Datarush, a beta product that lets you do super-fast analytics on data even if you never load it into a DBMS in the first place. I challenged them for use cases. One user turns out to be an insurance claims rule-checking outsourcer.
- One of Infobright’s references is a French CRM analytics outsourcer, 1024 Degres.
- 1010data has built up a client base of 50-60, including a number of financial and retail blue-chippers, with a soup-to-nuts BI/analysis/columnar database stack.
- I haven’t heard much about Verix in a while, but their niche was combining internal sales figures with external point-of-sale/prescription data to assess retail (especially pharma) microtrends.
To a first approximation, here’s what I think is going on. Read more
Pervasive is also pursuing simplicity and SaaS integration
I blogged recently about Cast Iron Systems, a simplicity-oriented data integration appliance vendor that is increasingly focusing on the SaaS market. Well, Pervasive Software is doing something similar.
Via Data Integrator, Pervasive is a leader in the low-cost integration market, with revenue split about 50/25/25 between direct sales, ISVs, and SaaS. Pervasive fondly believes that its products cost half as much as Cast Iron’s, and wind up taking no more installation effort when you factor in Pervasive’s broader capabilities in areas such as workflow. However, there’s some doubt as to whether this is apples-to-apples. Cast Iron does include hardware, after all, and as Pervasive itself points out, Cast Iron will bundle some professional services into a sale if you ask nicely.
Two things are new. Read more