Blog: Colin White

BI Directions for 2008: Usability?

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 16:36:04 -0700

This is the time of the year for making predictions for the coming year. I guess I am a little late, but given it's still January (just) I guess it is still okay to add my 2 cents.

During 2007 both vendors and industry pundits said that operational BI and getting BI out to the masses were key directions. There was certainly a significant amount of discussion on these two related topics during the year, but did customers actually succeed in making progress here?

To my way of thinking moving BI out to the masses involves making it easier to use. From this perspective I think 2007 was a failure. Yes, products did make significant progress in supporting Microsoft Office, but is this the really a good measure of usability? Are less experienced users really major users of Microsoft Excel? I think not.

There are two models in the market. One is the IBM and Microsoft model, where the emphasis on product functionality and thus complexity. The other is the Google and Apple model where the focus is on usability. Apple Mac Leopard blows Microsoft Vista out of the water in terms of usability, for example. The IBM and Microsoft model is important and is likely to be the cornerstone of IT systems and infrastructure for many years to come, but we need to find more user-friendly solutions.

For less experienced users the way to go is the Google and Apple model. This may provide be less functionality and less stability from an IT perspective, but end user acceptance and growth is likely to benefit most from this model.

The issue for vendors and IT is how to marry the two models. Most BI vendors are still committed to the IBM and Microsoft model, and this opens the door to innovative new BI vendors and I believe in some cases open source products. Many software-as-a-service (really applications-as-a-service) analytical solutions are also starting to gain traction because they offer user-friendly options at a reasonable cost.

I think some of the mainstream BI vendors (e.g., Actuate) are beginning to realize that piling more function into a tired old architecture is not the way forward. Hopefully other vendors will soon realize this as well. However, the size of many BI vendors and the number of products they have is working against fast and easy.

My focus for 2008 then is on BI usability. I think the products that can provide this will be the winners.

Oracle and Sun Acquisitions Heat Up Infrastructure and DBMS Market

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:02:22 -0700

We're only 16 days into the new year and already two important acquisitions have occurred: Oracle acquired BEA for $7.85 billion and Sun acquired MySQL for $1 billion.

The Oracle acquisition of BEA is no surprise. The battle for the infrastructure market is now clearly between Oracle and IBM, with Microsoft, SAP and Sun watching from the sidelines. One interesting aspect of the BEA acquisition is that Oracle now has four portal products. I am glad I'm not an Oracle salesperson!

Sun's proposed acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL was more of a surprise. To date, Sun has not been a database player. MySQL is the most popular open source database products on the market, and it is used by several major Web players including Google and Facebook. MySQL claims that 100 million copies of the product has been downloaded and that an additional 50,000 copies are downloaded daily.

The risk for any open source user is that the software can be acquired by a commercial company. The open source license usually ensures that the product source code remains freely available up to the development level at the time of acquisition. Sun says they will continue to develop the product on multiple platforms including Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and OpenSolaris. Given Sun's commitment to open source (e.g., OpenSolaris, Java System Portal Server/OpenPortal, Glassfish application server) there is no reason to disbelieve them.

One interesting aspect of the MySQL acquisition is that Oracle owns InnoDB, which is a storage engine for MySQL. InnoDB is not a standalone product: it is distributed with MySQL. InnoDB has a contractual relationship with MySQL. It will be interesting to see what happens here.

When is a Data Warehouse Appliance not a Data Warehouse Appliance?

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:55:41 -0700

Data warehouse appliances are so-called because they are used for storing and managing the data associated with data warehousing projects. Strictly speaking though these products should be called database appliances, or simply data appliances, because they support only the database processing component of a data warehousing and business intelligence environment. Many of these appliances are missing the data integration software required to capture data from operational systems, and transform and consolidate it into a data warehouse. Given that the task of data integration is a significant percentage of the effort required to build a data warehouse, the cost savings of these appliances for data warehousing projects may not be as high as it first appears.

This point is brought home by the recent announcement by Vertica of a strategic relationship with Talend, an open-source data integration vendor. Vertica markets the column-oriented Vertica Database, and has a relationship with HP and Red Hat to offer a bundled hardware and software analytical database solution. Given that Talend also has relationship with open source BI tool vendor Jaspersoft, it means the combination of Vertica, Talend, JasperSoft and Red Hat software on top of an HP hardware platform provides a cost-effective and open source data warehouse and BI environment. If this package was offered as a single solution, and supported by a single vendor, it would represent the ideal data warehouse and BI appliance solution.

In my opinion, the appliance vendors must move toward offering these types of packaged software environments if they are to survive. Simply offering better price/performance is not a viable long-term strategy. The database machine vendors discovered this. In fact, I believe the vendors need to go one step further and provide application appliances that provide a complete business solution. Although it had a proprietary architecture, the IBM AS/400 was a tremendous success because it offered a complete application solution to business users.

What a Surprise! IBM Acquires Cognos

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:39:11 -0700

It was just a matter of time before Cognos was acquired, and IBM purchased a BI company. It's a good match for IBM because there is no overlap between the product lines. This would not have been the case if IBM had acquired acquired Business Objects.

There are not many large independents BI vendors left. SAS, Information Builders, and Microstrategy are the main ones. The first two are private companies with CEOs that want to keep it that way. SAS's new relationship with Teradata becomes more important with the IBM acquisition. Information Builders has always been happy to do its own thing and makes a good living out of it.

The acquisition is both good and bad for Microstrategy. It's good because they can say they are one of the few independent vendors left. It's bad because all of the major infrastructure and database vendors now have significant BI and data integration products. This is going to make it tough for Microstrategy in large enterprise accounts, which are its sweet spot.

As I said when SAP acquired Business Objects, for smaller enterprises and SMB customers, open source BI and new BI vendors with modern technology are becoming increasingly attractive.

Master Data versus Reference Data

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:00:00 -0700

Master data is defined as data about the key business entities of an organization. Examples include customer, product, organizational structure, and chart of accounts. A common question about master data is, “What is the difference between master data and reference data?” Some people take the position that they are the same thing, but it can be argued that not all reference data is master data. For example, lookup and code tables that are used to encode information, such as state names and order codes, are not strictly master data tables.

The diving line between master data and reference data is not always clear cut. One solution is to break master data into two types: master reference data and master business entity data. Master reference data has well defined and simple data structures, has simple keys and governance rules, is often standardized (US state codes, for example), involves only a few applications, and is reasonably stable. Master business entity data, such as customer, on the other hand, is usually ill-defined, has complex data structures and relationships, requires compound and intelligent keys and complex governance rules, is not usually standardized, involves many business processes, and changes frequently.

Does this distinction really matter? When developing data quality management and master data management systems it can do. Cleaning and managing master reference status is a reasonable easy job. The opposite is true for master business entity data.

Any comments?

Gartner Magic Quadrants: Just Say No?

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:40:05 -0700

A whole of bunch of new Gartner quadrants have just been published. Every time I see a quadrant I ask myself, “Do these quadrants have any value?”

Vendors often complain to me they feel pressured by Gartner to subscribe to their services in order to be evaluated, while at the same time they obsess about getting their products in the top right corner of a quadrant. Smaller vendors also complain they are left out, because they don't have the budget to subscribe to Garter's services. One vendor even remarked to me jokingly, “It would be cheaper for vendors to get together, buy Gartner out, and scrap the quadrants.”

In my opinion, the Gartner material is superficial and not that useful. Take a master data management area such as Product Information Management (PIM), for example. There are so many facets to PIM, how can you lump all PIM products into a single quadrant as Gartner does? Of the analyst companies out there publishing this type of material, I think Forrester does a much better job.

The quadrants also seem to come and go. At one point, for example, Gartner abandoned its Portal Quadrant, and tried to introduce the concept of the Smart Enterprise Suite (SES). When this failed to get traction, they reverted back to the Portal Quadrant. I wonder if anyone has tracked how many failed acronyms, architectures, and 80% probability predictions Gartner has made? It would be an interesting exercise.

I also speculate about how useful the quadrants are to customers. I sense that sometimes customers feel that if they buy a product that is in the top right corner of a quadrant and it doesn't work for them, they can blame Garter.

I was interested to see a recent blog entry about the Gartner ECM Quadrant on one of my favorite Web sites: cmswatch.com.

“Late last year we blogged on the 2006 Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for ECM - and made the point that inclusion in the chart is believed by vendors to have a very positive impact on their sales. In the 2007 MQ - published this past week - it's clear that little (in Gartner's view) has changed in the ECM world. Well, we beg to differ: 2007 has been a period of major change!”

The blog entry by Alan Pelz-Sharpe (entitled “De-mystifying the Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant.”) goes on to remark, “If there is a problem to identify, it is likely a business model that hinges on such charts, and a public's demand for ever simplified information, along with the vendors addiction to getting the ‘right' placement in the chart. It is both the beauty and the curse of the MQ that it dramatically simplifies a marketplace. But ECM tools and choices are far from simple. In short, buyers of ECM beware.”

Personally, I think this comment applies to many of the Gartner quadrants!

CMS Watch is also an analyst company. It publishes in-depth reports about portal, web content management, enterprise content management, search, and web analytics products. I have seen several of these reports, and for about $1,000 these reports demonstrate the limited value of the Gartner material. The CMS Watch reports are vastly superior and considerably cheaper. Another thing to note about CMS Watch and its analysts is that they do not accept money from vendors. This of course is the opposite of Gartner.

What do you think? Should we just say no to Garter quadrants?

What is the Difference Between Querying and Browsing Data?

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:38:27 -0700

Search is beginning to gain interest in the business intelligence (BI) space, and several people have begun asking about the difference between querying data (using a traditional database query language) and browsing data using a search tool, and which approach to use when. This blog entry is an attempt to put a stake in the ground and to encourage a discussion on this topic.

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Microsoft Reports Significant Increase in Sales of its SharePoint Portal

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:20:39 -0700

Microsoft reported that its SharePoint Server business generated revenue of $800 million during this fiscal year. This represents growth of more than 35 percent over 2006. Microsoft also reported that to date 17,000 customers have purchased SharePoint with 85 million user licenses. I assume that these latter figures include not only SharePoint Server, but also Windows SharePoint Services, which comes with Microsoft's Windows Server platform.

These figures clearly demonstrate the growing influence of SharePoint in workgroup computing. At the portal conference I chair, some 75 percent of the audience use SharePoint. A far smaller number, however, use it for their enterprise portal, and the challenge for these users is how to integrate SharePoint-based workgroups with their enterprise portal.

Types of Data Warehouse Appliance

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:13:14 -0700

Richard Hackathorn and I have just published our report on data warehouse appliances. You can find it at www.beyeresearch.com. In the report we define four main types of data warehouse appliance.

1. Native data warehouse appliance where the hardware and software is tightly integrated into a single data warehouse solution. The software and hardware are not individually licensed and cannot be separated. Examples of vendors providing native data warehouse appliances include DATAllegro, Netezza, and Teradata.

2. Software data warehouse appliance where commercial or open source relational DBMS software is designed and/or optimized for data warehouse processing. The software supports hardware solutions purchased from one or more third-party vendors. Examples of vendors or vendors providing software data warehouse appliances include Greenplum and Sybase (Sybase IQ).

3. Packaged data warehouse appliance where commercial software and hardware is tuned for data warehousing, is packaged and supplied by a single vendor, and is installed and maintained as a single system. Examples of vendors providing packaged data warehouse appliances include HP (NeoView), IBM (Balanced Warehouse), and Sun/Greenplum (Data Warehouse Appliance).

4. Data management appliance that offloads data intensive operations from a host computer. The offloaded workload may involve operational, specialized analytics, or archival processing. Examples of vendors providing data management appliances include ParAccel and Dataupia.

Microsoft Moves into MDM with Acquisition of Stratature

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:33:26 -0700

At the recent Microsoft BI Conference, the company talked a lot about supporting MDM without giving any specific product details. They hinted more details would be revealed in the near future, and today's accoaccouncementt Microsoft is acquiring Stratature shows why they were reluctant to discuss details a few weeks ago.

It's interesting to note that all of the major database vendors (including IBM, Oracle and Teradata) have now acquired MDM products. Stratature is a good fit for Microsoft because it is 100 percent based on Microsoft technology including SQL Server and .NET.

Stratature's flagship product is EDM (enterprise dimension management), which provides a centralized solution and repository for coordinating, integrating, and reconciling master data, dimensional information, and reporting hierarchies across BI and operational systems. Key product features include a web-based interface, workflow, change management and version control, role-based security, a business rules engine, and a services-based architecture.

This acquisition continues Microsoft's thrust into the enterprise. It's strategy to provide lower cost and easier to use products is particularly attractive to enterprises who don't have the resources or money to implement complex solutions from mega vendors like IBM and Oracle, and who also don't always need the vast array of functions and options offered by these latter vendors. The Stratature acquisition provides a good base of master data services on which Microsoft and its partners can build MDM applications.

Red Hat Acquires MetaMatrix

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:06:49 -0700

There have been several BI-related acquisitions of late. One that has received little attention is Red Hat's proposed acquisition of MetaMatrix. At first sight it seems odd for an open source Linux vendor to acquire a BI product. After discussions with several BI vendors and thinking about it for a while this acquisition does have some logic to it.

Is Google Losing Its Edge?

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:49:43 -0700

I seem to be reading more articles pointing out there are now much better options than using Google. If my experience is anything to go by I agree.

1. When evaluating search products for the enterprise, Google may have the mind share and the right price, but there seems to be universal agreement that Google search appliances don't approach the capabilities offered by Endeca, FAST and IBM. Why then are the BI vendors so pre-occupied with supporting Google? Perhaps they should be looking elsewhere.

2. I tried using Google's new blogging software, but it was the most bug-ridden and unusable piece of software I have come across in a long time. I sent bug reports to Google, but the reply said we read these, but don't guarantee to do anything about them.

3. I find more and more when researching the Web, Google may be okay for consumer products, but when it comes to technology research Ask.com is superior and more usable. Perhaps advertisers should be looking elsewhere as well.

4. I have been using Google desktop search for a while, but it bogs down system performance and keeps hanging my computers. I have continued to use it for searching Outlook files because it is so much better than what Microsoft offers. Ken Rudin of LucidEra suggested I try X1, which is a replacement for Yahoo desktop search. It was like a breath of fresh air! It was way faster. more reliable, easier to use, and more capable.

Google's bloated and buggy products seem to resemble those of its main competitor. What's your experience?

What Does IT Mean to be the Father of Something?

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:38:39 -0700

I read with interest Dataupia's recent press release about its new management team. In it Foster Hinshaw (its President and CEO) is described as “the father of data warehouse appliances.” This started me thinking of whether there is a difference between being a father and being a creator, or inventor, of something. As the father and creator of my children I am very proud because I built them from the ground up. Most of the work of course was done by my wife, but it couldn't have happened without me! Is this true of fathers in the IT industry? Did they really create and invent the technology they are the father of?

DW Appliances Hit the Big Time: Netezza Files for IPO

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:25:57 -0700

Data warehouse appliances are certainly creating mind share in the data warehousing industry these days. The buzz went up one notch today with Netezza filing for an IPO. Netezza was one of the first entrants in the DW appliance space. It helped create visibility for what has become a disruptive technology. Since then there have been several other entrants into this space and those companies can thank Netezza for doing the trail blazing.

What Has Business Intelligence Got to Do With Data Warehousing?

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:34:37 -0700

It is interesting that whenever we talk about business intelligence we immediately think of it in the context of data warehousing. The two always go together, right? Wrong! I think we have been indoctrinated into thinking this way. We have lost sight of the fact that data warehousing only came about because we couldn't design our operational systems right in the first place.