The most blog postings from BeyeUK Copyright BeyeUK http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/rss/all_blogs.php 144 24 http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/images/logo_beyeblogs.gif http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/rss/all_blogs.php
There is no question that the Web has changed the way we consume information. This is because it provides us with fast access to a vast virtual information store. This information store has become so easy to access with modern search engines that we tend to assume that everything on the Web is free. This is not the case, and this is a potential minefield, not only for information publishers that wish to protect their intellectual property (IP) on the Web, but also for organizations that consume and use that IP.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/04/organizations_n.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:01:59 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/04/organizations_n.php
Following my recent series of articles on Web 2.0 and BI on the B-Eye-Network, it is exciting to see BI products pushing their way into the BI market embracing web 2.0. Several vendors such as Information Builders and SAP (Business Objects) have released BI Mashup tools recently but the one vendor that caught my eye is Antivia, a small Australian company based in Sydney that is really embracing communities and social networking with their product. As web 2.0 edges towards becoming mainstream in the BI market (probably 2009 timeframe) expect to see more adoption of richer interaction in user interfaces and more collaboration capability to share BI for joint decision making. If you are already using Web 2.0 in BI applications and tools in your organisation please share your experiences on what works and what doesn't.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/04/bi_vendor_adoption_of_web_20_e.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Wed, 9 Apr 2008 10:36:54 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/04/bi_vendor_adoption_of_web_20_e.php
If you are struggling to define your company's key performance indicators (KPIs), here is a useful bit of information. I recently discovered an interesting website dedicated to identifying KPIs for just about every category you can think of. And it is FREE!

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/04/free_kpis.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Tue, 1 Apr 2008 14:41:46 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/04/free_kpis.php
AIIM - The Enterprise Content Management Association - recently published a detailed report and survey ("Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent & Integrated") on Enterprise 2.0 (see www.aiim.org). The report provides some fascinating insight into how organizations view and are using Enterprise 2.0. The report proposes a new definition for Enterprise 2.0: "A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise." One of the reasons given for this new definition is the poor understanding of Web 2.0, which is often closely associated with Enterprise 2.0. In fact many people describe Enterprise 2.0 as the use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Some 44% of the 441 survey respondents said that Enterprise 2.0 (as a technology and a practice) is imperative or signifiant to achieving the organization's overall business goals and success. However, 41% of respondents said there was no clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is in their organization. These latter two results seem to contradict each other - people think the concept is critical to success, but are unsure what it is! The reason for these odd results is that most people are familiar with several of the technologies usually associated with Enterprise 2.0, but are still unsure how they fit together to provide a complete solution. Improved collaboration was often cited in the report as the main objective of Enterprise 2.0, but the term "collaboration" here has a broader meaning than its traditional definition. In this case, collaboration includes information and knowledge sharing, and also social networking. This is an important point because I think that collaboration today has a broader meaning than it has in the past. The main inhibitor to adoption of Enterprise 2.0 appears to be lack of control and increased security concerns (42% of respondents). There is nothing new here, but it does show that traditional governance approaches have to be modernized in order for Enterprise 2.0 to be successful. The results of this report are clearly inline with the direction of the BI industry, which is beginning to focus on the impact of modern collaborative and social networking techniques and Web content on BI processing.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/03/new_report_on_e.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:42:46 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/03/new_report_on_e.php
In 2008, some 18 years since I moved into the BI sector of the industry, you would think that this space would be exhausted. Yet here we seeing more announcements from relatively 'new generation' vendors agressively going after this market. I refer of course to the announcement yesterday between LogiXML and Vertica on integration between LogiXML’s Web-based BI platform with the Vertica Analytic Database. It seems clear that columnar data warehouse appliance vendors are climbing the popularity charts with Vertica, ParAccel and SybaseIQ all gaining ground. LogiXML is clearly also on a growth path with its web based BI platform. With consoilidation still happening in the BI market, it would be no surprise to me if these kinds of partnerships ultimately go further in future but for now, companies should not assume that just because the software giants (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) have made their moves into the BI market that the game is over. This kind of announcement really offers an attractive and competitive alternative

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/03/younger_generation_vendors_roc.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:10:53 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/03/younger_generation_vendors_roc.php
Over the last year or so I have noticed a real surge in companies using or evaluating products to rapidly develop dashboards. In my consulting activities in this area, I have been amazed at the reliance on one particular primary source of data that users have latched onto in dashboard development. This is of course Excel data. While there is nothing unusual about Excel data, it is the trait that users almost 'prefer' to access Excel data (because they are familiar with Excel) that I find concerning. Many users seem to either just have these spreadsheets or are downloading data into Excel from a range of data sources including operational systems, flat files (perhaps supplied from some other department or system), data marts and data warehouses. Once data is 'in the wild' like this, it takes on a life of its own with people manipulating it and sending it to others via email attachment. It's like data management just got left behind. While Excel can never be ignored in any organisation, the increasing demand to analyse Excel data raises questions as to whether or not that data can be trusted especially if you have been sent this data in your email. It brings back the issue that has plagued many companies for years when it comes to Excel. Do you know where the data in the spreadsheet came from? How do you know you have the right version of the spreadsheet? Are spreadsheets managed? Is there other server side data sources that can be accessed from the dashboard tool that would give you more confidence in trusting the data? With Office Excel 2007 increasing the maximum limit on the number of rows in a spreadsheet from 64000 to 1 million, my concern is that the increasing demand for dashboards will raise the likelihood of million row "spreadmarts" being created all over the organisation by business users rather than pointing dashboards at server side data in a BI system. Only time will tell however policy is clearly needed around spreadsheet management and dashboard development if we are to remain in control of the data and have confidence in it. I would be interested in hearing from many of you out there who are encountering this problem and what you are doing to manage it

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/03/dashboards_and_excel_data_busi.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:52:09 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/03/dashboards_and_excel_data_busi.php
Every now and then, I use my blog for something that has nothing to do with BI. Sometimes I use it for humor, sometimes a rant against a pet peeve, and sometimes -- like this time -- for something that I found astonishing.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/03/excess.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Sun, 2 Mar 2008 10:19:44 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/03/excess.php
Several times over the past few weeks discussions about the relationship between business analytics and business intelligence has led to some interesting conclusions. Three specific occasions spring to mind – when judging the 2008 SIIA CODiE Awards for Business Intelligence, while working with Judy Davis on a BI Network research report on embedded analytics, and at a recent SAS analyst conference. During interviews, business users always seem comfortable with the term business analytics, but often view BI as a vague and imprecise technical term. Some vendors and IT folks also seem to prefer business analytics to BI. In the area of operational BI, for example, new solutions are appearing on the market that employ embedded or stream analytics. These solutions often use data from sources other than a data warehouse. The vendor concern here is that BI and data warehousing are often seen as being tightly linked and one cannot occur without the other. The term operational analytics is sometimes preferred because it is viewed as being more dynamic than operational BI. At last week’s SAS conference, CEO Jim Goodnight commented that business intelligence has been watered down by competitors such as Business Objects and Cognos, whose query and reporting tools couldn’t approach the sophistication of the advanced analytics produced by SAS products. What do you think? Has the term business intelligence become so abused that it is now confusing and meaningless?

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/02/has_business_in.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:39:07 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/02/has_business_in.php
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.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/01/bi_directions_f.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Sun, 27 Jan 2008 16:36:04 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/01/bi_directions_f.php
Following on from my blog at the beginning of the year entitled "Predictions for 2008" which predicted that Complex Event Processing (CEP) would be a hot topic this year, IBM has moved already in to play in this market by their acquisition today of AptSoft. With the growth in SOA and business process management as well as some verticals such as manufacturing, logistics, retail and pharmaceuticals all investing in RFIDs we are set for an explosion of events on a scale we have never seen before in commercial business. Because of potentially significant business benefits in bottom line savings and revenue from being more responsive to events, CEP should not be ignored. This is a major emerging marketplace that offers automated business optimization and actions in a much more timely manner. There is no way business will be able to change applications at the pace required to keep up with demand to monitor business events over the next few years, There has to be a better way of doing this. That way is CEP - a declarative approach that involves no programming. CEP is the next generation beyond BAM. This announcement may well see IBM's competitors move in on this market to compete considering the growth potential. While the backlog of IT systems requiring SOA integration is growing, companies should educate themselves in this field as they may well benefit from looking at CEP as a way to become more responsive to business events rather than building everything themselves. There is no doubt that the era of "Right Time" BI has begun.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/01/ibm_moves_on_complex_event_pro.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:57:41 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/01/ibm_moves_on_complex_event_pro.php
Given the harrowing day in the world's stock markets yesterday and today's roller coaster ride in US markets, you would think that venture funding for start-ups and small companies would dry up like sub-prime lending. Well, maybe in other sectors but funding for BI and MDM companies is doing just fine!

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/01/bright_spot_in.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:31:51 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/01/bright_spot_in.php
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.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/01/oracle_and_sun.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:02:22 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/white/archives/2008/01/oracle_and_sun.php
Microsoft's announcement that it is intending on acquiring FAST last week is certainly the first major shot fired in the enterprise search battle that could ensue among the software giants. However it is not so much enterprise search that interests me in this context but the investment that a vendor like FAST had made in pursuing the BI market. There is no doubt that Search and BI are going to be hot in 2008. Expect much more activity in this area in 2008 as these two exciting areas of technology increasingly collide. I will be reasearching the state of this emerging Search and BI market and will feed back to the B-Eye-Network later in 2H08 on it. Meanwhile it will be interesting to watch vendors like Autonomy , Endeca and even Google and their relationships with the software giants to see where this leads.

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/01/giants_startsto_turn_up_the_he.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:14:53 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/01/giants_startsto_turn_up_the_he.php
Last week, Bill Gates gave what was billed as his last keynote as a full-time Microsoft employee at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He chose not to do a maudlin look backwards at all that he has done since 1975 but rather to look forward to his last day at Microsoft and his predictions of where the tech industry will be in the next decade. It was both a very funny and very poignant keynote...

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/01/bye_bye_bill_ga.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Tue, 8 Jan 2008 13:59:36 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/imhoff/archives/2008/01/bye_bye_bill_ga.php
Happy New Year to all of you! It's that time of year again when predictions are made so I thought I would throw my thoughts into the ring for debate. So here goes: 1. Consolidation in the BI market will continue now that we have seen the software giants make their moves in 2007. Oracle bought Hyperion, SAP bought Business Objects and IBM announced acqusition of Cognos. In order to compete with this, other vendors will consolidate to try to offer and alternative. So expect to see more mergers in 2008 2. The cost of the BI platform will continue to drop amid pressure from the software giants (Microsoft in particular), and open source alternatives (e.g. Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Talend et al). The money to be made is in Performance Management and Data Management. 3. Both Performance Management and Data Management technologies will separate from BI platforms (if they haven't done so already) and become suites of tools in their own right 4. The growth in the size of the data management market is set to continue as companies try to standardise of a suite of tools for enterprise data management (an enterprise data management platform) which includes an end-user business vocabulary tool, data modelling tool, data discovery and mapping tool, data quality profiling, data cleansing, data integration (consolidation, federation and synchronisation). This data management platform will be used for data replication, data warehousing, data migration, master data management, data synchronisation and on-demand data management services published in a service registry and available on an enterprise service bus (ESB) in a service oriented architecture (SOA) 5. Complex Event Processing (CEP) will become mainstream in 2008 as companies try to analyse data and the business impact of events well before that data arrives in any kind of data warehouse or data mart. This is also known as business activity monitoring (BAM) except we are going to see monitoring of complex events (on the lookout for several events happening before triggering action) and not just single ones 6. 2008 will be the year of massive growth in memory exploitation. We will see parallel query execution continue to run across multiple shared nothing nodes in MPP systems with multiple processors, and multiple disks (as is the case today in many parallel relational DBMSs). However the difference here is that we will see this happening against in-memory data on a massively parallel scale in 2008 and beyond. With the volumes of data about to climb higher, and demand for CEP on the increase, we need to access data in memory to respond more rapidly and keep performance optimal. Massively parallel memory is therefore inevitable and will arrive on the scene this year whether that memory be in a single cluster server or deployed over a grid in a virtual memory configuration 7. Performance Management is set to grow with BAM, process management, scorecards, dashboards, budgeting and planning and Business Intelligence all being integrated into a commpon performance management suite (enterprise performance management platform). Performance Management platforms will sit on top of BI platforms but will also integrate with other enterprise infrastructure software such as business process management, portals, enterprise content management systems and live collaboration tools. 8. Web 2.0 collaboration will push its way into Performance Management. In particular, socially networked performance management will start to appear so that end users can tag metrics, graphs and reports in order to organise BI and PM content. This user defined categorising of content via tagging is known as Folksonomies and is already heavily used on the public internet on sites like Facebook, MySpace, de.licio.us, Digg, Flickr, Jotspot etc. Now it is coming inside the enterprise and will be applied to BI and PM content as well as other unstructured content. This means that users can see other users' profiles and the tags that they have used to annotate BI and PM content. From here it means that BI and PM 'tag clouds' will form showing popular BI and PM tems that lead to popular BI and PM content and metrics. Also by following BI and PM tags we will see the dynamic formation of BI social networks consisting of people within the enterprise that have similar interests in acting on BI to improve performance. People will also be able to share reports and collaborate with others (in real time - e.g. IM, threaded discussions etc.) in Web 2.0 collaborative workspaces. Wikis (group publishing) will also come together with BI so as to fuel rapidly forming BI and PM workspaces that will be of exceptional value to the business. 9. Seach and BI are set to explode into popular use in 2008 as seach opens the doors to mass access to BI content from a userbase that is not comfortable with BI tools 10. BI reports will be capable of being published in document management and records management systems 11. Master data management market size will continue to grow as companies try to wrestle with the complexity of their data and get it under control. Information and data architects will continue to be in demand with demand for such professionals potentially outstripping supply 12. Companies will have to invest again in data modelling and data modelling skills. There is no doubt that standards here are dropping, many companies still have no data modelling tools at all and also too few people are skilled in good data modelling practices. 13. Data management professionals will start to come together into integration competency centres so that people with skills in data cleansing, data integration, data modelling, master data management, enterprise content management, metadata management and ESB XSLT XML data translation are all co-located and can work together to solve the problem of enterprise data management 14. Metadata manegement will become a mission critical issue if it is not already. Business users need access to business metadata to unnderstand what data means and where it came from. Holding this metadata in spreadsheets is no longer acceptable. It must me made available to bith end users and shared across multiple technologies. 2008 will see companies looking to act to solve this problem. Well that's all I have for now. Let me know your thoughts. I would be most grateful for your comments on any of this. Best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year!

]]> http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/01/predictions_for_2008.php?frss=1&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) Wed, 2 Jan 2008 13:32:45 MST http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/ferguson/archives/2008/01/predictions_for_2008.php