Intelligent Enterprise

For more than thirty years, Information Builders, led by its founder and CEO, Gerry Cohen, has been focused on solving the tough challenges in accessibility and integration of data for business. Over the last decade I have personally witnessed the company's evolution to provide robust tools for IT and business. Last month Information Builders released its latest product, called WebFocus InfoAssist, which brings a range of BI capabilities for business and IT for easily accessing, analyzing and publishing data across the enterprise.

If you read my blog on the latest from Microsoft at its BI conference in October, where it accurately describe the dilemma of "Excel Hell" created from the misuse of Microsoft's spreadsheet tool for storing and analyzing data across business. Unfortunately, Microsoft's prescribed antidote, called Project Gemini, won't be available until at least 2010 or beyond. The challenge with Microsoft's announcement is not just the promise of the release in the future, but the estimated requirements for the version of Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server and operating systems. Why wait years to evaluate a product when there are solutions today?

You know something is getting hot when it's picked up by the larger business press. That's the case with cloud computing, which seems to be all that and a bag of chips, if you ask the business journalism powerhouse "The Economist."

Specifically I'm referring to this recent article, which examined the rise of cloud computing. The Economist did a much better job of explaining its rise than most of the technical publications that I read.

I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup, which Camp co-founder David Berlind predicted will "trump all other development ecosystems" because it's focused on quickly and easily knitting together the meat of the functionality rather than all the system-level code required in conventional development and computing.

"Just as the spreadsheet enabled all sorts of people to become number crunchers, mashups are going to enable a much larger community to become Web developers," Berlind said in his kickoff keynote.

The battle for the Web is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other. The topic came up during a panel discussion on "Why Ajax Standards Matter," which didn't sound too promising going in. Things started getting really interesting when Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, warned, "there's a struggle for the soul of the Web," where rich Internet and Web application development is concerned, and "proprietary engines like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are coming on strong."

Information Week has published my article on open source business intelligence (OSBI), Open Source BI Still Fighting For Its Share, a title that applies both to the BI software market and to IW column inches. (The article is now also an Intelligent Enterprise feature.) I'll share with readers material I wrote, cut by IW's editors, on open-source data-integration vendor Talend and on Eclipse BIRT, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools.

For the past few months, I've collected a lot of data points to the effect that high-performance analytics – i.e., beyond straightforward query — is becoming increasingly important. And I've written about some of them at length. For example:

• MapReduce — controversial or in some cases even disappointing though it may be — has a lot of use cases.
• It's early days, but Netezza and Teradata (and others) are beefing up their geospatial analytic capabilities.
• Memory-centric analytics is in the spotlight.

Ack. I can't decide whether "analytics" should be a singular or plural noun. Thoughts?

Another area that's come up which I haven't blogged about so much is data mining in the database. Data mining accounts for a large part of data warehouse use. The traditional way to do data mining is to extract data from the database and dump it into SAS. But there are problems with this scenario, including:

I spent a worthwhile day last week at Clarabridge's inaugural user conference. The company is a leading text analytics vendor, and the opportunity to catch up with staff and users and (it turned out) prospects and partners, without having to travel far from home, was too good to pass up.

Clarabridge is different from many other text analytics vendors in its singular focus on customer-experience management (CEM). This isn't to say that you can't license and use Clarabridge's Content Mining Platform (CMP) for other applications, and it's not to say that the company doesn't have strong technical capabilities. It's a matter of market positioning that concentrates on a defined set of business users, across a broad spectrum of business sectors, with market messaging that focuses on business benefits rather than on technology. The approach seems to work. Clarabridge CEO and co-founder Sid Banerjee says "the business impact and deployability/usability of our solutions seem to be resonating with our customers and prospects."

Cloud computing is one of those buzz phrases that, like "redistribution of income," seems to make otherwise dispassionate people hyperventilate. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, speaking at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, raised quite a few eyebrows when he derided "cloud computing" as "complete gibberish" in an extended on-stage rant before an audience of financial analysts. A few days later, Free Software Foundation patriarch Richard Stallman (never one to mince words) called cloud computing "worse than stupidity" in a highly critical interview with The Guardian.

Don't be fooled, though. Cloud computing is not just a catchphrase. Like REST, it's a style of doing things that doesn't seem particularly profound at first glance, but has important implications for certain problem-spaces. What the skeptics need, perhaps, are a few real-world case studies in cloud computing, to understand what the hubbub is about.

I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and an enterprise service bus (ESB). ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There's a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though the company only really does two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — it had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do it. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint's systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only three to four months, and provide visibility into the processes.

TDWI hosted its first conference in New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina, last week. I admit, I was both worried and curious about the location, still reading regularly about how certain parts of the city have never recovered. And yet, after walking along Bourbon Street, with its diversity, old French buildings, and intricate beads galore, I can see why people are passionate about rebuilding and why TDWI picked it as a conference location.

Back to BI, I taught a new course at the event, the theme of which is highlighted in this week's Intelligent Enterprise In-Depth feature article, "Cool BI: Rating the Innovations." Those who know me know that I am anything but cool. Conservative, yes. Serious, yes. Cool, no. So I was catching some flack about the course title from colleagues, and well, my very cool kids. Trying to get into the spirit of things, I kicked the course off donning a cool '70s dress with Cold Play blasting in the background (guess who picked that music!).

I had the pleasure the other day of listing to a Webinar from Embarcadero that featured the Global Data Architect for a very large, global energy company, and I feel compelled to share three points that struck me as particularly sapient.

Enterprise data modeling is a formidable task, as those who have attempted or witnessed it will vouch. Difficulties begin right from the outset: what, exactly, do we mean by Enterprise Data Model (and Modeling)? Is it one large model, or a set of models? If the latter, are these models required to conform/share (entities, standards etc.)? Is it another name for the canonical data model? Who is responsible for building the model(s) — is it one person, one central team, or diverse project teams all contributing to it? Where do we start? How do we start? How do we maintain momentum?

In case you haven't heard it yet, here comes a new product category: Process Intelligence. But what does it mean? All of these terms overlap: Operational BI, Pervasive BI, Operational Intelligence, Process Intelligence, BAM, CEP (Complex Event Processing), Decision Management, Decision Services. Arguments over definitions tend to be vigorous for two reasons. First, the taxonomy of product classes tends to be pretty leaky and second, the stakes are so low.

The reason it is important to get some clarity on the definitions is that the wider BI industry (and I don't know what to call it) is driven by marketing, not by function or requirements. Software vendors invent things, acquire or get acquired by other vendors and give names to the combined capabilities they possess. Then it's packaged and sold to companies.

Salesforce.com is moving from SaaS to cloud computing, according to this article by Charles Babcock. So, what's the difference? And, where is this all going?

Microsoft's announcement last week of its intention to expose SaaS versions of its Office products (under the moniker "Office Live") can be interpreted in numerous ways. Some see it as not much more than a kneejerk response to Google Docs. Others have characterized it as a kind of belated attempt by Microsoft to tap the promise of cloud computing. (Microsoft is no stranger to cloud computing, however, as any Xbox owner knows.)

Salesforce.com opened the second day of its annual conference with even more splash as it focused on its applications for business. Earlier this week I highlighted the energy that salesforce.com is bringing to cloud computing. Now let's examine the company's applications strategy. Salesforce.com's focus on managing business information, sharing applications and providing a platform for building applications was highlighted as the key emphasis. The challenge for the company is how much it can invest to lead customers with innovations in applications, as opposed to technology infrastructure in the platform. Salesforce.com asserted it is doubling down on CRM with R&D investments in 2008 compared to 2007, but now it will be up to customers to set their R&D priorities for their business.

The keynote highlighted the latest salesforce.com release called Winter '09 which is the 27th release in nine years, and they are excited about the technology accolades they are getting. But will business be as excited? In the marketing department, they have added Google adwords support, email templates, site landing pages, campaign hierarchy support and influence, and analytics snapshots. The demonstrations provided some insight to handling landing pages, which provide the Web analytics to then be able to manage influence across campaigns providing the basics of lead nurturing. Some of these capabilities are already being delivered by partners like Marketo and MarketBright, which automate other elements of this process and will need to compete against their partner as they advance their efforts.

Anyone interested in the history of business process management (BPM) technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, Ghalimi's discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "business-empowerment" does not have especially high priority. And in spite of the fact that BPEL was originally conceived by IBM and Microsoft as an Intalio/BPML-killer — Ismael does not say that directly, but I will — his post insists that BPEL remains central to BPM's (and Intalio's) larger mission.

Listening in to Dr. Michael Stonebraker decry "elephants" and extol the virtues of column-store databases in general and Vertica in particular, it's becoming clear that a totally new data storage architecture is the need of the day.

Dr. Stonebraker is, of course, a venerable figure in the world of databases, best known for his pioneering work on Ingres at UC Berkeley more than a quarter century ago. These days, however, in his role as CTO of Vertica, he is constrained to speak more or less unilaterally on the topic. In a recent presentation on Vertica, Dr. Stonebraker didn't actually call the leading relational database vendors — Oracle, IBM, Microsoft — "large, lumbering and slow." He did, however, repeatedly refer to them as "elephants." Very clever.

Well, it was actually kind of an expected surprise... in my last post I mentioned that I'd be curious how Web analytics vendors might respond to Yahoo! Web Analytics at last month's eMetrics Summit in Washington DC. In fact it was Google Analytics that "stole the show" with the introduction of a host of long-awaited features, including an API and Advanced Segmentation.

The buzz at the conference was overwhelmingly positive, and both independent practitioners and Google Analytics partners have been providing plenty of color commentary on the features and cool things available, and so on and so on.

From what I've seen, I agree for the most part...