Wrinkles in the Informatica versus Business Objects patent litigation
Business Objects recently lost a patent lawsuit to Informatica in the area of data integration. While I was at the Business Objects conference, I asked about it, and was told in effect “It’s no big deal. In fact, the monetary award was reduced. Anyhow, we shipped a non-infringing version within 12 days after the decision, and sales are rolling along.” I then reflected that answer back to Informatica’s stellar analyst relations guy Chas Kielt. He checked with corporate counsel, and sent back the detailed clarification below. Since I got my Business Objects answers from a couple of caught-off-guard non-lawyer French guys, while Chas got a careful explanation of an American court’s judgment from an American lawyer, I’m inclined to think that in any details where they might conflict, Chas’ version is more likely to be accurate.
There’s a more substantive disagreement as to whether the features deleted from BOBJ’s product due to the injunction are actually important in the marketplace. I’m looking into that subject, and hope to post about it in the near future. Read more
| Categories: Business Objects, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica | Leave a Comment |
Webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS Tuesday October 23 12 noon Eastern time
I’m doing another webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS next Tuesday, at 12 noon Eastern. It’s sponsored by EnterpriseDB, who also sponsored one six months ago on the same subject. Hopefully, this one will be a bit fresher. Sign up today! The expected turnout is humongous.
Technorati Tags: EnterpriseDB, OLTP, database management system
| Categories: Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP | Leave a Comment |
One Greenplum customer — 35 terabytes and growing fast
I was at the Business Objects conference this week, and as usual went to very few sessions. But one I did stroll into was on “Managing Rapid Growth With the Right BI Strategy.” This was by Reliance Telecommunications, an outfit in India that is adding telecom subscribers very quickly, and consequently banging 100-150 gigs of data per day into a 35 terabyte warehouse.
The beginning of the talk astonished me, as the presenter seemed to be saying they were doing all this on Oracle. Hah. Oracle is what they moved away from; instead, they got Greenplum. I couldn’t get details; indeed, as a BI guy he was far enough away from DBMS to misspeak and say that Greenplum was brought in by ‘HP’, before quickly correcting himself when prompted. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business Objects, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Oracle, Specific users, Telecommunications | Leave a Comment |
Gartner 2007 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems
February, 2011 edit: I’ve now commented on Gartner’s 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant as well.
It’s early autumn, the leaves are turning in New England, and Gartner has issued another Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS. (Edit: As of January, 2009, that link is dead but this one works.) The big winners vs. last year are Greenplum and, secondarily, Sybase. Teradata continues to lead. Oracle has also leapfrogged IBM, and there are various other minor adjustments as well, among repeat mentionees Netezza, DATAllegro, Sand, Kognitio, and MySQL. HP isn’t on the radar yet; ditto Vertica. Read more
We know what BEA is — now it is just a matter of negotiating the price
After the long Oracle/Peoplesoft drama, I don’t see any likely way the Oracle bid for BEA will end with anything other than a rather rapid acquisition of BEA, probably by Oracle.
But for now it’s not a done deal, as BEA is quite reasonably still haggling about price.
| Categories: Application servers, Oracle | 1 Comment |
SAP is losing crucial managerial talent
In the past month or so, both Dennis Moore and Nimish Mehta have left SAP. Their reasons are well-known among Oracle alumni to be — at least in large part — discomfort with SAP’s direction. (My unnamed sources on that are highly reliable.) And of course Shai Agassi left earlier this year. It now looks as if my contrarian viewpoint pooh-poohing the importance of Shai’s departure was probably wrong.
Based on all that, I don’t think there’s much reason for optimism about SAP’s system software futures, except perhaps for those that are placed wholly under the control of the Business Objects division. NetWeaver? Already a creaking omnibus. MaxDB? They didn’t get it right the first time around; what will be different now? BI Accelerator? That one actually could do well under Business Objects. The dream of other kinds of appliances? Not likely to achieve take-off. TREX? They weren’t really enhancing that much anyway. The rest of the search-related vision Dennis outlined for me? That’s another one that actually could thrive under Business Objects, but I expect a considerable number of false starts at best before they work out a coherent new strategy.
The high-end app business, the new SaaS business, the new Business Objects subsidiary — any and all of those could do well. But the attempts to become a broad-based system software player rivaling Oracle, Microsoft, and/or IBM are looking a lot less healthy than they used to.
Keep getting great research about enterprise applications, analytics and related technologies. Get a FREE subscription by RSS or email!
Technorati Tags: SAP, NetWeaver, Business Objects, TREX, BI Accelerator
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, SAP AG | 1 Comment |
More on the Oracle-BEA deal
Jeff Nolan has a great post on the Oracle/BEA deal. Yeah, he still has some of his old SAP good/Oracle evil reflexes, but he can be forgiven those and the tinfoilhattishness associated with them. His analysis of sellers’ and buyers’ deal habits is revealing and sound. Ditto the start of his remarks on Oracle product delays and internal politics, and SAP/Oracle competition. Even better, nothing in his analysis seems to disagree with mine. 🙂
What Oracle now needs to do is make Oracle Application Server be a seamless “upgrade” from Weblogic. Then they can integrate in whatever kitchen-sink stuff they want from Oracle data caching (already there), app and/or dev tool run times, TimesTen, Tangosol, and so on, creating an app server stack that’s a worthy counterpart to the Oracle database in how it meets high-end OLTP needs. Meanwhile, Weblogic should remain as a not-bloated app-server-for-the-rest-of-us. Read more
Three ways Oracle or Microsoft could go MPP
I’ve been arguing for a while that Oracle and Microsoft are screwed in high-end data warehousing. The reason is that they’re stuck with SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) architectures, while Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, and many others enjoy the benefits of MPP (Massively Parallel Processing). Thus, Teradata and DATAllegro boast installations in the hundreds of terabytes each, while Oracle and Microsoft users usually have to perform unnatural acts of hard-coded partitioning even to reach the 10 terabyte level.
That said, there are at least three ways Oracle and/or Microsoft could get out of this technical box:
1. They could buy or just partner with MPP vendors such as Dataupia, who offer plug-compatibility with their respective main DBMS.
2. They could buy whoever they want, plug-compatibility be damned. Presumably, they’d quickly add a light-weight data federation front-end to give the appearance of integration, then merge the products more closely over time.
3. They could develop or buy technology like DATAllegro’s, which essentially federates instances of an ordinary SMP DBMS across nodes of an MPP grid (Greenplum does something similar). I imagine that, for example, ripping Ingres out of DATAllegro and slotting in Oracle instead would be a pretty straightforward exercise; even without dramatic change to any of the optimizations, the resulting port would be something that ran pretty quickly on Day 1.
Bottom line: Oracle and Microsoft are hemorrhaging at the data warehouse high end now. But there are ways they could stanch the bleeding.
Oracle and BEA — sometimes I am waaaay early
Back in December, 2002, I wrote up the rationale for an Oracle acquisition of BEA. The deal finally seems like it may be happening. Oddly, when I proposed it then, I was accused by Oracle’s analyst relations department of being “unprofessional” for having the temerity to suggest it. And while the specific individual who threw that tantrum is long gone, I haven’t talked all that much with Oracle’s core server groups since … but I digress.
Actually, the logic of an Oracle/BEA deal now isn’t much different from what it was way back then. One exception is that in the intervening half-decade Oracle has acquired a formidable amount of experience in integrating large and/or technically overlapping acquisitions. Technically, however, the story remains pretty much the same. Oracle’s app server and BEA Weblogic do pretty similar things, more or less compliant to standards, only with different add-on functionality. And BEA’s most important add-ons are in an area — integration with outside applications — where Oracle has long needed to improve.
| Categories: Application servers, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Oracle | 6 Comments |
SAS goes MPP on Teradata first
After a hurried discussion with SAS CTO Keith Collins and a followup with Teradata CTO Todd Walter, I think I’ve figured out the essence of the SAS port to Teradata. (Subtle nuances, however, have to await further research.) Here’s what I think is going on:
1. SAS is porting or creating two different products or modules, with two different names (and I don’t know exactly what those names are). The two different things they are porting amount to modeling (i.e., analysis) and scoring (i.e., using the results of the model for automated decision-making).
2. Both products are slated for delivery at or near the time of SAS 9.2, which is slated for GA at or near the middle of next year. (Maybe somebody from SAS could send me the official word, as well as product names and so on?)
3. The essence of the modeling port is a library of static UDFs (User Defined Functions).
4. The essence of the SAS scoring port is the ability to easily generate a single “dynamic” UDF to score according to a particular model. This would seem to leverage Teradata scoring-related enhancements much more than it would compete or conflict with them.
5. There are two different kinds of benefits SAS gets from integrating with an MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) DBMS. One is actual parallel processing of operations, shortening absolute calculation time dramatically, and also leveraging Moore’s Law without painful SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) overhead. The other is a radical reduction in data movement costs for the handoff between the database and the SAS software. Interestingly, SAS reports huge performance gains even from putting its software on a single node inside the Teradata grid. That is, changing how data movement is done is already a huge win, even when there’s no reduction in the overall amount moved. But of course, in the complete implementation, where database and SAS processing are done on the same nodes, there’s also a huge reduction in actual data movement effort required.
One obvious question would be: How hard would it be for SAS to replicate this work on other MPP DBMS? Well, at its core this work involves implementing a variety of elementary arithmetic and data manipulation functions. So a first-best guess is that a fairly efficient port would be easy (given that this one has already been performed), but that the last 20% or whatever of the performance optimizations require a lot more work. As to whether or not this is more than a theoretical question — well, both SAS and SPSS are disclosed members of the Netezza Developers Network. As for SMP DBMS — well, some of the work certainly could be replicated, but other important parts don’t even make sense on Oracle or Microsoft the way they do on Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, et al. Read more