Aster Data enters the appliance game

Aster Data is rolling out a line of nCluster appliances today.  Highlights include:

• Configurations ranging from 9 6.25 terabytes to 1 petabyte of user data. (Edit: Here’s the up-to-date data sheet.)
• A $50K “Express Edition” price for <1 terabyte of user data. Unfortunately, that’s the only stated price.
• The option of bundled MicroStrategy.
• “MapReduce” in the name, which suggests something about the positioning — i.e., enterprise decision support, rather than Aster’s usual web/”frontline” emphasis. (Edit: That also fits with Aster’s recent MapReduce-for-.NET announcement.) (Edit: Actual name is Aster MapReduce Data Warehouse Appliance.)
• Claims that because Aster runs effectively on cheaper, more truly “commodity” hardware than competitors, you get more hardware bang for the buck if you buy from Aster.

I don’t have a lot more to add right now, mainly because I wrote at some length about Aster’s non-appliance-specific, non-MapReduce technology and positioning a couple of weeks ago.

An example of what’s wrong with big vendors’ approaches to BI (SAP in this case)

I just found Chris Kanaracus’ article about SAP’s rollout last month of its “clear enterprises” strategy. The money quote comes from Sara Lee, the user SAP seems to have trotted out:

But Sara Lee has not yet decided to purchase the software, and there are substantial underlying tasks to perform as well, he added.

“This is giving us the horsepower [to analyze data] but we need to have harmonized and structured data underneath it.”

This is from the leading test user of the product?

Business intelligence and the associated data management processes need to be reimagined, and I’m increasingly coming to suspect that the big BI conglomerates aren’t up to the task.

Reinventing business intelligence

I’ve felt for quite a while that business intelligence tools are due for a revolution. But I’ve found the subject daunting to write about because — well, because it’s so multifaceted and big. So to break that logjam, here are some thoughts on the reinvention of business intelligence technology, with no pretense of being in any way comprehensive.

Natural language and classic science fiction

Actually, there’s a pretty well-known example of BI near-perfection — the Star Trek computers, usually voiced by the late Majel Barrett Roddenberry. They didn’t have a big role in the recent movie, which was so fast-paced nobody had time to analyze very much, but were a big part of the Star Trek universe overall. Star Trek’s computers integrated analytics, operations, and authentication, all with a great natural language/voice interface and visual displays. That example is at the heart of a 1998 article on natural language recognition I just re-posted.

As for reality: For decades, dating back at least to Artificial Intelligence Corporation’s Intellect, there have been offerings that provided “natural language” command, control, and query against otherwise fairly ordinary analytic tools. Such efforts have generally fizzled, for reasons outlined at the link above. Wolfram Alpha is the latest try; fortunately for its prospects, natural language is really only a small part of the Wolfram Alpha story.

A second theme has more recently emerged — using text indexing to get at data more flexibly than a relational schema would normally allow, either by searching on data values themselves (stressed by Attivio) or more by searching on the definitions of pre-built reports (the Google OneBox story). SAP’s Explorer is the latest such view, but I find Doug Henschen’s skepticism about SAP Explorer more persuasive than Cindi Howson’s cautiously favorable view. Partly that’s because I know SAP (and Business Objects); partly it’s because of difficulties such as those I already noted.

Flexibility and data exploration

It’s a truism that each generation of dashboard-like technology fails because it’s too inflexible. Users are shown the information that will provide them with the most insight. They appreciate it at first. But eventually it’s old hat, and when they want to do something new, the baked-in data model doesn’t support it.

The latest attempts to overcome this problem lie in two overlapping trends — cool data exploration/visualization tools, and in-memory analytics.

Read more

Notes on CEP application development

While performance may not be all that great a source of CEP competitive differentiation, event processing vendors find plenty of other bases for technological competition, including application development, analytics, packaged applications, and data integration. In particular:

• Most independent CEP vendors have some kind of application story in the capital markets vertical, such as packaged applications, ISV partners with packaged applications, application frameworks, and so on.
• CEP vendors offer lots of connectors to specific financial industry price/quote/trade feeds, as well as the usual other kinds of database connectivity (SQL, XML, etc.)
• Aleri/Coral8 (separately and now together) like to call attention to their business intelligence/analytics offerings. Analytics is front-and-center on Truviso’s web site too, not that Truviso does much to call attention to itself, period. (Roman Bukary once said he’d outline Truviso’s new strategy to me in 6-8 weeks or so … it’s now 14 months and counting.)

So far as I can tell, the areas of applications and analytics are fairly uncontroversial. Different CEP vendors have implemented different kinds of things, no doubt focusing on those they thought they would find easiest to build and then sell. But these seem to be choices in business execution, not in core technical philosophy.

In CEP application development, however, real philosophical differences do seem to arise. There are at least three different CEP application development paradigms:

Read more

37 Ways To Get More From Analytics, Version 2.0

As I hoped, there were some very helpful responses to my post listing ways to improve analytic effectiveness. Here’s a second draft incorporating them. Comments continue to be very welcome. I need to finalize this soon.

Read more

The SAP/Teradata deal explained

When I first saw the press release about the latest SAP/Teradata deal, I thought it sounded very Barney. But it turns out there’s a little bit of substance, as well. Amazingly, SAP BW doesn’t really run on Teradata right now. This deal will fix that. The time frame seems to be that SAP-BW-on-Teradata will ship with SAP BW 7.2 whenever that goes out. (First half of 2010?) Early adopters may be able to get their hands on it as early as Q3 2009.

Note: It surely would be more precise to insert “NetWeaver” a few times into that paragraph.

Just to be clear — I still don’t see this as a big deal. It doesn’t portend any grand SAP/Teradata joint mission to smite Oracle, IBM, and/or Microsoft. Nor is it a telling first step toward an SAP/Teradata merger. It just removes a particular competitive disadvantage Teradata had vs. Oracle et al., from which Teradata’s smaller specialist competitors still suffer. And it offers SAP BW customers another high-quality DBMS option.

Clearing some of my buffer

I have a large number of posts still in backlog.  For starters, there are ones based on recent visits with Aster, Greenplum, Sybase, Vertica, and a Very Large User.  I suspect I’ll write more soon on Oracle as well.  Plus there’s my whole future-of-online-media area.  And quite a bit more will grow out of planned research.

So there are a whole lot of other worthy subjects I doubt I’ll be getting to any time soon.  In some cases, of course, other people are doing great jobs of writing about same. Here are pointers to a few links that I am glad to recommend:

• I wrote recently that I’ve discovered a number of different in-memory OLAP engines. Cindi Howson far outdid that, writing at length for Intelligent Enterprise on in-memory analytics, in an article that seems to itself be a teaser for a longer, free white paper on the subject.
• CouchDB posted an eye-catching, risque slide presentation promoting CouchDB and, more generally, key-value stores, at least for internet applications.  And yes, they’ve integrated MapReduce.
• Merv Adrian posted favorably about Birst, with special reference to its OEM efforts.  As previously noted, I was highly unimpressed with Birst’s end-user BI story at the time of its September roll-out, and Jerome Pineau’s recent examination did nothing to reassure me.  But perhaps OEM is a different matter.
• Merv also offers an interesting post about data integration upstart Expressor, and a highly favorable one about “visualization” vendor Tableau.
• Ann All interviewed Nigel Pendse, who grumped that BI features are overrated, and what end users really want is great query performance. I’m not so sure about the features side of that, but I’m hugely in agreement about the performance. That’s a big part of why the analytic DBMS industry is so vibrant. It’s also why in-memory OLAP is suddenly so hot.

Donald Farmer knocks the April Fool 8-ball out of the park

Donald Farmer has an excellently-crafted April Fool post about a revolution in business intelligence. Look at the charatcter names, for example.

I wonder whether Donald learned operations research from that textbook where two main decision-making characters were Mark Off and his father Pop, an example company was Edifice Wrecks, and an example CEO was Dawn Shirley Light …

Business intelligence notes and trends

I keep not finding the time to write as much about business intelligence as I’d like to. So I’m going to do one omnibus post here covering a lot of companies and trends, then circle back in more detail when I can. Top-level highlights include:

• Jaspersoft has a new v3.5 product release. Highlights include multi-tenancy-for-SaaS and another in-memory OLAP option. Otherwise, things sound qualitatively much as I wrote last September.
• Inforsense has a cool composite-analytical-applications story. More precisely, they said my phrase “analytics-oriented EAI” was an “exceptionally good” way to describe their focus. Inforsense’s biggest target market seems to be health care, research and clinical alike. Financial services is next in line.
• Tableau Software “gets it” a little bit more than other BI vendors about the need to decide for yourself how to define metrics. (Of course, it’s possible that other “exploration”-oriented new-style vendors are just as clued-in, but I haven’t asked in the right way.)
• Jerome Pineau’s favorable view of Gooddata and unfavorable view of Birst are in line with other input I trust. I’ve never actually spoken with the Gooddata folks, however.
• Seth Grimes suggests the qualitative differences between open-source and closed-source BI are no longer significant. He has a point, although I’d frame it more as being about the difference between the largest (but acquisition-built) BI product portfolios and the smaller (but more home-grown) ones, counting open source in the latter group.
• I’ve discovered about five different in-memory OLAP efforts recently, and no doubt that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
• I’m hearing ever more about public-facing/extranet BI. Information Builders is a leader here, but other vendors are talking about it too.

A little more detail

Read more

Independent CEP vendors continue to flounder

Independent CEP (Complex/Event Processing) vendors continue to flounder, at least outside the financial services and national intelligence markets.

• StreamBase once planned to conquer the world, making an impact as big as database management’s. Now it has retreated into niche markets.
• Progress Software, a decent-sized company, put a large fraction of its energy into Apama. Little has happened outside the financial service sector.
• Coral8 has some great-sounding ideas. But Coral8 now has merged into Aleri, basically a financial-markets specialist.
• Mike Franklin says some ambitious things on behalf of Truviso, but I haven’t noticed much traction there either.

CEP’s penetration outside of its classical markets isn’t quite zero. Customers include several transportation companies (various vendors), Sallie Mae (Coral8), a game vendor or two (StreamBase, if I recall correctly), Verizon (Aleri, I think), and more. But I just wrote that list from memory — based mainly on not-so-recent deals — and a quick tour of the vendors’ web sites hasn’t turned up much I overlooked. (Truviso does have a recent deal with Technorati, but that’s not exactly a blue chip customer these days.)

So far as I can tell, this is a new version of a repeated story.

Read more

Ideas for BI POCs

Kevin Spurway of Altosoft has a post up offering his suggestions on how to do business intelligence POCs (Proofs-of-Concept).   Among the best ideas in his post are:

• Do POCs.
• Don’t let the vendors prepare the details of the POCs in advance.
• Get your hands on the actual SQL generated in the queries.
• Try to understand the actual development and deployment processes.

The post’s worst, or at least most self-serving, idea is:

• Restrict POCs to single-day toy projects.

Of course, he didn’t phrase it exactly that way, but that was the gist.

Actually, the more realistically your POC models:

• Full query workloads and throughput
• Repositories jammed full with a lot of messy detail

the more reliable it will be.

HP and Neoview update

I had lunch with some HP folks at TDWI. Highlights (burgers and jokes aside) included:

• HP’s BI consulting (especially the former Knightsbridge) and analytic product groups (including Neoview) are now tightly integrated.
• HP is trying to develop and pitch “solutions” where it has particular “intellectual property.” This IP can come from ordinary product engineering or internal use, because HP Labs serves both sides of the business. Specific examples offered included:
  • Telecom. Apparently, HP made specialized data warehouse devices for CDRs (Call Detail Records) long ago, and claims this has been area of particular expertise ever since.
  • Supply chain – based on HP’s internal experiences.
  • Customer relationship – ditto
• The main synergy suggested between consulting and Neoview is that HP’s experts work on talking buyers into such a complex view of their requirements that only Neoview (supposedly) can fit the bill.
• HP insists there are indeed new Neoview sales.
• Neoview sales seem to be concentrated in what Aster might call “frontline” applications — i.e., low latency, OLTP-like uptime requirements, etc.
• HP says it did an actual 80 TB POC. I asked whether this was for an 80 TB app or something a lot bigger, but didn’t get a clear answer.

Given the emphasis on trying to exploit HP’s other expertise in the data warehousing business, I suggested it was a pity that HP spun off Agilent (HP’s instrumentation division, aka HP Classic). Nobody much disagreed.

Microstrategy tidbits

I chatted with Microstrategy Wednesday in a call focused on the upcoming Microstrategy 9. There wasn’t a lot of technical content, but I did glean:

• In Microstrategy 9, virtual ROLAP cubes will be able to draw on multiple relational databases, not just one. (Frankly, I’ve never understood why BI vendors are so slow to put in features like that.)
• Actually, in Microstrategy 9 cubes won’t just be virtual. You’ll be able to instantiate parts of them in memory.
• The in-memory part requires manual intervention. However, that intervention can be as minor as pushing a button to accept the recommendations of a Cube Advisor.
• The Microstrategy Cube Advisor will examine workloads for a month or so to see which queries chew up the most resources.
• Another new feature is “complete” OLAP drilldown from any point in any chart or graph, without pre-programming or pre-specification.
• Microstrategy’s favorite DBMS partners are, in some order, Netezza and Teradata.
• Microstrategy 9 is currently scheduled for March 23 release.

Analytics’ role in a frightening economy

I chatted yesterday with the general business side (as opposed to the trading operation) of a household-name brokerage firm, one that’s in no immediate financial peril. It seems their #1 analytic-technology priority right now is changing planning from an annual to a monthly cycle.* That’s a smart idea. While it’s especially important in their business, larger enterprises of all kinds should consider following suit. Read more

Introduction to Pentaho

I finally caught up with Pentaho, which along with Jaspersoft is one of the two most visible open source business intelligence companies, Actuate perhaps excepted. Highlights included:

• Much like Jaspersoft, Pentaho’s initial focus was mainly on embedded, operational BI.
• However, Pentaho now feels it has a decent end-user GUI as well, and traditional-BI is a bigger part of sales.
• Also, some sales are focused on data integration, perhaps in support of more traditional BI products. Pentaho has even had an Ab Initio replacement in data integration. (Can there be any change more extreme than going from Ab Initio to open source?)
• As an example of technical breadth, Pentaho says that its Mondrian OLAP engine is used by Jaspersoft.
• Pentaho has Excel output, but not in the form of live formulas.
• Pentaho does XQuery.
• Industries with more Pentaho adoption than average include:
  • Financial services (traditionally open-source-friendly, according to Pentaho)
  • Government (ditto)
  • Web 2.0 (obviously ditto)
  • Travel/transportation (cash-strapped)
• Frontier Airlines is a Pentaho/Greenplum customer.
• TradeDoubler is a Pentaho/InfoBright customer. (Pentaho thinks that TradeDoubler reloads its warehouse every day, which if true frankly casts some doubt on InfoBright’s architecture.)
• Data mining is something of a Pentaho sideline. There’s some university in New Zealand that built data mining capabilities in Pentaho, and some data mining research is done in that. Separately, Pentaho has been integrated with R.
• Community contributions are concentrated in the areas you’d expect — features some user or system integrator needs for a specific project, connectors, bug reports, and the like.

Read more

Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence

A few days ago I tore into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS.  Well, the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms is out too. (Link here.  Last year’s here. Hat tip for both to Doug Henschen.)  Unlike the data warehouse MQ, Gartner’s BI MQ clusters its “Leaders” together tightly. But while less bold, the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant’s claims are just as questionable as those in data warehousing.

Of course, some parts do make sense.  E.g.: Read more

A Who’s-Who of BI Twitterers

I noted recently that there’s an active BI community on Twitter. It turns out that Shawn Rogers is attempting to keep a master list of BI Twitterers.  If you want to plug into the discussion, that’s a good list of URLs to start with.

Intelligent Enterprise’s Editors’/Editor’s Choice list

I have a blog on Intelligent Enterprise, which actually amounts to editor Doug Henschen’s selections of a few posts a month from DBMS2 (I still haven’t persuaded him to take anything from Text Technologies).  Accordingly, I was asked to contribute thoughts this year for his annual article Editors’ Choice article.  It’s out now, and as usual is a good piece. Read more

Database SaaS gains a little visibility

Way back in the 1970s, a huge fraction of analytic database management was done via timesharing, specifically in connection with the RAMIS and FOCUS business-intelligence-precursor fourth-generation languages.  (Both were written by Gerry Cohen, who built his company Information Builders around the latter one.)  The market for remoting-computing business intelligence has never wholly gone away since. Indeed, it’s being revived now, via everything from the analytics part of Salesforce.com to the service category I call data mart outsourcing.

Less successful to date are efforts in the area of pure database software-as-a-service.  It seems that if somebody is going for SaaS anyway, they usually want a more complete, integrated offering. The most noteworthy exceptions I can think of to this general rule are Kognitio and Vertica, and they only have a handful of database SaaS customers each. To wit: Read more

Some reasons business intelligence is in a funk

I wrote recently that BI is in a “funk”.  Let me now offer a few ideas as to why that is so. Read more

The business intelligence funk

Gartner analyst Andreas Bitterer’s rarely-updated blog has gotten some recent attention because of his kerfuffle with Yves de Montcheuil of Talend.   Reading same, I went on to notice another post by Andreas that captured my own feelings, to wit:

Sure, the BI market has enjoyed consistent growth, has seen a lot of action on the M&A front, technology has advanced significantly (I remember when gigabytes were considered wild), and yet we are still discussing same old business intelligence. I keep hearing vendors announce that the next version of their tool will be able to address that untapped market within their customer base, growing penetration beyond those 10-15% that are using BI today. I heard this 5 years ago already, but what has changed since then? Not much.

Of course, that post was probably met with considerable PR/AR outreach to the effect “I’m so glad you said that. OUR firm really IS different, and we’d love to tell you about how.”

Graphjam: I can haz BI

Charts and graphs, from the folks who brought you a whole lot of cute kitten photos:

• Social media explained
• Political news coverage explained
• Stupid Excel tricks

Coral8 proposes CEP as a BI data platform

It used to be that Coral8 and StreamBase were the two complex event/stream processing (CEP) vendors most committed to branching out beyond the super-low-latency algorithmic trading marketing. But StreamBase seems to have pulled in its horns after a management change, focusing much more on the financial market (and perhaps the defense/intelligence market as well). Aleri, Truviso, and Progress Apama, while each showing signs of branching out, don’t seem to have gone as far as Coral8 yet. And so, though it’s a small company with not all that many dozens of customers, my client Coral8 seems to be the one to look at when seeing whether CEP really is relevant to a broad range of mainstream – no pun intended – applications.

Coral8 today unveiled a new product release – the not-so-concisely named “Coral8 Engine and Portal Release 5.5” – and a new buzzphrase — “Continuous Intelligence.” The interesting part boils down to this:

Coral8 is proposing CEP — excuse me, “Continuous Intelligence” — as a data-store-equivalent for business intelligence.

This includes both operational BI (the current sweet spot) and dashboards (the part with cool, real-time-visualization demos).

Read more

A few operational BI/BPM/business rules stories

Intersystems is rolling out DeepSee, which is a Cache’-specific BI engine. Since some Intersystems OEMs have been known to pay more money to Business Objects/Crystal Reports than to Intersystems itself, the business motivation is obvious. Technically, Intersystems’ claims include: Read more

When BI, CEP, BAM, and Gartner meet together

Doug Henschen has two good articles based on Gartner’s Event Processing conference, on the theme of BI/event processing integration — an overview, and a detailed interview with Roy Schulte. And as I note elsewhere, Seth Grimes has a good article based on the conference too.

I have my own thoughts on these subjects, but I’m not ready to post them at the moment. In the mean time, I recommend the articles linked above.

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