• “Deliver products that really meet customers’ desires and needs.”
• “Successfully convince them that you’re doing so …”
• “… at an attractive overall cost.”

Vendors mentioned here are Oracle, SAP, HP, and IBM. Anybody smaller got left out due to the length of this post. Among the bigger omissions were:

• salesforce.com (multiple subjects).
• SAS HPA.
• The evolution of Hadoop.

A (lingering) issue for SAP and Oracle alike

As I noted in January of this year, integration of business intelligence into operational apps is making very slow progress. Even so, it’s a huge part of the apparent strategy at SAP and Oracle alike, as well it should be. Much of the benefit from automating routine desk work has already happened. The areas ripest for exploitation are the ones where analytics are part of the equation.

Given the lack of tangible progress, why do I think this is a genuine area of Oracle and SAP emphasis? Three reasons of many are:

• Why else did SAP buy Business Objects?
• If they’re not trying to integrate operational apps and analytics, why else does SAP’s emphasis on HANA make sense?
• Without business intelligence in the picture, how does Oracle’s integrated-stack story promise any direct user benefits?*

*As opposed to IT concerns — integration, administration, TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), etc.

After so many years of disappointment, I’m not going to forecast 2012 as a pivotal year for the integration of business intelligence into operational applications. But if one of SAP or Oracle ever does get a significant BI/operational app integration advantage over the other, it could be a major competitive advantage in those application market segments that are still up for grabs. It also is an opportunity for both vendors to gain BI market share in their respective application customer bases.

A more urgent issue for SAP

SAP has put huge amounts of credibility on the line for HANA, the integration of two different and not particularly mature in-memory database technologies. So far, it is difficult to find evidence that HANA is robust enough for widespread adoption. Whether or not SAP can fix that is a huge open question, which could have significant impact on the course of several technology areas: applications, business intelligence, in-memory DBMS, and maybe even hardware.

Based on current information, which is admittedly partial, I’m a short-term pessimist on HANA. Longer-term, I’m on record as saying that traditional databases will eventually wind up in RAM. SAP will surely get that technology right some day, whether or not the way it does so has anything to do with present-day HANA code.

Four more issues for Oracle

Oracle’s ambitions are near-endless, and so also therefore is its list of execution challenges. Four in the analytics area that I find particularly interesting are:

• True hybrid columnar DBMS. I was guessing that Oracle, like Teradata, would announce true hybrid columnar the week of Oracle OpenWorld. I was wrong. But if Oracle can’t bring out true hybrid columnar DBMS functionality relatively soon, Exadata will lose credibility as a competitor to more specialized analytic DBMS.
• Oracle Exalytics. With Exalytics in the mix, Oracle’s technology stack has HANA-like potential. But will Exalytics even ship in 2012? (I think so.) Will it be good for much in the first release? (I’m skeptical.)
• Oracle’s Big Data Appliance. I’m skeptical both about Oracle’s NoSQL product — a favorable InfoWorld review notwithstanding — and Hadoop appliances. But if I’m wrong, and Oracle can successfully embrace/extend the new non-relational paradigms, then it really might regain control over the evolution of data management.
• Oracle’s Endeca acquisition — will Oracle prove me wrong and integrate Endeca effectively into its overall analytic product line? If it does, we might finally see effective text (and eventually speech) navigation of enterprise software. (But as with all Oracle issues cited here, this is something that probably won’t amount to much in 2012 even if it does later go well.)

Three issues for IBM

Like Oracle, IBM is a huge company with many ambitions and hence many execution challenges. The biggest of those is surely: How effective can IBM be at selling outside its existing customer base? I don’t hear as much competitively about IBM DataStage, IBM SPSS or now IBM Netezza as I did when their vendors were independent companies. Even Cognos may not be much of an exception to the rule, although it has its own large customer base outside of IBM’s traditional one. (To lesser extents , the same is of course true of Netezza and numerous other IBM acquisitions.)

Another general issue for IBM is substantively integrating its various product lines, at least to the extent that makes sense. DB2/Netezza integration sounds good, but even that is a matter more of product marketing (the admirable part of that discipline) more than of actual technology. Other integrations (e.g. Cognos/DB2 in various bundles) have tended toward the dubious side.*

*I’m still waiting for IBM to get back to me with examples of how Cognos/DB2 joint tuning amounts to anything. It’s been more than a year, so I’m glad I didn’t hold my breath.

In a somewhat narrower vein, I wonder: Will IBM be able to gain traction for InfoSphere Streams? And if so, when and where will the traction be?

Will HP screw up Vertica?

Vertica has a very attractive product offering. It’s perhaps the most scalable analytic DBMS outside of Teradata, running on the hardware of your reasonable choice.  It’s also the one I recommend most often to clients in the 1-50 terabyte range.

So far HP doesn’t seem to have done much to leadfoot Vertica. (About all I’ve heard from competitors is that Vertica seems to have faded somewhat in the financial services market, and there could be multiple explanations if that is indeed true.) But if HP Vertica does somehow manage to botch things, opportunities will open up for a range of columnar analytic DBMS competitors.

This post is a moderately edited form of an actual interview. Two other posts cover analytic trends to watch (planned) and analytic vendor execution challenges to watch (already up).

Question: What do you think will happen next year with the Tableaus of the world?

Answer:

• I think adoption of flexible-visualization business intelligence tools will continue to be rapid.
• I think enterprise-friendly features will be increasingly important as a basis of competition.

Question: What do you mean by “enterprise-friendly”?

Answer: An example would be QlikTech no longer forcing you to use their native ETL, but rather working with Informatica and soon other third-party products. Also important can be:

• Database size.
• Concurrency.
• A full-featured development cycle for analytic applications.

Question: What does HP have to do to be relevant in analytics/data warehousing?

Answer: Avoid stupidity. HP Vertica is already relevant.

Question: OK. But what can HP do to build on Vertica?

Answer: HP — which botched Exadata 1 hardware — could do a good job with SAP HANA or other kinds of appliance products.

However:

• I don’t think trying to force Vertica beyond its natural growth — the way EMC is with Greenplum — is necessarily a good idea. Natural growth in Vertica’s case is plenty fast anyway.
• Obviously, making good Vertica hardware would be nice. But being hardware-independent is crucial to Vertica, not least because of cloud deployment, an option many buyers want to at least have in their hip pockets.

Question: You expressed some skepticism toward mobile BI/use cases. Why so?

Answer: The form factor hurts functionality a lot, so it’s only worthwhile in cases where timeliness is key.

And without more refined alert-setting functionality, it’s hard to think of that many cases.

Note: My views on mobile BI haven’t changed much since July, 2010.

Question: What about the idea of an enterprise being able to pay-per-drink to run jobs on an analytic cluster. Do you expect that concept to have any legs in 2012?

Answer: While other kinds of SaaS (Software as a Service) BI might make sense, remote computing BI that focuses on hardware cost sharing is problematic. Moving data in and out of the cluster is a big part of the overall cost, at least if you plan to process it only occasionally once it gets there. I haven’t seen a plan yet that gets around that point.

• HP needs to make outstanding enterprise systems again.
• They fell away from that target under Mark Hurd, but they surely can hit it again, based on the remnants of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), Tandem, the higher-end part of Compaq, and of course the original HP systems group.
• In particular:
  • Rumors say that Oracle Exadata 1 boxes, made by HP, were much lower quality than Exadata 2 boxes made by Sun.
  • HP Neoview was a waste of good engineering talent.
  • I’d like to see a few excellent Vertica appliances.
  • I hope the SAP HANA appliances go well, whenever HANA finally becomes a serious product.
  • The general move from disk to solid-state memory should offer some opportunities.

• HP is buying Autonomy.
• HP is pulling back from WebOS.
• HP may spin off its PC business altogether.

On a high level, this means:

• HP is doubling down on enterprise IT.
• HP is taking a more software-centric approach to the enterprise IT business.
• HP is backing away from the consumer electronics business.
• HP in particular is backing away from the generic desktop/laptop PC business, which may with only moderate exaggeration be regarded as:
  • The intersection of the enterprise IT and consumer electronics businesses.
  • The least attractive sector of each.

My coverage of Autonomy isn’t exactly current, but I don’t know of anything that contradicts long-time competitor* Dave Kellogg’s skeptical view of Autonomy. Autonomy is a collection of businesses involved in the management, search, and retrieval of poly-structured data, in some cases with strong market share, but even so not necessarily with the strongest of reputations for technology or technology momentum. Autonomy started from a text search engine and a Bayesian search algorithm on top of that, which did a decent job for many customers. But if there’s been much in the way of impressive enhancement over the past 8-10 years, I’ve missed the news.

*Dave, of course, was CEO of MarkLogic.

Questions obviously arise about how the Autonomy acquisition relates to other HP businesses. My early thoughts include: 

• HP has clearly signaled that it intends to pursue and focus on the data management business. Thus, we can anticipate marketing messages spanning Autonomy and Vertica. It may be helpful to recall that Vertica plays nicely with both Hadoop and Attensity.
• The first two natural tuck-in acquisitions I can think to add are Attensity and MarkLogic.
• One place I’d look for synergy is with HP’s system management software business. HP has previously acquired its way into a strong position there. If you add in knowledge of how many kinds of data are used, you have a chance to set yourself apart in the system management area.
• I had enough trouble advising Vertica about how to explain what they do in terms that HP’s hardware sales force can comfortably embrace. I think I did OK with that. But Autonomy? Youch. On the other hand, …
• … HP is run by guys from SAP (Leo Apotheker) and Oracle (Ray Lane), both of whom have dealt with similarly tough sales challenges before. But even at best, HP’s sales force organization, commission structure, and training is going to consume a lot of attention at the very highest levels of HP.
• Autonomy manages documents electronically. HP prints them. The markets where that seems synergistic, however, are fairly specialized or small. (E.g., equipment for printing on demand.) Perhaps there’s some grand joint venture possibility with Xerox here, antitrust permitting.

Vertica parted ways with marketing VP Dave Menninger in June. I started working with his successor, but despite seeming smart and energetic, she didn’t last long. Her successor didn’t even last long enough for me to meet him. And Vertica’s Colin Mahony, who was filling the gap, was a bit evasive.

I did have a recent NDA briefing with Vertica (Colin plus Shilpa Lawande). When I asked about announcements for this week (the TDWI conference is a common time for announcements), Colin told me there would be a few partnerships, and that one of them would go beyond Barney. I’ve got to give him credit for underselling on that score.

I asked Colin about Vertica’s stated figure of 328 customers by year-end 2010. He assured me that 250 or so were end-sale customers, with the rest being OEM sell-through. In all other ways I could think to ask about, Vertica’s stated customer count sounds clean — revenue recognized, not just for a paid POC, and so on.

By the way, Vertica has impressive market share among flashy internet companies, especially for an East Coast company — Twitter, Mozilla, a large fraction of the larger Facebook game vendors, and surely others that I’m forgetting as well.

Finally, let me point out that two other oddities go together, namely that:

• Vertica has positioned itself as an analytic platform company despite not obviously having the technology to back that up.
• Vertica went retro in its marketing with some Mike Stonebraker column-store architetural tub-thumping — and then removed the post a few days later when it came under fire.

Obviously — and I can also confirm both parts of this based on recent Vertica discussions — Vertica thinks it will soon have strong analytic platform technology, and doesn’t want to get mired in its “It’s Columnar!!!” marketing strategy of the past.

As for why that post ever went up in the first place — well, YOU try telling Mike Stonebraker not to say something that’s on his mind.

I do actually have quite a few details of product plans and customer success under NDA. I’ll think about what I can or can’t expose, and then perhaps write a more forward-looking HP/Vertica post.

• HP Neoview seems pretty dead.
• I haven’t heard a single favorable reference to HP Neoview since I remarked in March, 2010 that “HP Neoview is reeling.”
• A reporter asked me “What went wrong?” Well, almost any new analytic DBMS/appliance product will compete mainly on two things in its early days — price/performance (or absolute performance), and just how (im)mature it initially is. (Aster Data may be the only prominent exception to that rule.) Presumably, HP Neoview did badly by those metrics.
• HP Neoview was widely conjectured to be a pet project of ousted former HP CEO Mark Hurd.
• Nobody tells me of competing with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Parallel Data Warehouse either (i.e. Madison/DATallegro). Thus, in particular, I haven’t heard any reason to believe there’s anything good about the technology, especially now that the ever-upbeat Stuart Frost has left Microsoft. I’m conjecturing that Parallel Data Warehouse is focused heavily on the existing Microsoft installed base.
• Speaking of Aster — even under NDA, they won’t tell me or give me any useful hints as to who their undisclosed strategic investor is. Well, HP has a long history of investing in sometimes-competing DBMS vendors (back to Oracle and Informix), and a good reason to keep quiet (reluctance to admit the end of Neoview). Hmm …
• The consolidation appliance in the HP/Microsoft announcement is a clear response to Oracle’s Exadata strategy, or (which is probably more accurate) to the same market opportunity Oracle identified.
• I couldn’t quite figure out whether the cheap data warehouse appliance included Microsoft PowerPivot support, but that would make sense if it did.

• HP hired a software guy, Leo Apotheker, as CEO, and a software guy with a liking for high-end services, Ray Lane, as chairman. Now a Leo Apotheker conference call suggests HP will increase its emphasis on software, and maybe high-end services as well. No surprise. The article suggests, however,  that HP at this point has no clear strategy along these lines. That’s no surprise either.
  • And then there’s Sarah Lacy’s take, of which the interesting part reads “Separately, Andreessen has said that he thinks enterprise software is ripe for disruption and his firm is going to fund a new generation of Oracle-killers.”
  • I added more on Ray Lane’s tenure at Oracle over on Software Memories.
• Netezza had a falling out with its original supplier of geospatial technology, Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), and a lawsuit ensued over alleged copying. Now ISSi has upped the stakes, essentially alleging that Netezza’s new geospatial software doesn’t work, and that hence the CIA (evidently a Netezza user) is killing the wrong people via drone strikes. Netezza has wisely selected from its short list of acceptable responses, including versions of:
  • “All our classified customers are happy, and if we told you anything more than that, that would kind of defeat the purpose of being classified, wouldn’t it?”
  • “Copy, schmopy. A polygon is a polygon, and has been since Euclid.”
  • “We don’t have no steenking bugs.”
• OCZ, whoever they are, are trying to offer solid-state drives with PCIe-like bandwidth, which makes sense in that most observers except Teradata think the SAS interface isn’t fast enough for solid-state.
• Speaking of Teradata, I’d been wondering somewhat as to why they just shut down Kickfire’s product line after acquiring its assets. Well, somebody who tested a Kickfire box told me that — great TPC-H results notwithstanding — it turned out not to be nearly as fast as one might think, on real-life data sets that didn’t fit entirely into RAM. Hard though such a thing may be to imagine, it turns out that Kickfire’s TPC-H results were yet less significant than I thought they were.
• I haven’t been looking at High Scalability nearly as much as I should, and that’s an understatement. It’s an outstanding blog.
• A couple of Google execs offered some predictions about the future of online advertising, which might be of interest to anybody selling analytic (or text analytic) technology to the online/digital media market.
• The BBC shows us what a single 133-character tweet plus its metadata look like in JSON. (All 1582 characters.)
• Huffington Post’s CEO made some comments about influencers which are additive to what I’ve been saying about influencers over on Strategic Messaging. (If you don’t read that — well, it’s my blog about marketing.)
  
• Speaking of my other blogs, I’m not bothering to put up a separate post like this over on Text Technologies, where thee posts I have put up recently tend to be (at least by my standards) relatively link-heavy anyway, but I have a couple more to share even so:
  • Paul Carr’s 7 rules for TechCrunch/AOL employees are really funny.
  • Some major search engine marketing experts are sounding defeatist about web spam.

• Ray Lane was a highly effective leader at Oracle, both calm and tough. That doesn’t mean he had perfect control of the company, but things were much better managed once he was there.
  • Jeff Henley helped too, but I think Ray was the important one.
  • In particular, Ray introduced accountability for making customers happy.
  • Ray also somewhat tamed Oracle’s politics.
    • Dueling execs Mike Fields and Craig Conway both quickly left Oracle when he arrived. This was on the whole a good thing, even though both had the talent to go on and run major software companies.
    • In an exchange that was widely known even at the time, Ray told Ron Wohl he’d get him fired, to which Ron responded “Thank you — this is the first time anybody at Oracle has ever been stabbed in the FRONT.” That said, Ron did last at Oracle for a long time thereafter.
  • I don’t know what happened at the end, but for years Larry Ellison was VERY pleased to have Ray at Oracle.
  • There always were some Young Turk kinds of project leaders outside Ray’s control, most famously Mark Benioff.
• Ray Lane innovated the tight integration of software and professional services.
  • The software/services combination was central to Oracle’s success in the 1990s.
  • Ray obviously got the idea from his prior jobs, e.g. at EDS (where, this being a small world, he shared an office with Dave Peterschmidt, later the disastrously incompetent COO of Sybase).
  • American Management Systems, under Charles Rossotti, did an ever better job with the same strategy earlier (albeit at a much smaller company). Otherwise, it was Ray who taught the industry how to succeed at it.
  • It’s a pretty good guess that Ray leaving Oracle had a lot to do with Oracle retreating from that strategy, whatever the exact combination of cause and effect was.
    • Come to think of it, it’s an even better guess now that Mark Hurd is at Oracle. The Oracle tenures of Ray Lane, Chuck/Charles Phillips, and Mark Hurd each reflect very different kinds of business models.
  • HP has been pursuing a similar strategy with much less success. Perhaps Ray can teach them how to do it right.
• Ray Lane is still listed as a Vertica advisor. Start your own rumor accordingly. That said, Jerry Held has been much more involved with Vertica than Ray.

I have to head out soon to a meeting. More later.

Edit: I’ve added more about Ray Lane and Oracle in the 1990s over on Software Memories.

My thoughts on Mark Hurd (who I’ve never met) joining Oracle include:

• Mark Hurd is one of the least successful leaders in the modern history of the DBMS industry.
  • Mark Hurd presided over Teradata while Teradata allowed a bunch of smaller competitors to grow up.
  • Mark Hurd was said to be the prime mover behind HP Neoview, which has been an epic failure.
  • Mark Hurd was in charge of HP when HP lost the Exadata business to Sun, and it’s not clear that the loss was just because Oracle bought Sun.
• Mark Hurd seems to have done poorly running services businesses at HP as well, at least in terms of their reputations.
• None of this means that Mark Hurd can’t do a good job on the volume-hardware side of Oracle. Nor does it seem likely that Hurd would get the power to gut Oracle’s R&D the way he is reputed to have gutted HP’s. And by the way, the investment in the HP Neoview fiasco shows that Hurd didn’t COMPLETELY gut R&D at HP either.
• The Mark Hurd hire is a signal that Oracle is very serious about hardware/software integration. Notwithstanding any of the foregoing, Hurd can surely talk the hardware/software integration game. And one can reasonably spin Hurd’s HP Neoview failure as a high-desire, low-odds attempt to get into the database software/hardware stack business.
• The time to assess whether Oracle will continue with the hardware/software integration emphasis will be when Mark Hurd leaves. Just as Ray Lane’s departure coincided with a reversal of the software/services integration strategy he so successfully championed, Hurd’s eventual departure could signal a backing off from emphasizing a software/hardware stack.
• Mark Hurd’s sexual harassment problems sound similar to Al Gore’s:
  • He got services of the sort that are often a euphemism (massage in Gore’s case, escort in Hurd’s).
  • The provider(s) just wanted to provide the real thing, not the euphemistic part as well.
  • Unpleasantness ensued.

• Aster Data showed me a lot of customer names and deal sizes, across a bunch of industries (mainly enterprise rather than web). Yes, Aster’s market success is for real. (But almost all those details are NDA.)
• Sybase’s product plans for IQ are pretty impressive. (But the most interesting parts are, you guessed it, NDA.)
• I’ve kissed and made up* with ParAccel, now that they’ve replaced their CEO, replaced their marketing chief, and stopped the worst of the marketing nonsense I used to complain about. ParAccel has some interesting plans for ParAccel 3.0 which are, naturally, NDA.
• The Peoplesoft guys are doing it over again at Workday. Only this time, their platform isn’t a relational DBMS. Rather, it’s an in-memory, completely object-oriented data model, with disk used only on a “Just in case the power ever goes out” basis. (Thankfully, nothing at all about our conversation was NDA.)
• I’m finally feeling good about Northscale’s memcached-compatible persistent store Membase. The main reason is that they showed me a near-term path to interfaces that are richer than key-value. Also, Todd Hoff reassured me that even pure persistent memcached has a place.
• Rumor says that even the one app for which Facebook was using Cassandra — in-box search — has been decommissioned. On the other hand, numerous other scale-0ut DBMS (SQL or otherwise) seem to have Facebook footholds. But details are — all together now! — NDA.

*If you know ParAccel’s new marketing exec Michael Weir, you surely guessed I mean that only in a figurative sense.

From elsewhere:

• Daniel Abadi offered his analysis of Kickfire’s demise. In general I agree, but Daniel neglected to mention one hugely important factor — the chicken-egg negative effect of Kickfire’s lack of market or marketing traction. Customers were extremely reluctant to buy from Kickfire because they perceived, correctly, that Kickfire’s survivability was far from assured.
• While the InfiniDB forums suggest that there are at least a couple of production users of Calpont’s free InfiniDB, Calpont seemingly has a long way to go to be even as successful as Kickfire. But Calpont does have a bit of money to spend on lead generation; maybe some day they’ll even have actual customers.
• In a response to a question I messaged over, XtremeData tells me they have actual customers now. Press releases to follow.
• The admiration for the job Mark Hurd did at HP is in my opinion overstated. Sure, the financial/operational management appeared to work, but HP did little on Hurd’s watch to strengthen its reputation or customers’ loyalty. In particular:
  • HP’s analytics efforts have accomplished little.
  • HP’s data warehouse appliance efforts have failed pathetically.
  • From what I hear, HP’s execution in its Exadata partnership was not good.
  • HP’s server business in general is distinguished mainly by HP being a big company.
  • HP’s EDS acquisition has been rocky, not that EDS was sailing so smoothly on its own beforehand.
  • HP’s success in PCs amounts to “arguably, HP sucks a little less than the other guys”.
  • HP’s elite reputation is long gone (admittedly, for the most part that predates Hurd).
• Doug Henschen evidently favors really strong intellectual property protection for software, even forbidding plug-compatible reverse engineering. I agree with Doug up to the point that it should be forbidden to copy proprietary software, but I don’t see why he (or a court) would view such behavior as copying.