Most of what I get paid for is in some form or other consulting. (The same would be true for many other analysts.) And so I can be a bit stingy with my advice toward non-clients. But my non-clients are a distinguished and powerful group, including in their number Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and most of the BI vendors. So here’s a bit of advice for them too.

Oracle. On the plus side, you guys have been making progress against your reputation for untruthfulness. Oh, I’ve dinged you for some past slip-ups, but on the whole they’ve been no worse than other vendors.’ But recently you pulled a doozy. The analyst reports section of your website fails to distinguish between unsponsored and sponsored work.* That is a horrible ethical stumble. Fix it fast. Then put processes in place to ensure nothing that dishonest happens again for a good long time.

*Merv Adrian’s “report” listed high on that page is actually a sponsored white paper. That Merv himself screwed up by not labeling it clearly as such in no way exonerates Oracle. Besides, I’m sure Merv won’t soon repeat the error — but for Oracle, this represents a whole pattern of behavior.

Oracle. And while I’m at it, outright dishonesty isn’t your only unnecessary credibility problem. You’re also playing too many games in analyst relations.

HP. Neoview will never succeed. Admit it to yourselves. Go buy something that can. 

Smaller BI vendors. Analytic DBMS evaluations commonly include BI strategy and tool selection as well. If an analytic DBMS expert tells you he needs to learn more about your product line, don’t blow him off. In fact, you should be particularly embracing anybody who’s shown a fondness for small DBMS vendors; maybe he or his clients will like small BI vendors as well. That means (among others) Jaspersoft, Endeca, and Tableau.

Information Builders. Is there anything about your BI products that is in any way technologically differentiated? If so, you might want to mention some examples to somebody some time.

Kalido. I’ve said this to you before, but it bears repeating — your positioning translates to “I-CASE for analytics,” and that’s not a good thing. If your product is not as cumbersome and entrapping as that sounds, you need to do a much better job of explaining why not.

SenSage. You are what you are. Sell out while the selling is good. You don’t have the corporate personality to make it into the analytic DBMS mainstream on your own.

Ingres. You need to be more engaged with analysts than you are. Ingres navel-gazed too much 25 years ago, and evidently you haven’t outgrown it yet.

TIBCO. You probably have a lot of cool analytic technology, but I don’t know of an influencer who has much relationship with or trust in you. Rethink how you’re approaching influencer relations top to bottom.

Tableau. You had a lot of mindshare, but it’s fading. Do something.

MarkLogic, graph DBMS vendors, etc. You’re clinging too hard to the NoSQL label. Nobody is out there deciding among Cassandra, neo4j, and MarkLogic. They might be deciding between MongoDB and MarkLogic, I guess, but if you admit to yourself that’s all it is you’ll probably change your messaging somewhat.

Objectivity. Get real about marketing. Infinite Graph is a cool opportunity. But I didn’t even ping you for a meeting when I’m in your area next week, because I wouldn’t have known who to reach out to.

Everybody (especially Objectivity). “First X deployed in the cloud” is almost surely an inaccurate claim. Don’t make it. And by the way, even if it were true, it probably wouldn’t be interesting.

• 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, especially on Jaspersoft:

• Jaspersoft is not using multi-tenancy is to offer BI SaaS itself. But SaaS vendors were demanding the feature. What’s more, a couple of household-name corporations are using Jaspersoft’s multi-tenancy to give extranet BI access to their various customers or suppliers. Lawrence Livermore Labs seems to be a Jaspersoft extranet user too.
• The way Jaspersoft’s multi-tenancy works is that the concept of “organization” is added to the privileges hierarchy. Each organization sees its own virtual server. Only administrative superusers can span organizations.
• Jaspersoft also has a new memory-centric OLAP capability — with disk-based ROLAP for overflow – unrelated to the Mondrian MDX server. That’s a pretty common story in BI these days, I think, but I’ll confess to being unclear about exactly who is offering what when in that regard.
• Jaspersoft’s memory-centric OLAP is just a query accelerator, not a near-real-time data ingester like Aleri Live Update. Jaspersoft does handle real-time telemetry from at least one space mission (to Mars) — but how great can the bandwidth on that be?
• There’s also some kind of AJAX/Web 2.0/mash-up/whatever going on in Jaspersoft v3.5.

Some more detail yet, especially on Inforsense:

• Inforsense is focused on applications that answer a few questions rather than doing high-volume analytics, and are “designed to change.” This may be needed when there’s enough of an analytic business process that conventional BI tools aren’t a good fit (perhaps unless combined with some kind of composite application development tool or methodology).
• Inforsense’s application sweet spot to date is combining and moving around various kinds of health care data. (Especially laboratory data, both research and clinical.)
• Inforsense is a bit confusing because it was founded out of an academic research effort (Imperial College, London) to do data mining parallelized onto grids. That is no longer the company’s main focus, but the confusion continues with an occasional low-revenue, supposedly-high-prestige research award.
• Inforsense is further a bit confusing because, irrespective of focus, its analytic technology can supposedly be almost all things to almost all people. (Exactly the same thing complaint could be made about almost any other BI company.)
• What remains of the academic focus is what Inforsense characterizes as a “very flexible dataflow environment.”
• Inforsense can talk to lots of data sources and so on, including web services. It can also do updating, albeit not in demanding OLTP environments.

A few more notes, especially on Tableau Software:

• Tableau is built around a proprietary language VizQL. VizQL seems to be similar to SQL in that it focuses on filtering data. I haven’t yet read a paper Tableau sent, which should make it clearer what VizQL does that SQL doesn’t.
• Tableau is one of the new breed of “exploration” oriented BI vendors, encouraging users to just dive into data.
• I don’t know whether this is more a matter of technology or just astute marketing, but Tableau seems to be somewhat more focused than other vendors on the idea that you filter data, keep refining that filter as makes sense to you, share that filter with other people, and so on. It is hard to overstate how blind I think the BI industry is being in not aggressively developing and enhancing this kind of technology.
• That said, Tableau’s capabilities in this area still seem pretty primitive too.
• Like most software vendors, Tableau says its biggest competitor is incumbent/no decision. In Tableau’s case, the incumbent can be either BI tools or Microsoft Excel.
• Tableau says its second biggest group of competitors is other new/easy BI vendors such as QlikTech and LogiXML. Interestingly, both got mentioned with about equal emphasis.

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:

1.  Kognitio has built a lot of its marketing around database SaaS, which it calls DaaS for data-as-a-service, and runs primarily from its own facility.  On a small sample size, it reports a very roughly 50-50 split in new business activity (that’s customers/prospects, not revenue) between DaaS and conventionally licensed software.

2.  Vertica has expressed high hopes for its Amazon cloud offering. Actual production usage has so far only matched part of that, but it isn’t exactly zero either. Specifically, marketing chief Dave Menninger writes by email:

In addition to approximately a dozen POCs running on the cloud at any point in time we have five customers using the cloud on a regular basis. Three of these customers do short lived projects so they start up instances, run them for the duration of a project, and shut them down. They are three different types of orgs: govt agency, pharma consulting org and SaaS provider.

Two financial services companies use the cloud as spare resource/capacity.  When they need additional computing resource or capacity they will temporarily move some projects onto the cloud with the anticipation of moving them back off once the capacity constraint is relieved (new hardware arrives, other projects or systems come to an end, etc.

3.  1010data offers its data warehousing product by remote service only.  However, unlike Gartner I’m not totally convinced 1010data should be regarded as comparable to DBMS vendors; perhaps it’s more like a SaaS business intelligence provider.

Edits:

• A comment below says Gerry Cohen wrote Nomad too.
  
• Kognitio commented on Twitter that they actually use DaaS to mean Data warehouse As A Service.