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.

• Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
• Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
• Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice.

(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)

People advising Doug — who come to think of it actually are Contributing Editors to Intelligent Enterprise or something like that — included Cindi Howson, Seth Grimes, three others, and me.

And if past is prologue, I will now get a flood of PR emails calling my attention to this award that I already have both participated in and blogged about.

As usual, the sense:nonsense ratio on these lists was pleasingly high. Analytic DBMS vendors cited included IBM, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, Sybase, and Teradata in the “Most influential” group, with Aster, Greenplum, HP, Infobright, and Vertica among the “To watch” crowd. It’s tough to argue with those selections, whose most questionable element is probably the not-ridiculous supposition that HP could do something interesting over the coming year. Cloudera and Intersystems also made the list, deservedly.

All three of QlikTech, Tableau, and TIBCO made the list, which is appropriate given the potential for and interest in interactive data exploration technology.  The BI majors, independent or otherwise, were all on as well. In text mining, Doug included Attensity and Clarabridge, which I think is exactly right. (Plus OpenCalais.)  Upon reflection, I probably should have nominated Mark Logic, even though most of its business is non-enterprise; but hey, nobody’s perfect, and the same goes for lists. Open source was well represented, with Apache, Actuate, Jaspersoft, Eclipse, Infobright, Nuxeo and R all being cited (but not Ingres or Pentaho). Kalido made the list, with my endorsement, their silly I-CASE like marketing messaging notwithstanding.

Speaking of imperfections — there only are a few category names, and so category assignments can be pretty bizarre. (In an ideal world, middleware wouldn’t be included under “enterprise applications”.) Greenplum hasn’t really “extended” its DBMS with a “cloud” option. As much as I’d like Netezza to be more influential than SAP, that’s probably not the best way to rank them. And there are a number of “This company is on a roll!” kinds of comments that I wouldn’t necessarily endorse.

But those are all nitpicks. On the whole, it’s another nice job.

• Kalido Business Information Modeler (the newest part)
• Kalido Dynamic Information Warehouse
• Kalido Universal Information Director
• Kalido Master Data Management

But those mouthfuls aside, Kalido has some pretty interesting things to say about data warehouse schema complexity and change.

For the long-timers among us, the best way to describe what Kalido really offers is CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) organized around modeling concepts relevant to data warehousing and analytic queries. The middleware or data movement tools that actually do anything are basically just implementers for the models.

Kalido positions these tools as helping with two big challenges:

1. Changing schemas. That’s what we focused on in the call.
2. Reconciling conflicting schemas. Generic example – different ways of setting up the dimensional hierarchy in different countries. (Kalido was originally an internal project at Royal Dutch Shell, which does business in 130 countries or so.)

Kalido’s defining application seems to be the tracking of revenue, profitability, etc. in a complex organization. Typical customers are product companies (including those in extraction businesses) or heavily regulated ones. Applications and scenarios Kalido with which might be less helpful are ones where the warehouse structure and is simple and relatively fixed, such as credit scoring, call detail record apps in telcos, or retailing. Similarly, Kalido doesn’t focus on helping with repetitive production reporting, although I suspect that point would be misleading if one tried to take it to an extreme.

In line with this application focus, Kalido supports Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2. They don’t see warehouses over 10 Tb of user data. They don’t have much demand for Teradata support (ditto other data warehouse specialists). And they don’t seem to live in the part of the data warehouse world where Mike Stonebraker estimates 99% of users have single-fact-table schemas.

The core functionality of Kalido’s suite is:

• You (re)design the schema of your warehouse with boxes and arrows.
• Your desired schema is generated (both in the database and in, e.g., Business Objects universes).

The design information is stored in a very thin schema – mainly one table. Generation happens only occasionally – i.e., when you’re rolling out new business intelligence apps or important reports, and making associated schema changes.

Different CASE tools are “intelligent” about different kinds of things. Kalido’s focuses on automagic handling of dimensional hierarchies. I.e., give it enough information to specify a hierarchy, and it will do so, without demanding that you fill in the rest. It will generate various denormalizations upon request. Kalido’s product will also remember old versions of the information, which can be helpful in running reports about historical periods. And it’s workflow/collaborative capabilities are focused on data governance and schema development.

Kalido’s overall claim is that data warehouse projects go 5-10X faster with their tools than without. (Presumably, this is based on experience without the latest iteration of their visual tools – and do please recall that it’s a vendor estimate, on a matter that can’t be rigorously tested.) Obviously, such a claim is plausible only if the schemas aren’t very simple, and if they aren’t already purchased from, say, an application vendor. And of course, since Kalido claims a development speed advantage, they also offer a rapid/agile/get-to-what-the-business-user-really-wants development-cycle story as a potential benefit.

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