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
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, StreamBase, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP), Truviso | 12 Comments |
Three Greenplum customers’ applications of MapReduce
Greenplum (and Truviso) advisor Joseph Hellerstein offers a few examples of MapReduce applications (specifically Greenplum MapReduce), namely:
The big aha moment occured for me during our panel discussion, which included Luke Lonergan from Greenplum, Roger Magoulas from O’Reilly, and Brian Dolan from Fox Interactive Media (which runs MySpace among other web properties).
Roger talked about using MapReduce to extract structured entities from text for doing tech trend analyses from billions of rows of online job postings. Brian (who is a mathematician by training) was talking about implementing conjugate gradiant and Support Vector Machines in parallel SQL to support “hypertargeting” for advertisers. I mentioned how Jonathan Goldman at LinkedIn was using SQL and MapReduce to do graph algorithms for social network analysis.
Incidentally: While it’s been some months since I asked, my sense is that the O’Reilly text extraction is home-grown, and primitive compared to what one could do via commercial products. That said, if the specific application is examining job postings, I’m not sure how much value more sophisticated products would add. After all, tech job listings are generally written in a style explicitly designed to ensure that most or all of their meaning is conveyed simply by a bag of keywords. And by the way, this effort has been underway for quite some time.
Related link
- Greenplum has a page on the O’Reilly relationship. However, the part that isn’t behind a registration barrier is trivial — and I wouldn’t know one way or the other about the registration-required part.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Fox and MySpace, Greenplum, MapReduce, Specific users, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
Greenplum discloses a bit of pricing
Getting information about Greenplum pricing is not always easy. However, a bit was disclosed in a recent Greenplum blog post, which said:
… roughly $200k … For that amount you get the hardware, software and services to stand up around a 4TB (usable) Greenplum DW …
No doubt there are large quantity discounts for much bigger systems.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Greenplum, Pricing | Leave a Comment |
DATAllegro sales price: $275 million
According to a press release announcing a venture capitalist’s job change,
Microsoft purchased DATAllegro for $275 million
Technically, that needn’t shut down the rumor mill altogether, since given the way deals are structured and reported, it’s unlikely that Microsoft actually cut checks to DATAllegro stockholders in the aggregate amount of $275 million promptly after the close of the acquisition.
Still, it’s a data point of some weight.
Hat tip to Mark Myers.
Fox Interactive Media’s multi-hundred terabyte database running on Greenplum
Greenplum’s largest named account is Fox Interactive Media — the parent organization of MySpace — which has a multi-hundred terabyte database that it uses for hardcore data mining/analytics. Greenplum has been engaging in regrettable business practices, claiming that it is in the process of supplanting Aster Data at Fox/MySpace. In fact, MySpace’s use of Aster is more mission-critical than Fox’s use of Greenplum, and is increasing significantly.
Still, as Greenplum’s gushing customer video with Fox Interactive Media* illustrates, the Fox/Greenplum database is impressive on its own merits. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Fox and MySpace, Greenplum, Specific users, Theory and architecture, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
MySpace’s multi-hundred terabyte database running on Aster Data
Aster Data has put up a blog post embedding and summarizing a video about its MySpace account. Basic metrics include:
The combined Aster deployment now has 200+ commodity hardware servers working together to manage 200+ TB of data that is growing at 2-3TB per day by collecting 7-10B events that happen on one of the world.
I’m pretty sure that’s counting correctly (i.e., user data).* Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Application areas, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Fox and MySpace, Specific users, Theory and architecture, Web analytics | 11 Comments |
Closing the book on the DATAllegro customer base
I’m prepared to call an end to the “Guess DATAllegro’s customers” game. Bottom line is that there are three in all, two of which are TEOCO and Dell, and the third of which is a semi-open secret. I wrote last week:
The number of DATAllegro production references is expected to double imminently, from one to two. Few will be surprised at the identity of the second reference. I imagine the number will then stay at two, as DATAllegro technology is no longer being sold, and the third known production user has never been reputed to be particularly pleased with it.
Dell did indeed disclose at TDWI that it was a large DATAllegro user, notwithstanding that Dell is a huge Teradata user as well. No doubt, Dell is gearing up to be a big user of Madison too.
Also at TDWI, I talked with some former DATAllegro employees who now work for rival vendors. None thinks DATAllegro has more than three customers. Neither do I.
Edit: Subsequently, the DATAllegro customer count declined to 1.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Market share and customer counts, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Specific users | 10 Comments |
Named customer silliness
Neither Greenplum nor eBay will say for the record that eBay is a Greenplum customer. Indeed, saying that is quite verboten. On the other hand, Greenplum’s press release boilerplate says that Skype is a Greenplum customer, and Skype is of course a subsidiary of eBay. (Edit: Speaking of silliness, fixed a typo there.)
The point of such distinctions is sometimes lost on me.
In related news, of Greenplum’s two customers who back in August were supposedly heading into production soon with petabyte-plus databases, one hasn’t yet made it to that size. (“As we speak” turned out to be a longer conversation than I might have anticipated ….) The other (of course unnamed) customer has, Greenplum assures me, made it that high. But upon checking with that (unnamed, in case I forgot to mention the point) customer, I don’t detect a whole lot of enthusiasm about Greenplum.
| Categories: Data warehousing, eBay, Greenplum, Specific users | 3 Comments |
Data warehousing business trends
I’ve talked with a whole lot of vendors recently, some here at TDWI, as well as users, fellow analysts, and so on. Repeated themes include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Application areas, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehousing, eBay, Microsoft and SQL*Server, MySQL, Oracle, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
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.