• Neil Raden points out that business intelligence dashboards can be dangerously misleading. His reasoning (sound) is that whatever you measure is apt to be distorted by the fact people know they’re being measured. His solution (implied) is to hire a good-looking consultant like himself to do it right.
• I’ve had my issues with Fred Holahan, who was VP of Marketing when I posted that EnterpriseDB was not to be trusted. (That said, Fred is long gone from EnterpriseDB and my opinion hasn’t changed.) But he’s put up a good series of posts on the basis of the open source “progressive engagement” marketing funnel, including this gem on why you shouldn’t count on monetizing your community/free users.
• Oracle plans to increase its acquisition budget. The figure given is $70 billion over the next 5 years. Edit: But see this funny Register followup.
• Clayton Christensen wrote a phenomenal article on how to live a good life, from a very business-y perspective. (Only in one anecdote was it too religiously-oriented for my tastes.) Takeaways include:
  • Your core goals probably revolve around something other than business success. (E.g., family.) Don’t lose sight of that.
  • To the extent you’re a manager or leader, you may have a huge impact on other people’s lives. Use that power in admirable ways.
  • Teach people how to fish for answers, rather than just giving them answers. They’ll probably come to better conclusions than you would have anyway. (This is a core principle in my own consulting.)
  • Take time to reflect. And by the way, the same techniques you use for strategic analysis in business can be applied to your life as well.
• Mark Suster has a pretty good post expanding on my first Christensen takeaway, highlighting a point too often missing from articles in that genre: It’s not just family; it’s also all the cool things around us.
• I haven’t gone through the Hadoop Summit archives yet, but it looks as if there’s a lot of insight there about current Hadoop application activity.
• If you’re a cat lover and don’t hate simple/traditional music, check out Marc Gunn’s cat filksongs, especially the infectious “What Shall We Do With a Catnipped Kitty?” and “Lord of the Pounce”, both playable from the right sidebar of that page (#7 and #10 respectively). Gunn is also a chief perpetrator of the justly (in)famous Do Virgins Taste Better? cycle of filksongs.
• Former SAP exec Dennis Moore offers a theory as to why SAP cares so much about in-memory DBMS. It’s to integrate business processes, because SAP has no other software layer good at doing same. Interestingly, Dennis originated SAP’s previous attempt at meeting a similar need via its composite applications initiative. However, in Dennis’ view this benefit would only be achieved by a major rewrite of SAP’s applications.

And it’s not going to get any better. Next week = the oft-postponed elder care trip. Then I’m back for a short week. Then I’m off on my quarterly visit to the SF area. Soon thereafter I’ve have a lot to do in connection with Enzee Universe. And at that point another month will have gone by.

Anyhow:

• Back in January, Oracle finally briefed me on Exadata 2. I also requested and got permission to post what I regarded as pretty interesting slides, then never got around to doing so. Well, here they are. (Pay no attention to the word “Confidential”.)
• Two people I have a lot of respect for, Cindi Howson and Doug Henschen, seem bullish on SAP’s in-memory NewDB efforts. But for a variety of execution reasons, I’m skeptical that this will matter for anything except SAP’s analytics suite. I.e., I don’t think anybody much except SAP will write OLTP apps to it, and I don’t think that without OLTP apps being written to it it’s much more than Business Objects’ answer to QlikView.
• I just learned that Netezza’s previous geospatial technology didn’t get ported to TwinFin. However, Netezza obviously found a geospatial alternative.

I ‘m beginning to make a habit of asking vendors for a postable version of their slide decks. Sybase IQ is another example.

• Google is doing something called BigQuery that is “SQL-like” for big data analytics. I don’t know anything about it.
• I also don’t know anything about IBM BigSheets yet. It sounds something like Datameer, but that could be way off the mark.

That said,  

• Raj said that Sybase’s Aleri acquisition was, if anything, tracking ahead of expectations.
• Raj didn’t seem the slightest bit focused on the Coral8/Aleri CEP-based BI strategy that John Morell had long championed.
• Raj reminded me that Sybase SQL Anywhere has numerous OEMs, not just on the true desktop/laptop or smaller, but also in a return to its server/workgroup roots. Sybase SQL Anywhere even added geospatial indexing recently.

Raj also spoke glowingly of SAP’s in-memory database technology and the potential for Sybase of same — until I asked a follow-up question. At that point, he confessed that he didn’t really know much about about SAP’s in-memory database technology yet. As I said before, I believe SAP is fairly sincere about its belief that its in-memory database technology will conquer the world — but this is a naive and poorly-founded opinion even so.

One tidbit I did get is that SAP’s in-memory database technology is not just son-of-T-REX. A Korean (Raj thinks) company SAP had acquired is also in the mix. Raj also had the impression SAP’s in-memory technology can do rows, columns, or hybrid structures. On the one hand, that makes sense. On the other, it’s not a perfect fit with what Hasso Plattner said last year.

4 1/2 years ago, I noted that SAP believed strongly in database proliferation:

2. One big benefit they see to this strategy is that it reduces the need to have grand integrated databases. If one application manages data for an entity that is also important to another application, the two applications can exchange messages about the entity. Anyhow, many of their comments make it clear that, between partner company databases (a bit of a future) and legacy app databases (a very big factor in the present day), SAP is constantly aware of situations in which a single integrated database in infeasible.
…
4. One area where SAP definitely favors redundancy and synchronization is data warehousing. Indeed, they have an ever more elaborate staging system to move data from operational to analytic systems.

Per SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, quoted in Merv Adrian’s blog, they still do:

Last week I was at one of our largest consumer goods customers. They have 3000 data sources worldwide, and coordinating across all of them is a formidable challenge. Imagine our in-memory database sitting next to them, in hundreds of departments. To make decisions you need the data in synch in real time. We can use Sybase’s Replication Server, and event technology, to transform what companies can aspire to do.”

And by the way, MaxDB’s significant share in the SAP user base is evidence as well. (I expect that share to go to Sybase as the decade progresses.)

This all also fits well with Sybase IQ’s usage model.

• Sybase’s main businesses are:
  • Classic OLTP DBMS (Sybase ASE, for Adapative Server Enterprise, unless I’ve missed yet another name change).
  • Analytic technology — mainly Sybase IQ, but more generally Sybase RAP.
  • Mobile technology. (The frequently renamed small DBMS SQL Anywhere was the foundational product of and still is included in the mobile division.)
• SAP’s thoughts on in-memory database management are interesting. However, I think SAP’s oft-repeated claim that it has a lot of important in-memory database technology to bring to Sybase (or for that matter SAP customers) is mainly smoke and mirrors. Cool data access methods, good niche database products, and broadly applicable multi-domain DBMS innovations are three different things. Granting that SAP probably has the first and thinks it has the second is not the same as giving it much credence for having the third.
• SAP claims that, 15 years after its refusal to support Sybase turned Sybase into a DBMS also-ran, it by now is “relatively simple” to port SAP’s apps to Sybase ASE, and that they will make that happen. I actually believe that SAP’s apps will soon run on Sybase ASE, where by “soon” I mean “in a couple of years for no-apologies general availability.” (Certifying a DBMS for SAP is a long process.) The main missing features — e.g., row-level locking — were already put into Sybase back in the last millenium. Nor could there be fundamental architectural problems that keep SAP from supporting Sybase ASE, or else SAP couldn’t have supported Microsoft SQL Server (which, long ago, was a Sybase fork).
• I don’t see any market or competitive dynamics that would lead the SAP acquisition to hurt Sybase’s ASE or mobile businesses. General merger management mishegas is, of course, always a possibility.
• SAP Business Objects partners with Sybase IQ’s competitors. That could be a problem. However, coopetition is pretty strong in the business intelligence market. I don’t think any of SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, or Oracle Business Intelligence are much held back from partnering by competitive dislike of their parent companies.
• The rest of SAP might be able to drum up some extra business for Sybase IQ.
• It would be natural for IBM/Cognos to now buy a columnar DBMS of its own. Vertica is an obvious first choice. ParAccel would surely come much cheaper. Since ParAccel has little chance of surviving as an independent company — too immature and too little differentiation to overcome that — I’d expect ParAccel’s board to jump at the chance to sell out.
• It would be interesting if SAP Business Objects would revive the CEP-based BI idea.
• I gather Sybase’s AnswersAnywhere concept network/object model-based natural language/speech recognition technology never went anywhere. Unsurprising (it seemed like it needed too much hand-building to scale semantically), but regrettable even so.
• I don’t see anything in this acquisition that would revive PowerBuilder (Sybase’s Visual Basic competitor), Sybase’s CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) tools, and so on.
• And on the personal side — I’ll probably lose Sybase as a customer due to this merger, but it could have been worse. A lot of vendors smaller than Sybase are bigger customers for Monash Research.

Edit: Right after I posted this, I saw email from Sybase clarifying that Sybase’s in-memory technology, while slightly influenced by some ANTs IP Sybase bought non-exclusive rights to, is essentially home-grown. That’s what I thought, but the call sounded like it was saying something different.

Further coverage of SAP/Sybase:

• SAP believes in database proliferation
• More quick reactions to SAP/Sybase
• Technical basics of Sybase IQ
  

• Tom Foremski outlined the dire (at least in theory) privacy risks of geolocation services, going into a lot more detail on that point than I ever have. However, he topped that off with the odd claim that people pay toll (rather than using an electronic service) to cross the Bay Bridge because they fear being tracked, rather than for reasons of time or money.
• Oracle had an earnings conference call. Larry Dignan did a good job of covering the highlights; the gory details are on the Seeking Alpha transcript, especially pp. 3-5.  Oracle now claims to be getting lots of multi-system deals for Exadata. (But I still haven’t seen much in the way of production customers named.) ULAs, which I presume are Unlimited License Agreements, are important on the software side. Besides picking on IBM and SAP, Oracle even touted a competitive win vs. EMC, which not coincidentally seems to be working on partnering with almost every Oracle competitor it can find.
• Brian Prentice of Gartner basically accused open source of being Dotcom 2.0, in terms of dubious business models and the hype associated with same. I agree with many of his particulars, and indeed often steer vendor clients away from open source strategies. For marketing purposes, I do feel that sometimes free can be a real cool price; but open source is not the only way to be free.
• Akiban, which I wrote about a couple of days ago, seems to be building out its website. As of this writing the website is still pretty raw, with bewildering messaging, carelessly repeated paragraphs, and a notable lack of clues as to who’s in company leadership. Even so — unless I missed some of the current stuff before, the site has come a long way in a few days, so maybe there’s hope.
• Groovy Corporation, which introduced the Groovy SQL Switch just last summer, seems to be doing something different now. It’s merged into a company called uCirrus (where the u is really a mu), but uCirrus doesn’t have a meaningful website yet, whereas Groovy does. There’s stuff there about a “push data cloud,” stressing the importance of not being a DBMS, under the name Cortex, whatever that all means. Groovy seems to have an online gaming deal for Cortex with MySpace, or maybe Cortex is just the name of a specific Groovy/MySpace project.
• Mike Mooney offered a long rant on the problems with database (design) version control. He did concede that the most recent Microsoft Visual Studio might help, for those who are bought into (and can afford) the Microsoft stack. Frankly, I think that’s what views are for, updatable or otherwise. In many cases, they’ll let you build what you need, quickly and without breaking anything, and you can leave it to the DBAs to sort out database performance later.
• I just discovered Chad Stewart’s programming blog. While he’s evidently a game programmer, a lot of his comments have broader applicability.
• Chip Hazard offered a VC’s perspectives on the difficulties facing enterprise IT startups. (Hat tip to Miriam Tuerk for turning me on to him.) Although he didn’t phrase it this way, his bottom line (at least the part I agree with) is that the startup’s products have to be amazingly superior to the alternatives (big vendors or in-house).

• 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.

The Bottom Line  – SAP’s Turning The Corner

Credit must be given to SAP for charting a new course.  A shift in the management philosophy and product direction will take years to realize, however, its not too late for change.  SAP must remember its roots and become more German and less American.  The renewed focus must put customer requests and priorities ahead of SAP’s bureaucracy.  The emphasis must focus on the relationship.  When that reemerges in how SAP works with customers, partners, influencers, and its own employees, SAP will be back in good graces. In the meantime, its  time to get to work and deliver.  Oracle’s Fusions Apps are coming soon and competitors such as IBM, Microsoft, Epicor, IFS, and SalesForce.com will not relent.

I recall the 1980s, when SAP’s main differentiator, at least in the English-speaking US, was a total commitment to customer success, and when it could be taken for granted that SAP would do business ethically. Things change, and not always for the better.

Anyhow, the reason I’m highlighting Ray’s post is that he makes reference to a number of interesting SAP-cetric technology trends or initiatives. In no particular order, Ray suggests:

• SAP’s and Oracle’s (Fusion) efforts to meld memory-centric analytics with operational apps will be crucial for large enterprises — but perhaps only around the middle of the next decade. (I basically agree, although I’d note that:
  • Wisely, Ray suggested a very long time frame.
  • BI/operational app integration has been, on the whole, glacial.
  • The idea that you have to put pre-built aggregates into RAM to get performance is an indictment of market-leading RDBMS — but it’s a fair indictment.
  • I’m not sure whether memory-centric OLAP will wind up in RAM or Flash. If the data stores are updated at near-transactional speeds, RAM may make more sense. Otherwise, Flash should have major advantages.)
• SAP’s long-standing attempts to support third-party development of SAP add-ons are a technological mess, in line with my fears of a couple of years ago. However, the business-relationship part of the effort is vastly stronger.
• As SAP focused more on the mid-market, it is partnering closely with Microsoft. (If you think about it, that makes all kinds of sense.)
• Energy/environmental/safety tracking — i.e., sustainability — tools are a big deal. (See also The Economist on that point.)

For example, Greg Rahn twittered to me that Oracle Exadata commonly outperforms existing Oracle installations by a factor of 50 or better, based on a “geometric mean”. What I presume he meant by that is:

• At any one user installation, a number of queries were compared on new system vs. old.
• In each case, the ratio between new and old running time was taken.
• The geometric mean of all those ratios was computed.

Math note: Reversing the order of the second and third steps doesn’t change the outcome at all. Either way, you wind up multiplying N things together, dividing by the product of another N things, and taking the Nth root of all that.

Looking just at the arithmetic, a straightforward geometric-mean approach is not a terrible methodology. Theoretically, I’d prefer to just add up the running times for the whole workload — using each system — and divide the two aggregates. But I’ve tested that change in a couple of cases, and it didn’t seem to make a big difference. In particular, the geometric is better than the arithmetic mean, which gives huge weight to the most extreme number(s) in the set. (SAP used to do just that in marketing BI Accelerator, getting huge results because one customer once got a better than 600X speedup on one particular query out of eight or so.)

That said, there are a number of factors that can render such comparisons seriously misleading. For starters, most of these comparisons omit to consider how often each query will be run. (One advantage to my preferred approach — add up total running time before doing any other arithmetic — is that you can easily weight queries by frequency.) Beyond that, especially when a new challenger system is compared to an old incumbent:

• Comparisons aren’t always run on identical or comparable hardware.
• One system might be running an obsolete release of the software.
• Queries may not be equally well written and tuned on both systems.*
• Both systems may not be equally well administered and/or configured.

In addition:

• A small set of queries may not be representative of a whole workload.
• Since complete workloads are rarely tested, concurrency and contention may not be properly modeled.

And last but not least:

• Marketing departments tend to take their best results and claim those are “typical.”

*I suspect that some of the most dramatic speed-ups we see are for queries that are just plain badly written. On the other hand — if you’ve been running your data warehouse software for a few years and still haven’t figured out how to write your queries for decent performance, maybe it’s somewhat too hard to use …

Related links

• Tips for benchmarking an analytic DBMS
• Tips for buying an analytic DBMS

1) good buy for IBM? why or why not?

Yes. The integration of predictive analytics with other analytic or operational technologies is still ahead of us, so there was a lot of value to be gained from SPSS beyond what it had standalone.  (That said, I haven’t actually looked at the numbers, so I have no comment on the price.)

By the way, SPSS coined the phrase “predictive analytics”, with the rest of the industry then coming around to use it. As with all successful marketing phrases, it’s somewhat misleading, in that it’s not wholly focused on prediction.

2) how does it position IBM vs. competitors?

IBM’s ownership immediately makes SPSS a stronger competitor to SAS. Any advantage to the rest of IBM depends on the integration roadmap and execution.

3) How does this particularly affect SAP and SAS and Oracle, IBM’s closest competitors by revenue according to IDC’s figures?

If one of Oracle or SAP had bought SPSS, it would have given them a competitive advantage against the other, in the integration of predictive analytics with packaged operational apps. That’s a missed opportunity for each.

One notable point is that SPSS is more SQL-oriented than SAS. Thus, SPSS has gotten performance benefits from Oracle’s in-database data mining technology that SAS apparently hasn’t.

IBM’s done a good job of keeping its acquired products working well with Oracle and other competitive DBMS in the past, and SPSS will surely be no exception.

Obviously, if IBM does a good job of Cognos/SPSS integration, that’s bad for competitors, starting with Oracle and SAP/Business Objects. So far business intelligence/predictive analytics integration has been pretty minor, because nobody’s figured out how to do it right, but some day that will change. Hmm — I feel another “Future of … ” post coming on.

4) Do you predict further M&A?

Always.

Related links

• Official word from SPSS and IBM
• Blog posts from Larry Dignan and James Taylor
• James Kobelius’s post, which includes the obvious point that Oracle — unlike SAP — has pretty decent data mining of its own
• Eric Lai’s actual article