Software as a Service (SaaS)
Analysis of software-as-a-service offerings with a database or analytic focus, or data connectivity tools focused on SaaS. Related subjects include:
- Data mart outsourcing
- (in Text Technologies) Text analytics SaaS
- (in The Monash Report) Strategic issues in SaaS
Multitenancy hype is getting out of control
I posted recently on SaaS-data-integration-in-the-cloud, and a couple of vendors stopped by the comment thread to shared what they do. One was Boomi, which has a blog that does a good job of spelling out its opinions. What the Boomi blog is not so good at, however, is giving any good reasons why one should share those opinions.
I refer specifically to a couple of posts claiming that multitenancy is somehow crucial for SaaS data integration to work. To this I can only say — huh? A decent data integration system should be able to handle many parallel threads at once, connecting many pairs of databases at once. So the hard part of multitenancy is pretty much “free.” If, even so, the integration provider chooses not to go fully multitenant, whose business is it but theirs? Read more
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 6 Comments |
Everybody’s putting integration services in the cloud
Both Pervasive Software and Cast Iron Systems told me recently of fairly pure cloud offerings. In this, they’re joining Informatica, which started offering Salesforce.com integration-as-a-service back in 2006. So far as I can tell, the three vendors are doing somewhat different things. Read more
| Categories: Cast Iron Systems, Cloud computing, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica, Pervasive Software, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 8 Comments |
The essence of the Oracle Amazon cloud offering
OK. The press release adds color to what I previously posted about Oracle’s new Amazon cloud offering. Read more
| Categories: Cloud computing, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
Oracle announces an Amazon cloud offering
Per the Amazon Web Service Blog, Oracle announced that Oracle can be run in the Amazon cloud (i.e., on EC2, with EBS for persistent storage). Clustering is probably weak, however — e.g., there’s no RAC support, as per Oracle’s well-written FAQ. Perhaps not coincidentally, the FAQ seems to suggest that the primary use case at this time is for backup, and backup is generally a major point of emphasis on Oracle’s cloud computing page.
Of course, another use case could be development, but that depends in part on pricing. Of course, whether Oracle’s offering seems attractively priced compared with, for example, a similar one from EnterpriseDB and Elastra depends a lot on whether you’ve already negotiated an unlimited-use license for Oracle.
James Kobielus, who presumably was pre-briefed, has more to say.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Some Elastra numbers
GigaOm reports that Elastra just raised $12 million, and that it has 40 paying customers, up from 13 around the time of Elastra’s March launch.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Elastra | Leave a Comment |
Project Cassandra — Facebook’s open sourced quasi-DBMS
Facebook has open-sourced Project Cassandra, an imitation of Google’s BigTable. Actual public information about Facebook’s Cassandra seems to reside in a few links that may be found on the Cassandra Project’s Google code page. All the discussion I’ve seen seems to be based solely on some slides from a SIGMOD presentation. In particular, Dare Obasanjo offers an excellent overview of Cassandra. To wit: Read more
Jerry Held on cloud data warehousing and how business intelligence will be transformed by it
Vertica Chairman Jerry Held has a pair of blog posts on analytics and data warehousing in the cloud. The first lays out a number of potential benefits and consequences of cloud data warehousing, under the heading of “Transforming BI”: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Cloud computing, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehousing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Vertica Systems | 5 Comments |
Vertica in the cloud
I may have gotten confused again as to an embargo date, but if so, then this time I had it late rather than early. Anyhow, the TDWI-timed news is that Vertica is now available in the Amazon cloud. Of course, the new Vertica cloud offering is:
- Super-easy to set up
- Pay-as-you-go.
Slightly less obviously:
- Vertica insists its software was designed for grid computing from the ground up, and hence doesn’t need Elastra’s administrative aids for starting, stopping, and/or provisioning instances.
- This is a natural fit for new or existing Vertica customers in data mart outsourcing.
Other coverage:
Related link
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Cloud computing, Data warehousing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Vertica Systems | Leave a Comment |
Outsourced data marts
Call me slow on the uptake if you like, but it’s finally dawned on me that outsourced data marts are a nontrivial segment of the analytics business. For example:
- I was just briefed by Vertica, and got the impression that data mart outsourcers may be Vertica’s #3 vertical market, after financial services and telecom. Certainly it seems like they are Vertica’s #3 market if you bundle together data mart outsourcers and more conventional OEMs.
- When Netezza started out, a bunch of its early customers were credit data-based analytics outsourcers like Acxiom.
- After nagging DATAllegro for a production reference, I finally got a good one — TEOCO. TEOCO specializes in figuring out whether inter-carrier telcom bills are correct. While there’s certainly a transactional invoice-processing aspect to this, the business seems to hinge mainly around doing calculations to figure out correct charges.
- I was talking with Pervasive about Pervasive Datarush, a beta product that lets you do super-fast analytics on data even if you never load it into a DBMS in the first place. I challenged them for use cases. One user turns out to be an insurance claims rule-checking outsourcer.
- One of Infobright’s references is a French CRM analytics outsourcer, 1024 Degres.
- 1010data has built up a client base of 50-60, including a number of financial and retail blue-chippers, with a soup-to-nuts BI/analysis/columnar database stack.
- I haven’t heard much about Verix in a while, but their niche was combining internal sales figures with external point-of-sale/prescription data to assess retail (especially pharma) microtrends.
To a first approximation, here’s what I think is going on. Read more
Pervasive is also pursuing simplicity and SaaS integration
I blogged recently about Cast Iron Systems, a simplicity-oriented data integration appliance vendor that is increasingly focusing on the SaaS market. Well, Pervasive Software is doing something similar.
Via Data Integrator, Pervasive is a leader in the low-cost integration market, with revenue split about 50/25/25 between direct sales, ISVs, and SaaS. Pervasive fondly believes that its products cost half as much as Cast Iron’s, and wind up taking no more installation effort when you factor in Pervasive’s broader capabilities in areas such as workflow. However, there’s some doubt as to whether this is apples-to-apples. Cast Iron does include hardware, after all, and as Pervasive itself points out, Cast Iron will bundle some professional services into a sale if you ask nicely.
Two things are new. Read more
| Categories: Cloud computing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Pervasive Software, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 5 Comments |
Elastra launched today
At Elastra’s request, I didn’t write further about them back when I was interested in doing so. But you can go find out about them yourself. Basically, their secret sauce is that they write deployment instructions in a few hundred lines of two proprietary markup languages. They have ambitions beyond DBMS, and beyond the Amazon cloud.
According to their slides, they have 13 paying customers.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Elastra | 1 Comment |
Cast Iron Systems focuses on SaaS data integration
When I wrote about data integration vendor Cast Iron Systems a year ago, its core message was “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” Supporting points included:
- An appliance delivery format.
- Lots of heuristics for automatic mapping and quick set-up. E.g., Cast Iron claims that 70% of a typical SAP-Salesforce.com connection can be done straight out of the box.
- The absence of data cleaning/transformation features that might complicate things.
Cast Iron still believes in all that.
Even so, its messaging has changed a bit. Cast Iron now bills itself, in the first sentence of its press release boilerplate, as “the fastest growing SaaS integration appliance vendor.” And when I talked with marketing chief Simon Peel today, the only use cases we discussed were connections between SaaS and on-premises apps. Read more
| Categories: Cast Iron Systems, Cloud computing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
Microsoft SQL Server Data Services
As usual, Microsoft forgot to brief me, but Mary Jo Foley reports on Microsoft SQL Server Data Services. A look at the official site clarifies that this database-in-a-cloud offering uses “Microsoft SQL Server as a data storage node.” However, there seems to be a software layer on top of SQL Server providing scale-out and appropriate management.
In addition to the more-than-SQL-Server layer, there seems to be a less-than-SQL-Server aspect as well. In a particular, Microsoft SQL Server Data Services boasts “Support for simple types: string, numeric, datetime, boolean.” XML is the “primary wire format,” and hints dropped about the schema philosophy sound XMLish too.
Interestingly, Foley reports that Microsoft plans to offer an on-premises version of Microsoft SQL Server Data Services as well.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Native XML | Leave a Comment |
EnterpriseDB on Elastra, early stages
I finally caught up with Bob Zurek about EnterpriseDB’s foray into the Elastra cloud. Here are some highlights:
- There have been dozens of applicants for the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta program. As is usual in limited beta programs, EnterpriseDB is trying to sort out the ones who’ll make a big commitment from the tire-kickers.
- The main interest in EnterpriseDB/Elastra has come from ISVs, and secondarily from purely online businesses (e.g., SaaS vendors, web businesses, and a large MMO game vendor). There’s been a little interest from enterprises.
- Significant fractions of the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta applications come from each of the Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL user communities. A few come from SQL Server. None come from DB2.
- Bob praised Elastra for its technology in clustering, starting/stopping instances, etc. He also said that EnterpriseDB had “educated” Elastra on EnterpriseDB internals and/or admin tools, to make the integration work.
- EnterpriseDB will start turning on a few beta Elastra customers any day now (i.e., it may well not take until March, the original target).
| Categories: Cloud computing, Elastra, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source | Leave a Comment |
Why not database SaaS?
After a flurry of recent announcements of database SaaS (Software as a Service), eWeek has published a backlash article. The angle is that database SaaS is too expensive, because you can get decent DBMS for free and per-gig usage charges might be expensive for big databases.
I think that’s missing the point. Most OLTP databases are pretty small. Or, if they’re big, they get that way through a lot of transactions. In the first case, hosted management is cheap. In the second case, hosted management is taking care of a large burden for you. Read more
| Categories: Kognitio, OLTP, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
EnterpriseDB joins Elastra in the Amazon cloud
When Elastra announced their service to host MySQL and PostgreSQL in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud, I immediately told my dear darling clients at EnterpriseDB they should do the same. Whereupon they told me it would happen soon. However, they neglected to tell me when it was actually announced. So I know no more than can be found in this Computerworld article.
But I’ll say this — it’s a very tempting option, both for new web-based applications or businesses, or simply as a development platform pending later redeployment.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Elastra, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
The Great MapReduce Debate
Google’s highly parallel file manipulator MapReduce has gotten great attention recently, after a research paper revealed:
- MapReduce is running the core Google search engine, plus much of Google Analytics and other applications.
- MapReduce is processing 400+ petabytes of data per month.
(Niall Kennedy popularized the paper and surveyed its results.)
David DeWitt and Mike Stonebraker then launched a blistering attack on MapReduce, accusing it of disregarding almost all the lessons of database management system theory and practice. A vigorous comment thread has ensued, pointing out that MapReduce is not a DBMS and asserting it therefore shouldn’t be judged as one.
While correct, that defense begs the question – what is MapReduce good for? Proponents of MapReduce highlight two advantages:
- MapReduce makes it very easy to program data transformations, including ones to which relational structures are of little relevance.
- MapReduce runs in massively parallel mode “for free,” without extra programming.
Based on those advantages, MapReduce would indeed seem to have significant uses, including: Read more
| Categories: Cloud computing, MapReduce, Michael Stonebraker | 6 Comments |
LongJump is probably doing something interesting
According to VentureBeat, LongJump is offering a SaaS version of a “relational database architecture.” It’s also a “simple XML server.” And there are apps and workflow management. According to LongJump itself, there is “full search” and “wide palette of field types” and “multi-app mashup.” And since it’s a SaaS offering, the LongJump website also spends a whole page telling us how wonderful RackSpace is.
If VentureBeat got the “relational” part of the story wrong — perhaps out of confusion with Longjump’s parent company’s name “Relationals” — then the rest of it kind of hangs together: XML, composite apps, and so on. Otherwise — well, relational access, XML, and search can certainly be combined in a single package, as per MarkLogic, Attivio, or for that matter Oracle, DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server. But all that and apps and app dev too seem a lot to bite off for a single self-funded startup.
| Categories: Software as a Service (SaaS) | Leave a Comment |
Elastra - somewhat more sensible Amazon-based DBMS option
Elastra is a startup offering MySQL and PostgreSQL SaaS instances in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud. On their board is John Hummer, which I generally regard as a good thing, although it’s hardly a guarantee of success.* High Scalability raises some doubts about Elastra’s pricing, but I think that may be missing the point. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Elastra, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
Amazon SimpleDB - when less is, supposedly, enough
I’ve posted several times about Amazon as an innovative, super-high-end user — doing transactional object caching with ObjectStore, building an inhouse less-than-DBMS called Dynamo, or just generally adopting a very DBMS2-like approach to data management. Now Amazon is bring the Dynamo idea to the public, via a SaaS offering called SimpleDB. (Hat tip to Tim Anderson.)
SimpleDB is obviously meant to be a data server for online applications. There are no joins, and queries don’t run over 5 seconds, so serious analytics are out of the question. Domains are limited to 10GB for now, so extreme media file serving also isn’t what’s intended; indeed, Amazon encourages one to use SimpleDB to store pointers to larger objects stored as files in Amazon S3.
On the other hand, if you think of SimpleDB as an OLTP DBMS, your head might explode. There’s no sense of transaction, no mechanisms to help with integrity, no way to do arithmetic, and indeed no assurance that writes will be immediately reflected in reads. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Data models and architecture, OLTP, Software as a Service (SaaS), Theory and architecture | 4 Comments |
Amazon Dynamo — when primary key access is enough
Amazon has a very decentralized technical operation. But even the individual pieces have interestingly huge scale. Thus, various different things they’re doing are of interest.
They recently presented a research paper on a high-performance transactional system called Dynamo. (Hat tip to Dare Obasanjo.) A key point is the following:
There are many services on Amazon’s platform that only need primary-key access to a data store. For many services, such as those that provide best seller lists, shopping carts, customer preferences, session management, sales rank, and product catalog, the common pattern of using a relational database would lead to inefficiencies and limit scale and availability. Dynamo provides a simple primary-key only interface to meet the requirements of these applications.
Now, I don’t think too many organizations past Amazon are going to decide that they can’t afford the overhead of an RDBMS for such OLTP-like applications. But I do think it will become increasingly common to find other reasons to eschew traditional OLTP relational architectures. Maybe you’ll want the schema flexibility of XML. Or perhaps you’ll be happy with a fixed relational schema, but will want to optimize for analytic performance.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Data models and architecture, Database diversity, OLTP, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
The boom in Salesforce.com integration
SaaS integration is in the air.
- I recently talked with Pervasive Software about their data integration line. A large part of Pervasive’s new business is Salesforce.com integration, including at some big-name software vendors as customer/partner switch-hitters.
- I just rechecked my notes from my January talk with Cast Iron Systems. A large part of Cast Iron’s new business is also integration with Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and other SaaS vendors.
- Informatica keeps putting out press releases about Salesforce.com integration, most recently by offering replication in SaaS form itself.
But of course this makes sense. Without good data integration, SaaS applications would be pretty useless, at least at large and medium-sized enterprises.
