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
Sneakernet to the cloud
Recently, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels put up a blog post which suggested that, now and in the future, the best way to get large databases into the cloud is via sneakernet. In some circumstances, he is surely right. Possible implications include:
- When sending data to the cloud, you probably want to compress it to the max before sending. Clearpace’s new RainStor structured-data archiving service emphasizes that idea. RainStor marketing says cloud, cloud, cloud — but Clearpace thinks you really should have a bit of its software onsite too, to compress the data before sending it across the wire.
- Getting data from one cloud to another cloud could be problematic. I’m fond of saying that weblog data naturally lives in the cloud at your hosting company’s location, so you should analyze it there too. But this makes the most sense if you analyze it or at least filter/reduce it in place. (That said, the really, really big web companies have lots of different data centers, and presumably do move huge amounts of log data from place to place.)
But for one-time moves of data sets — sure, sneaker net/snail mail should work just fine.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Database compression, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Web analytics | 1 Comment |
Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Amazon is introducing a beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce. What it boils down to is cheap, on-demand Hadoop.
This seems like a great way to experiment with MapReduce and see if you like it. But for serious use, I don’t know why you wouldn’t prefer MapReduce more closely integrated into a DBMS.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, MapReduce | 1 Comment |
April Fool’s Day highlights
Amazon says it’s taking “cloud” computing to new heights, as it were.
Derivative funds and large government-subsidized entities will be especially interested in FACE’s transmodal operation. They can allocate a dedicated FACE, load it up with data, and then send it out to sea to perform advanced processing in safety. The government will have absolutely no chance of acting against them, because they will be too busy trying to decide which Federal Air Regulation (FAR) was violated, not to mention scheduling news conferences.
First excellent April Fool’s joke I saw this year was from The Guardian. The best so far is from Expedia. Others are linked in my Twitter feed. And personally, I’m encouraging the concept of April No-Fooling Day.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Humor | Leave a Comment |
SAS in its own cloud
The Register has a fairly detailed article about SAS expanding its cloud/SaaS offerings. I disagree with one part, namely:
SAS may not have a choice but to build its own cloud. Given the sensitive nature of the data its customers analyze, moving that data out to a public cloud such as the Amazon EC2 and S3 combo is just not going to happen.
And even if rugged security could make customers comfortable with that idea, moving large data sets into clouds (as Sun Microsystems discovered with the Sun Grid) is problematic. Even if you can parallelize the uploads of large data sets, it takes time.
But if you run the applications locally in the SAS cloud, then doing further analysis on that data is no big deal. It’s all on the same SAN anyway, locked down locally just as you would do in your own data center.
I fail to see why SAS’s campus would be better than leading hosting companies’ data centers for either of data privacy/security or data upload speed. Rather, I think major reasons for SAS building its own data center for cloud computing probably focus on: Read more
| Categories: SAS Institute, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 15 Comments |
IBM in the cloud
IBM is making DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, and other products available in the Amazon cloud. The press release says test and development are free, while production will be charged at an hourly rate. No doubt more price details will be forthcoming when the whole thing is fully in production.
Frankly, I’ve lost track of who all has some kind of cloud or SaaS offering now. The list is at least Oracle, IBM, presumably Microsoft, MySQL (via Elastra, and also at almost every web host), PostgreSQL (ditto, more or less), EnterpriseDB, Kognitio, Vertica, Netezza, Aster Data. No doubt I’m forgetting a bunch more.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Data warehousing, IBM and DB2, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Aster Data in the cloud
Aster Data is in the news, bragging about a cloud version of nCluster, and providing both a press release and a blog post on the subject. It seems there are three actual customers, two of which have been publicly named. One of them, ShareThis, is in production. (2 terabytes of data on 9 nodes, planning to scale to 10-18 TB on 24 or so nodes by year-end.) All seem to be doing something in the area of internet marketing, web analytics or otherwise — which makes sense, as the same could be said of almost all Aster customers overall. That said, it seems that these customers are doing their primary analytic processing remotely, which makes Aster’s experience in that regard more akin to Kognitio’s than to Vertica’s. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Application areas, Aster Data, Cloud computing, Data warehousing, MapReduce, Software as a Service (SaaS), Web analytics | 1 Comment |
Database SaaS gains a little visibility
Way back in the 1970s, a huge fraction of analytic database management was done via timesharing, specifically in connection with the RAMIS and FOCUS business-intelligence-precursor fourth-generation languages. (Both were written by Gerry Cohen, who built his company Information Builders around the latter one.) The market for remoting-computing business intelligence has never wholly gone away since. Indeed, it’s being revived now, via everything from the analytics part of Salesforce.com to the service category I call data mart outsourcing.
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: Read more
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 | 7 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 | 1 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 |
