EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

IT as a Service is one of the hottest topics these days. In a nutshell, it entails the radical alignment of all IT disciplines around strategic business requirements. Instead of having to beg IT for resources and services, as many of us are accustomed to, we can now pick all the resources and services from an easy-to-use online catalog. Workload automation features are finally becoming part of this service catalog, allowing business users to trigger, monitor, and even repair essential job flows.

In-Memory and Mobile Drive SAP

Today, SAP announced their revenues for 2011.  It was a record year in many respects.  In particular, SAP touted growth for their in-memory database HANA and their Mobile Solutions growth – two components I consider important for the development of an organizations Mobile BI capabilities.  Both exceeded expectations.

For the past two decades or so, several leading IT management vendors have tried to convince us that organizations should invest in a single unified management platform for supporting all of IT management needs.  Setting aside for the moment the fact that such an animal does not and cannot possibly exist (no vendor has the capital to develop every possible IT management product– I don’t care who they are), the value proposition of a single vendor uber-solution is flawed.  Sure, it sounds great to have one centralized console for accessing all automated support functions, and being able to deal with one vendor and one product set may seem like it will simplify management processes, but in reality this is not likely to be the case.   Primary deterrents to all-in-one solutions include:

Desktop PCs and laptops are the backbone of business profitability.  Yes, yes … I know … last week I raved about the rising mobile device revolution – but that transition is still a few years off.  Today the PC desktop remains king in enabling enterprise workforce productivity, and, in fact, organizational success and ongoing profitability is tied at the hip to desktop and laptop performance in most modern enterprises.  Unfortunately, management of these endpoints persists in being a nightmare to perform.  Consider your own home PC environment – how much time do you spend on installations, patch updates, and performance improvements, not to mention repairs from system crashes, malware intrusion, and software incompatibilities.  Now extend these challenges to hundreds or thousands or even millions of endpoints, and you get some sense of the daunting task facing IT managers.

A friend of mine recently asked why I am even still interested in enterprise computing when all the innovation is happening within the consumer electronics sector. Smartphones, tablet computers, e-book readers, and audio streaming devices have changed the way we live our daily lives. Now that I read the NYTimes on my iPad, I get through a substantially larger part of the newspaper, compared to when I was reading the paper edition. Now that I use “Read it Later,” I finally get to actually read all the interesting website articles that I bookmark during my workday, while relaxing in the evening on the couch with my iPad. Since I have Rhapsody on my iPhone, I get to actually listen to my favorite rare albums while driving to work. My Squeezebox streaming music players on my nightstand and in my living room allow me to listen to my favorite global radio stations, or I can create my own custom channels, by entering a number of my favorite bands. My home alarm system is controlled through an online dashboard or an iPad/iPhone app, so that I can turn off specific motion sensors or the entire system remotely.

Codeless BI from Altosoft

Recently I received a briefing from Altosoft to take a look at their 4th generation product – Altosoft’s Insight Release 4.  Altosoft Insight is a single unified business intelligence environment that contains the entire stack from ETL to data visualization.  This integrated environment allows for Altosoft users to have a completely (if desired) code/scripting-free implementation.  The integrated environment also allows for the automatic management of metadata and data mart storage optimization.
This “removal” of coding and scripting from an implementation removes many of the barriers, that business users and less robust IT departments may have, in implementing a BI environment.  The development interface is clean.  The point-and-click choices make the creation and implementation of a BI analytic dashboard less costly than it might be with a different environment.  This brings down time to implementation and ongoing maintenance issues.  With this approach, Altosoft promises to increase speed to implementation and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

Birst Announces Optimized In-Memory Database

TIBCO Updates Cloud-based Analytics

In September, TIBCO Software announced the latest update of its on-demand business analytics platform -  TIBCO Silver Spotfire® 2.0.  The prepackaged graph, chart and dashboard functionality in TIBCO Silver Spotfire 2.0 provides the type of data visualization functionality non-IT staff members can deploy easily.  This functionality has a level of maturity that business users will adopt quickly.  TIBCO Silver Spotfire provides an overall speed to implementation that allows organizations developing their business intelligence and data visualization requirements to make quick adjustments to existing business intelligence projects within Silver Spotfire 2.0 and fast implementations to either develop prototype visualizations or implements new business intelligence requirements.

See Dennis’ recent article on APM and BSM, posted at APM Digest, here: http://www.apmdigest.com/apm-and-bsm-evolution-confusion-and-business-ownership

Microstrategy Alert and Wisdom

When you take a look at the “stickiness” of the experience and amount of consumer information on Facebook, you see many intriguing concepts that make marketeers salivate: