EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

When I picked “The Journey to the Cloud” as the working title for one of my fall research projects, I triggered some immediate reactions from colleagues and customers, whose opinions I value. And while I typically do not place too much importance on selecting a working title and also did not intend to just warm up an earlier research piece on that same topic, these reactions prompted me to take a minute to think about how we can best target our research for maximum customer benefit. As EMA is conducting this research for our customers – vendors and end users – why not talk to exactly these people to find out which specific issues they want to learn more about? And so we did…

Cloud is still a rapidly evolving discipline, with currently many organizations thinking about how to get started or how to take their limited cloud environment to the next level. These organizations are faced with two general challenges. They have to a) get their own house – data center – in order and b) identify a shortlist of vendors that best fit their individual requirements.

Every March, IBM invites customers and analysts to its annual Pulse user conference. This year, Pulse was all about the more efficient delivery of IT services, a concept that is usually referred to as “cloud”. Since cloud has developed into a term that, due to its overuse, is often frowned upon, to say the least, it was great to see IBM try hard to demystify this elusive concept, backing it up with numerous case studies and customer testimonials. The fact that many of these case studies were not as polished as you so often see during this type of show, made the experience actually better. It became clear that these were real customers, implementing “cloud” to solve very specific corporate problems and while doing this, running into very specific IT problems. This is something that just happens when breaking new ground and it speaks for IBM’s self confidence to not present only squeaky clean projects at its show.

Informatica Goal: Maximize Return on Data

The theme of last week’s Informatica Analyst Conference was utilizing the “secular megatrends” of information technology to energize data integration across organizations at an enterprise scale.  These megatrends, described as trends we can all agree upon, are the following:

MicroStrategy adds Teradata to list of Cloud Partners

This week at the MicroStrategy World 2012 Conference in Miami Teradata and MicroStrategy announced that Teradata Integrated Data Warehouse (IDW) was being added to the lineup of partners for the MicroStrategy Cloud.  The list of partners includes:

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.

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.

The industry seems to be nearing an inflection point in its attitudes towards cloud computing—as best I can tell from headlines, commentaries and ongoing dialog with IT deployments and vendors.   If I had to put a few simple words around it, the era of “mythic hype” surrounding cloud is nearing its end and diffusing into a much [...]

See Dennis’ recent blog post on the state of cloud computing, posted at BSM Digest, here: http://www.bsmdigest.com/clouds-iron-fist

EMA conducted four research studies during Q4 2010 with over 400 respondents in total.  While the topics of these studies varied from two cloud computing topics and two asset management topics, we always include a standard set of demographic questions and budget questions.  I asked our Survey Production & Research Analytics Manager, Sylvia Rimmington, to combine the budgetary data from these four studies into a single analysis and compare this data with similar data from Q4 2009.