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:
If you look at the history of Big Data requirements (volume, velocity and variety), and the NoSQL platforms supporting those requirements, you see a history of organizations and development teams breaking the mold of traditional information technology (IT) programs. Instead of following the traditional IT methodologies to solve the Big Data issues, these teams pushed the envelope and invented new technologies to solve those “volume, velocity and variety” problems. More often than not, these efforts were accomplished using collaborative, bottom-up methodologies, such as Open Source, rather than rigid, top-down approaches found in traditional product development methodologies. Specifically, if you look at the history of the Hadoop development at Yahoo, you see an approach that sought the input and wide spread resources of the Open Source movement rather than a more rigid proprietary approach.
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:
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.
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).
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.
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:
Yesterday, Oracle announced their intent to purchase Endeca, a vendor of unstructured data management and web commerce solutions.
Many times when discussing the topic of big-data, the focus is on the volume of the data, the structure of the data or the near real-time analysis requirements of the data. We toss around buzzwords like Hadoop, structured vs unstructured, etc…. However, often times what is missed are the analysis goals of the big-data environment.
