Cutter Consortium: Business Intelligence

Responsiveness or Efficiency -- Pick One, But Agile Works Better with the Former

22 Oct 2009 22:52:51 GMT

Highsmith, Jim | E-Mail Advisors | 22 October 2009 | Agile Project Management; Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence; Innovation

In his book Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World, Michael Hugos, who is also a columnist for CIO magazine, talks about two fundamental business strategies: responsiveness and efficiency. While a company or business unit surely tries to be both responsive and efficient, one strategy tends to dominate; for example, no one does efficiency better than Wal-mart.

http://www.cutter.com/content/project/fulltext/advisor/2009/apm091022.html

Viability of the Cloud Model Still Up in the Air

20 Oct 2009 22:43:32 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 20 October 2009 | Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships

Back in June, I discussed how, after almost four years, BI software as a service (SaaS) provider LucidEra was considering calling it quits (see "As SaaS Provider Quits, What Happens to Its Data?" 30 June 2009). Just to refresh your memory, LucidEra, founded in 2005, offers a number of on-demand BI applications, including those for customer lead insight and pipeline and order analysis. But unable to secure new funding, LucidEra reached the point where company officers began looking to sell off its intellectual property. It appears that, to some extent, this has now happened, as commercial open source BI provider Pentaho Corporation has acquired LucidEra's ClearView reporting tool technology. Pentaho plans to repackage the LucidEra tool and offer it as a front end friendly to business users for Pentaho's on-site open source BI platform and for use with SaaS deployments.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia091020.html

Opening Up Enterprise Mashups

13 Oct 2009 22:32:33 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 13 October 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

Enterprise mashups increasingly are becoming part of companies' toolkits when it comes to integrating data for BI and other decision-support applications. According to our research [1], approximately 24% of end-user organizations currently use mashups to combine multiple data sources into a single source to feed BI applications like dashboards, maps (i.e., mapping and GIS), visualization tools, desktop productivity tools (spreadsheets, etc.), customer relationship management (CRM), and other decision support systems. But while their popularity has grown, the problem of incompatibility across different vendors' mashup tools has been a thorn in the side of some end-user organizations' adoption plans due to fears of platform interoperability and vendor lock-in issues. The Open Mashup Alliance (OMA) seeks to correct this problem.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia091013.html

Don't Dismiss Open Source BI's Effect on Traditional BI Software Licensing

7 Oct 2009 00:47:39 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 06 October 2009 | Business Intelligence

The use of open source BI and data warehousing tools continues to gain increasing acceptance by end-user organizations. But one of the big questions on a lot of people's minds is: what effect is open source BI adoption having on traditional BI software licensing?

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia091006.html

Roiled Waters: Corporate BI and Data Warehouse Spending in Troubled Times

7 Oct 2009 00:45:27 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 06 October 2009 | Business Intelligence

In June and July 2009, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 79 end-user organizations about their various BI and data warehousing efforts. One set of questions sought to determine the impact of the economic downturn on BI and data warehousing spending. In short, my goal was to identify trends that you can use to gauge your own organization's BI and data warehousing spending efforts during this period of economic uncertainty.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0912.html

BIRT Meets Infobright -- Open Source BI Matures

29 Sep 2009 19:20:15 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 29 September 2009 | Business Intelligence

This week saw an interesting development in which Actuate and Infobright teamed up to offer an open source BI solution that combines the former's open source reporting tools with the latter's open source data warehousing database. This effort is interesting for several reasons. For one, the toolset is packaged as a virtual machine (VM), which allows users to try it out and start prototyping their own applications without installing or configuring the software. Moreover, it shows the kind of innovative, collaborative BI offerings that are now possible -- and which I expect to continue to see a lot more of -- due to the increasing proliferation of open source BI and data warehousing technology.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090929.html

Reforming Healthcare and Insurance with BI and Data Warehousing: Some Innovative Applications

23 Sep 2009 01:38:52 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 22 September 2009 | Business Intelligence; Innovation

All the recent talk in the US surrounding proposed healthcare reform has inspired me to take a look at how BI and data warehousing are making an impact on healthcare and medicine. For our international readers who've not been following the healthcare debate in the US, the political discourse has reached a level of circuslike behavior. It has become, as my good British friend so understatedly put it, "most distasteful." But the applications covered here show that organizations are taking matters into their own hands by using IT to help optimize healthcare operations. One represents one of the most innovative uses of BI I've seen in a long time: an application developed by Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) for uncovering and tracking possible swine flu (H1N1) outbreaks. Another involves a very large data migration project at UK-based health insurance and care company Bupa.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090922.html

BI Search: Enabling Technologies, Functionality, and Enterprise Status

16 Sep 2009 01:24:42 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 15 September 2009 | Business Intelligence

Search is having a major influence on BI and data retrieval and analysis in general. Although the technology is still developing, the combination of BI and search is important because it can provide nontechnical business users and BI consumers with easier access to -- and the ability to analyze -- both structured and unstructured information.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090915.html

Informatica Acquires Agent Logic -- Bolsters Data Integration with Complex Event Processing

8 Sep 2009 19:43:50 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 08 September 2009 | Business Intelligence

Data integration vendor Informatica Corporation announced it is buying complex event processing (CEP) software vendor Agent Logic. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed. Still, this development is significant because it will combine the capabilities of Informatica's data integration tools with Agent Logic's rules-based CEP platform. This will add the ability to monitor, aggregate, and analyze information in near real time from a wide range of sources -- including distributed messaging systems, Web logs, databases, enterprise applications, and devices like RFID systems and sensors. Before considering the acquisition, I will briefly comment on CEP.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090908.html

A New Look at the Data Lifecycle for Today's Businesses: Data for Information Management

3 Sep 2009 19:39:08 GMT

Gupta, Vishal; Bhatt, Yogesh | Executive Updates | 03 September 2009 | Business Intelligence

"Your strategic and corporate reporting will be as effective as your operational system's performance management is" -- every organization or enterprise understands this one-liner. The question is how many work toward making sure this happens. The prime need for every enterprise revolves around making sure the performance management for decision making is backed by a solid foundation of effective data quality and provides the capability to tackle larger concerns, such as regulatory compliance, customer churn, and growth in new lines of business, security, and privacy.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0911.html

Complex Event Processing: The Vendors

2 Sep 2009 19:37:03 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 02 September 2009 | Enterprise Architecture; Business Intelligence

As I pointed out in last week's Advisor (see "Complex Event Processing," 26 August 2009), complex event processing (CEP) remains an emerging technology that holds the promise of enabling companies to increase operational efficiency by providing a means to identify and interpret the effect of seemingly unrelated events taking place across the organization and then notifying the appropriate stakeholders with near zero latency.

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2009/ea090902.html

Web 2.0: Yawn?

1 Aug 2009 19:34:11 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 01 September 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

I've been talking with friends and colleagues over the last few days about which current IT technologies and concepts will still be in vogue two years from now. Of course, "Web 2.0" immediately came up. Most agreed that Web 2.0 has been overhyped to the point where it seems that an almost mystical quality has been imparted to the technologies (blogs, wikis, social nets, etc.) of which it is composed. But when it came to the question of whether we'll still be talking about Web 2.0 in a few years the same way we do today, there was disagreement. About half said that Web 2.0 would still be highly regarded, perhaps even more so than today, while the other half said the hype will have played itself out. I happen to agree that the hype surrounding Web 2.0 will have largely receded, but not because the concept has been proved wrong.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090901.html

New Additions to the BIA Resource Center

31 Aug 2009 15:58:25 GMT

The Evolution of BPM: Part I -- Workflow to Process by Paul Allen

Enterprise Mashups in the IT Environment by Brian J. Dooley

Business Intelligence Virtualization: Benefits and Issues

25 Aug 2009 15:18:46 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 25 August 2009 | Business Intelligence

The recent announcement by BI vendor MicroStrategy, Inc., that its BI toolset (MicroStrategy 9) has been certified to run on the VMware virtualization platform has me thinking more about the possible benefits and issues of operating BI systems in virtualization environments.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090825.html

Satisfaction with On-Demand/Cloud-Based Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Remains High

18 Aug 2009 15:08:50 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 18 August 2009 | Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships

The majority of organizations using on-demand or cloud-based BI and data warehousing are basically satisfied with their solutions. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in May-July of 79 end-user organizations (based worldwide), which was designed to measure the corporate adoption of various software as a service (SaaS)/on-demand and cloud-based BI and data warehousing technologies and practices.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090818.html

Cost-Benefit Studies for On-Demand BI, Data Warehousing Find Favor

11 Aug 2009 14:49:46 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 11 August 2009 | Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships

About one-fifth of end-user organizations surveyed have conducted studies in order to estimate cost savings and possible benefits from using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions, and a clear majority of the results from these studies were found to be favorable. These findings were taken from a recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in May-July 2009) of 79 end-user organizations (based worldwide), which was designed to measure the corporate adoption of various software as a service (SaaS)/on-demand and cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090811.html

System and Process Maps for Decision Support Systems: Tracing the Data Lineage End to End

10 Aug 2009 14:47:17 GMT

Ramakrishnan, Babu Narayanan | Executive Updates | 10 August 2009 | Business Intelligence

This Executive Update touches on a solution for recording and maintaining the data lineage for decision support systems (DSSs). The aim is to increase the effectiveness and pace of impact analysis for enhancements and root-cause analysis of data issues. The solution explores the idea of connecting ETL and BI metadata via a custom-built metadata repository provisioning an end-to-end view of data from upstream to downstream.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0910.html

Top Odds: SPSS Purchase to Make IBM a Predictive Analytics Power

4 Aug 2009 14:37:55 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 04 August 2009 | Business Intelligence

Last week, it was Oracle Corporation buying real-time data integration vendor GoldenGate Software, Inc. (see "Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Adds Real-Time Data Integration and 'Zero-Downtime' Migration Tools," 28 July 2009). This week, it's IBM acquiring data mining and statistical analysis tools vendor SPSS, Inc. for US $1.2 billion. In contrast to Oracle's latest acquisition, IBM's move is strategic because it will immediately make IBM a major contender in the estimated $25 billion annual business analytics software market.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090804.html

Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Adds Real-Time Data Integration and "Zero-Downtime" Migration Tools

28 Jul 2009 16:36:45 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 28 July 2009 | Business Intelligence

Oracle Corporation is buying real-time data integration vendor GoldenGate Software, Inc. Although this deal can hardly be considered a strategic acquisition (financial terms were not disclosed), it is important, nevertheless, because it gives Oracle several real-time data integration technologies. These include changed data capture (CDC) and "zero-downtime" data migration tools that Oracle can incorporate with its current data integration, middleware, BI, CRM, and packaged enterprise applications offerings.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090728.html

Workforce Analytics in the Context of Business Performance Management

23 Jul 2009 16:30:53 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 23 July 2009 | Business Intelligence

Compared with other areas of the enterprise, human resources (HR) has been the "weak kid on the block" when it comes to the application of BI analytics. But due to an accelerated interest in business performance management, and, in particular, a high level of uncertainty surrounding staffing requirements caused by the current economic downturn, organizations have expressed a renewed interest in applying BI and business performance management techniques to better analyze their human capital investments. The aim is to be able to better align employees, job functions, workforce competencies, individual skills, and training and development needs with organizational goals and performance, and to monitor and analyze the results. In short, the new focus is on HR taking a more significant role in performance management, which has resulted in a new generation of workforce analytics applications.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0909.html

Living on the Web: Digital Life and Death in the Early 21st Century

1 May 2009 15:03:05 GMT

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Reports | 01 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

Quite simply, the Web has a huge impact on our personal and professional lives. It will continue to do so, becoming the dominant platform for everything from communication to business transaction processing. Within a decade, the personal/professional merger will be complete with virtually no distinctions between what we do to live and what we do to work. In this Executive Report, I predict that significant aspects of our lives will move to the Web, be managed by Web-based providers, and support an agility and mobility that we’re unable to define or fully appreciate today. This means that everyone will become immersed within, and dependent upon, the Web. I also explore the notion that moving to the Web has benefits that extend beyond this agility and mobility and is likely to change the way we all think about a wide range of activities.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2009/05/index.html

New Additions

1 Jul 2009 14:39:52 GMT

IT Services and Service Functionality: The New Frontier of Opportunity by Gabriele Piccoli
Service Functionality: Using IT to Better Serve Your Customers by Ron Cenfetelli
Delivering IT Services that Matter by Peter McGarahan
IT-Enabled Services: A Huge Opportunity ... Too Often Missed! by Gabriele Piccoli
Leveraging IT in Customer Service Survey Data

http://www.cutter.com/bia.html

Security, Privacy Worries Still Hinder Greater Use of On-Demand/Cloud-Based BI

21 Jul 2009 14:30:45 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 21 July 2009 | Business Intelligence

Security and privacy concerns remain the leading issues preventing more organizations from using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions. Infrastructure control issues and strategic considerations pertaining to the perceived value of in-house BI operations follow this. A number of other, more complex issues are also holding some organizations back from using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090721.html

On-Demand/Cloud-Based BI Solutions: What's the Story for Traditional Software Licensing?

14 Jul 2009 14:16:06 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 14 July 2009 | Business Intelligence

The option of using on-demand and cloud-based BI and data warehousing (DW) solutions is causing some end-user organizations to forego or reconsider renewing some of their existing BI/DW software licenses. At this time, however, this trend is limited. The majority of organizations are keeping their existing traditional (i.e., on-premise) BI software and DW licenses but are using on-demand/cloud-based solutions to augment their existing BI data management and analysis needs.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090714.html

Greenplum's Enterprise Data Cloud

16 Jun 2009 19:56:17 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 16 June 2009 | Business Intelligence

Data warehousing database vendor Greenplum has launched what the company calls its "Enterprise Data Cloud" (EDC) initiative. EDC builds on Greenplum's flagship massively parallel data warehousing database -- optimized for analytics and dynamic scalability -- and the concept of self-service provisioning.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090616.html

BI Information Interoperability: From the Database to the Data Stream

16 Jun 2009 19:54:29 GMT

Di Maio, Paola | Executive Updates | 16 June 2009 | Business Intelligence

The capabilities delivered by BI technologies, which provide computational power, speed, and capacity, do not always address and resolve the issues derived from the lack of interoperability of disparate data sets. While information at the core is always some form of data, enterprises understand the importance of capturing intelligence from unstructured information where it is known as "knowledge," which by definition comes from disparate, unsorted, and nonhomogeneous sources.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0908.html

Are You at the Controls? Do You Know Where Your Data Is?

10 Jun 2009 19:43:38 GMT

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 10 June 2009 | Enterprise Architecture; Business Intelligence; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance

Perhaps you remember the public service campaign from 1960s television that went something like, "It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?" For IT, we could rephrase it as; "It's 2009. Do you know where your data is?" You probably don't, especially if it's in the hands of your partners or outsourcers. So, the answer to the question in the title of this Advisor is most likely, "I don't know."

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2009/ea090610.html

Mining Social Media Via Sentiment Analysis

9 Jun 2009 19:41:27 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 09 June 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

I've been researching the state of the art in mining social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, CNET Reviews, Epicurious, IMDb, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Finance, Amazon, and WebMD. Today, cutting-edge organizations -- especially their marketing and PR departments -- are struggling to make sense out of what's being said about their companies and products on a variety of social media sites, sites that are now responsible for incredible amounts of user-generated content. Basically, you can consider these sites interactive forums offering a wealth of information expressing consumer sentiment, preferences, and trends, which, in effect, are helping to shape consumer behavior.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090609.html

Consider Casting Into the System S Stream for "Perpetual Analysis"

2 Jun 2009 16:12:53 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 02 June 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

IBM has announced the availability of what the company is calling "stream computing" software that can analyze high volumes of continuously streaming data -- both structured and unstructured -- in real time. "System S" is for implementing what IBM developers call "perpetual analytics." It uses a new streaming architecture and mathematical algorithms to create a forward-looking analysis of data, and to continuously refine its findings as additional data is made available.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090602.html

The Real Benefits of BI Search

26 May 2009 16:01:28 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 26 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

Last week, I discussed SAP AG's new Business Objects tool that combines BI reporting and analysis with functionality that is like an Internet search engine: SAP Business Objects Explorer (see "SAP Business Objects Explorer: BI Search Meets ERP, But Will It Accelerate Adoption of BI Search?," 19 May 2009). I also said that I thought the introduction of Explorer would lead to the greater acceptance of BI search tools among end-user organizations because it will help to validate the technology. Judging from the number of people who've contacted me regarding BI search, I think that Explorer is definitely generating increased interest in the technology.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090526.html

Implementation Strategy for Portal Adoption

22 May 2009 15:49:44 GMT

Mutha, Mohit C. | Executive Updates | 22 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

Portals provide a common user interface (UI) platform for federating varied content and applications. In addition, portal server products offer out-of-the-box features such as personalization, security, and administrative control. The portal server also provides several customization hooks for layout, themes, skins, security, and so forth. Compared with building a custom Web application having these features, portal servers are an attractive choice for decentralized content and module management, configurable UI, personalization and customization, short time to market, and maintainability.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0907.html

SAP Business Objects Explorer: BI Search Meets ERP, But Will It Accelerate Adoption of BI Search?

19 May 2009 15:37:01 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 19 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

SAP/Business Objects' representatives bill its new BI search tool as a way for companies to disseminate BI functionality throughout their organizations to business users -- a sort of "self-service" BI tool for nontechies that makes finding and analyzing information as easy as using Google or Yahoo! search. Business Objects Explorer is an impressive tool. But to date, use of BI search by end-user organizations has been limited. So will SAP throwing its weight behind Explorer lead to increased acceptance of BI search? Before attempting to answer this question, I first need to explain Explorer in more detail.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090519.html

On-Demand, Cloud-Based BI and Data Warehousing: Prime-Time Players in a Down Economy or Over-Hyped Technologies?

12 May 2009 15:19:15 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 12 May 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships; Business Intelligence

Organizations today may choose from a broad range of on-demand and "cloud-based" BI and data warehousing options, ranging from reporting, dashboards, and focused analytic applications (offered as licensable services) to hosted data integration services and full-blown managed data warehouses. These on-demand providers hope to benefit from a down economy by offering organizations a way to forgo having to implement costly data warehousing and BI applications inhouse, in effect offering to "rent" them a "solution" to help with their data integration, data management, and reporting and analysis needs.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090512.html

RDBMS Versus MapReduce -- Why the Feud? Just Integrate

5 May 2009 15:58:22 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 05 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

A schism has been brewing between traditional RDBMS (relational database management system) fans and proponents of the MapReduce data-crunching technology pioneered by Google and made popular by the open source Hadoop framework. This feud is apt to intensify with the upcoming publication of A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis; MapReduce vs. DBMS Benchmarks, a report slated for the June issue of the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGMOD RECORD journal on data management.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090505.html

Case Study: GHDOnline Aims to Break Ground Sharing Health Data

30 Apr 2009 15:54:15 GMT

Sullivan, Erin | E-Mail Advisors | 30 April 2009 | Innovation; Business Intelligence

The Web, in the last couple of years, has changed dramatically. Tens of millions of people are now -- for the first time -- actively participating in online communities. Social and professional networking sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have attracted millions, and the average age of users continues to rise. Scores of people are participating in community-driven news sites where like-minded users, not the Web site publishers, determine what news is most interesting and important on any given day.

http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2009/iea090430.html

Oracle Buys Sun: So What Happens with MySQL?

28 Apr 2009 15:47:04 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 28 April 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

In a strange twist of fate, the annual MySQL Conference was just getting underway in Santa Clara, California, USA, when news hit that Oracle Corporation was acquiring Sun and, along with it, MySQL. That the most aggressive enterprise software company was buying the world's leading open source database struck like lightning. After all, it had been only about 16 months since Sun had acquired MySQL for US $1 billion, and proponents of the open source database were still griping about Sun's efforts to steer and develop the technology. So it's quite understandable that MySQL fans should be a bit apprehensive about what Oracle might have in store for the database. Here's what I think will happen with MySQL under Oracle's stewardship.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090428.html

Googleplex, We Have a Problem!

23 Apr 2009 15:40:26 GMT

Orr, Ken | E-Mail Advisors | 23 April 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence

Before you do anything else, please go and read the Boston Globe article headlined "Electronic Health Records Raise Doubt" (13 April 2009). It is the story of one fellow who decided to take advantage of Google's vaunted Google Health free health records systems -- and it is not encouraging. The Globe's story revolves around one Dave deBronkart, who decided to transfer his medical records from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to Google Health. When he went to look at his records, he was shocked to find a large number of serious mistakes:

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090423.html

Kick-Start MySQL Data Warehouses with Kickfire

21 Mar 2009 15:35:09 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 21 April 2009 | Business Intelligence

Silicon Valley startup Kickfire, Inc. has developed a new data-warehousing appliance based on the open source MySQL database. Kickfire is a "true" appliance. By which I mean it packages both software and hardware designed specifically to support data warehousing and BI applications (as opposed to just providing specifications or reference architectures for various hardware/software bundles).

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090421.html

New Survey: Personal Productivity Tools and Systems

31 Mar 2009 22:27:57 GMT

Respond to our survey on Corporate Adoption of On-Demand BI and Data Warehousing and get a free copy of "The Business Technology Optimization Audit: Finding the Make Money/Save Money Zone."

http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/254734/1623/

Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloudera, EC2, and BI

14 Mar 2009 14:58:16 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 14 April 2009 | Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships

Recent developments have brought together parallel processing and cloud computing technologies in such a way that they are set to change the way organizations look at analyzing massive amounts of data. In fact, I believe that these developments hold the promise of ushering in a new era in high-end, affordable data analysis. And the cool thing about it is that this era isn't a few years "down the road"; it's here, now. I'm referring to the commercialization of the open source Hadoop and MapReduce distributed processing framework, Amazon's cloud-based version of these tools -- now available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform for anyone to rent -- and the rise of new startups, such as Cloudera, to help businesses apply these tools to data mining and other enterprise BI applications.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090414.html

Business Performance Management Outlook: Some Scale Back; Majority Move in Increments

7 Mar 2009 13:16:13 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 07 April 2009 | Business Intelligence

At the beginning of the year, I said that the most important BI-related initiative for organizations in 2009 would remain business performance management (see "Business Performance Management Tops '09 Strategy List," 6 January 2009). I said in that Advisor that more organizations than ever before consider business performance management a strategic application. I added that, even with a souring economy, I believed that most organizations were going to continue their performance management initiatives. As I mentioned, one of the main reasons organizations will stick with these initiatives is that the primary sponsors of most organizations' business performance management initiatives are top executives and functional unit executives, thus making it difficult to routinely cut these projects.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090407.html

Open Source BI in the Cloud: A Look at Pentaho 3.0

31 Mar 2009 13:08:49 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 31 March 2009 | Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships

In a recent BI Executive Update (see "Open Source BI and Data Warehousing: New Directions," Vol. 9, No. 2), I discussed the possible impact on the BI market caused by end-user organizations adopting open source BI tools. Basically, I wrote that the commercial BI vendors are also offering alternatives to standard software licenses for BI products. The most important are BI tools, applications, and services in the form of software as a service (SaaS) or on-demand (i.e., so-called "cloud-based") BI offerings. In short, I wrote that some end-user organizations are undoubtedly going to consider SaaS/on-demand BI offerings in place of open source BI software in order to take advantage of the benefits afforded by the on-demand model. I added that, in some sense, SaaS/on-demand BI could be seen as a competitor to the appeal of open source BI. But what about giving end-user organizations the choice of deploying open source BI applications in the cloud? That's exactly what open source BI vendor Pentaho is offering.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090331.html

Corporate Adoption of Web 2.0 in Support of Collaborative BI

31 Mar 2009 16:54:30 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 31 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Web 2.0 has been one of the leading buzzwords in the IT media and press over the past few years. But the question on everyone's mind is: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting Web 2.0 techniques, such as blogs, wikis, social networks, IM, and other technologies? In particular, I'm especially interested in the extent that organizations are applying Web 2.0 to support their BI users with better collaboration and ways to disseminate information.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0906.html

New Metrics for Managing Turbulent Times

1 Mar 2009 14:37:16 GMT

Mah, Michael C. | Journals | 01 March 2009 | Cutter IT Journal

The current economic downturn has cut a deep gash in the economies of virtually every country and industry, affecting people's lives in ways not seen in over 50 years. There is no doubt that we are now firmly on the scarcity side of the abundance/scarcity continuum, so the question is, where do we go from here? For many, cost cutting is now the order of the day. Others may see opportunity. In the last economic downturn, as their competitors slashed investments, companies such as Intel and IBM famously invested in R&D, thereby generating record profits in technologies like Wi-Fi once the economy recovered. Will organizations try to cost-cut their way out of this crisis, or can they find ways to invest through the downturn? How will IT managers make tough decisions in light of the economic conditions their companies face?

What they need is reliable information with which to navigate these turbulent waters. In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we explore metrics that can help IT managers make sound decisions in hard times. If your cost-cutting efforts include offshoring, you'll discover financial measures to help ensure your sourcing contracts deliver not only lower costs but project success. Hear how you can demonstrate the value enterprise architecture offers both to initial projects and later initiatives, enabling your organization to "make it through the current problems and be ready to compete when times improve again." If, as Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco famously said, "you can't control what you can't measure," join us to regain a measure of control.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2009/03/index.html

Reality Mining: Analyzing Data About Everything

26 Mar 2009 14:29:26 GMT

Berry, John | E-Mail Advisors | 26 March 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence

The biggest trend to hit business intelligence (BI) since the days of executive information systems may not be an innovation in the technology itself but in the kinds of data the technology analyzes. The new BI foreshadows a time when, for example, a disease epidemic will be stopped because data can reveal to health officials the movements of infected people. Welcome to the world of "reality mining."

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090326.html

Why Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited

24 Mar 2009 14:25:04 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 24 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

In last week's Advisor, I discussed findings showing that the adoption of BI search (i.e., tools and applications combining BI reporting and analysis with Internet search enginelike functionality) remains limited (see "Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited," 17 March 2009). In that Advisor, I cited surveys we've conducted over the past few years; the most recent (October 2008) shows that only approximately 11% of organizations use tools combining BI and search functionality. This compares to a similar survey we conducted in 2007, which found that approximately 6% of end-user organizations were then using BI search solutions. I added that use of BI search is expected to remain limited for the next 12-18 months. Several readers contacted me to ask why I thought BI search adoption remains where it is. Here's what I think.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090324.html

Semantics Is Hot; Data and Objects Are Not, Part I: The Emergence of the Semantic Web

19 Mar 2009 14:13:32 GMT

Orr, Ken | E-Mail Advisors | 19 March 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence; Enterprise Architecture

(This is the first in a series of Trends Advisors that will deal with the complex landscape of content, unstructured and structured, that confront organizations and individuals as we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and beyond. Future Advisors will deal with the growing schism between developers and database experts.)

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090319.html

Business Intelligence Optimization

18 Mar 2009 14:09:18 GMT

Dooley, Brian J. | Executive Updates | 18 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Business intelligence optimization can result in considerable savings across the enterprise, as well as yield more efficient operation and stronger analytic capabilities. Current BI infrastructures have been strained by the increasing challenge of managing terabytes of data, which are doubling every year. At the same time, ad hoc queries and scheduled reports are growing increasingly complex. Meanwhile, the value of business intelligence is becoming better known, which increases usage. This places ever greater demands on the BI infrastructure. As business moves into real-time operations, the required response time is also getting much shorter, and an immediate answer is often an imperative. All these factors have made optimization essential.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0905.html

Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited

17 Mar 2009 14:05:42 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 17 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

BI search (i.e., tools and applications combining BI reporting and analysis with functionality like Internet search engines) has received a fair amount of attention over the past few years. The selling point is that such solutions would allow nontechnical business users to locate information in BI environments much the same way that consumers do when using popular Web search engines, such as Google or Yahoo! Although corporate interest in using such solutions certainly exists, our research indicates that current use of BI search is low and is expected to remain so for the next 12-18 months.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090317.html

Data Warehousing, Virtualization, and Vertica: A Review

10 Mar 2009 19:49:38 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 10 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Virtualization is one of the hottest IT trends today. But when it comes to data warehousing, you'd hardly know it, because virtualization has made little impact in the data warehousing space. There's a good reason for this, which I'll get to in a minute. However, Vertica hopes to steer this trend in another direction with a new version of its high-performance analytic database packaged to run in virtualization environments.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090310.html

The Semantic Web 3.0 Mashup Universe: Coming to a Browser Near You

5 Mar 2009 19:42:25 GMT

Ummel, Mitchell | Executive Updates | 05 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

The Internet is undergoing a rapid transformation from a web of hyperlinked documents to a web of semantically linked data. Recent observations lead me to believe we're seeing the emergence of what may qualify as Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) applications.1 These applications are consumers and providers of semantically linked data. For the purposes of this Executive Update, I will refer to this new generation of Internet applications as semantically aware applications (SAAs).

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0904.html

Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse: A "Semiappliance"

3 Mar 2009 19:37:49 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 03 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Microsoft has stepped up its efforts to become a serious enterprise data warehouse player with the introduction of its SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse (SSFTDW) offerings -- a set of reference architectures for data warehousing available on pretested, preconfigured standard hardware from Bull, Dell, and HP.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090303.html

Cloud Computing: A New Paradigm in IT

1 Feb 2009 14:25:20 GMT

Murugesan, San | Executive Reports | 01 February 2009 | Business Intelligence

Are you computing in the clouds -- working with a constellation of computing resources accessed via the Internet? If not, you will be sooner or later. Cloud computing, touted to be the next big thing in IT, promises to offer utilitylike availability of huge computing resources and is attracting lots of interest among the IT community and businesses. A critical understanding of cloud computing is essential to leverage the opportunities and benefits this new computing paradigm offers. This Executive Report by San Murugesan provides an overview of cloud computing and examines its potential, risks, and challenges.

http://www.cutter.com/bia/fulltext/reports/2009/02/index.html