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The Challenge of Mobile Analytics

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Friday, May 30, 2008
1:04 PM

Last year everyone was talking about Web 2.0; this year it's all about the Mobile web. Let's take a look at what this means for mobile analytics, which by the way, I'll be speaking about on a panel at the Internet Marketing Conference in New York on June 4.

The bottom line: Mobile analytics are relatively new; beyond infancy, but certainly not for the faint of heart.

Continue reading "The Challenge of Mobile Analytics"

Comments

Posted by Kas Thomas
Friday, May 30, 2008
9:33 AM

Lawyers were well represented (you might say) at last week's Enterprise Search Summit in New York. At times, ESS felt more like an e-discovery conference with analytics and social-computing side-tracks rather than a search conference featuring a few e-discovery sessions.

Based on what I saw at the Search Summit, there seems to be a new awareness, at ever-higher levels in the corporate responsibility chain, that in a litigious business environment, "enterprise search" is not just a knowledge-management tactic or a productivity aid, but a survival imperative. You will be sued some day. (It's not a matter of "if," but when.) During the discovery phase of the suit, you're going to provide (and also receive from the other side) bewilderingly immense amounts of data. Without good search technology, sifting through the data isn't just tedious but nightmarishly expensive.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Thursday, May 29, 2008
3:30 PM

James Dixon had a comment on my services/cloud post worth exploring as it's about a fundamental criticism that's been around since the first ASP started years ago:

"Doesn't DW-in-the-cloud suffer from the same fundamental problem as DW-as-a-Service in that you have to pump all of your proprietary, strategic, highly sensitive data outside of the firewall onto someone else's hardware?"

I think that's a valid argument, provided your company has no external network connectivity. If you have an external connection, then all bets are off. It's worth looking at some networking pre-history to see why this has been true for decades.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, May 29, 2008
9:30 AM

Lombardi's Jim Rudden posts an admittedly "cranky" piece about software giants like SAP crashing the business process management (BPM) party. His beef with those companies, which he calls "Stackers," is that they pursue the promise of BPM half-heartedly. Actually, they have done everything in their power to bury BPM deep in what they view as their real market… which in the case of SAP and Oracle, he says, is enterprise apps, and in the case of IBM is… well he's not sure ( I would say IBM Global Business Services billable hours). However, if those guys — none of whom can touch Lombardi for speed of development (agility!), business empowerment, and overall elegance in execution — were not succeeding at some level, Jim would surely not be so cranky. But I think he paints the Stackers in BPM with too broad and too black a brush. So let me offer a more nuanced view.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
1:01 PM

In my book, it's time to stop thinking of data warehouse appliances (including those powered by column-store databases) as experimental devices for pioneers and performance nuts. Having personally interviewed more than a handful of appliance customers, my sense is that we're on the cusp of a broad adoption phase. Will these devices simply compliment conventional data warehouses as the foundation for data marts and non-mission-critical apps? Or will they also start replacing conventional enterprise data warehouses (EDWs)? I haven't heard many solid arguments against the appliance approach.

Posted by Neil Raden
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
9:34 AM

Although I don't remember when I first heard the term Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), I remember researching Web services around 2000. Back then, an architecture to handle Web services was unnamed, yet understood - at least to a degree. Now it has a name – SOA.

Back then, it seemed clear to me that Web services could provide more than just a way for Web-based applications to operate. With loosely coupled services communicating via standard protocol, while centralized directories allowed these services to describe their APIs, the sky seemed the limit. Reuse, long-chased but never achieved, seemed almost automatic. Platform independence, long-running transactions, and asynchronous processes — it would be like world peace.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
11:17 AM

I've been getting caught up on briefing notes and press releases since the TDWI conference and I've come to the conclusion that "as a service" is getting played out as a marketing term. The new and exciting term now being borrowed from the Web world is "in the cloud."

Companies have been throwing out the " aaS" as in SaaS in favor of " itC." While there is a difference between the two, many companies never figured out if they were SaaS or a managed hosting environment. Now they're doing the same thing with SitC and SaaS. I expect to see more confusing messages in the market as vendors rush to the next buzzword.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, May 26, 2008
4:56 PM

Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project in September 1983. Eric S. Raymond published the first version of The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 2000. IDC estimated a year ago that worldwide revenue from standalone open source software reached $1.8 billion in 2006, projecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26% from 2006 to 2011. That's revenue, not the presumably much higher avoided cost of closed source alternatives. So why are open-source fundamentals still so widely misunderstood, including in the business intelligence and data warehousing markets?

Case in point: An advisory firm's recent ranking of Top 200 Private Technology Companies misclassifies DATAllegro, a data warehouse appliance vendor, as open source. Now DATAllegro's innovative "direct data streaming" and database parallelization technology is built around the Ingres open-source DBMS, but they haven't opened their own source à la Sun and OpenSPARC.

Posted by Kas Thomas
Friday, May 23, 2008
10:49 AM

In an earlier post, I commented on the (undeclared) "VM war" that seems to be shaping up between Adobe and Sun Microsystems. If Adobe has its way, PC users will soon be running Web-friendly desktop apps in a secure Virtual Machine environment built on Adobe technology. If Sun has its way, we'll all be running JavaFX apps. (And if Microsoft has its way, we'll all be using some combination of .NET and Silverlight.)

Sun appears to have overslept the alarm this time, however. The company announced its JavaFX-based RIA strategy a year ago to relatively little fanfare. And although the technology was touted at the recent JavaOne show, the fact still remains that few people outside the Java developer community have ever heard of JavaFX.

Posted by Neil Raden
Thursday, May 22, 2008
9:35 AM

The movie Ghostbusters is perhaps the single best training film for consultants I've come across. In simple words, they embody all the right stuff for a successful consultant which is, lets face it, a real craft, not just something to do between jobs. With motivational thoughts about teamwork, confidence, authenticity, client management and the projection of competence, these guys have it knocked. For instance:

Teamwork: There aren't many engagements where the success of the operation is dependent on just one player. It's important to organize for success and enhance everyone's contribution in a "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" mentality. That special esprit de corps that develops among small groups provides the energy to keep a difficult assignment on track. And, sometimes, teamwork requires splitting the team up.

• "We have the tools, we have the talent"
• "I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it!"
• "Let's split up, we can cause more damage that way"

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
6:09 PM

Hey all you spreadsheet jockeys; want to do something creative (if a little crazy) in Excel? Today I was trolling Omniture (our Web Analytics suite) and I noticed an article on our sister site, Gamasutra, that is hugely popular. It's a primer on creating 3D games in Excel, and it includes demo programs and videos of games created with the Excel 3D engine.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
2:09 PM

Omniture's Q1 2008 financial results were as rosy as ever, and after listening to a year's worth of earning's calls, the transcripts are almost interchangeable... higher revenues, higher profit margins, more sales reps, more upselling of Genesis partner services.

Omniture's product strategy is focused on providing options and services on integrating Web data to both marketing and offline data — the logical next step for Web analytics discussed in the first edition of the Web Analytics Report.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
11:43 AM

I recently had a chance to demo OpenSpan, which is one of the tools that you can consider for bringing those legacy apps into the modern age of composite applications. A big problem with the existing user environment is that it has multiple, disparate applications — Windows, legacy, Web, whatever — that operate as non-integrated, functional silos. This requires re-keying of data between applications, or copy and paste if the user is particularly sophisticated. I see this all the time with my clients, and I'm constantly working with them to find improvements that reduce double keying.

In OpenSpan Studio, the visual design environment, you add a Windows (including terminal emulator or even DOS window) or Web application that you want to integrate, then use the interrogation tool to individually interrogate each individual Windows object (e.g., button) or Web page object (e.g., text box, hyperlink) to automatically create interfaces to those objects: a very sophisticated form of screen-scraping, if you will. However, you can also capture the events that occur with those objects, such as a button being clicked, and cause that to invoke actions or transfer data to other objects in other applications. Even bookmarks in MS-Word documents show up as entry/access points in the Studio environment.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
4:18 PM

Regarding the BPMS Watch Ratings report I released last month, each of the 11 BPM Suites evaluated was scored on the same set of capability categories, based on a weighted list of features/attributes, including "Strength of Execution," representing a subjective catch-all attribute (the individual reports on each vendor are available here at BPMInstitite.org. Three process types described in the report — production workflow, case management, and integration-centric — apply different weightings to the various capability categories, but use the same score for each category.

I have been looking for a way to publish the details of the scoring, and at the same time allow users to apply their own weightings to the features in each capability category, as well as to create custom process types with their own capability category weightings. I wanted to do it online, not as an Excel download, but had no idea how to do that.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
11:01 AM

I spent a couple of days in Chicago last week at BEA's (oops, Oracle's) Participate user conference. This is where AquaLogic (nιe Plumtree) Portal/Collaboration/BPM customers come to meet without any pesky WebLogic enthusiasts around.

Of course the big question surrounding the whole event was the "roadmap" for these products going forward. We've blogged previously that Oracle finds itself in possession of no less than four portal products. As Enterprise Portals Report readers know, all four systems are all really quite different. (That ought to tell you something about the current marketplace.) Oracle, as vendors are wont to do, will likely tell customers that the benefits of using multiple portal products are additive. BEA customers should expect a new set of sales calls at some point this year.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, May 19, 2008
12:21 PM

Close to 4,000 customers and partners convened in Las Vegas last week for the annual Cognos Forum, making it Cognos' largest conference ever.

While some time was given to synergies with IBM's product line, more air time was devoted to what's new in Cognos 8.3, the performance management products, and previews of what's coming. (Oh, and remember my disbelief in an earlier blog of both Cognos and Business Objects being shrink wrapped with DB2? Well, apparently the disbelief was warranted as the Business Objects OEM never materialized.)

In terms of cool factor, a future interactive viewer capability was the flashiest — literally, as it leverages Adobe Flash to provide this appealing interface. Cognos is not the first BI vendor to leverage Flash, and lack of interactivity has been a competitive weakness.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Sunday, May 18, 2008
11:08 AM

IBM recently posted a quite nice page on extracting business value from "unstructured" data. The page describes use of IBM's own products and formats to be sure, but it is potentially helpful for anyone who wishes to learn about information extraction from textual sources for data warehousing.

IBM's page starts with a brief text-analytics overview. It then dives into implementation with the OmniFind Analytics Edition for DB2 and its pureXML capabilities. It describes a process flow includes XML tagging of document features and the alternatives of mapping the XML schema to relational database structures or use using the XML structures directly for analyses. This text-analytics workflow, and the choices involved in dealing with text-sourced information, are not specific to IBM's tools, however. So which IBM provides diagrams and code listings and an analysis of the alternative approaches that relate to their own products, the lessons apply much more generally.

Posted by Nelson King
Friday, May 16, 2008
9:48 AM

I remember (lo these many years ago…) when IBM proved that the elephant could dance, and the name of the dance was PC. An obscure IBM skunk works in Boca Raton, Florida hatched this insanely great idea – a personal computer made out of cheap parts from all over the place – and two years later it became the world standard. Now I'm not saying that IBM's embrace of enterprise mashups is on the same order as the PC; but of all the really big IT companies, you'd think IBM would be among the last to adopt a technology called 'mashup.'

As I explored in this case study about a Defence Intelligence Agency mashup, the technology at its most fundamental addresses one of the oldest IT problems around: Delivering appropriate data in a usable fashion to those who make decisions. What's different now, obviously, is the Internet and the technologies behind Web applications and Web 2.0.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, May 15, 2008
8:43 AM

As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis. The first is "what about SharePoint?" The second is, "what about imaging?"

At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging in the context of ECM. Imaging is the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically under budget for. During the buying process it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file will soon be digital, even though paper is clearly here to stay.

Posted by Neil Raden
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
11:15 AM

Search isn't that great anymore. For one thing, it's become so commercial that it's really more like an ad search engine. SEO programs game the big ones to the point that you have to go to page 20 before you find something that isn't trying to sell what you're looking for. I want the Scotty Effect for myself (see my previous post). Why can't I ask a search engine questions and get sent to exactly the places with the answers, not 10,000 hits? Why can't the search engines help me assemble the information I need?

Tom Davenport suggests that the competitive playing field for businesses is analytics. I think we'd all be a lot better off if we could do some analytics for ourselves. What do you think? Here are some things I wonder about:

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
6:30 PM

As the mists clear away on the HP-EDS deal, it appears that there’s good news in the making for companies that outsource their infrastructure, and not-so-good news for HP competitors. Judging from the technology analysts/media response, here is an early assessment of the impact of the merger…

Posted by Kas Thomas
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
5:41 PM

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The recently announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, May 12, 2008
5:26 PM

News is that HP is purchasing EDS. HP was already marginally bigger than IBM, and now with this bold move, HP is looking to catch up with IBM in the lucrative Services sector, which provides a large chunk of IBM's revenue and an even larger chunk of profitability. In data management, though, IBM will probably continue to have a formidable lead for some time.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, May 12, 2008
10:28 AM

Do you remember the movie "Star Trek IV," when the crew needs to go back to the 20th century to find two hump back whales? When that movie was released, twenty-five years ago, we were already building pricing models with DSS software, we already had SAS to build models and do statistical work and we could write reports in FOCUS or any number of other tools. Compared to the things we can do today, this may seem primitive, but how different is it really?

Consider that the density of hard drives in the same period has increased five orders of magnitude, CPU speed even more so and the cost per unit of storage or MIP has fallen off the table. With that kind of improvement, a new BMW today would go from 0 to 60 mph in 0.00008 seconds, have a top speed of 15 million miles per hour and would burn gas at a rate of 2 million miles per gallon. Oh, and it would cost about 30 cents to buy. I haven't figured out the lease yet.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, May 12, 2008
10:09 AM

Whether you want to advance your career or just improve your team's chances of success, IT professionals would do well to read this week's installment of "Kimball University," entitled "Better Business Skills for BI and Data Warehouse Professionals". The title notwithstanding, it's a great guide for any IT pro who wants to better understand the business, improve interactions with colleagues and superiors, and develop better communication skills. I can personally vouch for several of the 12 resources author Warren Thornthwaite suggests.

Posted by Shawn Shell
Friday, May 9, 2008
12:32 PM

While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of reasons (a point I detail in the CMS Watch SharePoint Report 2008). Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST, see the Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog as CMSWatch.com, I highlighted a FAST presentation that showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts that demonstrate several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, including content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Thursday, May 8, 2008
11:06 AM

Now that the dust is settling on Microsoft's failed Yahoo! bid, let's turn our attention to the announcement (burried under the hostile-takeover talk) that Yahoo! will make IndexTools a free service. Coming so quickly on the heels of the acquisition, it would seem to serve notice to Omniture, Google Analytics, and other Web analytics vendors about the seriousness of Yahoo!'s intentions.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, May 8, 2008
10:02 AM

That might be one way to restate the premise of a survey on the Business Process Management Notation standard that has stirred up quite a controversy. The survey is interesting (because it raises some some good questions about BPMN and business process modeling) and entertaining (because it challenges dogmatic thinking on the topic).

In nutshell, the researchers reviewed 126 BPMN diagrams collected from "consultants, seminar participants, and online sources" (in other words, more or less unscientifically, which of course does not automatically invalidate the research), and found that of the 52 distinct elements (symbols) that exist in BPMN 1.1 specifications:

- Only nine elements were used on the average in each diagram (i.e. less than 20%)
- Only five elements were used in more than half the models, and another six symbols in a fourth of the models
- 17 elements (more than 30%) were used in three or fewer models, including five elements not used at all!

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
6:05 PM

The New York Times publishes exceptional visualizations. A couple this week stand out: All of Inflation's Little Parts, graphing the average American's spending by category, and a map of the human "diseasome" that supports the article, Redefining Disease, Genes and All.

What distinguishes these visualizations — the first is a form of treemap, a "space-constrained visualization of hierarchies," and the second a network-connectivity diagram — is their success at communicating relationships along multiple data dimensions.

Posted by Neil Raden
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
4:15 PM

What's the Deal With Server Virtualization? Over the past few years, I've been suggesting that people stop managing from scarcity. What that means is that the cost of hardware has fallen so sharply that we should reevaluate our methodologies and designs that sacrifice function for resource efficiency. In data warehousing, we still create summarized versions of detailed data in order to avoid costly queries from eating up the big data warehouse, depriving people of the analytical content of the whole picture. In other cases, people are restricted to certain times of the day, or certain subsets of data or governors are placed on queries. With the cost of computing power dropping four or five orders of magnitude since data warehouses were invented, is this really necessary?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
11:41 PM

The topic of business intelligence was largely missing in action at this week's SAPPHIRE event, though John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, an SAP Company, did give a keynote address today (albeit at 4:30 pm — not exactly prime time). One of the highlights of the presentation was a demo of Polestar running on top of the SAP BI Accelerator. Polestar is Business Object's search-style interface for BI while BIA is SAP's in-memory analytic appliance. The demo presented more evidence that in-memory technology will get fast-track attention in the SAP/Business Objects integration.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
9:44 AM

I'm picking and choosing my sessions here at SAPPHIRE carefully, in part because I have some prearranged meetings specifically about BPM. I had a chance one-on-one meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of NetWeaver BPM, this afternoon; funnily enough, just after I attended Ginger Gatling's session this morning, I had lunch in the press area, and when I mentioned that I'd seen the session on the new SAP BPM, three pairs of ears at the table swiveled around. These three, who I didn't know (nametags, unfortunately, hang below the level of the table when seated), gave me a light grilling on my opinions of what I had seen; although I figured that they worked for SAP, it wasn't until they stood up that I saw Hilpert's name tag.

By the time that we had our prearranged meeting, then, he knew that I'd seen a product overview, and he'd already heard my views on it, so we could jump right to some of the good stuff.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
9:16 AM

Surprisingly little information has reached public view concerning BPMN 2.0, the update of the Business Process Management Notation standard now under consideration in OMG. Unlike most standards approval processes, the outcome of this one is not preordained. There are two submissions, quite different, and it could go either way.

Oracle's Vishal Saxena notes that one reason BPMN 1.x has been so successful is that it "keeps simple things simple" by focusing on abstract business-level modeling, allowing developers flexibility in how to implement the technical details, and argues that BPMN 2.0 "should maintain this flexibility." In response, IDS Scheer's Sebastian Stein points out that a problem with BPMN 1.x is that it "only has implicitly defined execution semantics," and BPMN 2.0 needs to make them explicit. He goes on to neatly summarize the competing proposals:

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Monday, May 5, 2008
2:09 PM

It's my first time at SAPPHIRE, and I have one initial impression: this conference is huge. For me, 1,500 people at a conference is big, and this one is ten times that size. The press room is the size of a regular conference's general session ballroom. I just hiked 15 minutes to get to a session. More sessions run simultaneously than you'll find in total at most conferences. There are 30 official conference hotels. Wow. And I have to report that there are five bars of free wifi coverage everywhere in the conference center.

After a review of the massive schedule, I finally made it to a session: Ginger Gatling, SAP NetWeaver BPM Product Manager, giving an overview of the business process management (BPM) component in SAP, including a demo and some thoughts on the future functionality. She started with a discussion of the evolution of BPM, including the drivers that have moved us from the old-style workflow and EAI to the present-day collaborative design environment where multiple people might be working on modeling different components, from human-facing processes to rules. For SAP, however, a lot of this is future-state, not what they have now in the shipping product.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, May 5, 2008
5:19 AM

It's no mystery why diamonds are often referred to as "ice." Sure, they look like ice, all clear and faceted. But have you ever touched one and noticed it was cooler than you thought it would be? You probably thought it was just the power of suggestion, but it really is cooler. The reason is that a diamond's stiff crystalline structure actually shields the atoms from heat vibrations. So what does this have to do with information technology? A lot.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Friday, May 2, 2008
9:21 AM

Regarding TIBCO's first-ever "analyst summit" at their annual TUCON user conference, I'll leave it to Sandy Kemsley to record the actual content of the presentations to analysts. I'll stick to the impressionistic view.

Apparently "the analysts" told TIBCO they wanted to hear executives talk about go-to-market strategy, so we got almost nothing about product and an awful lot about "value propositions." Are there really analysts who want to spend half a day hearing about value props and selling tactics? Scary. But, having lowered my expectations completely, TIBCO's "solution showcase" exhibits — open to the hoi polloi after the analyst event ended — actually blew my socks off:

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, May 1, 2008
3:09 PM

Speaking at this week's "TUCON 08" TIBCO user conference in San Francisco, Christopher Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire and now president of that TIBCO division, discussed the capabilities of the technology and what's been done to integrate Spotfire into other TIBCO products.

Timely insight — the right information at the right time — is a competitive differentiator for most businesses, and classic business intelligence (BI) just doesn't cut it in many cases. Consumer applications like Google Finance are raising the bar for dynamic visualization techniques, although most of them are fairly inflexible when it comes to viewing or comparing specific data. In other words, we want the data selection and aggregation capabilities of our enterprise systems, and the visualization capabilities of consumer Web applications. Ahlberg sees a number of disruptive BI technologies transforming the platform — in-memory processes, interactive visualization, participatory architecture, mashups — and starting to be able to link to the event-driven world of classic TIBCO.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, May 1, 2008
10:37 AM

If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry it's "compliance."

To me it's like fingernails down a blackboard, and frankly if I never hear it used again then I would be a happy man. Of course I have to endure the word in virtually every article and vendor press release I read. I don't like the word because it is a blanket term that used without context is totally meaningless, yet it's a word (much like governance) that sounds impressive and few people in the room will admit that they don't really understand it. Well let me be among the first to point out that the Compliance Emperor often has no clothes.