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Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 30, 2008
3:42 PM

Opening the second day of the Business Rules Forum, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn't), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes. He made a good point that your customers react to your business decisions as if they were deliberate and personal to them, when often they're not; James' premise is that you should be making these deliberate and personal, providing the level of micro-targeting that's appropriate to your business (without getting too creepy about it), but that there's a mismatch between what customers want and what most organizations provide.

Decisions have to be built into processes and systems that manage your business, so although business may drive change, IT gets to manage it. James used the term "orthogonal" when talking about the crossover between process and rules; I used this same expression in a discussion with him yesterday in discussing how processes and decisions should not be dependent upon each other: if a decision and a process are interdependent, then you're likely dealing with a process decision that should be embedded within the process, rather than a business decision.

Continue reading "Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management"

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Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
8:00 PM

Manya Mayes of SAS has written a helpful introductory paper on audio analytics, "Tune into the Voice of Your Customer with Voice Mining." While the paper, which includes a call-center case study, focuses on customer-feedback audio, the technology and techniques described have applications for e-discovery, intelligence, and rich-media search. Given coverage of distinctive characteristics of speech and of analytical concerns that include BI integration, Manya's paper merits a look for anyone who works with audio data.

Manya's thesis: "Combining voice capture with business intelligence, analytics, and text mining provides valuable customer intelligence for marketing and competitive intelligence business functions." Hers is a marketing paper, but it's motivated by significant technical and business challenges. I've looked at the issues myself and have planned to research them and couldn't agree with her more. (That's why we plan significant coverage of speech mining and audio analytics at the Text Analytics Summit, which I chair, in 2009.)

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
4:43 PM

It's obvious to everyone that we are in turbulent times as economic challenges rattle the globe. As I have been reading in The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, it's clear that the finger pointing and rescue packages for large businesses will continue for some time. The question is whether the post-mortem analysis and diagnosis of the causes and symptoms will focus on the right area and help minimize future failures. Will the determination be that management processes failed and information was not put in place to provide the right level of notice to prevent the recent financial services industry meltdown?

Let's be honest. Organizations have not managed their businesses using systems to understand current performance and risk in a common, enterprisewide fashion. Without such an approach, the appropriate changes to business plans to minimize impacts on shareholders and the workforce can't be implemented. Frankly, the current environment shines the light on the lack of performance management and business intelligence. My take is that the lack of management processes, with analytics and information coordinated from across the business, has led to our current quandary. Business management in the financial services industry has failed the world by not heeding the need for enterprisewide decision-support systems for managing performance and risk.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
9:25 AM

The good news is that it's a lovely sunny, breezy and cool day: perfect fall weather for Toronto. The bad news is that I'm in Orlando, and was hoping to wear shorts more than sweaters this week. However, I'm here to attend — and speak at — the Business Rules Forum, not sit by the pool.

Ron Ross, executive editor of BRCommunity.com, kicked off this week's Business Rules Forum with a keynote called From Here to Agility; agility, of course, is one of the key reasons that you consider implementing business rules, whether in the context of BPM or other applications. It's pretty well attended — probably 200 people here at the opening keynote, and likely a lot of vendors off setting up their booths for later today.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
12:57 PM

Perhaps I've been watching too much political coverage on TV lately, but at one point during IBM's Information On Demand (IOD) press conference yesterday, it struck me like a campaign stop. To set the scene, the first question during the post-announcement Q&A session came from Forrester Research analyst Jim Kobielus, who cited the recent "pretty significant" announcements by Oracle and Teradata in the area of data warehousing and appliances. Noting the lack of warehouse- and appliance-related announcements at IOD, Koblielus asked, "what is IBM's strategy, going forward, to make your InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse portfolio ever most cost-effective and ever more scalable?"

Rather than responding directly to the question, Arvind Krishna, Vice President Data Management and Worldwide Information Management Development, first took on the role of Oracle attack dog. "The only pricing Oracle has provided [on the Oracle Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server] is for the hardware," Krishna challenged. "When you actually add in the pricing of the software, it's significantly higher than our pricing — more than three times as much. If you add in the price of the software to the $40,000 per terabyte that they claimed, the price is closer to $300,000 per terabyte."

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
10:51 AM

Microsoft has introduced Azure, a cloud computing platform. Interesting, but what does it comprise, and what is Microsoft offering that isn't already out there from the likes of Amazon and Google?

The Microsoft Azure Services Platform consists primarily of Windows Azure, together with Microsoft.Net, SQL and Microsoft Live Services, to be followed in the (presumably near) future by SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM services. Windows Azure is Microsoft's vision of a "cloud services operating system," and will serve as a platform for solution development (by Microsoft customers), service hosting (by Microsoft) and service management (by Microsoft and customers both). Windows Azure, Microsoft assures us, is intended to be "an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments" — for now, however, only .Net-managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, October 27, 2008
1:17 PM

Fellow TechWeb contributor Michael Biddick recently offered some great information on the cloud computing movement by taking a look at the factors that drive people to the clouds. He also addressed issues that keep people on the sidelines.

While cost was on the top of everyone's mind, other things such as 'going green,' and fixing internal IT issues were among the motives that sent many in search of better IT on the Web. However, some people said "Not so fast," especially when they considered the recent outages that demonstrated the downsides of depending upon SEI (Somebody Else's Infrastructure).

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, October 27, 2008
7:09 AM

I don't hear this expression much anymore, but my wife used to use it all the time to describe the kind of chatter one can make about a subject, and seem knowledgeable, but possess only a very superficial grasp of it. In fact, she used to describe her entire academic career as having merely prepared her for cocktail conversation. I don't feel that way. I think my education, even three decades hence, was an excellent preparation for what followed, but then, I didn't study anthropology. LOL

Posted by David Linthicum
Friday, October 24, 2008
11:50 AM

I'm back. After about 6 months of not writing for this site I'm back to hit the issues around SaaS, and the now larger opportunities around cloud computing. Indeed, a lot has happened in the last 6 months, a lot is happening now, so there is much to say. No worries, this blog will be forward looking.

First, what the heck was I doing for the last 6 months? Let's just say I was actively building the cloud…looking to drive the technology into some unique directions. The idea was to do something different; the cloud is getting crowded, in case you haven't noticed.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 23, 2008
2:11 PM

When Pegasystems invited me to attend this week's PegaWorld conference outside of Washington, D.C., I took a quick glance at the agenda and thought that it said that George Clooney would be speaking. I immediately accepted. On second look, I noticed that it was actually George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research.

The somewhat-less-famous George talked about business technology (BT) in the format of eight things that he would tell your CEO over coffee:

Posted by Curt Monash
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
12:27 PM

I spent about six hours at Oracle last week — talking with Andy Mendelsohn, Ray Roccaforte, Juan Loaiza, Cetin Ozbutun, et al. — and plan to write more later. For now, let me pass along a few quick comments.

• The key philosophical point that I had perhaps been missing is that Oracle thinks there is and should be a storage (server) tier, just as there also are database (server), application (server), and web (server) tiers.

• Exadata cells are designed to never talk with each other. Instead, they talk to a set of Infiniband switches, which then talk to a grid of servers on the database tier. Oracle thinks this has solved its I/O bandwidth problem for once and for all. It's hard to see why that wouldn't be the case.

• What Exadata does on the storage tier in query execution is throw stuff away. Mainly, this is projection and restriction/SELECT. But if a join has been resolved on a small fact table, and Oracle is now filtering a fact table to match a value or set of values, the storage tier can do that too.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
12:10 PM

The New York Times has published another excellent visualization, this one a heatmap, Can a President Tame the Business Cycle? The on-line, interactive version adds highly useful capabilities — a detail window that pops-up as a mouse-over effect, and alternative, bar-chart visualizations of each of the seven data series — that obviously can't be delivered in a static, printed newspaper. I've noted that paper/electronic gap before. My purpose this go-around is to explore, via comparison with a financial-information visualization published by the NASDAQ stock market, how underwhelming a mediocre heatmap can be.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
9:40 AM

Reuters reports that technology executives don't expect the current slowdown to impact them as badly as the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000. That sounds reasonable, because there are fundamentally different reasons for the slowdown then and now, even from a purely technology perspective.

During the 2000/2001 technology bust, the main culprit was… technology. Technology executives, product vendors and service providers all first bought into, then actively propagated, the erroneous and simple-minded formula "More + Faster = Better & Easier." Throw in as much technology and services as possible as quickly as possible, and the results are almost guaranteed—cost be damned. That was the Generally Accepted Absurd Panacea of the day. Technology vendors and service providers salivated at the easy sales and high margins; on the other side of the table, IT executives not only bought into the madness, they whole-heartedly supported and propagated it. CIO's and CEO's swooned over terms like "B2B/B2C," "first mover's advantage," and "24x7." Businesses and venture capitalists fell over themselves in their eagerness to fund these exciting new opportunities.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
3:23 PM

At Infor's annual "Inforum" conference in Las Vegas last week, I saw a significant step toward helping everyday business workers and managers access information and leverage analytics in a new, Web-based interface to enterprise applications called Infor MyDay. For those of you who might not keep track of application vendors as we do at Ventana Research, Infor is the third-largest enterprise applications company in the world, with more than $2 billion in revenue and 75,000-plus customers.

Tapping its large customer base and years of research into understanding what is needed to make business more productive and effective, Infor has developed a new class of user interface and role-based capabilities for enterprise applications. Infor MyDay provides information to specific roles to help enable easier actions and decisions to improve results of workers handling daily tasks. Infor MyDay will begin to roll out to ERP customers under maintenance and in 2009 will reach Financial Management (FM), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and other Infor applications to address the need to access, search and interact with specific information related to key tasks and activities. This includes the metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) needed to guide workers.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
9:52 AM

I was sorry to see last week's Teradata Partners user conference come to a close. The event was half Teradata technical sessions and half business sessions, where I spent more of my time. The business sessions were rougly equal parts enterprise BI platform and methods, data management topics, customer and business process BI, and active data warehousing. There were other topics mixed in as well, including a number of sessions that highlight the deepening company relationship with SAS.

While not a stated theme, I noticed an increase in Web data as the subject of analysis, or married to internal transactional and customer data. There was even a session on analyzing social networks based on cellular call data — not exactly Web, yet a topic most commonly associated with Web businesses. There were presentations by eBay, PayPal, and Netflix as well as non-Web companies and government departments.

Posted by Kas Thomas
Monday, October 20, 2008
8:53 AM

Remember Google the way it was in 2001? Slightly funky logo, exclamation point on the end. Lots of white space. Proud declaration above the query-box: "Search 1,326,920,000 Web pages"?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, October 17, 2008
9:55 AM

Earlier this month, Pegasystems announced a "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) business process management offering, and I had a chance prior to that to chat with Kerim Akgonul, VP of product management. My first thought on reading the phrase "internal cloud" was that they were just hitching a ride on the cloud bandwagon — check out James Governor's 15 Ways to Tell It's Not Cloud Computing for all the reasons that this isn't cloud computing — but there are definite cloud-like capabilities to what they're offering from the viewpoint of the individual projects, although not to the organization as a whole.

A problem that I see in many large customer organizations is that BPM projects end up being departmental, and even if the vendor manages to sell enterprise-wide licensing, it often ends up only deployed in one department. In many cases, this is because departments don't want to share BPMS instances, and it's just too hard to go through the effort of deploying another separate server and instance for every project. There's also the need for multiple instances for development and testing, usually hand-installed at some cost. This is exacerbated in large organizations with a variety of geographically-dispersed business units, where they may have several different independent BPM projects on the go at the same time, and have difficulty in applying successes in one area to another.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Thursday, October 16, 2008
11:07 AM

Teradata introduced the Teradata 1550 "extreme data appliance" at its user conference this week. The appliance starts at 50 TB (based on compression) for a single node and can scale to 50 PB (theoretical data size). This appliance is positioned to deal with the very large data volume problem, not so much for typical data warehouse usage.

When you look at data usage, there are two types of large data problems. The classic DW model involves analyzing subsets of the total data, and occasionally scanning all the data. The other model is the need to analyze very large data sets that would normally be impractical, like looking at a year of web traffic or call details.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, October 16, 2008
9:24 AM

I will be chairing an all-new BPMS Track at BPMInstitute.org’s upcoming BPM Conference in New York City at The Roosevelt Hotel (November 5-6). This track analyzes the latest generation of BPM Suites, and features an extended panel on November 5 in which leading vendors show how their offerings address key topics such as business-IT alignment, agility and time to value, end user experience, and optimizing business performance. We did this in San Francisco and it worked very well. The discussion was lively and open, and I learned things about each product that I didn’t know before.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
11:44 AM

I'm at the Teradata Partners conference this week. I consider it to be the best event in the BI market if you want to see a diversity of company presentations, particularly on more advanced topics. You won't find the same number and quality of end-user presentations at any other event. The official kickoff went through some interesting and entertaining moments and closed with a terrific keynote from Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Here's my quick takes on each of the talks:

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
9:46 AM

As bailouts become a global phenomenon, it's time to review what this all means for you, the technology buyer.

I think there are two main issues here:

1. The immediate liquidity crisis and any lingering effects that may lead to longer-term financial sclerosis
2. An enduring recession — which previously left much of the enterprise and web software space unscathed — getting deepened and extended

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
2:19 PM

The story of the year in information management is clearly data warehouse scalability. Against a backdrop of about a dozen or so alternative database/data warehouse appliance vendors emerging over the past 18 months, Oracle and Microsoft both recently threw their hats into the ring of scale-out architecture. The two database giants are finally acknowledging that the scale-up approach that they have touted for years only goes so far. As data volumes and demands keep growing, that's often not far enough.

The question for practitioners is, which architecture and approach will meet your long-term data warehousing needs? As Richard Winter explains in this week's in-depth feature, proper data warehouse planning is not just a matter of estimating data volumes; you also have to assess query volumes, query complexity, the number of users, and data latency and availability demands. Only then can you truly prepare for the workloads likely to be experienced three to five years down the road.

Posted by Curt Monash
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
11:51 AM

The Teradata Partners (i.e., user) conference is this week. So there have been lots of press releases, some presentations, lots of meetings, and so on. A lot of Teradata's messaging is in flux, as it moves fairly rapidly to correct what I believe have been some deficiencies in the past. One confusing result is that there was very little prebriefing about the actual announcement details, and we're all scrambling to figure out what's up.

Teradata does a good job of collecting its press releases at one URL. So without linking to most of them individually, let me jump in to an overview of Teradata news this week (whether or not in actual press release format):

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Monday, October 13, 2008
3:39 PM

Omniture's share price tanked last week after it was downgraded by a Wall Street analyst who found that companies consider Web analytics to be a discretionary cost, as well as "an increasingly competitive environment for OMTR."

Readers of the Web Analytics Report, and my post about Web analytics leadership know that I'd agree with the comment about a competitive marketplace in analytics.

This was borne out in even starker terms by the long awaited announcement later in the week on the launch of Yahoo! Web Analytics, the solution based on IndexTools. Yahoo! Web Analytics is a no-cost solution that is geared to serious web analysts who want to do behavioral segmentation on unaggregated data. If you're an experienced web analyst, this would be worth a closer look. One important note to this: Yahoo! Web Analytics is not freely available to the entire market. As described on the Yahoo blog, the initial rollout is limited to Yahoo! Small Business' 13,000 hosted e-commerce customers, Yahoo! Web Analytics out to advertisers who seek Yahoo!'s help to build custom micro-sites, and third-party application developers who build widgets and other mini-apps for Yahoo! users via the Yahoo developer network.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, October 10, 2008
11:12 AM

To know what's really going on within a firm or the industry in which it operates you need to watch where the money is flowing.

In September money flowed in some interesting directions within the enterprise content management (ECM) sector. At Open Text it flowed out, as Chairman and CEO John Shakelton dumped almost all of his shareholdings. In contrast at NewGen in India it flowed in through a confirmed investment from SAP's venture arm (which has already invested in open source ECM player Alfresco, among others).

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, October 10, 2008
11:05 AM

A press release from Lexalytics touts ExecDex, a Web site that features a "business-leader ranking index." I checked it out. Now Lexalytics makes an interesting sentiment-analysis engine, but I thought ExecDex should have been more fully developed before release to the likes of me. It seems Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin agreed, but the two of us couldn't have been more wrong. I suspect in the end, we both received a lesson in looking at tech applications through others' eyes.

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, October 9, 2008
10:14 AM

At its second annual BI conference, Microsoft offered a glimpse into what the future holds for its products. Stephen Elop, a Microsoft senior executive relatively new to business intelligence who is president of the Microsoft Business Division, introduced the theme of the conference, "Think Bigger about BI." Judging from the presentation and conversations I had, Microsoft believes it is leading the democratization of business intelligence around the world through its release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and future development projects that were officially unveiled. But is Microsoft thinking bigger or just catching up?

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, previously known as project Katmai, offers a number of new capabilities to support data warehousing and analytics for BI that expand its value as an enterprise data platform and its support of nonrelational data sources, as well as what Microsoft calls "pervasive insight" but is really the reporting and analysis of data that can be published. Microsoft has added new data adapters for Oracle, SAP BW and Teradata systems to enable users to gain better access to data and mechanisms for data compression and governors for resources and queries. A new Report Builder helps simplify developing, deploying and maintaining reports and delivering data into Microsoft Word and Excel.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
6:04 PM

The Semantic Web was conceptualized almost a decade ago, but despite progress on protocols and publishing tools, it remains far from realization. SW-technologist David Provost doesn't share my pessimism. To the contrary, the premise of his new report, On The Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry, is revealed by the report's title, namely that we're almost there. Yet the report itself, like so much material in the SW world, is itself devoid of semantic mark-up. Yes, semantics are important in boosting information findability and usefulness, but these SW examples — I cited another in a year-ago blog article — only emphasize the gap between SW boosterism and Web reality.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
9:13 AM

While many of my peers headed to Seattle for Microsoft's BI conference this week, I headed in the opposite direction to Prague, Czech Republic, to speak at IDC's annual BI road show.

I had never been here before, and I confess I had a degree of trepidation. While Prague today is a top business and tourist destination, the fall of communism was only 20 years ago. In fact, I was living nearby in Switzerland during that profound time so the memory is not too distant as my Czech friends then wondered if it was really safe to return. Some people I spoke with lament the modernization of the country, whereas others said the changes have been too slow, particularly outside of Prague. But back to BI.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
10:58 AM

Kilimanjaro, Gemini, Madison... what's with all the code names and why does Microsoft need so many to describe developments that are all expected to bow in the first half of 2010? Herain Oberoi, group product manager of the SQL Server Business Group, cleared up a few questions for me here at the Micosoft's BI Conference 2008, but it took an outsider (from Teradata) to reveal another possible rationale for the confusing naming conventions.

The clear headliner in Kilimanjaro is "Project Gemini," which will bring in-memory, on-the-fly sorting, filtering and slice-and-dice analysis of massive (millions of rows) data sets to Excel with the aid of a client plug-in, controlled storage and sharing through integration with Sharepoint, and behind-the-scenes modeling by Analysis Services. So why two separate names? Well, Oberoi stressed that Kilimanjaro also includes self-service reporting extensions to Report Builder that will enable users to create, store and share report components that can be mixed and matched for what's described as rapid, grab-and-go reporting.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, October 6, 2008
8:26 AM

I was on a panel at nGenera's (nee New Paradigm) Enterprise 2.0 get-together in Dallas last week. I missed the first day because I was speaking somewhere else and unfortunately missed listening to and meeting Ray Kurzweil, but the second day has some pretty good presentations by the nGenera staff, including Don Tapscott and my homey Nick Vitalari (it's amazing how you can live in a small town and only run into your neighbors at conferences).

This meeting is not to be confused with the much larger Enterprise 2.0 conference. The attendees are members of nGenera's network and gather a few times a year to listen to and present their progress on various research topics/projects at nGenera.

Posted by Curt Monash
Friday, October 3, 2008
1:11 PM

I've been trying to figure out how much the HP-Oracle Database Machine and HP-Oracle Exadata Storage Server actually cost. My first estimate was $58-190K/TB (user data), but I've since updated my pricing spreadsheet. Specifically:

• The first page of these estimates have been modestly altered to reflect more chargeable software options, as per the discussion below.
• Accordingly, my new estimate for HP Oracle Database Machine list price is $5,546,000. Per-terabyte prices (user data) are $60K and $198K for the two configurations.
• There's a whole new second page, for Exadata configurations smaller than a full Oracle Database Machine. Most of the work on that was done by Bence Arató of BI Consulting (Hungary), who graciously gave me permission to post it.
• The lowest per-terabyte Exadata price estimates are about 20% lower than for the full Oracle Database Machine. The difference is due mainly to eliminating Real Application Clusters for a single-node SMP machine, and secondarily to rounding down slightly on server hardware capacity. But these are rough estimates, as neither Bence nor I is a hardware pricing guy.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Friday, October 3, 2008
10:33 AM

At Oracle Open World last week, industry analysts got a good look at Oracle's BPM strategy and roadmap in the wake of the BEA acquisition. Overall, my conclusion is Oracle is showing the rest of the world the right way to do software acquisitions. BPM is progressing along the path of "interoperate, integrate, unify" that Oracle claims it tries to follow with all of its acquisitions.

Before the BEA deal there was the Oracle BPM solution comprised of SOA Suite (in particular BPEL Process Manager) and BPA Suite (rebranded ARIS with a BPEL roundtripping extension), and there was BEA's AquaLogic BPM. For details on those, see my BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org. Now there is the Oracle BPM Suite, which includes both Oracle BPM (rebranded from ALBPM) and BPEL PM. They "interoperate" in the sense that each can call the other as a subprocess. (Not a big deal, but Oracle did this in 100 days whereas WebSphere-FileNet took a year.) BPA Suite is still there, but more off to the side where it belongs; Oracle now calls it "enterprise modeling."

Posted by Kas Thomas
Thursday, October 2, 2008
3:24 PM

The last company on earth I'd expect to support open-source JavaScript libraries is Microsoft. By "support," I mean providing 24/7 product support through Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS).
But guess what? Hades has apparently frozen over, because according to Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, "later this year" Microsoft will begin providing 24/7 PSS support for jQuery, the popular open-source JavaScript library.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
3:32 PM

Do you work for a company or project that makes software tools? Now's the time to check out, and consider a nomination for, the 19th annual Jolt Awards for software-development product excellence.

I judge the database and enterprise tools categories. I'm definitely on the look-out myself for "Joltworthy" data management and analysis and application-deployment tools, products that provide an SDK, components, languages or APIs, and/or back-end capabilities for developers. There are 13 categories total. They accommodate a spectrum of software and software-related products.

Posted by Curt Monash
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
11:49 AM

Some kind Oracle development managers have reached out and helped me better understand where Oracle does or doesn't stand in query and analytic parallelization. Let's start with the part everybody pretty much knows already:

• There are two parts to a parallelization story — how you get data off of disk, and what you do with it once you have it.

• To a first approximation, the best way to get a lot of data off of disk is in parallel, specifically with different CPUs talking to different disk drives. Until last week's announcement of Exadata, Oracle was the most prominent holdout against this view. (That dubious honor now goes to Sybase.)

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
10:50 AM

SharePoint has been on my mind a lot recently, not least because we have been undertaking more research on the product and its usage in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) context. I've also had the unusual opportunity to speak to integrators, resellers and buyers on three continents over the past couple of weeks. The questions I asked may not have been scientific, or statistically meaningful, but they have at least been consistent. For example when I talked to buyers I asked:

• Does your organization currently use SharePoint?
• Does your organization currently use any other ECM systems?
• Are you planning to replace any existing ECM systems with SharePoint?