The initial set of HP Neoview customers that brought momentum has not increased a lot, and the future of the product is not clear. There's significant competition from the likes of Teradata, newly confident and competitive, IBM, with its advances in appliances announced at the IBM IOD conference, and Oracle, which announced a data warehouse appliance with HP at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference. Other competitors, like Greenplum, Infobright, Kognitio, Netezza and Vertica, have also inserted themselves into the ring for your data warehouse business, making things even more interesting with specialized database and appliance technologies.

I have no issue with IBM driving into the world of cloud computing — I figured it would. But just think about the larger hardware and software players — such as IBM and Microsoft, who are now moving toward the cloud — and the potential conflicts that could occur. In essence, your cable TV provider is offering to show you how to move to Satellite TV.

SAP's Business ByDesign, the newly introduced SaaS version for ERP, is "ready and done" and "the coolest app ever written," according to Apotheker. Yet, he admits, it's a bad time, financially, for doing a big market push — "hurting our margin, and hurting our stock," is how he describes it.

While handy in its own right, Overflight is not available as an RSS feed. It also doesn't seem to be searchable. So I decided to see if I could mash together my own version of Overflight (tailored to my own research needs), using Yahoo Pipes, the visual Web-app builder.

So what's an unconference? The basic definition is that it's participant driven, but can you imagine telling your boss you're going to a conference that has nothing on the agenda? That's where things stood (by design) on Tuesday morning, but at least a score of "campers" lined up after the morning keynote to present their ideas for discussion topics. Within 15 minutes, they nearly filled the schedule, and the remaining open slots were filled with discussions (not sales pitches) proposed by event-sponsors including IBM, AOL Developer Network, Google, JackBe, wetpaint, Yahoo Developer Network and Zembly.

If you read my blog on the latest from Microsoft at its BI conference in October, where it accurately describe the dilemma of "Excel Hell" created from the misuse of Microsoft's spreadsheet tool for storing and analyzing data across business. Unfortunately, Microsoft's prescribed antidote, called Project Gemini, won't be available until at least 2010 or beyond. The challenge with Microsoft's announcement is not just the promise of the release in the future, but the estimated requirements for the version of Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server and operating systems. Why wait years to evaluate a product when there are solutions today?

Specifically I'm referring to this recent article, which examined the rise of cloud computing. The Economist did a much better job of explaining its rise than most of the technical publications that I read.

The battle for the Web is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other. The topic came up during a panel discussion on "Why Ajax Standards Matter," which didn't sound too promising going in. Things started getting really interesting when Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, warned, "there's a struggle for the soul of the Web," where rich Internet and Web application development is concerned, and "proprietary engines like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are coming on strong."

• MapReduce — controversial or in some cases even disappointing though it may be — has a lot of use cases.
• It's early days, but Netezza and Teradata (and others) are beefing up their geospatial analytic capabilities.
• Memory-centric analytics is in the spotlight.

Ack. I can't decide whether "analytics" should be a singular or plural noun. Thoughts?

Another area that's come up which I haven't blogged about so much is data mining in the database. Data mining accounts for a large part of data warehouse use. The traditional way to do data mining is to extract data from the database and dump it into SAS. But there are problems with this scenario, including:

Clarabridge is different from many other text analytics vendors in its singular focus on customer-experience management (CEM). This isn't to say that you can't license and use Clarabridge's Content Mining Platform (CMP) for other applications, and it's not to say that the company doesn't have strong technical capabilities. It's a matter of market positioning that concentrates on a defined set of business users, across a broad spectrum of business sectors, with market messaging that focuses on business benefits rather than on technology. The approach seems to work. Clarabridge CEO and co-founder Sid Banerjee says "the business impact and deployability/usability of our solutions seem to be resonating with our customers and prospects."

Don't be fooled, though. Cloud computing is not just a catchphrase. Like REST, it's a style of doing things that doesn't seem particularly profound at first glance, but has important implications for certain problem-spaces. What the skeptics need, perhaps, are a few real-world case studies in cloud computing, to understand what the hubbub is about.