Intelligent Enterprise

You know something is getting hot when it's picked up by the larger business press. That's the case with cloud computing, which seems to be all that and a bag of chips, if you ask the business journalism powerhouse "The Economist."

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.

I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup, which Camp co-founder David Berlind predicted will "trump all other development ecosystems" because it's focused on quickly and easily knitting together the meat of the functionality rather than all the system-level code required in conventional development and computing.

"Just as the spreadsheet enabled all sorts of people to become number crunchers, mashups are going to enable a much larger community to become Web developers," Berlind said in his kickoff keynote.

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."

Information Week has published my article on open source business intelligence (OSBI), Open Source BI Still Fighting For Its Share, a title that applies both to the BI software market and to IW column inches. (The article is now also an Intelligent Enterprise feature.) I'll share with readers material I wrote, cut by IW's editors, on open-source data-integration vendor Talend and on Eclipse BIRT, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools.

For the past few months, I've collected a lot of data points to the effect that high-performance analytics – i.e., beyond straightforward query — is becoming increasingly important. And I've written about some of them at length. For example:

• 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:

Cloud computing is one of those buzz phrases that, like "redistribution of income," seems to make otherwise dispassionate people hyperventilate. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, speaking at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, raised quite a few eyebrows when he derided "cloud computing" as "complete gibberish" in an extended on-stage rant before an audience of financial analysts. A few days later, Free Software Foundation patriarch Richard Stallman (never one to mince words) called cloud computing "worse than stupidity" in a highly critical interview with The Guardian.

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.

TDWI hosted its first conference in New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina, last week. I admit, I was both worried and curious about the location, still reading regularly about how certain parts of the city have never recovered. And yet, after walking along Bourbon Street, with its diversity, old French buildings, and intricate beads galore, I can see why people are passionate about rebuilding and why TDWI picked it as a conference location.

Back to BI, I taught a new course at the event, the theme of which is highlighted in this week's Intelligent Enterprise In-Depth feature article, "Cool BI: Rating the Innovations." Those who know me know that I am anything but cool. Conservative, yes. Serious, yes. Cool, no. So I was catching some flack about the course title from colleagues, and well, my very cool kids. Trying to get into the spirit of things, I kicked the course off donning a cool '70s dress with Cold Play blasting in the background (guess who picked that music!).

I had the pleasure the other day of listing to a Webinar from Embarcadero that featured the Global Data Architect for a very large, global energy company, and I feel compelled to share three points that struck me as particularly sapient.

Enterprise data modeling is a formidable task, as those who have attempted or witnessed it will vouch. Difficulties begin right from the outset: what, exactly, do we mean by Enterprise Data Model (and Modeling)? Is it one large model, or a set of models? If the latter, are these models required to conform/share (entities, standards etc.)? Is it another name for the canonical data model? Who is responsible for building the model(s) — is it one person, one central team, or diverse project teams all contributing to it? Where do we start? How do we start? How do we maintain momentum?

I had the pleasure the other day of listing to a Webinar from Embarcadero that featured the Global Data Architect for a very large, global energy company, and I feel compelled to share three points that struck me as particularly sapient.

Enterprise data modeling is a formidable task, as those who have attempted or witnessed it will vouch. Difficulties begin right from the outset: what, exactly, do we mean by Enterprise Data Model (and Modeling)? Is it one large model, or a set of models? If the latter, are these models required to conform/share (entities, standards etc.)? Is it another name for the canonical data model? Who is responsible for building the model(s) — is it one person, one central team, or diverse project teams all contributing to it? Where do we start? How do we start? How do we maintain momentum?

Salesforce.com is moving from SaaS to cloud computing, according to this article by Charles Babcock. So, what's the difference? And, where is this all going?

Microsoft's announcement last week of its intention to expose SaaS versions of its Office products (under the moniker "Office Live") can be interpreted in numerous ways. Some see it as not much more than a kneejerk response to Google Docs. Others have characterized it as a kind of belated attempt by Microsoft to tap the promise of cloud computing. (Microsoft is no stranger to cloud computing, however, as any Xbox owner knows.)

Salesforce.com opened the second day of its annual conference with even more splash as it focused on its applications for business. Earlier this week I highlighted the energy that salesforce.com is bringing to cloud computing. Now let's examine the company's applications strategy. Salesforce.com's focus on managing business information, sharing applications and providing a platform for building applications was highlighted as the key emphasis. The challenge for the company is how much it can invest to lead customers with innovations in applications, as opposed to technology infrastructure in the platform. Salesforce.com asserted it is doubling down on CRM with R&D investments in 2008 compared to 2007, but now it will be up to customers to set their R&D priorities for their business.

The keynote highlighted the latest salesforce.com release called Winter '09 which is the 27th release in nine years, and they are excited about the technology accolades they are getting. But will business be as excited? In the marketing department, they have added Google adwords support, email templates, site landing pages, campaign hierarchy support and influence, and analytics snapshots. The demonstrations provided some insight to handling landing pages, which provide the Web analytics to then be able to manage influence across campaigns providing the basics of lead nurturing. Some of these capabilities are already being delivered by partners like Marketo and MarketBright, which automate other elements of this process and will need to compete against their partner as they advance their efforts.

Listening in to Dr. Michael Stonebraker decry "elephants" and extol the virtues of column-store databases in general and Vertica in particular, it's becoming clear that a totally new data storage architecture is the need of the day.

Dr. Stonebraker is, of course, a venerable figure in the world of databases, best known for his pioneering work on Ingres at UC Berkeley more than a quarter century ago. These days, however, in his role as CTO of Vertica, he is constrained to speak more or less unilaterally on the topic. In a recent presentation on Vertica, Dr. Stonebraker didn't actually call the leading relational database vendors — Oracle, IBM, Microsoft — "large, lumbering and slow." He did, however, repeatedly refer to them as "elephants." Very clever.

The "No Software" company, salesforce.com opened its annual Dreamforce conference yesterday with the usual loud sounds and video to introduce CEO and chairman, Marc Benioff. With more than 9,000 attendees from 40 countries in the standing-room-only keynote, Benioff said the company is doubling down on making its customers successful. The company's strategy is to put business information into their cloud computing environment and manage all your customer information, share all of your business information, and build multi-tenant applications.

On a personal note, I was pleased to hear salesforce.com highlight that it does significant work to help the community and non-profit organizations by donating more than 90,000 workforce hours and $13 million in grants to community service with some 5,000 non-profit organizations. This donation should be applauded as companies should give back to the community, especially as they continue to grow and succeed.

Saleforce.com is moving beyond the 2007 launch of the cloud computing technology platform Force.com and just competing against other IT technology platforms like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, as referenced in my blog "Can salesforce.com make the dream reality." Salesforce has gone beyond the traditional enterprise software market and is venturing into a new realm of applications and platforms for developers to bring cloud computing closer to a reality in your enterprise.

Microsoft last week unleashed it's Azure Cloud Computing offering into the IT universe, where there is some excitement that Microsoft is finally in the Cloud Computing game. I say nothing new here; I expected better.

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has been building this for a long time, and it's late to the party. With existing Cloud Computing offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com and Amazon.com, this offering is merely more of the same.

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."

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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:

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

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.

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):

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Aratσ 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

As I wrote last week, the information available on the HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server is incomplete. Pertinent questions are on the table, but I've been unsuccessful, thus far, in getting answers. Maybe the right people are taking a few well-deserved days off after Oracle Open World or maybe they're observing Rosh Hashanah. Nonetheless, I've not heard back on requests made Friday and again yesterday. I have, however, talked to HP about the fit between this new product and Neoview.

To review, the key questions about the HP-Oracle offering get into the nuts and bolts of the hardware. Is it shared-nothing architecture through and through, and, if not, how does the optimizer negotiate between the two sides of the devise (database and storage)? Second, if it's built on "industry standard" hardware, just how does it put query processing power "on each and every disk," as suggested by Larry Ellison? Netezza, for example, gains its performance by putting query processing power on a Field Programmable Gate Array on each and every disk, but that's proprietary hardware.

As I "pen" my 51st blog for IntelligentEnterprise.com, I'd like to take a different slant on the usual blog: What I, as a writer, expect from you, our reader. The continuing, unprecedented economic turbulence that is roiling us all provides a relevant backdrop to this note...

As a biz-tech writer with an established biz-tech publication, I am constantly striving to determine where lies that intersecting subset of what interests me, what interests you, and what passes by our beloved editor. Data structures and distributed operating systems? Interesting stuff for me, but likely much too theoretical for you. Social Web sites used for social purposes? Might be an essential part of your day, but leave me largely disinterested or wary even. Humor from the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse? Could have us both in tears of mirth (unless, of course, skewed – and skewered – stories of Edwardian England bore you), but will surely have Doug Henschen reaching for his editor's scissors.

This is my first time attending Oracle Open World. I met it with a degree of trepidation when a colleague told me 60,000 people attend. 60,000??! The official count was 43,000, but still, that’s more than twice the size of my home town and 10 to 20 times the size of the typical BI conferences I attend.

So I was a little worried about the BI sessions and customers getting lost beneath the weight of the larger lines of Oracle's businesses (mainly the database and operational apps) — let alone how do that many people move among venues?

The whole concept of the data warehouse appliances has gone from "an interesting niche in the market to something that's smack dab in the middle of the mainstream market." That's how Jim Baum, president and COO of Netezza, sized up the importance of this week's announcement of the HP Oracle Database Machine. That's the big picture, but having interviewed Netezza and Teradata executives thus far, it's clear that they, along with analysts and potential customers, are still struggling to size up the actual product. I'm still gathering opinions, but here's a short list of questions raised thus far:

Oracle, in partnership with HP, has announced a new data warehouse appliance product line, cleverly branded "Exadata." The basic idea seems to be that database processing is split among two sets of servers:

• (The new stuff) A set of back-end servers — the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers — that gets data off of disk and does some preliminary query processing.
• (The old stuff) A conventional Oracle RAC cluster on the front-end.

Numbers are being thrown around suggesting that, unlike prior Oracle offerings, the Exadata-based appliance at least has scalability and price/performance worth comparing to Teradata — hey, Exa is bigger than Tera! — Netezza, et al.

Omer Trajman of column-store DBMS vendor Vertica put up a must-read blog spelling out detailed compression numbers, based on actual field experience (which I'd guess is from a combination of production systems and POCs):

Could technology have saved Wall Street from its current financial crisis? That's something I've been thinking about over the last few days as I've scramble to move at least some of my money into FDIC-insured accounts at multiple institutions. From my perspective, the Fannies, Freddies, Lehmans and AIGs of this world no doubt had plenty of risk analysis, predictive analytics, and business rules technology to see and avoid the risk. They just ignored the danger signs or, worse, used the technology to paper over the risks.

It was with some measure of satisfaction that I saw Justin Cutroni's blog on Google Analytics compliance with Web Analytics Association (WAA) metrics standards. Cutroni works for EpikOne, a Google Analytics Authorized Partner.

You see, I'm asking all of the vendors I'm evaluating in Web Analytics Report to explain how they comply with the standards. The timing of this blog was perhaps no coincidence, as I've been working with Cutroni on updating my evaluation of Google Analytics.

Readers of the Web Analytics Report know that there are many steps to creating a successful Web analytics initiative — such as developing a strong organization, and creating processes to ensure that analytics get integrated into the mainstream of a company's operations.

If you're a Web analytics manager for a large organization, one of the biggest challenges you likely face in creating enterprisewide standards is at the very heart of Web analytics: data collection.

Richard Brown of Thomson Reuters delivered an illuminating talk, "News, Blogs, and Full-Tick Logs: Innovative Approaches to Quantitative and Event-Driven Trading," Tuesday at Gartner's Event Processing Summit. The summit and the Event Processing Technical Society symposium now underway feature many such use cases, descriptions of low-latency transformation and analysis of high-volume data and event streams as applied to diverse business problems. Brown's case study, which looked at exploiting information from unstructured sources to support financial-market trading, was of particular interest (to me) due to its combination of events, text sources, and sentiment analysis.

In case you didn't read the blog entry about CMIS by Kas Thomas, Microsoft, EMC, and IBM recently announce that they, along with other vendors like Open Text and Alfresco, have submitted a new content integration standard to OASIS. This new standard should enable disparate content management solutions to exchange content in a more standardized way. Presumably, this standard will enable organizations with multiple content repositories manage and present (to various applications) those repositories as a virtual content store. If history is to teach us anything about Microsoft's behavior, it would seem logical that Redmond will likely release a SharePoint "accelerator" to take advantage of this new standard.

Today I'm at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, Conn., and much of the buzz here is about what's going down on Wall Street. That's no surprise given that about 70 percent of the attendees here are from financial institutions. There have been plenty of jokes about not being able to buy paper clips, let alone enterprise technology. That said, I did see at least some tire kicking in the exhibit hall, and among the 15 vendors exhibiting at this smallish, 150-attendee hotel event, almost every one of them seemed to be showing off a dashboard-style interface.

As Gartner analyst Roy Schulte's observes in this week's in-depth Q&A interview, dashboards showing current (or at least near-real-time) business metrics have never been hotter. We're seeing these types of interfaces from BI vendors, BAM vendors and complex-event-processing (CEP) vendors alike. It's a healthy sign of a meeting of the minds between business and IT.