InformationWeek Stories by Doug Henschen

InformationWeek Stories by Doug Henschenhttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-01-02T09:06:00Z5 Cloud App Trends To Expect In 2013We'll see more mobile options and embedded analytics, of course, but surprises will include growth in financial apps and big-data insights.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/5-cloud-app-trends-to-expect-in-2013/240145319?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-cloud-computing-pioneers/240142397 "><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/909/01_cloud_gurus_tn.jpg" alt="10 Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="10 Cloud Computing Pioneers" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Cloud Computing Pioneers </div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Some of the trends we'll see in cloud-based enterprise applications in 2013 are obvious, while some might surprise. Here's my take on five trends to expect in the new year, along with examples and advice on how to ride each wave. Mobile options multiply. This is one of the obvious trends, as it's clear that tablets and smartphones are the preferred interface for executives, salespeople, managers and even not-so-mobile employees who accept that there are no longer barriers between work life and home life. Every credible cloud apps vendor is addressing mobile, but one standout is <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-revenues-surge-but-should/240142626">Salesforce.com</a>, which offers native apps as well as growing HTML5 support. There's no single right way to support mobile, so look for options. Does your vendor (or prospective vendor) have separate native apps for tablets and phones that do justice to each form factor? If not, has the vendor progressed to HTML5 content that adapts to a range of devices? If the vendor relies solely on Web-based access, has it at least designed with mobile browsers in mind? If you still see scrollbars and tiny buttons that were designed for mouse-and-keyboard interaction, it's not mobile-friendly. Try before you buy. [ For more on what to expect in the coming year, read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Outlook 2013</a> in our latest all-digital issue. ] Embedded analytics proliferate. Here's another established trend that's sure to keep growing in 2013 because users naturally want reporting and dashboarding options right in the context of the apps they use every day. One standout on this front is <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/workday-posts-strong-start-as-public-fir/240142845">Workday</a>, which offers particularly deep and configurable embedded analytics. What should you look for? Start by considering the out-of-the-box options for reporting and dashboarding. Next, consider the configurable options. Can you bring external apps and data sources into the mix, or is it a stovepipe of analysis of data generated within the app? What's the latency of the data -- will the reports and metrics show up-to-the-minute data, up-to-the-hour data or yesterday's information? Don't forget to consider the analytics embedded in mobile apps. Can your phone truly be smart if it's not serving up metrics and dashboards? When it's mobile, it really should be up-to-the-minute data. The need for insight usually goes beyond the confines of a single app, so it's important to consider partner offerings and options for working with well-known BI systems and data warehousing platforms. Salesforce.com has a panoply of partner options, while Microsoft (with <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/microsoft-dynamics-app-updates-whats-mis/240143756">Dynamics CRM Online</a>), <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-open-world-6-rants-and-raves/240008308">Oracle</a> (with Fusion Apps, Taleo, RightNow and so on), and SAP (with SuccessFactors, Business ByDesign and other cloud options) offer ways to work with their popular respective BI and data warehousing platforms. Configuration options abound. Configuration options are quickly replacing the need for customization across all applications, whether delivered in the cloud or on-premises. That's because most organizations want to avoid developing and maintaining custom code. In the configuration approach, the vendor supplies menu- or wizard-driven interfaces that let you expose industry-specific functionality or set company-specific controls. Workday, for example, uses configuration to deliver features designed for colleges, universities and government agencies. It's not that configuration is easy; it's a setup step that will likely have to be handled by deep technical experts during an initial deployment. But at least you won't have to worry about tweaking and testing code every time the application gets an upgrade. When you're using custom code, there's always a chance it will have to be redeveloped when changes are made to an underlying application. There are cases when custom development can be a big help, particularly when you need functionality that the vendor just doesn't offer. That's why Salesforce.com, for one, offers the Force.com development platform while <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/netsuite-ceo-whats-next-for-erp-in-cloud/240007963">NetSuite</a> provides SuiteBuilder customization tools and a SuiteFlow workflow engine. Consider both configuration and customization options when choosing a cloud app, but customize only when there's a clear return on the ongoing investment required.Financial apps emerge in the cloud. Cloud-based financial apps are growing in number and seeing healthy demand. Cloud suite vendors Workday and NetSuite provide the general ledger and accounting functionality associated with ERP systems. The same is true of FinancialForce.com, minority owned by Salesforce.com and majority owned by European ERP firm Unit4. On-premises giants Oracle and SAP seem to be waking up to the threat. Oracle introduced cloud-ready Oracle Fusion Financials in late 2011, and SAP released <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-takes-big-step-putting-crm-on-hana/240124898">Financials OnDemand</a> in November. The latter is based on functionality from the SAP Business ByDesign suite, and it's likely to be paired with SAP SuccessFactors human capital management applications to answer the competitive threat from Workday. For a deeper level of planning and budgeting functionality in the cloud, look to pure-play financial performance management vendors such as <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/will-financial-apps-be-next-cloud-growth/240005011">Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, Host Analytics, and Tidemark</a>. Adaptive Planning, founded in 2003, has more than 1,200 customers and 30,000 users, and in 2012 it acquired cloud business intelligence vendor MyDials to bolster its dashboarding capabilities. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/cloud-vendor-brings-cfos-closer-to-erp-d/232700463">Host Analytics</a>, founded in 2000, has deep CFO-oriented functionality, including consolidation, and it's the second-largest vendor in this group, with more than 800 customers and 14,000 users. Anaplan and Tidemark are fast-growing startups. SAP and Oracle are just starting to bring performance management functionality into the cloud, so check their roadmaps if you're inclined to stick with your on-premises software vendor. [ Want more on what to expect in the coming year? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Outlook 2013</a> in our latest, all-digital issue. ] Financial apps may never become as pervasive as CRM in the cloud, but the increasingly global nature of even midsized organizations -- with income streams and financial management needs on several continents -- makes cloud-based deployment an attractive option. Big data adds benchmarking value. A few cloud vendors have recognized that they're sitting on an incredibly valuable asset: the data generated by their many customers. The trick is aggregating this information in a secure, de-identified way such that it can't be traced back to a particular customer. This idea is not new. ERP vendors and user groups have collected and aggregated data for years in order to compile benchmark statistics. It's usually a data-swap affair in which you agree to provide your own data to the aggregated pool in exchange for access to the average and best-in-class statistics across your industry. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/successfactors-update-streamlines-hr-man/229500047">SuccessFactors </a> jumped on the benchmarking bandwagon even before it was acquired by SAP, tapping into aggregated data from thousands of cloud customers to deliver by-industry employee, departmental and total-workforce metrics such as operating profit per full-time employee, the turnover rate among top-performing employees, internal hiring rate and voluntary termination rates. Workday recently announced plans for a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/productivity-applications/workday-collaborative-hcm-analytics-tool/240062632">Workday Big Data Analytics</a> offering, set for release in the second half of 2013, that will bring third-party data sources into the analysis without complex ETL requirements. The more data you can bring to an analysis, the more accurate it's likely to be, so we like the idea of big-data-enabled benchmarking. These are five cloud apps that we'll be watching in 2013, and given <a href="http://www.informationweek.comthebrainyard/news/marketing/oracle-buys-eloqua-watch-out-salesforce/240145115">Oracle's plan to acquire Eloqua</a>, announced just last week, there's one more trend to watch in 2013: continued acquisitions of cloud-based marketing automation and marketing analytics companies. That trend started with IBM's purchase of Unica a few years ago, and since then SAS, Teradata, Oracle, Salesforce.com and others have jumped on the bandwagon. As we see it, most of the demand for marketing applications is in the cloud. Cloud computing, virtualization and the mobile explosion create computing demands that today’s servers may not meet. Join Dell executives to get an in-depth look at how next-generation servers meet the evolving demands of enterprise computing, while adapting to the next wave of IT challenges. <a href="https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1005372&K=EOA">Register for this Dell-sponsored webcast now</a>.2012-12-27T11:50:00ZAmazon Outage Scrooges Netflix, HerokuAmazon Web Services suffers a second holiday services disruption and the fourth outage of 2012.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-outage-scrooges-netflix-heroku/240145338?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors  <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/7-dumb-myths-about-cloud-computing/240124922"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/graphics_library/175x175/money_cloud.jpg" alt="7 Dumb Cloud Computing Myths" title="7 Dumb Cloud Computing Myths" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">7 Dumb Cloud Computing Myths</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div> What is it with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and holidays? First came the massive Easter weekend service outage of 2011. Now it's the Christmas Eve outage of 2012, which left millions of Netflix customers unable stream video on a high-demand night for movie viewing. Netflix customer complaints lit up social networks on Christmas Eve, but the video service could only point a finger of blame at AWS, its cloud services provider. Amazon offered little explanation, but a "status history" report for 12/24 on the <a href="http://status.aws.amazon.com/">Amazon Service Health Dashboard</a> shows "performance issues" affected Amazon's Northern Virginia data center. The outage hit Netflix viewers from Canada to Brazil. It also affected Amazon's own Amazon Prime video-streaming service and Salesforce.com's Heroku cloud platform, which served up HTTP errors and ssl:endpoint unavailability messages during the outage. Netflix reported that it was able to restore services to most of the affected consumers by late Christmas Eve. But that entailed a workaround that involved manually reassigning capacity to other Amazon data centers. Amazon reported that it took until the afternoon of Christmas Day to fix the problems at its Northern Virginia data center. [ Want more on cloud foibles? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cloud-computing-best-and-worst-news-of-2/240144531?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Cloud Computing: Best And Worst News Of 2012</a>. ] The three specific AWS services affected were Amazon CloudWatch, EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk. CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud services and apps. EC2 is the Elastic Compute Cloud that provides on-demand compute capacity. Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling and application health monitoring. AWS offers built-in redundancy for all these services by way of multiple data centers and availability zones around the globe, but it's clear that provisions for automatic failover went down along with the CloudWatch and Beanstalk services. The latest incident marks the fourth AWS outage in 2012. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-defended-after-june-14-cloud-outa/240002207">June 14</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-outage-hits-netflix-heroku-pinter/240003096">June 29</a> disruptions were tied to power outages while a less-serious <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-outage-multiple-zones-a-smart-str/240009598">October 22 incident</a> involved the vendor's Elastic Block Storage Service. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/post-mortem-when-amazons-cloud-turned-on/229402534">Amazon's Easter outage of 2011</a> still ranks as one of the service provider's worst disruptions, as multiple availability zones went down and some customers took days to recover. The outage was ultimately blamed on human error.2012-12-19T09:21:00ZOracle Q2 Results: Ellison Spins On SunCEO Larry Ellison talks up Oracle's Sun acquisition even as hardware sales slide 23%. Software sales rise.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-q2-results-ellison-spins-on-sun/240145003?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsOracle on Tuesday reported robust 18% growth in new software license and cloud software subscription revenues for the company's second fiscal quarter that ended November 30. It was a performance worth crowing about, yet CEO Larry Ellison confined most of his comments to Oracle's Sun hardware business, where the numbers were far from encouraging. Second quarter hardware sales totaled $734 million, down 23% from the year-earlier result of $953 million (all figures in constant currencies). The performance was well below Oracle's own low-end guidance of an 18% year-over-year decline, yet Ellison incongruously put a positive spin on the news. "Our $7.5 billion purchase of Sun has already proven to be the most strategic and profitable acquisition Oracle has ever made," Ellison said during a conference call with analysts after the close of the stock market on Tuesday. "Sun hardware technology has enabled us to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business." Sun hardware sales were in decline when the company was acquired, but Oracle accelerated that slide by getting out of the commodity X86 Intel server business. Oracle has said all along has been that fast growth in higher-margin sales of engineered systems -- Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics -- as well as the Sparc T4 Unix server would eventually counter the drop in commodity hardware sales while buoying profitability. It appears that transition is taking longer than expected. [ What's the latest from Oracle on big data? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/oracle-upgrades-nosql-database-big-data/240144555?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle Upgrades NoSQL Database, Big Data Appliance</a>. ] "The declines in the [hardware] business had been beginning to moderate; however, the more rapid declines in the August quarter and now the November quarter make it unlikely this business' growth will turn positive in the upcoming February quarter," wrote Nomura equity analyst Rick Sherlund in a research note. Ellison told analysts hardware sales will level off in the third quarter and turn positive in the fourth quarter. Engineered systems sales surpassed 700 units during the second quarter, with a 70% increase in sequential unit bookings, according to Oracle President Mark Hurd. Unit sales may have been boosted by October's introduction of a low-cost, eighth-rack Exadata appliance introduced at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-open-world-6-rants-and-raves/240008308">Oracle OpenWorld</a> that cut the cost of entry into the Exa-series line with a list price of $200,000. The most encouraging results for Oracle in 2Q were on the software front, with new software license and subscription sales hitting $2.39 billion, up 18% from $2.04 billion a year earlier. Software license update and product support revenues (otherwise known as maintenance fees) totaled $4.26 billion, up 8% from $3.98 billion in the year-earlier period. Oracle's total revenues on the quarter were $9.09 billion, up 5% from $8.79 a year earlier measures in constant currencies. By region, sales were up 22% in the Americas, 13% in the Asia-Pacific region, and 12% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Oracle's database, middleware and application revenues were all up by double digits, according to Hurd, but the bright spot was Oracle applications, up 30%. Cloud application wins included Abercrombie & Fitch, Emirates Air, Expedia, Macy's and United Airlines. Engineered systems customer wins included China Mobile, Facebook, Time Warner Cable, Chevron, Vodaphone and Walmart. Looking toward the third quarter, Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz projected new software and subscription sales would increase 4% to 14%. Hardware sales are expected to be negative 10% to flat, Catz said, putting Ellison's 3Q prediction at the top end of company guidance. Total revenue in the third quarter is expected to grow 2% to 6%. Reminding analysts that the Sun purchase wasn't just about hardware, Ellison also pointed out that Oracle gained Java through that deal. "Today our Java business is booming, growing over 34% this past quarter," Ellison said. He also noted that engineered systems are bundled with Oracle software, which is where the margins are realized. As is the case with the Exa-series products and other hardware, Oracle does not break out revenue or profit margins for Java, so it's tough to validate Ellison's claim that Sun has been Oracle's best acquisition ever. Is it more profitable and strategic than, say, Peoplesoft, Siebel or Hyperion, software businesses that have extended Oracle's reach into ERP, business intelligence, analytics and financial analysis? Time will tell.2012-12-18T11:06:00ZSalesforce.com Motivates Sales Teams With Work.comCloud vendor's sales apps are the first to gain new social recognition, reward and performance-management capabilities.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-motivates-sales-teams-with/240144599?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSalespeople sell more when goals are known, feedback is immediate, coaching is continuous and recognition is meaningful. These are the promises of Salesforce.com's new Work.com social recognition and rewards application when applied to the vendor's Sales Cloud applications. Work.com is the rebuilt, rebranded and extended version the cloud-based Ryyple application that Salesforce.com acquired one year ago. An alternative to traditional human capital management (HCM) apps, Work.com supports ongoing social interactions among managers, employees and coworkers rather than a top-down periodic performance review process tied to an org chart. Where Ryyple was mostly a gamified recognition app, with badges handed out as rewards, Work.com has been bolstered with private manager-employee coaching workspaces and a goal-and-reward system that can be tied to Amazon gift cards. The <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-goes-to-workcom/240007673">Work.com</a> makeover was announced at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event in September, and the debut was promised for Q4. The app is technically still in preview release, but on Tuesday Salesforce.com announced in <a href="http://work.com/blog/2012/12/a-new-approach-to-sales-performance-2/">a blog</a> that the integration with the Sales Cloud is ready. Customers need only contact the company to have the functionality turned on. The formal general release is expected in early 2013. [ Want more on cloud-based human capital management? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/payroll-giant-adp-flexes-hr-apps-muscle/240008796?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Payroll Giant ADP Flexes HR Apps Muscle</a>. ] A key contrast with conventional HCM apps is that Work.com is embedded in apps that workers use every day -- in this case the Sales Cloud and Salesforce Chatter social collaboration app. Managers don't have to go to a separate interface to let the sales team or the entire company know about a success. Work.com is not a free add-on -- that is, unless the customer has an all-inclusive enterprise license agreement. Per-user, per-month subscriptions start at $10 for Work.com Motivate, which gives managers tools to enhance Chatter.com social profiles with sales role details and reward plans. Rewards can be customizable, gamification-style social badges or point-value rewards that can be accumulated and exchanged for Amazon gift cards. For $15 per user, per month subscribers also get Work.com Align, which managers use to create and detail goals, outline a skills progression and structure an ongoing coaching program that Salesforce.com says is crucial when bringing new sales people onboard or when moving current employees up to the next level. The top subscription level of $20 per user, per month adds Work.com Perform, a performance-review app that aggregates all the data from the Motivate and Align apps into summarized reports. Individual reports are available for periodic one-on-one reviews while higher-level summaries can be used by senior sales and HR teams for succession planning. Here, too, the point is that it's not a separate, siloed HCM app; all the wins recognized, goals met, and coaching sessions shared are detailed as part of the day-to-day sales process in the apps used by the entire sales team. Where Ryyple was a lightweight app priced at $5 per user, per month, Work.com is decidedly more substantial, but so, too, is the pricing. Keep in mind that for all the new features, Work.com is not an employee system of record that covers essentials such as compensation management. For that you'll have to turn to a partner, such as Workday, or a third-party alternative such as ADP's Workforce Now or Vantage, Oracle's Taleo or Fusion HCM, or SAP's SuccessFactors app. Work.com has to be viewed as a complement to a core HR system, but Salesforce believes where motivating, coaching and managing performance are concerned, Work.com's social, collaborative and embedded approach is more likely to be used and effective than a conventional HCM app. Tech spending is looking up, but IT must focus more on customers and less on internal systems. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Outlook 2013</a> issue of InformationWeek: Five painless rules for encryption. (Free registration required.)2012-12-18T09:06:00ZOracle Upgrades NoSQL Database, Big Data ApplianceOracle NoSQL Database 2.0 gains management features, while the Oracle Big Data Appliance gets new software, more powerful Intel chips.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/oracle-upgrades-nosql-database-big-data/240144555?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/13-big-data-vendors-to-watch-in-2013/240144124"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/924/BigDataLogos_tn.jpg" alt="13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013" title="13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>Oracle on Monday announced second-generation releases of its NoSQL database and big data appliance, delivering the kind of user-driven, short-list upgrades that are typical when graduating from a 1.0 release. The high points of Oracle NoSQL Database Release 2.0 include auto-rebalancing, manageability and application programming interface (API) upgrades that address practical deployment and administrative concerns. The auto-rebalancing feature dynamically manages compute and storage capacity to maintain service levels even as processing demands fluctuate as the scale and throughput of data and the number of users varies. A new Web-based management console gives administrators access to all the tools and controls they need to deploy and monitor the database, according to Oracle. On the development front, Oracle has added a C-based API for those who prefer that language over the existing Java API. A new Large Object API is aimed at handling images, documents and other large objects. An automatic serialization API takes advantage of support for Apache Avro in Release 2.0. A remote procedure call for data serialization, Avro lets you define a schema (using JSON) for the data contained in a record's value. This compact, schema-based data format also eases integration with Hadoop. [ Want more on Oracle big data moves? Read <a href="https://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/oracle-acquires-dataraker-for-utility-analytics/240144346?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Information_Management_software&itc=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Information_Management_software&itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle Acquires DataRaker For Utility Analytics</a>. ] Oracle NoSQL Database is based on open-source Berkeley DB, a venerable, decades-old key value store that's widely used in the telecommunications industry. Oracle is hoping its NoSQL spinoff can go head to head with open-source NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase and Riak, which have quickly gained momentum in the big data movement in recent years. A free <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/nosqldb/downloads/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen">Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition</a> Release 2.0 is available from the Oracle Web site. Oracle's latest appliance release, Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2, has much in common with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2, which was announced in October at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-open-world-6-rants-and-raves/240008308">Oracle Open World</a>. Both appliances harness latest-generation 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2600 series of processors. The full-rack appliance packs 18 compute and storage servers offering a total of 648 terabytes of raw storage capacity. The hardware delivers 33% more processing power with 288 CPU cores and 33% more memory per node with 1.1 terabytes of main memory. Power and cooling requirements per terabyte are naturally reduced. On the software front, the Big Data Appliance includes <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-releases-next-generation-hadoop/240001574">Cloudera CDH4.1</a>, the latest Hadoop software distribution. Released in June, CDH4.1 was developed to improve NameNode availability and thereby eliminate the single point of failure in a Hadoop cluster. The Big Data Appliance also includes Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition 2.0, the free version of Oracle's just-released NoSQL database mentioned above. The Big Data Appliance software bundle also includes upgraded Oracle Big Data Connectors. A SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System, for example, is said to improve query performance of HDFS from Oracle Database by way of Hive tables. The upgraded software also offers transparent access to the Hive Query language from the R statistical programming language. This supports analytic techniques natively in Hadoop, enabling R developers to be more productive by opening up access to the data in Hadoop clusters. Both the Oracle NoSQL Database Release 2 and the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 are available immediately. Tech spending is looking up, but IT must focus more on customers and less on internal systems. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Outlook 2013</a> issue of InformationWeek: Five painless rules for encryption. (Free registration required.) 2012-12-14T18:05:00ZResearch: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trendshttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2012-12-13T13:34:00ZOracle Acquires DataRaker For Utility AnalyticsBig data deal gives Oracle a cloud-based platform for analyzing vast datasets generated by electric, gas and water utilities.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/oracle-acquires-dataraker-for-utility-analytics/240144346?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/ibm-smarter-cities-challenge-10-towns-ra/240142572"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/913/01_Smarter_Cities_tn.jpg" alt="IBM Smarter Cities Challenge: 10 Towns Raise Tech IQs" title="IBM Smarter Cities Challenge: 10 Towns Raise Tech IQs" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">IBM Smarter Cities Challenge: 10 Towns Raise Tech IQs</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Oracle announced Thursday that it has an agreement to acquire DataRaker, provider of a cloud-based platform used by electric, gas and water utilities to analyze smart meter and sensor data in order to optimize internal operations and improve customer service. Utilities are investing big money in smart meters and sensors to support data-driven operations and services. Where meter readings used to be captured once per month, mostly for billing purposes, readings are now captured by the hour, minute or even second to gain insights into demand patterns, network distribution characteristics, the impact of the weather and other dynamics. With more data and fast analysis, utilities can proactively address service problems and improve workforce efficiency while also serving up insights to customers for consumption efficiency programs. Oracle said DataRaker's capabilities will complement its Oracle Utilities solutions, which are mostly utility-specialized ERP applications for work management, asset management, customer care and billing, meter data management, network and outage management, forecasting, human capital management, financials, and supply chain. DataRaker's cloud-based services will help utility customers shorten customer call times, reduce billing complaints, make better use of field personal and improve customer engagement, <a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/dataraker/faq-1881041.pdf">Oracle said in a statement</a>. [ Want more on utility analytics? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/future-power-grids-will-need-big-data-analysis/240144132?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Future Power Grids Will Need Big Data Analysis</a>. ] With more data and better predictive analytics, utilities also will be able to improve capital planning and asset utilization while improving reliability with preventative maintenance and replacement programs designed to avoid outages. Oracle isn't alone in pursuing smart meter analytics. IBM and SAP both have initiatives underway, and both can point to customers with deployments in place. IBM worked with Washington D.C.'s water utility as part of its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/ibm-software-powers-smart-utilities-and/229219591">Smarter Cities initiative</a>, and it's working with Texas utility Oncor as part of its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-meets-texas-smart-energy-grid/240077542">Smarter Utilities</a> program. SAP is using its Hana database technology at U.K.-based <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/hana-and-exalytics-saps-hype-versus-orac/232901262">gas and electric utility</a> Centrica. Oracle did not disclose financial terms or an anticipated close date for the DataRaker acquisition. The company's management team and employees are expected to join the Oracle Utilities global business unit. Founded in 2007 and based in Sausalito, Calif., DataRaker currently monitors some 17 million smart meters, managing multiple terabytes of data and tracking hundreds of data elements for each utility customer. Data analysis is said to be continuous, with monitoring feeds and insights delivered through Web-based APIs and customizable graphical user interfaces. Predictive analysis is getting faster, more accurate and more accessible. Combined with big data, it's driving a new age of experiments. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111912/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Advanced Analytics</a> issue of InformationWeek: Are project management offices a waste of money? (Free registration required.)2012-12-13T10:22:00ZCouchbase Broadens Its NoSQL DatabaseCouchbase challenges 10Gen's MongoDB grip on document-oriented applications, adds JSON support to its key value store database.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/couchbase-broadens-its-nosql-database/240144362?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsCouchbase announced Wednesday the general availability of Couchbase Server 2.0, a significant upgrade aimed at bringing document-handling capabilities to a popular NoSQL database. Couchbase is an open-source, key value store database used mostly by Internet companies and gaming firms for its rapid scalability, reliability and high performance. Key value stores tend to be simple, with few bells and whistles for developers. Couchbase, the developer and support provider for the database of the same name, says the 2.0 release introduces data-model flexibility for support of JSON (JavaScript object notation), distributed indexing and querying capabilities, and support for MapReduce analytics. All of these features will step up competition with NoSQL competitor <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">10Gen and its MongoDB database</a>, the leading document-oriented database and arguably the most widely used NoSQL database overall. The popularity of MongoDB is due in large part to the many indexing, querying and other developer-friendly features 10Gen has built into the database. Couchbase is hoping scalability and performance will help win converts. [ Want more on NoSQL databases? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/2-lessons-learned-managing-big-data-in-c/232900443?itc=edit_in_body_cross">2 Lessons Learned Managing Big Data In Cloud</a>. ] "Now people are going to have a choice that offers easier scalability, higher performance and better reliability at scale, but that also is a document database that provides indexing and querying," Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold told InformationWeek. Support for JSON, together with the indexing, querying, full-text search and MapReduce features, expands the database's applicability into content-rich applications while also making development and management easier in terms of understanding data formatting. Gaming company Shuffle Entertainment chose Couchbase two years ago for its combination of rapid scalability and performance. These qualities were crucial in building cloud-based gaming and gambling platforms that had to be able to quickly support tens or even hundreds of thousands of new users while also meeting regulatory requirements and fraud-detection demands. The benefits of the 2.0 release to Shuffle include a new append-only write mode, which will speed confirmation of transactions, while JSON support will make the database accessible to a broader group of developers, according to Louis Castle, chief strategy officer. "The simplicity of JSON dramatically reduces the complexity of the database," Castle told InformationWeek. "With the database structures previously available, we relied on a handful of people who really understood how the various tables all mapped together. By switching to a document format with JSON, it will be easier for more of our server engineers to interact with and understand the data." Couchbase has more than 350 commercial support customers including Internet giants such as Orbitz, gaming companies including Zynga, and a growing number of brick-and-mortar companies including Adidas, Honda and Starbucks.2012-12-12T10:21:00ZBig Data Revolution Will Be Led By RevolutionariesWhy "old-guard" vendors didn't make our list of big data vendors to watch in 2013.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/big-data-revolution-will-be-led-by-revol/240144268?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/13-big-data-vendors-to-watch-in-2013/240144124"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/924/BigDataLogos_tn.jpg" alt="13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013" title="13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  The truest and most memorable insight into IT industry dynamics I ever heard was delivered by Steve Mills, senior VP and group executive of software and systems at IBM. During a 2010 interview we were discussing the relative importance of various layers of the stack, and I asked him, "what's really driving customer technology selections: hardware, middleware or applications?" "It's money," Mills replied. "That's the No. 1 motivator. And money is not a single-dimensional factor because there's short-term money, long-term money and money described in broader value terms versus the cost of a product. The surrounding costs are far in excess of products." That line hit me like a ton of bricks, so now no matter how hyped or religious technology debates become, I try to remember that money will determine the outcome. Customer loyalty, inertia, vendor market share, cozy relationships and other factors may intervene, but as in natural selection and economics, the idea is that the best, most cost-effective approach will ultimately win the day. The context of that 2010 question was whether companies would choose Oracle's engineered systems versus IBM's offerings. After sharing his money line, Mills said IBM is seeing customers switch from Oracle Database to IBM DB2 because the former is expensive by comparison. [ Want more on how big data might impact incumbent technologies? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-end-near-for-etl/240143068?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Big Data Debate: End Near For ETL?</a> ] Money cuts both ways where vendors are concerned. On Monday I had another interview with Mills, this time to talk about IBM's latest big data initiatives. I asked him whether he thinks Hadoop and NoSQL databases might change how or even whether people continue to use <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-end-near-for-data-wareh/240142290">relational databases</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-end-near-for-etl/240143068">extract, transform, load (ETL) technologies</a> -- a topic we've explored in recent InformationWeek debates. "Back in the 1990s the assertion was that object-oriented databases would replace relational databases," Mills responded. "Periodically we get all this excitement about technologies, but it's not a one-size-fits-all world. There are point-product companies that offer a thing, but those things don't necessarily solve the complete problem." At that point I had already completed our collection of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/13-big-data-vendors-to-watch-in-2013/240144124">"13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013,"</a> but the conversation with Mills confirmed in my mind the decision not to include any incumbent vendors from the relational database world. It's not that I disagree with Mills. In fact, I'd guess that some of the vendors that did make my list won't be around five years from now. All of these vendors are focused pretty much on one thing, and if it doesn't work out, well, then there's always the next startup. On the other hand, their pure, undiluted and uncompromised attention to one product tends to focus the vendor on building a better, more cost-effective product. Hadoop and NoSQL platforms are proving to be more scalable, flexible and affordable in big-data deployments, and that's why they are the focus of the "13 To Watch" collection. IBM does, in fact, have a Hadoop option. I recall Rod Smith, VP of emerging Internet technologies, presenting on IBM's research on Hadoop way back at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-world-nyc-highlights-budding-alte/220301046">Hadoop World NYC</a> in 2009. But it then took two years for IBM to release its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/ibm-beats-oracle-microsoft-with-big-data/231901566">InfoSphere BigInsights</a> Hadoop software distribution. Mills insists that "thousands of customers" are using BigInsights, but there are few signs of a big commercial push. I haven't heard many customer names. It feels like window dressing. Similarly, Mills said Monday that NoSQL structures can be managed by IBM DB2, but I never hear about it being used as a NoSQL database. DB2 was the incumbent database at Constant Contact, but the digital marketing services company chose the open-source Cassandra NoSQL database when it decided to provide social marketing services as well as e-mail campaigns. By <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2FLNZyPuWE&list=PL5AD5FA5751A729CA&index=7">Constant Contact's estimates</a> the relational route would have required a $2.5 million investment and nine months of development. It deployed Cassandra, supported by DataStax, within three months at a cost of $250,000. In short, money won. IBM isn't the only relational incumbent that seems to be taking an arm's length approach to new big data platforms. Teradata's thinking about Hadoop has clearly evolved. I recall conversations with CTO Stephen Brobst in 2010 in which he downplayed the importance of Hadoop, slammed its performance and served up the well-worn "open source isn't free" argument. One year later Teradata acquired AsterData so it could support MapReduce processing within a relational database environment. Then in October, Teradata announced it will support Hadoop nodes alongside relational nodes on a single appliance, mirroring a strategy EMC Greenplum adopted at least a year earlier. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/oracle-makes-big-data-appliance-move-wit/232400021">Oracle</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/microsoft-releases-hadoop-on-windows/240009632">Microsoft</a> are the latest big names to offer Hadoop, in this case through partnerships with Cloudera and Hortonworks, respectively. I'm guessing those moves helped persuade database newbie SAP to jump on the big data bandwagon by adding a Hadoop connector. At SAS I've heard the open-source-ain't-free argument from CEO Jim Goodnight more than once. Nonetheless, SAS added support for open-source R-based statistical models a couple of years ago at the behest of customers who didn't want to have to spend time and money developing stuff that was already available from the R community. I could cite other examples, but my point is that incumbents all too often suffer from not-invented-here syndrome. If they embrace potentially disruptive technologies at all, it tends to be a late, shallow or half-hearted embrace. That's because what might get disrupted is the flow of money from incumbent technologies. There's a lot going on in the world of big data, and I agree with Mills' point that companies using new platforms will still have to address data integration, data quality, data governance, backup, recovery and so on. They'll also still need conventional relational databases and business intelligence and analytic systems for all the proven applications and new applications to come that will run on those incumbent platforms. But if the question is which vendors will really champion and innovate big data platforms such as Hadoop, NoSQL and related analytics systems, you have to look to the companies that have all their money riding on these new environments.2012-12-11T09:06:00Z13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013From Amazon to Splunk, here's a look at the big data innovators that are now pushing Hadoop, NoSQL and big data analytics to the next level.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/13-big-data-vendors-to-watch-in-2013/240144124?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThere are leaders and there are followers in the big data movement. This collection comprises a baker's dozen leaders. Some, like Amazon, Cloudera and 10Gen, were there at the dawn of the Hadoop and NoSQL movements. Others, like Hortonworks and Platfora, are newcomers, but draw on deep experience. The three big themes you'll find in this collection are Hadoop maturation, NoSQL innovation and analytic discovery. The Hadoop crowd includes Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR, each of which is focused entirely on bringing this big data platform to a broader base of users by improving reliability, manageability and performance. Cloudera and Hortonworks are improving access to data with their Impala and HCatalog initiatives, respectively, while MapR's latest push is improving HBase performance. The NoSQL set is led by 10Gen, Amazon, CouchBase, DataStax and Neo Technologies. These are the developers and support providers behind MongoDB, DynamoDB, CouchBase, Cassandra and Neo4j, respectively, which are the leading document, cloud, key value, column and graph databases. Big data analytic discovery is still in the process of being invented, and the leaders here include Datameer, Hadapt, Karmasphere, Platfora and Splunk. The first four have competing visions of how we'll analyze data in Hadoop, while the last specializes in machine-data analysis. What you won't find here are old-guard vendors from the relational database world. Sure, some of those big-name companies have been fast followers. Some even have software distributions and have added important capabilities. But are their hearts really in it? In some cases, you get the sense that their efforts are window dressing. There are vested interests -- namely license revenue -- in sticking with the status quo, so you just don't see them out there aggressively selling something that just might displace their cash cows. In other cases, their ubiquitous connectors to Hadoop seem like desperate ploys for some big data cachet. For many users, the key issues include flexibility, speed and ease of use. And it isn't clear that any single product or service can offer all of those capabilities at the moment. We're still in the very early days of the big data movement, and as the saying goes, the pioneers might get the arrows while the settlers get the land. In our eyes, first movers like Amazon and Cloudera already look like settlers, and more than a few others on this list seem to have solid foundations in place. As we've seen before, acquisitions could change the big data landscape very quickly. But as of now, these are 13 big data pioneers that we're keeping our eyes on in 2013.10Gen is the developer and commercial support provider behind open source MongoDB. Among six NoSQL databases highlighted in this roundup (along with DynamoDB, Cassandra, HBase, CouchBase and Neo Technologies), MongoDB is distinguished as the leading document-oriented database. As such it can handle semi-structured information encoded in JSON (Java Script Object Notation), XML or other document formats. The big attraction is flexibility, speed and ease of use, as you can quickly embrace new data without the rigid schemas and data transformations required by relational databases. MongoDB is not the scalability champion of the NoSQL set, but 10Gen is working on that. In 2012 it introduced <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB 2.2</a>, which added a real-time aggregation framework, new sharding and replication features for multi-data center deployments, and improved performance and database concurrency for high-scale deployments. The data aggregation framework fills an analytics void by letting users directly query data within MongoDB without using complicated batch-oriented MapReduce jobs. CouchBase plans to step up competition with MongoDB by way of JSON support, but we're sure 10Gen and the MongoDB community will step up to improve scalability and performance in 2013. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> Amazon is about as big a big data practitioner as you can get. It's also the leading big data services provider. For starters, it introduced Elastic MapReduce (EMR) more than three years ago. Based on Hadoop, EMR isn't just a service for MapReduce sand boxes; it's being used for day-to-day high-scale production data processing by businesses including Ticketmaster and DNA researcher Ion Flux. Amazon Web Services upped the big data ante in 2012 with two new services: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB</a>, a NoSQL database service, and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Redshift</a>, a scalable data warehousing service now in preview and set for release early next year. DynamoDB, the service, is based on Dynamo, the NoSQL database that Amazon developed and deployed in 2007 to run big parts of its massive consumer website. Needless to say, it's proven at high scale. Redshift has yet to be generally available, but Amazon is promising ten times faster performance than conventional relational databases at one-tenth the cost of on-premises data warehouses. With costs as low as $1,000 per terabyte, per year, there's no doubt Redshift will see adoption. These three services are cornerstones for exploiting big data, and don't forget Amazon's scalable S3 storage, EC2 compute capacity and myriad integration and connection options for corporate data centers. In short, Amazon has been a big data pioneer, and its services appeal to more than just startups, SMBs and Internet businesses. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> Cloudera is the #1 provider of Hadoop software, training and commercial support. From this position of strength, Cloudera has sought to advance the manageability, reliability and usability of the platform. During 2012, the discussion turned from convincing the broad corporate market that Hadoop is a viable platform to convincing people that they can gain value from the masses of data on a cluster. But to do that, we'll need to get past one of Hadoop's biggest flaw: the slow, batch-oriented nature of MapReduce processing. Tackling the problem head on, Cloudera has introduced <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Impala</a>, an interactive-speed SQL query engine that runs on the existing Hadoop infrastructure. Two years in development and now in beta, Impala promises to make all the data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Apache HBase database tables accessible for real-time querying. Unlike Apache Hive, which offers a degree of SQL querying of Hadoop, Impala is not dependent on MapReduce processing, so it should be much faster. There's a lot riding on Impala. What's not yet clear is whether it will mostly work with conventional relational tools or whether it will cut many of them out of the picture. Thus, all eyes will be on Cloudera in 2013. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> A top contender in the NoSQL movement, Couchbase is a key-value store that is chosen for its scalability, reliability and high performance. As such, it's used by Internet giants (Orbitz), gaming companies (Zynga), and a growing flock of brick-and-mortar companies (Starbucks). These and other customers need to scale up much more quickly and affordably than is possible with conventional relational databases. Couchbase is the developer and commercial support provider behind the open-source database of the same name. Key-value stores tend to be simple, offering little beyond record storage. With Couchbase 2.0, set for release in mid-December, Couchbase is looking to bridge the gap between key-value store and document database, the latter being MongoDB's domain. Couchbase 2.0 adds support for storing JSON (Java Script Object Notation) documents, and it adds tools to build indexes and support querying. These basics may not wow MongoDB fans used to myriad developer-friendly features, but Couchbase thinks scalability and performance will win the day. Look for a pitched battle in 2013. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a>Having lots of data is one thing. Storing it all in one scalable place, like Hadoop, is better. But the real value in big data is being able to structure, explore and make use of that data without delay. That's where <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Datameer</a> comes in. Datameer's platform for analytics on Hadoop provides modules for data integration (with relational databases, mainframes, social network sources and so on), a spreadsheet-style data analysis environment and a development-and-authoring environment for creating dashboards and data visualizations. The big draw is the spreadsheet-driven data analysis environment, which provides more than 200 analytic functions, from simple joins to predictive analytics. Datameer customer <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Sears Holdings</a> reports that it can develop in three days interactive reports that would take six to 12 weeks to develop using conventional OLAP tools. What's more, the spreadsheet-style interface gives business users a point-and-click tool for analyzing data within Hadoop. Through a recent partnership with Workday, Datameer is poised to embed its capabilities into that cloud vendor's enterprise applications. We'll be watching for breakthrough results. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> Apache Cassandra is an open-source, column-group style NoSQL database that was developed by Facebook and inspired by Amazon's Dynamo database. DataStax is a software and commercial support provider that can implement Cassandra as a stand-alone database, in conjunction with Hadoop (on the same infrastructure) or with Solr, which offers full-text-search capabilities from Apache Lucene. The combination of Cassandra and Hadoop on the same cluster is attractive. There are some performance tradeoffs in the bargain, but Cassandra as implemented by DataStax offers a few scalable and cost-effective options. A big appeal with this NoSQL database is CQL (Cassandra Query Language) and the JDBC driver for CQL, which provide SQL-like querying and ODBC-like data access, respectively. Implemented in combination with Hadoop, you can also use MapReduce, Hive, Pig and Sqoop. Use of Solr is separate from Hadoop, but capabilities include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, and geospatial search. The two biggest threats to Cassandra, and thus to DataStax, are HBase (now used by Facebook) and DynamoDB, Amazon's cloud-based service based on Dynamo. The bigger threat appears to be HBase, as the entire Hadoop community is working on maturing that Hadoop component into a stable, high-performance, easy-to-manage NoSQL database that's available as part of the same platform. Success will likely take some of the wind out of Cassandra's sails (and out of DataStax's sales). For now, HBase is still perceived as green while DataStax customers like Constant Contact, Morningstar and NetFlix attest to stability, scalability and performance on Cassandra today. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> Hadapt was hip to the need for business intelligence and analytics on top of Hadoop before its first round of funding in early 2011. Hive, the Apache data warehousing component that runs on top of Hadoop, relies on slow, batch-oriented MapReduce processing. Hadapt works around that delay by adding a hybrid storage layer to Hadoop that provides relational data access. From there you can do SQL-based analysis of massive data sets using SQL-like Hadapt Interactive Query. The software automatically splits query execution between the Hadoop and relational database layers, delivering the speed of relational tools with the scalability of Hadoop. There's also a development kit for creating custom analytics, and you can work with popular, relational-world tools such as Tableau software. Hadapt is in good company, with Cloudera (Impala), Datameer, Karmasphere, Platfora and others all working on various ways to meet the same analytics-on-Hadoop challenge. It remains to be seen which of these vendors will be a breakout success in 2013. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a>Hortonworks is the youngest provider of Hadoop software and commercial support, but it's an old hand when it comes to working with the platform. The company is a 2011 spinoff of Yahoo, which remains one of the world's largest users of Hadoop. In fact, Hadoop was essentially invented at Yahoo, and Hortonworks retained a team of nearly 50 of its earliest and most prolific contributors to Hadoop. Hortonworks released its first product, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hortonworks-hadoop-dilemma-get-rich-givi/240007499">Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.0</a>, in June. Unlike those from rivals Cloudera and MapR, Hortonworks' distribution is entirely of open source Apache Hadoop software. And while Hortonwork's rivals claim higher performance (MapR) or are shipping components that are not yet sanctified by Apache (Cloudera), Hortonworks says its platform is proven and enterprise-ready. Hortonworks isn't leaving it up to others to innovate. The company led the development of the HCatalog table management service, which is aimed at the problem of doing analytics against the data in Hadoop. Teradata is an early adopter of HCatalog and a major partner for Hortonworks. Microsoft is another important partner, and it tapped Horton to create a version of Hadoop (since contributed to open source) that runs on Windows. With partners like these and its influential team of contributors, there's little doubt Hortonworks will be a big part of Hadoop's future. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> Karmasphere provides a reporting, analysis and data-visualization platform for Hadoop. The company has been helping data professionals mine and analyze Web, mobile, sensor and social media data in Hadoop since 2010. The software also is available as a service on Amazon Web Services for use in conjunction with Elastic MapReduce. Karmasphere uses Hive, the data warehousing component built on top of Hadoop. The company concedes that Hive has its flaws, like lack of speed tied to MapReduce batch processing. But Karmasphere is integrating its software with the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Impala </a> real-time query framework as one way around those flaws. "Impala dramatically improves speed-to-insight by enabling users to perform real-time, interactive analysis directly on source data stored in Hadoop," stated Karmasphere in an October announcement about the partnership. We'll see how quickly Impala will mature from private beta testing to proven production use, but if it delivers as promised, Karmasphere and others will see a huge leap forward in low-latency big data analysis. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> MapR's guiding principles are practicality and performance, so it didn't think twice about chucking the Hadoop Distributed File System out of its Hadoop software distribution. HDFS had (and still has, MapR argues) reliability and availability flaws, so MapR uses the proven Network File System (NFS) instead. In the bargain, MapR claims to get "twice the speed with half the required hardware." The NFS choice also enabled MapR to support <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">near-real-time data streaming</a> using messaging software from Informatica. MapR competitors Cloudera and Hortonworks can't stream data because HDFS is an append-only system. MapR's latest quest for better performance (regardless of open source consequences) is the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">M7 software distribution</a>, which the vendor says delivers high-performance Hadoop and HBase in one deployment. Many users have high hopes for HBase because it's the NoSQL database native to the Apache Hadoop platform (promising database access to all the data on Hadoop). But HBase is immature and still suffers from flaws, including instability and cumbersome administration. M7 delivers two times faster performance than HBase running on standard Hadoop architectures, says MapR, because the distribution does away with region servers, table splits and merges and data compaction steps. MapR also uses its proprietary infrastructure to support snapshotting, high availability and system recovery for HBase. If you're an open source purist swayed by arguments about system portability, MapR may not be the vendor for you. But we've talked to high-scale customers who have chosen MapR for better performance. Want to give it a try? MapR is available both on Amazon Web Services and the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">Google Compute Engine</a>. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a> "Social applications and graph databases go together like peanut butter and jelly," says graph database consultant Max De Marzi. That's the big reason Neo4j, the open source graph database developed and supported by Neo Technologies, has a unique place in the NoSQL world. Neo4j is used to model and query highly complex interconnected networks with an ease that's not possible with relational databases or other NoSQL products. Other NoSQL databases may excel in dealing with ever-changing data, but graph databases shine in dealing with ever-evolving relationships. In social network applications you can model and query the ever-changing social graph. In IT and telecom network scenarios you can quickly resolve secure access challenges. In master data management applications you can see changing relationships among data. And in recommendation-engine apps you can figure out what people want before they know they want it. Neo4j is a general-purpose graph database that can handle transaction processing or analytics, and it's compatible with leading development platforms including Java, Ruby, Python, Groovy and others. Neo Technology is working on scale-out architecture, but even without that, Neo4j can manage and reveal billions of relationships. As social and network applications multiply, Neo Technology is in a prime position to manage the future. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a>Platfora is one of those startups offering a "new-breed" analytics platform built to run on top of Hadoop. The software creates a data catalog that enumerates the data sets available on a Hadoop Distributed File System. When you want to do an analysis, you use a shopping cart-metaphor interface to pick and choose the dimensions of data you want to explore. Behind the scenes, Platfora's software generates and executes the MapReduce jobs required to bring all the requested data into a "data lens." Once the data lens is ready -- a process that takes a few hours, according to Platfora -- business users can create and explore intuitive, interactive data visualizations. You get sub-second query response times because the data lens runs in memory. Need to add new data types or change dimensions? That takes minutes or hours, says Platfora, versus the days or weeks it might take to rebuild a conventional data warehouse. Platfora is the newest of new-breed big data analysis companies, but it has a who's who list of venture capital backers and an experienced management team. In short, this is one to watch in 2013. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a>Splunk got its start offering an IT tool designed to help data center managers spot and solve problems with servers, messaging queues, websites and other systems. But as the big data trend starting gathering steam, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk</a> recognized that its technology could also answer all sorts of questions tied to high-scale machine data (a big factor in the company's successful 2012 IPO). Splunk employs a unique language and its core tools are geared to IT types, but those power users can set up metrics and dashboards that business users can tap to better understand e-commerce traffic, search results, ad campaign effectiveness and other machine-data-related business conditions. There's an overlap with Hadoop in that Splunk has its own proprietary machine-data repository, but database expert <a href="http://www.dbms2.com/2012/08/24/hadoop-notes-informatica-splunk-and-ibm/">Curt Monash</a> says Splunk is working on ways to work with Hadoop that go beyond the two-way integrations currently available. That would presumably leave Splunk free to pursue analytics while diminishing the need for redundant infrastructure. We'll be watching for that important release. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-dynamodb-big-datas-big-cloud-mome/232500104">Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/with-hadoop-big-data-analytics-challenge/240001922">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR Promises A Better Hbase</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/maprs-google-deal-marks-second-big-data/240003121">MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sears-hadoop-plans-check-out-data-wareho/240134931">Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/splunk-answers-business-demand-for-big-d/232400148">Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis</a>2012-12-06T10:05:00ZAmazon Redshift Leaves On-Premises Opening, Says ParAccelAmazon's new Redshift data warehousing service is billed as a game changer, but the supplier of its underlying database says lots of customers won't go for the cloud service.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-redshift-leaves-on-premises-openi/240143912?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/cloud-computing/infrastructure/232901167"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/788/01_Transformation-1_tn.jpg" alt="Amazon's 7 Cloud Advantages: Hype Vs. Reality" title="Amazon's 7 Cloud Advantages: Hype Vs. Reality" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Amazon's 7 Cloud Advantages: Hype Vs. Reality</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) </div>  Did ParAccel strike a Faustian bargain when it accepted $20 million in funding from Amazon in July? That investment added a big chunk to ParAccel's total venture capital haul of about $85 million. But in the bargain, Amazon gained license rights to ParAccel's database, which is now the foundation of Amazon Web Services' (AWS) new Redshift data warehousing service. ParAccel is in the business of selling database licenses for on-premises deployments, but with Redshift (now in limited preview and set for release early next year), Amazon says it will deliver an easy-to-consume service that will be one tenth the cost of conventional on-premises data warehouse deployments. Announcing <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">RedShift</a> at last week's AWS re: Invent conference, Amazon senior VP Andy Jassy described how "expensive and complicated" data warehousing is for large companies and how "out of reach" it is for smaller firms. Delivered as a service, Redshift will cost as little as $1,000 per terabyte, per year. That will be "game changing" versus the estimated $19,000 to $25,000 per terabyte, per year that companies are used to shelling out for on-premises deployments, Jassy said. [ Want more on Amazon's new big data option? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing</a>. ] You might think ParAccel is now thinking, "with investor 'friends' like these, who needs competitors?" But Chuck Berger, ParAccel's CEO, doesn't see it that way. "Amazon is using our technology for a major service offering, and that gives us a much stronger aura of credibility to any customer who might be concerned about dealing with a small company," Berger told InformationWeek. That will help ParAccel win deals against its usual competitors: EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica, IBM, Oracle and Teradata. As for the threat of Redshift cutting into on-premises sales, Berger launched into a litany of reasons why on-premises deployments will live on no matter how appealing Redshift might be. Topping his list are security, regulatory and performance concerns. On security, Amazon insists it has all the corporate concerns covered with Redshift and its other cloud services. And Berger admits that plenty of large companies are comfortable working with Amazon. But in the financial services industry, where ParAccel counts Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland as marquis customers, Berger said many companies "just aren't going to move their data or their applications into a public cloud." On performance, Berger said on-premises offers advantages over cloud when it comes to getting data into and out of the database -- a key issue we raised after last week's Redshift announcement. "It's obviously faster to load data in your own data center than it is to send it across even the highest performance connectivity solutions that Amazon has available," Berger said, adding that the best options from Amazon are expensive and "somewhat complex to set up." The data-loading options in question are Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud and AWS Direct Connect. The former is a virtualized private network offering that Berger described as complex. The latter is a private connection between AWS and a corporate data center that costs $0.30 per hour for a 1 gigabyte-per-second port and $2.25 per hour for a 10 gigabyte-per-second port. To put that in perspective, the Redshift service starts at $0.85 per 2-terabyte node, per hour, so the best connection is more twice as expensive as the service -- though it could presumably be used in conjunction with a variety of Amazon services. Another performance differentiator, said Berger, is the availability of high-speed connectors for Oracle and Teradata databases and Hadoop as a data source to ParAccel. These connectors have not been licensed by Amazon -- not yet, anyway, Berger said. One final differentiator between Redshift in the cloud and ParAccel on premises is the level of customer support available. Where Amazon looks to standardize its services for broad consumption, ParAccel helps its customers exploit features designed to tune the database for each deployment for higher performance. "Those are support-intensive and professional-service-intensive features, and that's not Amazon's business model," Berger said. InformationWeek has asked Amazon for follow-up interviews on Redshift. At press time the company had yet to respond. [[Author's update: Amazon sent answers to our questions -- posted below in the "comments" area -- four hours after this article was published.]] We told them we wanted to hear more about data-loading options and speeds. We also raised questions about just how and where companies will run their business intelligence (BI) software. Running BI in the cloud will add to total cost. Jaspersoft and Microstrategy are the first Redshift partners in the cloud. Even if you're using Jaspersoft's Community edition, which is free from a software licensing perspective, there are Amazon charges (ranging from $0.16 to $1.80, depending on compute power) for provisioning the software-as-a-service. If you stick with running BI in your data center, you have to remember that bringing data back on premises for analysis will introduce additional delays over and above the time required to load data into the cloud. Perhaps Amazon is working out the details, but we're still hoping to learn more about Redshift data-integration and BI workflows before the service goes live early next year. Until then, ParAccel says the ultimate in security, control and performance on its database can only be achieved on premises.2012-12-05T09:50:00ZBoston Taps SAP To Measure City ServicesSAP performance scorecards help Beantown track initiatives, meet goals and fix potholes faster.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/boston-taps-sap-to-measure-city-services/240143807?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/ibm-smarter-cities-challenge-10-towns-ra/240142572"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/913/01_Smarter_Cities_tn.jpg" alt="IBM Smarter Cities Challenge: 10 Towns Raise Tech IQs" title="IBM Smarter Cities Challenge: 10 Towns Raise Tech IQs" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">IBM Smarter Cities Challenge: 10 Towns Raise Tech IQs</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  SAP announced Tuesday that the City of Boston is using the vendor's strategy management software and a mobile application to support the Boston About Results (BAR) e-government initiative. The BAR program is designed to improve city services and increase accountability for city officials by detailing initiatives, goals and performance metrics on a <a href="http://www.cityofboston.gov/bar/home.asp">public website</a>. The performance scorecards featured on the site are powered by an SAP Strategy Management application. The stats are also made accessible to mobile users through a SAP <a href="https://store.sap.com/sap/cpa/ui/resources/store/html/SolutionDetails.html?pid=0000004909&pcntry=US&sap-language=EN&_cp_id=id-1354221270857-0">CitizenInsight</a> mobile app. In one example of the 16 scorecards currently posted on the BAR site, the Public Works Department scorecard shows that the percentage of pothole complaints resolved in two or fewer days has increased from 48% in early 2011 to 96% as of September 2012. The strategy management software was rolled out to 45 city departments in May. "Providing these tools to city officials enables them to continuously evaluate services and ensure we're all doing our part to improve the quality of life in Boston," said Mayor Thomas Menino in a statement. [ Want to learn more on urban information technology initiatives? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/state-local/future-cities-it-priorities-for-urban-tr/240142684?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Future Cities: IT Priorities For Urban Transformation</a>. ] SAP has a large government practice, but its work with Boston is part of an <a href="http://www1.sap.com/news-reader/index.epx?articleID=18956">SAP Urban Matters</a> program launched this spring to step up work with city governments. Populations are steadily concentrating in cities, so it's no surprise that SAP isn't the only vendor stepping up efforts to engage with city governments. IBM last month announced the latest round of finalists in its three-year <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/10-cities-raise-tech-iqs-in-ibm-challeng/240142572?pgno=1">Smarter Cities</a> initiative. Indeed, Boston was one of 100 cities awarded pro bono consulting engagements through IBM's program. Appearing at a Smarter Cities event last month, Boston CIO <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/10-cities-raise-tech-iqs-in-ibm-challeng/240142572?pgno=2">Bill Oates</a> described how the city's smartphone-powered citizen engagement apps let residents publicly post service requests. At least 25% of the city's service requests now come through digital channels including Twitter and mobile apps, he said. In an example related to Public Works, the city came up with a Street Bump app that lets citizens report potholes. But the department decided to also use the accelerometer- and GPS-enabled smartphone app within its own fleet so employees could report problems as they travel throughout the city. "Now we can crunch the data, see where we're getting the most hits and go fix the problem before we ever get a report from the public," Oates said. SAP said its Urban Matters strategy addresses five key areas of city government: supporting the fundamentals of good government; empowering public officials to be more productive; increasing community engagement and openness; driving innovation around government service delivery; and improving urban resilience to help ensure public safety and security.2012-12-05T08:00:00ZBig Data And Analytics Expertise: Beg, Borrow Or Steal?Demand for big data and analytics experts is on the rise, but it will take years for the supply to catch up. Here's how to cope.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/trends/big-data-and-analytics-expertise-beg-bor/240142905?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors   <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/120512s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/047/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Dec. 5, 2012" title="InformationWeek Green - Dec. 5, 2012" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/120512s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a> <div class="greenPromoText"> <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/120512s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire December 2012 InformationWeek special issue on semantic databases</a>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our Green Initiative (Registration required.) </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div>    It's a good time to be a big data and analytics expert -- 18% of big data-focused companies in our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/10/9136/Social+Networking-Collaboration/research-2012-state-of-it-staffing.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121205" target="_blank">InformationWeek 2012 State of IT Staffing Survey</a> want to increase staff in this area by more than 30% in the next two years, but 53% say it'll be hard to find people with the required skills. People with experience in both areas are "going for crazy prices," says Brian Courtney, general manager of industrial data intelligence at GE Intelligent Platforms. "We have a lot of analytics talent on staff already, but getting high-end analysts with big data experience is that much harder." The genealogy site Ancestry.com is another big data shop looking to hire. It recruits from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to find people with experience running Hadoop clusters, designing high-scale search technologies and analyzing big data clickstreams. Insurance company UnitedHealth Group, headquartered just outside of Minneapolis, also needs more analytics and data management professionals. The health insurer hasn't experimented with Hadoop or NoSQL databases yet, but it's an early implementer of SAS High-Performance Analytics running on EMC's Greenplum Data Computing Appliance. It's working with in-database text mining to prepare for a future in which it will have to analyze text-rich electronic medical records for patient care trends. With companies as diverse as industrial giants, Internet businesses and insurance companies all competing for the same scarce people, it's no wonder there's a talent gap. It's also clear that there's no single prescription for filling the positions available. Among respondents, 33% say they'll "do a mix of retraining and hiring/contracting." The second-largest group, 28%, will "mostly retrain staff and hire/contract a few people." The third-most-popular choice is to "hire or contract to fill needs," cited by 16%. The smallest group, 11%, will "retrain staff we already have." We hate to dash the hopes of those counting on a lot of external hiring, but it's unlikely you'll fill the talent gap with recent graduates and people lured away from other companies. The good news? It's a good bet you won't have to beg existing employees -- particularly younger employees -- to line up for training opportunities. If you've attended a conference on Hadoop or NoSQL in the last year, you've undoubtedly seen the throngs of 20- and 30-something data geeks (and some 40- and 50-something geeks) packing into the keynotes and seminars. Few companies are crawling with big data experts, but if you work for a large or sophisticated company, there's a good chance there are analytics experts on staff. They're often found in the research and development or finance departments, and some companies are pushing these groups to share the expertise. If you're set on new hiring, consider a recent grad. With the rise of Internet commerce early in the last decade, followed by the publication of best-selling business books like Competing On Analytics and The Numerati, interest in big data analytics started taking off in the academic world about five years ago. The stock-in-trade at schools of mathematics, computer science and business was typically degrees in statistics, operations research, computer science and management science, respectively. But interest in big data has sparked new degree programs in analytics, machine learning and data science. When big new technology waves come along, as we've seen in the last five years with big data analytics, it takes about 10 years to train the next generation on the new skills that are needed, according to Jim Spohrer, IBM's director of global university programs. "We're in one of those 10-year cycles right now," Spohrer says. If the 10-year pattern holds for big data analytics, a new wave of graduates is just starting to emerge and will reach a steady stream by 2018. Top schools include North Carolina State University, which has a well-known one-year Master of Analytics program that had extensive support from analytics vendor SAS. Others on Spohrer's list include the University of Ottawa, Northwestern University, DePaul University and the University of Connecticut. The latest addition to the list of schools supported by SAS is Louisiana State University, which just launched a 10-month degree program patterned after the one at North Carolina State. What makes an analytics degree different from, say, a degree in statistics or computer science? At LSU, an analytics degree combines the computer science topics of data management and business intelligence with training in statistics, predictive analytics and operations research. There's also a focus on areas such as fraud detection, risk management, text mining and process improvement. If poaching experienced employees from other IT shops is more your style, realize that it's not just a matter of offering more money. Top talent wants to know they'll be working with the latest technologies, have access to training and can collaborate with like-minded colleagues. The best big data analytics experts have a mix of business and data acumen. Keep all that in mind in your quest to hire or be hired. 2012-12-04T10:30:00ZMicrosoft Dynamics App Updates: What's MissingMicrosoft's latest Dynamics AX, GP and CRM upgrades pack plenty of new features, but promised cloud, mobile and marketing options have been delayed.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/microsoft-dynamics-app-updates-whats-mis/240143756?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsMicrosoft announced Tuesday that it will deliver three significant Dynamics application upgrades this month: Dynamics AX 2012 R2, Dynamics GP 2013 and the December update of Dynamics CRM Online. There's plenty of new functionality to consider with each upgrade, but Microsoft is falling behind on a few capabilities promised earlier this year. Microsoft stoked expectations for hybrid cloud, cross-mobile-platform and cross-browser capabilities at the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/6-pros-and-3-cons-of-microsofts-cloud-st/232602976">Dynamics Convergence Conference</a> in March. But Microsoft executives told InformationWeek on Monday that an anticipated Microsoft Azure public-cloud deployment option for Dynamics NAV and Dynamics GP ERP apps has been pushed back into the second half of next year. And on the mobile front, cross-platform HTML5 capabilities won't show up until 2014, so access on iPad, iPhone and Android devices is limited to Dynamics CRM. The biggest news with Dynamics AX 2012 R2 is that Microsoft's most scalable ERP system can now support multiple languages, multiple national tax and compliance regimes, and multiple vertical-industry capabilities on a single-instance deployment. According to Microsoft, supporting global needs from a single instance ensures faster deployments and easier and more cost-effective administration than the alternative, which is running separate geography-specific or industry-specific instances. Global language and regulatory support is common, but it's rarely supported on a single-instance deployment, according to analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research. [ Want more on Micrsoft's CRM updates? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/dynamics-crm-gets-yammer-skype-ipad-supp/240012740?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Dynamics CRM Gets Yammer, Skype, iPad Support</a>. ] "Oracle [E-Business Suite] and SAP address multiple languages, multiple tax jurisdictions and multiple industries in a single instance, but this is news in the [ERP] midmarket," said Wang, a principal with Constellation Research. Most Epicor, Infor, Oracle JD Edwards and Sage ERP deployments are typically site dependent and these vendors have not attempted to support single-instance global deployments for technical reasons, said Wang. The usual pattern is to see one instance for each major country or region. The AX 2012 R2 upgrade also enhances embedded, role-based business intelligence. AX already supported role-based business intelligence (BI), but with R2 support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, AX takes advantage of new Power View in-memory data-visualization technology. The upgrade delivers richer data and animated data visualizations that reveal trends, according to Microsoft. To date, role-based visualizations have been developed for CFOs, CIOs, human resources, plant operations managers, retailers and professional services firms, but more role-specific data visualizations are anticipated. Dynamics GP 2013 will be released December 19, and the big theme is Web and cloud deployment by way of a new Web client and a new Web management console for cloud delivery. Microsoft has also included new development tools said to support rapid deployment, system configuration and migration from simpler financial packages from vendors such as Intuit and Peachtree Accounting. GP was previously limited to thick-client deployment, so a Web client was essential for cloud-based delivery. But in this case the client is based on Microsoft Silverlight, a cross-platform application development framework that many view as a dead-end because, like Flash, it's not supported by Apple iOS or Android Devices. At the Convergence Conference, Microsoft said its long-term plan is to switch to HTML5, but there's no word as to when that will happen for GP. AX is on track for HTML5 support by 2014. A native app for Windows 8 tablets and phones is expected next year. At Convergence, Microsoft said Dynamics GP 2013 and Dynamics NAV 2013, released in October, would both be deployable in hybrid-public-cloud, private-cloud and on-premises models, but executives said Monday that the public-cloud option on Microsoft Azure won't be available until sometime in the second half of 2013. Private-cloud hosting is already available through a variety of Microsoft partners. The third major update coming this month is the December update to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/dynamics-crm-gets-yammer-skype-ipad-supp/240012740 ">Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online</a>. The upgrade, which will start rolling out midmonth, gives users the option to launch Skype communications and Yammer collaboration sessions directly from within the CRM app. The CRM update also supports a mix of browsers, including the Windows versions of Firefox and Chrome and the Mac versions of Firefox and Safari (making this the one Dynamics app consumable on an iPad). As with Microsoft's ERP applications, a native mobile app for Windows 8 tablets and phones is expected next year. Responding to Salesforce.com's push into the marketing arena, Microsoft executives said earlier this year that Dynamics CRM would gain social media monitoring capabilities by year end. This development, too, appears to be delayed, but in October Microsoft acquired <a href="http://www.marketingpilot.com/marketing_software.html">MarketingPilot </a>, a marketing management software provider, to bulk up cross-channel digital campaign management capabilities. "The acquisition will accelerate our ability to better meet the needs of CMOs ... and better enable marketers to successfully plan, execute, monitor and optimize customer interactions across digital, social and traditional channels," said Bob Stutz, corporate VP of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, in a recent blog post. Microsoft didn't make any promises, but no doubt the MarketingPilot capabilities will show up in Dynamics CRM sometime next year.2012-12-04T00:00:00ZBig Data Debate: End Near For ETL?Extract, transform and load processes are the backbone of data warehousing, but with Hadoop on the rise, some see a new way to transform data. Two experts share opposing views.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-end-near-for-etl/240143068?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsExtract, transform and load (ETL) processes have been the way to move and prepare data for analysis within data warehouses, but will the rise of Hadoop bring the end of ETL? Many Hadoop advocates argue that this data-processing platform is an ideal place to handle data transformation, as it offers scalability and cost advantages over conventional ETL software and server infrastructure. Defenders of ETL argue that handling the transformation step on Hadoop does not do away with the need for extract and load; nor does it address data-quality and data-governance requirements information management professionals have been working on for decades. In our debate, Phil Shelley, the chief technology officer at Sears Holdings and the CEO of its big data consulting and services offshoot, MetaScale, says we're witnessing the end of ETL. James Markarian, chief technology officer at information management vendor Informatica, says ETL is changing but will live on. What's your view on this raging debate? Use the commenting tool below the article to challenge these experts and share your view.  <div class="debateArticleContainer">  <div class="debateForColumn leftDebate"> <h3 class="debateHeader">For The Motion</h3>  <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/news/2012/12/Phil-Shelley_110.jpg" alt="Phil Shelley" title="Phil Shelley" align="left" />  <div class="debateAuthorInfo">  Phil Shelley CTO Sears Holdings, CEO Metascale  </div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> <h3>  ETL's Days Are Numbered  </h3> The foundation of any IT system is the data. Nothing of value can be done without generating, manipulating and consuming data. When we lived in the world of monolithic mainframe systems that were disconnected, data mostly stayed within that system and was consumed via screen or paper printout. Since that time ended, we live in a world of separate systems and interconnects between them. ETL (extract-transform-load) was born, and we began to copy and reuse data. Reuse of data rarely happens without some form of aggregation, transformation and re-loading into another system. The growth of ETL has been alarming, as data volumes escalate year after year. Companies have significant investment in people, skills, software and hardware to do nothing but ETL. Some consider ETL to be a bottleneck in IT operations: ETL takes time as, by definition, data has to be moved. Reading from one system, copying over a network and writing all take time -- ever growing blocks of time, causing latency in the data before it can be used. ETL is expensive in terms of people, software licensing and hardware. ETL is a non- value-added activity too, as the data is unusable until it lands in the destination system. So why do we still do ETL? Mostly because systems that generate data are not the ones that transform or consume data. How about changing all that, as it seems to make no sense that we spend time and money on non-value-added activities? Well, historical systems were not large enough to cost-effectively store, transform, analyze and report or consume data in a single place. Times and technology change, of course, and since Hadoop came to the enterprise, we are beginning to see the end of ETL as we know it. This is not just an idea or a desire, it is really possible and the evolution is underway. With Hadoop as a data hub in an enterprise data architecture, we now have a cost-effective, extreme-performance environment to store, transform and consume data, without traditional ETL. Here is how it works: <ul> <li>Systems generate data, just as they always have.</li> <li>As near to real-time as possible, data is loaded into Hadoop -- yes, this is still "E" from traditional ETL, but that is where the similarity ends.</li> <li>Now we can aggregate, sort, transform and analyze the data inside Hadoop. This is the "T"and the "L" from traditional ETL.</li> <li>Data latency is reduced to minutes instead of hours because the data never leaves Hadoop. There is no network copying time, no licenses for ETL software and no additional ETL hardware.</li> <li>Now the data can be consumed in place without moving it. There are a number of graphic analytic and reporting options to consume data without moving large amounts of data out of Hadoop.</li> <li>Some subsets of data do have to be moved out of Hadoop into other systems, for specific purposes. However, with a strong and coherent enterprise data architecture, this can be managed to be the exception.</li> </ul> So, ETL as we know it is gradually fading to be the exception rather than the norm. This is a journey, not a binary change. But in our case at Sears and for other companies, case-by-case, gradually, but certainly, ETL is becoming history. Phil Shelley is CTO at Sears Holdings, leading IT operations. He is also CEO of MetaScale, a Sears Holdings subsidiary that designs, delivers and operates Hadoop-based solutions for analytics, mainframe migration and massive-scale processing. </div>  <div class="debateAgainstColumn rightDebate"> <h3 class="debateHeader">Against The Motion</h3>  <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/news/2012/12/James-Markarian_110.jpg" alt="James Markarian" title="James Markarian" align="left" />  <div class="debateAuthorInfo">  James Markarian CTO, Informatica  </div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> <h3>  Don't Be Naive About Data Integrity  </h3> The stunning thing about the current buzz and questions heralding the end of ETL and even data warehousing is the lack of pushback and analysis of some of the outlandish comments made. The typical assertion is that "Hadoop eliminates the need for ETL." What no one seems to question in response to these sorts of comments is the naive assumptions these statements are based on. Is it realistic for most companies to move all of their data into Hadoop? Given the need to continue to use information that currently exists in legacy environments, probably not. Even if you did move everything into Hadoop, a path that will take years, if not decades, for most companies with existing databases, you still have to manipulate the data once it is there. So is writing ETL scripts in MapReduce code still ETL? Sure it is. Is running ETL faster (in some cases, and slower in other cases) on Hadoop eliminating ETL? No. Or is the introduction of Hadoop changing when, where and how ETL happens? Here the answer is definitely yes. So the question isn't really, are we eliminating ETL, but rather where does ETL take place and how are we extending or changing its definition. The "E" represents the ability to consistently and reliably extract data with high performance and minimal impact to the source system. The "T" represents the ability to transform one or more data sets in batch or real-time into a consumable format. The "L" stands for loading data into a persistent or virtual data store. Let's look at the fundamentals of enterprise data integration, partly manifested by ETL processes: <ol> <li>Data needs to flow from source applications into analytic data stores in a controlled, reliable, secure manner.</li> <li>Information needs to be standardized, with regards to semantics, format and lexicon, for accurate analysis.</li> <li>Operational results need to be consistent and repeatable.</li> <li>Operational results need to be verifiable and transparent -- where did information come from, who touched it, who viewed it, what transformations and calculations were performed on it, what does it mean, etc.?</li> </ol> What we ordinarily hear regarding new big data environments is that the data appears by some form of osmosis. We want every last bit of it for new insights, and don't worry about semantics and terminology -- those discrepancies just make the results more interesting. These kind of dreamy aspirations are seductive but deceptive. It's also just the start of a path toward relearning all the reasons why data practitioners developed best practices around accessing data, profiling data, discovering relationships, handling metadata, explaining context, transforming data, cleansing data, governing data for compliance and delivering information at various latencies using current-generation integration technologies. Modern data integration tools and platforms ensure timely, trusted, relevant, secure and authoritative data. Modern integration technologies use optimizers to process information in both scale-up and scale-out architectures, push processing into database management systems, and push processing -- not just data -- into Hadoop. They broker and publish a data layer that abstracts processing such that multiple applications can consume and benefit from secure and curated datasets. ETL no doubt needs to continue to evolve and adapt to developer preferences and the performance, scale and latency needs of modern applications. Hadoop is just another engine upon which ETL and its associated technologies (like data quality and data profiling) can run. Renaming what is commonly referred to as ETL, or worse, ignorantly dismissing data challenges and enterprise-wide data needs, is just irresponsible. James Markarian is executive VP and CTO at Informatica with responsibility for the strategic direction of Informatica products and platforms. He also runs the corporate development group, including acquisitions. </div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> 2012-12-03T08:36:00ZSAP Clings To A Dated Cloud Apps StrategyAs cloud vendors Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Workday look toward larger companies, SAP courts small and midsize firms.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-clings-to-a-dated-cloud-apps-strateg/240143034?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsBack in the early days of cloud-based applications, they were seen exclusively as an alternative for small and midsized companies. But the cloud ceiling has been broken, and now even SAP admits that the cloud appeals to even the largest companies in the world. Has SAP truly seen the light and will it now lead the cloud revolution? Unfortunately there are signs it's still clinging to the belief that core ERP will forever remain on premises. SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott was in New York last week to lead an "SME Summit" at its office in the city to explore the challenges of starting and growing small and midsize businesses. He was there to tout SAP's cloud applications as an ideal technology foundation for businesses that all too often "fail to scale," as he put it, but the event was a contrast with a broader industry trend that is seeing cloud apps moving up into the largest companies. [ Want more on an up-and-coming cloud rival? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/workday-posts-strong-start-as-public-fir/240142845?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Workday Posts Strong Start As Public Firm</a>. ] There's no doubt that small businesses are hugely important to the economy. They're the source of two out of three net new jobs -- a point that was constantly highlighted during the recent elections. Some of these businesses will become the giants of tomorrow. Apple, Google and Microsoft were all once small, entrepreneurial businesses. SAP itself was launched 40 years ago by five former IBM employees, and today it employs 65,000 people. Small and midsized businesses are the base of the customer pyramid for the IT industry, but about a decade ago SAP realized it was too focused on the top of the pyramid. So in 2002 it purchased TopManage Financial Systems and rebranded its product SAP BusinessOne. The server-based app suite included financials, purchasing, production, HR, inventory, and sales, and SAP later added CRM functionality and added embedded analytics supporting all of the apps. Aimed at small businesses, BusinessOne is still available as a server-based product, starting at around 1,000 Euros ($1,300), but the latest wrinkle is that the suite is now available in the cloud running on SAP's Hana in-memory database. Cloud delivery makes it faster, easier deployment than the on-premises approach at low initial cost of $42 to $86 per user, per month. Running on Hana ensures fast, real-time performance, according to SAP. SAP's next, cloud-based step up is Business ByDesign, which is ostensibly aimed at midsize enterprises, but here's where "cloud is for SMBs" argument has started breaking down. We've all heard about how cloud-based applications are leveling the playing field. Cloud makes the latest, greatest technology affordable and accessible to small firms on tight budgets and with meager IT staffs, and it also makes it far easier than the on-premises approach to quickly scale up. All that is still true, but the real story over the past two years has been breaking of the cloud ceiling, with companies like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Workday landing some of the largest businesses in the world as customers. Take Workday, for example, which now has a pot of money to expand sales, marketing and R&D after a highly successful October IPO that raised $685 million. During an earnings call with financial analysts on Wednesday, Workday co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri said Workday's Human Capital Management apps are already capable of handling the largest companies in the world, like Hewlett-Packard and DuPont, both of which recently signed enterprisewide deals with the company. Workday's financial apps are currently suitable for use by midsized companies, Bhusri said, but by the end of next year -- after investments in cloud capacity and app resiliency to sustain high-scale transaction processing -- they'll be ready for Fortune 1,000- or even Fortune 500-sized companies, he said.The interest in cloud apps among large companies hasn't gone unnoticed by SAP. That's why it acquired SuccessFactors late last year and put that company's CEO, Lars Dalgaard, in charge of all SAP cloud initiatives. SuccessFactors has some 5,000 human-capital management apps customers, versus Workday's current customer count of 356. As for scale, SuccessFactors' largest namable customer, Siemens, has more than 400,000 customers, versus about 320,000 at HP (before its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/desktop/hp-plans-to-cut-29000-jobs/240007104">recent layoff announcements</a>). Though SAP doesn't have permission to use its name, Walmart, a company with 2.2 million employees, is also <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-cio-wal-mart-picks-successfactors/224700586">known to be a customer</a>. SAP also recently introduced SAP Financials OnDemand, a stand-alone financial management app based on functionality from the Business ByDesign suite. "Workday, in the beginning, didn't have real competition, but we're beating them everywhere now," McDermott told InformationWeek in an interview at the SME event. "These DuPont and HP sales cycles started long ago before SAP had a truly hardened and mature HCM system, so it won't be so easy for companies like Workday and others anymore." [ Want more on an up-and-coming cloud rival? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/workday-posts-strong-start-as-public-fir/240142845?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Workday Posts Strong Start As Public Firm</a>. ] McDermott cited Timken as a case in point. The Toledo-based auto parts manufacturer is an SAP customer, and it recently chose SuccessFactors over Workday for HCM. McDermott said the simplicity and appeal of sticking with a single vendor and SAP's analytical capabilities won over Timken. SAP has repeatedly been slow to react to the threat of cloud taking customers at the top of the pyramid. In another example, Business ByDesign was originally billed as something exclusively for midsized companies, but last year SAP added an option to make it easier for customers to <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-brings-your-subsidiaries-hq-closer/231300200">integrate subsidiaries running on ByDesign</a> with headquarters operations running SAP on-premises software. That was clearly a response to so-called two-tier ERP deployments being touted by the likes of cloud rival NetSuite. More recently we've seen SAP bundling various CRM and CRM-related applications including cloud-based Sales OnDemand into the SAP 360 Customer Solution, a package clearly aimed at competing with Salesforce.com and its appeal to large companies through the chief marketing officer. SAP is clearly making headway with small and midsized customers. Back in 2005 SAP set a goal to reach 100,000 such customers. Today about two thirds of the company's 193,000 customers (or about 125,000) are said to be small or midsized companies. And with BusinessOne now in the cloud along with ByDesign, Financials OnDemand and other new cloud apps, SAP expects to continue to gain SMB market share. But given the trends in the market, it would seem the risk is that two years from now, SAP will be sitting pretty in the SMB market while starting to lose upgrades of large-scale on-premises deployments to cloud-based rivals. McDermott last week acknowledged that "edge applications" -- code for non-ERP apps like CRM and HCM -- are moving into the cloud at large companies. But he repeated SAP's line that "the core" will continue to stay on premises. SAP doesn't really specify what is "core," but now we're seeing financial management apps moving into the cloud, and that's about as close to the core as you can get. Workday is talking about scaling its financial apps up to serve Fortune 500s, but SAP says its Financials OnDemand app is something for SMBs or subsidiaries of large companies. So does the core mean ERP manufacturing production control, asset management and product lifecycle management apps? These, too, are moving into the cloud. SAP's on-premises competitors, like Oracle, Microsoft and Infor, have stopped making distinctions about what does and doesn't belong in the cloud. NetSuite and Workday, meanwhile, are pursuing ever-larger customers. It's true that we have yet to see truly high-scale, enterprise-class ERP running in the cloud. But it would behoove SAP to stop following and become the first company to deliver on that promise.2012-11-30T15:00:00ZSAS Acquires rPath Assets To Boost Cloud ServicesAnalytic vendor SAS buys automation technologies, hires key staff to bolster its rapidly scalable cloud delivery capabilities.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-acquires-rpath-assets-to-boost-cloud/240143015?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-cloud-computing-pioneers/240142397"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/909/01_cloud_gurus_tn.jpg"alt="10 Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="10 Cloud Computing Pioneers"class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Cloud Computing Pioneers </div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>SAS announced Friday that it has acquired technology and hired staff from rPath, a Raleigh, N.C.-based company that billed itself as a platform-as-a-service company. SAS said the deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, will enable it to better automate the setup and management of SAS applications in a variety of deployment approaches. "It's one thing to be elastic in a cloud, but it's quite another thing to be elastic in a public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid approach," said SAS CTO Keith Collins, in an interview with InformationWeek. rPath, a startup located less than a mile from SAS's Cary, N.C. headquarters, developed source-code management software designed to quickly and virtually deploy application technology stacks from the operating system up. The technology also ensures that maintenance activities and patches are consistently deployed across every virtual instance for operation within regulated environments. [ Want more on SAS Visual Analytics? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-introduces-big-data-visual-analytics/232700133?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAS Introduces Big Data Visual Analytics Platform</a>. ] rPath had raised $32.5 million through four rounds of venture capital funding, but <a href="http://gigaom.com/cloud/cloud-app-services-company-rpath-in-play-sas-seen-as-buyer/">as reported</a> on Thursday by GigaOm, the company was seen as "ahead of the curve," had seen management turnover and was the subject of sale rumors. SAS has acquired the company's intellectual property and has hired key employees while rPath is in the process of shutting down, Collins said. SAS already offers many analytic applications as hosted services, but that delivery model involves longer lead times and less flexibility than is typical in true cloud deployments. SAS also needs greater flexibility in combining a mix of public, private and hybrid scenarios. SAS had already been working on these things, but the rPath technologies and talent will accelerate those initiatives, Collins said. "The first and biggest area where you're likely to see this is in making it very easy to consume our Visual Analytics solution," Collins said. The Visual Analytics app, which is <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/video/1737994174001">detailed in this video</a>, puts a business-user-friendly graphical user interface for data exploration on top of a big-data-scale, Hadoop-based data store. SAS said in a statement that rPath employees will join the company as of Nov. 30 to form the Platform Deployment Technologies group within SAS Research and Development. Predictive analysis is getting faster, more accurate and more accessible. Combined with big data, it's driving a new age of experiments. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111912/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Advanced Analytics</a> issue of InformationWeek: Are project management offices a waste of money? (Free registration required.)2012-11-29T09:30:00ZWorkday Posts Strong Start As Public FirmWorkday post-IPO financial results exceed expectations and it sets lofty goals for market share gains against Oracle and SAP.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/workday-posts-strong-start-as-public-fir/240142845?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/8-cloud-tools-for-road-warriors/240142591"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/914/01_Clouds_tn.jpg" alt="8 Cloud Tools For Road Warriors" title="8 Cloud Tools For Road Warriors" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Cloud Tools For Road Warriors</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Workday exceeded expectations Wednesday in its first financial report as a public company. The provider of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) and financial management apps posted a 99% increase in total revenue and a 116% increase in subscription revenue compared with last year's third quarter ended October 31. The percentages were impressive, but the revenue figures underscored that Workday is a small, seven-year-old company with 356 customers and a sliver of the markets it serves. Total revenue for the quarter was $72.6 million while subscription revenue was $51.6 million. Workday is also far from profitable, reporting a third-quarter operating loss of $40.9 million, up from an operating loss of $19.4 million in the same period last year. The non-GAAP net loss for the quarter was $23 million. Operating cash flow was also negative, but Workday's balance sheet is strong, with $797.4 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities on the books at the end of the quarter. The company raised nearly $685 million of that hoard in its highly successful October initial public offering. Workday is now pouring that money into growing the company, and it has already increased its headcount by 75% this year. Investors bought into the IPO because they are counting on the company's prospects to grow quickly. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/workday-wins-more-customers-for-cloud-ap/240004762">Workday's HCM apps</a> are its most mature and are now driving large, enterprise-wide deals, like contracts recently signed with DuPont and Hewlett-Packard. [ Are cloud vendors profitable? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-revenues-surge-but-should/240142626?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Salesforce.com Revenues Surge, But Should You Ignore Losses?</a> ] "There aren't many companies bigger than HP, so on the HCM side we can sell to any size commercial enterprise," said Aneel Bhusri, chairman, co-founder and co-CEO of Workday, during Wednesday's conference call with analysts. Workday's financial management apps, which include core financials, revenue management, asset management, expense management and procurement, are about two years behind HCM in terms of scalability and maturity, Bhusri said. But with research and development now fueled by Workday's IPO haul, the financial apps will be closing the gap with on-premises rivals, Bhusri promised. "We're comfortable selling to medium-sized companies today, and by the end of next year we'll be a fit for Fortune 1000 to Fortune 500 sized companies," Bhusri said. Customers going live on the financials apps next year will include Netflix and Lifetime Fitness. Continued investments in sales and marketing, research and development, and associated head counts will weigh on short-term results, Workday warned. It projected higher operational losses for the fourth quarter while revenue won't grow as quickly, as it's a typically soft quarter. Workday's best opportunity to gain a new customer is when it's contemplating an upgrade on an on-premises legacy system from the likes of Oracle or SAP. That's when they invariably face investments of "tens of millions of dollars," Bhusri said. Customers are looking to cloud apps providers because they want a better user experience and a lower cost of ownership, he said. "It's a platform shift, much like we saw from mainframe to client server," Bhusri concluded. "We consider it to be a market share land grab opportunity." On-premises competitors clearly don't intend to let Workday walk away with the cloud market. Oracle has acquired Taleo for its cloud-based recruiting and learning management apps, and it built out its own <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-lays-out-app-agenda-cloud-mobile/240008266">Fusion HCM cloud apps</a>. SAP acquired <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/social_networking_private_platforms/successfactors-employee-central-now-look/240008990">SuccessFactors</a> for HCM and recently spun out a Financials OnDemand service to blunt cloud ERP competition from the likes of Workday.2012-11-28T14:30:00ZAmazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data WarehousingAmazon Redshift service promises ten times faster query performance than conventional on-premises data warehouses, at one-tenth the price.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAmazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday announced Amazon Redshift, a cloud-based data warehouse service that it says will deliver better scalability and performance than conventional on-premises data warehouses at dramatically lower costs. "We did the math and found that it generally costs between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte per year, at list prices, to build and run a good-sized data warehouse on your own," stated AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr in a <a href="http://aws.typepad.com/">blog on the announcement</a>. "Amazon Redshift, all-in, will cost you less than $1,000 per terabyte per year." Promising more than a cost advantage, Amazon said its managed service approach also liberates data warehouse administrators from the tasks of monitoring, tuning, doing backups, patching software and recovering from faults. Users launch and manage Redshift nodes and clusters from the AWS Management Console, and Amazon said they can start with a few hundred gigabytes and scale up to more than a petabyte. Redshift is based on relational database technology, so it uses SQL as its query language and is compatible with existing BI tools. It's pretty clear that the database in question is <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/paraccel-jumps-on-analytics-bandwagon/228300326">ParAccel</a>, as Amazon is an investor in that company and statements about Redshift acknowledge licensing key technology from the company. [ Want more on ParAccel, the database behind Redshift? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/paraccel-jumps-on-analytics-bandwagon/228300326?itc=edit_in_body_cross">ParAccel Jumps On Analytics Bandwagon</a>. ] ParAccel's database includes advanced features such as columnar data storage and advanced compression, but these are also offered by competitors including EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica and Teradata, and they are promised in the next release of Oracle Database. Despite Amazon's "ten times faster" claim, performance will clearly vary depending on the workload and the "conventional database" point of comparison. The distinction between the previously available <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/rds/">Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)</a> and Redshift is that the latter is exclusively for warehousing and analytics (as opposed to transactional database uses) and is capable of big-data scale. "RDS is based on Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL, and those aren't systems that are designed to do petabyte-scale data warehousing," said Jaspersoft's Karl Van den Bergh, VP of product and alliances. Jaspersoft is one of two initial business intelligence partners on Redshift, along with MicroStrategy, though Amazon said that other BI partners will soon follow. Despite the potential for big data analysis, Amazon seemed intent to highlight the potential for small and midsize companies to get into data warehousing at a very low cost. Customers can spin up two node types, including either 2 terabytes or 16 terabytes of compressed customer data per node. Pricing starts at $0.85 per hour for a 2-terabyte data warehouse. Reserved-instance pricing lowers the price to $0.228 per hour, or under $1,000 per terabyte, per year, according to Amazon. "Like anything that Amazon does, they're disrupting the market and offering something that nobody else has been able to offer from a cost-value perspective," said Van den Bergh. "This is a big deal for the data warehousing space, so it will be interesting to see how much uptake it gets." One thing Amazon doesn't address in detail on its <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/">Redshift site</a> is just how companies large and small will upload and synchronize their data with Redshift. Uploading data from one source isn't complicated, but the delays and complexities of data movement multiply as the number of sources increases. Presumably, BI systems will also have to operate in the cloud in order to avoid the potentially time-consuming step of moving data back and forth between on-premises systems and the cloud. Amazon representatives were not available for comment at press time, but InformationWeek will follow up with deeper analysis of Redshift capabilities and how it might impact the data warehousing industry. Predictive analysis is getting faster, more accurate and more accessible. Combined with big data, it's driving a new age of experiments. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111912/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Advanced Analytics</a> issue of InformationWeek: Are project management offices a waste of money? (Free registration required.)2012-11-27T16:42:00ZFormer Autonomy Chief Challenges HP Fraud AllegationsFormer Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch rejects HP allegations of impropriety. HP says questions will be answered in court.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/former-autonomy-chief-challenges-hp-frau/240142660?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/global-cio/interviews/232700431"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/772/01_Steve-Haindl_tn.jpg" alt="10 CIOs: Career Decisions I'd Do Over" title="10 CIOs: Career Decisions I'd Do Over" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 CIOs: Career Decisions I'd Do Over</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Rejecting allegations that Autonomy committed serious financial improprieties under his watch, former CEO Mike Lynch lashed out at Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday in an open letter to the company's board of directors. Pleading innocence, Lynch described HP's massive $8.8 billion write down of Autonomy as excessive, and he called on HP to publicly detail how it determined that $5 billion of that amount was attributable to fraud. HP quickly responded with its own statement repeating allegations that "accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations" occurred prior to HP's acquisition of Autonomy. Rejecting Lynch's call for "immediate and specific explanations" of its allegations, HP said it would let legal and regulatory authorities handle the matter, concluding "we look forward to hearing Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury." In his letter, Lynch said he was shocked by HP's "non-specific but highly damaging allegations," and he accuses the company of "selective disclosure of non-material information via background discussions with the media." [ Want more on HP's management struggles? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/hps-identity-crisis-continues/240142477?itc=edit_in_body_cross">HP's Identity Crisis Continues</a>. ] Zeroing in on the scale of HP's <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/hp-takes-88-billion-charge-on-autonomy-u/240142387">write down</a>, Lynch asks HP's board to explain how such extensive misrepresentations "could possibly have gone undetected during the extensive acquisition due diligence process." HP acquired the U.K.-based company in October 2011 for $11.1 billion. Last week the company wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion, attributing $5 billion of that write down to fraud. Lynch noted that Autonomy's books were overseen by independent auditor Deloitte LLC prior to the acquisition. And just two months after the deal, in December 2011, he said that Paul Curtis, HP's Worldwide Director of Software Revenue Recognition, KPMG and Ernst & Young undertook detailed studies of Autonomy's software revenue recognition methods in order to comply with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. The implication is that HP is hanging an undue share of its financial performance failings on Autonomy's former management rather than owning up to its own mismanagement. Indeed, IT and financial analysts were critical of HP's acquisition from the start, saying the cost of the acquisition was far too steep. It remains to be seen if $5 billion in lost value can be attributed to fraud, but it appears HP is already acknowledging that it paid nearly $4 billion more than Autonomy was worth. HP reiterated its contention that Autonomy's former management team managed to hoodwink auditors on both sides of the Atlantic. HP says it has referred the matter to the UK Serious Fraud Office, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Enforcement Division and the U.S. Department of Justice. "We will defer to them as to how they wish to engage with Dr. Lynch," HP stated.2012-11-27T10:39:00ZSalesforce.com Revenues Surge, But Should You Ignore Losses?Why cloud application vendors are held to a different standard when it comes to profitability.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-revenues-surge-but-should/240142626?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSalesforce.com reported yet another quarter of double-digit revenue growth last week, but financial analysts didn't seem to blink about the losses it reported. In fact, most prominent cloud application vendors do report losses, at least as measured by generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). So why do they appear to play by different rules than their on-premises counterparts? The short answer is that investors tend to tolerate losses from fast-growing companies in emerging technology markets. Last week's Salesforce.com earnings report for the third quarter ended Oct. 31 was like so many others in recent years, with revenue beating expectations. Revenue was up 35% over the year-earlier period to $788 million, surpassing the company's estimate of $773 million to $777 million. The company also projected revenue of $3.04 billion for the full year, up 34% from last year. It was a show of strength and a contrast to more than few on-premises software vendor financial reports in which shortfalls were blamed on exchange-rate woes, fiscal troubles in Europe or softness in the global economy. [ Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is one of the originators. Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-cloud-computing-pioneers/240142397?itc=edit_in_body_cross">10 Cloud Computing Pioneers</a>. ] The profit picture at Salesforce was far different. On a GAAP basis the company lost $220 million on the quarter, or $1.55 per share. That included a one-time charge of $149 million tied to tax accounting changes, but that still left more than $70 million in losses. Last year in the same quarter the company also lost money on a GAAP basis, but only $3.8 million. Why the big difference? For one thing, Salesforce.com's operating expenses rose 40% year over year to $656.3 million, with big increases in head count as well as research and development, sales and marketing, and general administrative expenses. So why weren't alarms going off during last week's call with financial analysts? A review of <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/1022201-salesforce-com-s-ceo-discusses-f3q-2013-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single">the call transcript</a> reveals there were zero questions about the loss. "GAAP versus non-GAAP is not entirely meaningful in terms of understanding profitability," explains Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard. "Ultimately, cash generation is what drives valuation, and it's probably the best measure of the value of a firm." As measured by cash flow, Salesforce.com generated $106 million on the quarter, so the company is profitable, says Maynard. What's more, he says, the operational cost increases (for sales and marketing and R&D) were roughly in line with the increases in revenue. Wells Fargo confirmed its "outperform" rating on Salesforce.com after last week's financial results were announced. As for other cloud apps vendors that post losses? "Companies that grow faster and that are at an earlier stage of maturation are generally given much more latitude in terms of investor patience," Maynard says. Good to know, but when should we stop cutting these companies slack? Or, to ask it another way, when are they "mature"? That, too, gets back to growth. Citing Google as an example, Maynard says that when the growth rates slow down, the stock valuations compress. "Five years ago Google traded at 30 to 40 times earnings, but today it trades in the mid teens," he says. As with men, you can't equate age with maturity. Salesforce.com and NetSuite.com were both founded within months of Google, but they're positively juvenile by comparison as measured by growth potential. And then there's Workday Inc., a company that just mounted a hugely successful IPO, despite predicting it would "experience a net usage of cash from operations" in the second half of the fiscal year ending Jan. 31. Workday has a market cap of $8.32 billion, yet it's expected to report a loss of 49 cents a share on Wednesday for its fiscal 2013 third quarter on revenue of $64 million. The vast gulf between Workday's market cap and its revenue and non-existent profit is all about growth potential. "Workday has a $40 billion total available market ahead between human resources apps, financial apps and related business intelligence apps, but cloud vendors in this market today have mid-single-digits in revenue," Maynard says. Investment growth potential is not a technology selection criteria, but it's important for customers and would-be customers of fast-growing vendors to keep the investor's perspective in mind. Rivals have been known to sow seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt when squaring off in competitive bidding situations. And when people want to pick holes in these companies, Maynard says, they focus on the income statement, but a well-rounded assessment will also consider the balance sheet and, most importantly, cash flow.2012-11-27T09:06:00Z10 Cities Raise Tech IQs In IBM ChallengeIBM's Smarter Cities Challenge helps 100 cities around the globe improve education, infrastructure, public safety and economic development. Look how 10 winning cities are tackling tough problems.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/10-cities-raise-tech-iqs-in-ibm-challeng/240142572?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsIBM is well known for its Grand Challenges, from developing Deep Blue, the chess-playing super computer, to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/inside-watson-ibms-jeopardy-computer/229100143">Watson</a>, the language-aware, question-and-answer computer that beat two human champions on the game show Jeopardy. IBM's three-year <a href="http://smartercitieschallenge.org/">Smarter Cities Challenge</a> is the company's largest-ever philanthropic initiative, bringing a $50 million competitive grant program to 100 cities worldwide. Launched in 2010, the Smarter Cities Challenge has already seen grants awarded to two waves of winning cities from among more than 400 applicant cities seeking innovative, technology-driven solutions to major challenges such as economic and workforce development, transportation and infrastructure planning, downtown revitalization and urban planning. The latest round of <a href="http://citizenibm.com/2012/11/scc2013.html">31 winning cities</a> was announced at the November 15 Smarter Cities Summit in Palisades, N.Y., where mayors, city CIOs and other policymakers and technology innovators gathered to review successes and share strategies. The grant program assigns six IBM experts to study the problems identified by each city. The grant work culminates in a three-week, pro bono consulting engagement through which these experts meet with local stakeholders and deliver recommendations on how cities can work smarter, taking advantage of technology to make the best use of scarce resources. Among the cities that have been through this process, Boston is developing an open data platform aimed at better sharing information, and it's working toward developing a cross-agency master traffic control system. Chicago is looking to develop a Silicon Valley of its own, but to do that it needs to develop a tech-savvy workforce. IBM is working with the city on math and science education initiatives across primary and secondary schools. [ Want more background on how forward-looking cities are using technology to plan smarter? See our sister site, <a href="http://www.ubmfuturecities.com?itc=edit_in_body_cross">UBM's Future Cities</a>. ] In Louisville, Kentucky, breathing disorders such as asthma are seen at higher-than-average rates, so the city is dispensing GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled rescue inhalers that gather data on asthma attack outbreaks so the city can find causes and work on cures. Philadelphia is divided between digital haves and have-nots, with more than 40% of households lacking a computer and access to the Internet. The city is working with cable provider Comcast to provide low-cost packages bundling laptops and Internet access, and IBM has advised the city on coordinating data, content and programs aimed at addressing a gap in education and training. IBM's consulting engagements in each city are valued at $400,000, but it's a smart philanthropic investment that could lead to commercial rewards. IBM's recommendations often point toward data-integration projects, analytics deployments and case-management systems projects that might cost upwards of tens of millions of dollars. Even where such projects are subject to competitive bidding requirements, the Challenge Grant work gives IBM deep insight into city systems and IT challenges, and, more importantly, goodwill and close working relationships with city leaders and technology stakeholders. Read on to learn about the tech innovation plans in Boston; Chicago; Durham, N.C.; Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Louisville, Ky.; Malaga, Spain; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; St. Louis, Mo.; and Syracuse, N.Y.Boston's challenge was sharing data across departments to avoid redundant data-collection efforts and improve city decision making. Data sharing is a common problem for many cities, and it's one Boston has addressed with the launch of an open data platform. "We think we have a nice platform and it does simple things like replace the need for Freedom of Information Act requests, but there's lots more to be done," said Boston CIO Bill Oates (pictured above). "Part of that challenge is to remediate data quality issues and the siloed nature of our systems." Boston's 2012 IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant bolstered efforts to reduce traffic and carbon emissions within the city. An IBM team surveyed more than 75 stakeholders in June and found that agencies including the Boston Transportation Department (BTD), an Environmental and Energy Services Cabinet and the city's Department of Innovation and Technology could all make use of traffic data that wasn't being shared. Recommendations included standardizing traffic data models and formats, automatically sharing BTD traffic data with other agencies, and consolidating access to videocameras across departments as the basis of a master traffic-control system. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/analytics-gets-more-accurate-more-accessible/240142189">Analytics Gets More Accurate, More Accessible</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/small-data-beat-big-data-in-election-2012/240062584">Small Data Beat Big Data In Election 2012</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/time-to-deliver-on-federal-it-reform/240124934">Time To Deliver On Federal IT Reform</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/wireless/more-ny-subway-stations-will-get-wi-fi-c/240142359">More NY Subway Stations Will Get Wi-Fi, Cell Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/hurricane-sandy-big-data-predicted-big-power-outages/240115312">Hurricane Sandy: Big Data Predicted Big Power Outages</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/hurricane-sandy-government-data-tools-as/240012635">Hurricane Sandy: Government Data Tools Assist</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/telecom/business/best-3g-4g-cities-in-america/240012556">Best 3G & 4G Cities In America</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/smb/ebusiness/232600832">9 Startups That Caught IBM's Eye</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-finally-graduates-medical-sch/240009562">IBM Watson Finally Graduates Medical School</a> <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119">Research: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends</a> Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (foreground right) has made attracting software and technology firms a high priority for the city. Chicago sought and won a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in 2011 to help the city align public school math and science education with economic development goals. "With the curriculum that IBM will be developing with Chicago Public Schools, we'll be giving students a better chance at a future in the most promising area of employment, and that's in technology and computer sciences," Emanuel said during a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbJWh7uMHQ&feature=player_embedded#!">2011 press conference</a>. IBM has since worked with the city to develop a long-range plan and short-term strategies to connect public school programs and the city's community college system to the city's economic agenda. "There were disconnects between the courses being taught, the success rates of students in key subjects and the economic development strategy," Stanley Litow, IBM's VP of corporate citizenship & corporate affairs (foreground, left), told InformationWeek at the November 15 Smarter Cities Challenge Summit in Palisades, N.Y. The city's new plan is to develop, track and analyze data on graduation rates by subject area, courses taught in community colleges, credentials of schools and instructors by subject area, and skills gaps in Chicago's available workforce. "If there's a disconnect between the data and the economic development strategy, you either have to change your strategy or change your approach to student preparation," Litow concluded. 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Mayor William V. Bell (inset photo) said 4,500 to 6,000 city youth from age of 14 to 25 are disconnected from schools and paths to employment. It's estimated that high school dropouts experience three times the poverty rate of those who have attended even one year of college, according to Bell. The long-term cost to the city is lower tax rolls and higher costs for policing. Durham won a Smart Cities Challenge Grant in 2011 to study ways to keep youth in school or to go back to school to become positive, contributing members of the community. "If we can reconnect even 3,000 of these youth, we could save the city as much as $42 million per year," Bell said at the November 15 Smarter Cities Challenge Summit. In a <a href="http://durhamnc.gov/ich/cmo/Documents/ibm_scc_report.pdf">March public report</a>, IBM's Challenge Grant team recommended a comprehensive service delivery model designed to coordinate the fragmented services of multiple city agencies. Recommended technologies included a case-management system with early warning alerts to flag youth in need of preventative or recovery actions. IBM also recommended a digital service-provider catalog with workflows to manage client referrals and handoffs from agency to agency. Bell said Durham is now in the first phase of a four-phase, three-year implementation project on the recommendations. 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The goal is ambitious given that this sprawling city had 27 traffic-related fatalities in 2010. The city won a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in 2011 to develop ideas to improve the integration, analysis and dissemination of traffic-safety data. IBM's team recommended that the city create an analytics center of excellence and improve data governance within the city's Office of Traffic Safety. IBM also recommended ways to simplify safety performance measures, improve public access to traffic-safety and transit information with social media, and step up collaboration with industry and academia. Edmonton has since <a href="http://www.gov.edmonton.ab.ca/transportation/traffic_safety/ibm-smarter-cities-recommendations.aspx">responded to the report</a> by engaging IBM to study integrating data on weather, road closures, road maintenance and police-enforcement activities. The goal is to create a real-time feed to inform traffic routing and traffic safety decisions. Edmonton is also working with Siemens on sensor-equipped transportation infrastructure and with analytics vendor <a href="http://www.ptvamerica.com/">PTV America</a> on traffic-data monitoring and traffic-flow simulation. 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The city embraced a data-driven approach to the problem early this year by partnering with <a href="http://asthmapolis.com/ ">Asthmapolis</a>, a Madison, Wisconsin-based company that developed a GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled inhaler and companion smartphone app that precisely logs when and where patients administer their medication. The app makes it easy for patients and doctors to track the use of medication while healthcare providers and municipalities see the bigger picture: precisely mapped data on breathing incidents. Louisville won an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in March to bolster its data-driven approach. "We wanted advice on what other data sets to mash up against this new data on asthma episodes," Ted Smith, chief of economic growth & innovation for Metro Louisville, told InformationWeek. Louisville has data available from air pollution monitors and traffic sensors, which Smith described as obvious data sources, but following a three-week fact-finding trip to Louisville in July, <a href="http://smartercitieschallenge.org/city_louisville_United_States.html">IBM recommended</a>, among other measures, developing data-sharing plans with the Commonwealth of Kentucky, area healthcare systems, school systems, the housing authority and the tree advisory board, among other stakeholders. "The IBM team brought a number of different angles to the problem, including bringing the schools into the discussion," Smith said, noting that data on absenteeism will help shed light on the impact of asthma on area youth. "They also pointed out data available from the federal government and the state that we didn't know existed." IBM's report was issued in September and about half of the 500 Asthmapolis inhalers the city has purchased have now been distributed, so the bulk of the data collection, integration and analysis work has yet to be done. 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But the financial downturn and credit crisis that has rocked southern Europe has not spared this city. Unemployment has more than doubled in Malaga over the last five years to more than 30%, while the rate among youth aged 18 to 25 is a staggering 50%. Public programs have helped incubate more than 100 new businesses in the region, yet few of those businesses have thrived and become significant employers without ongoing public support -- an untenable situation in the face of government austerity measures. Malaga won a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in early 2012 to promote sustainable economic development and diversifying the city's tourist-dependent economy. A three-week study carried out by an IBM team this summer yielded recommendations on economic development, public-private cooperation, branding efforts and technology development. Malaga's economic development strategy was found to be fragmented and lacking clear measures. It's hoped that private-sector collaboration will tie educational and entrepreneurial initiatives with emerging industries in the area. Branding campaigns are seen as a way to promote Malaga as a business center as well as a hub for tourism. Public data sharing, meanwhile, is expected to highlight technology as part of Malaga's business-friendly culture. Speaking at an IBM Smarter Cities event in November, Malaga's Mayor, Francisco de la Torre (inset photo), said he's confident the proposals will help the city drive technological development and improve the city's employment problem, but he also voiced concern about educational bureaucracy. "To address our structural problems we need high-quality education, but that's not in the mayor's hands because the provinces and the state government control the schools," he said. Several mayors in attendance, including Mayor William Bell of Durham and Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, echoed de la Torre's concern that mayors can't always address all aspects of a city problem. 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Yet more than 500,000 city residents fall below adult literacy levels. What's more, only 24% of city residents have college degrees and only a third of city residents are qualified to fill the positions that are available. All of these stats, cited by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (inset photo), figured in the city's 2011 win of an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant. A digital divide in the city starts with the fact that until recently more than 40% of city households lacked access to a computer or the Internet. Thus, a cornerstone of the city's plan was to create Digital On-Ramps to bring online education and training opportunities to youth and adults. Working with cable provider Comcast, the city set up an Internet Essentials package including a laptop computer, modem, Internet access and training for $9.95 per month for qualified households. The city also established 77 public computing centers across the city, concentrated in neighborhoods with limited Internet access. Access to the Internet is just a start. IBM's Smarter Cities team recommended developing an interactive, online guide to schools, courses and training programs. Scores of agencies and programs were found to be working on bits and pieces of the literacy challenge, yet they weren't collaborating or sharing data. IBM recommended creating a federated, cloud-based view of the populace built on data pulled together from multiple sources, including public schools and community colleges. The team also recommended engaging Philadelphia's business community, including trade associations, chambers of commerce and business councils to align courses and training programs with entry-level skills required in growing city industries including education, medical services and tourism. "The Smarter Cities plan validated our concept, gave us an operational plan and helped us land on concrete, early-action projects," said Nutter. Suggested "quick win" projects included using predictive analytics to spot students in danger of dropping out of school to trigger intervention programs; developing a credentialing system and digital badges to recognize proficiency and provide a permanent electronic record of employable skills; and launching projects to better understand the needs of low-literate adults and to serve them with neighborhood-based adult-learning communities and tutoring programs. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/analytics-gets-more-accurate-more-accessible/240142189">Analytics Gets More Accurate, More Accessible</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/small-data-beat-big-data-in-election-2012/240062584">Small Data Beat Big Data In Election 2012</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/time-to-deliver-on-federal-it-reform/240124934">Time To Deliver On Federal IT Reform</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/wireless/more-ny-subway-stations-will-get-wi-fi-c/240142359">More NY Subway Stations Will Get Wi-Fi, Cell Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/hurricane-sandy-big-data-predicted-big-power-outages/240115312">Hurricane Sandy: Big Data Predicted Big Power Outages</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/hurricane-sandy-government-data-tools-as/240012635">Hurricane Sandy: Government Data Tools Assist</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/telecom/business/best-3g-4g-cities-in-america/240012556">Best 3G & 4G Cities In America</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/smb/ebusiness/232600832">9 Startups That Caught IBM's Eye</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-finally-graduates-medical-sch/240009562">IBM Watson Finally Graduates Medical School</a> <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119">Research: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends</a> Pittsburgh is now experiencing its third renaissance since overcoming the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s, according to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (inset photo). After decades of decline, the city's population is now rebounding, according to the latest Census figures, with young people staying and working in Pittsburgh rather than leaving after graduating from area colleges and universities, Ravenstahl said. Growth has put a coordinated traffic plan on the top of the city's agenda, and in March it won a Smarter Cities Challenge grant to study rail, bus, auto, bicycle and walking path options. IBM's Challenge Grant team recently wrapped up its report. "They walked our streets, rode our buses, visited our economic development zones and saw our pilot projects and, as a result, they developed valuable recommendations that we'll use to plan our future transportation system," Ravenstahl told attendees of the November 15 Smarter Cities Challenge Summit in Palisades, N.Y. In one example, IBM recommended better sharing of information and expanded use of sensor-based systems. A "Park PGH" program, for example, gives drivers access to real-time information on parking availability, but it's currently limited to a few sensor-equipped lots. In another example, the city this year reduced traffic congestion in an economic development zone by 20% by using smart, computer-coordinated traffic signals. That project was spearheaded by Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, and the mayor said he wants the technology installed citywide. "The technology changes the light from red to green when it needs to be changed, and it eliminates one of my pet peeves, which is paying police officers to change traffic signals when they're better suited to the more important work of keeping us safe," Ravenstahl said. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/analytics-gets-more-accurate-more-accessible/240142189">Analytics Gets More Accurate, More Accessible</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/small-data-beat-big-data-in-election-2012/240062584">Small Data Beat Big Data In Election 2012</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/time-to-deliver-on-federal-it-reform/240124934">Time To Deliver On Federal IT Reform</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/wireless/more-ny-subway-stations-will-get-wi-fi-c/240142359">More NY Subway Stations Will Get Wi-Fi, Cell Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/hurricane-sandy-big-data-predicted-big-power-outages/240115312">Hurricane Sandy: Big Data Predicted Big Power Outages</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/hurricane-sandy-government-data-tools-as/240012635">Hurricane Sandy: Government Data Tools Assist</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/telecom/business/best-3g-4g-cities-in-america/240012556">Best 3G & 4G Cities In America</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/smb/ebusiness/232600832">9 Startups That Caught IBM's Eye</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-finally-graduates-medical-sch/240009562">IBM Watson Finally Graduates Medical School</a> <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119">Research: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends</a> St. Louis, Missouri's 2011 IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant was focused on the problem of crime and public safety, a problem that has marred the city's image and hampered economic development. Mayor Francis G. Slay sought recommendations on ensuring that information on crime would get to the right people across the entire public safety ecosystem, including the mayor's office, police department, circuit attorney, circuit courts and parole and probations. IBM's team found that individual agencies had separate, siloed systems for tracking offenders. To create a unified view, the Challenge Grant team recommended creating a common language and data model for sharing information across agencies. IBM also offered a number of recommendations about improving accountability and using data to spot crime trends, target police patrols and measure performance improvements. Yet no amount of technology or data analysis could overcome a gap in the chain of command in St. Louis whereby the city's police department was not accountable to the mayor. "Our recommendations highlighted this issue, and they've just <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/proposition-a-for-city-control-of-st-louis-police-passes/article_c96f33d4-5fa8-5f7a-a046-277f9906ba0d.html">changed the regulatory structure in St. Louis</a> so that the mayor does now have control over the police department," said Stanley Litow, IBM's VP of corporate citizenship & corporate affairs, in an interview with InformationWeek. "People had been talking about the issue for years, but being able to say, 'a team of outside experts identified this as a core problem,' may have been part of the impetus for getting the problem solved." RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/analytics-gets-more-accurate-more-accessible/240142189">Analytics Gets More Accurate, More Accessible</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/small-data-beat-big-data-in-election-2012/240062584">Small Data Beat Big Data In Election 2012</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/time-to-deliver-on-federal-it-reform/240124934">Time To Deliver On Federal IT Reform</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/wireless/more-ny-subway-stations-will-get-wi-fi-c/240142359">More NY Subway Stations Will Get Wi-Fi, Cell Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/hurricane-sandy-big-data-predicted-big-power-outages/240115312">Hurricane Sandy: Big Data Predicted Big Power Outages</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/hurricane-sandy-government-data-tools-as/240012635">Hurricane Sandy: Government Data Tools Assist</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/telecom/business/best-3g-4g-cities-in-america/240012556">Best 3G & 4G Cities In America</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/smb/ebusiness/232600832">9 Startups That Caught IBM's Eye</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-finally-graduates-medical-sch/240009562">IBM Watson Finally Graduates Medical School</a> <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119">Research: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends</a> Syracuse, N.Y., a 2011 winner of a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant, sought IBM's help with the problem of foreclosures. Exacerbated by an exodus of jobs and population to surrounding suburbs, foreclosures lead to properties moving off the tax rolls and ending up in the city's hands. Stephanie Miner, elected mayor in 2009, wanted a data system that could predict the properties most likely to go off the tax rolls before the city faced the problem. A prototype "Vacant Property Predictive System of Systems" designed by IBM used available housing and tax-roll data and turned up some interesting correlations, according to IBM. "The smaller the lot size, the more likely it was to be abandoned, and we also found that male heads of household in the city were more likely to have a problem with poverty," Ari Fishkind, an IBM spokesperson told InformationWeek. The predictive system performs "situational analysis" whereby recommendations are prioritized based on the state of the surrounding neighborhood and the likelihood that individual vacancies might tip neighborhoods into a distressed state, according to IBM. "We're moving from having a sense of what's important for neighborhoods and housing to putting in a system in place where we actually have objective data so we can prevent vacancies and bring properties back online," said Mayor Miner <a href="http://youtu.be/mRwnlZOgCj4">in a video</a> about the city's Challenge Grant project. RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/analytics-gets-more-accurate-more-accessible/240142189">Analytics Gets More Accurate, More Accessible</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/small-data-beat-big-data-in-election-2012/240062584">Small Data Beat Big Data In Election 2012</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/time-to-deliver-on-federal-it-reform/240124934">Time To Deliver On Federal IT Reform</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/wireless/more-ny-subway-stations-will-get-wi-fi-c/240142359">More NY Subway Stations Will Get Wi-Fi, Cell Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/hurricane-sandy-big-data-predicted-big-power-outages/240115312">Hurricane Sandy: Big Data Predicted Big Power Outages</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/hurricane-sandy-government-data-tools-as/240012635">Hurricane Sandy: Government Data Tools Assist</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/telecom/business/best-3g-4g-cities-in-america/240012556">Best 3G & 4G Cities In America</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/smb/ebusiness/232600832">9 Startups That Caught IBM's Eye</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-finally-graduates-medical-sch/240009562">IBM Watson Finally Graduates Medical School</a> <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119">Research: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends</a> The road to building a smart city has speed bumps and potholes, cautions Sarah Wartell (inset photo), president of the <a href="http://www.urban.org/">Urban Institute</a>. First, it's easy to get too smart about solving problems. "It's very cool and sexy to have computational scientists and researchers figuring how much data they can gather, but you want to make sure you're not overlooking much simpler solutions to problems," she warns. Second, partnerships with the private sector are often touted, but Wartell said government agencies have to learn how to innovate and develop the capacity to sustain programs on their own after private entities have moved on. Finally, the big data drive has cities looking for any and all sources of information to fuel data-driven decisions, but it's essential for cities to make sure they have comprehensive information. "Some data sets don't do a good job of measuring all citizens, and the people most in need often get missed," she says. "You want to make sure your data perspective is inclusive and fair." RECOMMENDED READING <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/analytics-gets-more-accurate-more-accessible/240142189">Analytics Gets More Accurate, More Accessible</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/small-data-beat-big-data-in-election-2012/240062584">Small Data Beat Big Data In Election 2012</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/time-to-deliver-on-federal-it-reform/240124934">Time To Deliver On Federal IT Reform</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/wireless/more-ny-subway-stations-will-get-wi-fi-c/240142359">More NY Subway Stations Will Get Wi-Fi, Cell Service</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/hurricane-sandy-big-data-predicted-big-power-outages/240115312">Hurricane Sandy: Big Data Predicted Big Power Outages</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/hurricane-sandy-government-data-tools-as/240012635">Hurricane Sandy: Government Data Tools Assist</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/telecom/business/best-3g-4g-cities-in-america/240012556">Best 3G & 4G Cities In America</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/smb/ebusiness/232600832">9 Startups That Caught IBM's Eye</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-finally-graduates-medical-sch/240009562">IBM Watson Finally Graduates Medical School</a> <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119">Research: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends</a>2012-11-19T12:01:00ZBig Data Debate: End Near For Data Warehousing?Some Hadoop advocates say this new platform will unseat the relational data warehouse from its dominant role in BI. Database champions say 'not so fast!' Share your opinion.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-end-near-for-data-warehousing/240142290?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThe enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is the backbone of analytics and business intelligence for most large organizations and many midsize firms. The tools and techniques are proven, the SQL query language is well known, and there's plenty of expertise available to keep EDWs humming. The downside of many relational data warehousing approaches is that they're rigid and hard to change. You start by modeling the data and creating a schema, but this assumes you know all the questions you'll need to answer. When new data sources and new questions arise, the schema and related ETL and BI applications have to be updated, which usually requires an expensive, time-consuming effort. Enter Hadoop, which lets you store data on a massive scale at low cost (compared with similarly scaled commercial databases). What's more it easily handles variety, complexity and change because you don't have to conform all the data to a predefined schema. That sounds great, but where do you find qualified people who know how to use Pig, Hive, Scoop and other tools needed to run Hadoop? More importantly, how do you get fast answers out of a batch-oriented platform that depends on slow and iterative MapReduce data processing? Will Hadoop supplant the enterprise data warehouse and relegate relational databases to data mart roles? Or is Hadoop far too green and too slow to change the way most people work? In our debate, Scott Gnau of Teradata and Ben Werther of Platfora square off. Share your opinion using the comment tool at the end of the article.  <div class="debateArticleContainer">  <div class="debateForColumn leftDebate"> <h3 class="debateHeader">For The Motion</h3>  <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/news/2012/11/Ben-Werther_110.jpg" alt="Ben Werther" title="Ben Werther" align="left" />  <div class="debateAuthorInfo">  Ben Werther Founder & CEO, Platfora  </div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> <h3>  The EDW Is A Relic  </h3> The proposition of the enterprise data warehouse seems tantalizing -- unifying all the data in your enterprise into one perfect database. So you start an 18-month journey to find important data sources, agree on the important business questions, map the business processes, and architect and implement it into the one database to rule them all. And when you are done, if you ever finish, you have a calcified relic of the world 18 months prior. If your world hasn't changed much in 18 months, then that might be ok. But that isn't the reality in any large business I've encountered. Why is Hadoop was gaining so much momentum? Clearly it's cost-effective and scalable, and it's intimately linked in people's minds to companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook. But there's more to it. Everywhere I looked, companies are generating more and more data -- interactions, logs, views, purchases, clicks, etc. These were being linked with increasing numbers of new and interesting datasets -- location data, purchased user demographics, Twitter sentiment, etc. The questions that these swirling data sets could one day support can't be known. And yet to build a data warehouse, I'd be expected to perfectly predict what data would be important and how I'd want to question it, years in advance, or spend months rearchitecting every time I was wrong. This is actually considered "best practice." The brilliance of what Hadoop does differently is that it doesn't ask for any of these decisions up front. You can land raw data, in any format and at any size, in Hadoop with virtually no friction. You don't have to think twice about how you are going to use the data when you write it. No more throwing away data because of cost, friction or politics. And yet, in the view of the status-quo players, Hadoop is just another data source. It is a dumping ground, and from there you can pull chunks into their carefully architected data warehouses -- their system of record." They'll even provide you a ‘connector' to make the medicine go down sweet. Sure, you are back in the land of consultants and 12-18 month IT projects. But let's go through the looking glass. The database isn't the "system of record" -- it is just a shadow of the data in Hadoop. In fact there is nothing more authentic than all of that raw data sitting in Hadoop. But machinery has been missing to complete the story, namely a way to do interactive business intelligence, exploration and analysis against the data in Hadoop. Platfora is among the vendors working on this need. Imagine what this means. Raw data of any kind or type lands in Hadoop with no friction. And without building a data warehouse, without the pain of ETL integration, and without any other IT project, everyday business users can put that data to work immediately. The machinery to support this is now appearing, and users' ability to harness data is undergoing a generational shift. There is no longer a need for a traditional data warehouse. It is an inflexible, expensive relic of a bygone age. It is time to leave the dark ages. Ben Werther is the Founder & CEO of Platfora, the company behind the first in-memory business intelligence platform for Hadoop. He is an industry veteran and big data thought leader and was head of products at Greenplum through the EMC acquisition. </div>  <div class="debateAgainstColumn rightDebate"> <h3 class="debateHeader">Against The Motion</h3>  <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/news/2012/11/Scott-Gnau_110.jpg" alt="Scott Gnau" title="Scott Gnau" align="left" />  <div class="debateAuthorInfo">  Scott Gnau President, Teradata Labs  </div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> <h3>  EDWs Will Thrive  </h3> Some people suggest that relational database management systems (RDBMS), and data warehouse built on top of them, are no longer needed. In fact, some argue that new technologies like Hadoop can do the job of the Data Warehouse at a fraction of the time and cost -- and, by the way, Hadoop is "free." We can't blame some for wanting to believe the argument. Before hitting the arguments, let me say that Hadoop has an important part in the future analytics environment because it provides a big data refinery, which can bring in massive amounts of raw material (data) -- and more importantly the corresponding analytics. One of the great features of Hadoop is that you can pile information into it without deciding in advance what you need to save or how you intend to use it. As businesses require more precise analytics, Hadoop as a source of new fuel is critical. The core argument really comes down to a couple of points: 1. Data Warehouses are too "rigid and inflexible," and 2. The "community" will fix all of the limitations of Hadoop. On the surface, these points sound very compelling. But with a deeper look they are misleading and self-contradictory. Starting with the point about inflexibility of data warehouses, it's important to distinguish the technology, RDBMS, from the practice, data warehousing. Rigid schemas attributed to EDWs -- where the users have to define what they are looking for before starting the search, and where some of the misconceptions stem -- are often the result of rigid IT policy, and sometimes the result of dated or inadequate data warehouse architecture. Rigid structures are not an inherent problem in today's best data warehouse architectures that are designed for analytics. Is structure bad in analytic environments? No! Imagine what would happen if you ran a public company and every quarter an analyst had to go through piles of un-modeled data, whether in Hadoop or otherwise, to come up with your financial quarterly results. The chance that something would go wrong in this process is too high to allow that uncertainty -- sometimes structure is really good to have! So, do all these successful enterprises use structure and data models because it is the only way to go in an RDBMS or a Data Warehouse? Of course not. This is not about what a data warehouse can do; this is about what the business needs. Claiming that customers will stop requiring data quality and accurate data models across all their data infrastructure is misleading. Let's move to the second question. Why would you need a data warehouse if Hadoop is going to support everything from SQL to BI in a year or two? This claim ignores a simple fact: it took decades of work from some of the most brilliant computer scientists to build databases. Can Hadoop provide and implement the same functionality in a couple of years? The answer is obviously, no, and it would be a real shame to waste the community's efforts to rebuild existing functionality vs. inventing newer and more extraordinary use cases. And some of the early deliverables in the Hadoop world that purport to eliminate RDBMS's require schemas and have physical design constraints that go against the "flexibility" argument of Hadoop. What's more, these claims leave out the fact that Hadoop was originally not developed for BI or SQL execution. It's like using a hammer when you really want a screwdriver -- let's free Hadoop to be the great tool it was designed to be! History teaches us that the impact of new technologies is over-estimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long run. Hadoop is not and will not become a data warehouse. RDBMs and data warehouses will thrive, not die, because of Hadoop. We think Hadoop will be an integral part of future analytic data infrastructure solutions, but not the only part! Scott Gnau is president of Teradata Labs, where he directs all research, development and sales support activities related to data warehousing, big data analytics, and associated solutions. </div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div>2012-11-19T10:45:00ZIntel CEO Otellini To Step DownIntel's Paul Otellini, president and CEO, is retiring as Intel stares down a post-PC era favoring mobile chips.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240142305?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/processors/intels-world-changing-vision-on-display/240007078"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/870/1_tn.jpg" alt="Intel's Tech Roadmap: Visual Tour" title="Intel's Tech Roadmap: Visual Tour" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Intel's Tech Roadmap: Visual Tour</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Paul Otellini, the 62-year-old president and CEO of Intel, has decided to retire, the chip maker announced on Monday. Otellini will step down from his executive and director posts following the company's annual stockholder's meeting in May 2013, and Intel promised an orderly leadership transition over the next six months. Otellini, who has served with the company for nearly 40 years, has been in the top spot since 2005. His departure comes amid trying times for Intel (and its smaller rival, AMD) as it struggles with both a slow global economy and what many are calling a post-PC era that is seeing sales grow for ARM chips designed for mobile devices such as tablet computers. Intel beat its latest financial forecasts when it reported earnings last month, but its outlook for fourth-quarter revenue came in at $13.1 billion to $14.1 billion, with the midpoint being lower than analysts' forecasts. That's an early sign that Intel doesn't expect the release of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system to turn around stagnating consumer sales of personal computers. Intel's announcement focused on Otellini's accomplishments, crediting him with transforming the company's operations and cost structure and, more recently, "reinventing the PC" with Ultrabook devices. [ Want more context? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/as-amd-explores-options-intel-pain-looms/240134977?itc=edit_in_body_cross">As AMD Explores Options, Intel Pain Looms</a>. ] "After almost four decades with the company and eight years as CEO, it's time to move on and transfer Intel’s helm to a new generation of leadership," Otellini said in a statement. Intel's board of directors will lead the search for Otellini's replacement, and it will consider both internal and external candidates, the company said. Intel also announced that the board has promoted three senior leaders to executive vice president: Renee James, head of Intel’s software business; Brian Krzanich, chief operating officer and head of worldwide manufacturing; and Stacy Smith, chief financial officer and director of corporate strategy.2012-11-19T08:00:00ZAnalytics Gets More Accurate, More AccessibleAdvanced analytics' predictive capabilities combined with big data are driving a new age of experimentation.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240142189?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors   <div style="margin:0; padding:0; border-top:dotted 2px #56a643;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111912/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1351/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Nov. 19, 2012" width="110" height="110" hspace="0" vspace="10" border="0" align="left" style="margin:12px 10px 8px 1px;" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111912/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" width="88" height="88" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" align="right" style="margin:18px 10px 8px 10px;" /></a> <div style="margin:20px 0 0 0; font-size:1.1em;" align="center"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111912/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire Nov. 19, 2012, issue of InformationWeek</a>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our Green Initiative (registration required.) </div> </div> <div style="clear:both; margin:0; padding:0 0 0 0; border-bottom:dotted 2px #56a643;"></div>    <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1351/351TOCcoverart_crop_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="Advanced Analytics" title="Advanced Analytics" width="110" height="110" hspace="0" vspace="0" align="right" style="margin:0 0 10px 10px" /> Five years ago, companies were standardizing on one or a couple of business intelligence products. Broad interest in advanced analytics, especially the predictive kind, was just emerging. Today, companies of all sizes and industries are experimenting with and using analytics, and veteran users are going for new levels of sophistication, according to our new <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119" target="_blank">InformationWeek Analytics, Business Intelligence and Information Management Survey</a>. Companies are embracing analytics to optimize operations, identify risks and spot new business opportunities. Advanced analytics is all about statistical analysis and predictive modeling -- being able to see what's coming and take action before it's too late, rather than just reacting to what has already happened. That latter practice, derisively known as "rearview-mirror reporting," is associated with conventional BI. The more data companies use, the more accurate their predictions become. But the big data movement isn't just about using more data. It's also about taking advantage of new data types, such as social media conversations, clickstreams and log files, sensor information and other real-time feeds. Experienced practitioners are taking cutting-edge approaches, including in-database analytics, text mining and sentiment analysis.  <div style="float:right;padding-left:10px;"> <div style="width:210px; border:1px solid #000000;"> <div style="margin:0; padding:5px; background-color:#CC0000; text-align:center; font-size:1em; color:#ffffff; font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Research: 2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends</a></div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1351/351CS_reportcover.jpg" width="175" height="110" style="margin:15px;"> <div style="font-size:.9em; margin:0px 1px 0px 10px;">Get our full report, <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119" target="_blank">"2013 Analytics & Info Management Trends,"</a> free with registration. In it you'll find more data from our survey of nearly 550 business technology professionals and more detail on our user examples. <center><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/9298/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2013-analytics-info-management-trends.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121119" target="_blank">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></center> </div> </div> </div>  In each of the past six years, respondents to our analytics and BI survey have rated their interest in 10 leading-edge technologies, and advanced analytics has always been the No. 1 choice. Advanced data visualization is No. 2 this year, up from being ranked third in 2009 (see chart at right). Last year we added "big data analysis" to the list of cutting-edge pursuits, and this year it ranked No. 4 along with collaborative BI. We also see clear evidence that companies are investing in software, people and advanced techniques. For starters, this year we added "in-database analysis for predictive or statistical modeling" to our list of leading-edge technologies, and respondents rated their interest higher than for more-established categories such as mobile BI and cloud-based BI. With in-database analysis, statistical and predictive algorithms are rewritten to operate inside databases that run on massively parallel processing (MPP) platforms. In-database analysis is faster than the old approach to data mining, where analysts moved data sets from data warehouses into specialized analytic servers to create and test predictive models. Data movement delays plagued the old approach, and the analytic servers were underpowered. As data sets have grown, time and power constraints limit work to small data samples rather than all available information, limiting the accuracy of the resulting models. Businesses that have embraced in-database approaches say they can develop models in less time for more precisely targeted segments, whether they're trying to predict customer behavior, product performance, business risks or other variables. What's more, MPP power lets them crunch through massive data sets, so they can use all available data and deliver far more accurate models.  <center>To read the rest of the article, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111912/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the Nov. 19, 2012, issue of InformationWeek</a></center>