http://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-05-20T10:02:00ZTableau Software and Marketo ride hot trends to bank millions with IPOs that post big gains in their first day of trading.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/tableau-marketo-cash-in-with-timely-ipos/240155204?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/5-big-wishes-for-big-data-deployments/240153214"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/981/Big_Hadoop_01_tn.jpg" alt="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" title="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Tableau Software's stock debuted at $31 per share on Friday and it finished the day at $50.75, up 63%. Marketo, too, launched its IPO on Friday and its stock shot up 79% from the opening price of $13 per share to $23.25. <P> It was a case of good timing for two companies cashing in on big trends in the technology industry. Investors associate data-visualization player Tableau with big data, but company co-founder Christian Chabot says the company addresses data of any size. <P> "People all over the world and in every profession and company size feel like they're swimming in data," Chabot told <em>InformationWeek</em>. "The alternative for making sense of it all are traditional enterprise business intelligence platforms, and they are universally complicated, development intensive, slow-moving, expensive, inflexible for end users and understood by a small priesthood of people." <P> Tableau, by contrast, focuses on "fast, easy, visual products for everyone," said Chabot. The company got its start in 2003, long before big data was on anybody's radar. In recent years Tableau, along with QlikTech (which had a successful IPO in 2010), has been among the fastest-growing vendors in the business intelligence market, outpacing far larger BI platform vendors including SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, IBM Cognos and MicroStrategy. <P> <strong>[ Want more on the latest analytics trends? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/gartner-magic-quadrant-looks-beyond-busi/240149302?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Gartner Magic Quadrant Looks Beyond Business Intelligence</a>. ]</strong> <P> The platform vendors that Chabot maligns have added data-visualization and ad-hoc data-exploration modules to try to match the ease-of-use appeal of Tableau and QlikTech, but Chabot insists that "the goliaths" are missing the point in thinking of it as just being about visualization. <P> "We're helping companies of all sizes complete BI projects and empower their employees with data for fact-based decision making at speeds that are at 10 to 100 times faster than you can do it with these old-school systems," Chabot said. <P> Competitors contend that Tableau's initial appeal wears off as customers realize that it's a "limited" solution for departments and individual users, according to MicroStrategy president Paul Zolfaghari. <P> "We enable business users to deploy information and analytics quickly, but we do that without sacrificing having a single version of the truth, an enterprise architecture and shared metadata," Zolfaghari recently told <em>InformationWeek</em>. <P> Chabot counters that Tableau has added server-based systems for centralized control. It has also recently added an in-memory database platform and is venturing into predictive analytics to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/gartner-magic-quadrant-looks-beyond-busi/240149302">move beyond BI</a> and provide forward-looking analysis and actionable intelligence. <P> Tableau raised $254 million through its IPO, but Chabot insists the company was already profitable and that it was more important to raise the company's profile and credibility than to raise money through the IPO. The company's revenue doubled to $127.7 million in 2012, up from $62.4 million in 2011. Net income was $1.4 million in 2012 and $3.4 million in 2011. <P> Marketo is smaller and younger than Tableau, but it's capitalizing on growing demand for systems to support digital marketing. The company's cloud-based marketing automation software is aimed primarily at managing business-to-business campaigns, and it's often used in combination with cloud-based CRM systems including Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The company's revenue was $58 million in 2012, up 81% from $32 million in 2011. <P> Marketo, which was founded in 2007, raised $78 million through its IPO, money it says it will pour into expanding its marketing application portfolio and increasing sales and marketing firepower. The company competes most directly with <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-eloqua-will-stay-friendly-with-sa/240149434">Eloqua</a>, which was recently acquired by Oracle for $871 million. <P> "We saw when we started the company that SaaS was going to change everything," co-founder and CEO Phil Fernandez told <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23266532/marketo-makes-mint-ipo-san-mateo-companys-stock"><em>Silicon Valley Mercury News</em></a> on Friday, "because it was going to let us be a company that could think about 'how could we get to 100,000 customers' rather than 'how do we get to 1,000 customers.'"2013-05-16T12:02:00ZSAP adapts its Business Suite to Hana in record time, but customers may want more proof of success before migrating mission-critical apps.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-vows-hana-is-ready-to-run-erp/240155017?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingYou get the feeling that SAP was bound and determined to announce at this week's <a href="http://www.sapandasug.com/">Sapphire Conference</a> that its core Business Suite applications are ready to run on the Hana in-memory database platform. But for some the question is, just how ready is "ready?" <P> It's hard to believe anybody could question Hana's readiness given that SAP has been "preaching about Hana for four years" as company Chairman Hasso Plattner put it in his Thursday keynote. <P> In 2011, SAP made Hana available to run selected analytic applications. Last year Hana was cleared to run SAP Business Warehouse, the company's data warehouse. This year, the preaching "reached a climax," Plattner said. "It's no longer about Hana, it's about the applications on Hana." <P> It's different this year because we're talking about running mission-critical ERP and CRM applications on Hana. Data warehouses and analytic apps can go down for a day without really disrupting business, but that's not the case for run-the-company core applications. Yet on Wednesday, SAP announced the general availability of the majority of its Business Suite apps on Hana. <P> Mind you, it has been little more than 12 weeks since the ramp-up period (SAP's parlance for beta testing) began. But SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said in his keynote at Sapphire that testing was going so well, it could give Business Suite on Hana a green light "significantly ahead of schedule." He also reported that roughly 100 companies are "working with SAP" to move Business Suite applications to Hana. <P> <strong>[ Want more on SAP's mobile-minded user interface makeover? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-gives-erp-a-facelift/240154923?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP Gives ERP A Facelift</a>. ]</strong> <P> What Snabe didn't say -- and what I learned after talking to customers and asking a lot of questions -- is that only about 10 companies have brought Business Suite applications into production on Hana as of this week. And only four, Under Armour, Florida Crystals, Deere and SAP itself, are going on record about their deployment successes. The other 90 would-be Hana customers are at some stage of studying, pilot testing or preparing for production roll outs. <P> To put this in perspective, Microsoft's community technology preview (beta) periods for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/microsoft-sql-server-2012-big-data-power/232602096">Microsoft SQL Server</a> typically run 10 months to a year and involve more than 100,000 customers downloading and testing beta software. Oracle announced Oracle Database 12c last October, and six months later we're still waiting for general availability. <P> Granted, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database have to work with an incredible diversity of applications whereas Hana is most likely to be used <i>almost</i> exclusively for SAP applications. (I say "almost" because SAP insists that Hana is compatible with more than just SAP apps because it relies on industry standard SQL. Indeed, SAP has more than 400 startups building on Hana, but few big third-party software vendors are talking about running on Hana.) <P> So was Business Suite on Hana rushed to market? "We would never announce a product as generally available unless we felt we have a solid solution," Snabe said in a one-on-one interview with <em>InformationWeek</em>. "We have very rigorous processes around quality and around announcing something as generally available, and I feel very good about where we are." <P> Analysts and consultants I spoke to -- Donald Feinberg of Gartner, Ray Wang of Constellation Research, Animesh Jhalani of VATs Consulting and Jon Reed of JonERP.com -- certainly raised their eyebrows about the short ramp-up period. But there was also a clear understanding and expectation that customers won't be moving core apps onto Hana quickly. <P> "There's little risk in saying it's GA because it's not like there are thousands of companies waiting in line to deploy ERP on Hana right away," said Reed. Any company moving Business Suite apps to Hana would likely take their time about it and get plenty of hand holding and support from SAP or a partner, Reed said. <P> Jhalani, who consults with 20 different SAP customers, including Becton Dickinson, Genentech and Roche, said his customers will want to see cost-benefit analyses specific to their businesses. "Most clients are asking about benefits in terms of functionality," he said. "Hana requires new hardware, and to make that kind of investment, they're looking for the value."Business value is, indeed, the bottom line, and SAP vowed customers will see it. There will be the technical wins of eliminating data redundancies and collapsing separate transactional and analytic layers such that 3-terabyte systems will slim down to 1 terabyte or even less. But Snabe said SAP knows that customers want to see business-process comparisons, not technical stats or speeds and feeds. <P> "The moment you have the Business Suite on Hana, you can rethink processes in ways you could not before, and that's where we're seeing the benefits," he said. <P> The most obvious examples are long-running processes involving lots of data crunching, such as cash-management, price optimization or manufacturing resource planning. "Why would you plan daily or nightly if you can plan constantly," Snabe said. Using sports apparel manufacturer Under Armour as an example, he said real-time planning will bring responsiveness, such that it could turn on dime when one team or another wins a playoff game or one player or another wearing particular shoes or branded clothing makes a big play. <P> "These sorts of [triggers] drive demand the week after the game, not the month after, so you need constant planning to react quickly enough," he said. <P> Speed is the essence of Hana's appeal, but companies are anything but speedy when it comes to changing ERP landscapes. That's why SAP introduced the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-cloud-push-starts-with-hana/240154340">Hana Enterprise Cloud</a> last week. SAP is trying to shorten the adoption curve by helping customers to move to Hana as a managed service. Indeed, many of those 100 customers in the Business Suite-on-Hana pipeline are now considering cloud deployment, according to SAP. <P> One such company is McLaren Group, the U.K.-based Formula One racing and electronics manufacturing company. McLaren had plans to replace multiple home-grown legacy systems with SAP ERP modules for manufacturing, HR, finance, CRM and more. Now that Hana Enterprise Cloud is available, it will host those deployments in SAP's data centers. <P> McLaren is also using Hana to correlate high-scale data streaming off of its race cars to design modeling data, air tunnel testing data and high-definition video of the race experience. This separate, analytic application will also move to the Hana Enterprise cloud. <P> McLaren CIO Stuart Birrell told me he's a lot more worried about the business changes his company faces in moving off legacy systems than he is about the technology changes. But he does admit that it does come down to trust when moving to a new platform. <P> "I've looked the people at SAP in the eye and asked them, 'Can you do it?'" Birrell said. "I wouldn't have done this if I didn't have trust in the people. Thus far they've been true to their word." <P> McLaren is a comparatively tiny, private company. At the other end of the spectrum is Deere, the $36 billion agricultural equipment manufacturer. SAP shared a video at Sapphire in which Derek Dyer, director of Global SAP Services at Deere, said his company was the first to move ERP to Hana, and he reported 70% to 90% improvements in process speeds. Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank reported a 91% improvement in a key sales aggregation and order-fulfillment process. <P> These are cryptic initial accounts of ERP-on-Hana success. SAP customers responsible for keeping big companies running will no doubt want to see many more examples, much deeper detail on what's possible and extensive analysis of the cost-benefit proposition of this new platform.2013-05-15T09:11:00ZSAP CEO says beautiful, consumer-grade look and feel is top priority for Fiori, SAP's new collection of 25 HTML5 applications.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-gives-erp-a-facelift/240154923?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/5-big-wishes-for-big-data-deployments/240153214"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/981/Big_Hadoop_01_tn.jpg" alt="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" title="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> SAP has redefined itself as a business-to-business-to-consumer company, co-CEO Bill McDermott declared on Tuesday at the company's annual <a href="http://www.sapandasug.com/">Sapphire Conference</a>. So it's now a "number-one priority" for the enterprise applications vendor to deliver "beautiful," consumer-grade user interfaces, he said. <P> McDermott's B2B2C message was wrapped in warnings about the dangers of failing to keep up with cloud, social, mobile and real-time expectations. These expectations are being set, he said, by the Millennial generation: 18- to 33-year-olds that are now "the biggest target market on earth" and "the driving force behind technology innovation," both as consumers and, increasingly, as employees. <P> On Wednesday the company was set to announce SAP Fiori, a collection of 25 HTML5 applications designed for desktop, tablet and smartphone interaction. Fiori means "to flower" or "blossom" in Italian, and it's meant to symbolize the renewal of SAP's core applications with <a href="https://experience.sap.com/fiori">clean, touch-friendly interfaces</a> that look more like screens you'd see on Facebook or Amazon.com. <P> The list of Fiori apps is said to cover common workflow, lookup and self-service interactions with SAP's core apps, including approve-leave requests, travel expenses approvals, timesheets, paystub lookups, create sales orders, customer invoices and purchase-order tracking. <P> <strong>[ Want more on SAP's latest cloud service? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-cloud-push-starts-with-hana/240154340?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP Cloud Push Starts With Hana</a>. ]</strong> <P> The lightweight Fiori apps, which are available immediately and said by SAP to be easy to deploy, were selected and co-developed with input from customers, and customers including Colgate-Palmolive and Valero were early beta testers. <P> SAP's plans for interface upgrades were telegraphed last week by SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner, who mentioned the initiative during a press conference on the just-launched <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-cloud-push-starts-with-hana/240154340">Hana Enterprise Cloud</a> service. SAP isn't the only enterprise software vendor putting a fresh face on old ERP apps. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/infor-bets-500-million-on-enterprise-app/240153410">Infor last month introduced</a> a battery of new interfaces billed as having the look and feel of popular consumer websites. <P> McDermott didn't elaborate on the interfaces, but he covered all of SAP's usual bases during his keynote -- the company's "winning" innovation strategy, the ability of the Hana in-memory database to deliver "intelligent data at the speed of thought," SAP's "always open" partner ecosystem and so on. He also formally announced that the world of sports and entertainment is now a 25th vertical industry addressed by SAP. <P> That sports news prompted a panel discussion between McDermott and SAP customers Adam Silver, deputy commissioner of the NBA, Jed York, CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, Kevin Plank, founder and CEO of sports clothing manufacturer Under Armour, and moderator James Brown, host of the TV show "The NFL Today." <P> Sports fits the B2B2C model well, McDermott said, because teams and leagues are digitizing their relationships with the fans. Silver explained that the NBA is using SAP Hana to power <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/nba-launches-sap-hana-powered-basketball/240148609">NBA.com/stats</a>, a site that he said is generating twice the level of traffic since it was relaunched with 60 years of historical stats and the query capabilities of the in-memory database. <P> The 49ers co-developed a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sap-courts-pro-sports-with-scouting-app/240150003">talent-scouting application</a> with SAP, and York said the team is also working with SAP to design consumer-friendly "ticketless and cashless" transactions at its new stadium under construction and set to open in 2014. McDermott demonstrated how the scouting app will be recast as an HR talent review app for mainstream businesses. <P> Echoing SAP's strategy to innovate with software and let customers choose hardware, York said the 49ers decided against investing $60 million in a state-of-the-art scoreboard that would "inevitably become antiquated within five years." Instead it's investing in mobile apps and leveraging the investments of Bay area fans, "who spend more than $1,000 every 18 months on smartphones," he explained. <P> Under Armour CEO Plank explained the clothing manufacturer's 2006 choice of SAP as a move to a platform the company would "never outgrow." Since that time the company has grown from $300 million to more than $1.8 billion in annual sales. It recently upgraded to SAP Hana because crucial sales allocation reports were taking so long that shipments were being delayed. <P> "Today we're running 91% faster and we get goods to the consumer in a timely way, because there's nothing more expensive for us than an empty retail store fixture," Plank said. <P> In other announcements at Sapphire, SAP outlined a unified strategy and rebranding of its cloud portfolio as the SAP Hana Cloud Platform, but it wasn't clear what changed beyond the naming of cloud assets. <P> The company also announced SAP Mobile Secure, an expansion of the Afaria enterprise mobility management system available on-premises or as a cloud-based service. The broader platform ensures "enterprise-grade" security for devices, apps and content, according to SAP. New app security capabilities are provided by partner Mocana, which offers app-wrapping technology that reportedly secures corporate and third-party applications without having to write code. <P> It's not like consumers will suddenly be approving requisitions and purchase orders. But if SAP's internal-facing interfaces can be as clean and simple as Amazon.com, the thinking is that it will become that much easier to use mobile development tools to dream up pleasing self-service applications for customers.2013-05-13T10:03:00ZMetLife uses 10Gen's MongoDB database to quickly integrate disparate data and deliver a consolidated view of the customer.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/metlife-uses-nosql-for-customer-service/240154741?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/20-top-masters-degrees-for-big-data-analytics-professionals/240145673"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/934/IntroImage_tn.jpg" alt=" Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs" title=" Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle"> Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Just about every company with the combination of lots of customers and lots of points of customer interaction aspires to build the proverbial 360-degree customer view. All too many fail, with disparate systems and data being the usual culprit in failed attempts to gain a consolidated customer view. <P> Developing an integrated customer view has been on the wish list at insurance giant MetLife for at least 10 years, but it recently took a fresh approach to the challenge by choosing a NoSQL database as the platform for bringing together data from more than 70 separate administrative systems, claims systems and other data sources. It moved from pilot to rollout in 90 days -- breakneck speed in an industry used to measuring IT projects in months and years. <P> "We had 60 different teams working together as one group, and they were working nights and weekends not because they had to but because they were excited and wanted to," says Gary Hoberman, MetLife's senior VP and CIO of regional application development. <P> The choice of NoSQL for the project makes sense because these databases can ingest structured, semi-structured and unstructured information without requiring tedious, expensive and time-consuming database-mapping or extract, transform and load (ETL) processes to normalize all data to a rigid schema, as required by relational databases. <P> <strong>[ 10Gen's Matt Assay will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKBOD">E2 Conference</a> in Boston, June 17 - 19. ]</strong> <P> Like any big company, MetLife has a profusion of product lines and supporting systems. Some systems are home grown, some are commercial software products and some are commercial or home-grown apps gained through acquisitions. Many systems have to meet complex federal and state regulatory requirements imposed on the annuity and individual- and group-insurance products that MetLife sells. <P> Ripping out, replacing or otherwise touching these mission-critical systems of record was out of the question. So how could MetLife access information from these diverse sources? NoSQL databases have emerged in recent years as a diverse and scalable option. <P> MetLife also confronts its share of data-quality and data-diversity challenges within systems. By definition, life insurance and annuity products are long lived, but as healthcare and the insurance business have evolved, so, too, have data-collection requirements and standards. Today's policy records, for example, have many more fields of data than the records behind policies issued in the 1990s, 1970s or 1950s. Look across the corpus and you have what might be described as ragged or sparse data with missing fields -- another argument for NoSQL. <P> Finally, MetLife deals with semi-structured and unstructured information, such as images of health records and death certificates. This contributed to MetLife's selection of MongoDB -- 10Gen's open source document database -- over other NoSQL alternatives such as Cassandra, which MetLife is testing in other applications. <P> "Everything we know about a customer and everything we know about a policy stores into a single JSON [Java Script Object Notation] document," says Hoberman, one of three top IT execs at MetLife who report up to the Global CIO. "Any other database wouldn't allow us to view customers as a single record without caring about structure at all. With Mongo, we can bring a group policy and an individual policy together without any [data] normalization, and we use a Web services layer and the application to render the best view of that data." <P> MetLife worked with software development firm Infusion to select the database and together they envisioned an interface akin to a Facebook Wall. The screen shows a customer profile listing all products owned on the left together with a reverse-chronological timeline of events on the right. The event feed shows all interactions with contact centers, logins to various websites, and in-person interactions with insurance agents, claims specialists, employer administrators and other touch points. <P> Once the key technology and interface decisions were finalized late last year, it took just two weeks to build a prototype and seed it with 2 million fake customer records to prove that it would scale. <P> "Within a few weeks of building the prototype, we were in front of the executive group of MetLife presenting a live demo, and the excitement in the room was tremendous," according to Hoberman, who says the project was given an immediate green light.<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/5-big-wishes-for-big-data-deployments/240153214"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/981/Big_Hadoop_01_tn.jpg" alt="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" title="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> MetLife's new app, dubbed "The Wall," was rolled out to 200 U.S.-based call-center and claims-administration researchers in early April. The initial results have been highly encouraging, says Hoberman, as indicated by shorter hold times and call-resolution measures and higher Net Promoter scores. It's too early to share those measures, he says, but he notes that some customer-service processes that used to require 40 clicks can now be handled with just one click. <P> "The call center reps had access to a lot of this information before, but they had to have as many as 15 different screens open, which is insane if your goal is to quickly serve customers," says Hoberman. In other cases, agents had to forward calls to back-office agents to gain access to records such as death certificates. <P> For now, The Wall is strictly an internal-facing application designed for service, in part because MetLife can't have 100% confidence that all records shown on The Wall resolve to a single customer. Is John Smith of Barrington, Ill., the same as John E. Smith of Barrington Hills, Ill.? Much like a search application, The Wall displays confidence measures for each record based on the number of coinciding data points. <P> <strong>[ Want more info on an up-and-coming NoSQL vendor? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/10gen-enterprise-release-takes-mongodb-u/240151110?itc=edit_in_body_cross">10Gen Enterprise Release Takes MongoDB Uptown</a>. ]</strong> <P> Here's where relational database advocates might pipe up about the certainty of having carefully mapped data indisputably resolved to a single customer. But Hoberman says most companies face inconsistencies and uncertainly even when querying records in conventional databases and applications. The Wall, he says, gives MetLife an opportunity to clean up its information and tie together formerly disparate records. <P> "If one of our employees is on the phone with a life insurance customer, he or she can ask, 'do you also happen to have an annuity with us, and do you happen to have the account number?'" Hoberman explains. "This gives us the ability to get the information right and link records behind the scenes." <P> The Wall complements an enterprise-wide roll out of Salesforce.com that's also in progress. The idea is to eventually get to just two screens: Salesforce for sales and service transactions and The Wall as the interface to customer records across the company's many business systems. <P> For now, the usual early-days bugs and kinks are still being worked out of the system, but The Wall is expected to roll out to 3,000 call center and research staff in the U.S. by this summer. The next steps will be going global and supporting sales as well as service. <P> MetLife is already moving ahead with service deployments in selected European countries, and it's testing a sales-facing prototype in Russia and a predictive attrition app in Japan. The predictive app will alert call-center agents when callers have a high propensity to switch to a competitor. This analytic application is based on real-time analysis of customer profiles and histories, and if attrition is likely, agents will be prompted to offer replacement products. The prototypes are expected to move into production by year end, according to Hoberman. <P> Another next step will be turning The Wall into a bi-directional application capable of updating legacy systems of record. That's something The Wall will have to support if it is to eventually become a platform for customer-facing self-service applications, as MetLife envisions. <P> The Wall has yet to go enterprise-wide and the vision extends far beyond the realities of the current deployment. But the scale, scope and speed of accomplishments to date points to a huge success. Looking beyond MetLife and even the insurance industry, The Wall may well be a prototype for the next generation of customer-360 applications.2013-05-10T14:32:00ZNetSuite buys cloud-based Order Motion management application to help retailers turn stores into mini warehouses and distribution centers.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/netsuite-acquisition-helps-retailers-bat/240154613?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingRetailers doing battle with Amazon and other online sellers have an underutilized asset that could be turned to their advantage: Stores. <P> NetSuite this week acquired order-management firm Order Motion to help retailers using its cloud-based application suite turn stores into mini warehouses and distribution points for faster, cheaper delivery close to the customer. The move comes as retailers are dealing with complex demands to enable customers to shop online and pick up or return products in stores and to deliver from online or other stores when customers don't find what they want in stock at a retail location. <P> Order Motion focuses on the back-end coordination behind the multi-channel challenge, which is the "unglamorous" but hard part, according to Andy Lloyd, general manager of commerce products at NetSuite. The company's cloud-based order-management applications help retailers effectively tap into in-store inventory for e-commerce fulfillment so they can operate more efficiently. <P> "Instead of having to have a massive stockpile of goods at a distribution center, they can burn down the inventory strategically from within retail locations," Lloyd told <i>InformationWeek</i>. <P> "With this distributed approach, retailers not only save on inventory, they can save on shipping and get goods to the consumer much more quickly from locations that are closer to the customer." <P> <strong>[ Want more on NetSuite's retail capabilities? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/netsuite-acquires-retail-anywhere-for-po/240145929?itc=edit_in_body_cross">NetSuite Acquires Retail Anywhere For Point-Of-Sale Boost</a>. ]</strong> <P> Sounds good in theory, but are retail stores and store employees really prepared to pick, pack and ship out goods on a day-to-day basis? <P> There are "core operational challenges" in this distributed order-management approach, Lloyd acknowledged, including store flow and employee training considerations. But the Order Motion application makes it obvious what products need to be picked off shelves and either held for pickup or shipped out for fulfillment as part of a larger order. <P> NetSuite acquired all assets of Order Motion, a privately held company in Burlington, Mass. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company had 180 customers, but it was acquired primarily for its technology and domain expertise. Company co-founder and CTO Patrick Puck is joining NetSuite. NetSuite will continue to offer standalone Order Motion services for current customers until the applications are integrated with the larger NetSuite service. <P> NetSuite already offered order-management capabilities to its 16,000-plus customers, but Order Motion offers superior order continuity and replenishment functionality, according to Lloyd. <P> "They have great support for recurring orders and direct-response TV was an area where they have been very successful with strong call-center support," Lloyd said. <P> The acquisition of Order Motion follows close on the heels of NetSuite's January purchase of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/netsuite-acquires-retail-anywhere-for-po/240145929">Retail Anywhere</a>, a cloud-based point-of-sale system that helps consolidate transactions from across multiple stores, integrate with backend systems and support business intelligence querying and reporting. <P> All of these capabilities are now directly tied in with NetSuite's multi-channel inventory management, storefront, order-management and customer support capabilities, which span retail, websites, call centers, social media networks and mobile channels.2013-05-09T10:20:00ZSAP costs average $1,518 per user, per year, but new research reveals that two routes to consolidation can bring big savings.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-customers-may-overspend-by-25/240154555?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/8-ways-an-smb-makes-most-of-salesforceco/240148303"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/947/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com" title="8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->SAP customers running multiple instances and versions of the vendor's software could save 25% by switching to a single-instance approach, according to HCL. That's a pitch worthy of a gecko with an English accent, but getting there takes a heck of a lot more than a 15-minute phone call. <P> HCL's findings, released Thursday, are based on a global survey of 225 SAP-customer CIOs that uncovered much more complexity than the systems integration firm anticipated. The survey revealed that the average SAP customer with $1 billion or more in annual revenue runs five different instances and six core modules of the vendor's ERP software. <P> In many cases separate instances are set up to run different regions, such as North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. But in all too many cases, mergers, acquisitions and business fiefdoms add to a jumble of instances and even multiple versions of software. <P> "The SAP installed based is more complex and more fragmented than we expected," said Steve Cardell, president of HCL's Enterprise Application Services practice, in an interview with <i>InformationWeek</i>. "In some cases customers are running four different instances on four different release versions with one having five modules and the other eight, but they're not the same modules." <P> <strong>[ Want more on SAP's latest Hana consolidation option? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-cloud-push-starts-with-hana/240154340?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP Cloud Push Starts With Hana</a>. ]</strong> <P> Running multiple instances and versions of software adds to complexity and cost, necessitating redundant hardware and extra people to upgrade, patch, develop and test applications. Only 6% of respondents are running on a single instance of SAP, but their costs are 25% lower than the average of $1,518 per user, per year. <P> Systems consolidation is a goal for many SAP customers, and HCL finds there are two predominant paths to that goal. In one approach, companies bite the bullet and force through a company-wide consolidation project that may take 18 months to two years and cost a large company as much as $20 million. These projects are typically sparked by a top-down edict from corporate, according to Cardell. <P> The second consolidation approach is a surround strategy whereby companies use the business intelligence layer or mobile applications to synchronize and serve up consistent reporting from divergent back-end systems. In this approach, companies essentially give up on the idea of quickly getting to a single instance, but with BI, mobile and, increasingly, cloud applications, they slowly whittle away at the core. <P> SAP itself promotes the surround strategy by touting the Hana in-memory database, mobile, cloud apps and BusinessObjects BI as consolidation agents. SAP also just announced <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-cloud-push-starts-with-hana/240154340">Hana Enterprise Cloud</a>, an option for large customers to quickly migrate applications onto the vendor's in-memory database running as a managed service. Upwards of 90% of respondents expressed interest in Hana as a possible route to consolidation, according to Cardell. <P> SAP touts the company's own growing portfolio of cloud-based <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-clings-to-a-dated-cloud-apps-strateg/240143034">"edge" applications</a>, such as CRM, SuccessFactors human capital management and finance apps, as a way to effectively shrink the core. But Salesforce.com and Workday have made significant inroads in helping SAP customers to shrink the SAP core, according to Cardell -- and as witnessed by the fact that Salesforce.com recently surpassed SAP as the leading CRM vendor, according to industry statistics. <P> As a leading SAP integrator (along with IBM and Accenture), HCL clearly has a stake in helping customers to consolidate. To support big-bang consolidation projects, HCL is introducing a set of data-mapping and data-migration accelerators at next week's Sapphire conference. The integrator also helps SAP customers with surround strategies, whereby it helps shrink the SAP core with mobile, BI or cloud services offerings. HCL is an integrator for Salesforce.com, Workday and Oracle as well as SAP, so it's not limited to one approach. <P> Where new implementations of SAP software are concerned, customers are intent on avoiding customization at all cost, according to Cardell. "In all the SAP projects we get, the first bullet point from the steering groups always emphasizes 'vanilla' deployments, because there are so many horror stories about customization," he said. <P> Moving off of and consolidating heavily customized legacy deployments is by no means as easy as signing up for a new auto insurance policy by phone. But a key takeaway from <a href="http://www.futureofsap.com/examining-the-future-role-of-sap/">HCL's study</a>, which was conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne, is that there are ways to consolidate and cut the high cost of SAP ERP deployments.2013-05-09T09:06:00ZTeradata says its hybrid 'Intelligent Memory' for data warehousing makes more sense than SAP Hana's all-in-memory approach.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/teradata-to-sap-our-memory-is-smarter/240154486?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingTeradata on Wednesday introduced a new in-memory database feature that it says offers a practical approach to exploiting random-access memory (RAM). The benefit, it says, is delivering the ultimate in query performance as needed without what it calls the "unnecessary and impractical" cost of an all-in-memory approach. <P> Teradata Intelligent Memory, the vendor's new database feature, is clearly being compared to SAP's Hana in-memory database. Teradata and SAP aren't exactly head-to-head competitors, with SAP primarily being an applications vendor and Teradata focusing exclusively on data warehousing. But with SAP thumping its chest about being the industry's fastest-growing database vendor, market leadership, mind share and industry buzz are clearly at stake. <P> Teradata Intelligent Memory is an extension of the vendor's years-old <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/teradata-takes-storage-swipe-at-oracle-e/232602441">Teradata Virtual Storage</a> software, which constantly monitors which data is being queried most often and then automatically moves that data to the fastest storage tiers available. Before Wednesday's announcement the choice was hot (on solid state disks or flash storage), warm (on fast hard drive disks) or cold (on slow hard drives). When different disk drives speeds aren't available, the software moves warm data to the outer tracks of the drives, where faster rotation delivers quicker access, and cold data to the inner tracks. <P> <strong>[ Want to hear about SAP's new Hana deployment option? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-cloud-push-starts-with-hana/240154340?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP Cloud Push Starts With Hana</a>. ]</strong> <P> Solid state disks and flash storage are certainly fast, but RAM is orders of magnitude faster, so Teradata Intelligent Memory adds "super hot" to the hot/warm/cold access-speed strategy by supporting an extended RAM storage layer. Because it's a database feature, currently in beta but set for an upcoming database release, the optional feature will be compatible with all existing Teradata deployments. <P> "We're delivering the performance of in-memory in a way that makes sense for data warehousing and in a package that's easy for our customers to implement," Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs, told <em>InformationWeek</em> <P> Teradata previously used (and still uses) the RAM available in its servers for caching, but Teradata Intelligent Memory creates a dedicated memory space where information that's in the most demand can be pinned for super-fast access. The size of the memory available is configurable by the customer and depends on the RAM available on servers. <P> Customers with business-to-consumer Web applications and mobile applications are likely to be the first adopters of Teradata Intelligent Memory, Gnau predicted, because the in-memory advantage will ensure fast and consistent performance. These applications also call for an automated, dynamic approach because yesterday's super hot data (appropriate for RAM) is likely to quickly become warm data better suited to SSD or fast disk drives. <P> SAP has argued that the cost of RAM has plummeted, making an all-RAM approach practical and affordable. Gnau counters that prices of all other storage options are also falling, so RAM still stands out as the most expensive option. <P> "I've never lived in a world where businesses buy something that's more expensive than another option just because it's cheap," said Gnau. "We're also in a world where data volumes are growing faster than RAM prices are declining, so cheap RAM, cheaper solid-state and cheapest-option rotational drives are still relevant options." <P> Are you better off using all RAM or a hybrid approach? There are too many variables to discount either approach, and keep in mind that the Teradata database and SAP Hana aren't used for the same purpose. SAP is pushing Hana as a transactional database for running applications, such as its ERP and CRM systems, as well as an analytic database for running SAP Business Warehouse (BW). But where BW is a data warehouse used mostly in connection with SAP application data, Teradata is invariably an enterprise data warehouse platform used for a much broader swath of historical information. <P> Even Hana champions Hasso Plattner, chairman of SAP, and Vishal Sikka, a member of the company's executive board, have acknowledged that truly cold data -- infrequently accessed historical information in a warehouse-- might be better managed by conventional databases and disk drives. In this scenario they tout the Sybase IQ database, which is the closest thing SAP has to a head-on Teradata competitor, though IQ is most often used for focused data marts rather than enterprise data warehouses (EDWs). <P> Teradata isn't the first data warehousing specialist to exploit RAM. Kognitio, for one, has been supporting high-memory deployments for years. Kognitio customer <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/tivo-research-analytics-mines-big-tv-dat/240154206">Tivo Research Analytics</a>, for example, pins as much as a third of its 15-terabyte data store in RAM so advertisers can quickly spot which televisions shows are most watched by the biggest buyers of specific products. <P> But Kognitio is a niche player compared to Teradata, a decades-old company that has a who's who list of prominent customers with massive petabyte-scale and 100-terabyte-plus deployments. What's more, Teradata is introducing a much more automated, dynamic and nuanced (super-hot-to-cold) approach than Kognitio offers. One other contrast: Kognitio sells a database whereas Teradata has a complete range of hardware platforms -- from large-scale EDWs to speed- and archive-focused appliances. In short, this is a pretty big deal for Teradata and its customers. <P> It's obvious even to SAP that high-scale data warehouses don't belong entirely in memory, but give it credit for sparking a lot of interest in in-memory performance. Teradata's press releases and executive comments make it clear that the buzz stoked by SAP helped spark the development of Teradata Intelligent Memory. Teradata isn't exactly leading the wave with its announcement, but it came up with a practical and sensible approach to in-memory performance for high-scale data warehousing.2013-05-07T13:18:00ZSAP Hana Enterprise Cloud service promises fast track to in-memory application and data warehouse performance.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-cloud-push-starts-with-hana/240154340?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/data-protection/8-great-cloud-storage-services/240151180"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/967/Cloud_Storage_Services_01_tn.jpg" alt="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" title="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">8 Great Cloud Storage Services</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->SAP introduced the Hana Enterprise Cloud service on Tuesday to help customers quickly take advantage of in-memory performance. The service will enable customers to move ERP or CRM applications, data warehouses or all of the above onto the Hana in-memory database running on SAP infrastructure. <P> Hana has been available as a service through Amazon Web Services (AWS) since last year, but the Hana Enterprise Cloud runs in seven SAP data centers around the globe, with two in North America, three in Europe and two in the Asia Pacific region. The service will bring large pools of compute capacity to midsize and larger customers running mission-critical applications. <P> The emphasis of the new service is on big commitments. Target customers will have at least a terabyte of data and could make use of hundreds of compute cores to quickly take advantage of Hana's in-memory performance, according to Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP AG's executive board. <P> "We're breaking down the barriers that we've been led to believe exist between rapid delivery of capabilities [via the cloud] and the ability to handle complex, mission-critical workloads," Sikka told <em>InformationWeek</em>. <P> <strong>[ Want more on SAP's corporate performance? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-outperforms-oracle-with-steady-finan/240153262?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP Outperforms Oracle With Steady Financial Results</a>. ]</strong> <P> Even large manufacturing customers will be able to "run their entire infrastructure" on Hana in the cloud, Sikka said, while gaining the advantages of real-time performance, a point of contrast with rival cloud offerings. <P> "After 13 years, you still can't do analytics of any significance in Salesforce.com," Sikka said. "Even basic reporting can't be done in real time, and if it involves multidimensional analytics, forecasting, large data sets or fast-moving data, forget it." <P> SAP has an array of options for migrating data into the cloud, including Sybase and BusinessObjects data management tools. There also will be options for synchronizing data when customers opt for hybrid deployments, with some apps remaining on premises and others moving onto Hana Enterprise Cloud to take advantage of in-memory performance. <P> SAP has spent two years building out capacity for the Hana Enterprise Cloud service, both at SAP data centers and those gained through the acquisitions of Sybase, SuccessFactors and Ariba. The Hana cloud won't be as elastic as the AWS option in that it will entail monthly subscriptions, versus hour-by-hour usage on AWS. Customers will be able to run multi-application workloads, including analytics, Business Warehouse (BW), CRM and ERP, and shift subscribed capacity to the workloads most in need of available power. <P> Little detail was available on the technical nature of the Hana cloud, although Sikka noted that SAP eschews virtualization for performance reasons, another sign that the service is akin to hosting on SAP servers. But the whole point is time to value, and on that score, beta customer Florida Crystals was able to complete an ERP and BW migration within two months. <P> "As part of our aggressive global growth strategy, it was paramount that we have the ability to deploy mission critical SAP applications powered by Hana as quickly as possible via the cloud," said Don Whittington, CIO at the sugar manufacturer, in a statement. <P> Hana is gaining interest among SAP customers, according to Steve Cardell, president of the enterprise application services practice at SAP systems integrator HCL. <P> "People originally thought of Hana as a sort of BI and big data tool, but a lot of customers are now opening their minds to the idea of migrating the whole SAP Business Suite onto Hana," said Cardell in an interview with <em>InformationWeek</em>. <P> According to HCL, upwards of 90% of CIOs and senior executives express interest in Hana, with one possible play being reducing complexity through system consolidation. <P> "Some companies are waiting on consolidation to see if Hana is fit for the purposes of doing a wholesale migration," said Cardell. <P> Tuesday's announcement came ahead of what's expected to be a series of cloud-related announcements at SAP's annual Sapphire event next week in Orlando, Fla. During a conference call with financial analysts last month, co-CEO Bill McDermott said SAP would be introducing an array of private, public and multi-tenant cloud services to give customers more deployment options and faster routes to innovation.2013-05-07T09:06:00ZCray introduces entry-level supercomputer starting at $500,000 for high-end engineering, computational modeling and simulation work.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/cray-builds-a-budget-minded-supercompute/240154311?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/unix-linux/10-cool-products-at-interop/240154110"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/988/collage-image_01v2_tn.jpg" alt="Interop 2013 Las Vegas Collage: 10 Cool Products at Interop" title="Interop 2013 Las Vegas Collage: 10 Cool Products at Interop" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Cool Products at Interop</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span> </div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Well-known supercomputer vendor Cray introduced what it describes an "aggressively priced" product line on Tuesday aimed at an emerging class of customers delving into high-performance computing (HPC) perhaps for the first time. <P> Cray's top-end models used by large corporations, big government research centers and university labs require raised-floor data centers, liquid cooling, optical networking cables and run upwards of $10 million to $20 million for a complete system. The new Cray XC30-AC supercomputer uses many of the same components and software elements as those monsters, but it is air cooled, requires no optical cables and costs from $500,000 to $3 million. The target market is <em>Fortune</em> 100 to <em>Fortune</em> 1000 manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and oil and gas firms, and smaller universities, government agencies and research labs that want to exploit supercomputing techniques. <P> "We're seeing a new wave of demand because companies are gathering more data and asking more complex questions than ever before," said Barry Bolding, Cray's VP of storage & data management and corporate marketing, in an interview with <i>InformationWeek</i>. <P> Aerospace Giants like Boeing, GE, and Pratt and Whitney are no strangers to HPC, but now smaller aircraft and jet engine manufacturers, for example, are among the types of firms looking at supercomputing to model airflows and eke out that much more efficiency in their products, said Bolding. Auto, truck and air foil manufacturers are doing the same to improve the fuel efficiency of vehicles while smaller petroleum exploration and pharmaceutical firms are doing high-end imaging and modeling work. <P> <strong>[ Want to hear about IBM's $3.3 million HPC option? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/supercomputers/rutgers-gets-big-data-weapon-in-ibm-supe/232700313?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Rutgers Gets Big Data Weapon In IBM Supercomputer</a>. ]</strong> <P> These types of problems and analyses aren't addressed by relational database systems or alternative processing platforms such as Hadoop. Smaller customers are experimenting through time sharing and hosting arrangements, but firms intent on cutting their development cycles are bringing HPC systems in house. <P> Cray is counting on XC30-AC filling a niche between its own top-end products and those of long-time competitor <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/information-management/lawrence-livermore-ibm-team-on-big-data/240002824">IBM</a> at the high end, and what Bolding calls "commodity cluster" competition from the likes of Dell, HP and SGI at the low end. Like the latter crowd, Cray uses chips from AMD, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise-architecture/intel-forms-subsidiary-for-federal-super/231600593">Intel</a> and Nvidia (having ceased manufacturing of its own chips seven years ago), but it maintains performance advantages through its internal networking and connection technologies, according to Bolding. <P> "When you're connecting thousands of cores as we are, it gives you a very large performance advantage," Bolding said. "Our interconnect is 10% to 20% faster than Infiniband on point-to-point connections and up to 10 times faster on total-system latencies." <P> Beta customers for the XC30-AC include a consumer electronics company and a global financial services firm. Neither company was identified, but both were described as the types of non-traditional Cray customers that are venturing into high-performance computing. <P> The XC30-AC is available immediately and comes with a Linux-based operating system and software environment including a compiler and software tools for parallel code. <P> Advances in chip design keep improving the performance of commodity clusters, but Cray has managed to keep its specs ahead of those competitors because "scaling complex problems is a harder problem than commodity system vendors can afford to keep up with," Bolding said. <P> "Cray has a history of leveraging the supercomputing technologies featured in its high-end systems, and economically repackaging those same technologies to offer solutions to fit the needs of HPC users with smaller budgets," said IDC HPC analyst Earl Joseph in a statement.2013-05-06T11:35:00ZTivo unit combines viewership data with product sales information to show advertisers which TV shows reach the right consumers.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/tivo-research-analytics-mines-big-tv-dat/240154206?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingTwentieth-century department store magnate John Wanamaker famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." <P> With big-data analysis, it's now possible to know which half is which. Tivo Research and Analytics (TRA) correlates data on television viewing habits to third-party purchasing data to show advertisers which ads are driving more sales, whether it's consumer packaged goods, automobiles or even prescription drugs. TRA is even exploring correlations among television advertising and online advertising so it can help marketers allocate cross-channel campaign spending. <P> How does TRA do it? It's all in the data, and in TRA's case it's "naturally occurring" data, meaning it's not based on surveys, diaries or logs collected from a small sample of TV viewers. The company's Media TRAnalytics service, launched four and a half years ago, relies on data from cable company set-top boxes to compile actual -- not estimated -- data on what shows are being watched and which ads are being seen in roughly 4.4 million households. Nielsen, by contrast, uses TV viewing data from a panel of some 20,000 households to extrapolate what share of approximately 116 million households are tuning in to particular shows. <P> <strong>[ Want more on surprising insights into household matters? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-knows-when-your-home-will-sell/240149209?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Big Data Knows When Your Home Will Sell</a>. ]</strong> <P> Nielsen and TRA are in fundamentally different businesses. Nielsen's ratings tell you how many households are tuning into mainstream broadcast and cable television shows. TRA goes after "the long tail" of smaller networks and programs and it licenses Nielsen data so it can combine and offer both sources to customers who are already subscribers to Nielsen ratings data. More to the point, TRA answers the fundamentally different question: Was my advertising effective in driving increased sales? <P> "Just knowing what people are watching on television doesn't answer that question," says Mark Lieberman, TRA's CEO. "To do that, we went out and licensed purchase data on what people are buying in places like supermarkets, what cars they're buying and what prescriptions they're filling." <P> The essence of Media TRAnalytics is correlating TV viewing data with these third-party data sets, and doing so in a way that doesn't raise privacy concerns. <P> In the case of supermarket purchasing, TRA partners with loyalty card data aggregators Dunnhumby and GFK. More than 80% of supermarket purchases are tied to loyalty card records, and using double-blind matching processes, TRA can correlate TV viewing with consumer packaged goods (CPG) purchases across 40 million households. TRA knows that set-top box "123" belongs to the same household that holds loyalty card "ABC," but no personally identifiable information is held in TRA servers or tied to that insight, according to Lieberman. <P> With this combination, TRA can tell advertisers which and how many households in which zip codes are heavy purchasers of, say, breakfast cereals, and which brands they're buying. Further, it can tell them which shows these buyers watch and whether ad campaigns run on these programs are stimulating higher sales. <P> Retailers and consumer package goods companies use these insights in any number of ways. If they're simply trying to increase sales, they can run ads on shows watched by loyal customers. If they're introducing new brands or trying to gain market share, they can run campaigns on shows watched by buyers of rival brands. <P> The real win -- and the part that addresses Wanamaker's lament -- is that advertisers can track campaign results over time and quickly discover whether their ad investments are paying off. <P> "What we're doing is telling advertisers which programming is rich in households that have particular purchasing preferences," explains Brian Canning, TRA's chief technology officer. "You can identify which households are known to buy Wheaties, for example, and that are heavy purchasers of cereal in general. Then you can see the rating for every program on television against that universe of households." <P> Ratings are expressed as an index, so, for example, the show "CSI" might have an index of 120 for Wheaties purchasers -- 20% higher than the average index of 100. Without TRA insight, ad buyers typically purchase based on the gross rating points (GRP) and demographics of any given show. But it could be that when considering two shows with identical GRPs and similar demographics, one show over-indexes for buyers of particular products whereas the other show under-indexes for those buyers.<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/20-top-masters-degrees-for-big-data-analytics-professionals/240145673"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/934/IntroImage_tn.jpg" alt=" Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs" title=" Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle"> Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Beyond consumer package goods, TRA correlates viewing habits and ad results with automotive data from Experian, so it knows what make, model and year vehicles were purchased over the last 18 years across 100 million households. Correlations to data on some 1.5 billion prescriptions filled each year can also be made, but this data stays on premises at data provider IMS, which does the correlation work using one-way hashing of TRA viewing data (but not household information) to ensure HIPAA-compliant data practices, according to Canning. <P> TRA gathers its data on TV viewing every day. TRA (formerly known as The Right Audience) was acquired by Tivo last summer, so it now has data from more than 1 million Tivo boxes as well as from more than 3 million conventional set-top cable boxes. With the Tivo data, TRA has data on not only every click on the remote but also time-shifting, ad-skipping, rewind and playback behavior. <P> TRA keeps 15 months' worth of daily viewing data so it can track campaign results over time, and it's by far the largest chunk of the 15 terabytes the company manages. The supermarket data is refreshed once per week while the auto ownership data is revised quarterly, so these sources account for less than 5% of TRA data. <P> <strong>[ Want more on Kognitio's database? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/kognitio-tries-fast-faster-fastest-data/231001235?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Kognitio Tries Fast, Faster, Fastest Data Warehouse Strategy</a>. ]</strong> <P> Media TRAnalytics is far from a petabyte-league big data deployment, but it quickly grew beyond the capabilities of the MySQL database the company started with four and a half years ago. The TRAnalytics service is exposed through an online portal, and the idea is to let media buyers and planners explore as many variables as possible to analyze programming and purchasing habits. But in those early days, complex, multi-dimensional reports were taking as long as 20 minutes. That was unacceptable, and with more data, more variables and more analyses on the way, the company knew it needed a more robust platform. <P> After reviewing alternatives, TRA switched from MySQL to the Kognitio database, and "all the problems went away," said Canning. Like Netezza, Greenplum and many of the other database options available four years ago, Kognitio offered the power of distributed, massively parallel processing on commodity X86 hardware, but it stood out (as it still does today) for its ability to exploit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/kognitio-tries-fast-faster-fastest-data/231001235">high levels of memory</a>. <P> "Use of memory is huge because it's the only way to get reasonable, Internet-query speed response times," says Canning. "We can pin up to 5 terabytes of data into memory, and we need that to generate ratings for all of the shows that people might be watching at any given time." <P> Having as much as a third of all available data available in memory is unusual for a data warehousing deployment (although some vendors, like SAP, are now touting all-in-memory warehouses). The in-memory access speeds have become increasingly important as TRA now has roughly 10 times more data than it did four years ago. The complexity of reports has also grown, but even the most complex, multi-dimensional reports (with as many as 20,000 lines of data when extracted to Excel) take about one minute. The system has about 400 users from ad agencies, advertisers and TV networks. Last year some 12,000 reports were done on more than 50,000 ad campaigns. <P> TRA is getting into cross-media measurement through cookie-based information Experian has on the Web browsing habits of 70 million households. That will expand the scale of analysis and the number of correlations available yet again. <P> "The Internet has obviously become an increasingly important element to advertisers, but they want to know where they'll get the best bang for the buck," Lieberman said. "Should they spend 70% TV and 30% Internet or 40% TV and 60% Internet? We can go deep on TV and Internet ad impacts on purchasing habits to help them determine the right mix." Internet data, too, is privacy protected through double-blind correlation approaches, Lieberman said. <P> The data that TRA analyzes is all highly structured, so it doesn't fit the classic notion of big data variety -- or the need for Hadoop or a NoSQL database as a platform for variable data. But it's no less a big data deal for TRA customers. <P> With all the information that's available -- on what's being watched on TV, which ads are actually seen, what cars are owned, what drugs are being prescribed, what websites are visited and what's being purchased the day after seeing particular ads on TV or on the Internet -- it seems like there's very little that can't be known through the power of query, correlation and analysis.2013-05-02T09:15:00ZSalesforce.com uses social and mobile connections to bring sales, service and marketing processes to business partners and consumers.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforce-communities-portal-killers/240154044?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/8-ways-an-smb-makes-most-of-salesforceco/240148303"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/947/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com" title="8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Salesforce.com on Thursday announced Salesforce Communities, a capability aimed at helping organizations engage with businesses and consumers through branded, social- and mobile-enabled online experiences. <P> The core of the Communities offering is the Salesforce platform -- and all the sales, service and marketing content and activities organizations run on it -- and Salesforce Chatter, the microblogging feed that enables people, processes and even products to communicate. But Communities are greater than the sum of their parts, such that Salesforce.com is proclaiming "the end of legacy portal software." <P> From Salesforce.com's perspective, there's no longer a need for separate, transactional partner and customer portals, each creating separate copies of customer and partner records and separate sales and service cases to manage. Ditto separate collaborative systems built to foster conversation, "but disconnected from the business," according to Salesforce. <P> With Communities, the theory is that you can build transactional, collaborative and mobile-device-ready experiences for business partners and consumers all on the same information available in (and feeding new transactions and conversations back into) the Salesforce.com Sales, Service and Marketing Clouds. <P> <strong>[ Want more on the Salesforce.com's new strategy? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecoms-new-message-its-the-custo/240149492?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Salesforce.com's New Message: It's The Customer, Stupid</a>. ]</strong> <P> "The next generation of enterprise apps are social with business data embedded at the core and accessible from any device," said Alex Dayon, Salesforce.com's president of applications and platform in a statement. <P> Salesforce.com isn't the only company looking beyond the confines of current product capabilities. SAP, Oracle, Infor and Microsoft are all working on the blend of CRM, social, collaboration and mobile. Salesforce.com was out ahead of this bunch when it announced Communities last August, but they're still not quite market ready. The company now says Communities will be delivered in the Summer '13 release (expected in June) and will cost $500 per community, per month (another example of why customers are switching to all-you-can-eat enterprise licensing). <P> Within Communities for Sales, companies will connect with distributors, resellers and suppliers, exposing sales channel analytics, sharing leads and registrations, and connecting experts inside the company with partners looking to improve product understanding and sales. Within Communities for Service, customers can expose knowledge bases, support options, and internal and community expertise. <P> Communities for Marketing support collaboration with agencies and creative teams, speeding approvals, ensuring version control and enforcing adherence to branding guidelines. Marketers could also mine insights from sales and service communities to get a better handle on what's selling, what customers are complaining about and what customers are asking for that might lead to the development of a breakthrough product. <P> Many of the bits and pieces of Communities -- Chatter, Chatter Answers, the Salesforce platform, etc. -- have been around for a while, but Salesforce is extending certain capabilities to enhance the community experience. Branding capabilities and access controls, for example, need to be robust to ensure that only the right information is exposed to the right constituent. What you would expose in a partner community, for example, would be very different than what you would expose to a customer community. And within each of those communities, you might need to be very selective about what you expose to and about community members as partner resellers, for example, are often competitors. <P> Participants in the Salesforce Communities beta program have included The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), General Electric, French liquor manufacturer Pernod Ricard and the World Economic Forum. The FDA is piloting multiple Salesforce applications with the goal of providing better customer service, developing expert networks, harnessing the power of social media and "creating a better FDA-Industry engagement model," according to Anjali Kataria, Sr. Technology Advisor at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. <P> The Communities functionality is being tested as a way to streamline drug and device approval processes. "We've made significant progress and see a number of benefits," Kataria told <i>InformationWeek</i> in an email interview. "At the same time we are proceeding with appropriate caution as we explore and test performance, security and other aspects of Salesforce as well as other cloud solutions." <P> Communities look particularly promising for greenfield deployments, but it's unlikely companies with legacy portals, collaborative platforms and knowledge bases will quickly rip and replace. To that extent, it may only be the beginning of the end of the portal era, as old silos of information hang on.2013-05-01T14:07:00ZMapR brings new power to HBase, taps LucidWorks to integrate Apache Lucene/Solr search into M7 Hadoop distribution.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-brings-search-to-hadoop/240153973?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingLast fall MapR set out to improve on HBase, Hadoop's built-in NoSQL database. On Wednesday it delivered on that promise and it announced a next move: integrating search capabilities with its M7 Hadoop distribution with partner LucidWorks. <P> With the latest <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608">MapR M7 release</a>, available immediately, the company says it has delivered higher performance and easier administration for both Hadoop and HBase by forging its own path on certain aspects of Hadoop infrastructure and administration. Specifically, M7 does away with region servers, table splits and merges, and data compaction steps tied to standard Apache software. Instead it implements an architecture exclusive to MapR for snapshotting, high availability and system recovery. <P> "We've eliminated the tradeoffs that organizations face in terms of getting scale, consistency, reliability and continuous low-latency performance in one solution, but M7 works across all these dimensions," MapR VP of marketing Jack Norris told <i>InformationWeek</i>. <P> MapR points to advantages including instant recovery from hardware or software errors, the ability to do online schema modifications for HBase applications, and performance specs exceeding 1 million operations per second on a 10-node Hadoop cluster. <P> <strong>[ Want more on improvements to Hadoop's NoSQL database? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mapr-promises-a-better-hbase/240009608?itc=edit_in_body_cross">MapR Promises A Better HBase</a>. ]</strong> <P> To support search, MapR introduced the beta offering of LucidWorks Search software integrated with the M7 platform. The search technologies will be optional, and plans call for general release next quarter. LucidWorks offers a supported software distribution, consulting and training for open source Apache Lucene/Solr search, and it adds commercial development platforms designed to simplify and accelerate the building of search applications. <P> With search integrated directly with Hadoop, customers will have an easier time building out recommendation engines for retail scenarios, fraud-detection for financial transactions and predictive applications for any number of industries, according to Norris. <P> "You could do some of these applications in a MapReduce framework, but if you need online performance, MapReduce latency is a problem and having a search platform is extremely useful," Norris explained. MapR can stream data from Hadoop clusters into the search engine from NFS, the file system used in M7 in place of HDFS. <P> LucidWorks offers an enterprise-hardened and secured version of Apache Lucene/Solr. The software provides a REST-based API, ODBC connectivity, provisions for LDAP and NIS security, and connections to HDFS and NFS among other features. <P> MapR will provide first-level support for the new search option, but LucidWorks will be available for deeper problem solving when tougher problems emerge, according to Norris. The cost of the LucidWorks Search option was not disclosed. <P> <i>E2 is the only event of its kind, bringing together business and technology leaders across IT, marketing, and other lines of business looking for new ways to evolve their enterprise applications strategy and transform their organizations to achieve business value. Join us June 17-19 for three days of 40+ conference sessions and workshops across eight tracks and discover the latest insights in enterprise social software, big data and analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS and APIs, UI/UX and more. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register for E2 Conference Boston today</a> and save $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference, or get a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass! </i>2013-05-01T09:06:00ZSAS broadens High-Performance Analytics portfolio, unites formerly siloed marketing applications and adds cloud deployment flexibility.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-makes-triple-play/240153951?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/5-big-wishes-for-big-data-deployments/240153214"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/981/Big_Hadoop_01_tn.jpg" alt="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" title="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> SAS unleashed three major announcements at its Global Forum in San Francisco this week, with a wave of new SAS High-Performance Analytics capabilities, a unified SAS Customer Experience marketing suite and added levels of support for public and private cloud deployment of SAS software. <P> SAS High-Performance Analytics software is designed to take advantage of highly distributed, massively parallel processing (MPP) on memory-intensive X86 servers. It has been a big strategic push for SAS over the last two years as customers demand ever-faster performance. <P> "The windows of opportunity to compute analytics are getting shorter and shorter," SAS CEO <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-ceo-jim-goodnight-not-the-retiring-t/231903100">Jim Goodnight</a> recently told <i>InformationWeek</i> in a preview of the Global Forum announcements. "People now want calculations almost in real time with almost everything that we do." <P> These low-latency demands cut across financial services, retailing, life sciences, oil and gas exploration, manufacturing and other industries. And they're often accompanied by ever-growing volumes of data from new risk, customer behavior, genomic, remote sensor and supply chain measures. <P> <strong>[ Want more on recent SAS data-visualization moves? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-upgrades-visual-analytics-app/240150551?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAS Upgrades Visual Analytics App</a>. ]</strong> <P> SAS previously offered High-Performance versions of industry specific applications such as financial risk analysis and marketing optimization. But with the SAS High-Performance Analytics upgrades announced this week and set for release in June, SAS will bring MPP power to six core products in its portfolio: Statistics, Data Mining, Text Mining, Optimization, Econometrics and Forecasting. <P> These general-purpose capabilities are applicable to most any industry and were heretofore sold together with standard SAS software. But as part of SAS High-Performance Analytics, the modules can be purchased individually to address the most demanding applications. In this way, customers can step up to high-scale or processing-intensive analysis in an affordable fashion, according to SAS CTO Keith Collins. <P> "It lowers the entry point and lets people focus on the techniques where there are bottlenecks at scale," Collins told <i>InformationWeek</i>. "That might mean Modeling for customer rewards analysis, Optimization for inventory optimization or Forecasting for retail, as an example." <P> SAS makes the case that it can address big data variety as well as sheer volume because SAS High-Performance Analytics can now run on Hadoop clusters. Customers need only use SAS' Anyfile Reader utility to map data on Hadoop cluster to SAS. <P> "We're able to map to and manage the metadata around any file in Hadoop, whether it's JSON, XML, comma-delimited or binary," Collins explained. "If you dump log files into Hadoop, we can also map to those [semi-structured] formats and use them with traditional analytics."The latest release also brings Oracle Database into the fold as a partner platform on High-Performance Analytics, with many in-database processing options along the lines of those previously supported only by <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/sas-teams-with-emc-and-teradata-and-n/229401016">EMC Greenplum and Teradata</a>. <P> SAS speed-of-analysis options now range from in-database to in-memory to in-stream, with the last option supported by SAS DataFlux Event Stream Processing technology. "Some things you'll want to do inside the database, like scoring," Collins explained. "You'll want to handle some processing-intensive analytic computing in memory, and the real-time work you'll want to handle with streaming technology." <P> In an example of a streaming application, Collins said a large bank has created a consolidated view of myriad risk-analysis computations. Stream-processing technology is used to connect, run and continuously monitor the risk measures. <P> In the area of marketing, SAS has been successful with purpose-built applications including SAS Marketing Automation, SAS Marketing Optimization, SAS Real-Time Decision Manager and SAS Digital Marketing. But marketers have been asking SAS for a more cohesive combination of these capabilities as they seek to develop and optimize cross-channel marketing campaigns. <P> With this week's release of a redesigned SAS Customer Intelligence product, the vendor is exposing all four applications within a single, integrated product. And it wasn't a simple matter of putting a portal-like veneer with single-sign-on capabilities in front of four otherwise-unchanged products. <P> "We spent a tremendous amount of time and energy working with customers to understand their processes, so it's a complete rethink about how work flows," Collins said. <P> Customers can chose any or all of the four marketing modules that are relevant to their needs, and the functionality shows up within process-oriented workflows, according to Collins. Rather than moving from application to application, users move more naturally through sequential and related tasks. <P> Choice is the theme behind the SAS cloud announcements this week, and the options include "your cloud, my cloud or their cloud," Collins said, meaning customer private clouds on virtualization technology, SAS managed services or third-party public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. <P> These choices are facilitated by a SAS 9.4 foundation software release set for June that incorporates cloud-friendly architectural enhancements including automation features developed to facilitate virtualized capacity deployment. The technology was gained through the November acquisition of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-acquires-rpath-assets-to-boost-cloud/240143015">cloud infrastructure company RPath</a>. <P> Big data, technology-driven marketing and cloud deployment are, of course, trendy topics for lots of tech vendors. But SAS, as always, has focused on advanced analytics and what these enablers can do to deliver its tag line "power to know" that much more quickly, flexibly and in-line with day-to-day business processes.2013-04-30T09:15:00ZCloudera's SQL-on-Hadoop tool hits general release, but will it satisfy demands for faster, easier exploration of big data?http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-impala-brings-sql-querying-to-h/240153861?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/5-big-wishes-for-big-data-deployments/240153214"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/981/Big_Hadoop_01_tn.jpg" alt="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" title="5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Cloudera on Tuesday announced the general release of its Impala query engine for Hadoop after six months of beta testing by more than 40 customers. <P> It's the first so-called SQL-on-Hadoop product to reach general release. But with a bevy of such systems on the way -- including options from <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">IBM (Big SQL)</a>, Hortonworks (Stinger), MapR (Drill), <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/emcs-pivotal-plan-brilliant-or-crazy/240153611">Pivotal (HAWQ)</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/teradata-joins-sqlonhadoop-bandwagon/240152917">Teradata (SQL-H)</a> -- the question is whether Impala will stand out as the best fix for Hadoop's shortcomings. <P> Companies are embracing Hadoop for its high-scale storage capacity, relative low cost (compared to relational databases at scale) and its ability to quickly ingest new and variable data types without the need to transform it all to a rigid, predefined schema. <P> Hadoop's biggest shortcoming is that most analysis is done through slow, batch-oriented and hard-to-code MapReduce processing. Apache Hive data warehousing infrastructure offers limited SQL querying capabilities, but it too relies on MapReduce behind the scenes, so it's much slower than conventional database querying. <P> <strong>[ Want more on SQL querying of big data? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Teradata Joins SQL-On-Hadoop Bandwagon</a>. ]</strong> <P> Impala supports direct querying of data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and HBase (NoSQL database) indexes, and Cloudera claims it's three to 30 times faster than Hive. Beta customers report results that are falling into that range. Six3 Systems, for example, a systems integrator serving federal agencies, has seen querying at least 14 times faster than Hive, according to analytics developer Wayne Wheeles. <P> "Just dealing with one day's worth of data on one system -- about 20 million records -- running one of my analytics using Hive took 82 seconds whereas running it on Impala took less than six seconds," Wheeles told <em>InformationWeek</em>. <P> The core Impala query engine ships under Apache license. It is "nearly" SQL standard compliant via Hive SQL. That means it falls short of full ANSI SQL support. But Impala does include ODBC and JDBC drivers and is supported by business intelligence systems from Alteryx, Karmasphere, Microstrategy, Pentaho, Qliktech and Tableau Software. An optional Cloudera Enterprise Real-Time Query (RTQ) subscription adds an administrative module for deploying, managing and monitoring Impala and its query performance. <P> Despite the wave of SQL-on-Hadoop project announcements in recent months, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson told <em>InformationWeek</em> that Impala won't be surpassed by rivals such as HAWQ from EMC/VMware spinoff Pivotal or Hortonwork's Stinger project. <P> "The announcement out of Pivotal is just a port of a decade-old technology [meaning Greenplum database] that has its own, independent, non-integrated schema layer that can't share information with the rest of the [Hadoop] platform," Olson said. As for Stinger, Olson pointed out that that project relies on Hive and MapReduce, "and we don't believe that it's going to be possible to drive down latencies and improve performance sufficiently via that platform." <P> Impala is clearly faster than Hive, but Cloudera said from the beginning that it's not a replacement for conventional data warehouses when workloads involve demanding service-level agreements or multi-dimensional (cube) analyses. Nevertheless, Olson insists that Impala will enable many organizations to shift a significant share of data and query workloads over to Hadoop, where Cloudera asserts that managing data at high scale costs anywhere from 10% to 1% of the cost of doing so in a conventional data warehouse. <P> Impala lacks flexible data-exploration capabilities, so companies will have to put forethought into which queries and data they put on Hadoop and which they keep on conventional warehouses. That's one drawback, along with incomplete SQL support, that Cloudera competitor MapR says it's hoping to avoid with Apache Drill, the project it has on track for beta release in the third quarter. <P> Full SQL support is needed "so you don't have SQL-related application errors that get traced back to narrow differences between SQL and SQL-like functionality," Jack Norris, VP of marketing at MapR, told <em>InformationWeek</em>. "We also want to support schema on discovery, so rather than dictating [querying] in advance, we want to be flexible and discover on the fly." <P> Exploratory analytics is a work in progress with Impala, Olson admitted. "It is a bit of a pain to have to think about [those choices] in advance, but it's a pain that already exists because one of the biggest costs of a conventional data warehouse is up-front schema definition," Olson said. "You'd rather have just one big sea of data and get all the capabilities of every platform everywhere, but we're not there yet." <P> The key advantage that Cloudera has with Impala, for now, is that it's already available, whereas it might be months before competitors move out of beta. More important, Cloudera has a larger base of support customers and software users than any other Hadoop distribution, and that's where the rubber meets the road in adoption.2013-04-29T13:26:00ZIBM MessageSight appliance connects sensors, mobile devices for machine-to-machine data capture and real-time analysis.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/ibm-crunches-internet-of-things-data/240153834?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <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><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">IBM Smarter Cities Challenge: 10 Towns Raise Tech IQs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> The biggest generators of big data won't be people chatting on social networks. No, the real challenge will be the millions of mobile and remote sensors out there monitoring everything from automobiles and traffic lights to oil refineries and manufacturing plants to in-home thermostats and appliances. <P> To help companies capture and analyze data from these machine-to-machine connections, IBM on Monday launched the IBM MessageSight appliance at the company's big annual <a href="http://www-01.ibm.com/software/websphere/events/impact/">Impact event</a> in Las Vegas. News of the ready-to-run, real-time data-capture and analysis machine was accompanied by the introduction of mobile application development, process management, API connectivity and Web services capabilities also designed to better connect the so-called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/pentaho-thinkbig-tackle-internet-of-thin/240152277">Internet of Things</a>. <P> The underpinning of IBM MessageSight is the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, an open standard for machine-to-machine connectivity proposed by the <a href="https://www.oasis-open.org/">OASIS technical standards body</a>. MQTT is a lightweight protocol built for low-power sensors and mobile devices. All sorts of devices and vehicles are already communicating, of course, but the lack of standards is getting to be a problem, according to Mike Riegel, IBM's VP of MobileFirst and WebSphere Marketing. <P> <strong>[ Want more on Internet of Things analysis? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/amazons-vogels-big-data-belongs-in-the-cloud/240153254?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Amazon's Vogels: Big Data Belongs In The Cloud</a>. ]</strong> <P> "Everybody has a different method, whether they're trying to support smarter buildings, smarter traffic or smarter health care," Reigel told <em>InformationWeek</em> in a phone interview. "In the same way that HTTP is the format for how Web pages are coded, MQTT is a message format for how low-power messages are sent and received across mobile networks and the Internet." <P> MQTT was invented by an IBMer decades ago as a way to handle home networking and automation, but Riegel said the OASIS consortium's involvement and endorsement will ensure a broader set of standards spanning multiple industries. The gain for adopters is assurance of compatibility across equipment providers and constituents within an industry ecosystem. Ford, for example, was set to demonstrate its latest Ford Fusion at the Impact event. The vehicle's multiple onboard processors report a wealth of information every second, and that information might be used by the manufacturer, component suppliers, dealers and vehicle owners. <P> "The car can report its speed, whether the windshield wipers are on, engine performance, gas consumption, brake conditions and even the old-favorite check-engine light," Riegel said, noting that Ford is testing IBM MessageSight as the foundation for connected car services. "If you have a single car that has all these sensor data points and can report every second, multiply that through the course of a day across one million vehicles and you're talking about an enormous amount of data." <P> The <a href="https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership.php?wg_abbrev=mqtt">OASIS MQTT technical committee</a> is loaded with IBMers, but it also includes representatives from Cisco, RedHat, Software AG and Tibco, among others, so it looks like it will set machine-to-machine connection standards across many industries. IBM MessageSight is a "huge breakthrough" in scaling up MQTT communications, said Riegel, in that a single 1U-form-factor appliance can handle up to 1 million sensors and 13 million concurrent messages. Beyond sheer scale, the other advantage of the appliance it that it supports real-time analysis of event streams. <P> "Today companies tend to dump this information into a big data store and analyze it in batch mode," Riegel said. "Once they implement MessageSight, they'll be able to pass messages to the appropriate recipients in real time so they can take action." <P> Potential customers include vehicle manufacturers and fleet owners, operators of sprawling supply chains or manufacturing networks, utilities or cities looking to manage distribution networks or traffic, or health care organizations looking to better manage medical equipment or even patients. St. Jude Medical, for example, is exploring the possibility of monitoring connected pacemakers in real time, according to IBM. <P> In other news from the Impact event, IBM introduced Worklight 6.0, the latest version of its mobile application development platform. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/development/mobility/ibm-acquires-mobile-specialist-worklight/232500829">Worklight</a> lets developers build core mobile apps once and then quickly spin off native iOS, Android, Windows and HTML5 versions of that app as needed. The 6.0 release has been integrated with IBM's TeaLeaf analytics platform, so mobile apps can be quickly instrumented for analytics. The new release also includes a new toolkit for geolocation services and new server-side services supporting Apple Passbook. <P> In an update to IBM's <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/will-ibm-go-all-in-on-cloud-computing/231000188">Business Process Management</a> platform, the core process server is now available on IBM's (public or private) SmartCloud as Software as a Service, so organizations can spin up and scale out process services on demand for rapidly scaling and quickly changing mobile and machine-to-machine process deployments. <P> Cloud and mobile connectivity are fast becoming the norm, so IBM is introducing an API Management solution, integrated with the latest release of the IBM WebSphere app server, to make it easier to build APIs and connect to enterprise assets via REST and Web services interfaces. <P> In the big picture, all of these updates fall under the umbrella of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/5-innovations-ibm-says-will-change-your/232300803">IBM's Smarter Planet</a> initiative, which was launched nearly five years ago as the company envisioned a world becoming more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. With five years of progress and technology giants including <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/what-ges-15-trillion-industrial-internet/240142639">General Electric</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/clouds-next-era-near-cisco-says/240152191">Cisco</a> joining the chorus, the prospect of a smarter planet seems like a reality at hand rather than a distant vision of the future.2013-04-25T12:32:00ZActian adds a high-scale distributed database to a portfolio that already includes Vectorwise, Ingres, Pervasive and Versant.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/actian-acquires-paraccel-fuel-behind-ama/240153593?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingActian announced Thursday that it has acquired ParAccel, the company that offers the massively parallel processing (MPP) database of the same name. The deal fills a gap in a portfolio that already includes the Vectorwise high-speed analytical database, which is limited to single-server SMP deployments. <P> Where the sweet spot for Vectorwise is up to 50 terabytes, ParAccel's MPP architecture lets it scale out in distributed fashion on tens, hundreds or even thousands of commodity servers. "Customers have a broad range of big data requirements, and if you're starting at 100 terabytes or 200 terabytes and saw that you were going to get there, it was difficult for us to meet that need," Actian CEO Steve Shine told <i>InformationWeek</i>. <P> The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Shine said Actian has purchased 100% of the company, buying the combined interests of investors including Amazon, MDV, Bay Partners, Walden International, Tao Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures that had pumped $64 million into ParAccel since its founding in 2007. Amazon led the most recent, $20 million round in 2012, and that deal lead to the subsequent launch of the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/amazon-launches-redshift-data-warehousin/240148742">Amazon Redshift service</a>, which is based on the ParAccel database. <P> <strong>[ Want to learn more on ParAccel's future? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-redshift-leaves-on-premises-openi/240143912?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Amazon Redshift Leaves On-Premises Opening, Says ParAccel</a>. ]</strong> <P> Amazon will continue to use the ParAccel database, according to Shine, but that does not mean Actian won't find its own ways to offer ParAccel <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-redshift-leaves-on-premises-openi/240143912">database services in the cloud</a>. <P> "I believe that Amazon will be very successful with Redshift, but there are some customers that will look for other flavors of cloud-based services," Shine explained. "The most obvious example is large enterprises, which might have very specialized service-level agreements that are a better fit with our business model than the Amazon model, which has to fit a much broader scope of needs." <P> Actian recently bolstered its cloud capabilities with the $162 million February purchase of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/actian-builds-mini-big-data-empire/240147619">Pervasive Software</a>, which had been pushing its data-integration software into the cloud-computing and big data markets through its Data Cloud and DataRush platforms. <P> "People are starting to wake up to the fact that machine-based and sensor-based data is going to be the real wave of big data," Shine said. "That data has to get connected somehow, and that's going to happen in the cloud, which Pervasive has its elastic Data Cloud for data integration." <P> Where today most deployments are on-premises for all of Actian's databases, which also include the Ingres transactional database, Shine said the future will see massive scale in the cloud, and that will necessitate ParAccel. <P> The competition for Actian and ParAccel includes Oracle with Exadata, IBM with PureData systems based on the Netezza Database, Pivotal with the Greenplum database (formerly offered by parent company EMC), and HP Vertica -- all companies with a hardware angle on database deployments. Shine said Actian and its customers prefer a software-only approach that's not tied to "proprietary" hardware. <P> All of these databases run on X86 servers, though there are many nuances in networking, storage schemes and processing approaches used with the same or similar hardware components. <P> <i>E2 is the only event of its kind, bringing together business and technology leaders across IT, marketing, and other lines of business looking for new ways to evolve their enterprise applications strategy and transform their organizations to achieve business value. Join us June 17-19 for three days of 40+ conference sessions and workshops across eight tracks and discover the latest insights in enterprise social software, big data and analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS and APIs, UI/UX and more. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register for E2 Conference Boston today</a>a and save $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference, or get a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass! </i>2013-04-25T09:35:00ZPivotal's ambitious plan promises next-generation cloud computing, big data, application-development and analytics capabilities. Can it succeed?http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/emcs-pivotal-plan-brilliant-or-crazy/240153611?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingPivotal, the company spun out of EMC and VMware on April 1, formally announced its launch on Wednesday, unveiling a truly grand plan. In fact, if you consider all the components and ambitions, you might conclude the plan is either brilliant or crazy. <P> The need for Pivotal's promised "next-generation enterprise computing platform" starts with the premise that there has been a fundamental shift in IT, with Internet consumer giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon pioneering large-scale data-management approaches and rapid application-development capabilities supported by unprecedented levels of automation. <P> These approaches have yet to effectively reach the vast majority of companies and government agencies still mostly dependent on client-server applications built on relational databases and even mainframes, said Paul Maritz, Pivotal's CEO. What's needed, he said, is a next-era platform that can integrate with those legacy technologies. <P> <strong>[ Want more on Pivotal's technology and business plans? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/development/database/emc-vmware-prep-big-data-analytics-spino/240151766?itc=edit_in_body_cross">EMC, VMware Prep Big Data Analytics Spinoff</a>. ]</strong> <P> "We have to bring together the ability to ingest large amounts of data, develop deep understanding and then do something, in real time, based on that insight," Maritz said, kicking off the launch event in San Francisco. "These kinds of applications are emerging across a wide variety of industries, but there's no easy, cost-effective way to do it on existing infrastructure and relational databases, so that's a strong hint that there's a new platform waiting to be born." <P> Plans for Pivotal were first announced in December, and last month Maritz detailed a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/development/database/emc-vmware-prep-big-data-analytics-spino/240151766">business plan</a> that foresees $1 billion in revenue by 2017. More details emerged on Wednesday along with the surprise announcement that General Electric is taking a $105 million stake in the company. <P> GE plans to take advantage of Pivotal's platform to power its efforts to build an industrial Internet, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said in a prerecorded video. The manufacturer will use Pivotal's platform to capture and analyze data from smart devices such as turbines, aircraft engines, locomotives and medical equipment, he said. <P> "It's about smart machines, big data and analytics, and mobile workforces, and those coming together for airlines, utilities, oil and gas companies, and healthcare providers to provide great applications like no unplanned downtime, asset optimization and enterprise optimization," Immelt said. <P> The three key components of the Pivotal platform, which will see its first release in the fourth quarter, are an abstraction layer for cloud computing, big data infrastructure with associated real-time analytics capabilities, and an agile application development environment. The company has a head start in each of these areas, said executives, thanks to software, communities and people contributed by both EMC and VMware. The company is launching with 1,250 employees moving over from EMC and VMware. <P> Amazon, Microsoft and others have built out cloud services for corporations and government agencies, but Pivotal said a key need yet to be addressed is providing a layer of abstraction affording cloud users a degree of independence from any one provider. The idea is to automate the provisioning of public and private, with the public options including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and others. <P> "Enterprises aren't all going to want to build [or work on] consumer, Internet-scale clouds, so we're going to have to offer them choice as to which cloud they deploy their applications on," Maritz said. "We need to offer enterprises a way to automate and scale with portability across clouds, which are the modern equivalent of hardware." <P> Pivotal said the "cloud fabric" that will provide this capability will be based on Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software and expertise from VMware. <P> Pivotal's big data and analytics capabilities blend Hadoop with EMC's Greenplum database, VMware's <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/development/java/vmwares-vision-for-next-generation-appli/240000434">GemFire</a> in-memory caching technology and the HAWQ (Hadoop With Query) SQL querying capabilities recently announced as part of a coming <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/emc-brings-data-analysis-breakthrough-to/240149339">Pivotal HD Hadoop release</a>. <P> Pivotal executives have said that they're "all in on Hadoop," but with HAWQ and GemFire, they're addressing the two biggest weaknesses of the platform, which are its currently slow and limited SQL query capabilities (as supported by Hive) and the general lack of performance. <P> "We announced the massively parallel processing query service in Pivotal HD through HAWQ, but you can expect advances from Pivotal in real-time database processing," said Scott Yara, Pivotal's senior VP, products and platform. <P> The third leg of Pivotal's strategy will be built on the application development expertise of Pivotal Labs, contributed by EMC, and VMware's SpringSource unit. Spring provides a suite of software products for building, running and managing Java Web applications, and it also provides training on the open source Spring Framework for Java application development. Yara noted that three to four million developers rely on Spring for application development. <P> "You have to be able to easily move from development to test to production without a process-heavy approach ... and you have to provide an auto-deploy and scaling mechanism as part of the application fabric," Yara said.With independence, Pivotal will be free to work with IaaS providers, such as Amazon and Microsoft, that might not have partnered with EMC or VMware, Maritz said. Independence helped VMware, where Maritz was the longtime CEO, move out from under EMC's wing, growing from a $635 million acquisition in 2004 into a separate company now valued at $32 billion. <P> Parent firms EMC and VMware are clearly hoping for a repeat growth story, but in going after so many aspects of enterprise computing, Pivotal is likely to make plenty of enemies. Fostering cloud independence, for example, isn't likely to endear Amazon or other cloud providers. And in the Hadoop arena, Pivotal's go-in-alone plans for HAWQ SQL querying and real-time performance with GemFire have competitors questioning Pivotal's use of Hadoop. <P> "What appears to be missing from [Pivotal's] strategy is real participation in the Apache Hadoop community, and more specifically, development in the open source projects like [the Hadoop Distributed File System] that are the foundation of their solution," said Cloudera CEO Mike Olson in an statement emailed to <i>InformationWeek</i>. <P> EMC has not made much headway as a Hadoop distributor through Greenplum, and, meanwhile, Cloudera and others are also working on fixes for Hadoop's flaws. Cloudera, for one, developed Impala for SQL querying on Hadoop, a project that is currently in beta. <P> Pivotal faces the complexity of coordinating multiple EMC- and VMware-derived products that weren't developed or designed to work together. The firm must also satisfy the needs of the divergent constituencies responsible for providing compute capacity, data-management and analytics, and application-development capabilities. Will inroads in any one of these areas naturally translate into opportunities in another? Or will professionals in each camp stick with favored, best-of-breed services and providers? <P> "[Pivotal's] success will hinge on their ability to compete flawlessly across multiple fronts against very large and established vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle," said Shaun Connolly, VP of corporate strategy at Hadoop software distributor Hortonworks, in a statement. "Rationalizing and enhancing technologies across application runtimes, analytic tools, data warehouse technologies, development frameworks and more will certainly be a complicated endeavor." <P> In a <a href="http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2448415">Gartner research note</a> published Wednesday, the analyst firm lauded Pivotal's vision but also pointed to gaps in its portfolio including a lack of data-, application- and cloud-integration technologies and mobile and social capabilities. <P> "Considerable functionality will have to be developed, acquired and integrated into the platform before it can claim victory," Gartner wrote. <P> Will Pivotal's reach prove to be beyond its grasp? That's a question only time can answer, but there's no doubt Pivotal's vision will help spark more reinvention of corporate computing approaches.2013-04-23T09:35:00ZInfor cranks out new user interfaces and social and cloud options for its enterprise apps to take on SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/infor-bets-500-million-on-enterprise-app/240153410?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingOne by one, at Infor's annual <a href="http://www.inforum2013.com/about/">Informum conference</a> in Orlando, Fla., CEO Charles Phillips on Monday flashed screen shots and offered quick critiques of the look and feel of competing enterprise applications. <P> SAP? "This order form was probably designed in the 1980s and it's been there ever since -- not very pleasing to use," said Philips. Oracle PeopleSoft? "Very crowded screen; looks like a 1995 website." Microsoft Dynamics? "Pretty much everything in Microsoft looks like an Excel spreadsheet." JD Edwards World? "I'm not even sure what that is -- looks like DOS." Workday? "A more recent company, but they designed their UI seven years ago; it's hard to read with small text and not a good layout." <P> "The bottom line," said Phillips, "is that enterprise software sucks." <P> The punchline drew a big laugh from Inforum's 6,000-plus attendees, and it led to a tour of a series of slick new user interfaces announced here along with the company's latest Infor 10x wave of applications, which span financials, human capital management, enterprise asset management, supply chain management, product lifecycle management, CRM and core ERP systems including Hansen, LN, M3, SyteLine, SX.e and S3. <P> <strong>[ Want more on Infor's two largest competitors? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-outperforms-oracle-with-steady-finan/240153262?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP Outperforms Oracle With Steady Financial Results</a>. ]</strong> <P> Some of Infor's ERP systems are as old or older than the apps Phillips critiqued, but he was getting to those slick new "SoHo" interfaces, just one example of some $500 million in investments he said the company is putting into revitalizing the portfolio. Other investments announced here included additional industry-specific functionality, a new Ming.le social interface and new cloud-deployment options supported by IBM and Amazon Web Services. <P> Infor didn't make any fresh claims about market share gains, but Phillips said the company is intent on ending the SAP-Oracle "duopoly." <P> Infor's consumery new interfaces are being turned out by an internal design team, dubbed "Hook & Loop," set up at Infor's new headquarters in New York and headed by design veterans who helped bring more usable interfaces to Google's DoubleClick advertising platform. <P> "We think the way the applications look and behave and the experience with those applications will be a deciding factor for the next generation of users, whether they'll use these applications and who you'll be able to hire," Phillips said. <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/news/2013/04/Infor-Ming.jpg" width="598" height="374" alt="Infor Ming" title="Infor Ming" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P> The SoHo app interfaces include cross-application business intelligence dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs) and report screens with clean-looking layouts, lots of white space and rich data visualizations. Hook & Loop VP Marc Scibelli, one of the design gurus, flashed a gaming interface that helped inspire a new sales-performance dashboard. He also insisted the modern interfaces don't amount to "lipstick on a pig" because his team is actually talking to users about how they interact with the applications, and in many cases we're asking for new fields and functionality to match the linear flow of how work gets done. <P> Infor's new Ming.le social app is another SoHo app, but it's built on Infor's XML- and Web-services-based Intelligent Open Network (ION) middleware. The collaboration platform lets users follow people, applications, KPIs, data, documents, workflows and any system-generated event. Oil & Gas exploration supplier Preferred Sands, for example, is using Ming.le to handle inventory queries across company and third-party distribution partners. The app provides what Luke Rains, the company's supply chain manager, described as a "consistent, human-friendly interface," making information from the company's SyteLine ERP system and ION-integrated third-party apps accessible to employees and partner employees. <P> "Before everybody had to go into SyteLine for inventory lookups, ION for approving requisitions and email to look at all the back-and-forth communications about requests, but now it's all in Ming.le," said Rains in an interview with <em>InformationWeek</em>. <P> Think of Ming.le as Twitter meets knowledge discovery, enterprise apps, business workflows and data, as you can learn who else is subscribing to and posting comments about the things you care about.Infor touts its ability to deliver applications on-premises, in private clouds or on public clouds, but Phillips commented during a question-and-answer session that the company isn't interested in investing in "ping, power and pipe," meaning building data centers. "We'd rather put our money into our applications." <P> Instead, Infor relies on IBM and Amazon for cloud infrastructure, though Infor handles all application management and provisioning no matter which partner provides the infrastructure. On Monday it made two notable announcements with its cloud partners. <P> IBM was already a hosting partner, but Infor and IBM announced new deployment modes including public-cloud options on IBM's SmartCloud. "IBM obviously has a lot of System I and Power [Server] capabilities... and they're helpful to us outside the U.S. as well," Phillips said. Several Infor Apps run on IBM System I (formerly AS/400) and Power Series Servers, and IBM's global presence helps because Infor gets more than 40% of its revenue outside of the U.S. <P> Amazon Web Services is used for public cloud app deployments on the EC2 service, but a new Sky Vault option announced Monday will run ION Business Vault data warehouses on Amazon's RedShift massively parallel processing database service. Business Vaults can grow quite large, so Sky Vault makes large-scale data warehousing easier and more affordable than on-premises warehouses, according to Infor. <P> Phillips touted Amazon's rapid scaling, "great" provisioning tools and track record on reducing costs. RedShift, he said, makes sense for Sky Vault by virtue of its low-cost -- starting at 85 cents per hour for a single-node with 2 terabytes of storage -- coupled with the fact that many customers already have databases in Amazon's cloud. <P> "It's a one-click copy command to move that data over to Redshift," he said. <P> <strong>Sizing Up The Competition</strong> <P> In contrast to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-outperforms-oracle-with-steady-finan/240153262">SAP</a>, which touts a mobile-first strategy as the key route to core application renewal, Infor (like <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/microsoft-gains-enterprise-clout-with-er/240151352">Microsoft Dynamics</a>) is emphasizing modern interfaces on the apps themselves. <P> Infor has a mobile strategy, too, but it got short shrift here, probably because more has been promised than delivered. Infor has seven native iOS and Android mobile apps to date. New HTML5 front-end interfaces essentially support browser-based viewing on laptops and tablets, but as seen with other HTML5 efforts, it is questionable how much device-native functionality, such as touch and gesture control, you'll get on tablets. <P> Phillips' spoke often of challenging SAP and Oracle, and his executives touted a mock "Save the People" program, though they were serious in promising to reduce current Oracle PeopleSoft maintenance costs by 20% by way of Infor replacements. Execs also talked about going after would-be Workday customers more aggressively with improved combinations of human capital management and financials apps. <P> The competitor that Infor encounters more often than executives let on is Microsoft Dynamics, a point confirmed by analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research. "A lot of new ERP business is going to [Oracle] JD Edwards and Microsoft, but with everything that Infor is doing, a lot of people are starting to consider them," Wang said. <P> In truth, Infor's biggest competitor is likely complacency among literally tens of thousands of legacy customers who have historically been all too willing to keep ERP systems running for more than a decade without upgrading. Until the last two years, Infor didn't give those customers many reasons to upgrade. But that has clearly changed, and in many cases Infor is going over IT's head and appealing directly to line-of-business executives with new features, functions and those slick new interfaces.2013-04-22T09:06:00ZBig data project leaders still hunger for some key technology ingredients. Here are the top five wants and the people working to solve those problems.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/5-big-wishes-for-big-data-deployments/240153214?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingIf you've even experimented with building big-data applications or analyses, you're probably acutely aware that the domain has its share of missing ingredients. We've boiled it down to five top wants on the big-data wish list, starting with SQL (or at least SQL-like) analysis options and shortcuts to deployment and advanced analytics and finishing with real-time and network analysis options. <P> The good news is that people and, in some cases, entire communities, are working on these problems. There are armies of data-management and data-analysis professionals who are familiar with SQL, for example, so organizations naturally want to take advantage of knowledge of that query language to make sense of data in Hadoop clusters and NoSQL databases -- the latter is no paradox, as the "No" in "NoSQL" stands for "not only" SQL. It's not a surprise that every distributor of Apache Hadoop software has proposed, is testing, and has or will soon release an option for SQL or SQL-like analysis of data residing on Hadoop clusters. That group includes Cloudera, EMC, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR and Teradata, among others. In the NoSQL camp, 10Gen has improved on the analytics capabilities within MongoDB, and commercial vendor Acunu does the same for Cassandra. <P> Deploying and managing Hadoop clusters and NoSQL databases is a new experience for most IT organizations, but it seems that each and every software update brings new deployment and management features expressly designed to make life easier. There are also a number of appliances -- available or planned by the likes of EMC, HP, IBM, Oracle and Teradata -- aimed at fast deployment of Hadoop. Other vendors are focusing on particularly tricky aspects of working with Hadoop framework components. WibiData, for example, provides open-source libraries, models and tools designed to make it easier to work with HBase, Hadoop's high-scale NoSQL database. <P> The whole point of gathering up and making use of big data is to come up with predictions and other advanced analytics that can trigger better-informed business decisions. But with the shortage of data-savvy talent in the world, companies are looking for an easier way to support sophisticated analyses. Machine learning is one technique that many vendors and companies are investigating because it relies on data and compute power, rather than human expertise, to spot customer behaviors and other patterns hidden in data. <P> One of the key "Vs" of big data (along with volume and variety) is velocity, but you'd be hard pressed to apply the phrase "real-time" to Hadoop, with its batchy MapReduce analysis approach. Alternative software distributor MapR and analytics vendor HStreaming are among a small group of firms bringing real-time analysis of data in Hadoop. It's an essential step that other vendors -- particularly event-stream processing vendors -- are likely to follow. <P> Last among the top five wishes for big data is easier network analysis. Here, corporate-friendly graph-analysis databases and tools are emerging that employ some of the same techniques Facebook uses at truly massive scale. Keep in mind that few of the tools and technologies described here have had 30 or more years to mature, like relational databases and SQL query tools have. But there are clear signs that the pain points of big-data management and big-data analysis are rapidly being addressed.You could compile a massive data set just by gathering all the stories and reports that have been written about the shortage of big-data talent. The most acute need is for data scientist types who know data and who also know how to write custom code, MapReduce jobs, and algorithms to gain insights from big data. But what if SQL-savvy professionals schooled in relational databases and business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools could do more of the heavy lifting? There are many more SQL professionals out there than there are data scientists, and most SQL pros would be eager to expand their career potential. <P> There's a big push to deliver SQL-analysis capabilities on top of Hadoop, and the talent shortage is just one reason. The second reason for the trend is that Apache Hive, Hadoop's incumbent data warehousing infrastructure, offers a limited subset of SQL-like query capabilities and suffers from slow performance tied to behind-the-scenes MapReduce processing. <P> Answering the call for broader, faster SQL querying on Hadoop are projects and initiatives including Cloudera Impala, EMC's HAWQ query feature on the Pivotal HD distribution, Hortonworks Stinger, IBM Big SQL, MapR-supported Apache Drill, and Teradata SQL-H. <P> Even the NoSQL camp wants better, SQL-like querying. Last year 10Gen added a real-time data aggregation framework to its popular <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB NoSQL database</a>. The aggregation framework lets users directly query data within MongoDB without resorting to writing and running complicated, batch-oriented MapReduce jobs. More evidence is Acunu, which has developed a SQL-like AQL language to support querying on top of Cassandra. <P> The development of SQL querying capabilities is only the beginning. BI and analytics tools and systems native to big-data platforms are emerging. Examples include Datameer, Hadapt, Karmasphere and Platfora, and they're offering distinguishing query, analysis, data-visualization and monitoring capabilities on top of Hadoop. <P> <strong>RECOMMENDED READING:</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/oracle-cuts-big-data-appliance-down-to-size/240152630">Oracle Cuts Big Data Appliance Down To Size</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">Inside IBM's Big Data, Hadoop Moves</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/10gen-enterprise-release-takes-mongodb-u/240151110">10Gen Enterprise Release Takes MongoDB Uptown</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/will-microsofts-hadoop-bring-big-data-to-masses/240012533">Will Microsoft's Hadoop Bring Big Data To Masses?</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/6-big-data-advances-some-might-be-giants/240149648">6 Big Data Advances: Some Might Be Giants</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-analytics-masters-degrees-20-top-programs/240145673">Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-datas-surprising-uses-from-lady-gaga-to-cia/240144221">Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA</a> <P> <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> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/recruiting/big-data-talent-war-7-ways-to-win/240012658">Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/teradata-joins-sqlonhadoop-bandwagon/240152917">Teradata Joins SQL-On-Hadoop Bandwagon</a>There's no shortage of efforts to simplify the deployment and management of big-data platforms including Hadoop and NoSQL databases. It seems each and every software update brings new management features and new built-in capabilities. 10Gen, for example, added built-in text search capabilities and on-premises monitoring capabilities with the latest release of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/10gen-enterprise-release-takes-mongodb-u/240151110">MondoDB</a>. And Hortonwork's distribution of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/will-microsofts-hadoop-bring-big-data-to-masses/240012533">Hadoop for Microsoft Windows</a> ties into Active Directory, Microsoft's System Center, and Microsoft virtualization technologies to simplify deployment and management. <P> We haven't heard a lot of complaining about the hardware-related challenges of building out Hadoop clusters. Nonetheless, EMC, IBM, Oracle and Teradata insist their released and pending Hadoop appliances make deployment faster and easier than the build-it-yourself approach. The cost of commodity hardware might be alluring, but Oracle, for one, says <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/oracle-cuts-big-data-appliance-down-to-size/240152630">its appliance</a> costs less less than build-it-yourself deployments when taking into account the price of individual components, time saved on provisioning and tuning the system, and support and upgrade efforts. Oracle's appliance includes pre-configured, ready-to-run versions of Cloudera software and Oracle's NoSQL database. <P> The real messiness and complication of managing Hadoop usually involves the software, not hardware configuration. HBase, for example, is the Hadoop framework's increasingly important NoSQL database, but many practitioners have found it hard to model and analyze data on the database. Vendor WibiData provides open-source libraries, models and tools that make it easier to store, extract and analyze data on HBase. The idea is to make the hard, technical parts of running HBase repeatable so you need fewer engineers and data scientists when trying to solve business problems. That's a formula that should and will be applied across many big-data platforms. <P> <strong>RECOMMENDED READING:</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/oracle-cuts-big-data-appliance-down-to-size/240152630">Oracle Cuts Big Data Appliance Down To Size</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">Inside IBM's Big Data, Hadoop Moves</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/10gen-enterprise-release-takes-mongodb-u/240151110">10Gen Enterprise Release Takes MongoDB Uptown</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/will-microsofts-hadoop-bring-big-data-to-masses/240012533">Will Microsoft's Hadoop Bring Big Data To Masses?</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/6-big-data-advances-some-might-be-giants/240149648">6 Big Data Advances: Some Might Be Giants</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-analytics-masters-degrees-20-top-programs/240145673">Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-datas-surprising-uses-from-lady-gaga-to-cia/240144221">Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA</a> <P> <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> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/recruiting/big-data-talent-war-7-ways-to-win/240012658">Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/teradata-joins-sqlonhadoop-bandwagon/240152917">Teradata Joins SQL-On-Hadoop Bandwagon</a>Developing algorithms and predictive models is work that has to be carried out by hard-to-find, expensive data scientists. Or is it? Scarcity of talent is one reason big-data, analytics and business intelligence vendors are developing machine-learning approaches. Proven in applications including optical character recognition, spam filtering and computer security threat detection, machine learning uses learning algorithms that are trained by the data itself. If you show the algorithm thousands or tens of thousands of examples of scanned text characters, unsolicited email messages, or virus bots and malware, it can reliably find more examples. <P> The same approach can be applied to spotting customers who are ready to churn or jet engines that are about to fail. With machine learning, trained models also can continue to learn from new data. Amazon.com and Netflix, for example, use algorithms to spot patterns in customer transactions so they can recommend other books or movies. When a new book or movie comes out, these companies can start recommending it as soon as their algorithms discerns the preference pattern in the data. <P> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Mahout">Apache Mahout</a> is the leading route to deploying machine-learning-based clustering, classification and collaborative filtering algorithms on Hadoop, but these techniques are also supported by the R statistical programming language. Commercial vendors supporting or embedding machine-learning techniques include Alpine Data Labs, Birst, Causata, Lionsolver, Revolution Analytics and a growing list of others. <P> <strong>RECOMMENDED READING:</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/oracle-cuts-big-data-appliance-down-to-size/240152630">Oracle Cuts Big Data Appliance Down To Size</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">Inside IBM's Big Data, Hadoop Moves</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/10gen-enterprise-release-takes-mongodb-u/240151110">10Gen Enterprise Release Takes MongoDB Uptown</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/will-microsofts-hadoop-bring-big-data-to-masses/240012533">Will Microsoft's Hadoop Bring Big Data To Masses?</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/6-big-data-advances-some-might-be-giants/240149648">6 Big Data Advances: Some Might Be Giants</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-analytics-masters-degrees-20-top-programs/240145673">Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-datas-surprising-uses-from-lady-gaga-to-cia/240144221">Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA</a> <P> <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> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/recruiting/big-data-talent-war-7-ways-to-win/240012658">Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/teradata-joins-sqlonhadoop-bandwagon/240152917">Teradata Joins SQL-On-Hadoop Bandwagon</a>Another item on the big-data analytics wish list is real-time performance. Two startup vendors going after this opportunity are marketing analytics vendor Causata and real-time Hadoop-analysis vendor HStreaming. <P> For Causata, "real time" means making decisions in under 50 milliseconds. You need that kind of speed to change content, banner ads and marketing offers while your customers are still active on websites and mobile devices. Causata uses Hadoop's HBase NoSQL database for storage or marketing-related data that might include clickstreams, campaign-response data and CRM records. HBase isn't good at real-time querying, however, so Causata runs Java-based algorithms on a proprietary query engine to improve performance. <P> As its name hints, HStreaming relies on stream-processing technology that's similar to the event-processing engines used by financial trading operations and offered by <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">IBM (InfoSphere Streams)</a>, Progress Software (Apama), SAP (Sybase Aleri), Tibco (Complex Event Processing) and others. HStreaming takes data directly from always-on sources such as video surveillance cameras, cell towers and sensors, and spots patterns in that data while it's still in flight. The technology also provides a form of extract, transform, load (ETL) for then storing the data onto Hadoop for later analysis. HStreaming cites video surveillance, network optimization and mobile advertising as its top applications. In all three cases, real-time insight and action are a must. <P> Taking a different tack, Hadoop software and support vendor <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">MapR has announced a partnership with Informatica</a> through which it claims it will become the first and only Hadoop software distributor capable of delivering near-real-time data streaming on the big-data platform. MapR's Hadoop distribution features a lockless storage services layer that works hand-in-hand with Informatica messaging software to continuously stream massive amounts of data into Hadoop. Couple this capability with a coming SQL-on-Hadoop option such as MapR-favored <a href="http://www.mapr.com/support/community-resources/drill">Drill</a>, and you'll have yet another option for fast big-data analysis. <P> <strong>RECOMMENDED READING:</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/oracle-cuts-big-data-appliance-down-to-size/240152630">Oracle Cuts Big Data Appliance Down To Size</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">Inside IBM's Big Data, Hadoop Moves</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/10gen-enterprise-release-takes-mongodb-u/240151110">10Gen Enterprise Release Takes MongoDB Uptown</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/will-microsofts-hadoop-bring-big-data-to-masses/240012533">Will Microsoft's Hadoop Bring Big Data To Masses?</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/6-big-data-advances-some-might-be-giants/240149648">6 Big Data Advances: Some Might Be Giants</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-analytics-masters-degrees-20-top-programs/240145673">Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-datas-surprising-uses-from-lady-gaga-to-cia/240144221">Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA</a> <P> <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> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/recruiting/big-data-talent-war-7-ways-to-win/240012658">Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/teradata-joins-sqlonhadoop-bandwagon/240152917">Teradata Joins SQL-On-Hadoop Bandwagon</a>Social networks are contributing to the scale and variability of big data. The social networks themselves use graph databases and analysis tools to uncover the web of user relationships by studying "nodes" -- representing people, companies, locations and so on -- and edges, the often-complex relationships among those nodes. <P> Mutual fund company American Century Investments uses graph analysis to predict the performance of the companies funds invest in. The company used the open source R statistical programming language and its <a href="http://igraph.wikidot.com/r-tutorial">iGraph package</a>, with software and support from <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/6-big-data-advances-some-might-be-giants/240149648">Revolution Analytics</a>, to build a graph-analysis application that tracks revenue flows among manufacturers and their suppliers. <P> Apple, for example, has suppliers of chips and screens just as car manufacturers have suppliers of components and parts. American Century combines public and proprietary data on those buying relationships, and it applies graph analyses to get a clearer understanding of the likely performance of suppliers. These forecasts are more accurate than what could be developed with forecasts based on quarters-old public financial reports, according to American Century. <P> Other open-source technologies supporting graph analysis include <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/13-big-data-vendors-to-watch-in-2013/240144124?pgno=12">Neo4j </a>, a graph database developed and supported by Neo Technologies. Neo4j is used in IT and telecom network scenarios to resolve secure-access challenges, in master data management applications to see changing relationships among data, and in recommendation-engine apps to figure out what people want based on the behaviors of friends and connections. Other open source graph-analysis projects include <a href="http://kowshik.github.io/JPregel/pregel_paper.pdf">Pregel</a> (from Google) and <a href="http://giraph.apache.org/">Apache Giraph</a>. It's not the stampede of solutions you see around Hadoop, but there's clearly growing interest in graph analysis. <P> <strong>RECOMMENDED READING:</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/oracle-cuts-big-data-appliance-down-to-size/240152630">Oracle Cuts Big Data Appliance Down To Size</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">Inside IBM's Big Data, Hadoop Moves</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mongodb-upgrade-fills-nosql-analytics-vo/240006437">MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/10gen-enterprise-release-takes-mongodb-u/240151110">10Gen Enterprise Release Takes MongoDB Uptown</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/will-microsofts-hadoop-bring-big-data-to-masses/240012533">Will Microsoft's Hadoop Bring Big Data To Masses?</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/6-big-data-advances-some-might-be-giants/240149648">6 Big Data Advances: Some Might Be Giants</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-meets-near-real-time-data/232601984">Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-analytics-masters-degrees-20-top-programs/240145673">Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-datas-surprising-uses-from-lady-gaga-to-cia/240144221">Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA</a> <P> <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> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/recruiting/big-data-talent-war-7-ways-to-win/240012658">Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win</a> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/teradata-joins-sqlonhadoop-bandwagon/240152917">Teradata Joins SQL-On-Hadoop Bandwagon</a>2013-04-22T09:06:00ZAmazon CTO Werner Vogels predicts real-time analysis and "invisible" Hadoop capacity on demand are the future of big data computing.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/amazons-vogels-big-data-belongs-in-the-cloud/240153254?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-tools-to-prevent-cloud-vendor-lock-in/240148635"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/948/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in" title="10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <p>Amazon CTO Werner Vogels kicked off the annual Amazon Web Services Summit series in New York last week with a vintage cloud-will-be-king presentation that made a strong case for big data computing in the cloud. And Vogels offered a few predictions for what will drive cloud-based data analytics. </p> <P> One, he predicted demand for big data analysis will spur interest in real-time analysis, and that companies will have to respond with unlimited capacity as needed. <P> Second, he said we can expect infrastructure like Hadoop (delivered by Amazon as the Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) service) in the future will "become invisible" behind analytic layers built on top of Hadoop. He described today's big data analysis tools as "rather crude." <P> Third, he said that this layer of big data analytics will include big-data-powered industry-specific applications. <P> <strong>[ What's Amazon's biggest rival up to? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/ms-azure-public-cloud-matches-amazon-pri/240152968?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Microsoft Azure Public Cloud Matches Amazon Prices</a>. ]</strong> <P> This slick new layer of next-era tools doesn't exist yet, but to prove the industry-focused point, Vogels introduced executives from Bristol-Meyers Squibb, GE and big data analytics startup Mortar Data (among other companies) to detail AWS-powered big data applications. <P> -- <strong>Bristol-Meyers Squibb</strong> IT executive Russell Towell described how the drug giant is using AWS to do computer simulations to optimize large-scale drug trials before actually conducting them with patients. The company uses AWS security provisions including private connections to Amazon data centers, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud services and encryption of all data, Towell said. Bristol-Meyers Squibb researchers can spin up scores and even hundreds of Linux server instances within five minutes and preconfigured Oracle Database instances within 12 minutes, he said. <P> Workloads that would have taken 60 hours to provision and complete on-premises using the company's old approach (and requiring huge investments in server capacity) now take 1.2 hours on AWS with service fees of $336, he said. As a result, the company can quickly do "thousands rather than hundreds" of simulations in the same amount of time, Towell said. <P> The big payoff for each simulation is money saved on live clinical trials. Having completed simulations, the company can reduce the number of patients required for a trial while being certain of valid results. Trial costs that averaged $750,000 have been cut to $250,000, according to Towell. <P> -- <strong>General Electric</strong> executive Joe Salvo, manager of the manufacturer's Business Integration Technologies Laboratory, touted a collaborative platform that GE built on AWS that's intended to help manufacturers and suppliers bring together expertise, materials data, and modeling and simulation capabilities to speed part and component development times by as much as five times. GE calls it a CEED -- crowd-driven ecosystem for evolutionary design. <P> "It's a flexible, elastic environment on [Amazon] EC2 that supports both rapid prototyping, simulation and, ultimately, building real parts that go into complex products and systems," Salvo said. "The teams come together quickly, they exchange their data and models [securely] ... and it holds the promise of transforming the whole manufacturing paradigm." <P> -- <strong>Mortar Data</strong> CEO K Young cited elastic capacity as the key to the 2011 startup's ability to grow quickly and provide Hadoop-as-a-service capacity without having to buy and set up servers. Mortar has raised $1.8 million in capital, and in 2012 the company spent some $500,000 on AWS services, using some 1,000 servers on demand. Provisioning that much capacity in a conventional on-premises data center would have cost $7 million and taken eight months to bring online, Young said. <P> "We're able to serve new customers without delay and without upfront costs, and we can start bringing in new revenue, and we're able to do it using about a quarter of what we would have had to raise otherwise," Young said. <P> <strong>Services To Come</strong> <P> Vogels' point about companies needing to tap into capacity on demand is an obvious selling point for AWS. His predictions about real-time analysis and the inevitability of analytic layer on top of invisible Hadoop infrastructure could well be a tease to coming AWS services announcements. <P> For example, Amazon has yet to join the SQL-on-Hadoop trend that is driving multiple projects and initiatives aimed at delivering faster and more extensive SQL querying capabilities on top of Hadoop than are currently supported by Hive. Lead Hadoop distributor Cloudera, for example, is promoting project Impala, while competitors EMC (Pivotal HD), Hortonworks (Stinger), IBM (Big SQL), MapR (Apache Drill) and Teradata (Teradata SQL-H) each have their own SQL-on-Hadoop initiatives in the works. <P> On coming up with an analytics layer, Amazon has heretofore partnered with BI and analytics vendors including Actuate, Birst, GoodData, Karmasphere, Pentaho and others. It would be interesting (and not terribly surprising) to see Amazon acquire or invest in BI and analytics technologies for Hadoop and other platforms. In the database arena, Amazon took a large equity stake in ParAccel, for example, to gain licensing rights to the high-scale, massively parallel-processing database now behind the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/amazon-debuts-low-cost-big-data-warehous/240142712">Amazon RedShift</a> data warehousing service. This could be the model for an analytics play. <P> Amazon did make two notable database-related announcements at the AWS Summit, one aimed at incumbent-database customers and one aimed at moving them to Amazon's big data services. In the first case, Vogels announced that encrypted data storage and network data flow is now available for Amazon Relational Database Services for Oracle Database and will soon be available for Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server. Amazon still has to allay corporate concerns about putting data in the cloud, so this announcement is aimed at companies using incumbent platforms. <P> As for those looking toward new platforms, Vogels announced that Amazon's DynomoDB NoSQL database has gained an important new analytical capability through a feature called Local Secondary Indexes. <P> "This allows you to perform queries on any attribute in your data model, so now you have all the power of querying that you're used to with relational databases available to you on DynamoDB," Vogels said. <P> The announcements fit a pattern for Amazon in which it offers familiar tools (like Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server) while also pioneering and promoting new platforms (like DynamoDB, Hadoop and Redshift). As always, the cloud is the place to do it all. <P> <i>Companies want more than they're getting today from big data analytics. But small and big vendors are working to solve the key problems. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/032513?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Analytics Wish List</a> issue of InformationWeek: Jay Parikh, the Facebook's infrastructure VP, discusses the company's big data plans. (Free registration required.)</i>2013-04-19T13:12:00ZSAP reports 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth as core applications lag but sales of Hana, cloud and mobile grow. http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-outperforms-oracle-with-steady-finan/240153262?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/more-pioneers-of-cloud-computing/240151032"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/964/Cloud-Computing-Pioneers_promo.jpg" alt="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for slideshow)</span> </div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->SAP reported good, but not great, financial results on Friday, posting a modest 5% gain in new software revenue contrasted with a 25% gain in overall software and cloud subscription revenue. The bright spots in the first quarter ended in March included healthy gains in Hana database, cloud subscription and mobile growth while sales of on-premises software and results in the Asia-Pacific region disappointed. <P> Despite the uneven performance, SAP reported its 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with software and software-related services revenue increasing 14% to 2.94 billion euros ($3.86 billion) compared to the same quarter last year (all figures are non-IRFS in constant currencies). <P> The performance outpaced that of SAP's biggest rival, Oracle, a point that SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott drove home several times during a conference call with financial analysts. <P> "We gained significant market share from our primary competitor, especially in the areas of cloud and database," McDermott said. "Our 25% software and cloud subscription growth is a stark contrast to [Oracle, which] did not grow at all in its latest quarter." <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/oracles-bad-quarter-is-self-inflicted/240151468">Oracle reported a 2% drop in software license and subscription revenue</a> in its third fiscal quarter ended in February. <P> <strong>[ Want to compare and contrast SAP's performance with Oracle's? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/oracles-bad-quarter-is-self-inflicted/240151468?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle's Bad Quarter Is Self-Inflicted</a>. ]</strong> <P> SAP's software license sales grew 8% in the Americas to 254 million euros ($333 million), but McDermott acknowledged that the performance was lower than expected. Federal budget sequestration had a negative impact on sales to government and overall results in the U.S., McDermott said. <P> In the Asia-Pacific region, where software sales declined 15% to 105 million euros ($137 million), McDermott cited slower sales in China, where a change in the national government slowed sales to state-owned businesses -- <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/ibm-sales-dragged-down-by-missed-deals/240153222">a sales trend also reported by IBM</a> on Thursday. <P> Accelerated by last year's acquisitions of SuccessFactors and Ariba, SAP cloud subscription and support revenue increased 380% to 167 million euros ($218 million). Total cloud subscription, support and services revenues were up 5% over the fourth quarter of 2012 to 224 million euros ($293 million) and are on track to reach $900 million euros ($1.17 billion) by year end, according to SAP. <P> Hana database software revenue tripled to 86 million euros ($112 million) in what is historically SAP's smallest quarter. The company predicted that accelerating sales would lift total Hana revenue to 650 to 700 million euros ($852 to $917 million) this year. SAP highlighted Hana adopters including oil giant Petrobras of Mexico, Levi Strauss, ConAgra and Siemens Bosch. <P> SAP's mobile infrastructure and application sales increased 76%, and together with cloud and Hana sales, these areas of innovation are driving renewal of SAP's core applications, according to co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe. <P> "The beauty of our strategy is that the core gets pulled [along] by the innovations," Snabe explained. "Mobile makes core applications easier to consume and Hana makes the core significantly more competitive, and with that we'll get more users."2013-04-19T08:24:00ZIBM blames revenue shortfall on sales execution issues, but analysts ask whether the cloud is driving structural changes in IT spending.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/ibm-sales-dragged-down-by-missed-deals/240153222?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingIBM reported Thursday that its financial results for the first quarter missed expectations with revenues falling 5% compared to the same quarter last year and earnings coming in at $3 per share, 5 cents lower than expected by Wall Street analysts. The company blamed the shortfall on poor sales execution and lower-than-expected demand for hardware. <P> "Despite a solid start and good client demand we did not close a number of software and mainframe transactions that have moved into the second quarter," IBM chairman, president and CEO Ginni Rometty said in statement. "Looking ahead, in addition to closing those transactions, we expect to benefit from investments we are making in our growth initiatives and from the actions we are taking to improve under-performing parts of the business." <P> IBM CFO and senior VP Mark Loughridge offered plenty of detailed explanations for the shortfall during a conference call on Thursday, but financial analysts asked whether cloud computing might be cutting into conventional IT sales. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/oracles-bad-quarter-is-self-inflicted/240151468">Oracle</a>, too, recently cited poor sales execution and a continued slide in hardware sales for its fiscal third quarter ended in February. With two tech stalwarts suffering bad quarters, it's natural to wonder whether structural changes in tech spending are taking place. <P> <strong>[ What's the comparison with Oracle's results? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/oracles-bad-quarter-is-self-inflicted/240151468?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle's Bad Quarter Is Self-Inflicted</a>. ]</strong> <P> IBM's quarterly revenue for the three months ended March 31 was $23.4 billion, down 5% overall and 3% in constant currencies from the same quarter last year. Breaking out IBM's core Services, Software and Systems & Technologies businesses -- representing roughly 60%, 24% and 13% of revenues, respectively -- the biggest shortfall was in the hardware-focused Systems & Technologies area, where revenue was down 14% (excluding the results of the Retail Store Solutions business that IBM sold last year). <P> Drilling down on hardware results, IBM System Z (mainframe) sales were up 7%, but that was lower than expected, and Loughridge said that some $400 million in anticipated mainframe and related software transactions weren't closed. <P> "We should have closed on those deals and we thought we had them right up until the end," he said, noting that this year's early Easter vacation period may have pushed back some sales. <P> IBM's sales of Power Systems servers (used in Unix and Linux deployments) were down 32% despite the introduction of new low-end and midrange <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/unix-linux/ibm-fights-rivals-with-aggressive-power/240147851">Power 7+ servers</a> in early February. Oracle's hardware sales, which include a mix of (x86-based) Engineered Systems and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/unix-linux/oracle-sparc-t5-cant-make-sun-rise/240151815">Orcle Sun Sparc</a> servers for Unix and Linux, were down 30.7% in its most recent quarter. <P> These recent results confirm that the Unix market is in decline, and, indeed, Loughridge said that IBM will shift the focus of the Power business to the Linux market, which is seeing growing sales of servers for high-performance computing. <P> "Once again Power [servers and storage] picked up share, but it doesn't mean much if you're declining at double digits," Loughridge said. "We need to move more strongly into new opportunity spaces like Linux ... which is now as big as the Unix market, and it's growing rapidly." <P> <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> reported Thursday that <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323809304578431160192440582.html">IBM is in talks with Lenovo to sell its x86-based System X server business</a>, which declined 9% year-over-year on the quarter. These servers tend to offer low margins, although IBM also uses x86 chips and various PureSystems products integrating software and hardware. <P> Loughridge vowed that IBM will redouble its sales efforts, regain momentum in high-growth markets including China and accelerate to the second quarter "workforce rebalancing" actions (code for layoffs in some areas and acquisitions in others) to ensure that company earnings stay on track for the $16.70-cents-per-share target the company set at the beginning of the year. Most of the rebalancing will take place outside of the U.S., he said. <P> Two analysts asked Loughridge whether customers are "taking a step back" or "reconsidering their IT infrastructures" with cloud computing options in mind. IBM's CFO stuck with the line that missed big deals -- and this year's early Easter -- made all the difference in the results. <P> IBM itself reported that its cloud revenue, which is not broken out, was up 70% in the latest quarter. Cloud leaders Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, meanwhile, are both experiencing heady growth. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazons-cloud-revenues-examined/240145741">Amazon Web Services</a> is said to be on track for $3.8 billion in revenue in 2013 and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-caps-record-year-eyes-acqu/240149775">Salesforce.com</a> expects to reach a $4 billion run rate this year. <P> As the late U.S. Senator Everett Dirkson reportedly once said in the context of government spending, "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money."2013-04-16T09:57:00ZWorkday updates of cloud-based HR and finance apps provide new mobile options and more ways to customize deployments.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/workday-adds-android-support-customizati/240152972?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computing<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <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><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Workday is rolling more than 170 new features with its annual spring update this week, but the headliners are clearly first-time support for Android devices and a bevy of new configuration options. <P> Workday updates its cloud-based human capital management (HCM) and financials applications three times per year. Workday 19, the update announced Tuesday, delivers on a number of big "vote getters" from customers on the vendor's community sites, according to Workday. <P> On the mobile front, Workday has been Apple iOS centric to date, with native support for iPhone and iPad. Workday introduced <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/workday-courts-mobile-users-large-enterp/232900557">an HTML5 site</a> last spring with an eye toward better support for non-iOS devices, but the company is now adding a Workday for Android wrapper around the HTML5 application that will better support Android devices. <P> "You can download Workday for Android through Google Play, and it matches most of the functionality that we support on iPhones," Stan Swete, Workday's CTO, told <em>InformationWeek</em>. "The HTML5 wrapper lets us use on-device cameras, for example, to take snapshots of expense receipts." <P> <strong>[ Want more on Workday's long-term strategy? 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>. ]</strong> <P> To better support company-specific needs, Workday 19 includes a battery of new custom field options on Workday objects. In previous releases Workday added customizable fields to the Worker, (job) application, job profile and bank account objects. With Workday 19, customers can add custom fields to the supervisory, supplier contract, purchase order, customer, supplier, cost center, location and company objects. <P> The idea is to support "customization," but the advantage of supporting this capability with configuration settings is that it's not something that has to be done with coding and software development. You can even set up field validation logic without coding, according to Swete. <P> "You fill out forms to define cross-field edits to compare one field's value to another, so, for example, if you wanted to compare two dates, you could generate an error or a notification of one date if it inappropriately comes before the other," Swete explained. <P> Because the custom fields are handled with configuration settings, they won't break, disappear or have to be tested and reconfigured as applications are updated, according to Workday. Other updates in Workday 19 also fit this pattern. For example, the Workday Financial Management application supports custom Worktags that can be used in place of conventional expense code categories that are based on long strings of inscrutable numbers used to represent cost or profit centers. <P> Custom Worktags let users set up natural-language categories, such as "annual meeting," "ACME account" or "Burns project," in place of numbers. Even though they're not numbers, you can still establish hierarchies and relationships so you can roll up and report on finances by department, account, project and other ways. <P> The Financial Management update also delivers new functionality to track the value and life cycle of intangible assets, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks and licenses. The value of these assets can be managed and measured from the inception of contracts through amortization. Another new feature manages and automates prepaid expenses and supports centralized customer and expense payments on behalf of other entities. <P> New Workday HCM functionality added with the latest update includes headcount planning functionality that continuously reports on hires, terminations and progress toward annual HCM goals. <P> HCM is Workday's most robust cloud-based application, used by giant employers including Hewlett-Packard and Flextronics with hundreds of thousands of employees. The sweet spot for the Financial Management application is currently among companies with 5,000 to 10,000 employees, but Workday has <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/workday-posts-strong-start-as-public-fir/240142845">detailed plans</a> to scale up the app over the next couple of years to handle large enterprises.2013-04-15T13:10:00ZTeradata announces standard SQL access to Hadoop data, following in the footsteps of IBM, EMC and Cloudera. Hadoop is the winner.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/teradata-joins-sqlonhadoop-bandwagon/240152917?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingChalk up 2013 as the year of SQL-on-Hadoop announcements. It's also the year that big vendors including IBM, EMC and Teradata effectively acknowledged that Hadoop will become a fixture of the corporate information management landscape. <P> The latest SQL-on-Hadoop development, announced Monday, is Teradata Enterprise Access for Hadoop, which provides two connection options to the Apache Hadoop open source data processing framework. <P> The first connection point is Teradata Smart Loader for Hadoop, a new feature of the Teradata Studio graphical interface for database administration, data access and querying. The Smart Loader gives business analysts a point-and-click tool to browse and move data sets from Cloudera or Hortonworks Hadoop clusters over to Teradata databases. <P> Moving data was possible before with data connectors, but it was a technical exercise that wasn't accessible to business users with point-and-click ease. So the Smart Loader is an advance, but it's not a SQL-on-Hadoop approach as is Teradata SQL-H, the second new connection option announced Monday. <P> <strong>[ What will SQL-on-Hadoop mean for the future? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-will-hadoop-become-dominant-platform/240151576?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Big Data Debate: Will Hadoop Become Dominant Platform?</a> ]</strong> <P> With Teradata SQL-H, users and applications get standard SQL query access to data stored within Hadoop through the Teradata database. The key difference with the Smart Loaders is that you don't have to move that data into the database. You're querying Hadoop data where it lives, and SQL-H also supports in-database analytic processing. <P> The payoff with SQL-H is blending the structured data in Teradata warehouses and marts with the multi-structured big data in Hadoop clusters. Marketers, for example, will be able to query structured customer data in Teradata as well as clickstreams and social data on Hadoop to develop a better understanding of customer behavior, customer experience or customer preferences and sentiments. Product managers might query test data from log files in Hadoop alongside warranty, component or supplier data in Teradata to get a better understanding of product defects and warranty claim patterns. <P> The limitation with SQL-H is that it relies on Hortonwork's Apache HCatalog data access project, so it works only with Hortonworks Hadoop deployments. It's not an uncommon limitation, as each and every Hadoop software distributor seems to be coming up with its own answer for SQL querying on Hadoop. <P> IBM earlier this month announced the technology preview of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">IBM Big SQL</a>, a query interface that the company plans to offer with its BigInsights Hadoop distribution. Last month EMC announced its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/emc-brings-data-analysis-breakthrough-to/240149339">Pivotal HD</a> Hadoop distribution, which brings Greenplum database access and querying to data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). <P> Teradata SQL-H will be released by the end of the second quarter. EMC's Pivotal HD release is set for the end of this month. It's unknown when IBM Big SQL will be available. The most anticipated SQL-on-Hadoop release, however, is <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Impala</a>. Impala was announced last fall and is currently in beta release. <P> Reliable statistics on Hadoop market share aren't available, but there's no doubt that Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop is the most widely deployed. That's why Impala is so anticipated. Competitors MapR and Hortonworks are also working on SQL access to Hadoop with their <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-will-hadoop-become-dominant-platform/240151576">Drill and Stinger</a> projects, respectively. <P> Teradata's Enterprise Access for Hadoop options are part of its larger Unified Data Architecture, which also includes the Teradata Aster database. Aster blends SQL and MapReduce-style querying so you can handle time-series analyses, graph analyses, collaborative filtering and other big-data style analyses as well as SQL queries. Where the combination of Teradata and SQL-H will let companies blend data from data warehouses and Hadoop for known analyses, Aster is billed as an exploratory data discovery platform for uncovering latent insights in big data. <P> The downside of Aster is that it's a separate database that might require data movement from both Teradata and Hadoop. But Teradata insists that Aster lets companies do complex, MapReduce-style, big-data analyses with far fewer expensive, hard-to-find data scientist types. <P> The theme in all the recent announcements from enterprise stalwarts EMC, IBM and Teradata -- as well as from <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/commentary/hardware-architectures/oracle-cuts-big-data-appliance-down-to-s/240152630">Oracle</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/6-big-data-advances-some-might-be-giants/240149648">Microsoft</a> -- is that Hadoop is here to stay, so they're finding ways to play well together and make the most of the platform. <P> <i>When it comes to database deals, customers -- not vendors -- now have the advantage. Find out the results of our new Database Technology Survey. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/040813?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">State Of Database Technology</a> issue of InformationWeek: Oracle has refreshed its midrange and high-end Sparc servers, but that may not help its bottom line. (Free registration required.)</i>2013-04-12T09:06:00ZFlash is now cheaper than most spinning disks -- and dramatically speeds up application and database performance, IBM says.http://www.informationweek.com/storage/systems/ibm-flash-storage-hits-tipping-point/240152747?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Platform_as_a_Service_cloud_computingEverybody agrees that spinning disk drives will give way to solid state alternatives, but there's much more debate about what share of storage will eventually move to server DRAM, what share will move to flash-based storage options and just how soon disk drives will disappear. <P> IBM on Thursday made the case that flash technology has reached an economic tipping point such that it's already cheaper than most spinning disks when you take into account power, cooling, floor space and software costs. IBM also argued that by adding all-flash storage arrays as an option within storage area networks -- a move that involves little more than plugging in racks -- organizations can realize dramatic improvements in both application and database performance without changes to software. Parts of these claims sound similar to claims being made by SAP and Oracle, but more on their very different approaches in a moment. <P> "If you slide in a flash array into an existing environment, you get a step-function change in economics and performance without a change in any system software, but that's just step one," said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM System Storage & Networking. In step two you eliminate striping, caching and other storage tricks previously necessitated by slow disk access speeds to get a next level of performance improvement. And in a third step, you tweak applications to take advantage of flash-optimized databases to get even higher performance, Goyal said. <P> <strong>[ Want more on IBM hardware and acceleration options? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Inside IBM's Big Data, Hadoop Moves</a>. ]</strong> <P> IBM made this case as part of an announcement of a new family of all-flash storage arrays, as well as a $1 billion investment in flash research and the establishment of 12 storage centers of competency around the globe that will help customers run proof-of-concept scenarios. The arrays, acquired last August with IBM's purchase of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/systems/ibms-buy-of-tms-shows-ssd-appeal/240005722">Texas Memory Systems</a> (TMS), pack 6 terabytes to 24 terabytes of usable storage in a 1U, pizza-box-sized rack. The technology offers 74% lower power, cooling and floor space cost than spinning disks, according to IBM. <P> With their fast data-retrieval speeds, flash arrays are most effective in reducing I/O-bound applications. It's possible to reduce transaction times in line-of-business, ERP and analytic applications by up to 90%, according to IBM. The basic strategy is to move the hot data that becomes the biggest I/O bottleneck into flash while leaving less-active data on slower storage options. <P> Several customers on hand at IBM's announcement verified that the strategy works. Mobile network Sprint said its use of TMS flash arrays brought 45 times faster access speeds to customer records at its call centers without changing the Oracle database or CRM application in use. Thomson Reuters said flash arrays brought a 10X improvement in throughput and reductions in latency to its financial trading floor services. Grocery chain Kroger reported it, too, had seen a 10X improvement in database performance by using flash arrays. <P> Application and database giants SAP and Oracle have also had a lot to say about solid state memory performance gains in recent years. SAP is promising dramatic performance improvements by taking advantage of the DRAM in modern servers by way of its Hana in-memory database. Goyal acknowledged that DRAM is faster than flash, but he cautioned that it's also more expensive, power hungry and volatile, necessitating new high-availability and disaster-recovery procedures. <P> "A combination that takes advantage of memory and flash, like the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/inside-ibms-big-data-hadoop-moves/240152210">DB2 BLU Acceleration</a> announcement we made last week, will yield both economic and performance gains," he said. <P> As for Oracle Exadata, which relies heavily on flash, Goyal described it as a "closed, proprietary system" that necessitates the upheaval of migrating databases. By running Oracle Database in conjunction with IBM's flash arrays, Goyal said customers can improve performance, reduce the number of cores required -- cutting licensing costs -- or both. <P> IBM has plenty of competition in the all-flash array market, with rivals including EMC, NetApp, Hitachi, Dell and others either having or planning products in this space. Texas Memory Systems was one of the earliest to the market, shipping the technology starting in 2005. IBM said its technology stands apart in being enterprise hardened for greater durability and up to 10 times faster performance than the consumer-grade flash used by some manufacturers.