InformationWeek Stories by Doug Henschen

InformationWeek Stories by Doug Henschenhttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-06-18T10:10:00ZOracle Wins Case Against Third-Party Support ProviderJudge finds in Oracle's favor against ServiceKey and its CEO, Angela Vines, in case involving Solaris operating system support.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-wins-case-against-third-party-sup/240156837?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationOracle announced on Monday that it effectively won one in court, settling a case after a U.S. district judge for the Northern District of Northern California issued an injunction against Norcross, Ga.-based ServiceKey and its CEO, Angela Vines. The injunction prohibits ServiceKey and Vines from providing many services it offered as a third-party software support provider. Oracle filed a lawsuit against ServiceKey and Vines on February 12, 2012, claiming copyright infringement, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, violation of the Lanham Act, breach of contract, inducing breach of contract, and intentional interference with its service business. At stake in the case, as in several other recent and pending cases Oracle has filed against third-party support providers, is lucrative support revenue the company receives for ongoing software maintenance. ServiceKey had licensed a small number of Oracle Sun servers and it admitted in court that it had used its access codes to illegally download, copy and distribute Oracle's copyrighted Solaris operating system, including Solaris software updates and patches. ServiceKey also admitted to falsely advertising its ability to provide the copyrighted Oracle Solaris patches to customers and illegally trafficking in passwords to Oracle's customer support website. [ Want more on third-party support options? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/application-optimization/rimini-street-expands-support-to-oracle/231700287?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Rimini Street Expands Support To Oracle Database</a>. ] In her injunction, District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ordered that ServiceKey and Vines may not "give, receive, sell or otherwise provide to anyone any Oracle/Sun software and/or support materials, including any updates, bug fixes, patches, media kits or other proprietary software support materials, and including any patches, bug fixes or updates to the Solaris Operating System." The injunction also prohibits ServiceKey and Vines from falsely advertising that they can provide Oracle-branded support, including "Oracle Premier Support for Systems." No monetary damages were stipulated as part of the judgment against ServiceKey and Vines. That's a contrast to the $272 million judgment in Oracle's favor in a similar case against SAP and its now-defunct <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-rejects-272-million-sap-award-dem/232600469">TomorrowNow </a> subsidiary. That case, which has yet to be resolved, also hinged on copyright infringement, and SAP admitted liability for illegal downloads carried out by TomorrowNow. Oracle has yet another lawsuit pending against third-part support provider <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-sues-rimini-street-for-massive-th/222500155">Rimini Street</a>, charging the company with "massive theft." Rimini countersued Oracle, maintaining its innocence and insisting it operates within the legal parameters of customer software license agreements.2013-06-18T09:50:00ZMySQL Cluster Adds NoSQL OptionMySQL Cluster 7.3 brings a JavaScript connector, foreign-key support and a wizard-driven auto installer to a highly scalable database.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/mysql-cluster-adds-nosql-option/240156809?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationOracle on Tuesday announced a collection of must-have and nice-to-have upgrades with the release of MySQL Cluster 7.3, the high-scale, shared-nothing, auto-sharding version of the MySQL database management system. The key must-have is foreign key support, while one nice-to-have is a wizard-driven auto installer. A new JavaScript connector for NoSQL data access falls somewhere in between. NoSQL technologies are getting a lot of attention these days, so it's no surprise that Tomas Ulin, VP, MySQL Engineering, is quick to point out that the open source MySQL database has offered options for direct, NoSQL access to data since 2004. That's in addition to standard SQL access and querying, of course. "There's going to be part of your application where rapid development and a schema-less approach makes sense, and then there's going to be other parts of your application where you need SQL, you need structure and you need to be able to write complex queries without having to program it yourself," Ulin told InformationWeek. "With MySQL, we've shown that we can give you both." [ Want more on open source wars in the big data arena? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/oracle-mysql-upgrade-challenges-nosql-on/240147829?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle MySQL Upgrade Challenges NoSQL Onslaught</a>. ] The new JavaScript connector for node.js will make it simpler and faster to build services deployed across clusters, according to Oracle, and it adds to the list of NoSQL connection options. MySQL already offered connectors for direct access to the data store (bypassing SQL) via Memcached, Java, JPA and HTTP/REST. Adding JavaScript brings support for a popular language. As for that must-have foreign-key support, that's been on the Cluster Edition wish list for years, Ulin admitted. InnoDB, the default storage engine or MySQL 5.6 (the standard MySQL server product), already supports foreign keys, but the lack of this feature has held back the MySQL Cluster edition. "Foreign key support enables you to maintain consistency in relationships across multiple tables," Ulin explained. Lots of applications have foreign key dependency, and support ensures that related data properties are preserved. In a human resources application, for example, one table might be used for employees and another for all the valid departments within the company. When you add a new worker to the employee table, a foreign key relationship verifies that the department listed for that employee actually exists in the department table. Finally, the nice-to-have introduced with MySQL Cluster 7.3 is an auto installer that makes it much easier to install and configure the clustered database across multiple nodes, according to Ulin. You point the installer at the intended host computers and it automatically detects how many cores and how much RAM is available. "Many parameters have to be set when you deploy, and you previously had to iterate through the settings on every cluster," said Ulin. "The auto installer will suggest configurations based on best practices developed through the years, and if you're happy with those you can stick with the auto suggestions." Adding one more NoSQL connector to MySQL may not change many minds about the need for highly scalable NoSQL options such as Cassandra, Couchbase and Riak. But Ulin insists MySQL Cluster 7.3 has a strong case on scalability. "MySQL Cluster offers transparent sharding, high performance, you can just add more data nodes to make it scale and you don't have to bother about scaling in your application," Ulin said. "In the end, as applications mature, you're going to want to do complex queries with SQL at some point, so our story is a good one."2013-06-14T12:01:00ZBig Data Pioneers Get Big For Their BritchesDataStax and Cloudera say NoSQL databases and Hadoop are the future, but don't count out Oracle and company just yet.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/big-data-pioneers-get-big-for-their-britches/240156703?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationDataStax, the commercial support provider behind the Cassandra open-source NoSQL database, announced this week that is has seen "dozens" of companies migrate from Oracle Database and Oracle MySQL to Cassandra over the last few quarters. The reason it's happening, according to DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth, is that these organizations are seeking scalability, disaster avoidance and cost savings. I'll buy in on scalability and cost savings. Cassandra can handle immense scale with replication and redundancy across multiple, global data centers. As for costs, we reported on one <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/commentary/software/information-management/big-data-revolution-will-be-led-by-revol/240144268">DataStax customer</a> that spent about $250,000 to build an application that they estimated would have cost $2.5 million to build on their incumbent relational database. But the whole idea of presenting NoSQL as a replacement for relational databases struck me as a big reach. I see NoSQL as a hugely promising platform for a wide range of never-before-possible applications -- applications where schemaless technologies are a fit -- but it doesn't logically follow that the handwriting is on the wall for relational databases. DataStax' press release was careful not to get too carried away, but Bosworth wasn't holding back during an interview with InformationWeek. "We now count 20 of the Fortune 100 companies among our customers, and that's how you get into Oracle's world," said Bosworth. "We're dealing with enterprises that have done their mission-critical work on Oracle for years, and suddenly they're starting to pick different technologies." [ Want more on the future of the big data trend? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/big-data-revolution-will-be-led-by-revol/240144268?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Big Data Revolution Will Be Led By Revolutionaries</a>. ] It's not that Bosworth didn't have compelling arguments. He talked about how the scale of applications and the way people write them has changed, with a move away from strictly internal-facing applications with a few hundred or a few thousand users. Companies are looking beyond back-office apps, he said, and are focusing on customer-facing applications that are, almost by definition, always-available online applications with Web interfaces. "If you're in a back office counting money, Oracle applications are great for that -- that's what ACID [atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability] compliance and relational databases are written for," said Bosworth. "But if you're writing a new application to interact with your customers, devices or sensors across the country or around the globe, you're going to have a tough time making it scale geographically and from a performance perspective without breaking your budget." The three customers DataStax cited as examples of this purported move away from Oracle Database and MySQL were NetFlix, the well-known Internet movie streamer, OpenWave, a provider of messaging software, and Ooyala, which provides analytics, cloud-based encoding and content management tools for Internet video streaming. I would hardly characterize these as typical database customers. Are more conventional enterprises finding new, innovative and pioneering applications that were not possible on relational databases? Absolutely. We've shared notable examples including <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/metlife-uses-nosql-for-customer-service/240154741">MetLife's Facebook Wall-style view of its customers</a>, which consolidates some 70 disparate sources of data, yet was built and deployed in little more than three months. Is Bosworth vastly understating the continuing need for ACID-compliant relational databases that guarantee that transactions are processed reliably and in timely way? Quite obviously. NoSQL technologies have been around for decades, yet millions of organizations continue to rely on relational databases like Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server. Is the entire NoSQL community even prepared so support all those customers? DataStax, for one, currently has about 100 employees and 300 customers. "We may be small, but we're an open source company," Bosworth responded. "The reason the technology feels so much bigger and the implications of the movement are so much bigger and the adoption is so much faster is because of the accessibility of open source and the ability to ramp up your learning in that open source ecosystem faster than we ever could back in a proprietary world." Fine, but what about open source MySQL, which can take you a long, long way before you might have to switch to an alternative that can better handle Web scale, global applications? "Why take yourself down a path where you know that if you're successful, you're going to have problems down the road?" Bosworth asks. "If you can start with an approach that gives you room to breathe, why would you not?" Bosworth had some snappy comebacks, but have we really reached a tipping point? I think the "we're ready to replace Oracle" yarn was great for generating publicity. It reminds me of Cloudera's recent "unaccept the status quo" claim that the "center of gravity" is shifting toward Hadoop. Cloudera, the biggest name in Hadoop support, is on track to become a $100 million company this year. That's a rounding error on one quarter's worth of Oracle Database business, not to mention MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and PureData (Netezza), Teradata, EMC Greenplum, Amazon RedShift and other analytical database options. It's absolutely the case that the NoSQL technologies and Hadoop are poised for huge growth and that we've seen the promise of new modes of building applications and managing data. We're seeing exciting and inspiring innovation that will, no doubt, dramatically change the database landscape. But it's going to take five to 10 years or more to see mass migration, so let's not get ahead of ourselves. Yesterday’s innovative data center may be today’s money pit. Is it time for a new plan? Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/061013?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Data Center Decision Time</a> issue of InformationWeek: Data center consolidation is tough, as the government's experience shows. (Free registration required.)2013-06-13T13:30:00ZCray Brings Hadoop To High-Performance ComputingCray puts Intel's Hadoop software distribution on its CS300 cluster supercomputers.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/cray-brings-hadoop-to-highperformance-computing/240156637?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education<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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>Cray announced Thursday that it's putting Hadoop software on its supercomputers, bringing an "enterprise-strength approach" to "high-value Hadoop applications."Cray is joining the Hadoop crowd by pairing Intel's Hadoop distribution with the Cray CS300 series of high-performance cluster supercomputers. The resulting system, which will be available by the end of the month, will handle complex algorithms that go beyond basic storage and reporting that are "pushing the limits of [existing] architectures," said Bill Blake, senior VP and CTO of Cray, in a statement. "Organizations can now focus on scaling their use of platform-independent Hadoop software, while gaining the benefits of important underlying architectural advantages from Cray and Intel," Blake said. [ Want more on Cray's CS300 product line? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/cray-builds-a-budget-minded-supercompute/240154311?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Cray Builds A Budget-Minded Supercomputer</a>. ] Cray listed Intel Hadoop distribution advantages, including "greater security, improved real-time handling of data, and improved performance throughout the storage hierarchy," with the "greater than" and "improved" comparisons presumably being to unoptimized Apache Hadoop software and distributions thereof from the likes of Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and IBM. One of Hadoop's big cost advantages stems from the fact that it's generally deployed on clusters of commodity hardware, with the sheer number of servers and cores trumping the processing power of high-end boxes. Cray also relies on "standard" Intel servers, but CS300 clusters are quite a bit more exotic than ordinary racks, with some even featuring liquid cooling. What's more, Cray's software stack is expressly designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and high availability. Cray's least expensive <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/cray-builds-a-budget-minded-supercompute/240154311">CS300</a> starts at $500,000. "The convergence of data-intensive HPC and high-end commercial analytics is forming a new big data market IDC calls High Performance Data Analysis," said IDC analyst Steve Conway in a statement issued by Cray. "Pairing the Cray CS300 systems with Intel's Hadoop distribution creates a solution with the potential to tackle big data problems that would frustrate most clusters." Cray did not cite examples of Hadoop-on-Cray beta customers or specific industry scenarios calling for the ultimate in Hadoop performance. But it's evident that Cray is already entrenched in big data problems. Cray has Sonexion storage systems offering fast-data and big-data-movement capabilities. It also provides the HPC platform behind YarcData's Urika appliance for graph analytics. These influential and accomplished government IT leaders are finding ways to be cost efficient and still innovate. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/052013gov?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Government CIO 25</a> special issue of InformationWeek Government: Video surveillance isn't just about networked cameras anymore. New technology provides analytics, automation, facial recognition, real-time alerts and situational-awareness capabilities. (Free registration required.)2013-06-12T12:20:00ZHP Gets Its Big Data Act TogetherHewlett-Packard's 'HAVEn' ecosystem unites Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica and enterprise security, backed by management software and consulting services.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/hp-gets-its-big-data-act-together/240156516?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education<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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>Sometimes one plus one can equal three. That's the kind of math that Hewlett-Packard is betting on with HAVEn, a big data ecosystem announced Tuesday at the company's Discover event in Las Vegas.HAVEn loosely stands for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-20-new-big-data-possibilities/240155288">Hadoop</a>, Autonomy, Vertica, HP Enterprise Security and "n" number of applications being brought together in a framework. HP already had the component parts. The Hadoop distribution is from Hortonworks, but it's shipped and ready to run on a preconfigured HP appliance. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hp-missed-chance-to-dump-autonomy/240146707">Autonomy</a> is HP's software for unstructured data search and analysis. Vertica is HP's columnar, massively parallel processing analytical database, which is also available on a ready-to-run, expand-as-needed HP appliance. The Enterprise Security assets include ArcSight software for security monitoring and risk management. What's new with HAVEn is deeper technical connections and integrations among these products and, more importantly, a much more well-developed collection of "solutions" and supporting management software and services for making it all work together in the real world. [ Want more on Hewlett-Packard's budding recovery? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/windows-servers/hp-ceo-whitman-keeps-calm-carries-on/240155456?itc=edit_in_body_cross">HP CEO Whitman Keeps Calm, Carries On</a>. ] "The connectivity portions of HAVEn are hidden behind services, so from a user standpoint, you can focus on what data you're managing through a single administrative interface," said Luis Maldonado, director of product management for HP Vertica. New connections between Autonomy and Hadoop, for example, enable customers to bring unstructured data stored on Hadoop, such as social network feeds, to the Autonomy platform so they can explore the context, sentiment and intent expressed in that information. But the idea with HAVEn is to support all data types and a breadth of analysis approaches that can be applied across a range of industries. "We're bringing these technologies together so that it's becoming a platform that HP and systems integrators can support with solutions and service practices," said June Manley, HP's director of big data solutions. "We're enabling customers to look at analytics top down and bottom up by giving them all the core technologies that they need." IT managers are specifically being catered to with HP operations analytics that deliver cross-platform insight with data on a variety of HP products. HP says this enables customers to efficiently consume, manage and analyze the big data of IT operations, including data streaming from HP ArcSight Logger, the HP Business Service Management portfolio and third-party IT management tools. The HP Technology Services business unit has expanded its big data consulting practice to ensure optimal hardware performance across the HAVEn platform. The new consulting services address IT strategy and architecture with a special emphasis on implementing Hadoop; system infrastructure; and data-protection services, including not only backup and recovery but also risk management. In two more offerings announced Tuesday, HP introduced HP Vertica Community Edition, a free download of the database that lets would-be customers test a three-node deployment analyzing up to 1 terabyte of data before licensing and unlocking higher-scale capabilities. The second offering is HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup, an application that analyzes a customer's legacy data and spots opportunities to eliminate redundancies and reduce risk while also spotting possible big data analysis opportunities. "This makes sure that your legacy data is not duplicated and that if it has value that it's being managed and acted upon," Manley said. The cleanup analysis requires input from the customer, of course, as "business value" is in the eye of the beholder, but the technology determines the nature of the information, the system it belongs to and who owns the management of that data. Only then can managers understand whether that data can be deleted, potentially saving money on storage and administrative overhead, or whether it might fuel valuable big data insights. The depth and breadth of what HP is putting forward with HAVEn is matched and, in some areas, surpassed by competitors including <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/application-security/oracle-promises-enterprise-java-security/240155912">Oracle</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/ibms-vision-for-cognitive-computing-era/240155630">IBM</a>, with the latter offering a broader trove of software and services. But for HP customers, this is a step forward in turning a collection of assets into a cohesive approach to big data. Yesterday’s innovative data center may be today’s money pit. Is it time for a new plan? Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/061013?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Data Center Decision Time</a> issue of InformationWeek: Data center consolidation is tough, as the government's experience shows. (Free registration required.)2013-06-11T14:26:00ZDefending NSA Prism's Big Data ToolsThe more you know about NSA's Accumulo system and graph analysis, the less likely you are to suspect Prism is a privacy-invading fishing expedition.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/defending-nsa-prisms-big-data-tools/240156388?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationIt's understandable that democracy-loving citizens everywhere are outraged by the idea that the U.S. Government has back-door access to digital details surrounding email messages, phone conversations, video chats, social networks and more on the servers of mainstream service providers including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Skype and Apple. But the more you know about the technologies being used by the National Security Agency (NSA), the agency behind the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/government/nsa-prism-creates-stir-but-appears-legal/240156233">controversial Prism program</a> revealed last week by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the less likely you are to view the project as a ham-fisted effort that's "trading a cherished American value for an unproven theory," as one <a href="http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/06/10/big-data-nsa-spying-is-not-even-an-effective-strategy/">opinion piece</a> contrasted personal privacy with big data analysis. The centerpiece of the NSA's data-processing capability is Accumulo, a highly distributed, massively parallel processing key/value store capable of analyzing structured and unstructured data. Accumolo is based on Google's BigTable data model, but NSA came up with a cell-level security feature that makes it possible to set access controls on individual bits of data. Without that capability, valuable information might remain out of reach to intelligence analysts who would otherwise have to wait for sanitized data sets scrubbed of personally identifiable information. [ Want more on the Prism controversy? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/privacy/nsa-prism-inside-the-modern-surveillance/240156341?itc=edit_in_body_cross">NSA Prism: Inside The Modern Surveillance State</a>. ] As InformationWeek reported last September, the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise-applications/nsa-submits-open-source-secure-database/231600835">NSA has shared Accumulo</a> with the Apache Foundation, and the technology has since been commercialized by Sqrrl, a startup launched by six former NSA employees joined with former White House cybersecurity strategy director (and now Sqrrl CE0) Ely Khan. "The reason NSA built Accumulo and didn't go with another open source project, like HBase or Cassandra, is that they needed a platform where they could tag every single piece of data with a security label that dictates how people can access that data and who can access that data," said Khan in an interview with InformationWeek. Having left government employment in 2010, Kahn says he has no knowledge of the Prism program and what information the NSA might be collecting, but he notes that Accumulo makes it possible to interrogate certain details while blocking access to personally identifiable information. This capability is likely among the things James R. Clapper, the U.S. director of National Intelligence, was referring to in a <a href="http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/868-dni-statement-on-recent-unauthorized-disclosures-of-classified-information">statement on the Prism disclosure</a> that mentioned "numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties." Are They Catching Bad Guys? So the NSA can investigate data with limits, but what good is partial information? One of Accumulo's strengths is finding connections among seemingly unrelated information. "By bringing data sets together, [Accumulo] allowed us to see things in the data that we didn't necessarily see from looking at the data from one point or another," <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise-applications/nsas-big-data-platform-faces-enterprise/240008916">Dave Hurry</a>, head of NSA's computer science research section, told InformationWeek last fall. Accumulo gives NSA the ability "to take data and to stretch it in new ways so that you can find out how to associate it with another piece of data and find those threats." The power of this capability is finding patterns in seemingly innocuous public network data -- which is how one might describe the data accessed through the Prism program -- yet those patterns might somehow correlate with, say, a database of known terrorists or data on known cyber warfare initiatives. Sqrrl has supplemented the Accumulo technology with analytical tools including SQL interfaces, statistical analytics interfaces, text search and graph search engines, and there's little doubt the NSA has done the same, according to Kahn. Graph search, in particular, is a powerful tool for investigation, as the NSA itself revealed last month when it shared at a Carnegie Mellon technical conference an <a href="http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/2013/slides/big_graph_nsa_rd_2013_56002v1.pdf ">in-depth presentation</a> on the 4.4-trillion-node graph database it's running on top of Accumulo. Nodes are essentially bits of information -- phone numbers, numbers called, locations -- and the relationships between those nodes are edges. NSA's graph uncovered 70.4 trillion edges among those 4.4 trillion nodes. That's truly an ocean of information, but just as Facebook's graph database can help you track down a long-lost high school classmate within seconds, security-oriented graph databases can quickly spot threats. Kahn says a Sqrrl partner company that does graph analysis of internal network activity for security purposes recently identified suspicious activity using a graph algorithm. "Five days later, they got a knock on the door from the FBI letting them know that data was being exfiltrated from their network, likely by a foreign entity," Kahn reports. As we've reported, graph database technology dates back to the 1950s, but only recently has it advanced to truly big data scale, with <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/facebook-on-big-data-analytics-an-inside/240150902">Facebook exposing its Graph Search</a> capabilities in January and NSA sharing details of its graph search capabilities last month. Where prior intelligence techniques have largely been based on knowing patterns and then alerting authorities when those patterns are detected, security and intelligence analysts now rely on big data to provide more powerful capabilities than analytics alone. "Graph analysis is just one really good technique for finding unknown patterns in data," Kahn explains. Do You Trust The Government? In the end, assurances from Clapper, a former White House employee like Khan or even President Barak Obama may do little to assuage the concerns of privacy hawks, critics inside government or large swaths of American citizens. But those who known the technology used by the NSA know that Prism is not a simplistic, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/privacy/nsa-prism-inside-the-modern-surveillance/240156341 ">"collect first, ask questions later"</a> expedition, and it's not based on an "unproven theory." It's likely no coincidence that suppliers of data to Prism such as Google have also been able to uncover <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/google-aurora-hack-was-chinese-counteres/240155268">espionage directed by foreign governments</a>. In fact, a bipartisan <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/strike-back-if-china-steals-ip-companies/240155480">Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property</a> last month recommended increasing the budget of the FBI and Department of Justice to investigate trade theft, amending U.S. counter-espionage laws, and encouraging U.S. businesses to take the information security threat more seriously. One government insider informs InformationWeek that he knows with certainty that "semantic and visual analytics tools have prevented multiple acts of terrorism." That insight predates recent advances in graph analysis that are undoubtedly giving the U.S. Government even more powerful tools. Privacy concerns and the desire for checks on government access to private information must be considered, but we can't naively turn a blind eye to very real threats by not making the most of advanced big data intelligence tools now at our disposal.2013-06-11T09:16:00ZMarketo: Salesforce-ExactTarget Combo Won't WinCEO Phil Fernandez says Marketo is leading digital marketing while Salesforce.com is buying 'commodity' capabilities with its $2.5 billion ExactTarget deal.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/marketo-salesforce-exacttarget-combo-won/240156407?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Marketers are getting really good at using automation systems to deliver well-targeted, high-frequency marketing campaigns across multiple channels. The next big challenge, according to Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, is interpreting and appropriately reacting to each individual customer response with the right content at the right time. "Campaign automation products have historically been inadequate in this area," said Fernandez, who includes Marketo on that list. "Users have had to write really complex and brittle rule sets to try to create true, personalized interactions." As you might have guessed, Fernandez said Marketo, fresh off a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/tableau-marketo-cash-in-with-timely-ipos/240155204">$78 million IPO</a>, is now redefining cutting-edge capabilities with a new Customer Engagement Engine announced Tuesday. The engine eliminates complex rules, he said, so marketers can focus on developing the content while letting the engine intelligently guide the content and the timing or content to each and every customer action, keeping track of customer reactions across multiple channels, be it email, mobile, social or websites. [ Want more information on Salesforce.com's latest acquisition? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecoms-exacttarget-buy-equals-ma/240156028?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Salesforce.com's ExactTarget Buy Equals Marketing Clout</a>. ] What about Salesforce.com, Marketo's long-time partner, which last week announced plans to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecoms-exacttarget-buy-equals-ma/240156028">acquire ExactTarget</a> in a $2.5 billion mega-deal? Will that move bring Salesforce such state-of-the-art capabilities? Not by a long shot, said Fernandez, who characterizes ExactTarget as a leader in email delivery, a market that is now "getting commoditized," with prices falling from about $2 per thousand messages to 25 cents per thousand messages in recent years. Both Salesforce.com and ExactTarget declined to comment on Fernandez's take on their pairing, but they would no doubt point to the marketing automation capabilities ExactTarget picked up in October through its acquisition of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/marketing/pardot-ties-social-media-to-marketing-au/231600592">Pardot</a>. But while that company is more of a competitor to Marketo, Fernandez said it's not in the same league. "Pardot is at the low end of marketing automation, so we only see skirmishes with them among our smallest customers," said Fernandez. "It's fine for small business and first-time users, but Pardot hasn't aspired to serve global companies like American Express, GE, Google or other large companies that show up in our customer base." Marketo is one of many companies offering an opinion on the Salesforce-ExactTarget deal. The comments ranged from the "this confirms our strategy" variety, served up by competitors Brand Networks, Lattice Engines, Neolane and Responsys, to the "we have more complete/mature capabilities" type barbs, offered last week by Act On, Badgeville, Lithium and Zoho. Are Fernandez's comments just sour grapes? Turning to one analyst perspective, Gartner in April named ExactTarget as a "visionary" in its Lead Management Magic Quadrant based on Pardot capabilities. Oracle-Eloqua and Marketo, meanwhile, were the only two vendors in the report's "leaders" quadrant. Visionaries are lower on the Quadrant report's "ability to execute" axis, which hints that scale might be one area where the ExactTarget-Pardot combo had yet to prove itself. How is Marketo's Customer Engagement Engine upping the ante in personalized delivery? The engine sets an appropriate cadence for marketing messages in an automated, yet individualized way, according to Fernandez, with marketers specifying the content and order of messages and the engine figuring out which message to trigger, when. Technologies including the MongoDB NoSQL database, Hadoop, Solr search and machine learning make it happen behind the scenes, he said, but marketers need only follow the lead of the cloud-based application. If the goal is trying to generate consumer advocacy on Facebook or Twitter about a particular brand of salad dressing, for example, one marketing message might be about the health aspects of the product while another might be about how kids love the taste of the dressing and will thus eat their salad. In practice the marketer might find that customer A is responding to the health message while it's not sparking likes or tweets from customers B, C and D. The system keeps track of responses and can automatically cut over to the "your kids will love it" message for customers that haven't responded to the initial marketing message. "This is the reality of modern content marketing," said Fernandez. "Marketers are generating messages trying to get a result, and success depends on the system keeping track of the degree of engagement both across different customers and across different pieces of content relative to other content on social, email, phone and Web channels over time." The real challenge is handling all that at scale, with hundreds of messages presented to tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers across multiple channels. Fernandez said the Content Engagement Engine also can alert marketers that a particular message is no longer working, that one message is outperforming another or that X percent of customers have seen every piece of content on a particular topic, suggesting it's time to come up with new messages. During a conference call with analysts last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff asserted that the Pardot acquisition puts ExactTarget in a strong position in marketing automation, and he added that Pardot enjoyed high customer satisfaction ratings. Can Pardot be made to scale? "It's software, so of course it can [scale] up," Fernandez said, "but the algorithms in our Customer Engagement Engine were built for big, hard problems, and I don't see any of that DNA in Pardot." Benioff also noted that Salesforce will likely avoid additional acquisitions over the next 12 to 18 months as it digests ExactTarget, which makes it clear that it will focus the company's attention on integrating and scaling up everything that the acquired company has to offer. The first fruits of that effort will undoubtedly show up at the Dreamforce conference in December, if not sooner. We'll be anxious to hear customer testimonials about high-scale automation deployments.2013-06-07T09:02:00ZSalesforce.com Appoints Oracle Vet As PresidentOracle's long-time sales kingpin Keith Block lands top spot at Salesforce.com one year after a nasty split with his former employer.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-appoints-oracle-vet-as-pre/240156223?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationOne year ago, Keith Block resigned as executive VP of North American Sales & Consulting at Oracle. On Thursday, Salesforce.com announced that Block will become that company's president, vice chairman and a member of the board of directors. Block was the top dog of Oracle's sales organization for years, credited with leading a transformation to a specialized sales model to support specific industries, solutions and market segments. "We are thrilled to welcome Keith to Salesforce.com," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a statement. "His exceptional track record leading sales, consulting and engineering teams makes him a powerful addition to our world-class distribution and leadership team." Block's departure from Oracle wasn't pretty. By all accounts <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-rushes-out-q4-results-top-exec-de/240002281">Block was forced out</a> after derogatory remarks surfaced in internal messages. Those remarks were publicly shared in the court case with HP tied to Oracle's decision to stop making software for Itanium-chip-based servers (a decision subsequently reversed by court order). In one internal instant message shared as evidence during the trial, Block commented that Oracle "bought a dog" when it acquired Sun Microsystems. In another exchange, Block slighted Oracle president Mark Hurd for generating "lots of noise, not much results" and for not traveling outside the U.S. often enough. [ Want more on Salesforce.com's latest cloud acquisition? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecoms-exacttarget-buy-equals-ma/240156028?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Salesforce.com's ExactTarget Buy Equals Marketing Clout</a>. ] Block now joins one of Oracle's biggest rivals, and it's likely no coincidence he's doing so roughly one year to the day after resigning, as he likely had a non-compete agreement with his former employer. Salesforce is clearly hoping Block can help the company build out its fast-growing sales organization, reach into new markets and tap into some of Oracle's most lucrative accounts. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/salesforcecom-secrets-8-apps-help-you-do/240148303">Salesforce</a> has been growing at a torrid, double-digit pace in recent years, growing from $1 billion in annual revenue in fiscal 2009 to $3 billion in 2013. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-shares-slide-despite-reven/240155535">Benioff's oft-stated goal</a> is to grow Salesforce into a $10 billion company, but keeping up those heady growth rates will only get harder as the company gets larger. "I'm incredibly excited to join Salesforce.com and help pave the way to $10 billion by delivering innovation, growth and customer success," Block said in a statement. Block is taking a big step up in corporate roles at Salesforce as vice chairman and a member of the board of directors. He was a member of Oracle's executive committee but was otherwise focused on operational matters. Block's appointment at Salesforce is certainly another juicy episode in the ongoing Silicon Valley soap opera. Will he set the tone from above or take more of a hands-on approach? Will an already-successful sales team easily take to Block's hard-charging leadership style? Will Block make Salesforce even more of a magnet to Oracle's top salespeople, exacerbating that company's uneven financial results over recent quarters? Tune in tomorrow.2013-06-06T11:20:00ZNoSQL Vs. Hadoop: Big Data Spotlight At E2Hadoop is the panacea while NoSQL databases are the unsung heroes. Execs from MetLife, 10Gen, Informatica and Datameer discuss platform envy at E2 in Boston.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/nosql-vs-hadoop-big-data-spotlight-at-e2/240156170?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education<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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>A NoSQL database helped MetLife build in 90 days the kind of consolidated customer view it had dreamed about for nearly 10 years. Similarly, Constant Contact took three months to build a social marketing services app on NoSQL that would have required nine months to build on a conventional database and with higher levels of ongoing admin work. Stories like these have me thinking that NoSQL databases don't get the credit they deserve as practical workhorses of the big-data revolution. That's just one of the topics I'll discuss in a series of keynotes at the June 17-19 <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/">E2 Conference</a> in Boston. The emphasis of three "fireside chats" on June 18 will be on getting to the business value in big data. Who better to kick off the conversation than John Bungert, the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/metlife-uses-nosql-for-customer-service/240154741">MetLife</a> executive who led the insurer's effort to build a Facebook-Wall-style interface for customer service. The application brings together data from more than 70 disparate administrative systems, claims systems and other data sources, and it rolled out to 200 call-center and claims admin staff in April. The Wall is expected to reach 3,000 more employees this summer, and there are plans to eventually add customer-self-service capabilities. MetLife chose MongoDB for the document-intensive Wall project, but it's using other NoSQL databases, including Cassandra, elsewhere within the organization. I'll discuss tradeoffs and NoSQL-style breakthrough business applications with Bungert and with 10gen VP of corporate strategy Matt Asay. [ Want more on bold claims about Hadoop? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software/information-management/cloudera-declares-end-of-data-warehousin/240156059?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Cloudera Declares End Of Data Warehousing Era</a>. ] In contrast to NoSQL, Hadoop seems to be getting all the credit it deserves and then some. By many accounts, it's the be-all and end-all of big data, despite the fact that the lion's share of deployments today are little more than digital landfills. All too many organizations have yet to find nuggets of gold in those landfills, yet outfits like <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software/information-management/cloudera-declares-end-of-data-warehousin/240156059">Cloudera</a> are declaring that Hadoop is the new "center of gravity" in data management, displacing (though not replacing) the enterprise data warehouse. Informatica CTO James Markarian will be at E2 to offer one of the most reasonable, nuanced and hype-free perspectives I've heard on big data trends, but I do intend to challenge him on whether Hadoop can actually provide the business benefit of dramatically reducing ETL costs. Saving money is not the sort of inspiring, never-before-possible story we've come to expect from big data, however, so I'll be asking Markarian and Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf to share their most eye-opening, real-world success stories. Datameer offers tools to find those latent nuggets of gold on Hadoop clusters, and Groschupf confirms that the IT-centric "Hadoop-is-cheaper-than-relational" yarn is no longer enough. We need to get to the business value in big data. That's why every Hadoop distributor now has a SQL-on-Hadoop strategy, even if most of the related software has yet to be proven and available. Also on the <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/track/big-data-and-analytics">Big Data and Analytics track at E2</a> is the June 19 presentation on "Fresh Approaches to Data Science." I'm pretty excited about this one because the panelists include Will Cukierski of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/commentary/software/business-intelligence/kaggle-winners-tapped-as-data-analytics/240150254">Kaggle</a> and Omer Trajman of Wibidata. Kaggle has helped Allstate, GE, Merck and plenty of others get to pretty incredible analytics breakthroughs by crowdsourcing their problems. Allstate, for example, gained ideas for risk models that were more than 200% more effective than the insurer's incumbent champion risk models. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/5-big-wishes-for-big-data-deployments/240153214?pgno=3">WibiData</a> provides open-source libraries, models and tools that make it easier to store, extract and analyze data on HBase, the Hadoop framework's increasingly important NoSQL database. That brings us full circle to the topic of NoSQL versus Hadoop, but it's not an either-or, one-is-better-than-the-other proposition. Both of these platforms have their place in big data and are usually complementary. It's strictly an observation about giving credit where credit is due and a good conversation starter on the topic of big data. 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! 2013-06-05T09:06:00ZCloudera Declares End Of Data Warehousing EraCloudera CEO Mike Olson urges companies to reconsider their data-management approach as the "center of gravity" shifts toward Hadoop.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-declares-end-of-data-warehousin/240156059?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div> Cloudera CEO Mike Olson took the stage Tuesday at the Cloudera Forum in San Francisco to extol companies to "unaccept the status quo" of enterprise data warehousing (EDW). "The place that enterprises will store their data is shifting toward Hadoop," Olson told InformationWeek last week in a preview of the speech. "We're seeing customers not replace, but, rather, rationalize their enterprise data warehouse investments by adding Hadoop alongside." Olson also announced a new Cloudera Search capability built on Apache Solr, but the larger purpose of the presentation was to question assumptions about enterprise data management. EDWs are "increasingly costly and difficult to maintain," Olson said, because the volume and variety of data now encountered is "totally out of whack" with what relational data warehouses were designed to handle in the 1990s. EDW costs are upward of $20,000 per terabyte, versus $1,000 to $2,000 per terabyte for Hadoop clusters, including hardware, according to Olson. Thus the time is right, he said, to reconsider where most data is stored, transformed, cleaned, prepared and interactively queried. [ Want more on changes in data management? 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> ] "All of those workloads are sucking cycles away from the stuff that the EDW platform does very well," Olson said, citing high-powered analytics and cube-based analyses as the key roles that EDWs will continue to handle. The announcement of Cloudera Search expands the list of Hadoop platform capabilities. Tapping the open-source Apache Solr search engine, Cloudera said it will support natural language keyword searches and faceted navigation of data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Apache HBase. The tool runs on the Hadoop cluster and will be useful for exploring data and finding subsets of information that might be targeted for large-scale MapReduce processing, Olson said. "When you have petabytes of data, folders don't work anymore, and we've all learned from Google that, when you need to find some bit of information, you just go search for it," he said. "Anybody can use this and you don't need to define ontologies or taxonomies to set it up." Cloudera Search has been in private beta for several months, with Monsanto cited as a company using the software to support a high-scale search application. The software will be distributed as part of Cloudera's Hadoop distribution, but management capabilities for search will be an add-on offering that's part of the vendor's commercial Cloudera Manager software. Cloudera competitor MapR recently announced its own answer to search-on-Hadoop, also based on Solr, but Olson discounted it as "an announcement not supported by shipping code." Cloudera Search is now available for download as part of a public beta test that's expected to last three months. As for Cloudera's premise of offloading <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load">ETL</a> and basic BI workloads and data volumes from more expensive EDWs onto Hadoop, the idea is not shocking or new. The strategy of turning Hadoop into the enterprise data hub has been articulated by outspoken practitioners such as <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717">Phil Shelley</a>, CTO at Sears Holdings. The topic also has been openly debated by vendors, with leading database suppliers such as <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-debate-end-near-for-data-warehousing/240142290">Teradata</a> and IBM shrugging off Hadoop as just one more arrow in the data-management quiver that enterprises will need to address big-data opportunities. With the costs of Hadoop what they are and the scale of data growing exponentially, there's little doubt that Hadoop's popularity will grow. Time will tell just how soon and to what extent it will displace EDWs from accustomed roles such as transforming and storing the bulk of historical data and supporting the basics of BI and reporting. 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! 2013-06-04T10:50:00ZSalesforce.com's ExactTarget Buy Equals Marketing CloutSalesforce.com strikes $2.5 billion mega-deal to extend the breadth and depth of its marketing cloud services.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecoms-exacttarget-buy-equals-ma/240156028?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div> Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced a whopping $2.5 billion deal to acquire ExactTarget, a 14-year-old marketing automation and campaign management vendor based in Indianapolis. The deal, which is set to close by the end of July subject to regulatory approvals, will dramatically increase Salesforce.com's marketing capabilities, helping the company to respond to rising digital marketing expenditures. "The CMO is expected to spend more on technology than the CIO by 2017," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com in a statement. "The addition of ExactTarget makes Salesforce the starting place for every company and puts Salesforce.com in the pole position to capture this opportunity." By combining ExactTarget's digital marketing capabilities with Salesforce.com's sales, service and social marketing capabilities, Salesforce said it will create "a world-class marketing platform across email, social, mobile and the Web." [ Will Salesforce.com ever be profitable? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-shares-slide-despite-reven/240155535?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Salesforce.com Shares Slide Despite Revenue Growth</a>. ] The acquisition comes at no small price, as Salesforce is paying a 53% premium over ExactTarget's Monday stock closing price $22.02 on the New York Stock Exchange. Under the terms of the deal, Salesforce.com will offer $33.75 per share for the outstanding shares of ExactTarget. Salesforce recently raised $1 billion through a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/what-will-salesforcecom-buy-with-1-billi/240150589">bond offering</a> for the express purpose of bolstering its marketing capabilities through acquisitions. The ExactTarget deal, Salesforce.com's largest acquisition to date, will blow through all of that cash and more. ExactTarget had revenues of $292 million last year and was projecting revenue of $317 million in 2013 -- a comparatively modest growth rate of 8.5%. The company's cloud-based marketing platform helps companies integrate customer data from multiple sources to power digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including e-mail, mobile, social and Websites. ExactTarget has more than 6,000 customers, including Coca-Cola, Gap and Nike. Salesforce marketing capabilities were previously limited to social channels, powered by capabilities gained through the acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media. In contrast, rivals including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAS and Teradata, among others, have much broader, multi-channel marketing capabilities, most on the strength of acquisitions over the last three years. Benioff recently acknowledged the gaps in the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-shares-slide-despite-reven/240155535">Salesforce Marketing Cloud</a>, and he said acquisitions would be required to meet the goal of reaching $1 billion in annual revenue. Marketing cloud revenue is currently at about $100 million, he said. Will the ExactTarget deal be worth it? Salesforce said the acquisition will increase total revenue by just $120 to $125 million in the current fiscal year, as revenues won't accrue until the fiscal third quarter. Salesforce also anticipates a $65 to $70 million reduction in revenues related to adjustments to billed and deferred revenues. Salesforce is clearly counting on growth to make the deal pay off in the long term. "Marketing was the fastest-growing CRM category in 2012, growing at 21% -- more than four times the software industry forecast norm in 2012," said Gartner analyst and VP Yvonne Genovese in a statement issued by Salesforce. "We believe this growth will continue and marketing will be the largest growing CRM category through 2017."2013-06-03T12:44:00ZMicrosoft Debuts Next-Gen Server SoftwareMicrosoft announces in-memory-enhanced Microsoft SQL Server 2014, supports hybrid cloud with Windows Server and System Center upgrades.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/microsoft-debuts-next-gen-server-softwar/240155929?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-vs-microsoft-8-cloud-battle-lines/240155221"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/996/Intro_Microsoft_v_vmware_01_tn.jpg" alt="VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines" title="VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Microsoft may be stumbling in the consumer space with Windows 8 and Surface tablets, but it's full steam ahead in the enterprise market as the company announced the release of public-beta versions of Microsoft SQL Server 2014, Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center R2. The announcements were made Monday at the company's TechEd Conference in New Orleans. Microsoft's enterprise server and tools business is in an enviable position, with $19 billion in annual revenue and growing 10% over the last year, according to the company. Microsoft SQL Server has 46% of the database management system market (by license numbers -- Oracle leads on revenue), while Windows Server is the operating system for 74% of the gigantic x86 server market, according to Microsoft. The upgraded products Microsoft is releasing as public community technology previews this week are aimed at keeping the growth going. Where Windows Server and System Center are concerned, Microsoft's big bet is that customers will embrace a hybrid cloud world with a mix of on-premises, private-cloud and public-cloud deployment. With Microsoft SQL Server 2014 the promise -- as is always the case with databases -- is higher scalability and improved performance. [ Want more on Microsoft versus Oracle? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/microsoft-sql-server-2012-vs-oracle-cust/232800476?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Vs. Oracle: Customers Voting</a>. ] The first big gain in Microsoft SQL Server 2014 is improved resource governance. With SQL Server 2012, for example, it was possible to allocate server CPU power and memory usage, but the 2014 upgrade adds allocation of I/O capacity. This will enable administrators to assign specific database tables to fast storage options, such as flash storage arrays or solid-state disks, for better performance in I/O-intensive applications. The SQL Server tuning advances will help Microsoft catch up to the Smart Flash Cache and Infiniband network speeds Oracle is delivering with its Exadata Database Machine. Microsoft is forging ahead of Oracle on another front: in-memory transactional processing. The technology preview previously known as <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/microsoft-in-memory-move-challenges-sap/240062566">Project Hekaton</a> is now simply known as the In-Memory OLTP Engine built into Microsoft SQL Server 2014. With this new in-memory option, database administrators will be able to speed selected transactional applications and processes by moving associated database tables into memory. And to help customers take advantage of this feature, Microsoft said it has developed built-in diagnostics that reveal which tables and stored procedures would benefit from the move into memory. Microsoft is in a middle-ground position between Oracle and SAP with this in-memory move. Oracle can exploit flash memory with its Exadata Database Appliance, but it has yet to announce plans to take advantage of the much-faster random access memory (RAM) built into modern processors. SAP, in contrast, offers its all-in-memory Hana database, which runs on industry-standard x86 servers, but begs for state-of-the-art, memory-intensive configurations. With Microsoft SQL Server 2014, companies won't have to upgrade hardware or change applications to take advantage of in-memory performance, according to the company. With that said, there's only so much memory to go around on legacy server deployments, so it remains to be seen just how much customers will be able to improve performance without upgrading hardware. Edgenet, a company that participated in the private beta of SQL Server 2014, has reportedly gained real-time inventory-management capabilities through the upgrade. The company sells inventory management software to big-box retailers; before the database upgrade, it was tough for the company's applications to keep up with fast-moving inventory data. With fast, in-memory transaction processing, retailers can count on up-to-the-second accuracy on what is and isn't available in a store, according to Microsoft. In another SQL Server 2014 upgrade, administrators can create, with a right click of a mouse, backup and disaster-recovery instances of the database in Microsoft's Azure cloud from the SQL Server Management Studio. That will save time and effort compared to much more complicated produces for cloud backups supported in SQL Server 2012, according to Microsoft.The public preview of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 will be available as a free download early this month, the company announced, while general availability is expected early next year. With Microsoft's focus on hybrid deployment, the Windows Server 2012 R2 upgrade delivers software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities that let companies see on-premises and Azure-cloud-based resources as a single, virtual network. In addition, virtualization improvements make it easier to move virtual machines between on-premises data centers and the cloud, according to Microsoft. Bringing technology proven on the Azure public cloud to its enterprise products, Microsoft said a Windows Azure Pack embedded in Windows Server 2012 R2 gives admins the same API and VM provisioning tools used on its public cloud. That reportedly makes it easier to provision virtual machines at scale, giving hosting companies, for example, the ability to support dense website deployments with many sites cost-effectively running on a single server node. [ Want more on Microsoft's cloud plans? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/productivity-applications/microsoft-office-365-steps-on-google-ent/240154836?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Microsoft Office 365 Steps On Google Enterprise Ambitions</a>. ] In another important upgrade, Windows Server 2012 R2 delivers granular support for tiered storage. The feature lets admins assign hot and cold data to the appropriate storage option from the management console, whether that's RAM, flash, SSDs or slower spinning discs. (This is the underlying capability that enables SQL Server 2014 to assign database tables to specific tiers of storage.) Microsoft server and tools executives are apparently wise to the fact that it's a hybrid world, as the key theme in System Center 2012 R2 is cross-platform device management. Where System Center is known for managing Windows, the R2 upgrade manages Windows, Apple iOS, Android and other devices from a single administrative interface and reporting infrastructure. The upgrade does not fill the niche of mobile-device-management systems, but it helps support bring-your-own-device scenarios by allowing administrators to publish, secure and monitor corporate applications across multiple operating systems. The Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 public previews are available immediately, and the general releases are expected before the end of the year. In a final bit of news from TechEd on Monday, Microsoft announced the debut of BizTalk services on Windows Azure. BizTalk supports application and business-to-business process integration. Supply chain data-exchange and transformation is a common use of BizTalk, so the availability of BizTalk services on Azure offers an option for meeting spikey, high-scale data-transformation workloads, according to Microsoft. Summing it up, the biggest news is clearly the net-new in-memory and I/O control capabilities in Microsoft SQL Server 2014. The database is also being delivered much sooner than many expected, making it clear that Microsoft is intent on putting its in-memory stake in the ground before Hana gains too many converts and Oracle comes up with its answer to in-memory database performance. 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! 2013-05-31T12:09:00ZThe IBM Way On AnalyticsIBM analytic services size up HR data from multiple sources to predict employee satisfaction and retention. Warning: Consulting is required.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/the-ibm-way-on-analytics/240155850?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationThere's the IBM way, and then there's how most of its software rivals address customer needs. The difference in capsulized in new IBM Survey Analytics and IBM Retention Analytics capabilities announced Thursday that take on employee satisfaction and retention as a starting point. The IBM way is to take a comprehensive, holistic approach, usually supported by consulting services. In an application-centric view of the world, in contrast, software vendors tend to look at company needs one RFP (request-for-proposal) at a time. Plenty of human capital management (HCM) applications, for example, offer built-in analytics, but whether they're on-premises systems (like Oracle PeopleSoft or SAP HCM) or cloud-based systems (like Workday), the analytics are focused on what's managed by those system. IBM is an integrator of HCM systems and other applications (ERP, CRM, etc.), and as an analytics specialist it invariably looks to integrate and analyze information from across many systems, not just one app. [ Want more on advanced analytics? 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>. ] The advantage of IBM's cross-systems approach is that it provides a more comprehensive view. In the case of HCM, for example, many companies have more than one application, with talent management and performance management increasingly handled by cloud-based apps such as Cornerstone, Oracle Taleo and SAP SuccessFactors. Last year IBM spent $1.3 billion to join the crowd mentioned above by acquiring <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/industry_analysis/inside-ibms-13-billion-kenexa-buy/240006296">Kenexa</a>, which addresses talent management, compensation management, employee engagement and leadership assessment with on-premises or cloud-based software. The Survey Analytics and Retention Analytics services ingest information from across many systems, with HCM systems and Kenexa or third-party talent-management apps being just two options. A key twist with these new services is that they handle unstructured information, like open-ended questions in surveys and comments on internal company collaboration systems. It just so happens that Kenexa has a practice in conducting survey-based company-culture and employee-satisfaction assessments, but plenty of third-party firms do survey work as well. In the HR context, Survey Analytics helps discern employee engagement and satisfaction, with a visual dashboard providing a visual heat map of sentiment trends broken down by employee segments. Retention Analytics crosses HR system data with internal collaboration data to spot high-attrition areas and the core issues behind those high attrition rates so companies can take steps to retain critical talent. Survey Analytics and Retention Analytics also can be applied outside of the context of HR, and that's where the benefit of IBM's comprehensive approach really kicks in. Customer satisfaction and retention are the most obvious opportunities, in which case CRM systems, customer-satisfaction surveys and public-social-network data becomes the focus of the analysis. Distributor-dealer satisfaction and retention might be another play. Multiple problems are addressed by one analytic capability rather than creating multiple silos of analysis. Another differentiator, at least in contrast to the analytics build into most apps, is that IBM generally focuses on predictive capabilities, as is the case with Survey Analytics and Retention Analytics. "Having 'built-in analytics' tends to mean that you can do reporting, slice and dice the population in various ways and see what each segment of the population is doing," explains Murray Campbell, senior manager of business analytics at IBM Research. "Predictive analytics provides forward-looking insight into what's going to happen." Beyond just extrapolating trends in data, for instance, predictive analytics can account for seasonality, historical patterns, the latest economic conditions, sentiment scores and other inputs to help you anticipate talent gaps or growing consumer demand that you might have otherwise missed. The downside of IBM's approach is that everything starts with a consulting engagement, and it's not a one-and-done deployment. Consultants will size up the available data sources and the need and potential for various analyses and then the data-integration work begins. Because they're sophisticated predictive capabilities, Survey Analytics and Retention Analytics will require data-modeling work, both up-front and over time. "Initially these capabilities are delivered as part of a consulting engagement ... and the models are refreshed as either market circumstances change or the data available changes or the organization changes its priorities," Campbell explains. Finally, Survey Analytics and Retention Analytics are more open-ended propositions than packaged products or clearly priced services. They can be deployed on-premises or hosted in IBM's cloud. Though they're described as "services," Survey Analytics and Retention Analytics are essentially custom-built services rather than the quickly deployed, cloud-based services that description might evoke. As described by Campbell, 80% of the service is repeatable -- with the data inputs and algorithms likely to be used known in advance -- but the final 20% is specific to each organization. So the question for customers is, are you likely to be satisfied with the separate analytic dashboards built into or offered as add-on options to HCM and CRM systems? Or do you want more sophisticated, predictive capabilities that can span multiple capabilities and take in unstructured survey and social sources? If you do want more sophisticated and flexible analytics, IBM isn't the only option. SAS, of course, also puts analytics first and treats all IT systems as potential data inputs. Among apps vendors, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/oracle-makes-its-big-play-for-analytics/232800252">Oracle</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sap-jumps-on-predictive-analytics-bandwa/232800164">SAP</a> have recently amped up their predictive capabilities, and they also have business intelligence platforms can integrate data from multiple systems. Unstructured data analysis capabilities are also becoming prevalent. SAS does it, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecoms-social-enterprise-vision/231600625">Salesforce.com</a> gained customer-centric capabilities with the acquisition of Radian6 two years ago and Oracle and SAP have added sentiment-analysis capabilities within the last year. Are the other guys as geared up to provide consultative services and highly customized and tuned deployments (or is it all about the deal)? For that kind of care you might have to turn to a systems-integration partner -- something IBM has in house. Let your need for consulting and ongoing support, your desire for a one-stop shop and your budget be your guide.2013-05-30T10:29:00ZSalesforce.com Sees Company Communities As Intranet KillersSalesforce says Company Communities spell the end for legacy intranets.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-sees-company-communities-a/240155791?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Early this month Salesforce.com introduced Salesforce.com Communities and proclaimed "the end of legacy portal software." On Thursday the company introduced Salesforce Company Communities and proclaimed "the end of company intranets." Are these appeals a decade out of date? Where Salesforce Communities are outward-facing to partners and customers, Company Communities are inward-facing to employees. Both types of Communities are built on the Salesforce Chatter collaborative platform combined with the content-management, process-management and application development and deployment strengths of the Force.com platform. Company Communities go beyond Chatter collaboration and networking to give employees social and mobile access to content such as HR policies, travel guidelines, Force.com-based custom apps and AppExchange partner apps. "Employees can get the answer to pretty much any question right on their mobile device -- except for the information on their corporate intranet, which is trapped on a website circa 1999," said Jim Sinai, Salesforce.com' platform product marketing executive, in a phone interview. [ Want more on the social, mobile replacement for portals? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforce-communities-portal-killers/240154044?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Salesforce Communities: Portal Killers?</a> ] Nice pitch, but Salesforce.com seems to be forgetting all the corporate collaboration platforms adopted over the last decade. So what about the IBM Connections, Microsoft Yammer, Jive and other such systems? "The employee social networks are great for helping peers to connect to each other, but where they're not full intranet replacements is in connecting to critical business information," said Sinai. "Salesforce has a platform where customers are building applications, so we're in a unique position to help customers bring everything together." We'll get to all those apps in a moment, but another potential overlap for Company Communities is Human Capital Management (HCM) and talent-management suites that combine multiple applications. These come in cloud-based varieties, like IBM Kenexa, Oracle Taleo, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday and Salesforce.com's own lightweight Work.com performance management system. On-premises versions of these systems are also still selling, with Oracle PeopleSoft and SAP HCM being leading examples. What about these systems? "A lot of the applications that the HR vendors are going after are things that employees don't need to access on a daily basis," Sinai remarked. "We're going to integrate with all those applications and make them available with a single sign on, but they're not core apps that employees need to get their job done." So just what apps might be exposed through a Company Community? They fall into three categories, says Sinai. First, there are custom apps that you might build on Force.com, like a help-desk ticking applications or expense-approval apps or vendor-management apps for bring new suppliers onboard. Second, there are AppExchange apps built on Force.com and offered by third-party vendors, such as Concur (travel and expense management), ServiceMax (field service management), and DocuSign (document approval workflows). Finally there are third-party apps not built on AppExchange, like Workday and other HCM or ERP systems. Here Salesforce offers multiple integration options including SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), the OAuth protocol, Salesforce.com's own Canvas approach to Force.com platform integration (which will be released next week) and standard API integration. A big part of Salesforce.com's pitch is that it has the best options for mobile delivery. It's promising to aggregate all the apps and information you need, give it a single sign-on and quickly expose it through smartphones and tablets. This is clearly appealing, and the company certainly does have a mobile leg up on home-grown websites, SharePoint-based intranets and collaboration and HCM vendors that tend to focus only on the information that they manage. The two remaining questions are, is it any easier to expose these apps through Company Communities than it would be through an intranet or collaboration platform, and is the Company Community compelling enough to either chuck or overlap with existing options including the intranets and collaboration system you've been trying to stretch into comprehensive resources? "From a development and support perspective, I think we're going to see a lot of changes and evolution over the next 12 to 18 months," said analyst Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research. "Having fewer code bases to maintain, applications to support and development environments to learn is better for IT." Companies are seeing significant ROI by integrating collaboration, content-sharing and applications on the Force.com platform, said Wettemann, but she also noted that Microsoft is investing heavily in Yammer. Another vendor tackling this problem in a novel way is <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/infor-bets-500-million-on-enterprise-app/240153410">Infor</a>, which recently introduced its Ming.le application. "Infor and Salesforce are the two vendors that have instrumented their collaboration to handle not just human beings or case records, but also devices within a network being able to contribute information and content," Wettemann said. The blend of humans, processes and devices gets into the promising "Internet of things" vision, but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. For now, Salesforce is pitching Company Communities as intranet killers. So the most obvious target is companies that truly haven't tried to move beyond the 1990s and primitive internal-facing Web sites. It may be that many or even most companies have tried to do better. But it's better for Salesforce to present Company Communities as the replacement for the oldest technologies and not as something that will make people wonder why they spent money on all those collaboration technologies.2013-05-29T10:12:00ZCFOs Join CMOs In Tech Power GrabLike CMOs, CFOs increasingly shape technology selections, Oracle-Accenture study finds. CIOs must find opportunities to collaborate.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cfos-join-cmos-in-tech-power-grab/240155702?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationChief financial officers' level of influence over technology decisions has increased during the last three years. This is the key finding of a just-released study, and it's a familiar trend, as the same thing is said to be happening with chief marketing officers. Some CIOs might view increasing CFO and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/why-cmo-tech-spending-is-good-for-it/240147374">CMO influence</a> over tech decisions as a threat, but executives at Oracle and Accenture, the co-sponsors of the CFO study, urge CIOs to view the trend as an opportunity to educate and cooperate with C-level peers. The CFO study was carried out by Longitude Research, which surveyed 930 CFOs from organizations of various sizes and around the globe. Where most CFOs were wrapped up in cash-flow analysis and cost-control efforts from 2008 until 2010, the study found that many are now looking beyond tactical financial concerns. "About a third of the CFOs we talked to are playing a leading role in building a rationale for business transformation, and almost 60% indicated that investments in things like big data and analytics are going to be a source of competitive advantage," Scott Brennan, global managing director of Accenture's Finance & Enterprise Performance unit, tells InformationWeek. [ Want more on effective C-level cooperation? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/6-rules-to-help-cios-cmos-be-smart-partn/232301493?itc=edit_in_body_cross">6 Rules To Help CIOs, CMOs Be Smart Partners</a>. ] Transformation is about "working with line-of-business managers and IT to help companies drive more innovation," explains John O'Rourke, VP of product marketing at Oracle. Mobile and cloud computing initiatives also fall under the umbrella of transformation, he says, but big data breakthroughs such as sentiments analysis are seen as being closely tied to financial results. "People are looking at what customers are saying about their products, their services and their company and they're linking it directly to budgeting and forecasting processes," O'Rourke explains. "If you're launching a new product, for example, that insight could impact your forecast, your pricing and what customer segments you decide to target." CFO influence over IT is nothing new, O'Rourke admits, as some surveys show that up to half of CIOs are already reporting up through the CFO. (Of course, there is history here: In the early days of IT, one of the first power struggles involved IT chiefs fighting to report to the CEO, not CFO.) Among the Oracle-Accenture study respondents, 38% say IT now reports to the CFO's office, and 84% say cooperation between CFOs and CIOs has increased during the last three years. "They have to work together to decide how to reduce the cost of IT operations and shift more of the budget into innovation and pursuing growth," says O'Rourke. The survey shows that 44% of CFOs are involved in decision on IT infrastructure purchasing and more than 50% are leading the purchase decisions on ERP. Similarly, Gartner has famously forecasted that CMOs will be outspending CIOs on technology by 2017. Marketing execs are influencing the selection of CRM, marketing automation and analytic systems. How should CIOs adjust to the growing role and influence of CFOs and CMOs in company strategy and related technology decisions? "There's a lot of new technology that these executives need to be aware of, so the onus is on the CIO to educate them on the return on investments in things like cloud, big data and analytics," says Brennan of Accenture. "The CIO may have to become as much an influencer as a decision maker." That influence should be focused on putting a consistent strategy in place and avoiding too many isolated, one-off decisions that don't adhere to the plan. CMOs and marketing departments are notorious for going their own way on technology decisions, but "there has to be coordination" says O'Rourke, "to make sure everyone's thinking strategically about which things stay on premises, which get deployed in the cloud." The same goes for data management and software development standards, which are best kept consistent and in sync. An upside of having CFOs or even chief operating officers or chief executive officers involved is that as IT budgets grow and decisions get scrutinized by executive-, management- or even board-level committees, oversight and accountability from senior executives can help projects happen and help ensure than CIO-endorsed standards are enforced.2013-05-28T12:46:00ZServer Sales Slump Continues, Gartner SaysWorldwide server revenue declines 5% in the first quarter, with Oracle as loss leader and Dell bucking the trend.http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/windows-servers/server-sales-slump-continues-gartner-say/240155633?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationThe server market ended 2012 in decline, and it didn't snap out of it in the first quarter of 2013. That's the key finding of the latest Worldwide Server Shipment report released by Gartner on Monday. "Budgets are restricted and server infrastructure spending is clearly not the highest priority for many organizations," said Adrian O'Connell, research director at Gartner, in a statement. Server unit shipments declined 0.7% compared to the first quarter last year, while revenue declined 5%. High-end servers, particularly those in the RISC/Itanium Unix category, suffered the biggest drop, with unit shipments off 38.8% and revenue down 35.8% from the same period last year. The two largest Unix server manufacturers, IBM and Oracle, were dragged down by the trend. IBM's Unix server revenue was off 32.3% to $841 million on the quarter (down from $1.24 billion a year earlier). That contributed to a 13.6% slide in total server revenue for IBM to $3.01 billion from $3.49 billion in the first quarter last year. It also reduced <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/ibm-sales-dragged-down-by-missed-deals/240153222">IBM's server revenue</a> market share to 25.5%, down from 28.0% last year, and ahead of HP, which had $2.95 billion in server revenue and 25.0% of the market in the first quarter. [ Want more on Oracle's next-gen Unix servers? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/unix-linux/oracle-sparc-t5-cant-make-sun-rise/240151815?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle Sparc T5 Can't Make Sun Rise</a>. ] Oracle's Unix server shipments were down 60.4% to 7,459 units in the first quarter, reducing revenue in that category 38.3% to $280 million from $382 million a year earlier. The drop could be explained by anticipation of Oracle's late-first-quarter release of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/unix-linux/oracle-sparc-t5-cant-make-sun-rise/240151815">Sparc T5</a> and M5 servers, the replacements for earlier-generation T4 and M9000 servers. Oracle's total server revenue across all categories dropped 27.2% to $538 million, down from $739 million in the first quarter of 2012. <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/news/2013/05/Gartner_Server_Shipments_1Q13_chart.gif" width="600" height="161" alt="Chart: Worldwide: Server Vendoe Revenue Estimates, 1Q13 (U.S. Dollars) - Gartner" title="Chart: Worldwide: Server Vendoe Revenue Estimates, 1Q13 (U.S. Dollars) - Gartner" /></center> Shipments were flat for x86 servers at 2.29 million units, while revenue increased 1.8% to $9.11 billion from $8.95 billion in the first quarter of 2012. These servers are the backbone of distributed systems based on commodity hardware (such as Hadoop and NoSQL deployments) that are displacing high-end server sales. Indeed, the "self-build" category within this segment saw a 34.7% increase in unit shipments and a 35.4% increase in revenue to $434 million for the quarter. Dell's focus on x86 servers helped it outperform competitors that rely on the RISC/Itanium sales. Dell shipments increased 2.6% to 516,355, up from 503,450 a year earlier. Revenue increased 14.4% to $2.12 billion, up from $1.85 billion in the first quarter of 2012. Looking at results by region, conditions were weakest in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), where units were down 6.8% and revenue declined 9.6%. The Asia/Pacific region and the United States had shipment and revenue increases of 7% and 1.7%, respectively. The increases were not enough to offset declines in all other geographies. "The reality for server vendors is that spending levels are very low and there is severe weakness in the high-end segment," O'Connell said. "The outlook for 2013 remains challenging."2013-05-24T10:02:00ZSAP Loses 'Cloud DNA' As Lars Dalgaard Steps DownSuccessFactors founder and CEO resigns from SAP Executive Board and will leave the company June 1.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-loses-cloud-dna-as-lars-dalgaard-ste/240155555?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationSAP announced Friday that Lars Dalgaard, head of its cloud operations, is parting ways with the company, stepping down from the executive board and leaving effective June 1 "to become an investor." When SAP acquired SuccessFactors in 2012 for $3.4 billion, it asked Lars Dalgaard, that company's founder and CEO, to join the company's executive board. It was vote of confidence that Dalgaard would bring what SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott described as "the cloud DNA and leadership [SAP] needed." "Since the acquisition of SuccessFactors, an SAP company, Lars Dalgaard has brought his unsurpassed passion, leadership and execution excellence in the cloud business to SAP," said SAP in a statement. "He will continue to play an active role as an advisor to the SAP Cloud business and will stay closely involved in the future development of SAP's cloud strategy." SAP stated that co-CEOs McDermott and Jim Hageman-Snabe, two executives who built their careers in the traditional, on-premises software business, will become the executive board sponsors for SAP's cloud business. [ Want more on SAP's "cloud truth teller?" Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/saps-ugly-bydesign-baby-gets-prettier/240004542?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP's Ugly (ByDesign) Baby Gets Prettier</a>. ] Rumors of Dalgaard's departure circulated at SAP's Sapphire Conference earlier this month, but Snabe told InformationWeek the executive's absence from the event was tied to the recent death of Dalgaard's father. "Lars is very important for our cloud," Snabe said. "He's going through a phase in his life where he's prioritizing how he's spending his time, but we have a very strong team reporting to him ... and we're not losing momentum in that business." One analyst speculating about Dalgaard's departure at Sapphire said it "wasn't a matter of if, but when." By many accounts, Dalgaard was a bit of a loose cannon for SAP, slamming SAP's earlier cloud efforts with SAP Business ByDesign and publicly displaying impatience with the pace of change. Having pocketed billions through the acquisition of SuccessFactors, Dalgaard is certainly in a position to become a serial entrepreneur guiding his own new company. It's likely any earn-out agreements Dalgaard might have signed to stay on with SAP for a specified period of time after the SuccessFactors acquisition have since expired. Dalgaard could not be reached in time for this story. SAP also announced a series of personnel restructuring moves highlighted by the consolidation of all development activities under the direction of executive board member Vishal Sikka. SAP said the moves will enable SAP to "accelerate innovations powered by the SAP Hana platform" and "drive a cloud-first approach for the development of line-of-business applications."2013-05-24T08:48:00ZSalesforce.com Shares Slide Despite Revenue GrowthSalesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff takes the long view while Wall Street reacts to a lower-than-expected outlook.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-shares-slide-despite-reven/240155535?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Salesforce.com on Thursday reported a 28% year-over-year increase in revenue to $893 million for its first quarter ended in April. Earnings per share on the quarter also were in line with estimates. Nonetheless, the company's stock was punished in after-hours trading because the firm's second-quarter forecast called for slightly lower earnings than financial analysts expected. In addition to the double-digit revenue gain, Salesforce reported a 33% year-over-year gain in cash flow and a 30% increase in deferred revenue. Yet the company's stock was off more than 6% after the market close because the company expects second-quarter revenue in the range of 11 cents to 12 cents per share. Analysts were expecting at least 12 cents in the current quarter. Measured by generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), Salesforce lost $67.7 million, or 12 cents per share, in the first quarter, compared to a net loss of $19.5 million, or 4 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. One reason Salesforce.com struggles with profitability is that it is making big bets that have yet to pay off. In the area of marketing, for example, Salesforce spent more than $1 billion acquiring <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/salesforcecom-acquisition-points-to-mark/229400634">Radian6</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-buys-buddy-media-to-extend/240001412">Buddy Media</a> over the last two years, yet the company's Marketing Cloud is currently a $100 million-annual-revenue business. The goal it to grow it to $1 billion, but that takes a commitment, said company CEO Marc Benioff during a conference call with financial analysts. [ Want more on Salesforce.com marketing ambitions? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecom-caps-record-year-eyes-acqu/240149775?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Salesforce.com Caps Record Year, Eyes Acquisitions</a>. ] "When we're in quarter one, quarter two or even quarter five or six after buying a small company, that's not when we're [judging] whether it's a success or a failure," he said. "It's year three or four when we can really judge it. In our industry, people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade." Benioff offered no apologies for what he described as "another great quarter" that put the company "well on its way to its first billion dollar quarter." He repeatedly referenced Gartner's recent recognition of Salesforce as the market-share leader in CRM, having surpassed SAP as the biggest seller of that application (whether on-premises or in the cloud). Benioff also reiterated Salesforce.com's recently forged "customer company" strategy, which he said sets the firm apart from "The Windows company," "the Hana company" and "the Exadata company," his description for Microsoft, SAP and Oracle, respectively. "We want to enable our customers to help their customers connect in a new way for sales, service and marketing on a new customer platform," Benioff said. "We have to show that we're different by taking any device that they show us, rapidly deploy an application on that device and make it world class." One lesson for Salesforce and other tech vendors this week is that pleasing Wall Street is an exercise in managing expectations. On Wednesday, for example, Hewlett-Packard reported a slew of declining revenue figures, yet the company's stock shot up 17% on Thursday because it beat its earnings-per-share forecast by 5 cents. Salesforce, by contrast, posted a slew of highly positive revenue figures with a cautious earnings forecast just for the second quarter. Salesforce also raised the low end of its revenue guidance for the full year to $3.83 from $3.82 billion, but it seems Wall Street is no longer dazzled by double-digit revenue gains. It's all about the profits.2013-05-23T09:24:00ZHP CEO Whitman Keeps Calm, Carries OnHewlett-Packard's second quarter sees big sales declines, but profits exceed forecast and CEO Whitman says problems are under control.http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/windows-servers/hp-ceo-whitman-keeps-calm-carries-on/240155456?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Cool Products At Interop</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) </div>  HP had few positive figures to report during a conference call with financial analysts on Wednesday, but one key figure, non-GAAP earnings, rose 11%. The 87 cents earned per share exceeded the high end of HP's 80- to 82-cent forecast and was a sign that the company's "fix and rebuild" plan is working, said CEO Meg Whitman. Whitman sounded comfortable, at ease and in control. She said the company's performance is much more predictable than it was last year, the first year of her tenure at HP. In another sign that financial stability is returning, the company reported a 44% increase in cash flow to $3.6 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2012. Most other numbers were not as good. Net quarterly revenue declined 10% to $27.6 billion from $30.7 billion in the same quarter last year, according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Net GAAP earnings declined 32% year-over-year to $1.1 billion. GAAP operating margins dropped 1.4 percentage points from the year-earlier quarter to 5.8%. In results by business unit, HP's Personal Systems revenue was down 20% from last year, with Windows 8 failing to lift PC sales, particularly in the consumer segment, which was down 29%. Enterprise Group revenue was down 10%, with a 12% decline in industry standard server sales and a 13% drop in storage revenue. HP's Enterprise Services business was down 8%. Software revenue was down 3%, with a 23% drop in new license revenue. [ Want more on HP's embrace of Android? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/hp-slate-android-tablet-pros-and-cons/240149260?itc=edit_in_body_cross">HP Slate Android Tablet: Pros And Cons</a>. ] The slogan "Keep Calm And Carry On" comes to mind. It was posted around London when all hell was breaking loose during the Battle of Britain. HP is restructuring amid a shift away from PCs, an enterprise move toward cloud computing and new types of servers and plenty of unfavorable macroeconomic trends. Whitman is HP's Churchill, saying "we shall never surrender the PC business; we will fight to compete profitably in servers, networking, storage, software and services." Whitman pointed to bright spots including a 1% increase in networking revenue, a 1% increase in printing revenue and robust gains with new products including <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/windows-servers/project-moonshot-can-new-server-line-rev/240152487">Moonshot</a> low-power servers, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/systems/hp-launches-3par-array-migration-softwar/231600069">3Par</a> midrange storage systems and <a href="http://www.networkcomputing.com/software-defined-networking-comparisons/hp">HP software-defined network</a> (SDN) products. She also detailed progress on efforts to control costs, like the restructuring program that will see 26,000 employees exit the company by the end of this year. But HP isn't just cutting its way to earnings-per-share targets, she insisted. It's also "protecting its investment in HP's future. You can see that investment in products like Moonshot, multi-function printers, OfficeJet ProX, SDN, low-tier and mid-tier storage and strategic enterprise services," she said. HP's competitors aren't making a return to profitability any easier. "This quarter you saw Dell completely crater their earnings," Whitman said of that company's <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/desktop/dell-posts-weak-earnings-services-growth/240155126">79% drop in profits</a> last week -- clearly grabbing for market share as it's poised to go private. "Maybe that's what you do when you're going private, but it is not what you do if you're running a big, publicly held company that is trying to create the financial capacity to invest in innovation." HP has been getting aggressive on the consumer front, introducing Android-based tablets to counter the slide in PC sales. "Having Android products helps a lot," Whitman said. "The $169 <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/hp-slate-android-tablet-pros-and-cons/240149260">Slate 7</a> covers a segment of the market that we didn't have before." In other segments HP is walking away from some deals, Whitman said, but she noted that the company is redoubling its efforts to be more competitive, with responsive pricing and products that are "appropriately featured rather than over featured." HP's multi-year makeover will require ongoing assessment of margin versus market share, she said. "We're going to be focused on the deals that are sticky as opposed to the deals that are transactional [with] no long-term relationship," she said. "Meg has done an excellent job executing in what has been a difficult environment," Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co., told <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/hp-forecast-tops-estimates-as-cost-cuts-counter-pc-slump.html">Bloomberg</a>. "The Street is giving them a pass on this year and perhaps even into next. But the market would like to see a return to growth in 2014."2013-05-22T09:06:00ZIBM Watson Gets Call Center JobIBM Watson Engagement Advisor advises service reps or "talks" directly to customers to improve the service experience.http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/ibm-watson-gets-call-center-job/240155321?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Cool Products at Interop</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) </div>  Do you call in with customer-service questions or complaints? Don't be surprised if one day soon the synthesized voice on the other end of the line says, "This is Watson; How can I help you?" IBM announced Tuesday the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a new version of the company's Jeopardy-playing, cognitive computing technology in a version designed to improve the customer service experience. The technology can interface with company service reps, for agent-assisted service, or it can interact directly with customers. An "Ask Watson" feature built into the Engagement Advisor will enable customers to ask questions, provide feedback to guide purchase decisions or troubleshoot problems by interacting with the system, according to IBM. "Companies tell us that their customers are sharing more and more information about themselves through Twitter, Facebook and reviews, yet the quality of service is going down and customers are getting frustrated," said Manoj Saxena, general manager of IBM Watson Solutions, during the launch event in Nashville, Tenn. "We believe Watson is a great answer to start intermediating this problem." [ Where does Watson fit in the future of technology? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/ibm-ceo-rometty-shares-vision-of-big-dat/240150326?itc=edit_in_body_cross">IBM CEO Rometty Shares Vision Of Big Data Era</a>. ] At least three attributes differentiate Watson Engagement Advisor from text analytics and other customer-support systems, according to Saxena. First, Watson can understand natural-language questions -- either spoken or written in English -- and it responds with not just answers but evidence and confidence levels in those answers. Second, Watson can engage across channels, be it phones, tablets, websites, messaging or email. Third, Watson learns over time and serves customers better because it can personalize the customer experience. As a cognitive computing technology, Watson does have to be trained, but Saxena pointed out that IBM started using Watson commercially in <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/ibms-watson-could-be-healthcare-game-cha/240148273">healthcare</a>, among the toughest challenges it could find and a domain that sees more than 2 million pages of research published on cancer alone each year. "We've had half-a-dozen contact-center customers guiding us on the design, and we've found that the problem is significantly easier because we're generally dealing with only gigabytes of data and because the language is much more plain English than you encounter in medicine," Saxena explained. The giant Watson system that played Jeopardy was the size of a master bedroom, but IBM says it has shrunk it down and can run deployments on a single-server appliance. Companies can tap into Watson Engagement Advisor as a cloud-based service or as an on-premises deployment. Either way, the goal is to have the system up and running within six weeks and delivering break-even ROI within six months, Saxena claimed. IBM listed beta customers including ANZ financial services of Australia and New Zealand; U.S.-based media ratings firm the Nielsen Company; Royal Bank of Canada; and mobile network provider Celcom of Malaysia. "We are pleased to explore with IBM how Watson can enable smarter, faster financial recommendations -- yielding a customer experience that is simple, personalized and steeped in data-informed insights," said Joyce Phillips, CEO of global wealth and group managing director at ANZ, in a statement. The Watson Engagement Advisor offering is part of IBM's three-year-old Smarter Commerce initiative, through which it's addressing marketing, sales, procurement, supply chain and service issues tied to increasingly digital consumers. The company has spent more than $3 billion in acquisitions in the domain, including the purchases of Coremetrics, Emptoris, Sterling Commmerce, TLeaf and Unica.2013-05-22T09:06:00ZHadoop 2.0: New Big Data PossibilitiesHadoop 2.0 will move beyond batch processing to support interactive, online and streaming applications. But don't let warnings about YARN tie you up in knots.http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/hadoop-20-new-big-data-possibilities/240155288?cid=SBX_iwk_related_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationHadoop 2.0 will be announced within a matter of days, and a new YARN framework component at its core promises to "take Hadoop beyond MapReduce," according to Arun Murthy, chairman of the Apache committee overseeing the release. Moving beyond slow, iterative MapReduce processing is obviously a good thing, but just what are the new possibilities? Better SQL querying, graph analysis and stream processing are all on the short list, according to Murthy, a Yahoo veteran who co-founded Hortonworks. He describes YARN (a slightly-off acronym for Yet Another Resource Manager) as a kind of large-scale, distributed operating system for big data applications. As is typical with operating systems, there's some question about what will and what won't work with YARN, but more on that later. Most Hadoop adopters are treating the platform as a data lake or ocean for all company information, says Murthy, but they want to be able to use the information in multiple ways roughly falling into four categories: batch, interactive, online and streaming. "As you look through the entire life cycle of that data, and as data is coming in, you want to process it quickly and efficiently and tackle whatever application you have in mind," Murthy says. [ Want more on Cloudera's answer to analysis on Hadoop? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-impala-brings-sql-querying-to-h/240153861?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Cloudera Impala Brings SQL Querying To Hadoop</a>. ] SQL is an example where human-interactive queries come in, and that could be through Hive. HBase, the Hadoop NoSQL database, is an online processing option. Storm (developed by Twitter) is a stream-processing option. Apache Giraph is an option for graph analysis. Spark is an option for high-speed, in-memory analytics on top of Hadoop. MPI is a modeling framework used for assessing risk, optimizing pricing and other advanced analytic applications. And then there are what Murthy calls the "great big honking batch jobs across six, nine or 12 months of data where you're processing hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes of data." That's where MapReduce comes in. "All of these things have been refactored to work on top of YARN," says Murthy. Of course Hive, HBase and other options have been available alongside MapReduce for some time, but before Hadoop 2.0, the system was designed to be a single-application system, setting up competition for resources. Run a complex Hive query or one of those great big honking MapReduce jobs and you're likely to lock up resources and prevent any other application from running with anything like predictable performance. YARN's job is to allocate resources across all the applications running on top of Hadoop to enable them to run simultaneously and with consistent levels of service to end users. This extends to supporting internal or external service-level agreements, quality-of-service standards and administrative control, according to Murthy. "Instead of having [simplistic] queues for each of your classes of applications, you can decide how much resource you want to give to which class of application," he explains. The only caveat with YARN is that it's part of the Apache Hadoop framework and is, therefore, designed to allocate resources to Apache Hadoop components. Where does that leave Cloudera Impala, Pivotal HAWQ and the many other SQL-on-Hadoop developments that may or may not become part of Hadoop? In the case of Impala, for example, the core query engine is shipped under Apache license, but Cloudera's Enterprise Real-Time Query (RTQ) management console for Impala is commercial, subscription-based tool. "It's absolutely conceivable that something like Impala or Pivotal HAWQ could come into the YARN resource-management framework," Murthy says promisingly, but then he adds the caveat. Speaking as an executive of Hortonworks -- a company that adheres strictly to open-source code and that competes with Cloudera, Pivotal and others adding commercial components to Hadoop -- Murthy warns that "with a bolt-on system like an Impala or a HAWQ, you reinvent everything built into YARN." With YARN inside Hadoop and a separate management system outside of the platform, the question becomes, which system will control the resources and will these services be duplicative?You could use YARN to allocate resources to Impala, for example, but then Enterprise RTQ would manage the concurrent queries running inside Impala. "If these queries went directly to YARN alone -- and you can look at how it works with Hive and Stinger, for example -- you no longer have two systems managing resources on the cluster and you don't have to reinvent everything from multi-tenancy to security and all of those things," Murthy says. This is a Hortonworks take on Hadoop, as that company is sticking with Hive and working on project Stinger as a way to drive faster query performance (45X in recent tests, according to Murthy). Impala, HAWQ and other SQL-on-Hadoop projects are offering alternatives to Hive that don't rely on MapReduce running behind the scenes (as is the case with Hive). With last month's release of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-impala-brings-sql-querying-to-h/240153861">Cloudera Impala</a>, company CEO Mike Olson said of Hive "we don't believe that it's going to be possible to drive down latencies and improve performance sufficiently via that platform." This is a side issue that doesn't take anything away from support of Hadoop 2.0 or the value of YARN. We've asked Cloudera, MapR and others for their positions on YARN, and thus far the statements of support are universal. Cloudera is not only contributing to YARN development and shipping a preview version in it's software distribution, according to Charles Zedlewski, VP of products, it's also "undertaking some developments in Impala to better take advantage of YARN. With the way Impala was designed there is no overlapping resource management or security." MapR is "working with the community to enhance YARN and make it more valuable," said MapR VP of Marketing Jack Norris. "For example, we are the primary contributors to Apache Drill, which is the YARN-based SQL-on-Hadoop solution." (Drill is in development and will be MapR's answer to Cloudera Impala and Stinger-improved Hive). Customers will inevitably rule the outcome if there is any debate. If most organizations are determined to control Hadoop resources using YARN, it will be easy enough for commercial tools to be rearchitected to defer to YARN resource management controls. If proprietary tools offer some measure of added value, we just might see overlapping administrative controls. It won't be the first time. The main point on the pending release of Hadoop and YARN is that the platform is maturing, Murthy maintains. It's a step that will help move the platform beyond the early Web-company implementations into the diverse demands of the enterprise market. "YARN makes it easy for a lot of applications to come into the Hadoop ecosystem and it gives you a significantly better return on your Hadoop cluster," he says. "You can manage applications one way, operate one way, monitor one way and drive down the cost of running your entire data architecture."2013-05-20T10:02:00ZTableau, Marketo Cash In With Timely IPOsTableau 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_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  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. 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. "People all over the world and in every profession and company size feel like they're swimming in data," Chabot told InformationWeek. "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." 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. [ 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>. ] 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. "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. 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. "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 InformationWeek. 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. 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. 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. 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. "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">Silicon Valley Mercury News</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 Vows Hana Is Ready To Run ERPSAP 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_mostpopular_Data_Management_educationYou 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?" 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. 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." 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. 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. [ 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>. ] 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. 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. Granted, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database have to work with an incredible diversity of applications whereas Hana is most likely to be used almost 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.) 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 InformationWeek. "We have very rigorous processes around quality and around announcing something as generally available, and I feel very good about where we are." 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. "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. 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. "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. 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. "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. 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. 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. 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. 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. "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." 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. 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 Gives ERP A FaceliftSAP 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_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  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. 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. 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. 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. [ 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>. ] 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. "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. 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. 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. 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 NoSQL For Customer Service BreakthroughMetLife 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_mostpopular_Data_Management_education <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> <div class="storyImageTitle"> Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  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. 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. "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. 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. [ 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. ] 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. 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. 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. 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. "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." 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. 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. "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. <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> <div class="storyImageTitle">5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  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. "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. 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. [ 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>. ] 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. "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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.