Profile of mmadsen

InformationWeek Staff

News & Commentary Posts: 23

Articles by mmadsen

Key Differences Between Data Integration and App Integration

3/23/2009
There's been a blurring of the lines between data integration in the BI environment and in the operational environment. You used buy ETL tools for the data warehouse while hand coding data integration for OLTP projects. Problems arise when vendors obscure the differences between data and application integration to broaden the appeal of their tools...
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Patent Lawsuits Plague ETL Vendors

3/4/2009
The biggest patent lawsuit ever to hit the ETL market is probably one you never heard of: JuxtaComm versus virtually every company in the market - a total of 16 defendants... Several ETL tools existed years before this patent was granted, so all the defendants are working together to fight this lawsuit. Actually, all the companies but one: Oracle...
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The True End User Experience for BI

12/15/2008
This video will help you understand the essence of the end-user experience for business intelligence, and the message is delivered in ten seconds. Keep it in mind as you deploy BI more broadly...
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Teradata's Tectonic Shift

10/21/2008
I was sorry to see last week's Teradata user conference come to a close... For me the biggest surprise was how far Teradata has shifted from their dogmatic view that an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is the only solution to BI problems and that you therefore only need one type of platform to meet these needs.
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Teradata Adds to a Growing Portfolio

10/16/2008
Teradata introduced the Teradata 1550 "extreme data appliance" at its conference this week. The appliance starts at 50 TB (based on compression) for a single node and can scale to 50 PB (theoretical data size). The 1550 is aimed at the very-large data volume problem, not so much typical data warehouse usage... The Teradata product family now covers everything from smaller projects to real-time large enterprise data warehouses.
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My Takeaway on Teradata's Keynotes

10/15/2008
I'm at the Teradata Partners conference this week. I consider it to be the best event in the BI market if you want to see a diversity of company presentations, particularly on more advanced topics. The official kickoff went through some interesting and entertaining moments and closed with a terrific keynote... Here's my quick takes on each of the talks:
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Open Source Blossoms at TDWI

9/2/2008
The people who say that open source has no impact or visibility in the data warehouse market were shown to be wrong at the TDWI conference in San Diego. Jaspersoft, Talend, Ingres and newcomer Kickfire all had booths at this event. That's a big change from no presence roughly 18 months ago. What's notable is that we're not talking about just BI tools...
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Talend Bows Data Quality Product

8/20/2008
Talend announced an open source data quality offering today. The company has been moving very quickly to fill out all of the basic components needed for a complete data integration suite. In June they delivered Talend Open Profiler for data profiling, and the Open Studio ETL tool contains changed data capture (CDC) features. That's a big expansion of functionality in short time...
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What the Microsoft-DatAllegro Deal Means for Customers, Vendors and BI

7/24/2008
By acquiring DatAllegro, Microsoft is filling a performance and scalability gap that has kept them from consideration in larger data warehouse deals... Regardless of any roadmap, the acquisition won't affect SQLServer users for at least two years... It will be hard to compete with Microsoft's deep pockets and a 100 percent SQLServer-compatible database...
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Microsoft's Mistake Buying 'Enron of Norway'

7/7/2008
I thought the billion dollar FAST deal Microsoft made was crazy based on my conversations last year with FAST about their products and prospects. The Microsoft presentation at the Independent Analyst Platform in Phoenix last week reminded me to follow up on things that have been sitting in the queue for a couple months.
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Spreadmarts and the Ideology of BI

6/2/2008
Excel is the devil and BI tools are the savoir. Spreadsheets are a satanic element we're trying to drive from unrepentant departments. This is because centralized data is good and distributed data is bad. Ideologies exist to simplify the world by trying to separate everything into two buckets: good and evil... Ever try to add a quick formula to a Web-delivered report?
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Security, the Cloud and the Data Warehouse

5/29/2008
"Doesn't DW-in-the-cloud suffer from the same fundamental problem as DW-as-a-Service in that you have to pump all of your proprietary, strategic, highly sensitive data outside of the firewall onto someone else's hardware?" James Dixon posted this question in response to my last post, and it points to a fundamental criticism that has been around since the first ASP started years ago...
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'In the Cloud' is the New 'as a Service'

5/27/2008
I've come to the conclusion that "as a service" is getting played out as a marketing term. The new and exciting term now being borrowed from the Web world is "in the cloud." While there is a difference between the two, many companies never figured out if they were SaaS or a managed hosting environment... I expect to see more confusing messages as vendors rush to the next buzzword.
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Is EMC Shaking up the DW Appliance Market?

3/6/2008
In a presentation planned for the upcoming EMC World conference in May, the storage vendor will introduce another entry into the warehouse appliance market through a partnership with ParAccel... On the competitive front, this is going to put pressure on hardware-based appliance vendors - companies like Netezza and Dataupia...
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Microsoft/Yahoo Combo Is Bad News for Web 2.0, Open Source

2/1/2008
Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is certain to shake up the online advertising, Web 2.0 and open-source markets... Yahoo has released tons of code via their developer programs and pushed some really innovative services aimed at Web developers... I'd expect less open source support out of them for a start... Here are some specific quotes from Microsoft's offer worth highlighting.
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Fire Low-Value Customers. No, Wait… Doh!

12/19/2007
The reasonable-sounding CRM conventional wisdom is that you should "fire your low-value customers," but it turns out to be not so reasonable after all. The theory is that low (or negative) value customers are a drain on limited resources, so getting rid of them should raise margins and make the company more profitable. Except it doesn't, according to a recent study by two Wharton marketing professors.
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ParAccel Lowers the Cost of High-Performance BI

12/4/2007
ParAccel announced top TPC-H benchmark numbers with Sun at the end of October, beating out the former leaders in both the price and price-performance. Not by a little, but by four times in performance with a big drop in cost. The fact that a little startup like ParAccel can enter the market with a database to support BI that beats the TPC-H results of all the major vendors should wake people up.
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IBM Acquiring Cognos: Why the Surprise?

11/12/2007
What will be interesting is how the IBM-Cognos deal changes the market. BI tools have been in need of a split, separating the user interface components from the data access components... By making the data access and query elements separate components from the UI, we can take advantage of the BI and data warehousing infrastructure from more than just reporting tools.
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The Teradata Conference Revisited

10/16/2007
Teredata has really been pushing the "Active" message: combining historical data with near-real-time to support operational BI... When it comes to blending the transactional nature of near-real-time with history, Teradata is way out in front of all the other database (and appliance) vendors. The latest release has lots of features that emphasize this.
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SAP Buys Business Objects: Who Wins, Who Loses?

10/8/2007
This is a great thing for SAP since they can now start taking in sales for BI where once it all went to third parties... It's good for Business Objects too, since this opens up the market for all those SAP accounts... It's not so great for Business Objects customers long term... This is definitely good news for stockholders since Business Objects said it will report earnings per share of 36 cents to 39 cents, well below projections of 51 cents per share [Reuters Estimates]...
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Web 2.0 Components Are Tomorrow's BI Front End

10/3/2007
Web 2.0 technologies are going to change BI, possibly undercutting demand for conventional BI software. People wonder why I keep saying this... The user interface side of Web 2.0 technology is the area that's going to affect BI vendors. You can get almost any display component you see in a dashboard or reporting tool as an embeddable widget.
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Mashups Inspire Creative IT Outbursts

9/19/2007
None of the shopping sites with which I'm familiar truly take advantage of the presentation opportunities of the Web. They merchandise online the same way they lay out shelves in a store. You filter by type of clothing, style, gender and size... I recently gave a presentation about Web mashups, BI and the blurring between the two. I showed ColorPickr, a nifty app that pulls images from photo site Flickr based on your choice of color from a palette.
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BI Trends and Highlights Seen at TDWI

9/11/2007
Every TDWI conference leaves me with insight into what to expect during the next year. At last month's World Conference in San Diego, the main trends I saw were... predictive analytics... data governance... data warehouse databases and appliances... open-source BI... clickstream analysis... GIS/location intelligence... and the Web 2.0 dark horse...
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