Letter Drop

Out With the Old? Not So Fast

In "Set Disruptors on Full" (December 4, 2004), Neil Raden makes the reader sit up and take notice by envisaging a world where the familiar concepts of present-day data warehousing technologies will all but disappear. He highlights the inadequacies of current concepts and discusses new technology. He argues that the new will replace the old.

I don't agree with him, however. The industry throws a lot of buzzwords at us, and most of them don't translate into widely adopted technologies. Although EAI and EII have their place in the IT infrastructure, I don't believe they'll replace traditional data warehousing tools and technologies, at least not in the next five years. I take this position for two reasons. First, the new technologies aren't yet robust and scalable, and they're difficult to implement. Second, there would be a lot of inertia within the industry in giving up on the current investment and embracing the new technology unless a substantial increase in ROI can be proven. This cycle will take five to 10 years at best. But, then again, Raden's article is precisely targeted at nonbelievers like me.

Raden brings up an interesting perspective that readers would benefit from understanding. The article should invoke a lively debate between those of us who swear by traditional data warehousing technologies and others, who believe that the new data integration technologies will prevail over the old.

Ganesh Variar
Lead analyst
Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon

Oracle vs. PeopleSoft

"PeopleSoft: Succeed or Secede" is an excellent article. Robert Kugel correctly points to legal and licensing issues that could easily thwart a new PeopleSoft. In fact, those issues — and Oracle's ability to tie a new PeopleSoft up in court for years — could be the dealbreaker in Kugel's scenario.

I look forward to more on the topic as it develops.

Name withheld by request
Montvale, NJ

Corrections

We made two errors in the 2004 RealWare Awards article (December 4, 2004). Under Best Business Process Management Application, the finalist entry for Virgin Entertainment Group and Microsoft should have read: "To get on top of an inventory shrinkage problem that was partly related to employee theft, Virgin worked with Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2004 to create a reporting solution that features real-time data monitoring, suspicious activity alerts and long-term trend analysis."

In the Best Intelligent Customer Relationship Management Application Category, we inadvertently left out the Merit Award Winner for Customer Data Integration. Sutter Health and Initiate Systems won this award. With a growing customer base of approximately 10 million individuals, Sutter Health chose to deploy an Enterprise Master Person Index, a software system that identifies persons in an integrated health care delivery system. Working with Initiate Systems' Identity Hub, Sutter Health enabled its network of doctors and hospitals to have a single view of its patients, no matter where they may go in the network for treatment.