Nine Choices on the Road to BI Solution Centers
December 2008
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212201130
Forrester Research says BI Solution Centers offer a business-governed, solutions-focused edge over BI competency centers. Here are nine key considerations you'll face when building your BISC.
By Boris Evelson and James Kobielus, Forrester Research
BI is no longer just about back-office reporting. As BI solutions increasingly permeate the enterprise and span a wide range of applications, analytics-driven organizations recognize BI as a key corporate asset and a do-or-die platform. In today's turbulent and increasingly commoditized economy, enterprises must make better and faster decisions to stay competitive — and often just to keep their heads above water.
As BI grows more pervasive, complex, feature-rich, and mission-critical, it also becomes harder to implement effectively. Many information and knowledge management professionals question whether they architect, implement, and manage their BI initiatives properly. Doing so requires sound BI and performance management best practices — and an awareness of the myriad ways it can all go wrong.
Forrester's ongoing research compiles a litany of worst practices often committed, deliberately or inadvertently, by even the smartest, most experienced information and knowledge management professionals. Common deficiencies in many enterprise BI environments often manifest themselves at the application level, but the root causes of the problems go much deeper. The chief symptoms of suboptimal BI management practices include:
The lack of a single trustworthy view of all relevant information. Many organizations strive for a single unified view of disparate transactional data and commit themselves to the long-range goal of consolidating it all into an all-encompassing enterprise data warehouse (EDW). In practice, though, the goal of an uber-EDW is a moving target. EDW projects are frequently the victims of "scope creep," due to constantly changing requirements, relentless growth in the range of operational-data sources, and stubborn resource bottlenecks within IT. Insufficient focus on data quality and master data management (MDM) only adds to a lack of trust. Even data in a comprehensive EDW may be viewed as untrustworthy or, in a worst case scenario, incorrect. As a result, BI application users resort to old fashioned methods to collect and analyze data such as running their own SQL queries and bringing data into spreadsheets for analysis.
BI applications too complex and confusing to use effectively. Crafting sophisticated BI applications for power users is important, but designing them for casual business users is far trickier. Even the most user-friendly, point-and-click BI applications often require users to slog through a daunting range of user interfaces, features, reports, metrics, dimensions, and hierarchies. Also, BI is just a subset of the surfeit of productivity tools that information workers must juggle just to perform their basic responsibilities. As a result, most BI end users have barely tapped the productivity potential of the tools at their disposal and often run back to IT to help them create new reports, queries, and dashboards.
BI applications too rigid to address even minor changes. Our modern world moves at lightning speed, but BI solutions are often too rigid to keep up with the changes. One simple change to a single source data element can result in a few changes to extract, transform, load (ETL) and data cleansing jobs, which may turn into several data model changes in operational data store (ODS), data warehouse (DW), and data marts; this in turn affects dozens of metrics and measures that could be referenced in hundreds of queries, reports, and dashboards.
As these problems illustrate, the typical BI environment is far from realizing its potential as a strategic business asset. Many organizations have responded by developing BI support centers or BI competency centers, but a BI Solution Center (BISC) offers a more business- and solutions-focused advance on these concepts. This article, which is based on the Forrester Report "Implementing Your Business Intelligence Solutions Center," details nine choices you'll need to make on the road to building an effective BISC.
BI Solutions Centers Cultivate BI Best Practices
Implementing BI technology is easy (relatively) — but getting value from those technology investments is the truly hard part. Recognizing that sound BI management practices are often the missing ingredient, many companies have begun to transform their project-based BI support groups into a more strategic function: the BI solutions center. Though the BISC has great promise, it is no silver bullet. Enterprises with more successful BI implementations often implement some form of BISC practices, but there are a wide range of BISC implementation options, and not all of them are appropriate for every scenario. Why? Because there are many different approaches, organizational structures, and modus operandi for BISCs, each with its own pros and cons.
Forrester defines a BISC as:
A permanent, cross-functional organizational structure responsible for governance and processes necessary to deliver or facilitate delivery of successful BI solutions, as well as being an institutional steward, protector, and forum for BI best practices.
How does a BISC differ from such kindred concepts as the BI competency center (BICC) and BI center of excellence (BI COE)? Though it has the same core IT-centric functions (such as building OLAP cubes, deploying data warehouses, and writing ETL scripts) as a BICC or BI COE, the BISC differs in its business-led governance and solutions focus, as explained below.
The BISC, like a sharp business suit, must be cut, trimmed, and tailored to the contours of each organization. Each BISC must, at the very least, fit an organization's specific structure, people, business processes, technology, and especially the BI, data warehousing, and other analytics-relevant infrastructures.
The intersections of these four dimensions — process, people, data, and technology — create multiple BISC scenarios and approaches that information and knowledge management pros must consider when developing a BISC most relevant to support your BI efforts. Detailed below are nine scenarios and approaches you must consider when implementing your BISC.
Consideration 1: Strategic Or Operational Objectives?
Some organizations deploy BISCs that are purely strategic or advisory in nature. In those organizations BISC accepts the role of being a BI champion, providing subject matter experts, and overseeing BI standards, methodologies, and a repository of best practices. When these BISCs take on more operational duties they become responsible for tasks like the BI project management office (PMO), training, and vendor management. And in an ultimate operational manifestation of BISC, it can also carry the full spectrum of delivering BI solutions — BI solutions-as-a-service.
Consideration 2: In-house or Outsourced?
Enterprises deploying BI will need help from experienced consultants and systems integrators (SIs). This expertise is critical because BI is very much an art and will remain that for the foreseeable future, since it involves engineering a complex set of systems and data to address the changing imperatives of business organizations.
All successful, complete, scalable, "industrial strength" BI solutions require customization, application of best practices, and a significant systems integration effort. Because true best practices do not evolve from implementing two or three BI applications, internal resources with experience in dozens of successful BI implementations are difficult to find. A knowledge of best practices and lessons learned needs to be accumulated across hundreds of BI implementations — a privilege reserved for full-time systems integrators specializing in BI. As a result, most of the more successful BISC organizations include both internal and external staff.
Consideration 3: Virtual Or Physical?
Organizations have a choice of leaving their BISC staff within their lines of business (LOBs) or functional departments, or moving them to a centralized physical BISC organization. Since members within virtual BISC organizational structure have other management or hands-on responsibilities, they may lack BI focus and have to juggle conflicting priorities. Therefore, this type of a structure is typically more appropriate to BISCs that are strategic and advisory in nature. On the other hand, a physical, dedicated, and centralized organization is often more appropriate to fully operational BISCs. However, these tend to become just another "cost center" — as any centralized function carries with it the burden of process, methodology, and organizational structure. This implies bureaucracy, red tape, and a lack of flexibility. While such a structure is a must for certain IT functions, like infrastructure, security, and many others, it could be a BI showstopper. The first time IT cannot respond quickly or efficiently enough to a new requirement, a typical BI user will run back to spreadsheets to build a homegrown model, run the analysis, and get the job done. Information and knowledge management pros must determine which BISC structure — virtual or physical — would be most effective within their organizational culture.
Consideration 4: Operational or Analytical in Scope?
A BISC for some may focus on addressing the front-end access, presentation, delivery, and visualization requirements of analytic applications. Alternately, others may encompass a wider scope including data warehousing; data integration; data quality; master data management (MDM); and many other analytics-relevant infrastructures, processes, and tools.
Information and knowledge management pros can draw the scope of your BISC narrowly or broadly, and that line may depend greatly on how your company staffs, funds, and organizes these diverse IT groups. How far should a BISC go "upstream" to operational applications to draw that line? For example, is a database trigger implemented in an operational application for changed data capture (CDC) that feeds a DW part of the analytical or operational realm of your BISC's responsibilities? Is the data mart that calculates customer or product profitability and feeds these numbers to downstream operational applications an analytical or an operational data store? Such scope needs to be very well defined and managed to avoid the very real BISC "scope creep."
Consideration 5: Support IT only or All Stakeholders?
In especially large, heterogeneous, and siloed organizations, corporate culture and other realities may not make a centralized strategic or operational BISC a practical proposition. However, even in such an environment, it's still possible and often beneficial to centralize BI infrastructure (servers, DW, ETL, and BI tools) and let each individual line of business and functional department manage its own prioritization and BI application development, while leveraging the centralized BI infrastructure. Developers are the ultimate customers of these more narrowly scoped BISCs, and in several real life examples Forrester found that this is a practical limit of how much responsibility a BISC can take on without running into "turf battles." Information and knowledge management pros must determine whether their organizational culture is ready to support BISC beyond BI infrastructure in scope.
Consideration 6: Type of Funding Model?
BISC can be treated as a corporate cost center, and all departments across the enterprise can use and benefit from BISC services. The difficulty here is that this approach carries a stigma of "just another IT department/cost center." Furthermore, departments that are not yet set up to take advantage of the BISC will push back on carrying part of the cost burden. A cost allocation model based on the actual usage of BISC services can be fairer, but detailed, activity-based cost allocation models can be tricky to set up, implement, and manage.
Consideration 7: Narrow or Broad Scope?
Though a BICC-ish BISC is certainly possible, it's not preferred. Forrester recommends business leadership and business-led governance orientation, not a technology-centric focus, for the BISC. The same road map principles that apply to the best practices of implementing BI apply to the BISC: strategy first, architecture next, technology last. In its ultimate breadth of scope, BISC could encompass as many as 20 major components, roles, and responsibilities (see Figure 6 in Forrester's complete report), so it's very important to start small and increase the scope slowly.
Consideration 8: Performance Measurement Approach?
BISC stakeholders require transparent measurements of the success of the BISC program in order to support ongoing momentum and funding. BISC leaders must establish a clear set of BISC performance metrics and clearly communicate them on a periodic basis. Some BISC performance metrics are obvious and easy to calculate. Examples include number of BI applications delivered and maintained by BISC, number of BI users, number of reports in production and the usage patterns of these reports, reduced BI support staff, and reduced BI software and maintenance costs. Other metrics could be trickier to calculate and monitor such as improved information accuracy and turnaround time on BI requests.
Most leading BI products come with pre-built applications to monitor and analyze at least some of these metrics. If such out-of-the-box applications are not available from your preferred BI vendor, or if you are using multiple BI platforms, a centralized BI metrics management solution can be architected by using products from vendors such as Appfluent Technology and Teleran Technologies.
Consideration 9: Isolated or Aligned With Other Solution Centers?
No BI environment is an island from the rest of the data management infrastructure. Just as BI applications touch, depend on, and overlap with many related processes and technologies, BISCs cannot exist in isolation from other competency centers, solutions centers, or centers of excellence. Federation between the BISC and other data management competency centers is a best practice. Many such competency centers have existed in organizations for years, though they may not be recognized as distinct disciplines or organizations. Essentially, any group that defines, approves, and/or enforces standard practices for new projects or initiatives in any of these areas is a competency center.
To realize the full return on investment from BI, your organization's BISC should engage with all or most of the interdependent competency centers.
To succeed in your specific organizational environment, your BISC must have clear lines of demarcation, cooperation, and integration with all these other relevant initiatives. Failing to define a clear charter with appropriate collaboration, communication, and change management processes between complementary efforts can be a fatal pitfall in your BISC initiative.
Download the Complete Report
This article is based on the Forrester Report "Implementing Your Business Intelligence Solutions Center." The 16-page report includes charts, diagrams and seven recommendations not included in this article. Click here to download the free report.
Friday, January 16, 2009
imho 2009 Predictions for Enterprise IT, SOA, Cloud and Business Intelligence
http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2008/12/briefingsdirect-analysts-make-2009.html
Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 35, on how analysts see cloud computing, SOA, the economy, and Obama Administration in 2009, recorded Dec. 19, 2008.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. …...
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel [Kobielus, Tony Baer, Brad Shimmin, Joe McKendrick, Dave Linthicum, Mike Meehan, JP Morgenthal].
Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
…………………….
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. ……….
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel. Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
*************************
Jim Kobielus, you're up. What are your five predictions?
Kobielus: I need to go home now. You stole all my predictions. Actually, that was great, Dana. I was taking notes, just to make sure that I don't repeat too many of your points unnecessarily, although I do want to steal everything you just said.
My five predictions for 2009 ... I'll start by listing them under a quick phrase and then I'll elaborate very quickly. I don't want to steal everybody else's thunder.
The five broad categories of prediction for 2009 are: Number one, Obama. Number two, cloud. Number three, recession. Number four, GRC -- that's governance, risk, and compliance. Then, number five, social networking.
Let me just start with [U.S. President Elect Barack] Obama. Obviously, we're going to have a new president in 2009. He'll most likely appoint a national chief technology officer or a national tech policy coordinator. Based on his appointment so far, I think Obama is going to choose a heavy hitter who has huge credibility and stature in the IT space.
We've batted around various names, and I'm not going to add more to the mix now. Whoever it is, it's going to be someone who's going to focus on SOA at a national level, in terms of how we, as a country, can take advantage of reusing agility, transformation, optimization, and all the other benefits that come from SOA properly implemented across different agencies.
So, number one, I think Obama is going to make a major change in how the government deploys IT assets and spends them.
The maturing of clouds
Number two, cloud. Dana went to town on cloud, and I am not going to say much more, beyond the fact that in 2009, clouds are going to become less of a work in progress, in terms of public clouds and private clouds, and become more of a mature reality, in terms of how enterprises acquire functionality, how they acquire applications and platforms.
I break out the cloud developments in 2009 into a long alliterative list. Clouds will start up in greater numbers. They will stratify, which means that the vendors, like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and others with their cloud offerings, will build full stacks, strata, in their cloud services that include all the appropriate layers, application components, integration services, and platforms. So, the industry will converge on a more of a reference model for cloud in 2009.
They'll also stabilize the clouds. In other words, they'll become more mature, stable and less scary for corporate IT to move applications and data to. They'll standardize, and the clouds will standardize around SOA and WOA standards. There will be more standards, interfaces, and application programming interfaces (APIs) focused on cloud computing, so you can move your applications and data from one cloud to another a bit more seamlessly than you can now with these proprietary clouds that are out there. And, there are other "S" items that I won't share here.
Number three, recession. Clearly, we are in a deep funk, and it might get a lot worse before it gets better. That's clearly hammering all IT budgets everywhere. So, as Dana said, every user and every organization is going to look for opportunities to save money on their IT budgets.
They're going to put a freeze on projects. They're going to delay or cancel upgrades. Their users, as you said very nicely, Dana, are going to dip into petty cash and go around IT to get what they need. They're going to go to cloud offerings. So, the recession will hammer the entire IT industry and all budgets.
As far as GRC, government is cracking down. If it has to bail out the financial-services industry, bail out the auto industry, and bail out other industries, the government is not going to do it with no strings attached.
Compliance, regulations, reporting requirements, the whole apparatus of GRC will be brought to bear on the industries that the government is saving and bailing out.
Then finally, social networking. Dana provided a very good discussion of how social networking will pervade everything in terms of applications and services.
The Obama campaign set the stage clearly for more WOA-style, Web 2.0, or social-networking style governance in this country and other countries. So, we'll see more uptake of social networking.
We'll see more BI become social networking, in the sense of mashup as a style of BI application, reporting, dashboards, and development. Mashups for user self-service BI development will come to the fore. It will be a huge theme in the BI space in 2009 and beyond of that.
That really plays into the whole cost control theme, which is that IT will be severely constrained in terms of budget and manpower. They're going to push more of the development work to the end user. The end user will build reports that heretofore you've relied on data modelers to build for you. Those are my five.
*************************
Gardner: We're just about out of time. Let's go quickly down our list for any last synthesis insights.
Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, thanks for joining. What's your synthesis of what you have heard?
Kobielus: My synthesis is that we are living in a very turbulent and volatile time in the industry. Things are changing on many levels simultaneously, and a lot of it will just be hammered by the recession. Approaches like cloud, social networking, and everything will be driven by the need to cut cost and to survive through fiscal austerity for an indefinite period.
Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 35, on how analysts see cloud computing, SOA, the economy, and Obama Administration in 2009, recorded Dec. 19, 2008.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. …...
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel [Kobielus, Tony Baer, Brad Shimmin, Joe McKendrick, Dave Linthicum, Mike Meehan, JP Morgenthal].
Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
…………………….
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 35. ……….
Our topic this week, and this is the week of Dec. 15, 2008, marks our year-end show. Happy holidays to you all! But, rather than look back at this year in review, because the year changed really dramatically after September, I think it makes a lot more sense to look forward into 2009.
We're going to look at what trends may have changed in 2008, but with an emphasis on the impacts for IT users, and buyers and sellers in the coming year. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their predictions for IT in 2009.
To help us gaze into the crystal ball, we're joined by this week's BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights panel. Please let me welcome Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody.
*************************
Jim Kobielus, you're up. What are your five predictions?
Kobielus: I need to go home now. You stole all my predictions. Actually, that was great, Dana. I was taking notes, just to make sure that I don't repeat too many of your points unnecessarily, although I do want to steal everything you just said.
My five predictions for 2009 ... I'll start by listing them under a quick phrase and then I'll elaborate very quickly. I don't want to steal everybody else's thunder.
The five broad categories of prediction for 2009 are: Number one, Obama. Number two, cloud. Number three, recession. Number four, GRC -- that's governance, risk, and compliance. Then, number five, social networking.
Let me just start with [U.S. President Elect Barack] Obama. Obviously, we're going to have a new president in 2009. He'll most likely appoint a national chief technology officer or a national tech policy coordinator. Based on his appointment so far, I think Obama is going to choose a heavy hitter who has huge credibility and stature in the IT space.
We've batted around various names, and I'm not going to add more to the mix now. Whoever it is, it's going to be someone who's going to focus on SOA at a national level, in terms of how we, as a country, can take advantage of reusing agility, transformation, optimization, and all the other benefits that come from SOA properly implemented across different agencies.
So, number one, I think Obama is going to make a major change in how the government deploys IT assets and spends them.
The maturing of clouds
Number two, cloud. Dana went to town on cloud, and I am not going to say much more, beyond the fact that in 2009, clouds are going to become less of a work in progress, in terms of public clouds and private clouds, and become more of a mature reality, in terms of how enterprises acquire functionality, how they acquire applications and platforms.
I break out the cloud developments in 2009 into a long alliterative list. Clouds will start up in greater numbers. They will stratify, which means that the vendors, like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and others with their cloud offerings, will build full stacks, strata, in their cloud services that include all the appropriate layers, application components, integration services, and platforms. So, the industry will converge on a more of a reference model for cloud in 2009.
They'll also stabilize the clouds. In other words, they'll become more mature, stable and less scary for corporate IT to move applications and data to. They'll standardize, and the clouds will standardize around SOA and WOA standards. There will be more standards, interfaces, and application programming interfaces (APIs) focused on cloud computing, so you can move your applications and data from one cloud to another a bit more seamlessly than you can now with these proprietary clouds that are out there. And, there are other "S" items that I won't share here.
Number three, recession. Clearly, we are in a deep funk, and it might get a lot worse before it gets better. That's clearly hammering all IT budgets everywhere. So, as Dana said, every user and every organization is going to look for opportunities to save money on their IT budgets.
They're going to put a freeze on projects. They're going to delay or cancel upgrades. Their users, as you said very nicely, Dana, are going to dip into petty cash and go around IT to get what they need. They're going to go to cloud offerings. So, the recession will hammer the entire IT industry and all budgets.
As far as GRC, government is cracking down. If it has to bail out the financial-services industry, bail out the auto industry, and bail out other industries, the government is not going to do it with no strings attached.
Compliance, regulations, reporting requirements, the whole apparatus of GRC will be brought to bear on the industries that the government is saving and bailing out.
Then finally, social networking. Dana provided a very good discussion of how social networking will pervade everything in terms of applications and services.
The Obama campaign set the stage clearly for more WOA-style, Web 2.0, or social-networking style governance in this country and other countries. So, we'll see more uptake of social networking.
We'll see more BI become social networking, in the sense of mashup as a style of BI application, reporting, dashboards, and development. Mashups for user self-service BI development will come to the fore. It will be a huge theme in the BI space in 2009 and beyond of that.
That really plays into the whole cost control theme, which is that IT will be severely constrained in terms of budget and manpower. They're going to push more of the development work to the end user. The end user will build reports that heretofore you've relied on data modelers to build for you. Those are my five.
*************************
Gardner: We're just about out of time. Let's go quickly down our list for any last synthesis insights.
Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, thanks for joining. What's your synthesis of what you have heard?
Kobielus: My synthesis is that we are living in a very turbulent and volatile time in the industry. Things are changing on many levels simultaneously, and a lot of it will just be hammered by the recession. Approaches like cloud, social networking, and everything will be driven by the need to cut cost and to survive through fiscal austerity for an indefinite period.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
imho SOA DOA? No way!
All:
In the crowded marketplace of ideas, everybody’s always trying to differentiate themselves. Declaring something “dead,” “obsolete,” “outmoded,” “tired,” “passe,” or “so last year” is such a clichéd look-at-me technique that I tend not to give too much credence. Yeah, I, like other analysts, am inclined to do it now and then, but you should interpret this sort of pronouncement as just part of the news cycle. The usual coarse or fine grains of salt.
That said, my take on this. First off, I define service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural paradigm: one that focuses on maximizing the sharing, reuse, and interoperability of corporate resources over distributed fabrics. In other words, it refers to an approach with a clear set of goals in efficiency, standardization, cost control, agility, and so forth. That paradigm and those goals/benefits are certainly not dead. Perhaps what is dead is the notion that this utopia can be realized purely over a Web services environment built purely on XML, SOAP, WSDL, WS-*, etc. Clearly, cloud computing, virtualization, Web 2.0, mashups, REST, social networking, and so forth show that a great many services—in fact, most new services—are not riding an “ESB” built on those interfaces and standards.
Just as important, life-cycle SOA governance—aka “service governance”--as a set of emerging best practices, is certainly not dead. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever, though few enterprises have mastered it throughout the service life cycle (design time, runtime, etc) and across all platforms, apps, and services. Moreover, service governance is getting much more challenging in a cloud-oriented environment, where literally EVERYTHING—from app components down through integration and hardware infrastructure (CPU, storage, etc.) is a service, or potentially. And, as more enterprise app/integration/hardware services are outsourced to public clouds, governance will get ever trickier, both in terms of negotiating service contracts and setting up the requisite public/private service-federation relationships and infrastructure.
Service governance in the cloud is a terra incognita. The cloud providers, cloud management tool providers, and their customers are all groping for a common set of approaches, and, to some degree, trying to square it all with established SOA governance best practices. But how do you wrap controls around the every atom in the billowing universe? Can we think--and tailor our governance--around that many dimensions without exploding from the sheer nebulous complexity of it all.
In every era, I’m tracking what’s being born, not what’s on its last legs. Our architectural orientation toward services is what SOA begot, and has bequeathed to this new age of the cloud.
Jim
In the crowded marketplace of ideas, everybody’s always trying to differentiate themselves. Declaring something “dead,” “obsolete,” “outmoded,” “tired,” “passe,” or “so last year” is such a clichéd look-at-me technique that I tend not to give too much credence. Yeah, I, like other analysts, am inclined to do it now and then, but you should interpret this sort of pronouncement as just part of the news cycle. The usual coarse or fine grains of salt.
That said, my take on this. First off, I define service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural paradigm: one that focuses on maximizing the sharing, reuse, and interoperability of corporate resources over distributed fabrics. In other words, it refers to an approach with a clear set of goals in efficiency, standardization, cost control, agility, and so forth. That paradigm and those goals/benefits are certainly not dead. Perhaps what is dead is the notion that this utopia can be realized purely over a Web services environment built purely on XML, SOAP, WSDL, WS-*, etc. Clearly, cloud computing, virtualization, Web 2.0, mashups, REST, social networking, and so forth show that a great many services—in fact, most new services—are not riding an “ESB” built on those interfaces and standards.
Just as important, life-cycle SOA governance—aka “service governance”--as a set of emerging best practices, is certainly not dead. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever, though few enterprises have mastered it throughout the service life cycle (design time, runtime, etc) and across all platforms, apps, and services. Moreover, service governance is getting much more challenging in a cloud-oriented environment, where literally EVERYTHING—from app components down through integration and hardware infrastructure (CPU, storage, etc.) is a service, or potentially. And, as more enterprise app/integration/hardware services are outsourced to public clouds, governance will get ever trickier, both in terms of negotiating service contracts and setting up the requisite public/private service-federation relationships and infrastructure.
Service governance in the cloud is a terra incognita. The cloud providers, cloud management tool providers, and their customers are all groping for a common set of approaches, and, to some degree, trying to square it all with established SOA governance best practices. But how do you wrap controls around the every atom in the billowing universe? Can we think--and tailor our governance--around that many dimensions without exploding from the sheer nebulous complexity of it all.
In every era, I’m tracking what’s being born, not what’s on its last legs. Our architectural orientation toward services is what SOA begot, and has bequeathed to this new age of the cloud.
Jim
Monday, January 12, 2009
Coral8 Webcast with Featured Guest Analyst from Forrester Research Explores Continuous Intelligence for Optimization of Cross-Channel....
Coral8 Webcast with Featured Guest Analyst from Forrester Research Explores Continuous Intelligence for Optimization of Cross-Channel Customer Interactions
Experts Share How Companies Can More Effectively Interact with Customers to Drive More Revenue and Raise Customer Loyalty
--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Coral8, Inc.:
What: During tough economic times, it’s vital for companies to optimize the growing online marketplace and optimize customer interactions. Coral8 is hosting a Webcast focused on innovative new technologies to help companies foster customer loyalty and drive more business in 2009.
Forrester Research estimates that U.S. online retail commerce will reach $335 billion in 2012, comprising 11% of the total market.1 Forrester also reports that the web will influence well over $1 trillion of in-store sales.2 Such market influences are leading many organizations to closely examine and optimize how they interact with customers across all channels.
Continuous Intelligence™ provides the platform, tools and techniques that allow organizations to constantly monitor all customer interaction channels, maintain a comprehensive “live” analytic profile of each customer, and drive immediate, personalized offers and service actions at the right time across all channels. This webcast will explain how companies can utilize rich untapped interaction sources – web, call center, ATMs, kiosks and more – to read and react to customer needs to drive faster purchasing decisions, cross-sell and up-sell products or services, and increase customer loyalty.
Join Coral8 for an interactive Webcast with featured guest James Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, and John Morrell, vice president of product marketing at Coral8, Inc., where they will explore:
What is Continuous Intelligence and where does it apply to the business?
How can Continuous Intelligence and Advanced Analytics provide an evolutionary step towards true real-time situation awareness and response?
What are the emerging best practices for applying CEP in the context of the Enterprise Data Warehouse?
How CEP-driven Continuous Intelligence can offer faster, richer information to influence and optimize customer actions across channels
1 Forrester Research report “US eCommerce Forecast: 2008 To 2012”, January 18, 2008
2 Forrester Research report “Four Essential Metrics For Cross-Channel Measurement”, August 12, 2008
When: Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 1:00 PM EST/10:00 AM PST
Where: To register and view a detailed agenda, visit: https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=129875&sessionid=1&key=75D71F9D85A91854C46725B2F9BC48A2&sourcepage=register
Who: James Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
John Morrell, VP of Product Marketing, Coral8
Matt McGowan, Webcast moderator, VP of Publishing, Search Engine Strategies
About Coral8, Inc.
Based in Mountain View, Calif., Coral8, Inc. is a leading provider of Complex Event Processing (CEP) software and Continuous Intelligence™ solutions. Bringing together high-performance, innovative SQL-based programming and modeling and enterprise-class scalability and availability, Coral8 Engine™ is the fastest, most economical way to deploy powerful, sophisticated Continuous Intelligence™ that drives faster decisions and actions that positively impact revenue, customer service and operational efficiency. Coral8 is speeding the delivery of critical business information for customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies and global leaders within financial services, e-commerce, telecommunications, transportation, government and other rapidly growing vertical applications. For more information, visit www.coral8.com or call (650) 210-3810.
Contacts
Coral8, Inc.
John Morrell, VP of Product Marketing, 650-210-3933 (Event contact)
johnm@coral8.com
or
Schwartz Communications
Jill Reed, 415-512-0770 (Press)
coral8@schwartz.com
Experts Share How Companies Can More Effectively Interact with Customers to Drive More Revenue and Raise Customer Loyalty
--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Coral8, Inc.:
What: During tough economic times, it’s vital for companies to optimize the growing online marketplace and optimize customer interactions. Coral8 is hosting a Webcast focused on innovative new technologies to help companies foster customer loyalty and drive more business in 2009.
Forrester Research estimates that U.S. online retail commerce will reach $335 billion in 2012, comprising 11% of the total market.1 Forrester also reports that the web will influence well over $1 trillion of in-store sales.2 Such market influences are leading many organizations to closely examine and optimize how they interact with customers across all channels.
Continuous Intelligence™ provides the platform, tools and techniques that allow organizations to constantly monitor all customer interaction channels, maintain a comprehensive “live” analytic profile of each customer, and drive immediate, personalized offers and service actions at the right time across all channels. This webcast will explain how companies can utilize rich untapped interaction sources – web, call center, ATMs, kiosks and more – to read and react to customer needs to drive faster purchasing decisions, cross-sell and up-sell products or services, and increase customer loyalty.
Join Coral8 for an interactive Webcast with featured guest James Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, and John Morrell, vice president of product marketing at Coral8, Inc., where they will explore:
What is Continuous Intelligence and where does it apply to the business?
How can Continuous Intelligence and Advanced Analytics provide an evolutionary step towards true real-time situation awareness and response?
What are the emerging best practices for applying CEP in the context of the Enterprise Data Warehouse?
How CEP-driven Continuous Intelligence can offer faster, richer information to influence and optimize customer actions across channels
1 Forrester Research report “US eCommerce Forecast: 2008 To 2012”, January 18, 2008
2 Forrester Research report “Four Essential Metrics For Cross-Channel Measurement”, August 12, 2008
When: Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 1:00 PM EST/10:00 AM PST
Where: To register and view a detailed agenda, visit: https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=129875&sessionid=1&key=75D71F9D85A91854C46725B2F9BC48A2&sourcepage=register
Who: James Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
John Morrell, VP of Product Marketing, Coral8
Matt McGowan, Webcast moderator, VP of Publishing, Search Engine Strategies
About Coral8, Inc.
Based in Mountain View, Calif., Coral8, Inc. is a leading provider of Complex Event Processing (CEP) software and Continuous Intelligence™ solutions. Bringing together high-performance, innovative SQL-based programming and modeling and enterprise-class scalability and availability, Coral8 Engine™ is the fastest, most economical way to deploy powerful, sophisticated Continuous Intelligence™ that drives faster decisions and actions that positively impact revenue, customer service and operational efficiency. Coral8 is speeding the delivery of critical business information for customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies and global leaders within financial services, e-commerce, telecommunications, transportation, government and other rapidly growing vertical applications. For more information, visit www.coral8.com or call (650) 210-3810.
Contacts
Coral8, Inc.
John Morrell, VP of Product Marketing, 650-210-3933 (Event contact)
johnm@coral8.com
or
Schwartz Communications
Jill Reed, 415-512-0770 (Press)
coral8@schwartz.com
imho Experts forecast business intelligence market trends for 2009
Experts forecast business intelligence market trends for 2009
http://go.techtarget.com/r/5497085/2433922
James G. Kobielus
Senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research covering BI and data warehousing.
BI moves into the cloud. Enterprises of all sizes will adopt hosted, subscription-based services in greater numbers to supplement or, in increasing numbers, replace their premises-based BI platforms. In a soft economy, any on-demand pay-as-you-go offering becomes more attractive across all customer segments. Just as important, the increasing scalability, performance, flexibility, and availability demands on the enterprise BI infrastructure are spurring many users to consider outsourced offerings.
BI adopting Web 2.0 development paradigm. Mashups will move into mainstream BI practice as budget-stressed organizations push more development to users through self-service tools. The chief enablers for this new paradigm are the growing range of commercial, in-memory, BI-integrated mashup tools that let power users develop rich reports, dashboards, and analytic applications on the fly from within their browsers and spreadsheets. Data modelers and other traditional BI developers will supervise governance of user-generated BI mashups.
BI growing more federated. Enterprises will turn to federated data environments to support operational BI across stubbornly decentralized information silos that are scattered throughout their service-oriented architectures (SOAs). To respond to this growing requirement, IT organizations will supplement their enterprise data warehouses by beefing up their enterprise information integration middleware and semantic virtualization layers.
BI evolving into advanced analytic applications. Enterprises have substantially completed their adoption of core BI, enterprise data warehouse, and enterprise content management platforms and will increasingly turn to powerful predictive analytics, data mining, statistical analysis, and text analytics tools to leverage that information for business optimization. One consequence of this trend will be the growing adoption of in-database analytics techniques, under which users will process these compute- and data-intensive functions inside the enterprise data warehouses, taking advantage of that platform's massive parallel processing.
http://go.techtarget.com/r/5497085/2433922
James G. Kobielus
Senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research covering BI and data warehousing.
BI moves into the cloud. Enterprises of all sizes will adopt hosted, subscription-based services in greater numbers to supplement or, in increasing numbers, replace their premises-based BI platforms. In a soft economy, any on-demand pay-as-you-go offering becomes more attractive across all customer segments. Just as important, the increasing scalability, performance, flexibility, and availability demands on the enterprise BI infrastructure are spurring many users to consider outsourced offerings.
BI adopting Web 2.0 development paradigm. Mashups will move into mainstream BI practice as budget-stressed organizations push more development to users through self-service tools. The chief enablers for this new paradigm are the growing range of commercial, in-memory, BI-integrated mashup tools that let power users develop rich reports, dashboards, and analytic applications on the fly from within their browsers and spreadsheets. Data modelers and other traditional BI developers will supervise governance of user-generated BI mashups.
BI growing more federated. Enterprises will turn to federated data environments to support operational BI across stubbornly decentralized information silos that are scattered throughout their service-oriented architectures (SOAs). To respond to this growing requirement, IT organizations will supplement their enterprise data warehouses by beefing up their enterprise information integration middleware and semantic virtualization layers.
BI evolving into advanced analytic applications. Enterprises have substantially completed their adoption of core BI, enterprise data warehouse, and enterprise content management platforms and will increasingly turn to powerful predictive analytics, data mining, statistical analysis, and text analytics tools to leverage that information for business optimization. One consequence of this trend will be the growing adoption of in-database analytics techniques, under which users will process these compute- and data-intensive functions inside the enterprise data warehouses, taking advantage of that platform's massive parallel processing.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
poem A Black Hole Meditation
A BLACK HOLE MEDITATION
Suppose that inside
It's rich with color, asplash
In light and beauty.
Suppose that flattened
Matter, stripped of all structure,
Is superstringy:
A harp of music
For the many-dimensioned
Almighty's fingers.
Suppose that inside
It's rich with color, asplash
In light and beauty.
Suppose that flattened
Matter, stripped of all structure,
Is superstringy:
A harp of music
For the many-dimensioned
Almighty's fingers.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
poem Cork
CORK
Don't let the year end
with joyous remembrance. That
might bring us to tears.
Don't let the same thought
cycle endlessly. That would
seal eternity.
Don't resolve it at
all. Let events wear on. Let
the year be gone. Yet.
Don't let the year end
with joyous remembrance. That
might bring us to tears.
Don't let the same thought
cycle endlessly. That would
seal eternity.
Don't resolve it at
all. Let events wear on. Let
the year be gone. Yet.
Monday, December 29, 2008
poem Air
AIR
Television was
simply always there airing
and available.
Television was
simple numbers to click and
point the aerial.
Television was
once tube and tuner a box
immaterial.
Television was
simply always there airing
and available.
Television was
simple numbers to click and
point the aerial.
Television was
once tube and tuner a box
immaterial.
Monday, December 22, 2008
imho New Year Fast Approaching, and So Is the Next-Generation Enterprise Data Warehouse
New Year Fast Approaching, and So Is the Next-Generation Enterprise Data Warehouse
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2008/12/new-year-fast-a.html
This has been one of the most pivotal years in the evolution of the enterprise data warehousing (EDW) market. Every EDW vendor of note has firmly repositioned its go-to-market strategy around the appliance approach, with some also taking tentative steps into what is sure to be a key theme in 2009 and beyond: EDW in the “cloud.”
Yes, much of the recent “cloud” buzz has been bleeding-edge IT trade-paper fodder. It’s all interesting, to be sure, and there’s plenty of innovation going on. But much of the discussion seems to be a renaming, repackaging, and mashing up--with subtle twists and tweaks--of such well-established themes as service-oriented architecture (SOA), software as a service (SaaS), virtualization, and Web 2.0. And much of the trendy attention to cloud services obscures that fact that public cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others are still primarily a work in progress.
Forrester clients have only recently begun to inquire about cloud topics in earnest. But still, it’s hard to stay cynical about cloud computing for long. This solution delivery approach is coming almost certainly, inexorably, to all IT solution segments, including to EDW and business intelligence (BI). Sure, I&KM pros can safely ignore much of the cloud buzz for now, but, a year ago, they said the same about EDW appliances, and look how quickly appliances have become a dominant deployment approach in this market.
In the EDW-related inquiries I take from Forrester I&KM customers, a great many concern the appliance market. CIOs, CTOs, DBAs, and other professionals are actively considering various vendors’ appliances to replace, or at least to supplement and extend, their traditional “roll-your-own” EDWs. Typically, the I&KM pro wants me to help them select the best EDW appliance for their needs from any of several vendors, both venerable blue-chip and sexy start-up.
What validated appliances for I&KM pros this year was the fact that big-name EDW vendors--including Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Sybase--have gone this route in earnest. The inflection point for the whole industry was this fall when Teradata--who effectively established the EDW appliance space years ago but had long resisted going to market under that label--embraced the approach and significantly expanded their appliance solution portfolio.
EDW cloud services are still a few years away from a similar inflection point. The leading EDW vendors have taken only the most tentative steps into the still-embryonic cloud services market. But they are all beginning to explore the cloud/SaaS channel with greater interest. They simply have to. Customers’ capital budgets are under severe pressure, and a multi-million dollar EDW solution--be it a premises-based appliance or what have you--is a tough sell. In a soft economy, any on-demand pay-as-you-go offering becomes more attractive across all customer segments. Just as important, the increasing scalability, performance, flexibility, and availability demands on the EDW and BI infrastructure are spurring many users to consider managed, hosted, outsourced offerings with fresh interest.
We’re starting to see the next-generation cloud EDW emerge. One noteworthy development this year was Oracle’s partnership with Amazon. Under that agreement, Oracle customers can license Oracle’s core EDW software stack to run in Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment. They can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.
Another important development was Microsoft’s announcement of its Windows Azure cloud initiative, of which one key component is the (still in beta) SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) subscription offering. When Microsoft SSDS goes into production in 2009, it will offer some basic DW/BI features in addition to transactional database support. Though SSDS will not initially be at a functional par with they licensed SQL Server offerings, it is clear that Microsoft plans to evolve it rapidly toward becoming a feature-competitive DW cloud offering over the next several years.
Microsoft also made a key EDW-related acquisition this year, appliance pure-play DATAllegro. Forrester expects this acquisition to figure centrally into Microsoft’s evolution of SSDS into a massively scalable cloud DW service. Though DATAllegro did not achieve much market adoption as a DW appliance pure-play, it provides Microsoft with a robust scale-out technology called “shared-nothing massively parallel processing” (MPP). By the way, Microsoft is playing catch-up in this regard, since most of its closest competitors implement shared-nothing MPP in their EDW premises-oriented solutions, and such DW appliance pure plays as Netezza, Greenplum, and Vertica also implement it to varying degrees.
When Microsoft ultimately ships a DATAllegro-powered SQL Server EDW appliance under its “Project Madison” in a year or two, we would not be surprised to see it adopted first in SSDS. The cloud EDW offering would benefit immensely from shared-nothing MPP’s ability to manage petabytes of analytic data and parallelize queries and other transactions seamlessly across a grid of hundreds or thousands of nodes.
Indeed, the industry consensus is largely in favor of shared-nothing MPP across the storage and compute tiers, coupled with flexible information-as a-service (IaaS) and server virtualization, as the principal platform for cloud computing. In the next-generation EDW, shared-nothing MPP allows the infrastructure to become more fluid, flexible, and virtualized, while managing ever more massive data sets and providing the agility to handle more complex mixed workloads of reporting, query, OLAP, data mining, data cleansing, transformations, and other functions.
As 2009 approaches, we’ll see pure-play DW cloud vendors come to the fore, appealing both to the early adopters among I&KM pros as well as to those under severe budgetary, headcount, and data center constraints. The established EDW vendors will not come to the cloud in a big way till 2010 at the earliest, it appears. But they will come, and with all guns blazing.
In 2-3 years’ time, the established vendors will own the EDW cloud space just as they’re starting to own the rapidly maturing appliance segment--in part, by acquiring the most promising cloud startups. The longer the economy stays drab and dreary, the faster the cloud EDW segment will expand, mature, and consolidate.
As that happens, commercial EDW cloud offerings will become as diverse and feature-rich as appliances have become, and I&KM pros will almost certainly ramp up their cloud EDW inquiries.
Forrester’s EDW analyst stands ready to serve.
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2008/12/new-year-fast-a.html
This has been one of the most pivotal years in the evolution of the enterprise data warehousing (EDW) market. Every EDW vendor of note has firmly repositioned its go-to-market strategy around the appliance approach, with some also taking tentative steps into what is sure to be a key theme in 2009 and beyond: EDW in the “cloud.”
Yes, much of the recent “cloud” buzz has been bleeding-edge IT trade-paper fodder. It’s all interesting, to be sure, and there’s plenty of innovation going on. But much of the discussion seems to be a renaming, repackaging, and mashing up--with subtle twists and tweaks--of such well-established themes as service-oriented architecture (SOA), software as a service (SaaS), virtualization, and Web 2.0. And much of the trendy attention to cloud services obscures that fact that public cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others are still primarily a work in progress.
Forrester clients have only recently begun to inquire about cloud topics in earnest. But still, it’s hard to stay cynical about cloud computing for long. This solution delivery approach is coming almost certainly, inexorably, to all IT solution segments, including to EDW and business intelligence (BI). Sure, I&KM pros can safely ignore much of the cloud buzz for now, but, a year ago, they said the same about EDW appliances, and look how quickly appliances have become a dominant deployment approach in this market.
In the EDW-related inquiries I take from Forrester I&KM customers, a great many concern the appliance market. CIOs, CTOs, DBAs, and other professionals are actively considering various vendors’ appliances to replace, or at least to supplement and extend, their traditional “roll-your-own” EDWs. Typically, the I&KM pro wants me to help them select the best EDW appliance for their needs from any of several vendors, both venerable blue-chip and sexy start-up.
What validated appliances for I&KM pros this year was the fact that big-name EDW vendors--including Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Sybase--have gone this route in earnest. The inflection point for the whole industry was this fall when Teradata--who effectively established the EDW appliance space years ago but had long resisted going to market under that label--embraced the approach and significantly expanded their appliance solution portfolio.
EDW cloud services are still a few years away from a similar inflection point. The leading EDW vendors have taken only the most tentative steps into the still-embryonic cloud services market. But they are all beginning to explore the cloud/SaaS channel with greater interest. They simply have to. Customers’ capital budgets are under severe pressure, and a multi-million dollar EDW solution--be it a premises-based appliance or what have you--is a tough sell. In a soft economy, any on-demand pay-as-you-go offering becomes more attractive across all customer segments. Just as important, the increasing scalability, performance, flexibility, and availability demands on the EDW and BI infrastructure are spurring many users to consider managed, hosted, outsourced offerings with fresh interest.
We’re starting to see the next-generation cloud EDW emerge. One noteworthy development this year was Oracle’s partnership with Amazon. Under that agreement, Oracle customers can license Oracle’s core EDW software stack to run in Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment. They can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.
Another important development was Microsoft’s announcement of its Windows Azure cloud initiative, of which one key component is the (still in beta) SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) subscription offering. When Microsoft SSDS goes into production in 2009, it will offer some basic DW/BI features in addition to transactional database support. Though SSDS will not initially be at a functional par with they licensed SQL Server offerings, it is clear that Microsoft plans to evolve it rapidly toward becoming a feature-competitive DW cloud offering over the next several years.
Microsoft also made a key EDW-related acquisition this year, appliance pure-play DATAllegro. Forrester expects this acquisition to figure centrally into Microsoft’s evolution of SSDS into a massively scalable cloud DW service. Though DATAllegro did not achieve much market adoption as a DW appliance pure-play, it provides Microsoft with a robust scale-out technology called “shared-nothing massively parallel processing” (MPP). By the way, Microsoft is playing catch-up in this regard, since most of its closest competitors implement shared-nothing MPP in their EDW premises-oriented solutions, and such DW appliance pure plays as Netezza, Greenplum, and Vertica also implement it to varying degrees.
When Microsoft ultimately ships a DATAllegro-powered SQL Server EDW appliance under its “Project Madison” in a year or two, we would not be surprised to see it adopted first in SSDS. The cloud EDW offering would benefit immensely from shared-nothing MPP’s ability to manage petabytes of analytic data and parallelize queries and other transactions seamlessly across a grid of hundreds or thousands of nodes.
Indeed, the industry consensus is largely in favor of shared-nothing MPP across the storage and compute tiers, coupled with flexible information-as a-service (IaaS) and server virtualization, as the principal platform for cloud computing. In the next-generation EDW, shared-nothing MPP allows the infrastructure to become more fluid, flexible, and virtualized, while managing ever more massive data sets and providing the agility to handle more complex mixed workloads of reporting, query, OLAP, data mining, data cleansing, transformations, and other functions.
As 2009 approaches, we’ll see pure-play DW cloud vendors come to the fore, appealing both to the early adopters among I&KM pros as well as to those under severe budgetary, headcount, and data center constraints. The established EDW vendors will not come to the cloud in a big way till 2010 at the earliest, it appears. But they will come, and with all guns blazing.
In 2-3 years’ time, the established vendors will own the EDW cloud space just as they’re starting to own the rapidly maturing appliance segment--in part, by acquiring the most promising cloud startups. The longer the economy stays drab and dreary, the faster the cloud EDW segment will expand, mature, and consolidate.
As that happens, commercial EDW cloud offerings will become as diverse and feature-rich as appliances have become, and I&KM pros will almost certainly ramp up their cloud EDW inquiries.
Forrester’s EDW analyst stands ready to serve.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
poem Nucleic
NUCLEIC
The savior’s siblings
Procreated, spread Mary’s
Blood matriarchy.
The prophets peopled:
Brethren of Buddha, sisters
Of Zoroaster.
Crossed. Cohabited
Christ with cousins Adamic
Non-Abrahamic.
The savior’s siblings
Procreated, spread Mary’s
Blood matriarchy.
The prophets peopled:
Brethren of Buddha, sisters
Of Zoroaster.
Crossed. Cohabited
Christ with cousins Adamic
Non-Abrahamic.
Friday, December 12, 2008
poem X OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO X
X OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO OOO X
Pet a very large
Number. Let it purr its stream
Of murmuring ohs.
Hmm. A one at one
Of the ends. Chasing, it slinks
Past time’s curvature.
Lost the count. Are we
Mounting the powers or gone
Deeply decimal?
Pet a very large
Number. Let it purr its stream
Of murmuring ohs.
Hmm. A one at one
Of the ends. Chasing, it slinks
Past time’s curvature.
Lost the count. Are we
Mounting the powers or gone
Deeply decimal?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
imho Cloud computing in a bubble economy
This story appeared on Network World at
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2008/120908kobelius.html
Cloud computing in a bubble economy
By James Kobielus , Network World , 12/09/2008
Cloud computing is the IT world's latest hot topic, and it's no secret why. In tough times, when capital expenditure budgets are under severe pressure, any pay-per-use solution looks like a winner.
If you give enterprises a credible outsourced alternative to their internal platforms and applications -- one that requires no capital outlays, long-term contracts, data-center infrastructure or internal IT staff -- users can scale that service up or down as their needs and fortunes expand or contract.
Clearly, cloud computing -- as a purely on-demand service-delivery model -- is tailor-made for a bubble economy, such as the world in which we live. In a bubble economy, volatility rules, prices fluctuate wildly, and acute uncertainty and risk permeate everything. Even more distressing, this dynamic new order can destroy established industries, vendors, business models and investment portfolios with sudden, sickening speed.
As we've seen in the financial and automotive industries, valuations can collapse overnight, thereby dislocating lives, careers and communities without much warning. As the economic outlook deteriorates, survival strategies and last-ditch tactics -- such as shotgun mergers -- quickly preempt sound business planning.
Does anybody truly believe that established IT market segments are immune from the brutality of the bubble economy? Hey, let's admit that the IT industry was in fact the proving ground and remains one of the chief enablers of this new economic order. If we learned anything from the dotcom bubble, it was that the frictionless business formation of an on-demand economy can prove disruptive in both the good and bad senses of that word.
Yes, on-demand services contribute to innovation, efficiency and agility throughout the IT world. But fast-bubbling start-ups can also, in the same bold burst, mortally wound established IT vendors before they know what hit them. And this same process can just as rapidly doom the disruptors themselves -- whenever the next cloud of fresh bubbles emerges to suck away their oxygen.
Excessive business risk is the thunderclap inside the world of cloud computing, and it can zap IT suppliers and users with equal devastation. If you've invested in a traditional IT solution that now confronts a significantly more cost-effective cloud-based rival, you'll be hard-pressed to survive if one of your competitors has leveraged that alternative to pare its cost structure to the bone.
And if you're counting on your established IT vendor to migrate you gracefully into its own emerging cloud-based environment, think again. Focusing on short-term financial results, its shareholders are demanding that it leverage the traditional cash cow of software license fees and maintenance revenue to the hilt. To the extent that your traditional IT supplier encourages you to adopt its new cloud-based offering, it will often be just a grudging nudge, a last-ditch effort to hold onto your business.
When looking at the cloud-computing horizon, no two IT industry observers agree on which solution vendors will ultimately prevail -- just as analysts in the financial and automotive sectors have no idea whether Citibank or General Motors will survive this period in anything resembling their current forms. How will Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, SAP, and other blue-chips weather this chaotic cloud front of tornadic start-ups?
Yes, the big guys all have their cloud initiatives, to varying degrees of maturity. But they all tremble before the possibility that such cloud-based pure-plays as Google, Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, or Akamai Technologies will lure away customers with more flexible, lower-cost offerings.
Established IT vendors are trying a bit of everything to keep their core businesses from slipping away. Fundamentally, they're all approaching cloud computing as a sort of Venn-style conceptual bubble diagram, one that converges software-as-a-service, service-oriented architecture, virtualization, utility computing, outsourcing, open source, Web 2.0, social networking and pretty much every other IT trend of the past 10 years. What the incumbents hope is that some magic synthesis of these approaches will help them hang on through this turbulence and prevail into the next era.
Let's be honest with ourselves. We all know the IT industry is in the throes of a major shakeout and some familiar names may not survive much longer. We may have to endure our fair share of shotgun mergers among veteran IT providers before we see the rainbow that signals the end of today's perfect storm. Silver linings are there in today's increasingly cloud-oriented environment, but they're hard to glimpse through the layers of macroeconomic gloom.
All contents copyright 1995-2008 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com
Above the Cloud: September 1987 to December 2008
Thanks, John G., John D., Neal W., Susan C., Adam G., Beth S., Julie B., Paul D., Charlie B., Barb W., Kyle, Alison C., Jim B., Paul S., Bruce G., Anne R., and Steve M.--and, of course, Cheryl C., and all the fine upstanding virtuous virtual citizens in their Speen Street finery
"Everything must run its course." --MGMT
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2008/120908kobelius.html
Cloud computing in a bubble economy
By James Kobielus , Network World , 12/09/2008
Cloud computing is the IT world's latest hot topic, and it's no secret why. In tough times, when capital expenditure budgets are under severe pressure, any pay-per-use solution looks like a winner.
If you give enterprises a credible outsourced alternative to their internal platforms and applications -- one that requires no capital outlays, long-term contracts, data-center infrastructure or internal IT staff -- users can scale that service up or down as their needs and fortunes expand or contract.
Clearly, cloud computing -- as a purely on-demand service-delivery model -- is tailor-made for a bubble economy, such as the world in which we live. In a bubble economy, volatility rules, prices fluctuate wildly, and acute uncertainty and risk permeate everything. Even more distressing, this dynamic new order can destroy established industries, vendors, business models and investment portfolios with sudden, sickening speed.
As we've seen in the financial and automotive industries, valuations can collapse overnight, thereby dislocating lives, careers and communities without much warning. As the economic outlook deteriorates, survival strategies and last-ditch tactics -- such as shotgun mergers -- quickly preempt sound business planning.
Does anybody truly believe that established IT market segments are immune from the brutality of the bubble economy? Hey, let's admit that the IT industry was in fact the proving ground and remains one of the chief enablers of this new economic order. If we learned anything from the dotcom bubble, it was that the frictionless business formation of an on-demand economy can prove disruptive in both the good and bad senses of that word.
Yes, on-demand services contribute to innovation, efficiency and agility throughout the IT world. But fast-bubbling start-ups can also, in the same bold burst, mortally wound established IT vendors before they know what hit them. And this same process can just as rapidly doom the disruptors themselves -- whenever the next cloud of fresh bubbles emerges to suck away their oxygen.
Excessive business risk is the thunderclap inside the world of cloud computing, and it can zap IT suppliers and users with equal devastation. If you've invested in a traditional IT solution that now confronts a significantly more cost-effective cloud-based rival, you'll be hard-pressed to survive if one of your competitors has leveraged that alternative to pare its cost structure to the bone.
And if you're counting on your established IT vendor to migrate you gracefully into its own emerging cloud-based environment, think again. Focusing on short-term financial results, its shareholders are demanding that it leverage the traditional cash cow of software license fees and maintenance revenue to the hilt. To the extent that your traditional IT supplier encourages you to adopt its new cloud-based offering, it will often be just a grudging nudge, a last-ditch effort to hold onto your business.
When looking at the cloud-computing horizon, no two IT industry observers agree on which solution vendors will ultimately prevail -- just as analysts in the financial and automotive sectors have no idea whether Citibank or General Motors will survive this period in anything resembling their current forms. How will Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, SAP, and other blue-chips weather this chaotic cloud front of tornadic start-ups?
Yes, the big guys all have their cloud initiatives, to varying degrees of maturity. But they all tremble before the possibility that such cloud-based pure-plays as Google, Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, or Akamai Technologies will lure away customers with more flexible, lower-cost offerings.
Established IT vendors are trying a bit of everything to keep their core businesses from slipping away. Fundamentally, they're all approaching cloud computing as a sort of Venn-style conceptual bubble diagram, one that converges software-as-a-service, service-oriented architecture, virtualization, utility computing, outsourcing, open source, Web 2.0, social networking and pretty much every other IT trend of the past 10 years. What the incumbents hope is that some magic synthesis of these approaches will help them hang on through this turbulence and prevail into the next era.
Let's be honest with ourselves. We all know the IT industry is in the throes of a major shakeout and some familiar names may not survive much longer. We may have to endure our fair share of shotgun mergers among veteran IT providers before we see the rainbow that signals the end of today's perfect storm. Silver linings are there in today's increasingly cloud-oriented environment, but they're hard to glimpse through the layers of macroeconomic gloom.
All contents copyright 1995-2008 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com
Above the Cloud: September 1987 to December 2008
Thanks, John G., John D., Neal W., Susan C., Adam G., Beth S., Julie B., Paul D., Charlie B., Barb W., Kyle, Alison C., Jim B., Paul S., Bruce G., Anne R., and Steve M.--and, of course, Cheryl C., and all the fine upstanding virtuous virtual citizens in their Speen Street finery
"Everything must run its course." --MGMT
poem Portraiture
PORTRAITURE
People somehow were.
Show me the photograph of
Thomas Jefferson.
Lives were recorded.
Lincoln's voice was more James Dean
than Jimmy Stewart.
Living thought was caught.
Woodrow Wilson's magnetic
resonance. On file.
People somehow were.
Show me the photograph of
Thomas Jefferson.
Lives were recorded.
Lincoln's voice was more James Dean
than Jimmy Stewart.
Living thought was caught.
Woodrow Wilson's magnetic
resonance. On file.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
poem Enya
ENYA
Upon this Earth few
mortals have experienced
such exaltation.
Enya's been here. She
and her mighty massed choir of
echoing Enyas.
Hark the herald cloud
of choral bliss. All those sweet
Enyas in Heaven!
Upon this Earth few
mortals have experienced
such exaltation.
Enya's been here. She
and her mighty massed choir of
echoing Enyas.
Hark the herald cloud
of choral bliss. All those sweet
Enyas in Heaven!
Monday, December 08, 2008
personal Yeah, I too use a Zune....What of it?
All:
Re these stories:
--Take that, iPod: Obama uses a Zune
--Obama's Zune Prompts Screams of Betrayal From Apple Fanboy Nation
Get over it, iPodders. We need our music. Microsoft makes a great portable media player. So does Apple. But iPod is not as great as you all like to believe. Nor is the Mac.
Also, I listen to KEXP. So should you.
Furthermore, Seattle's cooler than Silicon Valley. Better music. Better gloom. Anybody who follows my poetry can see that I'm more grunge than hippie, and more geek than nature boy. Though, being of the same age as Madonna and Prince, we fall directly between those generations, belonging to neither. All of which reminds me to re-publish the following poem, written several years ago (I spontaneously recited it for Linda Tucci this afternoon):
********************
SEATTLE
In the essential
Seattle users
photosynthesize
caffeine directly
from whatever drops
of liquid sunshine
are vouchsafed their way
or, failing that, fix
off the glints of glare
that glance in off the
gray and grace their green
eye-stained monitors.
********************
I have tea and cola poems too.
We're the Obama generation, literally. Our next president will be our first younger than me (by three years--I met JFK in 1960, as a toddler at my Mom's side, as did highschooler Bill Clinton a few years later--Obama, clearly, never did).
If Barack Obama seems way too weirdly self-contained and driven for your tastes, he seems exactly right to me. He is me (he's also Madonna and Prince).
Jim
Re these stories:
--Take that, iPod: Obama uses a Zune
--Obama's Zune Prompts Screams of Betrayal From Apple Fanboy Nation
Get over it, iPodders. We need our music. Microsoft makes a great portable media player. So does Apple. But iPod is not as great as you all like to believe. Nor is the Mac.
Also, I listen to KEXP. So should you.
Furthermore, Seattle's cooler than Silicon Valley. Better music. Better gloom. Anybody who follows my poetry can see that I'm more grunge than hippie, and more geek than nature boy. Though, being of the same age as Madonna and Prince, we fall directly between those generations, belonging to neither. All of which reminds me to re-publish the following poem, written several years ago (I spontaneously recited it for Linda Tucci this afternoon):
********************
SEATTLE
In the essential
Seattle users
photosynthesize
caffeine directly
from whatever drops
of liquid sunshine
are vouchsafed their way
or, failing that, fix
off the glints of glare
that glance in off the
gray and grace their green
eye-stained monitors.
********************
I have tea and cola poems too.
We're the Obama generation, literally. Our next president will be our first younger than me (by three years--I met JFK in 1960, as a toddler at my Mom's side, as did highschooler Bill Clinton a few years later--Obama, clearly, never did).
If Barack Obama seems way too weirdly self-contained and driven for your tastes, he seems exactly right to me. He is me (he's also Madonna and Prince).
Jim
Sunday, December 07, 2008
poem Old Lime Sing
OLD LIME SING
Should old tequila
stay locked up, far too hard for
celebration times?
Will Jose Cuervo
grace this cup, kindly chase our
singing spirits up?
Gaily waste this eve
on a new one's cusp, gamely
rim our rhymes with crust?
Should old tequila
stay locked up, far too hard for
celebration times?
Will Jose Cuervo
grace this cup, kindly chase our
singing spirits up?
Gaily waste this eve
on a new one's cusp, gamely
rim our rhymes with crust?
Thursday, December 04, 2008
poem Approaching Solstice
APPROACHING SOLSTICE
Air was there, was bare
and shimmering, around the
spot where bells should be.
Night was there, was spare
and sparkling, a strand of lights
suggesting a tree.
Some snow, a song, a
kid. These ticklesome trances
of holiday glee.
Air was there, was bare
and shimmering, around the
spot where bells should be.
Night was there, was spare
and sparkling, a strand of lights
suggesting a tree.
Some snow, a song, a
kid. These ticklesome trances
of holiday glee.
Monday, November 24, 2008
poem Contained
CONTAINED
Sit amid walling,
the ceiling, the flooring, the
shut and drawn drapery.
This the air you'll breathe,
the humidity your lungs
will, through living, swell.
Like any earthbound
structure, you're set--braced against
the rattling strata.
Sit amid walling,
the ceiling, the flooring, the
shut and drawn drapery.
This the air you'll breathe,
the humidity your lungs
will, through living, swell.
Like any earthbound
structure, you're set--braced against
the rattling strata.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
imho Natl Chf T Officer????!
All:
Tough times we’re living in. In fact, it’s hard to get through a day now without having the phrase “tough times” hammered into your head by the parrots in the media… with “down economy,” “bad economy,” “slowing economy,” “recessionary times,” “difficult times,” “challenging economic environment,” and a veritable Roget’s treasure chest of other near-synonyms creating a maddening echo-chamber effect.
Technology is proving to be a sort of shock absorber in times like these. What I mean is that it keeps us connected, productive, entertained, and tuned in to our friends, family, and support group---or, helps us to tune into and groove on our own comfy little private world of passions and distractions—even when the news from the wider world is bleak. And when travel options are expensive or unavailable—as they were in the immediate post-9/11 period—or the parcel post is potentially toxic—as it was post-anthrax--information technology helped us continue to carry on a constrained semblance of a normal economy.
Tensile strength is the amount of stress that a connection can bear before it breaks. The availability of so many communication options gives our social sinews more tensile strength than ever. IT makes us a tougher fabric, harder to rend asunder, even under the stresses that come from terrorism, financial panic, mass layoffs, and other nasty facts of life.
Telecommunications is a tendon, a tether, a thick thread that resists twisting and torque, and then springs back into shape. It’s a tissue that binds our community, maintains the integrity and possibility of collective action, the resilience and resolve of common response, even in the harshest circumstances. I still take inspiration from the thought that the initial impetus for the development of the Internet was to create a national network that can survive a nuclear holocaust. Even if that particular hope was too dire, desperate, and naïve to survive close scrutiny.
Tell the nation’s technologist-in-chief, if we ever appoint one, to update that vision. Tell that person to forge a new vision of a resilient national backbone, one that can help us weather rough times, and carry us over to boom periods, but remain in place, operational, evolving, and commercially viable through the subsequent economic cycles, with only minimal government oversight or funding. Wait…that vision’s already a reality—it’s the commercial Internet that Sen. Al Gore and others envisioned in the early 90s and which quickly became a worldwide reality.
Today’s Internet is working fine, but can always stand improvement. If we create a national CTO, that person must respect the fact that this network is a global resource, not a US fiefdom. A US national CTO must collaborate and federate with their counterparts in other nations.
Try not to monkey arrogantly and unilaterally with a good thing, which some call cyberspace but is in fact now a key connective thread of the human race.
Jim
Tough times we’re living in. In fact, it’s hard to get through a day now without having the phrase “tough times” hammered into your head by the parrots in the media… with “down economy,” “bad economy,” “slowing economy,” “recessionary times,” “difficult times,” “challenging economic environment,” and a veritable Roget’s treasure chest of other near-synonyms creating a maddening echo-chamber effect.
Technology is proving to be a sort of shock absorber in times like these. What I mean is that it keeps us connected, productive, entertained, and tuned in to our friends, family, and support group---or, helps us to tune into and groove on our own comfy little private world of passions and distractions—even when the news from the wider world is bleak. And when travel options are expensive or unavailable—as they were in the immediate post-9/11 period—or the parcel post is potentially toxic—as it was post-anthrax--information technology helped us continue to carry on a constrained semblance of a normal economy.
Tensile strength is the amount of stress that a connection can bear before it breaks. The availability of so many communication options gives our social sinews more tensile strength than ever. IT makes us a tougher fabric, harder to rend asunder, even under the stresses that come from terrorism, financial panic, mass layoffs, and other nasty facts of life.
Telecommunications is a tendon, a tether, a thick thread that resists twisting and torque, and then springs back into shape. It’s a tissue that binds our community, maintains the integrity and possibility of collective action, the resilience and resolve of common response, even in the harshest circumstances. I still take inspiration from the thought that the initial impetus for the development of the Internet was to create a national network that can survive a nuclear holocaust. Even if that particular hope was too dire, desperate, and naïve to survive close scrutiny.
Tell the nation’s technologist-in-chief, if we ever appoint one, to update that vision. Tell that person to forge a new vision of a resilient national backbone, one that can help us weather rough times, and carry us over to boom periods, but remain in place, operational, evolving, and commercially viable through the subsequent economic cycles, with only minimal government oversight or funding. Wait…that vision’s already a reality—it’s the commercial Internet that Sen. Al Gore and others envisioned in the early 90s and which quickly became a worldwide reality.
Today’s Internet is working fine, but can always stand improvement. If we create a national CTO, that person must respect the fact that this network is a global resource, not a US fiefdom. A US national CTO must collaborate and federate with their counterparts in other nations.
Try not to monkey arrogantly and unilaterally with a good thing, which some call cyberspace but is in fact now a key connective thread of the human race.
Jim
Monday, November 17, 2008
imho Natl Chf T Officer???
All:
Way over yonder in CIO Insight magazine, Eric Lundquist says we should have a national chief information officer (CIO), not a national CTO.
Maybe I’m dense, but I’ve never fully understood the difference. A CIO is supposedly focused on applications, or, in Lundquist’s words, “business first and technology second.” Whereas a CTO would be, by implication, a business-be-damned technology zealot of the first order.
Or maybe I’m exaggerating slightly. But I’ve met quite a few CTOs in my life and times, and I still haven’t met an irresponsible bit-hugging code-cutting wire-pulling maniac among them. Which is not to say that there aren’t incompetent twits in this line of work, as in all walks of life. But, if there is a practical distinction between CIO and CTO, it isn’t usually in their relative business-savvy. It’s usually that the former is better at working with stakeholders, gaining buy-in, and nailing down the budget, whereas the latter is adept at delivering on any commitments that the former has made. The best C-level tech execs combine both skill sets, or focus on CIO responsibilities and know enough to delegate the CTO responsibilities to the right person. Whoever fulfills these roles, they, in Lundquist’s words, should certainly “know how to get things done.”
Where a national CTO/CIO is concerned, the big issue is what “thing” we the people want them to get done. As I stated in the past few posts, it’s anybody’s guess what specific responsibilities President-elect Obama would invest in any future national CTO that Congress may or may not authorize him to appoint. In Lundquist’s article, I’m glad he mentioned the heretofore fruitless federal effort to focus cybersecurity policy in a single position. “How many cybersecurity czars,” says Lundquist, “have we gone through since 9/11? I count at least three (Amit Yoran, Howard Schmidt, Greg Garcia and I’m sure there have been more) along with long gaps between selections. I think what happened was in the panic to develop national security there was an unwillingness to admit that a national security plan could take years and years to develop as competing agencies, privacy concerns and security processes needed to be considered. A national CTO could face the same difficulties.”
That last sentence is the understatement of the year. You think giving one person responsibility for all federal cybersecurity policy was a ticket to failure? Well, just imagine the insanely overflowing inbox—-cybersecurity and much much more--that will greet the person who tries to take on President Obama’s IT policy agenda, per the all-encompassing sci-tech position paper that his campaign published months ago.
If a federal CTO/CIO does nothing else, they should at least focus on the same core agenda as their counterparts in the private sector: leveraging information assets to improve organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. In other words, the whole business transformation and optimization agenda—where the business we’re speaking of is the “people’s business.” Maybe what we need is a national Chief Transformation Officer.
Which is why I initially thought Al Gore would be a good candidate for the national CTO job—never mind that he would be an even better candidate for Secretary of State. When Gore was Vice President, he headed a “Reinventing Government” effort—essentially, a thankless, possibly futile, effort to prod government agencies to work both smarter and harder. Not that I have anything against government employees, but most of them work for what are essentially monopolies, and many of them have secure, unionized jobs. Good luck asking them to transform themselves when they have absolutely no career-saving need to do so.
If the incoming Democratic administration attempts to revive the “Reinventing Government” initiative, whoever leads it will need to consider the transformative power of the government’s vast IT assets. Will that leader be the presumed national CTO? Will it be Vice President Biden? Should it be?
If we’re going to give someone the thankless job of national CTO, why not hand it to the second-in-command, whose position was once described as not being worth a “pitcher of warm spit.”
Jim
Way over yonder in CIO Insight magazine, Eric Lundquist says we should have a national chief information officer (CIO), not a national CTO.
Maybe I’m dense, but I’ve never fully understood the difference. A CIO is supposedly focused on applications, or, in Lundquist’s words, “business first and technology second.” Whereas a CTO would be, by implication, a business-be-damned technology zealot of the first order.
Or maybe I’m exaggerating slightly. But I’ve met quite a few CTOs in my life and times, and I still haven’t met an irresponsible bit-hugging code-cutting wire-pulling maniac among them. Which is not to say that there aren’t incompetent twits in this line of work, as in all walks of life. But, if there is a practical distinction between CIO and CTO, it isn’t usually in their relative business-savvy. It’s usually that the former is better at working with stakeholders, gaining buy-in, and nailing down the budget, whereas the latter is adept at delivering on any commitments that the former has made. The best C-level tech execs combine both skill sets, or focus on CIO responsibilities and know enough to delegate the CTO responsibilities to the right person. Whoever fulfills these roles, they, in Lundquist’s words, should certainly “know how to get things done.”
Where a national CTO/CIO is concerned, the big issue is what “thing” we the people want them to get done. As I stated in the past few posts, it’s anybody’s guess what specific responsibilities President-elect Obama would invest in any future national CTO that Congress may or may not authorize him to appoint. In Lundquist’s article, I’m glad he mentioned the heretofore fruitless federal effort to focus cybersecurity policy in a single position. “How many cybersecurity czars,” says Lundquist, “have we gone through since 9/11? I count at least three (Amit Yoran, Howard Schmidt, Greg Garcia and I’m sure there have been more) along with long gaps between selections. I think what happened was in the panic to develop national security there was an unwillingness to admit that a national security plan could take years and years to develop as competing agencies, privacy concerns and security processes needed to be considered. A national CTO could face the same difficulties.”
That last sentence is the understatement of the year. You think giving one person responsibility for all federal cybersecurity policy was a ticket to failure? Well, just imagine the insanely overflowing inbox—-cybersecurity and much much more--that will greet the person who tries to take on President Obama’s IT policy agenda, per the all-encompassing sci-tech position paper that his campaign published months ago.
If a federal CTO/CIO does nothing else, they should at least focus on the same core agenda as their counterparts in the private sector: leveraging information assets to improve organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. In other words, the whole business transformation and optimization agenda—where the business we’re speaking of is the “people’s business.” Maybe what we need is a national Chief Transformation Officer.
Which is why I initially thought Al Gore would be a good candidate for the national CTO job—never mind that he would be an even better candidate for Secretary of State. When Gore was Vice President, he headed a “Reinventing Government” effort—essentially, a thankless, possibly futile, effort to prod government agencies to work both smarter and harder. Not that I have anything against government employees, but most of them work for what are essentially monopolies, and many of them have secure, unionized jobs. Good luck asking them to transform themselves when they have absolutely no career-saving need to do so.
If the incoming Democratic administration attempts to revive the “Reinventing Government” initiative, whoever leads it will need to consider the transformative power of the government’s vast IT assets. Will that leader be the presumed national CTO? Will it be Vice President Biden? Should it be?
If we’re going to give someone the thankless job of national CTO, why not hand it to the second-in-command, whose position was once described as not being worth a “pitcher of warm spit.”
Jim
Sunday, November 16, 2008
imho Natl Chf T Officer??
All:
Obama has not yet articulated any compelling public interest for creating a national CTO, however that role may be defined.
Furthermore, the president-elect has not addressed the obvious corollary of his proposal: a national CTO would be powerless and ineffectual without statutory authority and a corresponding budget and bureaucracy. To make his vision of a national CTO a reality, Obama would need to propose legislation that would establish a new agency, which would probably absorb the functions of existing agencies.
Of course, we already have just such an agency: the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is under the Department of Commerce and describes itself as “the President's principal adviser on telecommunications and information policy.” Does Obama simply want to give NTIA’s head, the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, a new job title, “National CTO,” or is he proposing something different? Does he also want to invest this position/agency with additional responsibilities? Does he want to split it from Commerce and reconstitute it as a separate agency? None of this is clear at this point.
That’s not to say making NTIA a separate agency would necessarily be a bad idea (but I have no opinions on the matter, one way or another). Periodically, the U.S. government has created new agencies from the programs formerly held by established bureaucracies, and/or to administer new laws. Sometimes, an overriding national emergency creates an urgent demand for a new regulatory bureaucracy. Excuse me for putting a cynical spin on this, but the Department of Homeland Security will always be the 9/11-reaction agency…just as the Environmental Protection Agency is the “Rachel Carson Silent Spring Earth Day” reaction agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission is the “1929 stock market crash” reaction agency, and the Federal Reserve System is the “Panic of 1907” reaction agency.
OK, I’m oversimplifying, but only slightly. But I’m not sensing any great urgent national call for a CTO-like position. More critical, at this historical juncture, is a totally reconstituted financial regulatory authority to replace the Federal Reserve in the wake of the current meltdown.
If we need any sort of national CTO right now, maybe it should be a Chief Transparency Officer. What do I mean by that? Well, the Obama campaign pledged to “use cutting-edge technologies to ...creat[e] a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens.”
What this suggests is a role for business intelligence and performance management technologies in the federal government’s outreach to citizens. What I’m thinking of, and discussed in a recent Forrester blog post, is some sort of online, continuously refreshed scorecard, dashboard, or report that measures how well the government is serving its constitutents, as measured across many key performance indicators. Or, at the very least, such a scorecard might illustrate how well President Obama is living up to his campaign promises or stacking up against, say, the government’s performance under the outgoing President Bush.
Hmmm….a national government transparency scorecard. Only an aggressive push from the incoming president can put this sort of initiative on a legislative fast track. And fresh blood, in the form of a national Chief Transparency Officer from an activist background, would be needed to sell it to a skeptical public and federal bureaucracy.
Yeah, we could give the government scorecard program to the NTIA, but that would bury it deep in the bureaucracy and probably doom it to failure. The Chief Transparency Officer would need to report directly to the president, who should be promoting it as a key component of his efforts to open government to deep scrutiny.
Jim
Obama has not yet articulated any compelling public interest for creating a national CTO, however that role may be defined.
Furthermore, the president-elect has not addressed the obvious corollary of his proposal: a national CTO would be powerless and ineffectual without statutory authority and a corresponding budget and bureaucracy. To make his vision of a national CTO a reality, Obama would need to propose legislation that would establish a new agency, which would probably absorb the functions of existing agencies.
Of course, we already have just such an agency: the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is under the Department of Commerce and describes itself as “the President's principal adviser on telecommunications and information policy.” Does Obama simply want to give NTIA’s head, the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, a new job title, “National CTO,” or is he proposing something different? Does he also want to invest this position/agency with additional responsibilities? Does he want to split it from Commerce and reconstitute it as a separate agency? None of this is clear at this point.
That’s not to say making NTIA a separate agency would necessarily be a bad idea (but I have no opinions on the matter, one way or another). Periodically, the U.S. government has created new agencies from the programs formerly held by established bureaucracies, and/or to administer new laws. Sometimes, an overriding national emergency creates an urgent demand for a new regulatory bureaucracy. Excuse me for putting a cynical spin on this, but the Department of Homeland Security will always be the 9/11-reaction agency…just as the Environmental Protection Agency is the “Rachel Carson Silent Spring Earth Day” reaction agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission is the “1929 stock market crash” reaction agency, and the Federal Reserve System is the “Panic of 1907” reaction agency.
OK, I’m oversimplifying, but only slightly. But I’m not sensing any great urgent national call for a CTO-like position. More critical, at this historical juncture, is a totally reconstituted financial regulatory authority to replace the Federal Reserve in the wake of the current meltdown.
If we need any sort of national CTO right now, maybe it should be a Chief Transparency Officer. What do I mean by that? Well, the Obama campaign pledged to “use cutting-edge technologies to ...creat[e] a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens.”
What this suggests is a role for business intelligence and performance management technologies in the federal government’s outreach to citizens. What I’m thinking of, and discussed in a recent Forrester blog post, is some sort of online, continuously refreshed scorecard, dashboard, or report that measures how well the government is serving its constitutents, as measured across many key performance indicators. Or, at the very least, such a scorecard might illustrate how well President Obama is living up to his campaign promises or stacking up against, say, the government’s performance under the outgoing President Bush.
Hmmm….a national government transparency scorecard. Only an aggressive push from the incoming president can put this sort of initiative on a legislative fast track. And fresh blood, in the form of a national Chief Transparency Officer from an activist background, would be needed to sell it to a skeptical public and federal bureaucracy.
Yeah, we could give the government scorecard program to the NTIA, but that would bury it deep in the bureaucracy and probably doom it to failure. The Chief Transparency Officer would need to report directly to the president, who should be promoting it as a key component of his efforts to open government to deep scrutiny.
Jim
Saturday, November 15, 2008
imho Natl Chf T Officer?
All:
My first reaction when I heard that Obama wanted to create a national “chief technology officer” (CTO) was a tad on the cynical side. I haven’t progressed much beyond that—-yet.
National CTO? A technology czar, so to speak? To do what, exactly? With what mandate? What budget? What bureaucracy? What programs? Which champions and defenders in which committees on Capitol Hill? Which lobbyists fighting for a slot on your agenda so they can report to their customers that they have access to someone who actually has real influence over policy and legislation that matters to them? You’re nothing in Washington if you don’t have any of that.
So what’s to distinguish a National CTO from an impotent, symbolic, figurehead position, such as, say, U.S. Poet Laureate, doing a perpetual roadshow to showcase the best in US tech prowess and innovation?
Is this national CTO’s primary job going to be promoting digital apple pie causes such as the need for everybody to get connected, achieve some basic Internet literacy, or give kids laptops to help them develop into the next generation of geniuses, and so forth?
Or will the national CTO have something slightly meatier to fill their days, such as convening meetings of federal-agency CTOs in order to disseminate government best practices for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the like?
Or will the national CTO serve as some sort of policy coordinator driving the Obama administration’s attempts to get its IT-related initiatives implemented in legislation?
We definitely need all of those things. But in the same job? Same person? And what person(s) might be suited to any or all of the above? What conceivable reason might, say, a tech billionaire have to accept such a position, which sounds like a politics-intensive job for a longtime inside-Washington policy wonk with a thick skin and the soul of a lobbyist? Where’s the fun? The glamour? The chance to do something innovative?
Jim
My first reaction when I heard that Obama wanted to create a national “chief technology officer” (CTO) was a tad on the cynical side. I haven’t progressed much beyond that—-yet.
National CTO? A technology czar, so to speak? To do what, exactly? With what mandate? What budget? What bureaucracy? What programs? Which champions and defenders in which committees on Capitol Hill? Which lobbyists fighting for a slot on your agenda so they can report to their customers that they have access to someone who actually has real influence over policy and legislation that matters to them? You’re nothing in Washington if you don’t have any of that.
So what’s to distinguish a National CTO from an impotent, symbolic, figurehead position, such as, say, U.S. Poet Laureate, doing a perpetual roadshow to showcase the best in US tech prowess and innovation?
Is this national CTO’s primary job going to be promoting digital apple pie causes such as the need for everybody to get connected, achieve some basic Internet literacy, or give kids laptops to help them develop into the next generation of geniuses, and so forth?
Or will the national CTO have something slightly meatier to fill their days, such as convening meetings of federal-agency CTOs in order to disseminate government best practices for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the like?
Or will the national CTO serve as some sort of policy coordinator driving the Obama administration’s attempts to get its IT-related initiatives implemented in legislation?
We definitely need all of those things. But in the same job? Same person? And what person(s) might be suited to any or all of the above? What conceivable reason might, say, a tech billionaire have to accept such a position, which sounds like a politics-intensive job for a longtime inside-Washington policy wonk with a thick skin and the soul of a lobbyist? Where’s the fun? The glamour? The chance to do something innovative?
Jim
Thursday, November 13, 2008
personal Quick breather
All:
Hey.
Birthday’s a good day to take a breather. So I am. Just today.
It’s also a good day to take a quick look back at the year gone by. Especially if, like me , you were born in late autumn, and will be too damn busy in the coming weeks to take another break till Christmas hits, and everybody will be doing their wrap-ups, and it all becomes just too much.
Too much is exactly what I’m avoiding today, which is a Novemberly one all right, outside my window: overcast, chill, rain, bare trees. Feels like home for a transplanted Michigan boy like me. The calm of gray light and soft sofa.
This personal blog is nearing the end of its fourth year. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve slacked off on the tech postings. In case you were wondering, I’ve moved most, but not all, of my tech musings to the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog, where I’m one of many. Rather than confuse the industry regarding what Jim Kobielus’ real position is on this or that, I’ve kept my personal blog tech blather to just the marginal, silly, tangential, and self-indulgent—and to re-postings of my Network World columns.
Here, for the record, are links to my Forrester blog posts, from latest to earliest:
**************************************************************
November 2008
Obama’s Information Agenda....What is It and Is There A Role for BI?
October 2008
Governance Risk Compliance Agenda....Critical in Turbulent Economy, But Conspicuously Missing from IBM’s IOD Go-To-Market Message
Extreme Affordability at the Data Warehouse? Teradata? Really?
Tactile user-built micro-analytics...OLAP and BI for the next generation...and for the aging Baby Boomer generation
September 2008
Agenda Politics -- Information Shifts The Balance Of Policy And Influence In Any Organization
Oracle Soars Into Petabyte Stratosphere, Puts HP-Powered Grid Storage At The Heart Of Its New High-End DW Appliance
Oracle Virtualizes DBMS And DW Into Amazon's Cloud
Federation Supplements The Data Warehouse - Not Either/Or, Never Was
The New Paradigm Of In-Database Cloud Analytics, And Google’s Role As Catalyst
August 2008
Database Virtualization Could Induce I&KM Vertigo
July 2008
Microsoft Acquiring DATAllegro, Rebooting Data Warehousing Appliance Strategy, And Triggering Industry Consolidation
OLAP's Cube Is Crumbling Around The Edges
June 2008
No posts in June.
May 2008
Analytic Databases Power BI Boom
April 2008
Teradata Goes Appliance, Officially
The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) — Defined, Refined, Evolving With The Times
CEP For Real-Time BI: Vendor Announcement Events Come In Threes, Apparently
March 2008
Competitive Business Intelligence, Harnessed Through Collaboration And CEP, Harvested Across The Cloud
Oh No, Not Another 2.0 -- Database 2.0? Data Warehousing In The Cloud!
February 2008
Complex Decisions Driven, But Not Overtaken, By Events
Complex Events, Simple Experiences
Complex Event Processing (CEP) For I&KM — Mouthfuls, Morsels, And Meaningful, Manageable, Multifaceted Streams of Real-Time Intelligence
IBM Expands IOD Portfolio, Perhaps To The Bursting Point
January 2008
Data Warehousing Appliances: Growing Bigger Than A Breadbox, Softer Than The Bread
BI's New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond
Everything That Happens In The Enterprise Software Market Affects BI
**************************************************************
I noticed that I’ve published 15 poems on my blog this year. Interesting how those just sprung up, after having put it all on relative hiatus for the past few years. Basically, it all sprung up to have content to stick in my personal blog till I figure out the next thread. If you scroll back over the past 4 years in this blog, I started by riding the news cycle, in terms of offering opinions triggered by stories I read in the IT press. Then, there was a long period where I rode the “me cycle,” in terms of doing long multi-post rambling discussions on whatever tech topics came into my head, or topics I developed in my freelance IT writing jobs, or tech topics that I’d developed positions on previously in my analyst gigs that I still had ideas I needed to share with the world.
This year has seen a bit of all that, plus the poems, which I started developing late in my 30s to have an outlet for stray thoughts and to distract me in the late 90s/early 00s from the sometimes overwhelming task of writing books on workflow, doing my freelance articles, having a full-time job, and having a family.
Someday I’ll publish it all, hopefully, in book form. But mostly, it’s just to amuse. Of the recent ones, I’m particularly fond of “Charles Schulz’s ‘Kids’” (inspired by David Michaelis’ biography of the cartoonist—the first stanza of that poem is a direct rejoinder to a Peanuts cartoon from the mid-60s—look it up); “U.S. Pres. Barry H. ("Rocky") Obama, Jr. (D)” (inspired by an actual sticker on my sliding glass door in back, but written a month before the election, in Seattle, 6:30am, at Pike Place Market, standing on a concrete baluster with Starbucks coffee in hand, looking out over Puget Sound, knowing what’s coming); “Crunchy Analytic” (inspired by Kristina Kerr of Microsoft—hey Kristina, I told you I’d mention you--and composed in my head during dinner with Microsoft during their BI show in Seattle last month); “Wane and Wax” (inspired by a Cocteau Twins song); “Music and Music Accessories” (inspired by a piano player in the lounge at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier in Ottawa during the IBM Cognos analyst summit two months ago); “Talk Toxins” (a yoga breathing/relaxation/disengagement poem that also anticipated the recent panic and has helped me stay centered); “Bill Gates’ ‘Retirement’” (a ten-stanza triple-haiku, like the Schulz piece; it rode both the news cycle and the me cycle; like the Schulz piece, was actually a mediation on marriage, and also on the span of 50 years; like today’s poem, which they both foreshadowed); “Menhir” (for Elizabeth Aliman, my recently departed mother-in-law, and also for Jean Elizabeth Hoff Kobielus, my beloved mother who left this world almost 40 years ago); the Las Vegas poems from early June (especially “Center of Conventions Exhibitions Conferences and Expositions,” because it captures the essential spatial geometry of the huge interior public spaces that have been one of the primary settings for my career since the mid-80s, and which, like airports and business hotels, tend to blur in my dreams into each other).
Because I dream in space. And my mind processes information geometrically, and tangibly. Hence “Crunchy Analytic.”
Jim
Hey.
Birthday’s a good day to take a breather. So I am. Just today.
It’s also a good day to take a quick look back at the year gone by. Especially if, like me , you were born in late autumn, and will be too damn busy in the coming weeks to take another break till Christmas hits, and everybody will be doing their wrap-ups, and it all becomes just too much.
Too much is exactly what I’m avoiding today, which is a Novemberly one all right, outside my window: overcast, chill, rain, bare trees. Feels like home for a transplanted Michigan boy like me. The calm of gray light and soft sofa.
This personal blog is nearing the end of its fourth year. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve slacked off on the tech postings. In case you were wondering, I’ve moved most, but not all, of my tech musings to the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog, where I’m one of many. Rather than confuse the industry regarding what Jim Kobielus’ real position is on this or that, I’ve kept my personal blog tech blather to just the marginal, silly, tangential, and self-indulgent—and to re-postings of my Network World columns.
Here, for the record, are links to my Forrester blog posts, from latest to earliest:
**************************************************************
November 2008
Obama’s Information Agenda....What is It and Is There A Role for BI?
October 2008
Governance Risk Compliance Agenda....Critical in Turbulent Economy, But Conspicuously Missing from IBM’s IOD Go-To-Market Message
Extreme Affordability at the Data Warehouse? Teradata? Really?
Tactile user-built micro-analytics...OLAP and BI for the next generation...and for the aging Baby Boomer generation
September 2008
Agenda Politics -- Information Shifts The Balance Of Policy And Influence In Any Organization
Oracle Soars Into Petabyte Stratosphere, Puts HP-Powered Grid Storage At The Heart Of Its New High-End DW Appliance
Oracle Virtualizes DBMS And DW Into Amazon's Cloud
Federation Supplements The Data Warehouse - Not Either/Or, Never Was
The New Paradigm Of In-Database Cloud Analytics, And Google’s Role As Catalyst
August 2008
Database Virtualization Could Induce I&KM Vertigo
July 2008
Microsoft Acquiring DATAllegro, Rebooting Data Warehousing Appliance Strategy, And Triggering Industry Consolidation
OLAP's Cube Is Crumbling Around The Edges
June 2008
No posts in June.
May 2008
Analytic Databases Power BI Boom
April 2008
Teradata Goes Appliance, Officially
The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) — Defined, Refined, Evolving With The Times
CEP For Real-Time BI: Vendor Announcement Events Come In Threes, Apparently
March 2008
Competitive Business Intelligence, Harnessed Through Collaboration And CEP, Harvested Across The Cloud
Oh No, Not Another 2.0 -- Database 2.0? Data Warehousing In The Cloud!
February 2008
Complex Decisions Driven, But Not Overtaken, By Events
Complex Events, Simple Experiences
Complex Event Processing (CEP) For I&KM — Mouthfuls, Morsels, And Meaningful, Manageable, Multifaceted Streams of Real-Time Intelligence
IBM Expands IOD Portfolio, Perhaps To The Bursting Point
January 2008
Data Warehousing Appliances: Growing Bigger Than A Breadbox, Softer Than The Bread
BI's New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond
Everything That Happens In The Enterprise Software Market Affects BI
**************************************************************
I noticed that I’ve published 15 poems on my blog this year. Interesting how those just sprung up, after having put it all on relative hiatus for the past few years. Basically, it all sprung up to have content to stick in my personal blog till I figure out the next thread. If you scroll back over the past 4 years in this blog, I started by riding the news cycle, in terms of offering opinions triggered by stories I read in the IT press. Then, there was a long period where I rode the “me cycle,” in terms of doing long multi-post rambling discussions on whatever tech topics came into my head, or topics I developed in my freelance IT writing jobs, or tech topics that I’d developed positions on previously in my analyst gigs that I still had ideas I needed to share with the world.
This year has seen a bit of all that, plus the poems, which I started developing late in my 30s to have an outlet for stray thoughts and to distract me in the late 90s/early 00s from the sometimes overwhelming task of writing books on workflow, doing my freelance articles, having a full-time job, and having a family.
Someday I’ll publish it all, hopefully, in book form. But mostly, it’s just to amuse. Of the recent ones, I’m particularly fond of “Charles Schulz’s ‘Kids’” (inspired by David Michaelis’ biography of the cartoonist—the first stanza of that poem is a direct rejoinder to a Peanuts cartoon from the mid-60s—look it up); “U.S. Pres. Barry H. ("Rocky") Obama, Jr. (D)” (inspired by an actual sticker on my sliding glass door in back, but written a month before the election, in Seattle, 6:30am, at Pike Place Market, standing on a concrete baluster with Starbucks coffee in hand, looking out over Puget Sound, knowing what’s coming); “Crunchy Analytic” (inspired by Kristina Kerr of Microsoft—hey Kristina, I told you I’d mention you--and composed in my head during dinner with Microsoft during their BI show in Seattle last month); “Wane and Wax” (inspired by a Cocteau Twins song); “Music and Music Accessories” (inspired by a piano player in the lounge at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier in Ottawa during the IBM Cognos analyst summit two months ago); “Talk Toxins” (a yoga breathing/relaxation/disengagement poem that also anticipated the recent panic and has helped me stay centered); “Bill Gates’ ‘Retirement’” (a ten-stanza triple-haiku, like the Schulz piece; it rode both the news cycle and the me cycle; like the Schulz piece, was actually a mediation on marriage, and also on the span of 50 years; like today’s poem, which they both foreshadowed); “Menhir” (for Elizabeth Aliman, my recently departed mother-in-law, and also for Jean Elizabeth Hoff Kobielus, my beloved mother who left this world almost 40 years ago); the Las Vegas poems from early June (especially “Center of Conventions Exhibitions Conferences and Expositions,” because it captures the essential spatial geometry of the huge interior public spaces that have been one of the primary settings for my career since the mid-80s, and which, like airports and business hotels, tend to blur in my dreams into each other).
Because I dream in space. And my mind processes information geometrically, and tangibly. Hence “Crunchy Analytic.”
Jim
poem Fifty
FIFTY
i'm..time...in its blunt
beneficence...has granted
jim...continuance.
fine...as a finite
analyst can be...parsing
his...half-century.
thanks...i'll take the cake
and mind my sun...counting on
candle fifty-one.
i'm..time...in its blunt
beneficence...has granted
jim...continuance.
fine...as a finite
analyst can be...parsing
his...half-century.
thanks...i'll take the cake
and mind my sun...counting on
candle fifty-one.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
poem U.S. Pres. Barry H. ("Rocky") Obama, Jr. (D)
U.S. PRES. BARRY H. ("ROCKY") OBAMA, JR. (D)
Red fades from the flag
of my post nine eleven
sticker. One white stripe.
Reds--remember when
they were death, a patriot
was anything but.
On a bluing field.
Behold the latest star. A
black white Hawaiian.
Red fades from the flag
of my post nine eleven
sticker. One white stripe.
Reds--remember when
they were death, a patriot
was anything but.
On a bluing field.
Behold the latest star. A
black white Hawaiian.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
poem An Insinuation
AN INSINUATION
Whether the weather
blows over or not I'll be
sitting here chilling.
Every God-given
day, damned or otherwise, is
another excuse.
A day to rise and
be still in situ and in
my very sinew.
Whether the weather
blows over or not I'll be
sitting here chilling.
Every God-given
day, damned or otherwise, is
another excuse.
A day to rise and
be still in situ and in
my very sinew.
poem Drench
DRENCH
Could rain fall as snow
and in flight form a bow of
crystalline color.
Leaves would float as light
and diffuse the heavenly
silence of autumn.
Jumble the remains
of drifting summer. Soak and
drench the memory.
Could rain fall as snow
and in flight form a bow of
crystalline color.
Leaves would float as light
and diffuse the heavenly
silence of autumn.
Jumble the remains
of drifting summer. Soak and
drench the memory.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Ellison hypes Oracle's data warehouse appliance
This story appeared on Network World at
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2008/100708-kobielus.html
Ellison hypes Oracle's data warehouse appliance
By James Kobielus , Network World , 10/07/2008
The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.
The DW industry's new battlefront is petabyte scalability. This refers to a DW platform's ability to ingest, store, process and deliver an order-of-magnitude more data than today's typical terabyte-size warehouses. In this regard, the competitive high ground is still held by pioneering DW-appliance provider Teradata. That vendor recently released a high-end, shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) DW appliance that can scale to an astounding 10 petabytes across as many as 1,024 compute/storage nodes.
Oracle and HP recently joined the petabyte battle with all guns blazing. At Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference, they jointly announced general availability of a new petabyte-scalable DW appliance: the HP Oracle Database Machine, which includes the HP Exadata Storage Server. They touted its "extreme" performance and scaling features, bolstering those claims through public demos and beta-tester testimonials.
Most significant, they enlisted none other than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and HP honchos Mark Hurd and Ann Livermore to unveil the new offering from the conference's main stage.
Clearly, the HP Oracle Database Machine is highly strategic for both companies. It provides a platform for Oracle to sell more database licenses and for HP to sell more server and storage hardware into DW deployments. It will almost certainly get the partners onto vendor short lists, alongside Teradata, for petabyte-scale DW solutions, which are increasingly being deployed in such vertical markets as telecommunications, government and financial services.
Also, it helps them blunt the momentum of DW appliance up-and-comer Netezza, whose platform, like the new Oracle/HP offering, performs SQL processing in an intelligent storage layer, thereby accelerating queries and table scans against very large data sets.
For sure, the recent Oracle/HP announcement was substantial and has shifted the competitive dynamics in the high-end DW market. But it was also an exercise in pure, albeit well-engineered, marketing hype. Predictably, it triggered an immediate firestorm of heated retorts from aggrieved competitors, which will almost certainly escalate in coming months.
In the fog of war, the first casualty is perspective, and that's certainly the case in this competitive fracas. Buyers of DW solutions should exercise extreme caution when evaluating the new Oracle/HP solution vis-à-vis comparably scalable offerings from Teradata, Sybase, Greenplum, IBM and others. You'll definitely need to apply the standard caveats to Larry Ellison's bold price/performance claims for his new monster DW appliance. And considering that Ellison was employing the native marketing speak of the DW arena, you'll need to apply the same grains of salt to his competitors' tails. Everybody in the DW market presents their self-serving performance story in much the same way as Oracle's big kahuna.
For starters, Ellison studded his talk with what might be regarded as the "virtuous coefficients" of DW performance enhancement: 10x, 20x, 30x, 40x, 50x, as high as 72x speedups have been documented by beta testers of the HP Oracle Database Machine. Of course, every DW professional knows that these performance boosts are extremely sensitive to myriad implementation factors, such as what you put in a SQL "where" clause, how many table joins you perform, whether and how you compress the data and so forth.
The performance enhancements are also relative to whatever DW configuration -- well-engineered or otherwise -- the beta testers had implemented prior to getting their hands on this shiny new uber-appliance. Note the tag line near the end of Ellison's presentation (emphasis added): "10-50x faster than current Oracle data warehouses."
Also, Oracle's big boss hammered Teradata and Netezza with benchmarks that were ostensibly apples-to-apples. However, Ellison's presentation seriously lacked the detailed footnoting that would be necessary to ascertain that he was indeed comparing his product against comparably configured instances of rival offerings that were processing comparable workloads. Where are those fast-talking, TV-commercial pharmaceutical disclaimer readers when we need them?
But even without aid of a magnifying glass, it was clear that Ellison was comparing his appliance directly to the Teradata 2550 and Netezza 10100 on the basis of a single common-denominator, configuration-wise: They all have a one-rack footprint. That's an odd basis for comparison. Those competitors do in fact have higher-end DW-appliance models, with more capacity, that might serve as a better basis for performance and price comparisons. Somehow, though, Oracle chose to overlook that fact. Why did it size up a 168-terabyte Oracle/HP machine against 43-terabyte offerings from Teradata and Netezza respectively?
Furthermore, Oracle somehow failed to benchmark these same solutions on the full range of performance criteria that actually matter in DW and business intelligence (BI) deployments, such as query response times, concurrent usage, mixed workload support, load speed and transaction throughput. Of course, even if Oracle had provided reliable, unbiased, third-party benchmarks in all of these areas, it would have been useless if the company didn't apply to comparably configured Teradata and Netezza offerings.
And the price-comparison chart -- including those same rival solutions -- was also seriously deficient. Most notably, the HP Oracle Database Machine's overall price, as presented by Ellison, lacked the requisite Oracle Database Real Application Cluster license fees. However, the stated prices for the Teradata and Netezza solutions definitely included the database management systems that come configured into those offerings (though, of course, Netezza has a free open source database, PostgreSQL, at the heart of its offering). So when you factor in all relevant costs, the new HP Oracle Database Machine doesn't look quite as attractive on the common-denominator of acquisition price per usable terabyte of production data.
Finally, Ellison, like most DW vendors, implicitly presented his solution's architectural approach as the gold standard against which all others must be disparaged. That, of course, is a highly debatable proposition.
For one thing, Oracle Database 11g -- the software heart of the appliance -- is still a general-purpose relational DBMS that has one foot in DW but another solidly planted in online transaction processing (OLTP). By constast, Teradata, Sybase, Netezza, Greenplum and other competitors have optimized their DBMSs for DW from the get-go, and do not support OLTP.
Also, Oracle's new appliance implements a shared-disk storage-area network architecture. By most accounts, shared-disk approaches are inherently less scalable than the shared-nothing MPP approach at the heart of DW solutions from, among others, Teradata and Greenplum.
And the Exadata storage layer can only parallelize SQL queries, and only against structured relational data. In its present incarnation, the Exadata storage grid cannot be used to execute a wider range of analytic functions or handle unstructured and semi-structured data types. Consequently, it is not applicable to the new generation of "content DWs" or for any of the in-database analytics that might be applied to the myriad nonrelational data types that reside in those warehouses.
Of course, Larry Ellison didn't go into anywhere near this degree of industry context. His job was and is to sell the world on an important new Oracle product and partnership, and he did so quite well. We shouldn't expect his direct competitors to be any more frank about their respective DW solutions' limitations. No commercial DW platform can optimally address every business-analytics requirement, now and future.
Sorting through the field of high-end DW solutions is getting more difficult, due to the diversity of vendor approaches. IT professionals need to read between the lines of DW vendors' increasingly breathtaking product announcements -- and talk to a consultant or analyst in the know -- before deciding if Oracle, HP or any other solution provider is truly breaking new ground.
If you find all of these complexities and caveats extremely confusing, and you're having trouble deciding which high-end appliance-based solutions can support the most extreme petabyte-scale workloads, welcome to the new DW market.
All contents copyright 1995-2008 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2008/100708-kobielus.html
Ellison hypes Oracle's data warehouse appliance
By James Kobielus , Network World , 10/07/2008
The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.
The DW industry's new battlefront is petabyte scalability. This refers to a DW platform's ability to ingest, store, process and deliver an order-of-magnitude more data than today's typical terabyte-size warehouses. In this regard, the competitive high ground is still held by pioneering DW-appliance provider Teradata. That vendor recently released a high-end, shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) DW appliance that can scale to an astounding 10 petabytes across as many as 1,024 compute/storage nodes.
Oracle and HP recently joined the petabyte battle with all guns blazing. At Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference, they jointly announced general availability of a new petabyte-scalable DW appliance: the HP Oracle Database Machine, which includes the HP Exadata Storage Server. They touted its "extreme" performance and scaling features, bolstering those claims through public demos and beta-tester testimonials.
Most significant, they enlisted none other than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and HP honchos Mark Hurd and Ann Livermore to unveil the new offering from the conference's main stage.
Clearly, the HP Oracle Database Machine is highly strategic for both companies. It provides a platform for Oracle to sell more database licenses and for HP to sell more server and storage hardware into DW deployments. It will almost certainly get the partners onto vendor short lists, alongside Teradata, for petabyte-scale DW solutions, which are increasingly being deployed in such vertical markets as telecommunications, government and financial services.
Also, it helps them blunt the momentum of DW appliance up-and-comer Netezza, whose platform, like the new Oracle/HP offering, performs SQL processing in an intelligent storage layer, thereby accelerating queries and table scans against very large data sets.
For sure, the recent Oracle/HP announcement was substantial and has shifted the competitive dynamics in the high-end DW market. But it was also an exercise in pure, albeit well-engineered, marketing hype. Predictably, it triggered an immediate firestorm of heated retorts from aggrieved competitors, which will almost certainly escalate in coming months.
In the fog of war, the first casualty is perspective, and that's certainly the case in this competitive fracas. Buyers of DW solutions should exercise extreme caution when evaluating the new Oracle/HP solution vis-à-vis comparably scalable offerings from Teradata, Sybase, Greenplum, IBM and others. You'll definitely need to apply the standard caveats to Larry Ellison's bold price/performance claims for his new monster DW appliance. And considering that Ellison was employing the native marketing speak of the DW arena, you'll need to apply the same grains of salt to his competitors' tails. Everybody in the DW market presents their self-serving performance story in much the same way as Oracle's big kahuna.
For starters, Ellison studded his talk with what might be regarded as the "virtuous coefficients" of DW performance enhancement: 10x, 20x, 30x, 40x, 50x, as high as 72x speedups have been documented by beta testers of the HP Oracle Database Machine. Of course, every DW professional knows that these performance boosts are extremely sensitive to myriad implementation factors, such as what you put in a SQL "where" clause, how many table joins you perform, whether and how you compress the data and so forth.
The performance enhancements are also relative to whatever DW configuration -- well-engineered or otherwise -- the beta testers had implemented prior to getting their hands on this shiny new uber-appliance. Note the tag line near the end of Ellison's presentation (emphasis added): "10-50x faster than current Oracle data warehouses."
Also, Oracle's big boss hammered Teradata and Netezza with benchmarks that were ostensibly apples-to-apples. However, Ellison's presentation seriously lacked the detailed footnoting that would be necessary to ascertain that he was indeed comparing his product against comparably configured instances of rival offerings that were processing comparable workloads. Where are those fast-talking, TV-commercial pharmaceutical disclaimer readers when we need them?
But even without aid of a magnifying glass, it was clear that Ellison was comparing his appliance directly to the Teradata 2550 and Netezza 10100 on the basis of a single common-denominator, configuration-wise: They all have a one-rack footprint. That's an odd basis for comparison. Those competitors do in fact have higher-end DW-appliance models, with more capacity, that might serve as a better basis for performance and price comparisons. Somehow, though, Oracle chose to overlook that fact. Why did it size up a 168-terabyte Oracle/HP machine against 43-terabyte offerings from Teradata and Netezza respectively?
Furthermore, Oracle somehow failed to benchmark these same solutions on the full range of performance criteria that actually matter in DW and business intelligence (BI) deployments, such as query response times, concurrent usage, mixed workload support, load speed and transaction throughput. Of course, even if Oracle had provided reliable, unbiased, third-party benchmarks in all of these areas, it would have been useless if the company didn't apply to comparably configured Teradata and Netezza offerings.
And the price-comparison chart -- including those same rival solutions -- was also seriously deficient. Most notably, the HP Oracle Database Machine's overall price, as presented by Ellison, lacked the requisite Oracle Database Real Application Cluster license fees. However, the stated prices for the Teradata and Netezza solutions definitely included the database management systems that come configured into those offerings (though, of course, Netezza has a free open source database, PostgreSQL, at the heart of its offering). So when you factor in all relevant costs, the new HP Oracle Database Machine doesn't look quite as attractive on the common-denominator of acquisition price per usable terabyte of production data.
Finally, Ellison, like most DW vendors, implicitly presented his solution's architectural approach as the gold standard against which all others must be disparaged. That, of course, is a highly debatable proposition.
For one thing, Oracle Database 11g -- the software heart of the appliance -- is still a general-purpose relational DBMS that has one foot in DW but another solidly planted in online transaction processing (OLTP). By constast, Teradata, Sybase, Netezza, Greenplum and other competitors have optimized their DBMSs for DW from the get-go, and do not support OLTP.
Also, Oracle's new appliance implements a shared-disk storage-area network architecture. By most accounts, shared-disk approaches are inherently less scalable than the shared-nothing MPP approach at the heart of DW solutions from, among others, Teradata and Greenplum.
And the Exadata storage layer can only parallelize SQL queries, and only against structured relational data. In its present incarnation, the Exadata storage grid cannot be used to execute a wider range of analytic functions or handle unstructured and semi-structured data types. Consequently, it is not applicable to the new generation of "content DWs" or for any of the in-database analytics that might be applied to the myriad nonrelational data types that reside in those warehouses.
Of course, Larry Ellison didn't go into anywhere near this degree of industry context. His job was and is to sell the world on an important new Oracle product and partnership, and he did so quite well. We shouldn't expect his direct competitors to be any more frank about their respective DW solutions' limitations. No commercial DW platform can optimally address every business-analytics requirement, now and future.
Sorting through the field of high-end DW solutions is getting more difficult, due to the diversity of vendor approaches. IT professionals need to read between the lines of DW vendors' increasingly breathtaking product announcements -- and talk to a consultant or analyst in the know -- before deciding if Oracle, HP or any other solution provider is truly breaking new ground.
If you find all of these complexities and caveats extremely confusing, and you're having trouble deciding which high-end appliance-based solutions can support the most extreme petabyte-scale workloads, welcome to the new DW market.
All contents copyright 1995-2008 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
imho Re “Forensic Architecture and other lessons from SOA land ”
All:
See Duane Nickull’s post and Anne Thomas Manes’ musings on the same.
First off, I started reading into this because I wasn’t, and still am not, clear on why Nickull is using the term “forensic” in this context. He refers to “forensic architecture” as “the process of describing the architecture of something after it has been built,” as if this is a non-judgmental effort. But he then uses it to refer to his dissection of various failed, ineffectual, and/or underwhelming SOA standardization efforts in which he was involved: ebXML, W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group, UN/CEFACT eBusiness Architecture, and OASIS Reference Model for SOA. But it becomes clear, in his analysis, that he’s actually deploying the term “forensic” in the standard negative connotation of post-mortem (on a victim) and building of an evidence-based case for prosecution of perpetrators.
Though, fortunately, Nickull doesn’t lay it on that heavy. And he provides a good analysis of what went wrong and lessons learned from those various efforts. But, reading into this, it’s clear to me that he’s primarily critiquing the applicability of the software development life cycle “waterfall methodology” to committee-based development of standards in sprawling, ill-defined architectural initiatives--of which SOA is perhaps a classic case in point.
What his analysis points to is the value of a retrospective approach to clarifying the core design principles of an emergent architectural phenomenon that simply works--such as the Web, with REST as perhaps the textbook premier example of a “principles clarification” exercise. In contrast to the “waterfall” method, I’d call this the “salmon swimming upstream to reconceptualize in their presumed/intuited spawning place” approach. Or maybe simply the “salmon” methodology.
Which reminds me of a point I need to make. For the past several years, I’ve been focusing on a space--business intelligence (BI), data warehousing (DW), and data integration (DI)--in which SOA (however defined and standardized) has had just a minimal footprint, and primarily as one integration approach in the back-end. But BI/DW/DI continues to grow and innovate at an amazing clip, still hinging on an old, stable, universal standard: SQL (with SOA-ish XQuery/XPath not achieving any significant momentum swimming upstream against this powerful current).
Interestingly, there are few if any industry specification activities in any forum that involve the BI/DW/DI segment. Much of the front-end BI innovation revolves around integrating Web 2.0-style interfaces and services, and much of that relies on REST (the non-architected architecture that has totally eclipsed SOA in real-world adoption).
REST-ive salmon continue to spawn like crazy downstream in the BI and analytics market. Look, for example, at my latest Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blogpost on the next-generation OLAP “Project Gemini” features that Microsoft began demonstrating publicly this week. Not much SOA in this approach, but a hefty dose of REST, thanks to its tight integration with Microsoft’s Sharepoint portal/collaboration platform, and a lot of SQL, owing to integration with SQL Server Analysis Services.
By the way, people who read James Kobielus’ blog may or may not realize that I now put most of my tech-meaty musings under Forrester’s I&KM blog. Please plug that blog into your reader. I’m one of many Forrester analysts who post to that regularly. Seriously great stuff, all of it.
And you thought all I do nowadays is write pretentious poetry.
Pretentious? Moi? Au contraire, mon frere.
Jim
See Duane Nickull’s post and Anne Thomas Manes’ musings on the same.
First off, I started reading into this because I wasn’t, and still am not, clear on why Nickull is using the term “forensic” in this context. He refers to “forensic architecture” as “the process of describing the architecture of something after it has been built,” as if this is a non-judgmental effort. But he then uses it to refer to his dissection of various failed, ineffectual, and/or underwhelming SOA standardization efforts in which he was involved: ebXML, W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group, UN/CEFACT eBusiness Architecture, and OASIS Reference Model for SOA. But it becomes clear, in his analysis, that he’s actually deploying the term “forensic” in the standard negative connotation of post-mortem (on a victim) and building of an evidence-based case for prosecution of perpetrators.
Though, fortunately, Nickull doesn’t lay it on that heavy. And he provides a good analysis of what went wrong and lessons learned from those various efforts. But, reading into this, it’s clear to me that he’s primarily critiquing the applicability of the software development life cycle “waterfall methodology” to committee-based development of standards in sprawling, ill-defined architectural initiatives--of which SOA is perhaps a classic case in point.
What his analysis points to is the value of a retrospective approach to clarifying the core design principles of an emergent architectural phenomenon that simply works--such as the Web, with REST as perhaps the textbook premier example of a “principles clarification” exercise. In contrast to the “waterfall” method, I’d call this the “salmon swimming upstream to reconceptualize in their presumed/intuited spawning place” approach. Or maybe simply the “salmon” methodology.
Which reminds me of a point I need to make. For the past several years, I’ve been focusing on a space--business intelligence (BI), data warehousing (DW), and data integration (DI)--in which SOA (however defined and standardized) has had just a minimal footprint, and primarily as one integration approach in the back-end. But BI/DW/DI continues to grow and innovate at an amazing clip, still hinging on an old, stable, universal standard: SQL (with SOA-ish XQuery/XPath not achieving any significant momentum swimming upstream against this powerful current).
Interestingly, there are few if any industry specification activities in any forum that involve the BI/DW/DI segment. Much of the front-end BI innovation revolves around integrating Web 2.0-style interfaces and services, and much of that relies on REST (the non-architected architecture that has totally eclipsed SOA in real-world adoption).
REST-ive salmon continue to spawn like crazy downstream in the BI and analytics market. Look, for example, at my latest Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blogpost on the next-generation OLAP “Project Gemini” features that Microsoft began demonstrating publicly this week. Not much SOA in this approach, but a hefty dose of REST, thanks to its tight integration with Microsoft’s Sharepoint portal/collaboration platform, and a lot of SQL, owing to integration with SQL Server Analysis Services.
By the way, people who read James Kobielus’ blog may or may not realize that I now put most of my tech-meaty musings under Forrester’s I&KM blog. Please plug that blog into your reader. I’m one of many Forrester analysts who post to that regularly. Seriously great stuff, all of it.
And you thought all I do nowadays is write pretentious poetry.
Pretentious? Moi? Au contraire, mon frere.
Jim
Monday, October 06, 2008
poem Crunchy Analytic
CRUNCHY ANALYTIC
Thought is optional.
Have to have hands to grasp and
tear the text to bits.
Pulp's preferable.
Its immolation is a
blazing face of fire.
An unlocking of
energies that only hard
tedium can free.
Thought is optional.
Have to have hands to grasp and
tear the text to bits.
Pulp's preferable.
Its immolation is a
blazing face of fire.
An unlocking of
energies that only hard
tedium can free.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
poem Wane and Wax
WANE AND WAX
Summer’s technically
through. September masquerades.
Burns, but it’s all fall.
And spring in all its
blessed symmetry, tickling
our antipodes.
Twisting our equal
nights full polar. Highest noon
resetting the Moon.
Summer’s technically
through. September masquerades.
Burns, but it’s all fall.
And spring in all its
blessed symmetry, tickling
our antipodes.
Twisting our equal
nights full polar. Highest noon
resetting the Moon.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
poem Music and Music Accessories
MUSIC AND MUSIC ACCESSORIES
A piano. A
soft a strong touch. A note hangs
barely sustaining.
An annotation
of alternating tones and
strokes of black on bright.
Read or ignored. Tuned
or open to any odd
interpretation.
A piano. A
soft a strong touch. A note hangs
barely sustaining.
An annotation
of alternating tones and
strokes of black on bright.
Read or ignored. Tuned
or open to any odd
interpretation.
Monday, September 15, 2008
poem Talk Toxins
TALK TOXINS
Poise through poisonous
interiors and voices
surrounding. Bad days.
Calm through the acid
drip-drop of commentary’s
corrosion. Bad thought.
Cool and close. Breathing
equilibrium as all
words and worlds dissolve.
Poise through poisonous
interiors and voices
surrounding. Bad days.
Calm through the acid
drip-drop of commentary’s
corrosion. Bad thought.
Cool and close. Breathing
equilibrium as all
words and worlds dissolve.
Monday, September 08, 2008
My take on the first Seinfeld-Gates commercial for Microsoft
All:
I like it.
I like the emptiness of it--just two super-rich super-famous guys in their 50s in an aggressively fake situation.
And I like the anti-punchline, per Seinfeld: “Give me a signal--adjust your shorts.” [Gates squinches buttocks in baggy pants as they walk side-by-side, viewed from behind] “I knew it!”
Neither of these guys is trying to seem even remotely hip, and I actually like that. I don’t know about anybody else, but what I love most about the Apple commercials is John Hodgman as the faux Gates. Whereas Justin Long as the faux Jobs--I just want to push a grapefruit in his smug mug--sorry, true feeling there.
Re the Seinfeld commercial (first of a series I suppose), notice how Gates now looks his age, but Seinfeld, though two years older than the software mogul, looks at least 10 years younger. I wonder which one of them works out.
Also notice how essentially mute Gates is in the commercial--but how he and Jerry make an odd funny level of eye contact in the shoe store. That was interesting.
You can view it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6amk3P-hY
This one’s actually worth repeated viewings. Within reason.
Hey, I’m a dork, I admit it. I loved Microsoft Bob too.
By the way, at a minute-and-a-half, it will undoubtedly re-run in tightly edited format (hmmm..."tight"). With that in mind, my suggestions to the editors (in sequence):
--Seinfeld: "Shoe Circus...Bill Gates"
--Seinfeld/Gates: "Is that your toe?" "It's leather." [that eye contact]
--Seinfeld/Gates: "Ever wear clothes in the shower, Bill?" "Never" "You're dressed and you're clean."
--Seinfeld: "Guess what Bill, you're a 10."
--Gates: "Platinum!"
--Seinfeld: "Magnum Jupiter brain...."
--Seinfeld: “Give me a signal--adjust your shorts.” [Gates squinches buttocks in baggy pants as they walk side-by-side, viewed from behind] “I knew it!”
That's easily the dorkiest concentrated take-away from this commercial. Compressed into 30 seconds.
A little editing can make a world of difference.
Jim
I like it.
I like the emptiness of it--just two super-rich super-famous guys in their 50s in an aggressively fake situation.
And I like the anti-punchline, per Seinfeld: “Give me a signal--adjust your shorts.” [Gates squinches buttocks in baggy pants as they walk side-by-side, viewed from behind] “I knew it!”
Neither of these guys is trying to seem even remotely hip, and I actually like that. I don’t know about anybody else, but what I love most about the Apple commercials is John Hodgman as the faux Gates. Whereas Justin Long as the faux Jobs--I just want to push a grapefruit in his smug mug--sorry, true feeling there.
Re the Seinfeld commercial (first of a series I suppose), notice how Gates now looks his age, but Seinfeld, though two years older than the software mogul, looks at least 10 years younger. I wonder which one of them works out.
Also notice how essentially mute Gates is in the commercial--but how he and Jerry make an odd funny level of eye contact in the shoe store. That was interesting.
You can view it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6amk3P-hY
This one’s actually worth repeated viewings. Within reason.
Hey, I’m a dork, I admit it. I loved Microsoft Bob too.
By the way, at a minute-and-a-half, it will undoubtedly re-run in tightly edited format (hmmm..."tight"). With that in mind, my suggestions to the editors (in sequence):
--Seinfeld: "Shoe Circus...Bill Gates"
--Seinfeld/Gates: "Is that your toe?" "It's leather." [that eye contact]
--Seinfeld/Gates: "Ever wear clothes in the shower, Bill?" "Never" "You're dressed and you're clean."
--Seinfeld: "Guess what Bill, you're a 10."
--Gates: "Platinum!"
--Seinfeld: "Magnum Jupiter brain...."
--Seinfeld: “Give me a signal--adjust your shorts.” [Gates squinches buttocks in baggy pants as they walk side-by-side, viewed from behind] “I knew it!”
That's easily the dorkiest concentrated take-away from this commercial. Compressed into 30 seconds.
A little editing can make a world of difference.
Jim
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Real-time drives database virtualization
Databases are evolving faster than ever, becoming more fluid to keep pace with an online world that's becoming virtualized at every level.
In many ways, the database as we know it is disappearing into a virtualization fabric of its own. In this emerging paradigm, data will not physically reside anywhere in particular. Instead, it will be transparently persisted, in a growing range of physical and logical formats, to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources; and delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications.
Real-time is the most exciting new frontier in business intelligence, and virtualization will facilitate low-latency analytics more powerfully than traditional approaches. Database virtualization will enable real-time business intelligence through a policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching memory grid that permeates an infrastructure at all levels.
As this new approach takes hold, it will provide a convergence architecture for diverse approaches to real-time business intelligence, such as trickle-feed extract transform load (ETL), changed-data capture (CDC), event-stream processing and data federation. Traditionally deployed as stovepipe infrastructures, these approaches will become alternative integration patterns in a virtualized information fabric for real-time business intelligence.
The convergence of real-time business-intelligence approaches onto a unified, in-memory, distributed-caching infrastructure may take more than a decade to come to fruition because of the immaturity of the technology; lack of multivendor standards; and spotty, fragmented implementation of its enabling technologies among today's business-intelligence and data-warehouse vendors. However, all signs point to its inevitability.
Case in point: Microsoft, though not necessarily the most visionary vendor of real-time solutions, has recently ramped up its support for real-time business intelligence in its SQL Server product platform. Even more important, it has begun to discuss plans to make in-memory distributed caching, often known as "information fabric," the centerpiece middleware approach of its evolving business-intelligence and data-warehouse strategy.
For starters, Microsoft recently released its long-awaited SQL Server 2008 to manufacturing. Among this release's many enhancements is a new CDC module and proactive caching in its online analytical processing (OLAP) engine. CDC is a best practice for traditional real-time business intelligence, because, by enabling continuous loading of database updates from transaction redo logs, it minimizes the performance impact on source platforms' transactional workloads. Proactive caching is an important capability in the front-end data mart because it speeds response on user queries against aggregate data.
Also, Microsoft recently went public with plans to develop a next-generation, in-memory distributed-caching middleware code-named "Project Velocity." Though the vendor hasn't indicated when or how this new technology will find its way into shipping products, it's almost certain it will be integrated into future versions of SQL Server. Within Project Velocity, Microsoft is playing a bit of competitor catch-up, considering that Oracle already has a well-developed in-memory, distributed-caching technology called Coherence, which it acquired more than a year ago from Tangosol. Likewise, pure-plays, such as GigaSpaces, Gemstone Systems, and ScaleOut Software have similar data-virtualization offerings.
Furthermore, Microsoft recently announced plans to acquire data-warehouse-appliance pure-play DATAllegro and to move that grid-enabled solution over to a pure Microsoft data-warehouse stack that includes SQL Server, its query optimization tools and data-integration middleware. Though Microsoft cannot discuss any road-map details until after the deal closes, it's highly likely it will leverage DATAllegro's sophisticated massively parallel processing, dynamic task-brokering and federated deployment features in future releases of its databases, including the on-demand version of SQL Server. In addition, it doesn't take much imagination to see a big role for in-memory distributed caching, à la Project Velocity in Microsoft's future road map for appliance-based business-intelligence/data-warehouse solutions. Going even further, it's not inconceivable that, while plugging SQL Server into DATAllegro's platform (and removing the current Ingres open source database), Microsoft may tweak the underlying storage engine to support more business-intelligence-optimized logical and physical schemas.
Microsoft, however, isn't saying much about its platform road map for real-time business-intelligence/data-warehousing, because it probably hasn't worked out a coherent plan that combines these diverse elements. To be fair, neither has Oracle -- or, indeed, any other business-intelligence/data-warehouse vendor that has strong real-time features or plans. No vendor in the business-intelligence/data-warehouse arena has defined a coherent road map yet that converges its diverse real-time middleware approaches into a unified in-memory, distributed-caching approach.
Likewise, no vendor has clearly spelled out its approach for supporting the full range of physical and logical data-persistence models across its real-time information fabrics. Nevertheless, it's quite clear that the business-intelligence/data-warehouse industry is moving toward a new paradigm wherein the optimal data-persistence model will be provisioned automatically to each node based on its deployment role -- and in which data will be written to whatever blend of virtualized memory and disk best suits applications' real-time requirements.
For example, dimensional and column-based approaches are optimized to the front-end OLAP tier of data marts, where they support high-performance queries against large, aggregate tables. By contrast, relational and row-based approaches are suited best to the mid-tier of enterprise data-warehouse hubs, where they facilitate the speedy administration of complex hierarchies across multiple subject-area domains. Other persistence approaches -- such as inverted indexing -- may be suited to back-end staging nodes, where they can support efficient ETL, profiling and storage of complex data types before they are loaded into enterprise data-warehouse hubs.
For sure, all this virtualized data infrastructure will live in the "cloud," in a managed-service environment and within organizations' existing, premises-based business-intelligence/data-warehouse environments. It would be ridiculous, however, to imagine this evolution will take place overnight. Even if solution vendors suddenly converged on a common information-fabric framework -- which is highly doubtful -- enterprises have too much invested in their current data environments to justify migrating them to a virtualized architecture overnight.
Old data-warehouse platforms linger on generation after generation, solid and trusty, albeit increasingly crusty and musty. They won't get virtualized out of existence anytime soon, even as the new generation steals their oxygen. Old databases will expire only when someone migrates their precious data to a new environment, then physically pulls the plug, putting them out of their misery.
In many ways, the database as we know it is disappearing into a virtualization fabric of its own. In this emerging paradigm, data will not physically reside anywhere in particular. Instead, it will be transparently persisted, in a growing range of physical and logical formats, to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources; and delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications.
Real-time is the most exciting new frontier in business intelligence, and virtualization will facilitate low-latency analytics more powerfully than traditional approaches. Database virtualization will enable real-time business intelligence through a policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching memory grid that permeates an infrastructure at all levels.
As this new approach takes hold, it will provide a convergence architecture for diverse approaches to real-time business intelligence, such as trickle-feed extract transform load (ETL), changed-data capture (CDC), event-stream processing and data federation. Traditionally deployed as stovepipe infrastructures, these approaches will become alternative integration patterns in a virtualized information fabric for real-time business intelligence.
The convergence of real-time business-intelligence approaches onto a unified, in-memory, distributed-caching infrastructure may take more than a decade to come to fruition because of the immaturity of the technology; lack of multivendor standards; and spotty, fragmented implementation of its enabling technologies among today's business-intelligence and data-warehouse vendors. However, all signs point to its inevitability.
Case in point: Microsoft, though not necessarily the most visionary vendor of real-time solutions, has recently ramped up its support for real-time business intelligence in its SQL Server product platform. Even more important, it has begun to discuss plans to make in-memory distributed caching, often known as "information fabric," the centerpiece middleware approach of its evolving business-intelligence and data-warehouse strategy.
For starters, Microsoft recently released its long-awaited SQL Server 2008 to manufacturing. Among this release's many enhancements is a new CDC module and proactive caching in its online analytical processing (OLAP) engine. CDC is a best practice for traditional real-time business intelligence, because, by enabling continuous loading of database updates from transaction redo logs, it minimizes the performance impact on source platforms' transactional workloads. Proactive caching is an important capability in the front-end data mart because it speeds response on user queries against aggregate data.
Also, Microsoft recently went public with plans to develop a next-generation, in-memory distributed-caching middleware code-named "Project Velocity." Though the vendor hasn't indicated when or how this new technology will find its way into shipping products, it's almost certain it will be integrated into future versions of SQL Server. Within Project Velocity, Microsoft is playing a bit of competitor catch-up, considering that Oracle already has a well-developed in-memory, distributed-caching technology called Coherence, which it acquired more than a year ago from Tangosol. Likewise, pure-plays, such as GigaSpaces, Gemstone Systems, and ScaleOut Software have similar data-virtualization offerings.
Furthermore, Microsoft recently announced plans to acquire data-warehouse-appliance pure-play DATAllegro and to move that grid-enabled solution over to a pure Microsoft data-warehouse stack that includes SQL Server, its query optimization tools and data-integration middleware. Though Microsoft cannot discuss any road-map details until after the deal closes, it's highly likely it will leverage DATAllegro's sophisticated massively parallel processing, dynamic task-brokering and federated deployment features in future releases of its databases, including the on-demand version of SQL Server. In addition, it doesn't take much imagination to see a big role for in-memory distributed caching, à la Project Velocity in Microsoft's future road map for appliance-based business-intelligence/data-warehouse solutions. Going even further, it's not inconceivable that, while plugging SQL Server into DATAllegro's platform (and removing the current Ingres open source database), Microsoft may tweak the underlying storage engine to support more business-intelligence-optimized logical and physical schemas.
Microsoft, however, isn't saying much about its platform road map for real-time business-intelligence/data-warehousing, because it probably hasn't worked out a coherent plan that combines these diverse elements. To be fair, neither has Oracle -- or, indeed, any other business-intelligence/data-warehouse vendor that has strong real-time features or plans. No vendor in the business-intelligence/data-warehouse arena has defined a coherent road map yet that converges its diverse real-time middleware approaches into a unified in-memory, distributed-caching approach.
Likewise, no vendor has clearly spelled out its approach for supporting the full range of physical and logical data-persistence models across its real-time information fabrics. Nevertheless, it's quite clear that the business-intelligence/data-warehouse industry is moving toward a new paradigm wherein the optimal data-persistence model will be provisioned automatically to each node based on its deployment role -- and in which data will be written to whatever blend of virtualized memory and disk best suits applications' real-time requirements.
For example, dimensional and column-based approaches are optimized to the front-end OLAP tier of data marts, where they support high-performance queries against large, aggregate tables. By contrast, relational and row-based approaches are suited best to the mid-tier of enterprise data-warehouse hubs, where they facilitate the speedy administration of complex hierarchies across multiple subject-area domains. Other persistence approaches -- such as inverted indexing -- may be suited to back-end staging nodes, where they can support efficient ETL, profiling and storage of complex data types before they are loaded into enterprise data-warehouse hubs.
For sure, all this virtualized data infrastructure will live in the "cloud," in a managed-service environment and within organizations' existing, premises-based business-intelligence/data-warehouse environments. It would be ridiculous, however, to imagine this evolution will take place overnight. Even if solution vendors suddenly converged on a common information-fabric framework -- which is highly doubtful -- enterprises have too much invested in their current data environments to justify migrating them to a virtualized architecture overnight.
Old data-warehouse platforms linger on generation after generation, solid and trusty, albeit increasingly crusty and musty. They won't get virtualized out of existence anytime soon, even as the new generation steals their oxygen. Old databases will expire only when someone migrates their precious data to a new environment, then physically pulls the plug, putting them out of their misery.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
poem Charles Schulz' "Kids"
CHARLES SCHULZ’ “KIDS”
I
Stupid cartoonists
and stupid Lucy, griping
at a starry sky.
Nobody really
thinks your wee anxieties
are this fussworthy.
Or that your little
life, daily composure, will
somehow shrink the night.
II
Oh, brother! Only
an only child could have this
big a moony head.
Sally surely was
adopted and Charlie Brown
knows it but won’t tell.
This independent
blonde girl barely registers
on his self-regard.
III
In their fifty-year
childhood, Sparky never got
past the first eighteen.
Snoopy’s teargassing
at the Daisy Hill Puppy
Farm--sharkjump?--discuss!
Or introducing
Franklin, a black character
who was simply black?
IV
What was funnier:
the round head kid’s frustrations
or beagle’s fancies?
Lucy’s little bro
contemplating his blanket
and smoking his thumb?
The German-surnamed
pianist’s love-resisting
monomania?
V
My priest pulpited
upon the Peanuts phenom
and divorce, Sparky’s.
Humor is waning
lately: the implication,
sin, the wages: duh!
The man’s overworked,
I thought, raising two sets of
kids can hammer you.
VI
Joyce was certainly
his muse, unacknowledged, his
Norse Alice Kramden.
Unbarren. Bestowed
him a girl, then a Linus
and a few Reruns.
Settled an estate
around this milquetoast of a
one-man industry.
VII
Crisp lettering, bold
silence, warm meditations
on the most minute.
Schulz was sad and fused
his autobiography
into every frame.
So we were treated
to his affair and breakup
through chatty Snoopy.
VIII
Google Earth clearly
shows Sparky and Snoopy’s home
ice and tennis court.
Googling the Moon shows
the Sea of Tranquility,
where boy and dog roamed.
Beyond that the Star
of Bethlehem, which Linus
mentioned on TV.
IX
Throughout an anxious
childhood, real children’s voices
skated in your rink.
Real psychiatric
kids, inked and lined in pain and
shades of awareness.
Likely as Shermy
to grace an old friend with an
o-how-i-hate-him.
X
Sit and draw. All you
ever do is sit in this
stupid room and draw!
(Silence). (Silence). (More
silence). Well? What do you have
to say for yourself?
(More silence) (No eye
contact). (Rapt concentration).
(Scribble, scribble). “Sigh!”
I
Stupid cartoonists
and stupid Lucy, griping
at a starry sky.
Nobody really
thinks your wee anxieties
are this fussworthy.
Or that your little
life, daily composure, will
somehow shrink the night.
II
Oh, brother! Only
an only child could have this
big a moony head.
Sally surely was
adopted and Charlie Brown
knows it but won’t tell.
This independent
blonde girl barely registers
on his self-regard.
III
In their fifty-year
childhood, Sparky never got
past the first eighteen.
Snoopy’s teargassing
at the Daisy Hill Puppy
Farm--sharkjump?--discuss!
Or introducing
Franklin, a black character
who was simply black?
IV
What was funnier:
the round head kid’s frustrations
or beagle’s fancies?
Lucy’s little bro
contemplating his blanket
and smoking his thumb?
The German-surnamed
pianist’s love-resisting
monomania?
V
My priest pulpited
upon the Peanuts phenom
and divorce, Sparky’s.
Humor is waning
lately: the implication,
sin, the wages: duh!
The man’s overworked,
I thought, raising two sets of
kids can hammer you.
VI
Joyce was certainly
his muse, unacknowledged, his
Norse Alice Kramden.
Unbarren. Bestowed
him a girl, then a Linus
and a few Reruns.
Settled an estate
around this milquetoast of a
one-man industry.
VII
Crisp lettering, bold
silence, warm meditations
on the most minute.
Schulz was sad and fused
his autobiography
into every frame.
So we were treated
to his affair and breakup
through chatty Snoopy.
VIII
Google Earth clearly
shows Sparky and Snoopy’s home
ice and tennis court.
Googling the Moon shows
the Sea of Tranquility,
where boy and dog roamed.
Beyond that the Star
of Bethlehem, which Linus
mentioned on TV.
IX
Throughout an anxious
childhood, real children’s voices
skated in your rink.
Real psychiatric
kids, inked and lined in pain and
shades of awareness.
Likely as Shermy
to grace an old friend with an
o-how-i-hate-him.
X
Sit and draw. All you
ever do is sit in this
stupid room and draw!
(Silence). (Silence). (More
silence). Well? What do you have
to say for yourself?
(More silence) (No eye
contact). (Rapt concentration).
(Scribble, scribble). “Sigh!”
Monday, July 07, 2008
poem Bill Gates' "Retirement"
BILL GATES’ “RETIREMENT”
I
Man can multitask
and recognize when one big
one, for him, is done.
The man’s stack is still
very deep. Yeah. Iconhood
alone’s a full-time.
Not to mention his
new to-do: doing good on
a grandiose scale.
II
Bill: the short form of
billionaire: a shorthand for
envy incarnate.
Kids know him: name a
five-year-old, in the day, knew
what Carnegie wrought.
Or J.P., John D.
Not one learnt their ABCs
on raw pig iron.
III
Met him. Upon two
occasions. Analyst-packed
rooms. Me: Q. Him: A.
Ordinariness.
Smart, technical. But that’s par
for this profession.
Has private nervous
tics I’m told, and swears a fair
bit, but so do I.
IV
He’s fifty-two now.
Has held one job since nineteen.
That’s unusual.
Has weathered pressures
uncommon, advancing far
beyond wunderkind.
Put yourself in his
place: Would you still rise early,
check e-mail daily?
V
As the salesperson
wearies of the pitch, software’s
abstractions grow old.
Real though the money
may be, coding can often
blur into word games.
So it’s no wonder
programmers seek programs a
bit more tangible.
VI
Melinda, for one.
A wife programs you in ways
imperceptible.
May make you think of
work less. Retire earlier
than was your habit.
May make you want to
designate her cornerstone
of your foundation.
VII
Dare say he and she
don’t see these as their waning
or remaining days.
Aren’t hunkering down
in their subterranean
Lake Washington lodge.
Decrementing the
dollars and hours from their cache
of Microsoft years.
VIII
An open expanse
of marriage is scary: too
much time before us.
Office visits: these
daily separations have
held us together.
The milestones of our
children’s lives, the schedules of
work the world demands.
IX
Can you walk away
from unfinished business and
leave others the mess?
Then dive forever
into the muck of ages
and leave a fresh one?
An execution
plan and platform that, like your
first, will decompose?
X
William: is your will
writ large? Are your intentions
inexhaustible?
As we straddle our
respective half-century,
there’s no letting go.
Men still managing
ours. Me: these thoughts. You: still chair
and emeritus.
I
Man can multitask
and recognize when one big
one, for him, is done.
The man’s stack is still
very deep. Yeah. Iconhood
alone’s a full-time.
Not to mention his
new to-do: doing good on
a grandiose scale.
II
Bill: the short form of
billionaire: a shorthand for
envy incarnate.
Kids know him: name a
five-year-old, in the day, knew
what Carnegie wrought.
Or J.P., John D.
Not one learnt their ABCs
on raw pig iron.
III
Met him. Upon two
occasions. Analyst-packed
rooms. Me: Q. Him: A.
Ordinariness.
Smart, technical. But that’s par
for this profession.
Has private nervous
tics I’m told, and swears a fair
bit, but so do I.
IV
He’s fifty-two now.
Has held one job since nineteen.
That’s unusual.
Has weathered pressures
uncommon, advancing far
beyond wunderkind.
Put yourself in his
place: Would you still rise early,
check e-mail daily?
V
As the salesperson
wearies of the pitch, software’s
abstractions grow old.
Real though the money
may be, coding can often
blur into word games.
So it’s no wonder
programmers seek programs a
bit more tangible.
VI
Melinda, for one.
A wife programs you in ways
imperceptible.
May make you think of
work less. Retire earlier
than was your habit.
May make you want to
designate her cornerstone
of your foundation.
VII
Dare say he and she
don’t see these as their waning
or remaining days.
Aren’t hunkering down
in their subterranean
Lake Washington lodge.
Decrementing the
dollars and hours from their cache
of Microsoft years.
VIII
An open expanse
of marriage is scary: too
much time before us.
Office visits: these
daily separations have
held us together.
The milestones of our
children’s lives, the schedules of
work the world demands.
IX
Can you walk away
from unfinished business and
leave others the mess?
Then dive forever
into the muck of ages
and leave a fresh one?
An execution
plan and platform that, like your
first, will decompose?
X
William: is your will
writ large? Are your intentions
inexhaustible?
As we straddle our
respective half-century,
there’s no letting go.
Men still managing
ours. Me: these thoughts. You: still chair
and emeritus.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
