February 2010

In this podcast, Rob discusses some of the preliminary findings from Forrester’s November 2009 Global ETL Online Survey. He also directs listeners to more of Forrester’s ETL research.

http://www.forrester.com/role_based/images/author/imported/forresterDotCom/Podcasts/BPA/rob%20karel%202-26-10%20mixed.mp3

Hello everyone, welcome to my first blog post as a Forrester Analyst.

I joined Forrester in late January after nearly six years at Alterian, an Enterprise Marketing software company, where I was Vice President of Platform Strategy, supporting Product Marketing, Analyst Relations and Corporate Development.

First and foremost, I’m thrilled to be on board at Forrester and I’m looking forward to getting to work!  Many thanks to the Forrester team and our clients who have been so supportive. 

US music subscription service MOG is set to launch in the UKby the end of the 2^nd quarter off the back of a 2^nd round of investment totaling $10 million.

As I posted earlier in the month, the music subscriptions space is going through an important period of transition.  It took much of the last decade to realize that the 9.99 premium rentals model was only ever going to appeal to a niche of music aficionados, and though global premium music subscribers total 8.25 million, we’re still no closer to mass market appeal for premium subscriptions.  And yet we have a host of new entrants including, MOG, Spotify Premium, We7 Premium, Sky Songs, Virgin Media etc etc.  

So what’s changed?  Well, both a little and a lot.

The niche audience is getting bigger.  Firstly, the appeal for premium subscriptions is still a niche addressable audience of tech savvy music aficionados, but that audience is growing. It’s still far from mass market (and never will be) but it’s a more attractively scaled base now.  A few million per major music market perhaps. For a company like MOG that’s plenty enough addressable market. Also improvements in consumer technology and connectivity make it easier to deliver a high quality on-the-go cloud based experience, a crucial asset.

We all struggle with complexity of designing, building and maintaining BI apps. Why? Among many other reasons, the simplest one is that there's just too many components involved. Just to name a few

• Data sourcing
• Data extraction
• Data integration
• Data cleansing
• Data aggregation
• Data modeling (star schemas, cubes)
• Metrics management
• Queries
• Reports
• Dashboards
• Alerts
• Delivery (portals, schedulers, emails, etc)

For years there were many attempts to automate some of these steps via metadata. So rather than than coding source to target SQL transformations or DDL for DW generation vendors came up with, what I know call "1st generation" metadata driven BI tools, such as

• ETL tools where metadata auto-generated SQL scripts for data extraction, loading and transformation
• BI tools where metadata auto-generated SQL for queries
• Data modeling tools where metadata auto-generated logical data models and DDL for physical data models

But, the "2nd generation" metadata driven BI apps (note apps vs tools now) do much more. For example, they:

• Use metadata to generate multi vendor apps (like BalancedInsight, Kalido and BIReady do), and having a single place where changes can be made
• Use metadata to generate all three (ETL SQL, BI SQL, DW DDL, like Cognos, Wherescape, BIReady do), and having a single place where changes to all 3 can be made
• Using metadata to generate report layouts (like Cognos does)

The bottom line here is that these 2nd gen metadata driven BI apps actually generate apps (vs SQL).

I am currently looking at the following vendors