By James Kobielus

As is clear from the general pattern of my Forrester I&KM blog posts, I'm closely tracking the penetration of complex event processing (CEP) into the world of real-time BI and data warehousing (DW). I'm working on a report now providing best practices for real-time DW, which will be available later in Q2. I'll follow up with a trends document on CEP for real-time BI in Q3.

By James Kobielus

Boris Evelson's latest post on free BI got me thinking about another type of freedom.

Boris commented on the newly announced beta of a gratis, lightweight, Panorama-powered BI/OLAP-engine add-on to Google's hosted apps. You know, whenever anybody mentions BI/OLAP, I think of analytical databases, hence data warehousing (DW). And when my thoughts turn to DW, I often wonder when these dimensional data stores will be let loose from their earthly tethers and begin to float free in the SaaS cloud. This is no blue-sky speculation, but rather an inevitability in a world shifting to subscription-based SaaS for on-demand delivery of all infrastructure and application services. Where database services are concerned, this trend even has a name in popular circulation: Database 2.0 (aka "cloud databases").

By James Kobielus

Before the week is out, a few more thoughts inspired by various things I experienced at and around Forrester's Enterprise Architecture (EA) Forum last week in beautiful (but surprisingly chilly) Coronado, California.

What stuck with me was the presentation and demo by Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe. Though I was already quite familiar with Adobe’s Flex technology for rich Internet applications (RIA) technology, I liked the fact that Lynch presented Flex this time around as a business tool--in other words, as an interactive visualization technology for business intelligence (BI), business performance optimization, and event-rich analytics. All of which made perfect sense in a forum for enterprise architects.

By James Kobielus, Boris Evelson, Paul Hamerman, Rob Karel, Kyle McNabb, Craig Le Clair, Colin Teubner, Merv Adrian, and Connie Moore

Simplicity is bliss, but complexity has the upper hand in many enterprise information and knowledge management (I&KM) environments.

To keep a lid on runaway complexity, enterprise I&KM professionals often limit their strategic solution vendors and professional services partners to a chosen few. Typically, strategic vendors are those that can offer the widest range of best-of-breed I&KM solutions. Sourcing from a core group of solution providers also allows enterprise IT staff to obtain better licensing terms, reduce maintenance costs, and tighten cross-product and platform integration across diverse solution components.

By James Kobielus

Business intelligence (BI) remains one of the most vital and innovative sectors of the data management arena. The past year saw BI achieve a new degree of importance in the solution portfolios of users everywhere. In fact, BI has begun to play into a much broader range of enterprise IT planning and deployment decisions than ever before. What follows are the most important trends that will continue to transform the BI industry, and add a new degree of complexity into decisions confronting CIOs, enterprise architects, and information and knowledge management professionals: