It was my pleasure to participate in the latest DM Radio podcast panel yesterday. Eric Kavanaugh and Jim Ericson always do a fine job of organizing these events, and, with their stellar industry panels and fun “morning drive-time crew” on-air patter, they keep it lively. And these guys actually know a thing or two about information management. 

The latest DM Radio panel was right in my core coverage area. They called it their “Third Annual Appliance Showdown.” That got to me to thinking: early 2008 (when they held their first) was also when Forrester began our coverage of data warehousing (DW) appliances, starting with publication of my report “Appliance Power: Crunching Data Warehousing Workloads Faster And Cheaper Than Ever.”  When I published that report, DW appliances were still not quite in the enterprise mainstream, because they were still regarded by enterprise IT as, in the words of Kavanaugh, an “adjunct” to the enterprise DW (EDW) for fast table scans and query processing, rather than as platform that could scale to support all EDW functions. 

Decisions are a very human investment of attention to a problem, and gut feel--the stream of intuition, impulse, memory, and emotion behind all behavior--is the impetus driving every decision that people make

In his latest podcast, Jim discusses the increasing adoption of more user-friendly data mining tools. This trend, he argues, is helping advanced analytics become a core feature of operational business intelligence (BI) suites.

http://www.forrester.com/role_based/images/author/imported/forresterDotCom/Podcasts/BPA/James%20Kobielus_The%20New%20Decade%20Of%20Advanced%20Analytics%20Roll%20Over%20Rocket%20Scientists!_021010.mp3

In the analytics wars, one of the quasi-metaphysical topics I try to avoid is debating the distinctions between “information,” “intelligence,” and “insight.”

I recently came across a trade-press article with the headline “Mining the Cloud.” The cynic in me immediately issued a silent scoff: How is that different from “crawling the Web”? Are we just mapping old wine to shinier new bottles? Or is there something different here?

But, seeing as how I too like to proliferate discussions of mining this or that information type, I was willing to cut the reporter some slack. The article was from Redmond Developer, and concerns “Project Dallas” under Microsoft’s Azure cloud initiative. Essentially, “Project Dallas” (still in beta) supports discovery, manipulation, visualization, and analysis of data retrieved from multiple public, commercial, and private data sources via the Azure cloud. “Dallas” allows enterprises to provide users (via REST, Excel PowerPivot, and/or Visual Basic applications) with online access to aggregated feeds via Azure, which essentially operates as an online information marketplace. Also, “Dallas” allows customers to have Azure host their data for them, or simply continue to host it on their own premises while the cloud service connects securely to it.