IBM dropped a big bombshell at the start of any already action-packed day for the analyst community. At this moment, I’m sitting, along with several dozen of my peers from Forrester and other firms, at the IBM Smart Analytics System launch event in Hawthorne NY. I’ll blog on IBM’s other announcements in a separate items.
Yes, of course, Software AG is buying IDS Scheer primarily for the latter’s ARIS family of business process management (BPM) tools. I’ll leave it to my Forrester colleagues who focus on BPM--on both the IT and TI sides of the house — to call out the ramifications for Software AG’s positioning in that market.
In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”
Virtualization is a venerable old computing concept that has achieved new life in recent years.
Virtualization brings to life a new world of more flexible service provisioning while cleverly emulating the old world that is being replaced. Virtualization refers to any approach that abstracts the external interface from the internal implementation of some service, functionality, or other resource.
If you tuned into my Forrester teleconference yesterday, you heard me discuss the end-to-end infrastructure necessary to fully support mashup-style self-service business intelligence (BI).
Last fall, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that his company was getting into the hardware business, but I think he misspoke. At that time, he was referring to the new HP Oracle Database Machine with Exadata Storage, a high-end data warehousing (DW) appliance that incorporated hardware from his partner, as well as intelligent storage software technology from that partner--and even had the partner’s name first in the product name. If that was the criterion for “getting into the hardware business”--i.e., running on someone else’s hardware--then every software vendor on earth is in the hardware business, by my reckoning.
It's painful to see the auto, newspaper, construction, financial services, and so many other formerly vibrant sectors of the world economy go down the proverbial tubes. One of the most nauseating realities is when millions of people lose their jobs, homes, and communities in a seeming blink.
In a recent article, Bill Inmon incinerates a strawman concept that he refers to as “virtual data warehousing (DW).” For those unfamiliar with Inmon, he is generally considered the founder of DW as a data management discipline, has been at it since the 70s, and has more published books and articles to his name than most mortals. So he clearly may be considered an authority on the topic of DW.
Cynics might call Semantic Web a technology looking for a solution. And they might have a point.
Semantic Web refers to a long-running World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) initiative that is working toward an ambitious — some might say hopelessly utopian — goal. At heart, it is a vision for how the World Wide Web should evolve to realize its full interoperability potential.
When the going gets tough, the tough get lean, focused, and flexible. To help organizations survive the bad times and thrive in all climates, their information management initiatives must remain agile and adaptable.
If you feel your information management strategy is anything but lean, you’re not alone. Many organizations struggle to gain control over information infrastructures that have become too bloated, rigid, and slow to realign with new business drivers.
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