Analyst Perspectives

Social media, the newest channel of communication across the Internet, is increasingly being used to influence, but also to deliver advice and research. I wrote about this revolution last year (See: “The Social Media Revolution in Industry Analyst Community”), reporting on the transformation that is underway and the work of our firm along with Altimeter Group and dozens of other active industry...

Cloud computing is having an increasingly large influence over the IT landscape. It’s likely that, whether you realize it or not, corporate data exists has and or is migrating outside the walls of your organization. Recent research by Ventana Research shows that in areas such as customer services, sales, workforce or human capital management, software as a service (SaaS) or cloud-based...

Wall Street has many leading indicators to work with, some serious – such as housing starts and the purchasing managers’ index – and some done a bit tongue-in-cheek. One of the latter is the Super Bowl Indicator, which says that if a team from the original National Football League wins the game, the market will be up for the year, but if an old American Football League team wins it, the market...

At this year’s Influencer Summit (Twitter: #SAPSummit) SAP’s executive leadership team summarized the company’s progress in 2010 and described its plans for the coming year in a range of technologies. The event led off with co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe discussing by video from Germany the business and technology areas in which SAP expects growth in 2011. Jim focused SAP’s efforts in on-premises and...

Talend, a vendor of open source data integration tools, recently announced its acquisition of Sopera, an open source application integration company whose products are based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It simultaneously announced an additional $34 million of funding. As I pondered what the announcements mean, I couldn’t help but think of the bigger picture. Is this entrepreneurial...

No one has seemed to notice that in the last several months, Hewlett-Packard has quietly made changes to its participation in the enterprise software market; this will significantly change HP’s value for CIOs and IT organizations in regards to business intelligence (BI) technologies.

Tableau Software officially released Version 6 of its product this week. Tableau approaches business intelligence from the end user’s perspective, focusing primarily on delivering tools that allow people to easily interact with data and visualize it. With this release, Tableau has advanced its in-memory processing capabilities significantly. Fundamentally Tableau 6 shifts from the intelligent...

Interest in and development of in-memory technologies have increased over the last few years, driven in part by widespread availability of affordable 64-bit hardware and operating systems and the performance advantages in-memory operations provide over disk-based operations. Some software vendors, such as SAP with its High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) project has been advancing with...

Actuate held its annual customer day in San Francisco amid the happy chaos of the World Series champion Giants’ ticker-tape celebration, and on that day the company’s ticker symbol changed from ACTU to BIRT (a shift, incidentally, botched by NASDAQ). There was a great deal of focus on its ActuateOne platform (which my colleague reviewed here) and the advancements in using open source software...

In the weeks leading up to and as part of its Information On Demand Conference that my colleague assessed, IBM introduced version 8.5 of InfoSphere Information Server and several related product updates. As my colleague suggested earlier, IBM has an ambitious agenda to provide comprehensive information management capabilities through a combination of product development and acquisitions. The...

The battle for business analytics rages on. IBM, Oracle, SAP and SAS as billion dollar and larger companies each combine analytic computation and processing in the underlying data but Teradata remains a key player. For its part Teradata used its annual Partners conference to tout the next generation of analytics in its product portfolio and brought along customers to testify to their success in...

This year IBM joined its annual Information on Demand conference with the new IBM Business Analytics Forum. Some 10,000 attendees came to learn about managing information assets using analytics for business, and the value of integrating business intelligence (BI) with information assets across the enterprise. All these topics are relevant, as large organizations have created thousands of silos...

On October 25, IBM introduced Cognos 10 at its Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum in Las Vegas that I attended to review the technology closer from my examination at its recent IBM Business Analytics analyst summit in September. According to Rob Ashe, IBM’s general manager of business analytics, Cognos 10 has been developed for over six years. You’re probably aware that in that...

SuccessFactors is known for applications in performance and talent management but has been working to expand its portfolio more broadly into business. This year the company expanded its focus to workforce analytics with the acquisition of Inform, which I assessed. I have assessed that Inform needed to improve the usability of its tools to compete better which is now more easily possible with a...

My colleague recently wrote about QlikView, noting its rapid ascent to providing a very robust support of mobile technology platforms among BI vendors and integration with SAP. On the occasion of its release of a major product revision, QlikView 10, I’d like to add my perspective on the company and its most recent release. I first learned of QlikView about five years ago while working on the TM1...

It is not easy for businesses to make their operations more efficient, partly because their information systems do not provide notifications of events as they are happening. Most enterprise technology uses batch processing and is designed to move data from one database to another; otherwise it requires people to go and find the data they need. To be more responsive, new technologies capture and...

If you enjoyed my previous blog, “Hadoop Is the Elephant in the Room,” perhaps you’d be interested in what your organization might do with Hadoop. As I mentioned, the Hadoop World event this week showcased some of the biggest and most mature Hadoop implementations, such as those of eBay, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo. Those of you who need 8,500 processors and 16 petabytes of storage like eBay...

Earlier this week I attended Hadoop World in New York City. Hosted by Cloudera, the one-day event was by almost all accounts a smashing success. Attendance was approximately double that of last year. There were five tracks filled mostly with user presentations. According to Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, the conference’s tweet stream (#hw2010) was one of the top 10 trending topics of that morning....

At its annual conference Oracle OpenWorld this year Oracle flexed its muscles as a technology giant. The company has been steadily growing through acquisitions to expand its database, middleware and applications, and the recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems gives it a way to sell hardware for servers and storage. This momentum is enabling Oracle to develop new streams of revenue, which were on...

I attended the IBM Business Analytics Analyst Summit in Ottawa and while I can’t tell you much about what was discussed there due to confidentiality restrictions that will be released shortly, I can share with you some of my own observations regarding the state of BI, particularly what’s wrong with it. By “wrong,” I mean why aren’t adoption rates higher?  Why aren’t users more satisfied?  Our ...