Autonomy Responds to Structured Data Specialists
October 1, 2009
When I was writing the Gilbane report called Beyond Search, I was surprised by the number of vendors who were doing the structured-unstructured data do-si-do. Some of the companies were anchored in search (Attivio); others in data mining (Clarabridge); and others in transformation and extraction (Relegence). Big outfits like Microsoft Fast ESP promised to provide access to a range of content and add business intelligence to the mix. My head was spinning. I was, therefore, not surprised to read about Autonomy’s entrance into this market sector. You can read about Autonomy SPE and Free Your Data on the Autonomy Web site. At this time (October 2009), Autonomy SPE is in beta. You can sign up for the beta program here. Autonomy has posted a podcast with Mike Lynch as well. Oh, SPE is an acronym for structured probability engine.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2009
Wall Street Journal Spamming Again
October 1, 2009
I have to give the Wall Street Journal a big thanks. What a wonderful example of how newspapers who want to charge for their content, sustain their untenable business model, and anger paying customers. If I were teaching, I would profile the witless activities of this company. First, it muffed the online service. Then it created the crazy regional papers making bibliographic citations exciting for folks everywhere. Now it is spamming paying customers again. I have called the company. What a joke that was. I have written email and hard copy letters. Into file 13 for sure. And I have been writing to my two or three readers that WSJ is spamming me, a paying customer, to subscribe to the newspaper. For a case example of ineptitude, may I suggest that we look no further than the WSJ’s “please, subscribe” emails to paying customers. Silly. Indicative of a train with a faulty locomotive. Maybe this is a WSJ contractor? Quite a third party rep in my view. Nice work. Colorful. Clown-like too.
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2009
Oracle Chases Business Intelligence
October 1, 2009
A happy quack to my colleague in Israel. Another useful heads up. This time about Oracle.
Life has been getting tough for the companies hawking old-style relational database management systems. The vendors have been moving into verticals, chasing applications, and pumping up licensing fees. I am surprised to see database appliances poking their noses from corporate research labs. Instead of breaking new ground, these DB appliances are tackling performance problems by throwing hardware at the inherent weaknesses of the row and column systems that once were state of the art. Not any more. New approaches from outfits like Google and clever start ups like Aster Data have shifted the game from checkers to data management chess. One can argue that technology like MarkLogic’s may contribute to the data management revolution. I was not surprised to learn that Oracle has bought an Israeli business intelligence company. The idea seems to be that business intelligence is a hot sector and, probably more important, relies on data stored in RDBMS tables. You can read the Oracle statement here. Globes reported in “Oracle Buys Israeli Business Intelligence Company HyperRoll”:
Last night, Oracle reported that it had acquired HyperRoll Inc., which develops what are known as financial reporting acceleration solutions, that is software that enables an enterprise to gather data for financial reporting faster and thus produce financial statements in a shorter time. Oracle did not disclose financial details of the transaction, which is expected to close in the next few months. HyperRoll was founded in 2000. It has its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California, and its development center in Omer. Its field is business intelligence (BI), more specifically data warehouse performance acceleration software.
For me the key word is “acceleration”. Oracle is having to find ways around the inherent performance problems petascale data management imposes on dear Dr. Codd’s decades old invention. In my opinion, the Oracle approach is a stop gap measure. Newer approaches are in the market already and it is just a matter of time before the bottom falls out of the RDBMS market. Costs and performance will be the spikes that kill these agility vampires in my view. I wonder if Oracle will make more of a success in business intelligence than it has with its enterprise search initiative. Hot a couple of years ago, the Oracle search system has dropped outside the range of my radar.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2009
HP Analysis Urges Mainframe Rip and Replace
October 1, 2009
I read “Staying on Legacy Systems Ends Up Costing IT More” absolutely fascinating. The article appeared on the Ziff Davis Web site. There is a link to a podcast (latency and audio made this tough for me given my age, lousy hearing, and general impatience with serial info streams) and a series of excerpts from the “Briefings Direct” podcast discussion. The sponsor of the podcast was, according to the Web site, is Hewlett Packard. HP is on my radar because the company just merged its personal computer and printer business. I suppose that will make it untenable for me to describe HP as “the printer cartridge company”. I really liked that description, but now HP is a consulting firm and a PC company. Much better I suppose.
I abandoned the audio show and jumped to the transcript which you can obtain by clicking http://interarborsolutions.books.officelive.com/Documents/DoingNothing901.pdf.
The premise of the podcast, in my interpretation, is that smart companies will want to dump legacy hardware and systems for the hot, new hardware and systems available from HP. I understand this type of message. I use them myself. The idea sounds good. The notion of progress is based on the idea that what’s new is better than what came before. I won’t drag out the Jacques Ellul argument that technology creates more technology and more, unexpected problems. I will also ignore the studies of progress such as Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, originally published in December 2003, five years before the economic dominos starting falling in April 2008. I won’t point out that “legacy” is not defined in a way that helped me understand the premise of the discussion. And, I won’t beat too forcefully on the fuzziness of word “cost” as the industry experts use the term. But costs are the core of the podcast, so I will have to make a quick dash through the thicket of accounting methods but not yet.
HP red ink as metaphor for the cost problems of a mainframe to next generation platform solution.
The first idea that snagged me was “cost hasn’t changed”. What changed was the amount of cash available to organizations. I don’t buy this. First, it is not clear what is included in the data to support the generalization. Without an indication of direct and indirects, capital, services, and any other costs that are associated with a legacy system, I can’t let the generalization into the argument. Without this premise in place, the rest of the assertions are on think ice, at least for me.
Second, consider this assertion by one of the HP “transformation” experts:
What’s still there, and is changing today, is the ability to look at a legacy source code application. We have the tools now to look at the code and visualize it in ways that are very compelling. That’s typically one of the biggest obstacles. If you look at a legacy application and the number of lines of code and number of people that are maintaining it, it’s usually obvious that large portions of the application haven’t really changed much. There’s a lot of library code and that sort of thing
My view is that “obvious” is a word that can be used to create a cloud of unknowing. Mainframe apps, if stable, and doing a good enough job may be useful because the application has not changed. As one of my neighbors here in Harrods Creek said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In my experience, that applies to mainframe apps that are working. If a mainframe app is broken, then an analysis is required to track down direct and indirect costs, opportunity costs, and fuzzy to be sure, but important going-forward costs. Not much is obvious once one gets rolling down the path of the rip-and-replace approach. In my experience, the reason mainframe apps continue to chug along in insurance companies, certain travel sectors, and some manufacturing firms is because they are predictable, known, and stable. Jumping into a whizzy new world may be fun, but such a step may not be prudent within the context of the business. But HP and its wizards aren’t known for their own rock solid business decisions. I am thinking of the ball drop with AltaVista.com and the most recent mash up of the printer and the PC industry. Ink revenue will make HP’s PC revenues soar, but it won’t change the nature of that low margin business.
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