Oracle and Business Intelligence Reality
July 4, 2013
I don’t know if this Computerworld write up is accurate. For the purposes of the addled goose, let’s assume that it is semi-accurate. The story is “Oracle Quietly Slashes BI Software Prices.” Now “BI” for those in the know means “business intelligence.” I am not sure what “business intelligence” means. I have some evidence to suggest that, like “military intelligence,” we have a trendy oxymoron.
I am okay with stealthy price increases. Every time I visit the Kia dealership to fix up my small Kia Soul, I know that what I think the cost will be and what the final cost will be are two very different types of number tweaking. Is enterprise software any different? I think agile pricing is pretty much the name of the game. I bought two tubes of toothpaste. When I presented my “affiliate” card, the price dropped. Then I was told if I bought another tube of toothpaste, I would get an additional discount. Car repairs, toothpaste, enterprise software — those MBAs and bean counters have figured an angle.
The point of the Computerworld write up is that Oracle (the company which owns Endeca) offers a business foundation suite. Endeca morphed from a search and eCommerce company into business intelligence years ago. The Computerworld story does not mention Endeca, which I find interesting. If one pays $1 billion or more for an acquisition which is in the business intelligence business, why isn’t Endeca part of the BI Foundation Suite?
Here’s the purportedly accurate pricing:
BI Foundation Suite encompasses Oracle BI Enterprise Edition 11g, BI Publisher, Essbase, Scorecard and Strategy Management, and Essbase Analytics Link, according to an official whitepaper. The new price list also lowers the price of BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus from $295,000 to $221,250, as well as Scorecard and Strategy Management from $149,250 to $89,550.
The Computerworld story quotes an expert that there may be a catch in Oracle’s enterprise software pricing. Do you think that’s possible?
Another interesting item from the article is the unsupported assertion about Oracle’s revenue growth from business intelligence:
However, Oracle’s BI revenue grew by 2 percent in 2012, compared to SAP’s 0.6 percent BI growth rate that year, Gartner said.
The economy is not so good. Why is pricing such a slippery issue? Perhaps the growth is coming from efforts akin to climbing a mountain in bad weather? Maybe the traditional customers are struggling to find value from software which offers “business intelligence”?
My hunch is that like toothpaste pricing the economy is forcing big companies to increase their pricing agility. Maybe there will be an enterprise software loyalty card? If so, I want one. I am fascinated by cascading and fluid discounts.
Stephen E Arnold, July 4, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
At the Top of the BI Stack
June 28, 2013
Business intelligence tools are becoming a big priority for even small businesses. TopCultured supplies some guidance for those considering their options in, “The 4 Biggest Business Intelligence Companies.” We were a little surprised that writer Drew Hendricks included Microsoft on this list.
The write-up begins:
“Finding the meaning behind mountains of raw data can be a difficult task, especially for companies that have not been monitoring their processes on a regular basis. Keeping an eye on business intelligence can tell stories of new opportunities, potential verticals for growth, and identify dangerous problems, allowing companies to enact a solution.
“As business intelligence becomes more accessible to smaller companies and startups, with app developers driving mobile solutions, the need for BI-trained workers and software solutions goes up. Take a look at the four top business intelligence companies out there now.”
With that, the list begins. Roambi is lauded for being easy to use and interpret. YellowFin boasts a bird’s-eye-view of a company’s strengths and weaknesses. In at number three, Domo is flexible enough to be used throughout an organization. Microsoft‘s SharePoint—well, I suppose being “considered the industry standard” does give the veteran platform some standing.
See the article for more on each of these companies. Organizations would do well to carefully consider their needs and investigate all options before choosing a BI platform.
Cynthia Murrell, June 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
National Instruments Selects Attivio
June 14, 2013
Increasingly major national and international companies are turning to open source solutions to solve their information storage and retrieval needs. These companies need enterprise solutions that are agile, efficient, affordable, and secure. The latest to join the ranks of open source adoption is National Instruments. KM World covers the news in their story, “Powering Information Discovery and Search Needs.”
The article begins:
“National Instruments has chosen a unified information access platform to enable more efficient knowledge discovery and analysis into the future. After evaluating a number of solutions, National Instruments decided that Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) would best handle its requirements, particularly related to ontology-driven query completion, auto categorization, sentiment analysis, dictionary management, recommendations, language support and improved relevancy boosting, according to Attivio.”
Attivio’s Active Intelligence model strives to integrate business intelligence, enterprise search, and Big Data into one scalable model. This type of consolidation seems to be driving the value-added open source market. For instance, LucidWorks offers two solutions: LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data. Both have distinct functions, but are designed to serve the all-encompassing enterprise needs of an organization. Small and medium sized organizations even find that they can benefit from the scalability of LucidWorks, and rest on their trusted support and security. Explore both options and see how they will fit into your enterprise.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Quote to Note: Understanding and Content
June 12, 2013
I read “How a Low Level Insider Could Steal” in the USA Today. Here’s the phrase I circled:
We cannot defend what we don not undertand.
If accurate, does this statement apply to Big Data, whatever that is? If one does not know, how does one search for information?
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
FOCUS Issue 29 on Big Data Available Now
May 27, 2013
Datacenter Dynamics’ publication, FOCUS, just released issue 29 with an emphasis on Big Data. Penny Jones provides a look into the latest edition in her story, “FOCUS 29 – the Big Data Issue. Read it Online Now!” which appears on the Datacenter Dynamics blog.
To introduce the topic of Big Data, the author discusses the concept with the head of CERN’s open lab project, Bob Jones. She quotes him here:
“Jones likens CERN to a big industrial plant, which is quite fitting for GE’s purpose. GE pushes big data solutions focused on the Industrial Internet (see Pages 30-33).”
She then continues by introducing another leading mind in the world of Big Data:
“Another vendor representative I spoke with, LucidWork’s CTO Grant Ingersoll, told me machines and the Internet – funnily enough – are the reason we have big data in the first place. ‘[Big data] is this unique combination of man and machine that work together on data that brings new business insights and solves complex problems that, until now, have not been tackled. In many ways, business intelligence (BI), big data and analysis tools are closely related.’”
LucidWorks definitely has a voice in the Big Data market, as they seek to aid businesses with efficiency and accuracy in their enterprise search and Big Data needs. Built on Apache Lucene and Solr, the LucidWorks offerings do deliver on the promise that Ingersoll makes above, ensuring that business intelligence is coupled with analysis and Big Data in a way that ensures a competitive advantage.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Janya Goes Dark
April 22, 2013
The business intelligence world is growing at a rapid pace. There are a variety of business intelligence vendors that all offer worthwhile products. Each vendor continues to come up with new ways to stay competitive and ahead of the competition and the sometimes the battle can get fierce. Janya was a business intelligence company known for providing customers with semantic analysis tools and solutions that allows users to extract important information from both structured and semi-structured data. In addition they also had a variety of customizable solutions which included automated metadata, social media mining and CRM enhancement. Users basically counted on Janya solutions to help them speed up the discovery as well as sharing of hidden information within their existing data. In previous years the company seemed to be doing well and had built a respectable reputation. However, it now seems that the company’s website seems to have gone dark. A trip to the Janya website brings up a Go Daddy page and asks visitors
“Do you want to buy this domain?”
They didn’t leave any information or even a forwarding address for customers to find. Should we assume that they are gone for good? It makes one wonder exactly what happened to the once bustling company and their product base. In such a competitive field did they meet their match and were able to uncover or do they simply run out of financial resources. One thing is for sure Janya has gone dark and only time will tell if they will ever see the light of day again.
April Holmes, April 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Oracle Upgrades Discovery and BI Tools
April 14, 2013
Oracle has released upgrades aimed at improving business outcomes and simplifying IT requirements, we learn from a press release posted at MarketWatch, “Oracle Extends Business Analytics Portfolio Empowering Organizations to Transform Data Into Insights.” Both Endeca Information Discovery and Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite have been enhanced. The company points out that both solutions perform best on their tailor-made Exalytics In-Memory Machine. The write-up informs us:
“Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.0 delivers a completely redesigned user interface that offers new drag and drop visualizations to provide users with a superior discovery experience, new personal data load for business users to add their own Excel data files to IT provided data, and new Oracle BI Server connectivity, to leverage trusted data from existing analytic applications, along with other features.
“Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite Release 11.1.1.7 delivers significant enhancements to usability, mobility, user experience and Big Data integration, enabling organizations to analyze critical information and get the intelligence they need to optimize their business.
“Endeca Information Discovery and Oracle BI Foundation Suite run better on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, the industry’s first engineered system for Business Analytics. Oracle Exalytics takes best-in class analytics and in-memory software engineered on high-performance hardware to reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructures while increasing productivity and performance for data discovery, business intelligence, modeling and planning applications.”
This Exalytics machine has the potential to make the entire BI undertaking much, much simpler. Endeca, acquired by Oracle in 2011, has long been a strong player in the enterprise discovery field. Oracle’s BI suite integrates several key features in one platform: enterprise reporting, dashboards, ad-hoc analysis, scenario analysis, scorecards, and predictive analytics. The company’s commitment to supplying cutting-edge technology while maintaining easy-to-use interfaces is apparent in these latest improvements.
Cynthia Murrell, April 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Recorded Future Sheds Light on Sony
April 2, 2013
One of the best ways to find the correlation between data from various sources it by comparison. Recorded Future is an online business intelligence analysis tool designed for open web sources. Recorded future scans thousands of different type such as blogs and online news and analyzes the text to identify certain references entities or events. The GamaGanda article “Analyzing Sony with Recorded Future #2” is a great example of how the intelligence tool works. The author does an analysis on Sony’s position in the video gaming market. Recently, Sony had been discussing innovation and was due to make a big announcement. The author used Recorded Future to see if Sony was really making any innovative strides and more specifically how they shaped up when compared to Microsoft and Apple.
“Patent filling is something you can track and it gives you a pretty good idea on a company’s disposition to invest in R&D and hence design innovative products and services.”
As shown on the online screen shots Sony is definitely not keeping up with the innovative minds of Microsoft and Apple and the number of patents clearly demonstrate that. Also more alarming is that Sony has seen an increasing number of layoffs over the past several years. Though patent filing seems to be increasing they are still behind the other big two and have lost a lot of ground in the race. Only time will tell if the upcoming announcement and future projects will help Sony to bounce back. With just a few screenshots Recorded Future broke the bad news to Sony shareholders and now all they can do is watch, wait and hope for the best.
April Holmes, April 02, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
On The Road Again: Watson Heads to USC
March 20, 2013
“IBM’s Watson Cognitive Computing System Spurs Competition at USC” and is helping to tap into new, innovative ideas based upon the supercomputer’s capabilities.
Two years ago, Watson beat out its human competitors on the popular game show “Jeopardy.” The company is now putting the computer to work in the healthcare field to help solve some of the industries problems until they can develop a more commercial application for the network.
“UCS students imagined a Watson-powered system that could uncover data-driven insights to help medical professionals identify those who may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) provide lawyers with faster research capabilities to improve their cases and help businesses hire the best talent in the job market.”
More than 100 USC students participated in the IBM Watson Academic Case Competition, but the question is this: Why has it taken so long for Watson to be utilized in a commercial setting? Where are the customers and what is going to drive consumer interest in order to make Watson profitable?
It is a big cognitive computing system, why hasn’t it been turned into something more user friendly and widely available if the potential is there for widespread use and immediate impact?
Leslie Radcliff, March 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Oracle has a Hand in Many Cookie Jars
March 17, 2013
Oracle has long been seen as the kingpin of the analytic industry. That could be tough for their competition to argue with, especially after a recent report from Market Watch, “Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.”
Gartner, Inc. identified Oracle as being in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2013 report, Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms. This is the seventh consecutive year for Oracle has been given this distinction.
Here’s what the article had to say:
“Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports position vendors within a particular quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute… Oracle’s positioning in the Leaders Quadrant showcases how Oracle Business Analytics portfolio provides customers with an end-to-end family of analytic solutions ranging from descriptive to prescriptive based on a comprehensive set of BI, advanced analytics and CPM functionality that is also integrated and optimized with the Oracle technology stack.”
That is another impressive accolade to add to their mantle. However, it begs the question: what about the properties which comprise Oracle. Are those leaders too? This company is one that has its hand in many, many cookie jars. While we do not have direct experience with them all, it is safe to say not everything owns Oracle’s mastery, such as their analytics arm. This is to say that the homework required by choosing a new product still needs to be done, even for a company like Oracle.
Patrick Roland, March 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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