BPM and Big Data
February 8, 2012
Search and business process management: a shotgun marriage. The two can’t help but come together, as IT Business Edge reports in “Two Examples of BPM’s Role in Data Integration.” Writer Loraine Lawson writes that Talend intends to integrate BonitaSoft’s business process management solution with its Unified Platform.
Lawson is pretty sure Talend is the first data integration specialist vendor to venture into this area. She asked Talend’s VP of marketing, Yves de Montcheuil, how the use of BPM contributes to integration. The write up states:
Data governance. To use a master data hub as a system of record, you’ll need to load it from multiple sources, which will have conflicting data. The MDM and data quality tool will resolve many of these conflicts automatically through matching, but for more complicated conflicts, you’ll need a workflow. BPM can drive this workflow, sending the data to business users who can resolve the conflict by validating the correct data.
That does sound more efficient. Another way Talend expects BPM to help is to manage and automate data integration and data quality services.
Talend provides both open source and SaaS big data solutions to organizations around the world. BonitaSoft also offers both open source and paid solutions, but its realm is business process management. Best wishes to the happy couple!
Cynthia Murrell, February 8, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New Oracle E-Book
February 3, 2012
Oracle brews a data latté with cinnamon you may enjoy if you if you suck down this new book. The Salvatoreyc blog presents for download, “Oracle XSQL: Combining SQL, Oracle Text, XSLT and Java to Publish Dynamic Web Content.” The product description states:
Welcome to the exciting world of eXtended Structured Query Language (XSQL). ‘Oracle XSQL: Combining SQL, Oracle Text, XSLT and Java to Publish Dynamic Web Content’ presents a complete approach to building XML Web applications and Web services with XSQL, Oracle Text, SQL, XSLT, and Java from data found in Oracle databases. Companion Web site contains the code examples in the book as well.
Sounds helpful. The download is only available to Media Search members, and the download page takes you right to their signup sheet. Naturally, there is a fee.
Cynthia Murrell, February 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
RightNow Takes the Oracle Money
January 29, 2012
Good idea in our opinion.
RightNow joins Endeca as a billion dollar baby, as revealed in TechCrunch’s “RightNow Stockholders Approve $1.5 Billion Merger with Oracle.” The vote was nearly unanimous; the $1.5 billion deal represents a per-share value of $43.
What will the customer experience management company bring to Oracle? What Writer Robin Wauters wrote:
RightNow’s solutions help companies handle customer interactions across a multitude of channels, including call and contact centers, the Web and social networks. Its products are used by nearly 2,000 organizations across the globe, the company says. With the acquisition, which is still subject to regulatory approval, Oracle will thus be adding a robust cloud-based customer service offering to its own Public Cloud solution.
RightNow has been around since 1997, and is driven to bring order, efficiency, and good will to customer interactions. For its part, Oracle needs to get its revenues back on track. Maybe, with Oracle magic, customer support and search will do the trick? However, Oracle faces legal set backs with regard to its Oracle litigation, open source threats, and the challenge of making those big search investments pay off in real money.
Cynthia Murrell, Janaury 29, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SAP HANA Spreads Its Wings
January 19, 2012
We learn more about SAP HANA from PR Newswire’s “SAP HANA™ Opens Up to Wider Industry and Partner Adoption.” Leading software vendors are tapping the speed and power of SAP HANA, a storage and data management system, for both existing products and for new applications. The press release boasts:
SAP also showcased the latest customers to experience the power of SAP HANA across industries, giving them instant access to massive amounts of information and the ability to make real-time decisions, in the process achieving breakthrough performance improvement by factors of thousands, even tens of thousands, compared to existing systems in their landscapes.
The article lists the vendors and describes how SAP HANA will help each. The companies represent fields from telecom to business visualization to healthcare. Examples include UFIDA, TIBCO, Tableau Software, and T-Mobile.
SAP serves up business management software to organizations of all sizes around the world, allowing workers to collaborate efficiently and to gain an edge on the competition. The company, founded back in 1972, is headquartered in Walldorf, Germany. Will HANA triumph in the fierce storage and data management wars? Uptake, according to our research, has been plugging along.
Cynthia Murrell, January 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Amazon: Will DynamoDB Electrocute the Big Boys?
January 18, 2012
I want to capture a few business related observations about Amazon’s now public DynamoDB. The blog post by Amazon’s chief technical officer provides a good overview of the home grown NoSQL data management service. Navigate to “Amazon DynamoDB–A Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications.” For a run down of some of the features, point your browser at “Notes About Amazon DynamoDB.” The basic idea is that Amazon has created its own NoSQL database, matched it to the Amazon cloud environment, and packaged it with taxi meter pricing.
Why didn’t Amazon use Hadoop or some other NoSQL, open source, Codd free systems? My hunch is that Amazon sees big money in a ready-to-role, automatic sharding, solid state disc base data management solution. Rolling its own solution gives Amazon control. In fact, Amazon is cranking up the dial on its Controlometer.
The issue that interests me is the business angle of the DynamoDB. Here are several preliminary thoughts.
First, Amazon is getting frisky but slowly. My sources report that work on the DynamoDB system began several years ago. Microsoft picked up wind of the project and was unable to respond. Right now, Amazon’s an engineering magnet, attracting talent from outfits once considered the best in the soggy city. With higher quality engineering horsepower, the dowdy retailer is shifting from a horse and wagon to a far more capable vehicle.
Second, MarkLogic had the idea that it could impinge on Oracle. Well, we know how that turned out with AtomicPR (the content fallout kids), management change, and wild and crazy marketing. Now Amazon is on the path to make life tough for Oracle. Amazon had Oracle as a steady date, but senior year is coming. Amazon may be marrying the DynamoDB, leaving Oracle without a homecoming date. If Amazon pulls off this new hitch up, Amazon may be ready to go for the enterprise gold. I think this is better than a 50-50 deal but I may change my mind.
Third, Amazon has demonstrated the value of a “Google Legacy.” Google plunged forward, diffused its resources, and ended up with its lovely self snared in legal and social thorns. Amazon, on the other hand, has avoided some of the traps into which Google threw itself. In the process itself, Amazon used Android to move its branded hardware forward. There is nothing like a friend who plans on evicting you from your home. Amazon is, once again, going beyond Google.
I have a number of other thoughts, but the goose’s liver needs a rest. Oh, oh, here comes a scowling nurse. Will she rescue the electrocuted big boys of database? I doubt it.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Oracle Faces EnterpriseDB Surge
January 18, 2012
Oracle has ruled the information processing market for years now with fear as the dominating marketing tool. The article, EnterpriseDB Is Giving Oracle a Run For Its Money, on Forbes, explains how that has changed (with Oracle stock prices serving as proof) thanks to a declining economy and EnterpriseDB.
For years now Oracle has been on fire doing the once believed impossible – making money on open source technology. Controlling over fifty percent of the information processing market with their MYSQL Oracle thought they were scot-free. They were until the economy tanked and some smooth talking competition stepped in.
With IT departments’ budgets drastically cut across all industries some creative outside-the-box thinking has been going on. Oracle has kept their customers in line by telling scary stories of what will happen if they switch to another provider. With EnterpriseDB offering the same services as Oracle but at only ten percent of the price, most IT departments are willing to take their chances.
The article speaks of EnterpriseDB’s growth by reporting,
One of the reasons that it’s grown so fast is that EnterpriseDB has lowered customer switching costs. How so? Along with its support of the open source database, PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB has added features that let customers port the applications they’ve developed for Oracle and other databases over to PostgreSQL.
Oracle might have overcome the open-source hurdle a while back and come out ahead, but we wonder about how they will fare with new competition like EnterpriseDB. Obviously, we are not alone as their stock shares have taken a dramatic hit.
Catherine Lamsfuss, January 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SAP: Lemons from Lemonade for Search Vendors
January 18, 2012
A couple of years ago I did a series of columns about SAP, the German software company which is imbued with the DNA of IBM and the more unpredictable genes of the “let ‘er rip” approach to generating revenues. Change is difficult, and SAP interests to me because the firm’s machinations are the embodiment of the dislocations that old style software vendors face in the cloudy world of Amazon, Google, and even old Big Blue herself, IBM. Keep in mind, one of SAP’s strategic moves was to purchase Sybase.
HANA emerged two years ago as a solution to the woes of organizations struggling with big data, the need to make sense of them, and the complexity which threatens to sink traditional enterprise applications. Consider SAP itself. The company owns Business Objects, once the leader in business analytics. Today I don’t think of Business Objects, which may say more about my awareness than SAP’s marketing. But I hear zero about Inxight Software which performs entity extraction and other text operations and I have heard little or nothing about TREX, SAP’s information retrieval system. I lost track of the SAP investment in Endeca long before SAP’s rival Oracle snagged the 1998 technology to “enhance” its own struggling search solutions.
What is HANA?
According to an SAP friendly blog, SAP describes HANA in this way:
HANA is the foundation and the core of all that we do now and going forward for existing products, new products and entirely new frontiers. We are transforming enterprise software with HANA, and we are transforming our entire product portfolio,” Sikka said in a statement earlier this week announcing that SAP HANA is now generally available worldwide. “But HANA is more than a product,” Sikka continued. “It is a new paradigm, an entirely new way to build applications. It is the basis for our own intellectual renewal internally at SAP—where we rethink how we design, build, deploy, service and sell products—and the basis for our customers’ and partners’ intellectual renewal—where we help customers rethink existing business problems and help them solve entirely new challenges using design-thinking.” (Source: The Top 10 Reasons SAP HANA Is Disrupting Larry Ellison’s Grand Plans]
To me, HANA is a next generation database and it now has to differentiate itself from the XML next generation database from the likes of MarkLogic, from Cloudera, from other NoSQL solutions, and from the new and improved versions of data management systems from IBM, Microsoft, and even Amazon. Big job. Maybe an impossible job?
In December 2011, I snipped the write up “Can SAP be the #2 database vendor by 2015?” I found this passage particularly interesting:
Why doesn’t SAP HANA have deeper market penetration? Put simply it is because SAP wanted it this way. Whilst HANA truly is a general-purpose database, SAP first announced it as an analytics appliance for the 1.0 release. They also priced it really high and didn’t’ offer a discount – list pricing can be as high as €180,000 for a 64GB HANA “unit”, depending on which version you require. And what’s more, SAP sells solutions and HANA is a platform, so the global sales force doesn’t quite know how to sell it in volume – yet. They didn’t want to sell it in volume in any case because they wanted to introduce it slowly to market – building stability, references along the way and avoiding expensive and embarrassing global escalations. So by the end of 2011 we should expect $100-150m of HANA sales, which is 3-5% of SAP’s total revenue. Not particularly significant, right? Well in September they released HANA as being supported for SAP’s Business Warehouse software, which allows large-scale data warehouses. And this is where it gets interesting: there are 17,000 existing BW customers, and HANA would provide business benefit to all of them.
If you are interested in HANA, you can access SAP’s primer about the solution at this link.
In the midst of the HANA hype, Seeking Alpha’s “SAP Is No Longer The Leader It Once Was” stated in December 2011:
The current most promising innovation is SAP HANA, an appliance with columnar in-memory technology enabling fast processing and near real-time analytics. According to SAP, HANA has the potential to become the next-generation system architecture, removing the use of middleware and relational databases. However, the root causes of the downturn appear outside the perimeter of the company transformations: product development, continuous customer complaints, and the 20-year aging ERP that represents the core of the customer base seem to remain unchanged. Agile is probably not enough to address the long-term issues of product development. Most likely, Agile is not the solution to fifteen years of trying to get CRM right, or to making three platform mistakes in three on-demand initiatives (CRM on-demand in 2006, Business byDesign in 2007, and SaaS Enterprise in 2009).
The Seeking Alpha analysis then makes these machine gun like statements:
Is SAP getting it right? Here is a summary of the points to keep in mind to answer this question:
SAP R&D has yet to deliver its first truly successful product since 1992 (it could be HANA overtime)
The core of ERP that holds the customer base is outdated
There seem to be no plans to develop a modern replacement product
Development of a potential new ERP would take years
Sales have declined stepping back by 3 to 4.5 years
SAP’s leadership is questionable
According to Gartner, the revenue from relicensing R/3 to ERP 6.0 is ending
Customers and employees have lost trust
Executives have been leaving
On-demand is not making progress
The customer base is increasingly at risk
Analysts estimate that HANA could produce just 10% of the revenue by 2013.
There is a gap between the buzz and the hard facts.
What does this mean for vendors who hitch their wagons to the SAP “star” as ISYS Search Software did with the announcement “ISYS Wins Software Deal with SAP”? Three points:
- Search vendors are looking at their technology and packaging it in ways to generate incremental revenue. ISYS, it appears, is in the connector game, competing with firms such as EntropySoft
- SAP seems to be lagging further and further behind the NoSQL players who are now facing headwinds despite early market leads. My example is MarkLogic, the XML database outfit
- The broader market seems to be splitting into quite different segments. SAP is going to have difficulty in the IBM and Oracle space, and it is going to have trouble with the open source NoSQL crowd which seems to prefer having Hadoop on its T shirts than HANA.
SAP remains interesting, but it is now in some danger of further marginalization. SAP needs a search system still.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
What’s Hot: Sharepoint Semantics Dec 30 – Jan 6
January 10, 2012
This week, SharePoint Semantics provided followers with several informative articles to help end users navigate through the mine field that is often associated with the SharePoint experience.
According to the post, “New Book Explains the Benefits of Silverlight for Microsoft SharePoint 2010,” a recently released book gives an extensive overview of how to package an application created with Silverlight, a browser plug in technology similar to Adobe Flash, so that it works well in SharePoint.
Writer Ken Toth states:
“The authors have also included new ideas that were not documented anywhere, such as an easier way of packaging Silverlight applications for deployment on SharePoint. The book’s audience is developers familiar with the .NET framework and has tutorials on the basics of both Silverlight and SharePoint development.”
Another post worth noting from this past week, shares seven recent webinars for free consumption. According to “Free Webinar Recordings of Notes Migrator SharePoint Partner Training Series” there are links to the audio and slides from Walch’s seven-week Partner Training webcasts on migrating Lotus Notes to SharePoint.
Toth aptly notes:
“Large migration projects can be tricky, and finding content once you have migrated to SharePoint can be even trickier. To solve both these issues, look to the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform from Smartlogic as your migration tool to speed up SharePoint commissioning and add comprehensive taxonomy support.”
Recently, discussions regarding SharePoint governance have come into play as well as a certain graphic. The post “Pie Graphic from Microsoft – Should it be Used to Explain SharePoint?” shares one unique perspective on this issue.
Toth says:
“A survey follows the article polling users if they are using the SharePoint 2010 pie in presentations. Right now, most use the graphic judiciously depending on the audience. A graphic is a good approach to explaining the breadth and depth of the SharePoint platform, but as the author points out, there really isn’t another comparable compelling graphic out there besides the pie.”
In order to fully discuss and understand SharePoint effectively, it is important that end users utilize a variety of different resources. For those who don’t want to take the time and energy to follow these diverse points of view, and would rather easily boost the search and find experience, turn to Smartlogic and the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform.
Jasmine Ashton, January 10, 2012
Mr. MapR: A Xoogler
January 8, 2012
Wired Enterprise gives us a glimpse into MapR, a new distribution for Apache Hadoop, in “Ex-Google Man Sells Search Genius to Rest of World.” The ex-Googler in this case is M.C. Srivas, who was so impressed with Google’s MapReduce platform that he decided to spread its concepts to the outside world. Writer Cade Metz explains,
In the summer of 2009, [Srivas] left the company to found a startup that takes the ideas behind Google’s top-secret infrastructure and delivers them to the average business. The company is called MapR, after Google’s MapReduce, and like so many other companies, Srivas and crew are selling a product based on Hadoop, an open source incarnation of Google’s GFS and MapReduce platforms.
Srivas had the chance to get in on the ground floor of Cloudera, but he was unhappy with that project’s emphasis on support, services, and software add-ons. Instead, he wanted to directly address the core problems with the Hadoop platform. Shortly thereafter, MapR was born.
The article details some of the Hadoop hitches that MapR is addressing. We admire the drive to get to the root of the problems, rather than surrender to the temptation of shortcuts.
Cynthia Murrell, January 8, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Digital Reasoning Connects with TeraDact
January 4, 2012
Big data analytics specialist Digital Reasoning has been a regular topic of discussion here at Beyond Search, most recently for achieving series B funding for a big data intelligence push.
Now, we would like to share an exciting new development in the quest to solve the big data problem in the news release “Digital Reasoning and TeraDact Partner to Automatically Remove Sensitive Information from Big Data.”
According to the article, TeraDact Solutions, a software tools and data integration solutions provider, has integrated their TeraDactor Information Identification and Presentation capabilities with Synthesys Cloud, a software-as-a-service data analytics solution.
The news story states:
In conjunction with Synthesys, TeraDactor can automatically assist in appropriately classifying information not recognized by the original data provider. TeraDactor allows participants to push and pull information without waiting for the declassification process, assuring that formerly classified documents may be released without unintended leakages.
The innovative technology that TeraDact Solutions brings to Digital Reasoning’s table demonstrates the power of Synthesys as a cloud-based data analytics tool in building the next generation of Big Data analytic solutions. Kudos to the surging Digital Reasoning organization.
Jasmine Ashton, January 4, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
