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Data Integration Comes in Three Flavors

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, April 30, 2007
8:04 AM

Those shopping for data integration solutions will find that they come in three flavors that sometimes seem similar, but keep these distinctions in mind.

Stand-alone Tools: Niche data-integration tools from vendors such as MetaMatrix, Group 1 Software, Pervasive and Tableau enable you to provide "spot" solutions for specific problems such as pulling together data from diverse sources into a portal (MetaMatrix) mixing and matching technologies to create your own "data integration stack" (Pervasive or Group 1 together with Tableau). Enterprise and solution architects will relish the opportunity to exercise their creativity to create heterogeneous, best-of-breed solutions at reasonable cost.

Focused Solutions: Solution vendors such as Business Objects, Cognos, Informatica, Initiate Systems and SAS offer high-class capabilities in data integration as well, but usually with a specific purpose, such as business intelligence or customer data integration. If they have the integrated solution that you need, look no further – but if you pick just one component from the solution, the proposition will look less attractive

Continue reading "Data Integration Comes in Three Flavors"

Comments

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, April 30, 2007
7:17 AM

As I began to discuss in my last post, we're now seeing SaaS companies move into the platform space, selling beyond enterprise applications into databases, application development, integration and even operating systems, all on demand. Case in point is the Platform Edition release by salesforce.com last week.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, April 26, 2007
8:52 AM

Are SaaS (Software as a Service) options viable for enterprise content management (ECM)? I hear that question with increasing frequency, and frankly, it's a difficult one to answer. There are plenty of vendor options out there - from pure plays like Spring CM, to hybrids like Xythos and Treno. But just because there are plenty of options doesn't means it's a particularly good idea.

I can see the logic of Basic Content Services (BCS) being delivered through the SaaS model, but full-blown ECM deployments seem much more of a stretch. In the world of ECM we are typically looking at complex processes with integration into legacy systems -- it's hard to see the match up with SaaS.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
10:32 AM

A couple of weeks ago - long before Business Objects announced it will acquire Cartesis - I had an interesting chat with Cognos- and Outlooksoft-veteran Ben Plummer, who is now vice president of marketing at Applix. It was a routine update on the company's latest release, Applix 9.1, but Plummer started by commenting that the company is positioning itself "in the convergence between BI and performance management… we're calling it 'Business Analytics.'"

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
8:54 AM

Data privacy issues are a growing menace. On April 20, the New York Times reported yet another significant data breach: the inadvertent public disclosure of tens of thousands of social security numbers, belonging to people who received financial assistance from the U.S. Agriculture Department, on a web site powered by Census Bureau database. The breach, coming on top of numerous similar ones reported in recent times, is a clear indication that data governance is the need of the hour.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
3:28 PM

Last week Symantec announced Symantec Protection Network, a software as a service (SaaS) platform. The press release states that the service is designed to deliver easy-to-use security and availability offerings to small and mid-sized businesses using the same pay-as-you-go model of existing SaaS players.

"The first SaaS offering from Symantec, Symantec Protection Network – Online Backup Service will enable cost-effective, reliable backup and restoration of business-critical data from the convenience of a Web browser. Today marks the beta launch of Symantec Protection Network – Online Backup Service, scheduled to become available later this year."

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
10:23 AM

If you work in finance or IT, yesterday was a big news day, with announcements hitting the wire on changes in ownership and shifting positions in the race for BI and financial performance management leadership.

Starting off the morning was Business Objects' announcement that it will acquire Paris-based Cartesis. In so doing, the San Jose, Calif. (and originally French-based) software company will acquire a world-class financial performance management suite that will be enhanced through the addition of Business Objects' costing and profitability applications (acquired with ALG Software) and the BI suite of tools and applications. Talk about a deal! For a mere $300 million, Business Objects has improved its market position, accelerated its development pace and very shortly will be able to compete with the big kids in financial performance management. There is definitely no doubt that this is a smart acquisition; in fact, it's one that Business Objects should have done earlier instead of acquiring the much smaller and less enterprise-ready SRC. Putting that aside, Business Objects now is just as well-equipped as Cognos, Infor and Oracle – and probably better equipped than SAP!

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, April 23, 2007
11:41 AM

When Business Objects first acquired SRC software in Q3 2005, some industry and financial experts wondered, "why SRC, a little known budgeting, planning, and financial consolidation vendor … why not a stronger performance management player such as Cartesis or OutlookSoft?"

Fast forward 18 months and Business Objects did exactly that, announcing late Sunday night its intent to acquire Cartesis.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, April 23, 2007
9:25 AM

I don't typically watch C-Span, but I was watching last week because my wife was giving testimony before a Senate Committee. There were two panels, each with four panelists, and they included an Assistant Surgeon General, the head of the FDA Enforcement Unit, a senior person from the NIH who is in charge of the Women's Health Initiative, the largest (and most costly) clinical study of hormone replacement therapy ever, a Harvard professor of medicine and the head the Endocrine Society. How my wife managed to get to go last and get the last word is a mystery (though it's de rigueur around here), but that isn't what caught my attention. Here is what did.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, April 23, 2007
8:56 AM

I want to highlight a piece of recent news from CIO Insight: women are leaving IT. There are no studies as to why this is happening, only the fact that it is. Fortunately, for women in BI, it looks like our role in this segment of IT remains steady at 28 percent, although our pay is falling, according to just released research from TDWI.

Compared to other IT sectors, BI leadership seems to be wonderfully represented by females, particularly in industry thought leadership.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, April 20, 2007
12:43 PM

If China and India aspire to recognition and respect for their increasing prowess in technology, they must do better.

The World Economic Forum recently released its annual Global Information Technology Report for 2006-2007. The hallmark of the report is the Networked Readiness Index (NRI), which seeks to benchmark countries in their capabilities in information and telecommunication technologies (ICT). Denmark, Sweden and Singapore take the top honors for 2006-07. India (ranked 44) and China (ranked 59) are both placed somewhat dismally – and losing ground to boot (India down 4 spaces, China down 9 spaces).

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Thursday, April 19, 2007
12:32 PM

Long-time Intelligent Enterprise contributor Cindi Howson wants to understand why and how some companies are more successful with business intelligence than others. The results of the survey will be published in her upcoming book, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI A Killer App (to be published by McGraw Hill in November).

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, April 19, 2007
10:32 AM

John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, yesterday gave a keynote address at AIIM Expo entitled "The Parallel Evolution and Convergence of Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence." The title notwithstanding, I didn't hear a lot of concrete examples of convergence in the speech, but there are signs the worlds of structured data and less-structured content are slowly coming together.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Thursday, April 19, 2007
10:09 AM

The hype around enterprise portals seems to have subsided, but I believe genuine interest remains high. Yesterday at the annual AIIM Expo, we held an "Enterprise Portal Smackdown," in which a packed room of document and records managers keenly watched seven-minute demos presented by different consultancies (Ironworks, Molecular, and Liferay) demonstrating, respectively: BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and Liferay Portal. Here's a very brief summary of the demos:

Posted by Nelson King
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
3:28 PM

Microsoft let one Cinderella shoe drop (calling it ever so evocatively Silverlight), what's the next shoe going to be? A marriage of Silverlight and Atlas (aka ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions)? Perhaps not a marriage just yet, but a kind of pre-nup involving the .NET library capability…

Let me translate the blog-speak: On April 15, Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight, which formerly was called Windows Presentation Foundation/E (WPF/E). Based on technology developed for Windows Vista (the graphics portion formerly called Avalon), Silverlight is a streaming media delivery module, a piece of code that plugs into a browser, that Microsoft hopes will open the floodgates for media rich applications. Also, it's an Adobe (Macromedia) Flash killer.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
5:54 AM

Compliance mandates and legal risks are a big focus here at the AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston. Also everywhere - the keynote lineup, the press room, the collateral material, etc. - are presentations, announcements and references to Microsoft SharePoint. I'll get to SharePoint and parallels between Microsoft's BI and content management thrusts in a moment, but first a few thoughts on fear mongering.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
7:26 PM

Enterprise search vendor FAST is poised to strike a blow for SNaaS – Software NOT as a Service. With a planned April 30 software release, FAST plans to alter the Web's money equation, which to date has been service mediated. The FAST AdMomentum platform – provided for installation by online publishers – is designed to shift control of delivery of contextual advertising from third-party service providers. Company CEO John M. Lervik claims that by adopting a SNaaS model, media companies, retailers, and telecommunications service providers will be able "to maintain control of their revenue, serving their advertisers and audiences more effectively," something "difficult to do with third-party platforms."

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
10:09 AM

I came across this post by Ann All, questioning the true commitment to SaaS by the larger consulting players. I think it's a good point to consider.

"So, software-as-a-service could be a good thing for folks like consultants and systems integrators — unless it ends up putting them out of business."

In essence the use of SaaS could lead to fewer consulting dollars, and thus the larger consulting firms could be pushing back on SaaS to serve their own interests. Clearly, for SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft (now a part of Oracle), planning, installation, and customization projects of days gone by were big bucks and took years to implement in some cases. Now these firms are finding that their clients can get up and running in days using subscription-based services such as Salesforce.com, RightNow, or NetSuite.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, April 16, 2007
8:57 AM

These are extended responses to comments made in the original blog "Who Defines BI?"

Cliff Longman, CTO at Kalido, commented: "I think of BI as the car and data warehousing as the engine…Data warehouses should represent the historical view (and the "what if?" views as well if it is a business requirement) of data that a business relies on to judge its performance."

Cliff, we're pretty much in agreement. I think what we have is a problem of semantics (what a coincidence). We need to separate the data warehouse from data warehousing, which I think you did. The data warehouse is a repository of re-used information with historical context. Its use, going forward, will be diminished to some uncertain degree by advances in technology. It will not go away, at least not anytime soon. I have no quarrel with the data warehouse as a data source for reporting and analysis, but not as THE source.

Posted by Product Maven
Monday, April 16, 2007
8:22 AM

The enterprise content management market has split into two camps in recent years. One camp, lead by Microsoft, provides basic content services, while the other, lead by IBM/FileNet, Open Text and EMC, provides highly scalable ECM platforms with extensive portfolios of horizontal and industry-specialized content applications. Xerox straddles both camps, offering both its low-cost DocuShare 6.0 system for basic content management as well as DocuShare CPX, a beefier but still relatively low-cost system for advanced content management and workflow-enabled applications.

On the eve of this week's AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston, Xerox today announced version 6.0 upgrades of both DocuShare and DocuShare CPX offering more robust and extensive support for document imaging as well as beefed up workflow and e-forms capabilities.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, April 13, 2007
11:49 AM

Ronen Feldman last year posed a grand challenge problem for text mining: to create "systems that will be able to pass standard reading comprehension tests such as SAT, GRE, GMAT etc."

Feldman is one of the great authorities of the field, a computer science professor, author, and co-founder of text-analytics vendor ClearForest. No one is more qualified to suggest text mining's research agenda than he. Indeed, the aim of Feldman and his 2006 SIGKDD co-authors proposing Data Mining Grand Challenges goes far beyond research. It is to "get researchers, press, funding agencies, venture capitalists, and public interested, greatly stimulate research, and produce dramatic advances in science and technology." This is a worthy vision and goal.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, April 13, 2007
10:38 AM

The Software Equity Group reports that the year 2006 "established new benchmarks for domestic M&A; activity across all industry sectors." The operative phrase is, of course, new benchmarks: 2006 has apparently beaten records set in the glorious – some might say vainglorious – years of 1999 and 2000. In North America alone, there were more than 1,700 mergers and acquisitions in the software and IT services sector, up from 2005 and consuming more than $80 billion in M&A; spending, up about 10 percent from the previous year.

This comes as no surprise. Watching giants like IBM, HP, Microsoft and Oracle voraciously mop up the corporate IT landscape (not to forget, of course, the Googles and the Ciscos), we expect 2007 to be another stellar year for acquisitions, with implications for all of us.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Thursday, April 12, 2007
3:19 PM

AIIM Europe has just completed a major piece of research in the UK that reveals that the number of firms deploying ECM there has doubled in the last two years. In addition, AIIM finds that the number of firms now trying to integrate ECM projects across departments has risen steeply. Another interesting piece of research released in the last week revealed that around 25 percent of enterprises now at least claim to run a services oriented architecture, and that number is set to grow rapidly.

Posted by David Linthicum
Thursday, April 12, 2007
9:14 AM

I noted back in February the release of the enterprise version of the Google Apps hosted services for businesses. While many wrote about it, the best description is here on Cnet.

"Google plans to launch… a subscription-based version of its Google Apps hosted services for businesses, which offers more storage and customer support than the free, ad-supported version. The Google Apps products, previously called Google Apps for Your Domain, also now include Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which combines online word processing and spreadsheets, and they will support Gmail on BlackBerry devices."

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
10:15 AM

Yesterday, Salesforce.com, the hosted CRM giant, announced it will enter the ECM sector with Web 2.0-style collaboration software it acquired earlier this year from a start-up called Koral. It's a bold announcement that boasts the Salesforce Platform will "manage all enterprise information on demand - structured and unstructured." In fact it goes even further to state that Salesforce Content will "liberate customers from....software like EMC|Documentum..." so said charismatic CEO Marc Benioff.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
10:26 AM

Confusion and controversy about Open Source licensing did not start with current Free Software Foundation efforts to revise the GNU General Public License (GPL). Nor will emergence of an acceptable GPL V3 – or of a revised Lesser GPL or Affero GPL (thanks Dana Blankenhorn) – make OS licensing much less problematical for enterprise users. Concerns are both alleviated and complicated by a profusion of options that range from GPL's communitarianism to the Common Public License's collaborative focus to BSD's laissez-faire liberality. The variety of schemes in use creates opportunity: witness, for instance, Apache's magnificent munificence. But one must also take care to avoid bait-and-switch, pretend Open Source licenses that promise freedom in both common senses, liberty and price, but ultimately deliver neither.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
9:45 AM

That thundering sound you heard down the streets leading to the offices of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) earlier this month was the stampede of immigration lawyers rushing to grab their share of H-1B visas for their resource-starved clients. In a feeding frenzy against which the annual Thanksgiving rush at any Macy's or Best Buy pales into insignificance, it appears that all 65,000 H-1B visas for the coming year were snapped up in a day – the entire year's quota of work visas, sold out in one single day.

What gives?

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, April 9, 2007
8:19 AM

As Dave Stodder writes in a recent feature story, BI penetration remains relatively low in most organization, at about 20 percent of employees. Yet what we did find in a survey last summer, is that for companies that consider their BI deployment "successful," BI usage is much higher.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Friday, April 6, 2007
7:02 AM

For the past two decades I've heard about the "coming convergence" in enterprise software between the data and content sides -- or, if you like (I don't like, but other people do) -- between structured and unstructured information management. This always seemed like more of a vendor fantasy than real enterprise need, but let's acknowledge that CRM and ERP systems use free-form text fields and document attachments, while Web CMS and Records Management systems need good data to run.

Posted by David Linthicum
Thursday, April 5, 2007
12:25 AM

I had a call the other day with an analyst in Europe. The topic of the call was the same as many others; how is SaaS moving into the market, what are the opportunities and how will enterprise software cope with SaaS? Good questions, but most financial analysts who have large stakes in huge enterprise software companies don't like my answers.

Last week I did a keynote at the Enterprise Architecture Conference in New Orleans. I spoke on SaaS, SOA and Web 2.0, and always have a bit of a poll as part of my talk. How many people are using SaaS now? About half of the hands went up. How many of those people were using SaaS two years ago? Almost no hands up. How many people will deploy SaaS in the next two years? Almost all hands went up. Hmmmm.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, April 5, 2007
12:01 AM

Currently on Intelligent Enterprise you can read my recent review of Xythos Document Manager Version 6. Though I have a short fuse with those who say that "basic content services" (BCS) are all that any enterprise needs for their ECM requirements, I remain nonetheless supportive of "lite" offerings.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
4:04 PM

You already know about the Oracle/SAP flap: Oracle is claiming that a SAP subsidiary has illegally downloaded Oracle software and documentation, and wants this grievance redressed. But that's just the latest episode of a long running comedy-drama…

The Oracle complaint, filed in California, makes for surprisingly easy and interesting reading. In essence, Oracle's contention is that the software/documentation downloads, and indeed the SAP strategy, is to:
• Offer cut-rate support services to Oracle customers
• Lure Oracle customers to (SAP)
• Siphon off valuable software maintenance revenue from Oracle
• Compete with Oracle support and maintenance services on Oracle products, despite not owning any of the software code

[The reasons for this curious format will become clear shortly…]

Posted by Nelson King
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
1:54 PM

Last May, Rod Smith, VP of Internet Technologies at IBM invited Microsoft to join OpenAjax, the Ajax standardization consortium, saying, "I hope what comes out is the same as what came out of the early Web services meetings" -- meetings in which IBM, Microsoft and others drew up an early blueprint for Web services standards. In this case, about nine months of internal debate later, Microsoft opted to join OpenAjax. Here's last month's announcement by Microsoft's Scott Guthrie.

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
9:01 AM

I was more than a little surprised when I read the article "Think Critically When Applying Best Practices," by Bob Becker and Ralph Kimball. Unless I misread it, they have come around and defined BI as the total process, including data warehousing. This is something that the other prominent data warehousing guru's did a few years ago when, fearing they would miss the boat of the suddenly hot BI market, declared their IT-oriented data warehouse environment as BI. The fallacy in this is that the people who use BI were always conspicuously absent from the diagrams and descriptions of the data warehouse. Their architecture blueprints depicted "users" (and keep in mind that there are only two industries that call their customers users) as little stick figures crushed under the weight of their elegant, multi-colored architectures, or through demeaning models with names such as "Farmers."

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, April 2, 2007
8:12 AM

I spent a pleasant and illuminating 90 minutes recently with Justin Langseth, president and co-founder of Clarabridge. Clarabridge sells text-mining software designed to integrate with business-intelligence tools. The company's solutions target both established text-analytics markets, such as life sciences, law enforcement and intelligence, as well as rapidly growing segments: marketing, CRM, reputation management and the like. But boosting Clarabridge is not my job, and, at least for those 90 minutes, it wasn't Justin's either. We did talk about the company's latest software release, but the bulk of our conversation, the helpful and illuminating part, was about the changing market landscape.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, April 2, 2007
8:01 AM

Enterprise data integration has clearly "arrived." The road had many twists and turns, yet data integration has not just survived, it has grown in strength and stature. How do we apply our collective learning from market developments to position ourselves better for 2007 and beyond?