Tim sums it up pretty well at http://www.timoelliott.com/blog/2009/01/the_complete_list_of_2009_bi_p.html and I keep hoping that someone retains these lists and then runs a year end reality check so as to mark the actual hit rates - kinda along the lines of the feedback loops that we advize the business to do to constantly improve their prediction intelligentsia ?!
I just keep this 1st post in a while short - and wish everyone a kick ass new year with hopefully less mergers and wars than last year ...... !!!!
This space is having jscript issues - blogging will resume once Bill's Boyz get their act together.
I'm also busy surfing in Africa and head back to the Middle East in two weeks .. till then take it easy over Xmas and lets hope the new year brings more interesting tech !!
I don't see many companies running comparative exercises as to which toolset would best suite their organisation these days - must be a reflection of industry maturity and/or the intricate vendor relationships that currently exist along with some consolidation of software accounts.
I have stated previously that there are the Forrester, TDWI and Gartner sites that offer product comparions - for a price - but the one that has always stood out has been http://www.biscorecard.com/evaluations.asp#BO.
Cindy deserves some recognition, not only for her consistant net presence and posts, but for providing a Blank Scorecard for those unable to purchase a pre-loaded comparative scorecard!
Gemini seems to be the topic of the day and it raises ye age olde debate of the so called 'runaway power user' - Chris has a pretty good overview http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/
I have never been one for trying to diminish the possiblities of the desktop analyst, and/or trying to herd everyone into a DWH enclosure as the most analytical people in an organisation should be enabled in every way possible. The only focus should be on ensuring that there be some governance and expanded insight into what they're doing so as to ensure continuity and correctness.
Most generic BI tools are not very statistical orientated, and rightly so as statistical calculations rely on a tight integration with the RDBMS. Now that the RDBMS vendors such as Oracle and MS are heavily investing in DWH, BI, Reporting components of their own, it will be interesting to see if they stick to traditional / generic information delivery options, provide a stat's stack or focus more on industry specific solutions that require statistical formulae of a more complex level.
There are a few companies that tend to specialise more on the stats front - SAS being the most known - but there's an interesting discussion as to leveraging stats AND soa http://boulderbibraintrust.org/brain_trust_blog/2008/10/spotfile-does-data-viz.php - the key comment being the interaction with the big vendors such as Cognos and BO etc.
Thanks to http://www.microstrategy.com/ for: Gartner’s 2008 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms Report
Gartner’s BI Platforms User Survey
TDWI Best Practices Report: Pervasive Business Intelligence
The subscription was painless and these reports are always worth a once over - especially when considering how much you normally have to pay for them.
Oracle makes it's Appliance announcement http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/exadata.html and I still maintain that it's an RDBMS appliance and not a DWH or BI appliance. Sure, it boosts performance for all possible data exit points, but the promise of x10 faster data retrieval needs to be evaluated in it's context i.e. faster than what? Give us real specs, costs, processing, h/w, s/w for the comparisons.
In fact - the appliance is called a Database Accelerator ....
There is actually no debate re running Kettle as an ETL tool as opposed to MS SSIS - it's all related to a sites RDBMS technologies, resources and procedures.
Pentaho does not quite have the sharpness and colours the big players but it's all about functionality and cost - if it suites your requirements, it's definitely worth considering!
I encountered a post today calling for the creation of a Business Intelligence Institute to help resolve the issue of the Biz not being aware of the possiblities of BI.
I agree with the concept but disagree with the solution.
Until such time as the business AND IT dedicate key resources and time - for as long as it takes - this just side steps the premise of the BICC.
I'm waiting for the big players to jump on the latest global economic governance bandwagon as to marketing their products to help avoid the same again ....
There's a new community - SAAS for BI - the net can be a fickle place, so one can only watch and see if it takes off http://saasbi.ning.com/
I've always wondered why there is so little focus on the Intelligence aspect of BI - something that just confirms my belief that BI is more commonly used to describe base reporting.
Generic method to use for product evaluation: Place into a spreadsheet with the Yes / No / Other options to rank the features.
GENERAL Add-ons Libraries Price Required Software Supported platform APIs and system interfaces APIs Interface Language support for pipes, sockets, and files Reports Data and graphics formats Application data ASCII Database Export file type Financial data Import files Native database ODBC interface Spreadsheets
DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT Debugger Framework Libraries Programming Language Project, file and task management User-defined functions, objects, classes, methods and libraries
GRAPHICAL FUNCTIONS 3-D wireframe charts Bar charts Box plots Control over colors, lines, axes, annotations and layout Dot chart Histogram Interactive charts Pie charts Scatterplot Time series charts
GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE Create custom toolbars, menus and dialogs Cut-and-paste to Word, PowerPoint and Excel Database import and export dialogs Drag and Drop File import and export dialogs Integrated Excel spreadsheets Interactive command-line with history recall Manage objects with Object Explorer Multiple data and graphics windows PowerPoint Wizard: quickly create slides from charts
SCALABLE PIPELINE ARCHITECTURE Data types for out-of-memory vectors, data frames, and time series Scalable algorithms Scalable model estimation
STATISTICAL & NUMERICAL TECHNIQUES Analysis of Variance Cluster Analysis Correlated Data Analysis Correlation Crosstabulations Date, Time, and Calendar Data Durbin-Watson Goodness-of-Fit Mathematical Computations Maximum Likelihood Missing Data Multivariate Analysis Neural networks Nonlinear Regression Nonparametric Regression Power and Sample Size Probabilities, quantiles, densities and random number generation Proportions Quality Control Rank tests Regression Resampling Robust Statistics Summary statistics Survival Analysis t-test Time Series Analysis Tree Models Wilcoxon SUPPORT On-line
Many think that I am an unthinking antagonist for all of Bill's (read Microsoft) products.
Not so - when it comes to BI tools I simply think that the generic toolsets, that are database independant, have a slightly different focus in versatility.
Sure, the counter argument is that these tools will optimally leverage the database environment for maximum data usage.
Until such time as an organisation has matured in it's use of toolsets and technical, analytical and business interactions, it might be wise to keep some of the technology out of the inner core IT department.
It will be interesting to see how MS reacts to the next generation of tools that will piggyback on their products:
The Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse appliance industry has been hovering around for a while, but I've only managed to get physical access to http://www.cognos.com/products/now/
Goes to show how anything can be packaged - and it will be interesting to see if the industry matures enough for more people to rather opt for the prebuilt or off site solution as opposed to inhouse and self built.
We've seen this cycle constantly in IT and most orgs tend to reach that point of just not wanting to hear about any new issues relating to upgrades, incompatiblity, resource, performance, lincense mixes etc
Others are calling the appliances glorified data storage units - so lets see where this all goes.
The underlying issue is that XIr2 and XI 3.0 are NOT version upgrades from BO 6.x. This complicates the issue of which version to migrate to, as the one is an interim consolidated version, based on previous Crystal architecture, whilst the latest is the reworked consolidated version that will be used going forward - that in turn is UNPROVEN.
And - it's not entirely correct that SP1 will offer the secure base most refer to as XI 3.1 will be a FIRST release of the .Net version and IIS. So please consider that my UNPROVEN statement is wholistic in a dual sense.
There are a number of guiding questions one could pose to the organisation to help determine which version one should migrate to, but the bottom line is - do you have the resources, architecture and time to do an effective migration using a phased approach, or is your migration window and access to resources and architecture limited - to a big bang, one hop now?
Governing this is the fact that you WILL be required to get to XI 3.x, at some stage - so the question is, do you use XIr2 as an interim hop to get there?
I follow the debates in a variety of places - and receive a number of emails on this subject, and it's always a case of, which one to migrate to - instead of questioning if a two step approach should be considered.
Most don't want to hear about a possible 6 month to 2 year journey to get there - be that from a corporate or technical perspective.
The determining factor will always be - the organisations dependancy on BO and their relationship with you !!!!!!!!!!
I do not question the success stories in here - and already have a set XI.30 servers up and running - so, as much as I am convinced that XI 3.x is the way to go - strategically it might be too risky for some.
The ideal would be - and has been mentioned before - that if you start now with XI 3.0, you should be able to time this nicely with the XI 3.1 release - which is what I'm hoping to convince my current client to do.
BUT
I would be hesitant to stake everything on this - and am the first to state that there IS a risk so the parallel option is unquestionable: I.e. do not hope to free up your current servers for this process.
I have an unholy mix of 6.5 and stalled XIr2 installations that I am looking at consolidating into XI 3.0 - so the issues are more complex in that I have scattered solutions that are not in synch.
I am not convinced that the XI 3.0 release is optimal from an architecture perspective - and am waiting patiently to see some benchmarks - from the vendor and from some of the trials that I am performing.
It is a slick, nice effective portal - the architecture is better - but still needs some tweaking - so that poses another set of questions: Will you effectively be able to hand hold users faced with a new environment At the same time resolving some security issues (there will be a settling in period no matter how effective you establish your CMS environment) And whilst possibly dealing with the odd backend issue ?
It's also not that simple to just segregate the issue between 1 / 2 server installations, and complex 24/7 server clusters either. The latter typically involves more people in the decision making process and typically forms part of an architecture governance program whilst the former could be a single server delivering event tracking that is core to the running of the business.
Add the fact that the learning curves are STEEP on ALL sides: Security, Usage, Admin, etc
So the debate then involves: Does it make sense to use XIr2 as an interim learning mechanism as there are alot of similarites and lessons that could be taken going forward? Or would the duality of this be a time waster in that any effort applied to this process will have to, in some respects, be duplicated?
If I knew I was going to start posting this, I would have been better off creating a set of relative questions to be asked to help determine this - regardless of your installation size.
I.e As it is with all things DWH / BI related - it's the softer issues that have to be discussed up front with the client. A frank honest discussion with the business as to the pro's and con's - as well as the risks and benefits - and then the respective time frames and learning curves should form the basis of the discussion.
Companies don't like being surprised after the fact - and if you involve them up front - all the way through - you can make a success of this - even if it turns out that some of the platform is sub-optimal for a while whilst the vendor resolves things. That is if you plan for it ... and keep everyone in the loop.
Note that there are external influences like local vs external resources - access to architecture and licensing etc etc that I have avoided for now - maybe I should create list - but I stillowe BOBJ a development life cycle plan so am avoiding any further promises
Also add to the above the fact that you have a bunch of previous IIS admins that face a Tomcat curve ....
I was ecstatic that the XI releases from BusinessObjects focussed on Tomcat as opposed to IIS - but - that has a bunch of admins that are pretty clueless as to the Jakarta offerings.
To complicate matters further, XI is releasing the Enterprise BI product onto Tomcat as a Web AND Application server - basically replicating the IIS dual functionality, and when faced with a requirement to split this functionality, many opt for throwing IIS in front of Tomcat as opposed to Apache.
I migrated an enire site off IIS back in the old BO version 6 days - and have never looked back - I do admit that it was quite a change and bought a manual that helped me along, but many online sites were either too much on an idiot level, or waay too complex to get a general understanding as to the possiblities of Apache / Tomcat.
Ever since humanity discovered how to create purple dye, the quest for colour has driven a number of industries - and the frontier for this has shifted to the virtual plane.
And yes - they invariable find their way over to BI - so don't for a minute think that the BI vendors ared driving this concept - it's as old as a sabre tooth fossil and probably a mutant of scientific research institutes and game developers .....
I once 'worked' with a professor in Maths and Stats from Zurich, who lost us totally after only about 2 hours when trying to explain how database management systems REALLY work. This was when most core databases were mainframe based (DB2 - MVS and VM), and I oft wonder what it would be like to encounter him again after more than a decade of rampant technological change.
In the RDBMS world, the database and DBA toolsets have got smarter and more complex - but do most DBA's actually know and understand the underlying 'engine'?
Once in a while it's worth looking into the labs where the true thinkers exist - if only to humble ones self concept of knowledge:
Whilst the majority of online browsers have a misconception that anything can be had via online browsing aka google and chrome, there are still places that mainatin the basic principle that thought and conceptualisation hold an inherent quantifiable value.
So - just when you thought you reached http://www.endoftheinternet.com/ and know where and how to retrieve anything - go back - do not past go - and haul out your paypal or credit card for the data vaults of information that have been quantified as being worthy of an intrinsic monetary value.
Catch 22 really as it's all topical - they all have shelf lives that can expire today or somehere in the next ice age.
Be that as it may - automation and autonomy is driving the pace and this 'consolidation' must certainly look like a holy grail from way up above the coroporate food chain
I say - call it what you will - my resume is open ended enough to convey the fact that I can process bytes into bitmaps - on a variety of platforms - using a mix of technologies - to hopefully service any realistic demand.
Strumenti 
so am avoiding any further promises 
