Data Integration in the Cloud (via Business Analytics 3.0)

This post provides a comprehensive overview of cloud integration use cases, options and approaches. It’s definitely worth reviewing if you’re interested in the topic.

The growing enterprise adoption of Salesforce SFA/CRM, Workday HR, Netsuite ERP, Oracle on Demand, Force.com for apps and Amazon Web Services for e-commerce will result in more fragmented enterprise data scattered across the cloud. Automating the moving, monitoring, securing and synchronization of data is no longer a “nice-to-have” but “must-have” capability. Data quality and integration issues — aggregating data from the myriad sources and servi … Read More

via Business Analytics 3.0

Next Generation Cloud Business Intelligence?

MicroStrategy entered the cloud BI market today by announcing the general availability of MicroStrategy Cloud. From the press release:

“Compared to traditional on-premises BI approaches, MicroStrategy Cloud is quicker to deploy (within 48 hours) and more flexible, delivers world-class performance, and offers significant financial advantages. MicroStrategy Cloud is powerful and flexible enough to support the full range of cloud use cases, from fast, flexible tactical BI solutions, to the largest implementations where performance and scalability are imperative.”

The announcement goes on to highlight the following benefits:

• World-Class Performance
• Integrated Database and Data Integration
• Accelerated Time to Market
• Comprehensive Security
• Elite Platform Partners

Of note on the partner front:

• “IBM Netezza will provide its complete family of analytical appliances.”
• “MicroStrategy Cloud customers will be able to choose from a multitenant Cloud-based Data Integration solution, or run their own dedicated Informatica environment in the MicroStrategy Cloud.”
• “ParAccel will bring its analytic platform to MicroStrategy Cloud customers, delivering extreme scalability to thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of users in a flexible, solution that is optimized for virtualized and cloud-based environments.”

Is Cloud BI 2.0 now upon us? Be sure to read the entire MicroStrategy Cloud press release for more details.

Related articles

• Highlights from the 2011 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study (kellblog.com)
• Has Business Intelligence Failed? (bjconquest.com)
• MicroStrategy Expands Business Intelligence For SMBs (informationweek.com)

Forrester: 6 Categories SaaS Will Impact the Most

CIO.com recently featured a summary of Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert: How SaaS Will Impact 6 Key Software Categories.  They are:

1. IT Management Applications
2. CRM Software and productivity applications
3. ERP and Supply Chain Software
4. Business Intelligence
5. HR Software
6. Platform and Middleware Solutions

No big surprises here, but the article also provides some solid recommendations for source executives, “in light of increased SaaS adoption.”

“Sourcing executives must prepare for a hybrid landscape where SaaS co-exists with on-premise and hosted solutions, with many new vendors in the overall software portfolio. To navigate this complex environment, sourcing professionals should consider weighing the valuable aspects of SaaS — such as functionality, community, and accessibility — with risk elements — like vendor viability, vendor lock-in, and security.”

The Increasing Importance of Cloud Data Replication

Last week we hosted a webinar on cloud data replication, with a particular focus on Salesforce CRM and Force.com. The level of interest and interaction was amazing. Whether the use case is back-up, compliance or business intelligence, having a flexible and cloud-based approach to cloud data replication is clearly critical to software as a service (SaaS) application and platform success. You can check out the recording here.

Related Articles

• 5 Apps Supersize Salesforce.com CRM (customerthink.com)

Gartner Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant

Thanks to the folks at Tableau for publishing the latest Gartner BI Magic Quadrant. I’ve been out of the pure BI market for a couple of years and I have to say I’m a little surprised by the results.

• Microsoft on top. Really? Last I heard they blew up the core BI team and this was primarily an Excel + Sharepoint play. Guess that’s working well for them. Do they break out BI Platform revenue? Are they displacing SAP/Business Objects and Cognos/IBM in the enterprise?
• Oracle #2. This is less surprising given the Siebel and Hyperion technology they provide, but I didn’t realize their story had come together to this extent. Is there a separate BI sales organization these days or is this also mainly sold an add-on?
• IBM (Cognos) way out on vision (but seems to be overshadowed by the vendors above them). Congrats to them on their latest release. It appears to have had an impact.
• Information Builders name should have been in the top left. The optics of the current location certainly play in their favor for the casual observer.
• QlikTech and Tableau not further ahead on vision. This is what I don’t get about this (and most other) quads. From all accounts QlikTech and Tableau are disrupting the market and growing at a phenomenal rate (albeit from a smaller base). Why aren’t the newer vendors who are innovating and disrupting given more credit on vision? Their execution is clearly impressive.
• SAP (Business Objects) is in such a weak position. What am I missing here? Who’s running analyst relations over there? This can’t have gone over well with my friends in BI marketing at SAP. In this just the on-going sea-saw with Cognos, was it the Cognos 10 release that helped them get so far ahead? How will SAP counter?
• Pentaho didn’t make the cut. I’m not sure if this is so bad given the bottom left position of fellow open-source BI vendor JasperSoft.
• Corda, arcPlan and Accuate are still in business. These guys have been around for a long time. What direction are they moving? Congrats to LogiXML for making the cut this year. I haven’t heard of Board International (name needs work), Targit, Salient,or Bitam, but congratulations to them as well.
• No SaaS BI…yet? Okay, just throwing that in. I realize there’s a revenue threshold here, but I do wonder how vendors in the cloud BI market are doing at this point.

Full disclosure: I realize the above “analysis” (ok, questions and commentary) is exactly what Gartner doesn’t like, but in my experience it’s exactly how both vendors and customers review these quadrants.

Any insight appreciated. Here’s the quad:

Related Articles

• Gartner Quadrant Reports BI Split (informationweek.com)
• Comments on the Gartner 2010/2011 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant (dbms2.com)
• Gartner Explains the Process for Creating a Magic Quadrant (readwriteweb.com)

Salesforce CRM 2011 Predictions

Image via CrunchBase

Better late than never, Alex Dayon from Salesforce.com weighs in with his 2011 CRM predictions. He predicts 3 major trends emerging this year:

1. Increased importance of social networking
2. Enterprise collaboration (as highlighted in this preview for the upcoming Salesforce Chatter Super Bowl ad)
3. Broader business intelligence dashboards and decision making

Today is the last day of the fiscal year for my friends at Salesforce. I suspect many of them are now busy at work on their FY2012 V2MOM.

Related Articles

• Salesforce Buys Superbowl Ads To Promote Its New “Facebook For Businesses” (CRM) (businessinsider.com)
• Salesforce Launches Chatter.com For Any Business With Company Email Addresses (webpronews.com)
• How worried should Salesforce.com be about Microsoft’s cloud based CRM offering? (customerthink.com)

You Can’t Put the Cloud Horse Back in the Barn

Thanks to my friend @rssanborn for tweeting this 2015 Cloud Checklist:

1. Accept that many cloud providers already are better at security than you are.
2. Private clouds should not be your end game.
3. Know how to structure contracts.
4. Understand the workloads you’re supporting.
5. Seek coordination (not control) of cloud resources.

#5 in particular caught my attention. It speaks to some of the issues I’ve written about in this post about cloud politics and the role of data integration. I like how the author of the CIO Insight post, Tony Contzer, puts it:

“Those who try to put the kibosh on a business unit’s rogue adoption of cloud services are on the same fruitless path as the CIOs who fought Web browsers and voice over IP.”

The article features a few choice quotes from Gartner‘s Daryl Plummer (see his video interview in this post). He notes:

“Business units are not going to let you take back control. You can’t put the horse back in the barn.”

I was recently interviewed by Leigh Dow at ITToolbox and put it this way:

“With the SaaS model, the business can just go get software, do a trial with a credit card and start adopting and managing SaaS applications autonomously.  What often happens is a spiral of tools manifest in the company and at some point you get “SaaS sprawl.”  No different than what we saw in BI in the Data Warehousing space when data marts popped up and at some point they needed to be consolidated.  It is becoming a huge problem for IT. One customer told me, “we need to get on this cloud train or get run over by it”. Being the “department of no” isn’t an option.“

Related Articles

• ‘Go to’ clouds of the future, part 2 (news.cnet.com)
• Whose data is it anyway? (go.theregister.com)
• Gartner Forecasts 16% Increase In Enterprise SaaS Revenue During 2011 (cloudave.com)

Cloud Integration Customer Success

Ever wonder what the benefits are of having the right strategy for cloud integration?

Here is a summary of two Salesforce.com customers who integrate CRM and on-premise applications, databases and files. The first is a mid-sized company that enabled nontechnical business users to perform self-service cloud-based data integration. Benefits include:

• Enhanced the accuracy and timeliness of enterprise data for better business decisions
• Helped the company compete more successfully in a challenging building supplies market
• Introduced 360-degree, near real-time, dashboard view of business operations
• Improved customer service via launch of innovative customer portal and other initiatives
• Reduced the cost and risk associated with managing technology
• Increased cost control though improved agent and customer credit checking and management
• Increased the reliability and availability of critical operational data

Download the case study here.

The second is a Global 2000 enterprise that introduced a fast, low-risk route to data replication as service for analytical reporting purposes. Benefits include:

• Reduced the time required to prepare certain reports from days to minutes
• Allowed the organization to make faster, more accurate decisions, based on a single version ofthe truth
• Ensured delivery of timely, relevant, and trustworthy information throughout the organization
• Saved money using low-cost subscription-based pricing
• Enabled more robust reporting and analysis on Salesforce.com data
• Leveraged existing skills in on-premise reporting tools to build better, faster reports

Download the case study here.

The Wisdom of Crowd Business Intelligence Survey

Howard Dresner has created a short business intelligence vendor survey and he’s regularly tweeting the results.

It’s not clear yet if he’ll turn the results into his own Magic Quadrant to compete with his old friends at Gartner. Guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Go Howard!

Here’s the survey link and here’s Howard’s Twitter address.

Intelligent Enterprise Names ‘The Dozen’ Most Influential Vendors

Drum roll please….

Check out the Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Awards 2010. Here’s the “The Dozen” (in alphabetical order):

• Amazon
• Apache
• Google
• IBM
• Informatica
• Microsoft
• Netezza
• Oracle
• Salesforce.com
• SAS
• Sybase
• Teradata

Intelligent Enterprise also lists 36 other vendors in the categories they cover: Business Intelligence (forgive me, but I’d never heard of Acorn Systems), Enterprise Applications (SAP – really??), Information Management (lots of emerging high-end database vendors to watch – congrats to my friends at Aster Data).

Not surprisingly, my favorite part of “The Dozen” is this statement about the Informatica Cloud:

“The company also extended three years of work on cloud-oriented integration approaches with the Cloud 9 platform, a multi-tenant environment for building, sharing and running data integration services and data quality mappings.”

Congratulations to all of the recognized vendors!