Ellison's Oracle vs. Plattner's SAP - Battle of "In-Memory"

The battle between Ellison’s Oracle and Plattner’s SAP seems to be heating up with Plattner having fired a salvo across Ellison’s bow with “HANA” (Hasso Plattner’s New Architecture – neither of these gentlemen can ever be accused of humility/modesty).

Plattner seems to have upped the ante by taking the battle beyond the usual mooning each other at yacht races and billion dollar acquisitions as bolt-on’s for their core platforms to the core of Oracle’s key strength – its underlying data base. SAP claims HANA which allows companies to store data in servers' main memory, instead of using the relational databases that Oracle dominates is significantly faster than Oracle’s Exadata .

The Jury is still out. T-mobile has taken HANA out for a test drive and has been impressed.

Ellison’s response- “Whacko”, adding he wants the name of SAP’s “Pharmacist”.

Read more in this article from the WSJ (01/26): Inside SAP's Skunkworks as It Takes Aim at Oracle

Key question: which way are the database technology winds going to blow – in-memory or relational?

In the BI space an in-memory application like Qliktech’s Qlikview emerged as a serious contender to traditional BI vendors (strengthening Data Discovery vis-a-vis traditional enterprise BI).

If SAP’s HANA pans out, I think the database market will see a new segment emerge for applications focused on “Big Data” (McKinsey’s definition: Datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze) , with Oracle too strengthening its offerings in that area ( Oracle has bought an in-memory database company called TimesTen ).

It may be a few years before data in-memory database architecture really matures and comes center-stage. Process may be speeded up with a behemoth like SAP putting its financial muscle behind it. The strong demand for tools with ability to manage/ mine “big data” which companies are accumulating as a result of tapping into their customers web-usage, geo-location etc. is another driver.

Creating "Rypples" - Social Technologies and Performance Management

It all started with the McKinsey Quarterly article on "How social technologies are extending the organization". I liked the article but for me it raised a few questions which were published as a comment on the McKinsey Quarterly website:

• The growth of social technologies within organizations creates an interesting conundrum: how to reward employees for contributions they are making or changes they are driving across the organization by using thsee boundary-less social technologies? Many current performance-management processes focus on evaluating contributions to the “silo,” as judged by the supervisor or, in some cases, other stakeholders. However, social technologies can significantly increase the breadth and scope of an employee’s contributions. How are companies preparing their performance management processes to reflect the emergence of social technologies, and how do these tools enable those processes?
  

  Sooner or later, as social technologies become an integral part of the organization’s fabric, there will be a need to integrate them into the reward and recognition process for employees.

More details on an earlier blogpost:  How social technologies are extending the organization: My comments on McKinsey Article

Most of us have been in situations where the boss either has no clue or cannot fathom as to what we have been doing during the year ; a scenario which bites us in the back during the Annual Performance Review (or when "they" make lists on who to fire during downsizing). A problem likely to be compounded when with the new emerging social technologies an employee can be making contributions far beyond the span of the classical "silo" which a typical boss oversees.

Interesting dilemma, but seems like I an not quite the visionary I think myself to be :-) . The smart guys and gals at Rypple have already seized the bull by the horns ("The social way to improve performance at work : Build a results-driven culture and make reviews meaningful with Rypple’s social performance management platform").

Here's a look at how Facebook is using Rypple to manage the Facebook generation (How Facebook manages the Facebook generation. People at Facebook talk about how they use Rypple's social performance platform to support their social, collaborative, fast-moving culture.)

And looks like the mighty salesforce.com has now decided to ride and steer the bull (Salesforce.com Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Rypple – First Step Toward Human Capital Management for the Social Enterprise). They plan to rebrand/relaunch it as SuccessForce. 

The action has just started in this space and I can only see it hotting up as social technologies become part of the "life and blood" of more organizations; which will then need them to figure out ways to integrate them with performance appraisal; and the technology companies (SAP, Oracle, IBM) which will also need to figure out ways to incorporate these capabilities in their own offerings (What with  ZDNet blogger Dennis Howlett headlining it as:   Salesforce snubs SAP with Rypple flip )

Stay Tuned.

The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 20: The Battlelines are drawn: Traditional Enterprise BI Platforms vs. Data Discovery Platforms

Gartner's recently released Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms highlights a trend which all BI practitioners have observed over the past few years : the divide between Traditional enterprise BI platforms and Data Discovery platforms and the resultant confusion amongst decision makers about which one to opt for.

Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses as Gartner has very nicely captured in this comparison:

Gartner goes on to say 

"The chasm between these segments has deepened because business users find the benefits of using data discovery tools so compelling that they make this choice despite the risk of creating fragmented silos of data, definitions and tools. This has accentuated the need for IT organizations to back away from a single-minded pursuit of standardization on one vendor to a more pragmatic portfolio approach."

Gartner's magic quadrant as it stands today still shows the Traditional enterprise BI Platforms (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Microstrategy etc.) in the Leaders quadrant while the Data Discovery Platforms with the exception of Qliktech are in the Challengers (Tableau, Tibco) or in the Niche Players category (Jaspersoft et al)

However, that will be in a state of flux as Traditional BI vendors  add Data Discovery to their portfolio (Microsoft with PowerPivot, SAP with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, IBM with IBM Cognos Express and Information Builders with WebFocus Visual Discovery ) as they see BI spend dollars slipping to Data Discovery vendors with their ability to model, navigate and visualize data.

Meanwhile, Data discovery tool vendors (like Qliktech) are implementing capabilities to improve their enterprise readiness.
Gartner views "capabilities for integrating departmental and enterprise data models" as one of 10 important capabilities for Quadrant placement.
 
Surprisingly there is no player in the "Visionary" category. So it seems that we are stuck with these two alternate approaches (Traditional Platform and Data Discovery) and their hybrids for the near term horizon. I was hoping that time was ripe for a player to emerge with a Google/Amazon/Facebook mash up kind of approach to BI of the kind I described in an earlier post: The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 8: Star Trek returns....  :
 

I would focus on the direction it should be headed. And the single word answer to that is "simplification". The current and evolving paradigm of user-technology interface can be defined by a single word : "Google". Never before has the "Keep it Simple, Stupid" paradigm been so successful.

And that is the direction which BI needs to head to also.

A simple, single line search box which delivers context specific search and reporting capabilities. A sales rep types in the name of a city and links to sales report(s) for all customers in that city appear.

Also an Amazon.com kind of feature -" People who viewed this report also viewed...". Gives the user a quick and easy feel of what else s/he should be looking for. Building in "crowd intellect" into the reporting capabilities.

And what about a feature which allows a user to know who else is looking at a particular report in real-time or has viewed the report earlier (a viewing history). Combine this with interactive chat or communication capabilities and you have transformed a "report" into a "collaborative interaction".

Did I miss Geospatial analytics and GPS, how about integrating them with BI capabilities. A manager viewing a report, identifies issues with a particular customer, is able to identify the sales rep closest to that location based on the GPS capabilities of the handheld the rep is carrying and asks him/her to visit the customer.

BI has already ventured beyond Reporting & Analytics to Actionable Intelligence. Now it needs to venture even further to "Intelligent Actions". The gap,distance between the availability of intelligence and resultant action needs to be reduced by incorporating other emerging technologies into the classical BI Framework

A (non) player which I have been bullish about has been Google. I wrote in 2009 ( The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 12 :BI - "Head in the clouds but feet firmly planted on the ground") :
 

Staying on Google, I think that it may not be long before they enter the BI arena. They know how to manage huge volumes of data, run server farms and manage an analytics front end , currently primarily used to present information related to blogs/website statistics but can easily be modified as a front-end for business related information.

They have confounded me by not showing their hand yet.

Maybe IBM may have something up its sleeve with "Watson". They'll have to put it to work after it is done clobbering Ken and Brad on Jeopardy. BI would be a good space to put is skills to use. I had speculated :

There was a time when we had BI Tools, then vendors started branding them as Applications. These days several vendors are offering BI Appliances. Following the trend to it's logical conclusion, I would think that very soon we may see BI Machines or BI Engines.

Is "Watson" going to be the BI Machine/BI Engine of the future? "Elementary, My dear Watson",  I hear as I stroke my Sherlockian chin.

The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 12 :BI - "Head in the clouds but feet firmly planted on the ground"

A few weeks ago I wrote about emerging trends in Business Intelligence (The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 8: Star Trek returns.... ). Today I am in the mood to do some crystal ball gazing again and share some random musings :

1. Last couple of years saw several big time players enhancing their share and leverage in the BI arena through strategic mergers & acquisitions : IBM-Cognos, SAP-Business Objects, Oracle-Hyperion. I think by the end of this year the big names will complete their "digestion" of these entities and will make them shed their old monikers. Some may say that the goodwill of names like Cognos, Hyperion etc is too big to be easily written of and the big players will balk from doing that. On the contrary,I think that a company like IBM gains more overall by having a single integrated "Business Intelligence Suite" under it's own name rather than retaining the Cognos name and creating confusion and competition with it's own other BI offerings. Similarly the case with the other players. So this may be the last year for die hard fans to order their Cognos Coffee Mugs or Hyperion T-shirts. They may be the collectibles of the future.
2. I had written "The current and evolving paradigm of user-technology interface can be defined by a single word : "Google". That was before I saw "Wolfram" . "Computational Knowledge Engine" is how it is described. The front end is not very pretty but I was impressed by what it does. Typing in :China, US in a routine search engine like Google will give you links to millions of web articles where these 2 words appear. On the other hand Wolfram will deliver an output which compares China and US on various attributes : Name, Location, Flags, Demographics, Economic Indices etc. Type in the name of 2 companies : IBM, Oracle and it will compare the 2 companies for several parameters -Latest trades, Fundamentals and Financials, Recent Returns, Relative Price History etc. Pretty Cool. An "Intelligent" Search Engine. I am sure the smart guys at Google would be cooking up something similar in their Labs.
3. Staying on Google, I think that it may not be long before they enter the BI arena. They know how to manage huge volumes of data, run server farms and manage an analytics front end , currently primarily used to present information related to blogs/website statistics but can easily be modified as a front-end for business related information.
4. There was a time when we had BI Tools, then vendors started branding them as Applications. These days several vendors are offering BI Appliances. Following the trend to it's logical conclusion, I would think that very soon we may see BI Machines or BI Engines. Or better still combining BI capabilities with Cloud computing, one may see the emergence of "BI Clouds" . BI will then live up to the classic proverb “It may have it's head in the clouds, but has it's feet well set on the ground.”

Let's see how many of these predictions pan out. If they do, remember where you read about them first !!

Are you ready with some of your own tea leaves readings ? please share......

The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 1: Six Blind Men and a Elephant

Many years ago when I transitioned into Business Intelligence Applications (Peoplesoft EPM/Cognos) from a ERP Transactional Applications (Peoplesoft Financials) background, one of my first endeavors was to "sell" the concept on an ongoing basis to what almost always used to be a wary audience of executives, managers and users who had heard the buzz but were not exactly sure what it meant. With my Sales and Marketing Background I knew that a picture will do it better than words.


The first slide in my presentation deck was the parable of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant :

• Is it a Wall ?
• Is it a spear ?
• Is it a snake ?
• Is it a tree or a fan or a rope ?
  Each blind man describes the elephant from where he is standing, from his perspective, and each is different...
  With EPM - Provide timely & consistent information across the global organization in order to align executives, operational managers, field sales force and knowledge workers in defining, viewing and pursuing strategic objectives.

The slide always drove the message home and I retained it in my deck as we continued to roll out BI applications to more sites/functions. Always succeeded in getting the audience engaged as it very aptly described the state of data and information in most sites/functions/organizations and what we intended to do about it. A very clear positioning for our "Brand".

What do you think ? With the multitudes of BI applications and Data Warehousing Solutions are organizations today better equipped to see the Full Elephant or are they still like the Six Blind Men ? Share your stories and watch out for Part 2 of The Business Intelligence Chronicles.