Why The Next App You Use Might Be In A Social Network
While social networks are still just getting their sea legs in most organizations, the next big leap forward — in addition to social analytics – is likely to be the integration of our productivity and line of business apps into our activity streams. Will this unleash significant new value? Very probably. But it’s also possibly the big integration [...]
IBM Fills Out Netezza Lineup With High Capacity Appliance
In the months since IBM closed its Netezza acquisition, the data warehouse appliance pioneer has been busy, if the announcements at this week’s Enzee are any indication. An enthusiastic crowd – 1000 strong – heard CEO Jim Baum deliver the news: new hardware, software and partnerships.The biggest news was The Appliance Formerly Known As Cruiser, [...]
Twitter Drafting – Marketing in the Tweetstream
Racing fans - cars or bicycles – are familiar with the concept of drafting – travelling close behind another vehicle to reduce wind resistance. The concept is sometimes applied to marketing by savvy practitioners who use the spend of others to multiply their own impact in public consciousness. In recent months, I’ve noticed a growing use of twitter [...]
IBM STG Trip Report Part 1: Hardware-Software Synergy Yielding Dividends
Every year in the fourth quarter, IBM assembles its Systems & Technology Group (STG – the hardware guys) executives for discussions with the analyst community to review results and discuss the year ahead. STG’s Senior VP Rod Adkins teed up this year’s meeting with a reminder that STG and Software Group (SWG) both now report [...]
Cloudera Convenes Colleagues to Crunch Content (Make Mine Membase)
Over the past two years, Cloudera has demonstrated the power of surrounding emerging open source software with support services, expertise and its own IP. The firm has racked up over 30 customers since its founding in late 2008, and emerged as the leading source of Apache Hadoop. Cloudera’s recent C round of financing brought its [...]
Cloudera-Informatica Deal Opens Broader Horizons for Both
Cloudera‘s continuing focus on the implications of explosive data growth has led it to another key partnership, this time with Informatica. Connecting to the dominant player in data integration and data quality expands the opportunity for Cloudera dramatically; it enables the de facto commercial Hadoop leader to find new ways to empower the “silent majority” [...]
Going to Gartner
This is a personal note about a professional decision. You might not be interested. If you are, read on. I’ll try to be brief. I’ve had a very fulfilling two years as an independent analyst, succeeding beyond my expectations. I established (or continued) a respected brand, gathered several thousand twitter followers, drew 80,000 blog views [...]
Microsoft Leaps Late, Lags with SQL Server PDW
Microsoft chose a user group meeting, Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), for the rollout of its long-awaited, and late, SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (note, yet again, how foolish it is for vendors to trap themselves with dates in product names.) PDW is late to market; there are other MPP DBMS players [...]
IBM’s IOD Showcases DB2, Informix, InfoSphere. Now, About Marketing….
It was hard to decide where to look first in Las Vegas this year at IBM’s flagship information management event. Coming as it did on the heels of a massive, sprawling Oracle Open World, it was also overwhelming, but distinguished itself immediately by its focus. Whereas Oracle has smashed together hardware systems, apps, middleware, java [...]
Oracle’s Exadata Refresh Ups Ante on Technology and Selling Strategy
The Exadata marketing story is unrelenting, and Oracle backed it with plenty of happy customers for analysts to query at Open World this year. The stories were compelling; I’ll mention a few below. In the analyst pitch, we were shown a couple of dozen logos – good for a still relatively new high-end, long sales [...]
