When and why to virtualize
In one of the best Slashdot threads I’ve seen in ages, a number of posters chime in with their personal experiences of virtualization. (Usage hint: Set the general threshold = 5 to filter out the dreck, using Advanced Context Controls.) The rough consensus appears to be:
- Virtualization has overhead, but probably a lot less than the 43-50% sometimes claimed.
- Just to be safe, don’t virtualize apps that are already I/O-bound or otherwise running flat-out. (So there’s no contradiction to my support for dedicated security, networking, and data warehouse appliances.)
- Big enterprises have lots of production servers that are old, unreliable, and/or idle most of the time. Virtualize those.
- If a server’s use is particularly spiky, it may be a great candidate for virtualization.
- Most development servers can and should be virtualized.
Makes sense to me.
| Categories: Computing appliances, Platforms, Virtualization | Leave a Comment |
More on Shai Agassi and SAP
Sramana Mitra has a little bit of a different take on Shai Agassi’s departure than mine. At first blush, it’s a distinction almost without a difference. In essence, she argues that Shai was frustrated because he couldn’t make big needed changes fast enough. That’s pretty close to my view that change simply wasn’t happening quickly or completely enough.
But the thing is — I think SAP’s overall technology roadmap has remained too incomplete. In essence — and I know some of my friends there will dispute this — SAP is still too focused on delivering software for how people should work, and doesn’t properly support the way they actually do — or realistically would like to — work.
Yes, it’s great that Dennis Moore and Dan Rosenberg are at SAP. But nobody — and this includes Shai — seems to be driving a real software re-think down into the individual products. The move to portal-based technology needs to be the beginning of the software functionality redesign, not the end. Josh Greenbaum thinks that Duet is all that and more, but I don’t see it that way.
| Categories: Enterprise applications, SAP | 4 Comments |
Shai Agassi – a contrarian view
Shai Agassi is leaving SAP because, in essence, the old guard didn’t want to turn over the reins to him as fast as he would have liked.* Often, this kind of departure is a bad thing (e.g., Ray Lane at Oracle). But I suspect that SAP may actually be improved by Shai’s leaving.
*His other stated reasons include two very good and highly admirable ones – working on energy technologies and improving matters in Israel.
SAP’s technical strategy has three core elements:
- Automate business processes.
- Provide the technical infrastructure for automating business processes.
- Encapsulate process and data at the object/process level.
This strategy has been heavily developed and refined on Shai’s watch, with major contributions from lots of other folks. The issue isn’t vision any more. What SAP needs to do better is execute on the vision.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Enterprise applications, SAP | 3 Comments |
Great news for Openwave
Dave Peterschmidt is out as CEO of Openwave, and this is a very good thing. Even better, the company is being shopped. Best news: Jerry Held is on the committee doing the shopping. Not that I agree with Jerry on everything, but on the whole he’s pretty astute.
Openwave will probably find a buyer at a decent price. Dave’s bad, but he doesn’t completely destroy companies; there should still be some value there.
| Categories: Enterprise applications, Openwave | 2 Comments |
Three ways to market analytics-related technology
“Decision support”, “information centers”, “business intelligence”, “analytic technology”, and “information services” have been around, in one form or other, for 35+ years. For most of that time, there have been two fundamental ways to sell, market, and position them:
- Access to information
- Application software
More recently – especially the past five years – there’s been a third way:
- Infrastructure upgrade
as early-generation implementations get replaced by newer ones.
At the 50,000 foot level, here’s some of what I see going on:
- Classical BI marketing is floundering. BI vendors don’t know whether they’re in the business of quick/easy information access, analytic apps, or better-enterprise-system-software.
- A few areas of analytic application are being packaged and marketed well, with solid business-process stories and good customer acceptance of same. The biggies are budgeting/planning and CRM analytics. On the whole, however, analytic apps are floundering, or else are little more than reporting front-ends on operational systems (e.g., in network management).
- Data warehouse software startups are on a roll. Especially at the high end, this is a pure infrastructure-upgrade business. There’s plenty of room still for improvement, but multiple vendors each are doing good jobs of marketing on the basis of:
- Speeds and feeds
- Ease of deployment
- Ease of administration
- Price
- Credibility
- Data integration is mainly an infrastructure improvement play. After all, that integration COULD be hand-coded. Automating the process is usually a better-infrastructure story.
- Text search is still an information-access story. There are multiple niches where search is booming. But in all cases the story is information access. Evidently the technology and/or market aren’t mature enough yet for strong infrastructure stories. And in the limited cases where text search gets integrated into general application software packages, it’s usually just for information access rather than a real business process.
- Data mining and predictive analytics are mainly information access plays. Yes, the information being accessed is calculated rather than raw. Yes, I believe that the heart of the data mining market is continuous process improvement. Even so, what users buy from the vendors is usually little more than information toolkits.
- Text analytics is mainly an information access play. Text mining and information extraction have two main uses right now. Either they resemble – and indeed often feed into — data mining, or else they are used to enhance search and search-like document access.
- Information services have always been an information access play. When you think about it, the financial-quote-machine business is a huge part of the whole decision support market. Lexis/Nexis is no slouch either. And they’re all about providing information access.
Links:
- This three-headed taxonomy of strategies is similar to one I previously postulated for Microsoft, SAP, and IBMOracle.
- I covered analytic business processes at length in a November, 2004 white paper. Unfortunately, industry progress since then has been relatively slow.
- I’ve written voluminously about data warehouse software startups on DBMS2.
- One example of infrastructure focus is the ease-of-deployment trend.
- Web search and generic enterprise search aren’t the only search areas to focus on information access. (And yes, they’re most definitely separate areas.) Even customer-facing structured search does; the information is just tailored according to different criteria.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data mining | 4 Comments |
Have analytics vendors rediscovered ease-of-deployment?
Business intelligence (BI) used to be characterized by speed and cost-effectiveness — short sales cycles, low-cost departmental purchases and deployments, evasion of IT departments’ strangleholds of data, and so on and so forth. That focus has blurred, as BI vendors have increasingly focused on analytic applications or enterprise-wide standardization sales. But increasingly I’m seeing signs that the pendulum has swung at least partway back. For example:
- Business Objects and Netezza have announced a mid-range BI appliance.
- Ingres is headed in the same direction.
- QlikTech is enjoying great growth for its fast-deploying BI technology.
- KXEN and Verix offer “easy” data mining technology.
- Search-based BI is trying to circumvent the data warehouse deployment process.
It’s about time.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Computing appliances, DBMS vendors and technologies, Data mining, Usability and UI | 1 Comment |
Check Point caves in
Not long ago, I wrote of Check Point Software’s unusual appliance strategy. While a lot of their sales were on partners’ Type 1 appliances – custom boxes with standard parts — the only appliances they sold themselves were Type 2 – software-only.
However, that turns out to be wrong in two interesting ways. First, it was slightly incorrect all along; Check Point’s “Edge” product line has been Type 1 for almost five years. Second and more important, a few weeks ago Check Point announced that it was finally entering the Type 1 appliance mainstream market itself.