Positioning Choices in the Analytic DBMS Market
For the first time in ages, I put up a Monash Advantage Members-only Monash Letter at www.monashadvantage.com. Passwords can be obtained from my principal contacts at each Member. (If you can’t guess who that is at your company, please feel free to contact me directly.)
The subject is Positioning Choices in the Analytic DBMS Market. (Aka data warehouse DBMS, data warehouse appliance, analytic appliance, or whatever.) I proposed eight ideas that I think work, but they overlap a lot – four are variants on “great price/performance” and three are variants on “the safe choice.” I also called out a few that I don’t think work, including at least one that one of my clients is pretty much betting the company on.
Obviously, there’s a huge amount of research backing up this analysis over on DBMS2. (Just one example – my recent Teradata product line overview.) But I also invoked some underlying marketing theory. Part of that has been posted on Strategic Messaging. Other exists only in very crude draft form. (Sadly, that’s what my whole company website used to look like, until Melissa Bradshaw rescued it.)
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Who should Obama appoint as United States CTO/CIO?
During the campaign, Barack Obama promised to appoint a national Chief Technology Officer. Naturally, vigorous discussion has ensued as to who that should be. I’ve been right in the thick of it:
- Arguing that the CTO should really be a CIO, in line with Obama’s own description of the job. (That got Slashdotted.)
- Discussing which direct responsibilities the United States CTO/CIO actually should have.
- Recommending former IRS Commissoner and American Management Systems CEO Charles Rossotti for the job, both because of his accomplishments and his honesty. (Rossotti emailed me implying that he wasn’t interested. I shot back that this was the first time in our quarter-century acquaintance I didn’t precisely believe what he said.)
- Outlining my recommended list of Obama Administration IT priorities.
Much of the blogosphere and trade press discussion started out silly, speculating on Eric Schmidt for the job and so on. Richard Koman was one of the first to analyze the subject more sensibly. But now Dan Farber has weighed in with a great post, looking at the practicalities of the position in detail, which was quickly echoed by his old partner Larry Dignan.
Getting Federal IT straight is a VERY difficult job. It’s also utterly crucial. I hope the Obama Administration gets it right.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 5 Comments |
Technology highlights of the 2008 US Presidential campaign
I’ve been writing quite a bit over on A World of Bytes about the technology used in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Subjects included:
- A brilliant viral get-out-the-vote video (from MoveOn.org, actually, not the Obama campaign as I first thought). What was so innovative about it was the personalization inside the video. This is one to learn from in your own business.
- Obama campaign successes and failures at local targeting (that one also has links to a number of other posts on technology-in-the-campaign).
- Two appallingly dishonest site-specific search boxes.
I’m also writing over there about what I think the Obama Administration should do with respect to technology policy. First up is a ringing recommendation of Charles Rossotti for CIO/CTO. More to follow.
Good riddance to Secure Computing
McAfee has announced a takeover of Secure Computing, ending that company’s independent existence. To this I can only say: It’s about time! Early this century, I was asked to revive my old investment research career and find stocks to short. A promising candidate turned out to be Secure Computing, whose main product lines included:
- A high-end “proxy”-style firewall, which was widely used in the US intelligence and defense communities
- A two-factor authentication division
- A censorware division that, for example, had run Saudi Arabia’s web censorship since the late 1990s
- A firewall-on-a-board OEM deal with 3COM
The short idea was in large part that the firewall-on-a-board idea had caused great overoptimism, stoked by the company. On further digging, I found that CEO John McNulty’s resume, as stated for example in Secure Computing’s SEC filings, seemed inconsistent with his resume as stated in SEC filings of his prior employer. Nobody seemed to care much about correcting that, however. Read more
Announcements, announcements, announcements!
A couple of months ago, we set up a category in this blog called Monash Research highlights for the purpose of clueing you in to our biggest news. Indeed, if you ever decide you can’t handle our full integrated feed, there’s a special Highlights feed that will keep you at least partly clued in to what we’re up to.
Other than the highlights feed itself, we have four pieces of news to share today:
- A new white paper
- A new Network World blog called A World of Bytes
- A new Intelligent Enterprise blog that may or may not wind up being named Data Frontiers
- Translation of some of my analytics-oriented posts into Russian
Let me explain. Read more
| Categories: Monash Research highlights | 1 Comment |
High-energy physics considered by means of a rap video
CERN brought us the World Wide Web, which no matter what else it ever does leaves it on the plus side of the ledger. (Unless, of course, it creates black holes that destroy the planet, but that seems thankfully unlikely.) The Web led to blogs and YouTube. And now things have come full circle, as Jason Perlow has blogged a YouTube video that explains CERN’s main new venture — the much discussed Large Hadron Collider — in the form of a rap video.
It’s pretty funny and actually somewhat informative. Check it out.
Meanwhile, another video has time-lapse photography showing the building of the Large Hadron Collider. I actually only watched from about the 7:30 to 8:00 marks, but that part was pretty cool.
I’m going to be doing an online chat
August 19, 2-3 pm Eastern time, I’m going to be doing an online chat, hosted by Network World.
But please pay no attention to the listed description. Any topic goes — from Attensity to Zilliant — and the write-up is just one editor’s idea of what would be a good hook to attract participants. (And please, definitely, pay NO attention to my antiquated and scrunched up picture, to the missing text, or to any other aspect of networkworld.com’s user interface.)
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We’re staying out on vacation another week
Contrary to what I previously said, I did not come back to Acton this weekend. Instead, Linda and I are staying on Grand Cayman for another week, and hoping nobody else I follow gets acquired. Here’s a taste of why.
- Like swimming in an aquarium
- Parrot fish and friends
- Rock lobster and friends
- Puffer fish
- Our home away from home, aka The Reef Resort
- Our cat away from cat
Babycare dos and don’ts
There’s no tech angle here. Just a funny set of cartoons.
Happy summer Friday. I leave on vacation tomorrow.
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Our blog redesign
If you’re reading this (and not just in your feed reader), you’ve probably noticed that the five Monash Research blogs have undergone a major redesign. We had two main goals in mind:
- Help visitors find information that may be of interest to them
- Keep the blogs easy to read and pleasant to look at
I hope you will agree that we’ve met those goals with — as it were — flying colors.
Most aspects of the redesign are pretty obvious, but here’s a biggie you might at first overlook. On most category pages on DBMS2, Text Technologies, and Software Memories, there are now brief category descriptions and, crucially, suggested links. Hopefully, these will help you find research that is interesting to you, but which you may have missed the first time around. If you want to check out some examples, you could start with:
- (in DBMS2) Business intelligence
- (in DBMS2) SAP
- (in Text Technologies) Google
Also — if you’re wondering why we added that super-prominent sign-up box for our complete feed, the reason is simple: Only about a third of our feed subscribers take the integrated feed. (The others typically take just Text Technologies or just DBMS2.) Given how my interests and subjects connect to each other, I think my readers are much better off if they get at least the headlines to everything.
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