BI Blogs

The oldest “new” company goes public today. Yes, Teradata, a Division of NCR, is no longer. It is now Teradata Corporation, a fully independent company with the NYSE symbol of TDC. Let’s look at the stats of this born-again Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing company.

Over the past year, I have enjoyed reading The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs from an anonymous blogger who assumed the persona of Steve Jobs — Apple’s CEO. It was incredible funny, acerbic, and just what you would expect to read from one of the world’s most famous and eccentric chief executives. Want to know who Fake Steve really is? Read on.

Sun Microsystems has decided that its stock ticker for 21 years just doesn’t reflect its new face. The company, formerly known as SUNW, now wants to be known as JAVA. Good move or bad?

And here’s a quiz for you — what does SUNW stand for? Think you know? Read on…

Heavens! It is not often that I read about a company (especially a small company) doing something for altruistic reasons. And so it was that I read with great interest an article in yesterday’s Denver newspaper about AWhere and its commitment to help African countries adapt to climate change.

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In the category of weird news stories, my husband sent me the following YouTube video. Ever worked with someone who was just plain annoying?

OK — So MANY of you enjoyed the “Snake Eats Alligator and Explodes” blog that I just couldn’t resist another one of these… My husband sent me this gem and it just made my day. The comments by the videographer are priceless!

It’s June — My birth month. I always require humor at these times. And have I got one for you…

I got the following gem from my good friend, Shelley S - a long-time Oregon resident. Turns out Oregon is one strange state… or at least has some very strange ideas about “waste disposal”. The “powers that be” most definitely needed an injection of BI analytics before they decided on how to dispose of a dead whale…

I just finished reading an interesting article in the latest TDWI newsletter (dated today)titled “Data Cleansing versus Auditability: Achieving Competitive Advantage in a Cautious Era” It was written by Michael Mansur, Simon Terr, and David Stanvick from HP Services’ Information Management Practice. It got me to thinking about the notion that there may be times when we destroy the usability of data by fixing it up too much…

If you are interested in reading their article, click here and sign up for the newsletter. It is worth reading.

It’s official — the Dog Days of summer are here. It is hotter than blazes here in Colorado (and I imagine just about everywhere else). So I thought a bit of cool trivia was needed. Who knows the origin of Dog Days? If you do, post a comment with the information. If no one posts a definition, I’ll post an “official” one in a few days — after I recover from heat stroke.

Here are some things to know about Dog Days though…

We communicate mainly by words — whether spoken or written. Everyone slips up occasionally when speaking but to do so in written form is a major negative. I admit it — reading poorly written or misworded documents just makes me crazy… (It comes from my childhood — my Mom always corrected my grammar)

So to save my sanity and to perhaps improve overall communications between people, I offer up this blog based on Jody Gilbert’s two articles on the topics of grammatical and wording mistakes “that make you look stupid.”

I read with increasing sadness and futility about the massive effort launched to find Jim Gray, world-renown computer scientist. He disappeared on January 28, 2007 while sailing out of San Francisco Bay. After 16 days of intense searching using remarkable technologies, the ad hoc search was disbanded. The conclusion was that he was lost at sea.

Ah — it’s early February. The weather is awful, the winter doldrums are in full swing, but there is one bright spot — the Super Bowl ads. If you are like me, you don’t tune in for the game. You are there to see the $2.6 million 30 second ads…

I recently complained to my husband that I couldn’t keep up with all the marvelous and innovative ways that people are using technology there days. Take Web 2.0 for example. Do you know what it means? Do you understand the ramifications it generates? Do you see how you might use it? Do you understand how YOU will influence it?

Don’t know? Then you’ll like the YouTube video my husband just sent to me.

I have read with interest a number of blogs and articles, and listened to a number of presentations about data integration technologies from a number of people. It seems to me that we need to clear the air regarding the role of data integration and what projects use it in our enterprises…

Ron Powell (publisher of the B-EYE-Network) sent me an email about a recent survey of 450 Directors of publicly traded companies (with revenues of over $1 billion) conducted by Deloitte Consulting, LLP. Apparently most corporate board members are really good at talking up a good story about how they support aligning IT with the corporate strategies they develop. Unfortunately their actions say otherwise…

Zipcar and Flexcar are both car sharing companies. For background on the concept, read about it here.

My wife and I share one car for a variety of reasons and it works out really well. We end up walking a bunch more. We take the bus downtown. I work from a home office so I don’t need a car for a daily commute. Foregoing expense of a car used only once or twice a week. Lots of reasons. Car sharing has been a great way to have the “extra car” when we need it. If I need a car in the middle of the day, I reserve one online for a couple of hours, run my errands, come back and drop it off. My wife and I LOVE the concept for so many reasons.

Now that I’ve buried the lead:

I’m THRILLED that Zipcar is acquiring Flexcar. Why? Completely selfish reasons.

I lived in Boston so my first car sharing experience was with Zipcar. I thought their “execution” on the operations side was excellent. Great website. Great card/entry system. Great refueling. Great phone interface. Great billing system (can see when I used what). Everything was great. Then I moved to Seattle.

Zipcar wasn’t in Seattle, but Flexcar was. I signed up with Flexcar and have been solidly underwhelmed with their operation. Sure, it’s the same sort of thing and its been quite similar but hands down Zipcar was much much better. Flexcar had weird lock boxes and keypads. Refueling numbers on your reservation. Flexcar website doesn’t do positional location of cars (you have to know your neighborhood). Flexcar requires you use your Member ID (2039884) to login instead of a username (ngoodman). I’ve used Flexcar for the past three years and, well, it was adequate.

The news that Flexcar has been acquired (release says merged, but Zipcar is x3 the size of Flexcar) by Zipcar is AWESOME. As a customer of BOTH companies I’m absolutely thrilled that I’ll be able to get the same Boston experience I’ve been missing here in Seattle.

Woo Woo Zipcar.

After SAP announced it was acquiring Business Objects the speculation immediately started about when and who would buy Cognos (COGN).

Although Cognos might very well be acquired, let’s examine two related arguments that people made. First, they infer that a BI independent company will not survive against the tech titans of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Second, when people refer to Cognos as the last major independent BI company they imply that there are not any other thriving or viable firms in the industry.

BI independents cannot survive

Oracle (ORCL) and SAP just spent $10 billion collectively to buy a couple of the top independent BI firms, Hyperion Solutions and Business Objects, during the last year. If the titans were so dominant why did they feel they needed to buy these firms? If the titans are the preferred business choice for BI software why are they ranked # 4, 7 and 8 according to IDC’s 2006 estimates for BI tools revenue?

There is a split personality in business technology purchasing: one side wants to purchase everything from one vendor, the other side just wants to buy the best tool to do the job. It is clear that to date, there are plenty of businesses buying the best rather than just buying whatever their app vendor sells.

Cognos is the last one standing

According the IDC 2006 estimates on BI tools revenue there are five firms with approximately $200 million or more sales that are not the titans or anyone they have acquired to date. SAS was number two, ahead of Cognos, but it seems to be forgotten because it is private. MicroStrategy, Information Builders, SPSS and Actuate have been successful in this market and have had loyal customers for years.

And there are plenty of smaller (less than $100M revenue) BI firms that sell very capable BI solutions. These include companies that you might have seen on industry analysts’ charts such as QlikTech and Panorama Software, as well as those firms below everyone’s radar except their customers such as Dimensional Insight and Board International. All of these BI independents have tools that their customers have chosen over the titans’ products.

Finally, the rise of open source software (OSS) BI, such as Pentaho and JasperSoft, also shows there are market opportunities beyond the titans.

Wrap-up

The tech titans have been on a M&A (mergers & acquisition) binge the last few years, but large firms gobbling up smaller ones is not new to our industry. People will continue to launch new, innovative and nimble companies. Some with thrive and some will not. Those that succeed will offer their customers software of value. And maybe they will be acquired eventually only to replaced by newer firms.  

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IBM isn’t the only best-of-breed data integration player on the block, as the latest PowerCenter 8.5 release proves

Experts on selecting BI software offer seasoned advice on choosing the right solution.