Cutter Consortium: Business Intelligence

Greenplum's Enterprise Data Cloud

16 Jun 2009 19:56:17 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 16 June 2009 | Business Intelligence

Data warehousing database vendor Greenplum has launched what the company calls its "Enterprise Data Cloud" (EDC) initiative. EDC builds on Greenplum's flagship massively parallel data warehousing database -- optimized for analytics and dynamic scalability -- and the concept of self-service provisioning.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090616.html

BI Information Interoperability: From the Database to the Data Stream

16 Jun 2009 19:54:29 GMT

Di Maio, Paola | Executive Updates | 16 June 2009 | Business Intelligence

The capabilities delivered by BI technologies, which provide computational power, speed, and capacity, do not always address and resolve the issues derived from the lack of interoperability of disparate data sets. While information at the core is always some form of data, enterprises understand the importance of capturing intelligence from unstructured information where it is known as "knowledge," which by definition comes from disparate, unsorted, and nonhomogeneous sources.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0908.html

Are You at the Controls? Do You Know Where Your Data Is?

10 Jun 2009 19:43:38 GMT

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 10 June 2009 | Enterprise Architecture; Business Intelligence; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance

Perhaps you remember the public service campaign from 1960s television that went something like, "It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?" For IT, we could rephrase it as; "It's 2009. Do you know where your data is?" You probably don't, especially if it's in the hands of your partners or outsourcers. So, the answer to the question in the title of this Advisor is most likely, "I don't know."

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2009/ea090610.html

Mining Social Media Via Sentiment Analysis

9 Jun 2009 19:41:27 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 09 June 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

I've been researching the state of the art in mining social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, CNET Reviews, Epicurious, IMDb, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Finance, Amazon, and WebMD. Today, cutting-edge organizations -- especially their marketing and PR departments -- are struggling to make sense out of what's being said about their companies and products on a variety of social media sites, sites that are now responsible for incredible amounts of user-generated content. Basically, you can consider these sites interactive forums offering a wealth of information expressing consumer sentiment, preferences, and trends, which, in effect, are helping to shape consumer behavior.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090609.html

Consider Casting Into the System S Stream for "Perpetual Analysis"

2 Jun 2009 16:12:53 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 02 June 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

IBM has announced the availability of what the company is calling "stream computing" software that can analyze high volumes of continuously streaming data -- both structured and unstructured -- in real time. "System S" is for implementing what IBM developers call "perpetual analytics." It uses a new streaming architecture and mathematical algorithms to create a forward-looking analysis of data, and to continuously refine its findings as additional data is made available.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090602.html

The Real Benefits of BI Search

26 May 2009 16:01:28 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 26 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

Last week, I discussed SAP AG's new Business Objects tool that combines BI reporting and analysis with functionality that is like an Internet search engine: SAP Business Objects Explorer (see "SAP Business Objects Explorer: BI Search Meets ERP, But Will It Accelerate Adoption of BI Search?," 19 May 2009). I also said that I thought the introduction of Explorer would lead to the greater acceptance of BI search tools among end-user organizations because it will help to validate the technology. Judging from the number of people who've contacted me regarding BI search, I think that Explorer is definitely generating increased interest in the technology.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090526.html

Implementation Strategy for Portal Adoption

22 May 2009 15:49:44 GMT

Mutha, Mohit C. | Executive Updates | 22 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

Portals provide a common user interface (UI) platform for federating varied content and applications. In addition, portal server products offer out-of-the-box features such as personalization, security, and administrative control. The portal server also provides several customization hooks for layout, themes, skins, security, and so forth. Compared with building a custom Web application having these features, portal servers are an attractive choice for decentralized content and module management, configurable UI, personalization and customization, short time to market, and maintainability.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0907.html

SAP Business Objects Explorer: BI Search Meets ERP, But Will It Accelerate Adoption of BI Search?

19 May 2009 15:37:01 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 19 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

SAP/Business Objects' representatives bill its new BI search tool as a way for companies to disseminate BI functionality throughout their organizations to business users -- a sort of "self-service" BI tool for nontechies that makes finding and analyzing information as easy as using Google or Yahoo! search. Business Objects Explorer is an impressive tool. But to date, use of BI search by end-user organizations has been limited. So will SAP throwing its weight behind Explorer lead to increased acceptance of BI search? Before attempting to answer this question, I first need to explain Explorer in more detail.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090519.html

On-Demand, Cloud-Based BI and Data Warehousing: Prime-Time Players in a Down Economy or Over-Hyped Technologies?

12 May 2009 15:19:15 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 12 May 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships; Business Intelligence

Organizations today may choose from a broad range of on-demand and "cloud-based" BI and data warehousing options, ranging from reporting, dashboards, and focused analytic applications (offered as licensable services) to hosted data integration services and full-blown managed data warehouses. These on-demand providers hope to benefit from a down economy by offering organizations a way to forgo having to implement costly data warehousing and BI applications inhouse, in effect offering to "rent" them a "solution" to help with their data integration, data management, and reporting and analysis needs.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090512.html

RDBMS Versus MapReduce -- Why the Feud? Just Integrate

5 May 2009 15:58:22 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 05 May 2009 | Business Intelligence

A schism has been brewing between traditional RDBMS (relational database management system) fans and proponents of the MapReduce data-crunching technology pioneered by Google and made popular by the open source Hadoop framework. This feud is apt to intensify with the upcoming publication of A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis; MapReduce vs. DBMS Benchmarks, a report slated for the June issue of the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGMOD RECORD journal on data management.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090505.html

Case Study: GHDOnline Aims to Break Ground Sharing Health Data

30 Apr 2009 15:54:15 GMT

Sullivan, Erin | E-Mail Advisors | 30 April 2009 | Innovation; Business Intelligence

The Web, in the last couple of years, has changed dramatically. Tens of millions of people are now -- for the first time -- actively participating in online communities. Social and professional networking sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have attracted millions, and the average age of users continues to rise. Scores of people are participating in community-driven news sites where like-minded users, not the Web site publishers, determine what news is most interesting and important on any given day.

http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2009/iea090430.html

Oracle Buys Sun: So What Happens with MySQL?

28 Apr 2009 15:47:04 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 28 April 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

In a strange twist of fate, the annual MySQL Conference was just getting underway in Santa Clara, California, USA, when news hit that Oracle Corporation was acquiring Sun and, along with it, MySQL. That the most aggressive enterprise software company was buying the world's leading open source database struck like lightning. After all, it had been only about 16 months since Sun had acquired MySQL for US $1 billion, and proponents of the open source database were still griping about Sun's efforts to steer and develop the technology. So it's quite understandable that MySQL fans should be a bit apprehensive about what Oracle might have in store for the database. Here's what I think will happen with MySQL under Oracle's stewardship.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090428.html

Googleplex, We Have a Problem!

23 Apr 2009 15:40:26 GMT

Orr, Ken | E-Mail Advisors | 23 April 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence

Before you do anything else, please go and read the Boston Globe article headlined "Electronic Health Records Raise Doubt" (13 April 2009). It is the story of one fellow who decided to take advantage of Google's vaunted Google Health free health records systems -- and it is not encouraging. The Globe's story revolves around one Dave deBronkart, who decided to transfer his medical records from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to Google Health. When he went to look at his records, he was shocked to find a large number of serious mistakes:

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090423.html

Kick-Start MySQL Data Warehouses with Kickfire

21 Mar 2009 15:35:09 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 21 April 2009 | Business Intelligence

Silicon Valley startup Kickfire, Inc. has developed a new data-warehousing appliance based on the open source MySQL database. Kickfire is a "true" appliance. By which I mean it packages both software and hardware designed specifically to support data warehousing and BI applications (as opposed to just providing specifications or reference architectures for various hardware/software bundles).

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090421.html

New Survey: Personal Productivity Tools and Systems

31 Mar 2009 22:27:57 GMT

Respond to our survey on Corporate Adoption of On-Demand BI and Data Warehousing and get a free copy of "The Business Technology Optimization Audit: Finding the Make Money/Save Money Zone."

http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/254734/1623/

Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloudera, EC2, and BI

14 Mar 2009 14:58:16 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 14 April 2009 | Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships

Recent developments have brought together parallel processing and cloud computing technologies in such a way that they are set to change the way organizations look at analyzing massive amounts of data. In fact, I believe that these developments hold the promise of ushering in a new era in high-end, affordable data analysis. And the cool thing about it is that this era isn't a few years "down the road"; it's here, now. I'm referring to the commercialization of the open source Hadoop and MapReduce distributed processing framework, Amazon's cloud-based version of these tools -- now available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform for anyone to rent -- and the rise of new startups, such as Cloudera, to help businesses apply these tools to data mining and other enterprise BI applications.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090414.html

Business Performance Management Outlook: Some Scale Back; Majority Move in Increments

7 Mar 2009 13:16:13 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 07 April 2009 | Business Intelligence

At the beginning of the year, I said that the most important BI-related initiative for organizations in 2009 would remain business performance management (see "Business Performance Management Tops '09 Strategy List," 6 January 2009). I said in that Advisor that more organizations than ever before consider business performance management a strategic application. I added that, even with a souring economy, I believed that most organizations were going to continue their performance management initiatives. As I mentioned, one of the main reasons organizations will stick with these initiatives is that the primary sponsors of most organizations' business performance management initiatives are top executives and functional unit executives, thus making it difficult to routinely cut these projects.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090407.html

Open Source BI in the Cloud: A Look at Pentaho 3.0

31 Mar 2009 13:08:49 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 31 March 2009 | Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships

In a recent BI Executive Update (see "Open Source BI and Data Warehousing: New Directions," Vol. 9, No. 2), I discussed the possible impact on the BI market caused by end-user organizations adopting open source BI tools. Basically, I wrote that the commercial BI vendors are also offering alternatives to standard software licenses for BI products. The most important are BI tools, applications, and services in the form of software as a service (SaaS) or on-demand (i.e., so-called "cloud-based") BI offerings. In short, I wrote that some end-user organizations are undoubtedly going to consider SaaS/on-demand BI offerings in place of open source BI software in order to take advantage of the benefits afforded by the on-demand model. I added that, in some sense, SaaS/on-demand BI could be seen as a competitor to the appeal of open source BI. But what about giving end-user organizations the choice of deploying open source BI applications in the cloud? That's exactly what open source BI vendor Pentaho is offering.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090331.html

Corporate Adoption of Web 2.0 in Support of Collaborative BI

31 Mar 2009 16:54:30 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 31 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Web 2.0 has been one of the leading buzzwords in the IT media and press over the past few years. But the question on everyone's mind is: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting Web 2.0 techniques, such as blogs, wikis, social networks, IM, and other technologies? In particular, I'm especially interested in the extent that organizations are applying Web 2.0 to support their BI users with better collaboration and ways to disseminate information.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0906.html

New Metrics for Managing Turbulent Times

1 Mar 2009 14:37:16 GMT

Mah, Michael C. | Journals | 01 March 2009 | Cutter IT Journal

The current economic downturn has cut a deep gash in the economies of virtually every country and industry, affecting people's lives in ways not seen in over 50 years. There is no doubt that we are now firmly on the scarcity side of the abundance/scarcity continuum, so the question is, where do we go from here? For many, cost cutting is now the order of the day. Others may see opportunity. In the last economic downturn, as their competitors slashed investments, companies such as Intel and IBM famously invested in R&D, thereby generating record profits in technologies like Wi-Fi once the economy recovered. Will organizations try to cost-cut their way out of this crisis, or can they find ways to invest through the downturn? How will IT managers make tough decisions in light of the economic conditions their companies face?

What they need is reliable information with which to navigate these turbulent waters. In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we explore metrics that can help IT managers make sound decisions in hard times. If your cost-cutting efforts include offshoring, you'll discover financial measures to help ensure your sourcing contracts deliver not only lower costs but project success. Hear how you can demonstrate the value enterprise architecture offers both to initial projects and later initiatives, enabling your organization to "make it through the current problems and be ready to compete when times improve again." If, as Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco famously said, "you can't control what you can't measure," join us to regain a measure of control.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2009/03/index.html

Reality Mining: Analyzing Data About Everything

26 Mar 2009 14:29:26 GMT

Berry, John | E-Mail Advisors | 26 March 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence

The biggest trend to hit business intelligence (BI) since the days of executive information systems may not be an innovation in the technology itself but in the kinds of data the technology analyzes. The new BI foreshadows a time when, for example, a disease epidemic will be stopped because data can reveal to health officials the movements of infected people. Welcome to the world of "reality mining."

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090326.html

Why Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited

24 Mar 2009 14:25:04 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 24 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

In last week's Advisor, I discussed findings showing that the adoption of BI search (i.e., tools and applications combining BI reporting and analysis with Internet search enginelike functionality) remains limited (see "Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited," 17 March 2009). In that Advisor, I cited surveys we've conducted over the past few years; the most recent (October 2008) shows that only approximately 11% of organizations use tools combining BI and search functionality. This compares to a similar survey we conducted in 2007, which found that approximately 6% of end-user organizations were then using BI search solutions. I added that use of BI search is expected to remain limited for the next 12-18 months. Several readers contacted me to ask why I thought BI search adoption remains where it is. Here's what I think.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090324.html

Semantics Is Hot; Data and Objects Are Not, Part I: The Emergence of the Semantic Web

19 Mar 2009 14:13:32 GMT

Orr, Ken | E-Mail Advisors | 19 March 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence; Enterprise Architecture

(This is the first in a series of Trends Advisors that will deal with the complex landscape of content, unstructured and structured, that confront organizations and individuals as we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and beyond. Future Advisors will deal with the growing schism between developers and database experts.)

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090319.html

Business Intelligence Optimization

18 Mar 2009 14:09:18 GMT

Dooley, Brian J. | Executive Updates | 18 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Business intelligence optimization can result in considerable savings across the enterprise, as well as yield more efficient operation and stronger analytic capabilities. Current BI infrastructures have been strained by the increasing challenge of managing terabytes of data, which are doubling every year. At the same time, ad hoc queries and scheduled reports are growing increasingly complex. Meanwhile, the value of business intelligence is becoming better known, which increases usage. This places ever greater demands on the BI infrastructure. As business moves into real-time operations, the required response time is also getting much shorter, and an immediate answer is often an imperative. All these factors have made optimization essential.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0905.html

Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited

17 Mar 2009 14:05:42 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 17 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

BI search (i.e., tools and applications combining BI reporting and analysis with functionality like Internet search engines) has received a fair amount of attention over the past few years. The selling point is that such solutions would allow nontechnical business users to locate information in BI environments much the same way that consumers do when using popular Web search engines, such as Google or Yahoo! Although corporate interest in using such solutions certainly exists, our research indicates that current use of BI search is low and is expected to remain so for the next 12-18 months.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090317.html

Data Warehousing, Virtualization, and Vertica: A Review

10 Mar 2009 19:49:38 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 10 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Virtualization is one of the hottest IT trends today. But when it comes to data warehousing, you'd hardly know it, because virtualization has made little impact in the data warehousing space. There's a good reason for this, which I'll get to in a minute. However, Vertica hopes to steer this trend in another direction with a new version of its high-performance analytic database packaged to run in virtualization environments.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090310.html

The Semantic Web 3.0 Mashup Universe: Coming to a Browser Near You

5 Mar 2009 19:42:25 GMT

Ummel, Mitchell | Executive Updates | 05 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

The Internet is undergoing a rapid transformation from a web of hyperlinked documents to a web of semantically linked data. Recent observations lead me to believe we're seeing the emergence of what may qualify as Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) applications.1 These applications are consumers and providers of semantically linked data. For the purposes of this Executive Update, I will refer to this new generation of Internet applications as semantically aware applications (SAAs).

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0904.html

Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse: A "Semiappliance"

3 Mar 2009 19:37:49 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 03 March 2009 | Business Intelligence

Microsoft has stepped up its efforts to become a serious enterprise data warehouse player with the introduction of its SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse (SSFTDW) offerings -- a set of reference architectures for data warehousing available on pretested, preconfigured standard hardware from Bull, Dell, and HP.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090303.html

Cloud Computing: A New Paradigm in IT

1 Feb 2009 14:25:20 GMT

Murugesan, San | Executive Reports | 01 February 2009 | Business Intelligence

Are you computing in the clouds -- working with a constellation of computing resources accessed via the Internet? If not, you will be sooner or later. Cloud computing, touted to be the next big thing in IT, promises to offer utilitylike availability of huge computing resources and is attracting lots of interest among the IT community and businesses. A critical understanding of cloud computing is essential to leverage the opportunities and benefits this new computing paradigm offers. This Executive Report by San Murugesan provides an overview of cloud computing and examines its potential, risks, and challenges.

http://www.cutter.com/bia/fulltext/reports/2009/02/index.html

In a Down Economy, Proceed Incrementally to Avoid Whipsaw Effect

26 Feb 2009 14:07:13 GMT

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 26 February 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business Intelligence

The 3.8% contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) for the fourth quarter of last year, while better than the 5.5% contraction that economists had been predicting, was still not good news. Why? Inventories increased. If you account for those increased inventories, GDP shrank 5.1%.

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090226.html

Six Techniques for Identifying KPIs for Business Performance Management

24 Feb 2009 14:00:09 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 24 February 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business-IT Strategies

In last week's Advisor, I wrote that the most demanding task confronting organizations in their business performance management initiatives is identifying and implementing the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics needed to measure and manage operational performance in relation to strategies and goals (see, "Six Key Roadblocks En Route to Business Performance Management," 17 February 2009). Since several readers contacted me about this, I thought I'd make identifying KPIs the topic of this week's Advisor.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090224.html

Open Source BI and Data Warehousing: Corporate Adoption of Open Source Linux and Databases

20 Feb 2009 13:54:13 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 20 February 2009 | Business Intelligence

In October 2008, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 85 end-user organizations about their BI and data warehousing plans. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are adopting various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices. In addition, I wanted to identify development issues and trends, discern how companies are progressing with their initiatives, and provide findings you can use to gauge your own organization's BI and data warehousing efforts.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0903.html

Six Key Roadblocks En Route to Business Performance Management

17 Feb 2009 22:15:15 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 17 February 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business-IT Strategies

Back in early January, I said that the most important BI-related initiative for organizations in 2009 would be business performance management (see "Business Performance Management Tops '09 Strategy List," 6 January 2009). In fact, I recommended that you consider business performance management a strategic application. In short, more organizations than ever before are undertaking business performance management initiatives. That said, organizations face a number of challenges in their quest to solve the business performance management equation. Based on my research and interaction with companies over the last few years, I've come up with a ranked list of the biggest issues and challenges confronting organizations as they attempt to carry out their business performance management efforts.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090217.html

Taking the Long View Means Thinking Like an Enterprise Architect

11 Feb 2009 22:00:12 GMT

Orr, Ken | E-Mail Advisors | 11 February 2009 | Enterprise Architecture; Business Intelligence

Here is a question: "What will the computing environment of a midsize enterprise be in 2020?" That is, it seems to me, a fair question. The year 2020 is just about 11 years away (10 years if you're in government), and a decade is just a blink of the eye. What programming language will you be developing systems in: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby -- something else? What database management system will you be using? What computing platform will your organization be using: centralized, decentralized, on the cloud?

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2009/ea090211.html

The Message Driven Warehouse: A New Architectural Model for BI Systems

1 Jan 2009 14:25:54 GMT

Collier, Ken; O'Leary, Dan | Executive Summaries | 01 January 2009 | Business Intelligence

In this Executive Report, Ken Collier and Dan O'Leary introduce an enhanced data warehousing architecture designed to enable developers to respond quickly to new requirements and to adapt easily to change. The Message Driven Warehouse uses a generalized Java Message Service format to push rather than pull source data into a domain-independent, adaptive data model in the warehouse. Warehouse component implementation is highly generalized and adaptive, while domain specifics, business logic, data handling rules, and other variant elements are retained as metadata. This architecture blends well with either Inmon or Kimball presentation architectures.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2009/01/index.html

The Enterprise Data Warehouse -- Still Going Strong, But New Integration Technologies Are Having an Impact

10 Feb 2009 13:40:27 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 10 February 2009 | Business Intelligence

Despite often-touted alternatives and real drawbacks, the enterprise data warehouse remains a very popular architecture for providing the data integration and management foundation for end-user organizations' BI environments. Moreover, my research indicates that use of enterprise data warehouses will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. However, organizations are not limiting themselves only to data warehouse-driven BI applications. They are also using new data integration techniques borrowed from the "Web 2.0 world" to supplement the integration capabilities of their data warehouse-powered BI environments.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090210.html

Open Source BI and Data Warehousing: New Directions

6 Feb 2009 13:36:30 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 06 February 2009 | Business Intelligence

In October 2008, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 85 end-user organizations about their BI and data warehousing plans. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are adopting various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices. In addition, I wanted to identify development issues and trends, discern how companies are progressing with their initiatives, and provide findings you can use to gauge your own organization's BI and data warehousing efforts.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0902.html

Use of Real-Time Data Warehousing Techniques Grows

3 Jan 2009 13:30:15 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 03 February 2009 | Business Intelligence

Our research indicates a gradual but certain increase in the use of real-time data warehousing techniques -- such as trickle-feeding data from production sources or using technologies that capture changed data -- by end-user organizations to enable real-time updating of their data warehouses. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in October 2008 of 85 end-user organizations based worldwide that was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices. The survey revealed the following:

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090203.html

Information Quality Monitor for Data Warehouses

29 Jan 2009 19:09:33 GMT

Babu Narayanan Ramakrishnan | Executive Updates | 29 January 2009 | Business Intelligence

This Executive Update aims to present a framework for monitoring and maintaining information quality in data warehouses. The framework includes:

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2009/biau0901.html

Exploration Warehouses in the Cloud: Substance or Hot Air?

27 Jan 2009 19:02:02 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 27 January 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

I think that many end-user organizations are going to have serious reservations about deploying their data warehouses permanently to the cloud, certainly at least initially. This is quite understandable, given that most companies tend to view their data -- especially customer data -- as a strategic asset. In fact, according to my research, the number-one reason that organizations do not use on-demand BI and data warehousing is that they deem data analysis simply too important a strategic function to outsource (see "Corporate Adoption of On-demand BI and Data Warehousing: Trends and Directions," Business Intelligence Executive Update, Vol. 7, No. 18). Moreover, let's face it: the concept of deploying large data warehouses in the cloud is still relatively new and unproved. That said, one application for which I do see end-user organizations trying out cloud-based data warehouses is to quickly launch exploration warehouses that analysts can use to run very complex queries on large data sets.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090127.html

Adoption of BI and Data Warehousing Appliances Remains Strong

20 Jan 2009 18:52:47 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 20 January 2009 | Business Intelligence

BI and data warehousing appliances -- prepackaged offerings bundling software and hardware designed to support specific data warehousing and BI applications -- continue to garner strong usage. This trend is expected to continue through 2009 as end-user organizations look for ways to cost-effectively advance their data management and analytic needs. These findings come from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in October 2008 of 85 end-user organizations based worldwide that was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090120.html

Open Source BI and Data Warehousing: Trends and Projections

16 Jan 2009 18:47:51 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 16 January 2009 | Business Intelligence

Open source BI (e.g., query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards) and data warehousing tools (e.g., data integration, data cleansing) have generated considerable industry buzz over the past few years. But the $64 million question remains: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting these tools to build and deploy BI and data warehousing applications?

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2008/biau0824.html

Grids, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence

13 Jan 2009 16:03:37 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 13 January 2009 | Business Intelligence

Grid computing did not generate as much attention in 2008 as it did in 2007. However, our research indicates that use of grid architectures to support data warehousing and BI by end-user organizations has grown considerably. Yet despite this development, use of grids in such a capacity still remains fairly limited. These findings come from a Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in October 2008) of 85 end-user organizations based worldwide that was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090113.html

The Yin and Yang of Data-Driven Decision Making

8 Jan 2009 15:55:47 GMT

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 08 January 2009 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Agile Project Management; Business Intelligence

IT is sort of caught in the middle of a debate. In one corner stands a group of researchers and enthusiasts who look at the marvels of how the human mind can make quick, accurate judgments and decisions. This group tends to look optimistically at the capabilities of the human mind to work effectively in the environment. In the other corner stands a group that sees our minds as limited, prone to errors, and in need of improvement with logic, training, and tools.

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2009/btt090108.html

Business Performance Management Tops '09 Strategy List

6 Jan 2009 15:48:45 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 06 January 2009 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

The most important BI-related initiative for organizations in 2009 will be business performance management. In fact, I recommend that you consider business performance management a strategic application. Yes, I know, there's the ever-looming specter of a worsening economy. And, of course, the downturn is undoubtedly negatively affecting some organizations' corporate performance management efforts. But I believe that most organizations are not going to abandon their initiatives. Here's why.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2009/bia090106.html

New Trends in Data Integration for BI and Data Warehousing

6 Jan 2009 15:44:50 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 06 January 2009 | Business Intelligence

BI and data warehousing have moved way beyond basic extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL), as well as canned reporting. The trend today is for companies to apply BI techniques across the organization in a variety of formats. These range from basic reports and analyses to dashboards and scorecards for performance management and even embedded analytic workflows (i.e., process-embedded analytics) that tie together comprehensive metrics with business methodologies. As a result, both application and end-user data integration requirements can vary considerably.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2008/biau0823.html

Forget the Naysayers -- Web 2.0 Is Making an Impact in the Enterprise

30 Dec 2008 14:18:59 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 30 December 2008 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

In the light of the hype over Web 2.0 this past year, I want to stress that organizations are making use of the techniques to improve the collaboration capabilities of their BI and business performance management initiatives. In fact, according to the results of our latest survey, slightly more than one-quarter of end-user organizations are currently using Web 2.0 techniques to support their BI users. This finding comes from a survey conducted in October 2008 of 85 end-user organizations based worldwide. It was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2008/bia081230.html

As Open Source BI and Data Warehousing Grow, Downturn Raises Questions

23 Dec 2008 19:45:01 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 23 December 2008 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to open source BI (e.g., query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards) and data warehousing (data integration, data cleansing, etc.) tools over the past few years. But the big question on everyone's minds remains: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting open source BI and data warehousing tools?

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2008/bia081223.html

Ontology-Supported BI

22 Dec 2008 19:37:01 GMT

Di Maio, Paola | Executive Updates | 22 December 2008 | Business Intelligence

Achieving intelligence depends on the ability to query, interpret, and generally "make sense" of growing amounts of information and data stored in repositories. BI technologies and strategies are being deployed to face new challenges and to leverage the intelligence that lies dormant in data stores; however, large and complex projects can become risky: BI can easily become unmanageable, fail to meet its objectives, and may not remain sustainable in the long term.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2008/biau0822.html

People-Centric BI for Open Innovation

1 Dec 2008 19:32:16 GMT

Di Maio, Paola | Executive Reports | 01 December 2008 | Business Intelligence

As businesses open up to interact with and leverage social networking environments and tools, we find users, customers, partners, and suppliers are taking up important roles, each day becoming more involved in the R&D of all commercial products and services. In this Executive Report by Paola Di Maio, we look at contemporary issues surrounding the state of the art in BI, evaluating those issues in relation to people-centric methodologies in the context of an open innovation paradigm.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2008/12/index.html

Corporate Data Mart and Data Warehouse Consolidation Continues

16 Dec 2008 19:07:03 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 16 December 2008 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts

The need to consolidate disparate data warehouses and data marts is a situation that many organizations have been forced to deal with. Based on our latest research, approximately 39% of organizations indicate that they have already conducted, or are involved in carrying out, some type of effort to consolidate data warehousing or data marts. It also appears that this trend has accelerated.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2008/bia081216.html

BI Search: Corporate Adoption Trends

16 Dec 2008 19:04:44 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | 16 December 2008 | Business Intelligence

The major BI vendors as well as a number of independent software vendors now offer products that combine the ease of use of Internet-style search engines with the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools. The purpose of these BI search solutions is to provide better capabilities for less technical business users to more easily find, access, and analyze a variety of data -- including structured and unstructured information.1 The overall goal is to try and fulfill the promise of enterprise BI by enabling organizations to distribute BI functionality to increasing numbers and classes of BI consumers in a manner that makes true self-service BI a practicality.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2008/biau0821.html

Trends and Anti-Trends for 2009

11 Dec 2008 14:45:42 GMT

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 11 December 2008 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence; Enterprise Architecture; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships; Business-IT Strategies

With 2009 looming large, ugly, and just around the corner, it's time for the obligatory prognostications. Boy, is this difficult.... Hmmm. What will next year bring? Any wild guesses?

http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2008/btt081211.html

Adoption of Operational BI Moves Forward, More on Horizon

9 Dec 2008 14:39:45 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 09 December 2008 | Business Intelligence

Almost one-quarter of end-user organizations indicate that they currently have operational BI applications deployed and in use. Just to make sure we're all on the same page here, by "operational BI," we are referring to applications designed to provide their users with a current view of daily business operations so as to take advantage of situations -- or preempt problems -- as they become aware of them. This is opposed to more traditional BI, which tends to focus on more strategic or long-term goals (e.g., should we enter this new market?).

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2008/bia081209.html

Taking the Measure of Marketing: Going Beyond BI to Measure and Manage Marketing Performance

1 Nov 2008 17:12:54 GMT

Meili, Christophe; Guttman, Michael; Parodi, John | Executive Reports | 01 November 2008 | Business Intelligence

The enterprise needs marketing more than ever in these difficult times. But without the ability to measure the effectiveness of specific marketing activities, optimizing the use of marketing's resources is impossible, as is fact-based decision making. As discussed in this Executive Report by Christophe Meili, Michael Guttman, and John Parodi, marketing performance management (MPM) addresses these issues, thereby allowing marketing to use its central position to integrate efforts of other functions and to help achieve the strategic goals of the enterprise.

http://www.cutter.com/bia/fulltext/reports/2008/11/index.html

Corporate Adoption of High-Performance Analytic Databases

2 Dec 2008 16:47:06 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 02 December 2008 | Business Intelligence

During the past year, high-performance analytic databases have received a fair amount of attention in the IT press. "Analytic database" products are typically characterized as a massively parallel (shared-nothing architecture) database management system (DBMS) that combines such analytic processing performance techniques as columnar orientation, adaptive compression, and in-memory processing to provide a high-performance database optimized specifically for data warehousing and BI environments. A number of vendors have introduced analytic database products over the past year or so. These include ParAccel and Vertica, with the latter even offering an on-demand version hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2008/bia081202.html