Latest News from Tony Baer

Another Vote for the Apache Hadoop Stack

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

The two primary commercial providers that signed on for the proprietary files systems – IBM and EMC (via partnership with MapR) – have retrenched. As we’ve noted previously, the measure of success of an open source stack is the degree to which the target remains intact. That either comes as part of a captive open source project, where a vendor unilaterally open sources their code (typically hosting the project) to promote adoption, or a community model where a neutral industry body hosts the project and gains support from a diverse cross section of vendors and advanced developers. In that case, the goal is getting the formal standard to also become the de facto standard. The most successful open source projects are those that represent commodity software – otherwise, why would vendors choose not to compete with software that anybody can freely license or consume? That’s been the secret behind the success of Linux, where there has been general agreement on where the kernel ends, and as a result, a healthy market of products that run atop (and license) Linux. For community open source projects, vendors obviously have to agree on where the line between commodity and unique value-add begins.

Fast Data Hits the Big Data Fast Lane

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:00:00 EDT

While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion. Of the 3 "V’s” of Big Data – volume, variety, velocity (we’d add "Value” as the 4th V) – velocity has been the unsung ‘V.’ With the spotlight on Hadoop, the popular image of Big Data is large petabyte data stores of unstructured data (which are the first two V’s). While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion. "Fast Data” refers to processes that require lower latencies than would otherwise be possible with optimized disk-based storage. Fast Data is not a single technology, but a spectrum of approaches that process data that might or might not be stored. It could encompass event processing, in-memory databases, or hybrid data stores that optimize cache with disk. Fast Data is nothing new, but because of the cost of memory, was traditionally restricted to a handful of extremely high-value use cases.

SAP and Databases No Longer an Oxymoron

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:13:51 EDT

With emergence of Big Data and Fast Data, energy shifted back to the data tier given the efficiencies of processing data big or fast inside the data store itself. In its rise to leadership of the ERP market, SAP shrewdly placed bounds around its strategy: it would stick to its knitting on applications and rely on partnerships with systems integrators to get critical mass implementation across the Global 2000. When it came to architecture, SAP left no doubt of its ambitions to own the application tier, while leaving the data tier to the kindness of strangers (or in Oracle’s case, the estranged). Times change in more ways than one – and one of those ways is in the data tier. The headlines of SAP acquiring Sybase (for its mobile assets, primarily) and subsequent emergence of HANA, its new in-memory data platform, placed SAP in the database market. And so it was that at an analyst meeting last December, SAP made the audacious declaration that it wanted to become the #2 database player by 2015.

Informatica's Stretch Goal

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Informatica is within a year or two of becoming a $1 billion company, and the CEO’s stretch goal is to get to $3b. Informatica has been on a decent tear. It’s had a string of roughly 30 consecutive growth quarters, growth over the last 6 years averaging 20%, and 2011 revenues nearing $800 million. Abbasi took charge back in 2004, lifting Informatica out of its midlife crisis by ditching an abortive foray into analytic applications, instead expanding from the company’s data transformation roots to data integration. Getting the company to its current level came largely through a series of acquisitions that then expanded the category of data integration itself. While master data management (MDM) has been the headliner, other recent acquisitions have targeted information lifecycle management (ILM), complex event processing (CEP), low latency messaging (ultra messaging), along with filling gaps in its B2B and data quality offerings. While some of those pieces were obvious additions, others such as ultra messaging or event processing were not.

Big Moves in Big Data: EMC's Hadoop Strategy

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:35:00 EST

To date, Big Storage has been locked out of Big Data. It’s been all about direct attached storage for several reasons. First, Advanced SQL players have typically optimized architectures from data structure (using columnar), unique compression algorithms, and liberal usage of caching to juice response over hundreds of terabytes. For the NoSQL side, it’s been about cheap, cheap, cheap along the Internet data center model: have lots of commodity stuff and scale it out. Hadoop was engineered exactly for such an architecture; rather than speed, it was optimized for sheer linear scale. Over the past year, most of the major platform players have planted their table stakes with Hadoop. Not surprisingly, IT household names are seeking to somehow tame Hadoop and make it safe for the enterprise.

Oracle Fills Another Gap in Its Big Data Offering

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:15:00 EST

When we last left Oracle’s big data plans, there was definitely a missing piece. Oracle’s Big Data Appliance as initially disclosed at last fall’s OpenWorld was a vague plan that appeared to be positioned primarily as an appliance that would accompany and feed data to Exadata. Oracle did specify some utilities, such as an enterprise version of the open source R statistical processing program that was designed for multithreaded execution, plus a distribution of a NoSQL database based on Oracle’s BerkeleyDB as an alternative to Apache Hive. But the emphasis appeared to be extraction and transformation of data for Exadata via Oracle’s own utilities that were optimized for its platform.

HP Does a 180 – Now It's Apotheker's Company

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:00:00 EDT

HP is now pulling a 180 in ditching both the PC and Palm hardware business, and making an offer to buy Autonomy, one of the last major independent enterprise content management players, for roughly $11 billion. HP chose the occasion of its Q3 earnings call to drop the bomb. The company that under Mike Hurd’s watch focused on Converged Infrastructure, spending almost $7 billion to buy Palm, 3COM, and 3PAR, is now pulling a 180 in ditching both the PC and Palm hardware business, and making an offer to buy Autonomy, one of the last major independent enterprise content management players, for roughly $11 billion.

Big Data Consolidation Enters Home Stretch as Teradata Buys Aster Data

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 15:19:19 EST

Viewed from a market perspective, Teradata’s acquisition marks the home stretch for consolidation of the current crop of analytic database challengers, who are mostly spread in the columnar field. At this point, probably at least 90 percent or more of analytic systems/data warehouses are easily contained within the SQL-based technologies that are commercially available today. We’ll take that argument a step further: Most enterprise data warehouses are less than 5 terabytes. So why then all the excitement about big data, and why are acquisitions in this field becoming almost a biweekly thing?

Progress Scoops Up Savvion in BPM Race

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST

Is it more than coincidence that IT acquisitions tend to come in waves? Just weeks after IBM's announcement to snap up Lombardi, Progress Software today responds with an agreement to put Savvion out of its misery? In such a small space that is undergoing active consolidation, it is hard not to know who's in play. Nonetheless, Progress's acquisition confirms that Business Process Management (BPM)'s pure play days are numbered, if you expect executable BPM. The traditional appeal of BPM was that it was a business stakeholder-friendly approach to developing solutions that didn't rely on IT programmatic logic. The mythology around BPM pure-plays was that these were business user-, not IT-, driven software buys. [Disclosure: Progress Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]