Vertica 4.0 adds strength and flexibility

I just spent a great couple days in Las Vegas at the TDWI World Conference. I'm happy to report that the industry seems to be bouncing back in a positive direction, the floor was full of vendors and the attendee numbers were up 40%+ over last years event according Rich Zbylut of TDWI. I had lots of briefings and saw a bunch of great technology over the 3 days so I'll be writing about a few of my favorites over the next few days. 

Dave Menninger Vice President of Marketing and I met up to talk about Vertica 4.0 The news from Vertica continues to be positive. They have grown to 120+ customers and are now adding 10 -15 each quarter. Each time Dave and meet the news and improvements are substantial and continues to show that Vertica is executing on its road map and long term strategy.

The latest version of Vertica includes important upgrades like workload management that allows users to manage complex mixed queries and align them to business priorities. They have also made the system Unicode compliant enabling them to handle international locations and data. Armed with enhanced international capabilities I would look for Vertica to start aggressive growth initiatives in Europe in 2010. They have also made patent-pending changes to the Optimizer and Execution Engine within the appliance to keep them very competitive in regards to speed. To stay current with more sophisticated demands from users, Vertica is now SQL 99 Complaint adding a variety of new and more powerful query types to their arsenal.

Vertica continues to focus on its partner ecosystem and has added an Informatica Powercenter 8.6 plug-in to the line up along with continuing its relationships with partners Cloudera, IBM/Cognos, JasperSoft, MicroStrategy, SyncSort, SAP/Business Objects, Streambase, Tableau, Talend and others.

Collaborative Business Intelligence...we have a leader!!

I'm pretty critical of most business intelligence solutions that claim to be collaborative or socially driven. While the industry is taking small steps to enter the space most attempts to date have fallen short. More often than not companies struggle in 3 main areas:

1. Full integrated into workflow and processs - Users don't want to leave the BI environment where they make decisions then be forced to jump into a separate application just to be collaborative. Also adoption fails when you have to use multiple platforms. And its difficult to create the proper climate to grow the meritocracy culture that drives social networking and engagement.

2. Strong collaborative tools - Hanging a "thumbs up" or "star icons" on your report repositiory is not social business intelligence...its window dressing and generally an indication that you don't really get the culture of social networking in business intelligence. Successful applications need to allow for ratings, commenting, instant messaging, live interactive dashboards, decision and data traceability, blogs, easily added images and video, security as well as access to outside sources and commentary. The ability to bookmark and create your own work space are also important features that should not be missed.

3. Easy enterprise data integration - all to often I see so called social business intelligence platforms that can't reach beyond data from CSV files or Excel or worse yet they only allow an image file of the report. They are seldom tied back to the enterprise data source and are not dynamically updated. Collaborating doesn't make up for bad data it just produced highly collaborative bad decisions. You should run away from a system that doesn't make data access easy.

I was quoted today in a press release as saying "Lyzasoft has taken the next step beyond accessorizing business intelligence solutions with social networking tools to fully integrating those features into the new version of Lyza, creating the culture, tools and the work process necessary for an effective solution," added Shawn Rogers, president of Analytic Response, which focuses on the analytics, social media, business intelligence and Enterprise 2.0 markets. "With Lyza, users no longer have to exit out of their BI processes to leverage the social media aspects of the solution, creating and facilitating a culture of sharing and collaboration into the standard BI workflow." 

I happily stand behind the quote and my review of Lyzasoft. It hit the nail on the head, executing on all 3 of the pitfalls I mentioned above and by moving well beyond them in scope and features. The lauch of Lyza Commons sets a new standard for the big stack business intelligence companies to catch up to. Plus Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis didn't miss the importance of pricing and has set the bar exactly where companies can adopt the technology without heavy risk. 

The new version of Lyza is available immediately for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is priced at $400 for a single machine, one-year subscription with unlimited online support and complimentary product updates, or $2000 per user for a perpetual license and one year of support. 

Lyza Commons runs on Microsoft Windows and is priced at $4,000 per workgroup for an annual license including maintenance and $20,000 per workgroup for a perpetual license and one year of support. There are no per-user fees for Lyza Commons, and there are no limits on the number of users in the workgroup.

Bottom line, Lyza and Lyza Commons have set a new standard for bringing collaborative business context to enterprise data. 

Interactive Olympic Dashboard - very cool

iDashboards is tracking the Vancouver Olympics with its interactive dashboard software. Its updated daily with the days results and the ability to click into details ranging from country medal counts to comparative information from the Torino games in 2006. The dashboard highlights information using speedometers, gauges, interactive country flags, world map overlays, bar charts etc. It free so check it out if your looking to add more details to your Olympic experience. 

Gartner Says the Social Enterprise is a Reality

In December Gartner released its "Predicts 2010: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality" report. In it we learn at least one thing that won't surprise most of us. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail. Ouch...that hurts. 

Thats an ugly prediction but understandable when you consider that much of social media and networking is driven by the business and the platforms that support these initiatives and strategies are not yet enterprise class. IT is well suited to run servers and business applications but they fall short on the skills needed to support social solutions. 

Gartner goes on to say that through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 30 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

I agree with Gartner's position on this. If your looking to bring social media solutions into the enterprise allow business to have the first and final say on spec's and features. Executives need to fight for a piece of the technology turf on this type of project and take the lead in providing the right solution to fit the strategy of the corporation.

SAP launches 12Sprints for Collaborative Decision Making

SAP has launched its rival to Google Wave called 12Sprints. It's a platform for collaborative decision making and offers many of the functions you might expect from this type of platform. In many ways it mimics what Google Wave delivers but is more structured and perhaps better tailored for enterprise use. Here is a short intro video that covers the high points.

The tool is a good start but is more project oriented than anything. My concern is that its a standalone application that will require the business users to step out of their normal work flow and step into an application they will have to learn. Adoption would be greatly enhanced if they could weave the application features into the normal decision work flow.

More importantly, I'd like to see them integrate it seamlessly with the enterprise business intelligence layer. Allowing teams to bring in dynamic business data. The only outside information that can be imported into the platform is a manual process and seems to be limited to PDF, Images and Excel....yuck. Without access to the rich, deep and real-time enterprise information this platform won't really help you solve much. lastly the program relies too heavily on email. It needs a more instant IM based communication layer. To quote Bill French "Email is where knowledge goes to die" Real-time communication is critical.

I commend SAP for starting down this road and I hope to see them add real power to the platform in the future.

Update on Friday, February 19, 2010 at 10:44AM by Shawn Rogers

I attended a briefing with SAP today and got more info on 12Sprints and the good news is they see things not to far off from my initial review. More improvements are coming, what you see today is a public beta. The good news is that they are going to enhance the enterprise data access and freshness of data issues. Sorry NDA stops me from going into greater details. (I hate NDA's)