While SAP has lately given huge publicity to in-memory computing via its incessant promotion of SAP HANA, the technology has been around since the late 1990s, and there are currently over 50 software vendors delivering such proven solutions. Most recently, during the COLLABORATE ’13 Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) conference, Oracle announced new Oracle In-Memory Applications for Oracle Engineered Systems, leveraging dynamic random access memory (DRAM), flash memories, and the near zero latency InfiniBand network fabric to run ten to twenty times faster than commodity hardware. These tools can achieve these impressive speeds by transforming batch processing to real-time and shortening response time with improved user interface (UI) rendering.

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SAP has announced the release of three new rapid-deployment solutions (RDS) for companies implementing the recently unveiled SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. These solutions are making innovations like SAP HANA more accessible to enterprise customers looking to boost their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) operations with real-time analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce that QlikTech’s QlikView, version 11, is now part of TEC’s certified business intelligence (BI) applications family of products, and available for evaluation online in the Business Intelligence and Data Management Evaluation Center.
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As part of its approach to big data, QlikTech, the provider of in-memory–based business intelligence (BI) solution QlikView, is launching Direct Discovery, a new offering that enables direct access to big data sources using QlikView apps. Direct Discovery is able to link data already in-memory with data coming from big-data sources on the fly, giving users the capability for rapid analysis and without a pre-loading process. Read the rest of this entry »

During SAP’s TechEd event in Las Vegas, SAP announced that in an agreement with Amazon, SAP HANA can be used on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and will be available immediately via the AWS Marketplace as an offering called SAP HANA One. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed a snapshot of the SAP HANA offerings’ achievements at the time of the product’s first anniversary in June 2012. SAP is now a de facto database provider that intends to become the #2 database vendor by 2015. The company’s recently unveiled real-time data platform combines the SAP HANA platform, Sybase data management offerings, and SAP BusinessObjects solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). The combination is being touted as an answer to handling the data abundance (the so-called “big data” phenomenon) with near-zero latency.

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It doesn’t take an exceptional industry analyst or market observer to realize that SAP HANA has become one of the pillars of SAP’s future strategy (possibly even a “bet the farm” move). HANA is a major part of SAP’s goal of being a next-generation database management provider, and SAP now has a number of relational database assets, both developed on its own and from the Sybase acquisition. In fact, according to IDC, SAP has been the fastest growing database provider of late, although still smaller than the traditional leaders – Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

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If there’s any doubt as to whether the potential of big data could be exploited via the cloud, Kognitio has put that to rest. The cloud analytics database provider has announced the immediate availability of its in-memory analytics platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS), via the AWS Marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 25, Pentaho delivered Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5, and I had a chance to get a sense of its new features via a demo prepared by Pentaho. Two main topics were at the forefront of this new offering from the Orlando-based company: visualization and performance.

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My recent series on how to plan and manage in uncertainty and volatility (which conditions have become the “new normal” in many sectors and industries) has generated much interest and many comments. As mentioned in the series, the inspiration came from Kinaxis customers’ case studies presented during the Kinexions 2011 user conference.

Ottawa (Canada)-based Kinaxis has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts lately in these days of dispersed complex supply networks and outsourced and offshore manufacturing (with so-called brand owners and their vast network of suppliers). After over 25 years in existence, and some name changes for both the company and its products since the inception, it is not exactly easy to explain what Kinaxis offers (or even better, where its capabilities start and end in the realm of supply chain management [SCM]).

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Yesterday SAP announced its strategy to provide small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with the services of the SAP HANA platform via SAP HANA analytics for SAP Business One and the SAP HANA Edge Edition. Read the rest of this entry »

Managing data—particularly in large numbers—still is and probably will be the number one priority for many organizations in the upcoming years. Many of the traditional ways to store and analyze large amounts of data are being replaced with new technologies and methodologies to manage the new volume, complexity, and analysis requirements. These include new ways of developing data warehousing, the emergence of big-data providers to store and analyze very large sets of information, and new hardware and software technologies to speed the data analysis process, among others.

One of the important players in this fierce and competitive space is Kognitio, a company founded in 2005 with headquarters in Bracknell, United Kingdom, and offices in the United States in Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis.

Kognitio is a provider of data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) systems that incorporate in-memory, massively parallel processing (MPP), as well as an interesting virtual online analytical processing (OLAP) cube solution.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Roger Gaskell, chief technical officer (CTO) of Kognitio, and got some of interesting insights on Kognitio’s systems as well the BI and the data warehouse space in general. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Part 2 of this series then got under the hood and analyzed Workday’s secret sauce: its object-oriented and in-memory database (IMDB) and definitional services approach, which involves no coding by developers.

The final part of this series will discuss who should be a good fit for Workday and who might not, and why.

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Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and notable PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. For a few years now I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about this software company that has purportedly finally overcome the traditional shortcomings of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of the 1990s.

One of Workday’s earlier marketing slogans said that it was the first new business management solution to come to market “since the Web turned 2.0, Sarbanes met Oxley, and the world became flat.” In fact, Workday is a younger company than Facebook. The vendor says that its biggest distinguishing factor over traditional ERP platforms is its inherent flexibility, most notably its ability to logically reorganize personnel in a global organization on the fly as required.

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In 2005, after his PeopleSoft venture ended (successfully in financial terms, at least), I was sure that Dave Duffield would not sit still for long. And in fact, I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about Workday for a few years now – this company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri.

Dave Duffield is Workday’s co-CEO, co-founder, and chief customer advocate. As mentioned earlier, he was co-founder, CEO, and chairman at PeopleSoft, and Workday is the fifth company that he has founded (see his full bio here). Aneel Bhusri is Workday’s co-CEO and co-founder (he was vice chairman at PeopleSoft). Aneel was named #15 on the 2011 Forbes Midas list (see his full bio here as well as other Workday leadership bios here).

Indeed, David Dobrin, Naomi Bloom, Ray Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett, Dana Gardner, Nick Carr, Mike Krigsman, Jason Busch, Phil Wainewright, and Brian Sommer are only a few of the renowned market observers that have been talking, blogging, tweeting, and whatnot about Workday as possibly the best invention since sliced bread. Naturally, the skeptic in me has wondered what all this fuss and adulation was about. For some flavor, here are the blog posts on Workday by Dennis Howlett of ZDNet, Nick Carr of the Rough Type blog, and Vinnie Mirchandani of Deal Architect, and these seasoned and discerning fellas are not easily impressed.

I finally had a deeper look at Workday at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference by salesforce.com (where Workday had a noted presence at the expo floor), and the vendor’s conceptual design and approach is beyond reproach. In many ways, Workday can be viewed as the next generation of good-old PeopleSoft enterprise applications. Like its predecessor, the company started with a set of best-of-breed applications around human capital management (HCM).

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