How sad -- and what does this say for the tradeshow business in general? Comdex in its heyday - the mid 1990's -- attracted more than 200,000 attendees to Las Vegas and was quite the showplace for new and established technology exhibitors. It was THE place where all major IT products and innovations were launched.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to present there for two years and what a thrill it was. I have never seen so much creativity under one (really big) roof. The excitement and undercurrent of energy was incredible. Ah, it was grand!

Unfortunately these types of large shows have had their attendees drained off in recent years by smaller and more focused events. According to the organizers, the traditional exhibitors were not enthusiastic enough about being in this year's show. Others state that they have doubts that the past enthusiam will ever return. Could this be the death nell for a grand old show?

Let me know your thoughts.

Yours in BI success,

Claudia

Mark Hurd came up through the ranks of Teradata -- ultimately serving as their COO and President. He became NCR's CEO in March 2003. Under his leadership, NCR saw a turnaround of their declining revenues (last quarter saw their net income rise 55 % and sales rise 9% to $1.79 Billion) but it seems like going from NCR to HP is a mightly big leap for him. The two companies are quite different in size (HP's annual revenues are about $80 Billion!) and HP has had a very high profile CEO who, despite what the naysayers may think of her, did keep HP in the news.

Apparently, Mr. Hurd really wanted the job . For the past 7 weeks, he has campaigned for the it (who knew?)and read everything in the public domain he could about the company. He is bringing his background in Business Intelligence as well. He has already gotten Board chairwoman Patty Dunn and CFO Bob Wayman talking about the need for metrics associated with the 'winning' strategy. Dunn said. "Mark is very much a fan of performance metrics, and we like the establishment of logical performance metrics to monitor that success..." Good for him!

I read a sample of several people's opinions about Mr. Hurd and found that most had never heard of him. I guess he is a much more familiar name to those of us in the BI area. Here are some comments from Ian Foster's blog and other sources:

Rob Enderle says Hurd is a good choice saying that this selection is a "staying the course strategy from HP". He expects Hurd to focus on management basics and will not cause any major disruptions. Sounds to me like Mr. Enderle thinks Hurd will continue with Fiorina's directions.

Naomi Moneypenny states that it was "an interesting choice and how very different from Carly Fiorina." She wondered if Hurd can come up with a new strategy -- She says in her blog: "... I'm worried that HP is really trying to go to the same 'strategyspace' as IBM. That's a good way to destroy value. Think about HP's collaborative culture... HP is not adept at monolothic operations, never has been. Its history is in product innovation. The question is how can you continue to be known for innovation when you operate across many product lines." Hopefully Mr. Hurd can bring some of his magic at NCR with him to HP.

All this aside, what does it mean for NCR and Teradata? I guess that remains to be seen but it must be a blow to those who were so happy with Mr. Hurd at the helm there. I know he was highly regarded, a great promotor of Teradata and Business Intelligence in general, and will be sorely missed.

Yours in BI success,

Claudia

The five building blocks are:

Data Profiling – Gaining an understanding of the existing data relative to quality specifications. This is your starting point from which improvement (and ROI) is measured. From this block you should be able to answer these questions: How complete is the data and how accurate is it? Consider this your baseline measurement from which you base your data quality improvement.
Data Quality – Gaining an understanding of the causes of quality problems. This block relies heavily upon the usage of data quality technology. The results yield an analysis of the root causes of data quality problems and inconsistencies. Once these are known, you can then begin to “fix” the problems, choosing from one of four options.
Data Integration – Collapsing disparate versions of data into a single one. This block demonstrates the recognition that the same data exists in multiple locations and systems with variable content in each system. It is in this block that you standardize the multiple versions (e.g., customers, products, geographies, etc.) to single version of the truth.
Data Enrichment – Incorporating additional external data to gain further insight. Her you combine your integrated internal customer, product or other data with third party data to increase your understanding of your customers (e.g., their demographics, credit history, etc.), competitors, total industry sales, and so on.
Data Monitoring – The data management effort requires an investment that requires a justification. Therefore, specific, tangible improvement measurements are often necessary to show the worth of this investment. To demonstrate this requires appropriate tracking techniques. There are three categories of data monitoring techniques – data auditing, data trending, and data alerts and controls. Use these to determine if your efforts are indeed paying off.

We are fortunate today to have technological help for each of these blocks. I hope this overview gives you some idea of what I think are the important building blocks for a successful data quality management program. If you want to hear more, you can hear an archive of the entire hour talk.

Please let me know how your own data quality management program has done.

Yours in BI success,

Claudia

For Information Strategy -- or "getting the whole picture", the winner was IBM because of their stated direction: Integrated information on demand, managed by self-healing systems that "autonomically" respond to the agile business. IBM now offers alternative business integration solutions to bring together all forms of information.

For Business Intelligence, the winner was Business Objects basically for their solid incorporation of Crystal's technology into their latest release, XI. What is interesting is to note who was in the "Companies to Watch" bracket - Qliktech, a relative newcomer that changes the paradigm of preset cubes, aggregations and views to let users be more creative in their analyses. And ProClarity for bringing performance and speed into Analytics Platform 6.

Business Execution or business process management (BPM)- This was a surprise to me: FileNet. The company;s P8 archteicture combines content management applications with process management.

Customer Intelligence or solutions that provide strong visualization and interactivity and that must put higher customer intelligence at the service of real business problems, such as campaign management. The winner should be no surprise here: NCR/Teradata with their "active" data warehouse. Again of interest are the companies to watch which include Netezza with their offer of an "appliance" that bundles advanced database, storage and server technology. And Spotfire - focusing on the marriage of advanced data visualization with analytic depth.

Last one is Unstructured Intelligence and the winner is SAS! Surprising at first but after reading the explanation, I agree with their decision. This special topic area recognizes a company that are helping organizations accomplish very strategic objectives. According to Dave, "Expertise in text mining and other fields is valuable, but the convergence of structured and unstructured intelligence solutions is what organizations really need."

Apparently Gartner has turned its skeptical eye onto BI -- again. In 2003, Gartner predicted that over 50% of data warehouse projects would fail... That time, they said that enterprises will fail to use BI properly, losing market share to those that implement and leverage BI correctlyI guess they have decided that the same story can run again. No real evidence of why or even if this prediction was close.

Now two years later, Gartner is making the same claim. As for why, Ted Friedman, a principal analyst with the company, claims it will be due to poor data quality. He suggests that the enterprise should create a data quality firewall – something to “sniff out data quality issues that are coming from your suppliers.” My, but he has rather negative statement that is shy on facts – at least very few were given -- again.

The most recent CIO Magazine just published a story on the remarkable success that the food industry – especially fast food – has had with BI analyses. Of course, they too start their article off with a statement that BI has not had the best success rate. Again no evidence or examples were given.

Sure makes you wonder where these people get their information. Call me a Pollyanna or cockeyed optimist, but the clients I work with have had remarkable success with their projects. I have worked with very few companies that have had less than successful implementations. I welcome your input as to the success of your BI implementations and the reasons for it. Let’s see if we can get some real information on the SUCCESS rates of BI to counter this negative reporting.

Yours in BI success!

Claudia

The Wall Street Journal (March 16, 2005 edition) defines the Imperial corporate leaders as powerful decision-makers, risk-takers or strong leaders who have come to personify their companies – for good or ill. They earn this moniker through their staying power, unbelievable records, or through their relentless public relations departments who make them seem bigger than life… Some of them even earn jail sentences from their company’s illegal activities like CEO Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom.

The Journal suggests that the list of these Imperials could include Bill Gates (though he is no longer the CEO for Microsoft), Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple and Pixar) and Martha Stewart, recently returned from “exile”. Apparently these titans rank low on the scale of vulnerability -- they aren't going anywhere. Here are some others they ranked:

Larry Ellison – Oracle’s CEO. His company is cash rich and over the last 15 years, the stock has appreciated over 1900%. His vulnerability number? A mere 1 out of 10, despite his yachts, reputed playboy persona, and arrogant attitude. The past five years have not been kind to Oracle’s stock but apparently Mr. Ellison is in no danger of losing his job.

Rupert Murdoch – News Corp.’s CEO. According the WSJ, he tends to employee family members and hopes to eventually turn the company over to his sons. His number is 2 because John Malone has increased his stake in News Corp to 18% rivaling Mr. Murdoch’s family stake of 29.5%.

Finally Warren Buffett – CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He packs his board with his buddies (including Bill Gates) to make sure he gets what he wants. His vulnerability on a scale of 1 to 10? Well, the WSJ apparently likes Mr. Buffett and gives him a 0! Guess he will be around for a while.

The majority of the respondents are from financial, manufacturing, services, communications, retail and government industries. The bottom line is that businesses appear to spooling up for strategic investments like ERP (go figure!), CRM, security and -- YES -- Business Intelligence (an increase over lat year of 8.2%) -- which was number 3 in the top spending priorities!

The survey also indicated declines specifically in spending on corporate portals, application integration and network management. That seems strange to me but what do I know...

Another interesting snippet is that a whopping 72% have seen NO impact from Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts. According to the report, this indicates that the anticipated spending "tailwind" has not yet materialized for those vendors with SOX applications.

Analytic applications retained the number 11 spot among software spending priorities and the number 2 spot as an application spending priority. In addition, ETL and data warehousing spending is expected to increast by almost 6%. By the way, Microsoft and Business Objects remain the top 2 vendors in the purchase intent area. Oracle moved up to number 3 and Cognos fell to number 4.

In terms of database vendors and an increase in spending, Oracle remained number 1 at 58% of the respondents saying they would spend more on Oracle but, surprisingly, Microsoft was right behind at 43%. The number 3 spot was a distant IBM at 9% of the respondents. Remarkable!

Finally, in light of the news about IBM acquiring Ascential, 50% of the respondents favored consolidation in the software industry because they thought there were too many vendors and that consolidation would provide better integration.

For more about this report, please contact Ed Maquire at ed_maquire@ml.com or 212-449-9140.

According to most press reports, Ascential made an ideal IBM acquisition target. It has around 900 employees, and revenues last year of $271.9 million, up 46% from the year before. Furthermore, IBM has been a reseller of Ascential's technology for about as long as it has been on the market. In fact, the two companies have 550 joint customers, and IBM has accounted for about 10% of Ascential's revenue last year.

Such familiarity can mean a great deal in the software industry, where we have seen many a merger / acquisition "marriage" causing a culture clash and difficult integration. HP and Compaq come to my mind.

Ascential has certainly had an interesting history. Pardon me if I get some of this out of order but here is the gist of their history:

-- First it was VMark. Then it became Ardent Software and it was only an ETL vendor.
-- Informix acquired them and they became a subdivision of that company.
-- Next, IBM bought the Informix and Redbrick assets for $1 billion, leaving the ETL business alone which became Ascential Software. The newly named company also had a fat bank account (approximately $800 million by the end of the deal) with which to go shopping.
-- And shopping they did go. Ascential acquired, in short order, Vality for its data cleansing capabilities, Torrent for its parallel processing infrastructure, Prism Solutions for its mainframe connectivy capability, and probably a few other companies that I can't remember.

Now it seems IBM wanted the whole enchilada.

What this means for our industry remains to be seen but I would keep an eye on Informatica, the largest remainig independent ETL vendor, as a probable acquisition target soon.

The really sensational part of the announcement was about Ray Ozzie, Groove Network's founder and the visionary/creator of Lotus Notes. Microsoft announced today that Mr. Ozzie will become Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Microsoft reporting directly to Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates himself.

Ray Ozzie is certainly not a new entity to Microsoft - he was named "Windows Pioneer" long before he founded Groove for his work on teh Windows Platform. And when he founded Groove in 1997, Microsoft was a prominent investor in the company. According to one Microsoft insider, "For Bill it's always been about Ray." Bill Gates has been known to refer to Mr. Ozzie as the best programmer on the planet. High praise, indeed.

David Via, CEO of Wolcott Systems Group - a solutions provider located in Fairlawn, Ohio - states "It's a huge coup for Microsoft. Ray [Ozzie] is one of the most respected figures in the industry. It could be to Groove what IBM's acquisition of Lotus was back in '95, a huge accelerator."

Groove makes tools and software that allow virtual workers (geographically dispersed, if you will) to collaborate over the Internet. The company's Virtual Office allows workers to securely share files, project plans, calendars, even photos over thr Internet. Seems like a natural for the creator of Lotus Notes to push the document management / collaboration arena even further toward a truly ad hoc environment.

One of my first overviews was with a new contender – Silver Creek Systems. I met with Martin Boyd, their VP of Marketing. The best way to describe Silver Creek’s offering is to say that it is like capturing a subject matter expert (SME) in a can or in their case, an application. We all know that the most difficult step in ETL processing these days is the arduous manual process of interpreting or translating the various pieces of data from our operational systems into the one “single version of the truth”. This involves the manual creation of “look up” or translation tables by knowledgeable programmers or willing SMEs. Unfortunately ETL tools don’t help us much in this area. Well, now there is help in the form of Silver Creek Systems. Take a look at their offering at their website for more information on this critical process.

Then there was a familiar player – Informatica and Don Tirsell, Director of Product Marketing. I got an overview of their roadmap for the next couple of years and their current work on mainframe connectivity. They have finally filled the void in their ETL offering by announcing that PowerCenter is now able to natively connect to mainframe environments. It is interesting to note that many corporations today still rely on their mainframes not just as sources of data but also as homes for their data warehouses. Informatica will be able to help those companies that wish to implement their warehouses on their mainframe environments. Another new addition is the data profiling capability that Informatica built and embedded in PowerCenter. On another note, Don said that Informatica has pretty much abandoned their analytical applications and are focusing almost exclusively on the broader data integration market (beyond ETL for BI). They are offering the data models behind their applications but are not expending effort to sell or enhance these offerings. Quite a change from where they were two years ago, huh?

Metapa is another interesting, relatively new company. I spoke with Scott Yara, their CEO, about what Metapa does. He considers his company to be the “pioneer in data warehouse supercomputing” – a tall claim that Scott feels they can really deliver upon. Their product is a software-only solution – that is, it is a database only, not hardware, which makes it different from the data warehouse appliance idea (see below). The technology is based on POSTgres which is an MPP database system that runs on commodity hardware. An interesting snippet – keep your eye out for a name change for Metapa…

Datallegro is an innovative, new technology company for the BI space. Stuart Frost, their CEO, and Kim Stanick, their VP of Marketing, used this conference to announce their new offering and to introduce themselves to the BI world in general. Datallegro is the newest member in the data warehouse appliance arena. The definition of a data warehouse appliance according to their website is a server designed to provide outstanding performance at an affordable price. Basically it a very different technological paradigm from the traditional solutions we have today. It is a black box that combines hardware and software seamlessly to create a screamingly fast environment that can hold massive amounts of data for data analysis. Given their price points and performance promises, Datallegro is poised to give Teradata and Netezza a run for their money in terms of both performance and price point. Good luck to this newest member of the BI space.

And while I can’t talk about what they are doing just yet, keep an eye on Unisys. They are developing some very interesting technology to be announced later this year. As they say – “Imagine it!”

The conference offered a combination of the old standards – introductory courses to BI, its methodology and project management, multi-dimensional modeling, and more advanced courses (including my own course on implementing the Corporate Information Factory) – as well as new offerings on meta data management (Jonathan Geiger), data profiling tips and techniques (Lisa Loftis), and data visualization (Stephen Few). There was something for everyone from the experienced BI professional to the brand new team member.

I was particularly impressed with the level of sophisticated interaction from attendees in my guru sessions and my course. The questions and contributions from the attendees were thought-provoking and, in many cases, visionary. My thanks to all of you. You make conferences like these so worthwhile.