I am currently at the Teradata Third-Pary Influncers meeting. One observation based on the various architecture diagrams and case studies pesented over the past two days is the wisdom of the Teradata/SAS strategic partnership. The partnership is a win for Teradata, which can provide the scalability and system support for analyzing massive data sets, and is likewise a win for SAS in opening up new markets for software sales. But the true winner is the shared customer community, which apparently is making significant strides in exploiting the computational power to speed up their SAS analytic applications, integrate real-time analytics into operational environments, and achieve a high return on their technology investments.

As was rumored a few weeks back (see my previous blog entry), Microsoft continues its acquisitions in the data quality/MDM arena with its announced purchase of Israeli data quality company Zoomix. This should yet again add to Microsoft's growing incorporation of data quality and data mining capabilities into its SQL Server/Office productivity platform...

This presentation by Roger Hodskins from Lumigent focused on their AppGRC product, and Roger discussed their value propostion of monitoring database access logs to observe compliance to specified policies. The Lumigent product seems to be a good hook to include with ERP applications, and might be an interesting acquisition target by an Oracle- or IBM-style company.

Informatica's IAP presentation focused on the evolution of the data quality technology plus the capabilities obtained from the Itemfield acquisition into an "extra-enterprise" data governance and process orchestration offering.

A welcome and interesting trend is the introdution of business process modelng into the data management operations silo.

First of all, the canonical example of the power of data mining and preditive analytics, the correlation of purchasing beer and diapers, is widly misused. The notion is that that through analysis, one data miner discovered that males typically buy diapers along with beer, and this is typically followed by explaining why males buy beer with diapers, and then saying that putting beer and diapers together will increase overall sale of both items.

Anyone familiar with urban legends would immdiately be dubious, and so I did a quick search and found a http://www.dssresources.com/newsletters/66.phpgood analysis of the history (and relevance) of diapers and beer.

Yet another quickie from the Independent Analyst Plaftorm in Phoenix. I am listening to the Informatica presentation by Karen Hsu, and she is discussing the introduction of orchestrating buiness process and workstreaming into Informatica's support platform. I could see an interesting workflow integration impact for extra-enterprise information quality management and information integration.

Something to explore a little more: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).