Breaking News - First Report from Oracle OpenWorld
It seems like old times at Oracle OpenWorld being held in San Francisco this week. Attendance is expected to top the 40,000 mark. The City of San Francisco has agreed to shut some of the streets around the Moscone Center to accommodate the crowds. And Elton John kicked off the festivities.
Not surprisingly, companies in the Oracle ecosystem are taking advantage of the venue to release new products. After more than a year in development and in beta testing since December, Quest has taken the wraps of Toad for Quest 9, its database development technology. "This is a big release for us," Ramon Graham, the Toad product manager, told 5 Minute Briefing prior to the announcement. "And we think that it will be exciting for Oracle users."
According to Graham, Quest has focused in three primary areas with this release. "We are adhering to best practices to develop quality code," he said. The new release also has improved reporting capabilities and improved automation. There are significant improvements in security and a new Toad dashboard, Graham said.
Toad for Oracle 9 will be come in three versions - standard, professional and expert. The expert edition will include the Quest Data Modeler, which was quietly released this summer. "This is geared for developers and DBAs, not architects," Graham said. It is getting a great response, he added.
Symantec announced that it had broadened and extended its partnership with Oracle for another two years. As part of the agreement, the companies have signed a new interoperability agreement with Oracle providing for qualification of Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC synchronously with the release of new Oracle RAC offerings. The agreement governs the companies' joint engineering efforts around Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC on IBM AIX, HP-UX, and Sun Solaris.
Moreover, Symantec will base people and equipment on the Oracle campus to work on the interoperability enhancements. "We are the only software-only company with people and equipment on-site at Oracle," Brian Schwartz, senior product manager at Symantec, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Open Text was showing its Customer Transaction Console for the first time. The Customer Transaction Console streamlines the customer inquiry processing in sales, call centers and service departments. With it, data and documents stored in Oracle applications, including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and the Oracle E-Business Suite, can be viewed directly in Microsoft Office applications. "This is a great example what Oracle Fusion middleware used with our applications and interface will yield," Ron Vangell, vice president and general manager at Open Text's Oracle Solutions Group, told 5 Minute briefing.
In the Customer Transaction Console, all the documents are stored in Oracle's Content DB. Other applications from Open Text, which builds content-enabled solutions that solve complex problems in specific industries, also use Oracle's BPEL process manager and other middleware products. In fact, it is anticipated that Open Text and Oracle, which have had a reseller relationship for a decade, will soon announce a much more extensive relationship. "The relationship had been one of benign neglect," Vangell said. "Now there are a lot of reasons for us to be joined closer at the hip."
5 Minute Briefing will have a complete Oracle OpenWorld report next week. For more information about Quest, go here. For more information about Symantec, go to here. For more information about Open Text Oracle Solutions, go here.
Back to top
Breaking News - QlikTech Unveils QlikView for the Masses Program
At Qonnections 2006, its first global users conference being held in Philadelphia today, QlikTech, a vendor of in-memory business intelligence technology, unveiled what is calling QlikView for the Masses. The objective, Anthony Deighton, QlikTech's vice president of marketing told 5 Minute Briefing in a private interview prior to the announcement, is to make business intelligence accessible to non-traditional BI users. "We did a World Cup application that had 50,000 hits," he noted. "You cannot train 50,000 users."
QlikTech's QlikViews offers in-memory business intelligence technology. In this approach, the data needed for analysis is held in-memory instead of being moved and stored in a separate database optimized for analysis. Keeping the data in-memory, Deighton said, make BI faster, more flexible and more interactive. "We are bridging the gap between OLAP and reporting," he added. As the underlying computing platforms move to 64-bit and multicore technologies, massive amounts of data can be managed in-memory, Deighton said.
BI for the Masses is mainly a pricing strategy, Deighton said. "We have priced it in a way that is not tied to the number of users, he noted. In addition to QlikView for the Masses, QlikTech made a number of additional announcements at the Qonnections, which is being attended by several hundred people from around a dozen companies. It realized Publisher 4.0, a key component for managing enterprise deployments of QlikView, and launched a new partner program called Qonnect, and a new Web site called QlikCommunity, through which QlikView Users can share their expertise. For more information, go here.
Back to top
Breaking News - CA Wily Releases Introscope for Microsoft .NET
Today CA's Wily Technology Division announced the availability of Wily Introscope for Microsoft .NET, which, according to the company, will provide customers with a single solution for comprehensive J2EE and .NET application performance management in complex enterprise and SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments.
"The great advantage for existing and potential customers is that, with one product, they can manage virtually all of their critical Web applications," Mike Malloy, vice president and CMO at Wily, told 5 Minute Briefing during a private interview. "Customers need a common view of these applications regardless of what technology they were built using."
According to Malloy, .NET-based applications are picking up speed in the enterprise. "We have seen more and more investment in .NET applications," he remarked. ".NET is really making headway in the enterprise Web application market space. Most large enterprises now have both J2EE and .NET applications for online business."
Introscope for Microsoft .NET features 24x7 production monitoring, customizable alerts, SLA management and capacity planning, auto-generated dependency mapping, and an automatic analytics engine. The product provides deep visibility into the individual .NET components, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET, ASMX, Enterprise Services, Directory Services, .NET Messaging, .NET Remoting, and more.
"We help IT figure out exactly what is going on," Jeff Cobb, vice president of engineering at Wily, emphasized. "This lets them monitor in real-time, 24-by-7, all the traffic. They can detect things and fix them as they happen - instead of when they get angry phone calls from the customers. You can quickly isolate the problems."
Introscope for Microsoft .NET automatically identifies transaction paths and isolates performance bottlenecks. The solution also automatically instruments custom .NET-based applications without any coding or development effort.
Introscope for Microsoft .NET supports .NET version 1.1 and 2.0, and is compatible with Introscope 7.0. For more information, go here.
Back to top
Attunity Releases Integration Suite 5.0
In its first major new release is approximately a year, Attunity, a maker of data integration and application integration technology, has unveiled Attunity Integration Suite (AIS) 5.0. While the new release includes enhancements to all three products that make up the suite - Attunity Connect, Attunity Federate and Attunity Stream - perhaps the key new feature is its CDC Accelerator for SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS). "SSIS does not have change data capture (CDC)," Itamar Ankorian, director of product marketing at Attunity, told 5 Minute Briefing in a private interview. "CDC is a must-have for enterprise ETL. This is the first in the marketplace."
Change data capture allows for the capture and transfer of only changed items from a source database to a target database. It can help improve the efficiency of the ETL (extraction, transformation and load) process as well as other data integration applications. Attunity Connect is Attunity's data access and data adapters product. Attunity Federate is the company's enterprise integration technology.
According to Ankorian, people will be able to access the functionality of CDC Accelerator for SSIS from the SSIS user interface. "This is very specific to SSIS," he said.
In addition to the CDC Accelerator, Attunity has enhanced support for service-oriented architectures. It now offers XML Database Services that support update and support operations for all data sources, in addition to the read functionality already offered. Moreover, it has extended its support with the inclusion of Adabas on Open VMS and for DB2/400. Moreover, Ankorian noted, Attunity's relationship with Oracle has deepened via Oracle's acquisition of Sunopsis. "We work cross-platform," Ankorian said. For more information, go here.
Back to top
IBM Unveils IBM Information Server
Big Blue unveiled IBM Information Server at its inaugural Information on Demand Global Conference last week. According to the company, the new server is a "first-of-its-kind" software platform - a crucial milestone in IBM's efforts to help organizations leverage information as a strategic business asset.
"This is a new kind of platform, built from experience with more than 5,000 customers, that allows organizations to turn complex, heterogeneous data into trusted information to drive new innovation, increase operational efficiency, and lower risk," Ambuj Goyal, general manager, IBM Information Management, IBM Software Group, said.
Information Server is positioned to deliver on the promise of trusted, consistent, and reusable information for applications and business processes. "Most organizations lack access to information they can really trust to be complete, accurate and properly interpreted," Goyal explained.
Information Server, in turn, aims to help end-users understand their disparate data sources; cleanse data to ensure consistent quality; transform and restructure information for the intended use; and deliver data in the form needed.
Many IBM partners and solutions providers have jumped on the opportunity to provide support for and integration with the new server. DATAllegro has announced interoperability with its data warehouse appliance. GoldenGate, similarly, is partnering with IBM in support of the new platform to provide real-time data capture capabilities to the Information Server.
"This will allow their customers - those who need real-time information - to leverage the capabilities in IBM Information Server while and get directly to the real-time data - to capture and move that data with minimal overhead to the source systems," Sami Akbay, vice president of marketing, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Jinfonet announced the use of its embeddable reporting solution for Java applications, JReport, within the IBM Information Server. JReport is the reporting front end of the server and allows system administrators to easily track and report on the success of integration efforts, the integration information itself, and on the performance of underlying systems.
"We are very pleased IBM chose us for such a critical product," Fred Richards, vice president of product management for Jinfonet, told 5 Minute Briefing during a private interview. "Together, we are helping solving some pressing information management needs out there in the enterprise."
IBM Information Server will be available worldwide in November 2006. For more information, click here.
Back to top
Protegrity Offers Enterprise-Wide Data View
Protegrity Corp., a data security vendor, has released the Defiance 4.2 Software Security suite, an integrated security platform to protect databases, files, and Web applications in a single offering. The new solution incorporates Defiance DPS data protection, Protegrity VPDisk file security, and Defiance TMS Web application threat management.
With this integrated suite release, Protegrity seeks to offer end-to-end protection that enables security administrators to view and manage security events at all data protection points, throughout the data lifecycle, Paul Giardina, senior vice president of marketing for Protegrity, told 5 Minute Briefing. "We have an integrated release of our management and reporting capabilities of the product," he explained. "From one central location, a security officer or administrator can view the significant security events that occur through all these different layers of the lifecycle so they can see potential security events that happened at the application layer, or at the database layer or at the file layer."
Defiance 4.2 also builds on Protegrity's Intelligent Escalation functionality for enterprise-wide security response. Events detected by any 4.2 element - DPS, VPDisk or TMS - can trigger alerting and an intelligent threat management escalation at enforcement points, for true protection of sensitive data across the entire organization. By having a centralized view, said Giardina, Defiance 4.2 allows security officers to better manage security, and also offers "one place to go to, to get all the information to provide to a compliance auditor."
Defiance 4.2 also features expanded enterprise protection of, and support for, databases and applications on IBM iSeries (AS/400), and IBM z/OS DB/2 mainframe environments. "When you talk about data protection, most organizations today have multiple platforms that they need to protect it on," Giardina said. Legacy application protection has often been overlooked in the past, though sensitive information is often housed on mainframes, he observed. This was okay when legacy applications existed as closed-loop systems, but as these systems are exposed to the Web, they are becoming more vulnerable to attacks they were not designed to handle, he noted. That, combined with the compliance piece, creates an urgent need for organizations to protect that information, said Giardina. For additional information on new features in Defiance 4.2, go here.
Back to top
Celequest Introduces New Software-as-a-Service BI Offering
Celequest, a provider of operational business intelligence (BI), has announced LAVA On Demand, a software-as-a-service offering for BI. LAVA, a BI appliance, was designed to bring BI information to thousands of users without the complexity or cost associated with traditional BI offerings, according to the company. "What we have found is that our appliance, which we launched earlier this year, seemed to be very appealing to mid-size businesses," Diaz Nesamoney, chief executive officer, told 5 Minute Briefing. They were further interested in the on-demand model where BI could be served up to them in as a hosted service or some similar fashion, he said.
As a result, Celequest has introduced LAVA On Demand in two subscription-based options. One, is a managed service, where BI data remains entirely within the company's firewall. "For that we used a new technology we have developed called a Remote Service manager that allows us to remotely log into the appliance, which is inside the firewall, and remotely administer and manage it as if it were a hosted solution." The new LAVA Remote Service Manager handles upgrades, patches, software and hardware monitoring - as well as troubleshooting and recovery.
The second option, the LAVA Hosted Service, announced with Salesforce.com, provides a hosted solution at a lower initial cost. This model is intended for organizations with few IT resources, as it requires no IT involvement and no hardware or software need be installed internally. It also works best when there are only one or two data sources - or when application data is already hosted outside the company.
"The key thing is total cost of ownership," said Nesamoney. "Mid-size and smaller companies seem to prefer more of an on-demand model where they don't have to incur all the up-front costs in setting up BI. It's basically the notion of BI for the masses, where now even the mid- and small-size companies can enjoy what the larger companies have enjoyed for quite some time."
The LAVA Managed Service is available now. The LAVA Hosted Service is now available in an initial rollout for salesforce.com customers. For more information, go here.
Back to top
Confio Software Announces Ignite for RAC
Confio Software, provider of application performance tools, has announced Confio Ignite for RAC, developed specifically for improving the performance of applications running on Oracle RAC environments. Ignite for RAC is designed to enables database administrators to identify and eliminate overhead associated with RAC configurations.
Ignite for RAC, similar to the company's flagship product Ignite for Oracle, is a "wait-time-based" database performance tool. "Wait-time is what really affects the end-users," Don Bergal, CIO of Confio, explained to 5 Minute Briefing during a private interview. "We look at every transaction request individually and every step along the path."
According to Bergal, most tools only look at statistics across the database. "Most just count operations," he said. "It is much more difficult to look at wait time. But this is what it takes to help the DBA identify the exact place where the delay is building up. You need to measure how long the individual steps take."
Ignite for RAC features the ability to set alerts based on wait-time metrics and provides charts from which a DBA can drill-down on individual wait-time events. Agent-less operation allows for the monitoring of multiple databases from a single central repository without installation of any executable agent on the production server.
Confio Ignite for RAC has been certified for use with Oracle 9i and 10g RAC and is currently available. For more information, or free trial downloads, click here.
Back to top |
