Five Minute Briefing - Information Management
February 1, 2011
Five Minute Briefing - Information Management: February 1, 2011. A concise weekly report with key product news, market research and insight for data management professionals and IT executives.
News Flashes
IBM has launched new business analytics software called Cognos Express Planner which is designed to help midsize organizations drive a more integrated, automated and collaborative approach to building timely financial plans, budgeting, anticipating performance gaps, prioritizing resources, and gaining insights into profit and growth. "What we set out to do with the Express family is to help overcome the barriers to adoption that midsize organizations had," Dan Potter, product marketing executive for the IBM Business Analytics team, tells 5 Minute Briefing. These organizations need solutions that are easy to install, configure and keep running; that help them overcome budget barriers with not only lower price but also a modular approach; and that provide their users with self-service capabilities, he explains.
EMC has introduced a free Community Edition of the EMC Greenplum Database, the high-performance massively parallel processing (MPP) database product, along with free analytic algorithms and data mining tools. The new offering is intended to remove the cost barrier to entry for big data power tools for developers, data scientists, and other data professionals, according to EMC. This free set of tools will enable the community to better understand their data, gain deeper insights and better visualize insights, as well as contribute and participate in the development of new tools and solutions. With the Community Edition stack, developers can build complex applications to collect, analyze and operationalize big data leveraging big data tools including the Greenplum Database with its in-database analytic processing capabilities.
The market for data warehouse appliances - solutions consisting of integrated software and hardware - is heating up, with new twists emerging from both established and new appliance vendors. Netezza, an early proponent of the appliance approach, was acquired in November 2010 by IBM. Here, Phil Francisco, vice president, product management and marketing for IBM Netezza, shares his views on what's changing and what's ahead. Going forward, Francisco sees very specific, vertically-oriented solutions that are built on appliances, whether it be for Telco, retailers, or financial services. "These appliances will take into account the kinds of data models that are required, but also the kind of functionality that is required for those industries and relieve even more of the day-to-day administration requirements," he notes.
DataStax (formerly Riptano), has unveiled DataStax OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra. A platform for managing, monitoring and operating enterprise Cassandra applications, DataStax OpsCenter provides Cassandra users with an advanced operations environment bundled with support for their real-time, high-volume, and low-latency applications. "Our customers are finding that anywhere that scale of data and real-time responsiveness are a challenge, Cassandra is proving to be the answer," said Matt Pfeil, CEO and co-founder, DataStax. "With DataStax OpsCenter we're giving these customers the confidence and control they need to deploy Cassandra for their most important applications."
Ingres Corporation, an analytic database vendor, has teamed up with Jaspersoft, a provider of business intelligence software, to certify deployments of Jaspersoft with Ingres VectorWise. Jaspersoft's business intelligence products were tested with Ingres VectorWise, and reportedly delivered faster query response times compared to other database solutions that run on Jaspersoft, the company says.
Predixion Software, a developer of self-service predictive analytics solutions, and Neudesic, a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold Certified Partner, are embarking on an 18-city seminar series to demonstrate how to quickly and cost-effectively deliver self-service predictive analytics utilizing the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform and Predixion's cloud-based predictive analytics solution
Oracle has made enhancements to Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g enables organizations to develop and deploy internal and external portals and websites, composite applications, mashups, and social and collaboration services all tightly integrated with enterprise applications. The updates combine best-of-breed capabilities from Oracle's portfolio of portal products and provide customers with a unified user experience platform for the enterprise and the web, Andy MacMillan, vice president, Product Management, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
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