Vendors Jockey For BI Pole Position
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
Now that all the checks have been signed and SEC documents have been filed, top enterprise software vendors are racing to release new intermediate products to prove they can efficiently integrate all this new business intelligence technology they’ve paid billions to acquire.
IBM on Wednesday took its turn, announcing 10 Cognos-enabled applications tailored for customers in specific industries that increasingly rely on real-time business analytics and reporting data to differentiate themselves from the competition.
One such application is for store planning and shelf-space management for retailers. Other programs include one for financial risk management and planning for banks and a crime-management application for government agencies and law enforcement.
After spending more than 15 years partnering with Cognos on various BI implementations, IBM acquired the company for $5 billion in November and immediately began integrating its front-end, customer-facing tools with IBM’s ambitious information-on-demand (IOD) strategy.
While analysts say much of what IBM offered Wednesday represents more of a revamped pricing and packaging model than any significant technology integration, it provides a preview of how these top-tier middleware providers will use their new BI suites to supplement their middleware stacks and attract new customers still riding the fence.
“IBM is attractive to any company that’s looking for a one-stop shop for software, hardware and services,” Madan Sheina, an analyst at Ovum, told InternetNews.com. “Business intelligence was third leg in its IOD stool, along with data content management and data integration.”
Sheina added, “We’re seeing BI absorbed into the enterprise infrastructure, and right now, IBM has more pieces than SAP and Oracle.”
[cob:Related_Articles]Oracle, which picked up Hyperion Solutions in March, and SAP, which snapped up Business Objects in October, might not have the inventory of hardware, software and services that IBM offers, but they have plenty of experience deploying customer-facing applications and — particularly in Oracle’s case — incorporating new applications with their core middleware product.
SAP unveiled nine new applications born out of its Business Objects acquisition last month and is expected to announce significant news related to its business intelligence platform next week. Oracle outlined some of its plans for Hyperion applications during its OpenWorld conference in October.
“These initial joint offerings are mainly about new pricing options and new packaging and configurations,” Ken Vesset, an analyst at IDC, told InternetNews.com.
“They were all partnering and competing with each other before [the consolidation],” he said. “They’re all been pretty aggressive about making some sort of intermediate announcements to show things are moving forward. But there’s still a lot of work ahead.”
[cob:Special_Report]And customers who counted on the likes of Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos for new, innovative data mining, reporting and querying tools will now have to look elsewhere — at least for the next year or so — to find the next generation of killer applications that drive business analytics and reporting.
“I suspect that based on what I see, there will be whole new classes and families of applications that will come out into the marketplace as point solutions,” Denis Pombriant, an analyst at Beagle Research Group, told InternetNews.com. “We’ll soon see them become partner products for IBM, Oracle and SAP. That’s a never-ending game.”
While the big vendors sort our their strategies, weed out their overlapping products and integrate their newly acquired BI assets with their core middleware suites, enterprise customers will likely have to sit and wait.
“I don’t think you’ll see a slew of overhauled or revamped product releases from any of these companies for the next year,” Sheina said. “That opens the doors for smaller and independent companies to innovate. Sheina said BI is being pressured by new delivery models involving software as a service and open source. “Now is the best opportunity for these companies to get their foot in the door while the large vendors are distracted,” Sheina said.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Phase Change Memory Offers Best Of Both Worlds
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
Intel and STMicroelectronics are still working to spin off their flash memory joint venture, to be dubbed Numonyx, but the two aren’t waiting until the deal settles to begin working on new technologies. The first technology from the venture is based on an idea that has been around since the 1970s, but only now is technologically possible to deliver.
The two companies have begun shipping samples of Phase Change Memory (PCM) to OEM partners for evaluation. The memory, developed under the codename “Alverstone,” provides the storage capabilities of flash memory with the speed of DRAM.
The test devices are 256MB multi-level cell devices manufactured in a 90nm process.
(Read the full post about ‘Phase Change Memory Offers Best Of Both Worlds’…)
CA Streamlines Data Protection Suite
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
With a new version of a number of its key backup and recovery applications, enterprise software vendor CA is aiming to deliver more robust data protection capabilities that improve security — while being easier to manage and purchase.
The latest version of its Recovery Management apps include enhancements to the product’s ARCserve Backup, XOsoft High Availability (formerly XOsoft WANSyncHA) and XOsoft Replication (formerly XOsoft WANSync) components.
Improvements to ARCserve Backup include centralized management by combining disk and tape backup using a single console, integrated antivirus and encryption tools and enhanced VMware integration — which boosts data protection and backup efficiencies within virtual environments.
(Read the full post about ‘CA Streamlines Data Protection Suite’…)
Cisco: ‘We’re Talking Ourselves Into This Slowdown’
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
Quarter after quarter, year after year, Cisco Systems has been a bellwether for the IT industry. So when the networking giant sees trouble ahead, people take notice.
During Cisco’s Wednesday earnings call for its second fiscal quarter, CEO John Chambers announced solid results. However, the news was tempered by his warning that the company is seeing signs of a slowdown in its business.
For the quarter ending Jan. 26, Cisco said net income totaled $2.1 billion ($0.33 per share), a year-over-year gain of 7.2 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The networking vendor’s net sales also rose to $9.8 billion, an increase of 16.5 percent over the second quarter of 2007.
(Read the full post about ‘Cisco: ‘We’re Talking Ourselves Into This Slowdown’’…)
Google Apps Adds Workgroup Features For Businesses
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
Network administrators, the custodians of an organization’s passwords and privileges, may want to find another job as Google Inc helps business users set up and manage their own work groups.
On Thursday, Google expanded its free software suite, called Google Apps, to the enterprise market to allow coworkers or students to collaborate on documents, calendars or presentations and to chat via instant messaging.
Google Apps Team Edition, as the service is known, adds teamwork features to the 18-month-old software, which initially allowed users to share documents only with other individual users, but lacked some group management features required by businesses.
(Read the full post about ‘Google Apps Adds Workgroup Features For Businesses’…)
ARM to Show Google Phone Prototype Next Week: Source
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
British chip designer ARM Holdings will show a prototype mobile phone based on Google’s Android platform next Monday at the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, a source close to the company said on Thursday.
Google and ARM declined to comment on the report.
Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and Taiwan’s High Tech Computer have said they plan to offer phones based on the open source Android software platform this year.
Internet search leader Google may upset the wireless industry with its software system designed to make the Web as smoothly accessible from mobile devices as from PCs, challenging Nokia, Microsoft and Apple.
(Read the full post about ‘ARM to Show Google Phone Prototype Next Week: Source’…)
IDC: Microsoft’s Yahoo Deal Could be a Big Hit
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
Microsoft’s proposed takeover of search competitor Yahoo may be highly controversial, but it also just might prove to be a successful market counterweight to Google, according to a report by research firm IDC.
“IDC’s data on online search behavior and advertising revenue shows that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger creates a credible challenger to Google’s Web hegemony,” the report, which was authored by 14 IDC analysts, states.
Microsoft made an unsolicited bid on Friday to buy out Yahoo for approximately $44.6 billion which, if completed, would be the largest buyout in tech industry history.
One thing that Microsoft should not do, the IDC report suggests, is to dilute or destroy the well-established Yahoo brand, by renaming it to its own “Live” or “MSN” branding.
(Read the full post about ‘IDC: Microsoft’s Yahoo Deal Could be a Big Hit’…)
Autonomy ‘Discovers’ Virtualization
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
Enterprise search vendor Autonomy has added new eDiscovery capabilities for virtual environments to its Autonomy Zantaz Introspect software. Autonomy said the new feature in Introspect makes it the first to offer automated search or discovery in a wide range of virtual environments, including VMWare, a process that usually requires a time-consuming, manual set of steps, if it’s done at all.
So-called eDiscovery is particularly relevant to companies that need to be government regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which states software must be able to find and hold all information relevant to litigation, including more complex file types such as virtual images, multimedia attachments, voice, video, IM and Blackberry messages.
(Read the full post about ‘Autonomy ‘Discovers’ Virtualization’…)
Spammers Go Old School as Gimmicks Fail
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
The battle against spam continues, with many of the trends that started in 2007 dying out in favor of older techniques that worked, according to a new report from Symantec Messaging and Web Security.
One new trend, though, has been Europe surpassing the U.S. as the primary source of spam.
For the longest time, it had been botnet-infected (define) computers in the U.S. that pumped out the bulk of offers for mortgages and herbal Viagra, which comprised a staggering 78.5 percent of all e-mail floating around on the Internet according to Symantec.
During the last half of 2007 that changed, however. In August, the U.S. accounted for 46.5 percent of all spam, compared to 30.6 percent for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). By January, EMEA produced 44 percent while the U.S. was down to 35.1 percent.
Doug Bowers, Executive Editor in Symantec’s Antispam Engineering group and editor of the report, attributes the change to a two-part condition in Europe: the growth in broadband and a lack of installed security software.
RELATED ARTICLES
Symantec Finds Scope of IT Risk Widening
eBay’s PayPal Scoops Up Fraud Sciences
Spammers Hijack Microsoft’s SkyDrive Service
Teleworkers Feel Safe, Threaten Network Security
A Particularly Nasty Week For Malware
For more stories on this topic:
“The more prevalent broadband connections become, then the more potential targets you have to become botnets,” he told InternetNews.com. “We’ve seen the adoption of security software lagging as broadband has exploded in Europe.”
The nature of spam has also changed, particularly when it comes to the use of attachments. Image-based spam started appearing in 2006 but has tapered off, as it have other attachments, like PDF and MP3s, which never really took off en masse.
Bowers has theories on this trend as well.
“I think they gave up [on image-based spam] as filters got better,” he said. “Spammers are smart, they measure their results, they move around to find other holes they can exploit.”
Symantec found that only 8 percent of spam letters now use images, down from 52 percent a year ago.
This decline in the use of graphics has resulted in the average spam letter getting smaller. Now the majority of letters (64 percent) are 2KB to 5KB in size, generally the size of a normal e-mail.
Special Report
The War Against Spam
Say what you will about those unsolicited marketing emails affectionately known as spam. But it does have a unifying effect. So given everyone’s disdain, what’s being done to stop spam?
In part, images have become passé because many spammers are going back to the tried-and-true method of sending a link and counting on the recipient to click.
A growing trend has been to embed Google links that trigger a search. When the user clicks on it, they are taken directly to a spammer’s site.
Another growth area in spam has been in scam-based letters. These are different from phishing attacks in that they aren’t looking for banking information; instead, they attempt to get people involved in shady investment, real estate or loan deals.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the news comes the same week as Symantec debuts its Mail Security 8300 Series Virtual Edition, a virtual appliance version of its e-mail filtering appliance for VMware Server and ESX environments.
The Virtual Edition, introduced on Monday, runs on virtualized servers, so administrators can reprovision the resources as needed to add capacity to their infrastructure.
So if a company expands, merges, grows suddenly or is subject to seasonal changes in business, the server can be expanded to provide greater filtering.
“Going virtual means they can spin up virtual machines to meet their needs at a particular frame of time,” Bowers said.
Aches & Pains Map Shows Where It Hurts: Yahoo-Microsoft and Google
Autor admin | 07.02.2008 | Category SEO
Aches & Pains Map Shows Where It Hurts: Yahoo-Microsoft and Google The list of search engines is shrinking. Yahoo-Microsoft? The hottest topic. Search engine market share? The fulcrum of the hostile MS-Yahoo bid — and one of the most popular searches in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. On Super Tuesday, we found a way to watch Presidential primaries on a search engine: a mashup of Google Earth and twitter / twittervision, with a Google Gadget and iGoogle thrown in for good measure. Still, keyword Meta Tag, meta tags, and meta keywords remain our stock in trade here at Search Engine Watch. (Read the full post about ‘Aches & Pains Map Shows Where It Hurts: Yahoo-Microsoft and Google’…)