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The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

Gartner Sums Up SaaS-Based BPM OptionsSeptember 12

Is software as a service a viable option for process improvement projects? Michele Cantera covered some of the same material here at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. For example, based on 2007 estimates, she segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

• Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don't have an enterprise-wide scope.
• Beginners, 40% of the market, are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don't want to grow an IT department.
• Masters, 10% of the market, are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
• Visionaries, a mere 1%, are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

MicroStrategy and SAS Advance Mainstream BI VisualizationSeptember 11

Advanced visualization isn't easy to get right. Simply put, our ability to generate and crunch data, and the palette of visualization options available to us, have outstripped our ability to choose charts and options that are appropriate for our data and effectively communicate important interrelationships. Nonetheless, we all know that visualization done right can really boost BI's value.

The visualization approaches taken by leading BI companies vary significantly. Some have built out their capabilities nicely — notably MicroStrategy and SAS — while others continue to promote more-of-the-same-but-glitzier graphs and charts. In a worst-case scenario, we even have a major analytics vendor that’s fumbled its latest visualization launch.

Customers Say the Darnedest ThingsSeptember 11

At yesterday's lunch presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it's necessary — and possible — to put business process management right in the hands of the business users and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.

CMIS: A New Lingua Franca of ECM?September 10

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

Today, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

Tradeoffs In Splitting DBMS Work Among MPP NodesSeptember 9

I talk with lots of vendors of MPP data warehouse DBMS. I've now heard enough different approaches to MPP architecture that I think it might be interesting to contrast some of the alternatives. The base-case MPP DBMS architecture is one in which there are two kinds of nodes:

A boss node, whose jobs include:
- Receiving and parsing queries
- Optimizing queries, determining execution plans, and sending execution plans to the nodes
- Receiving result sets and sending them back to the querier
Worker nodes, which do their part of the query execution job and eventually ship data back to the head