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The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

Complex Event Processing as a Marketing DeviceJanuary 5

I had to share a CEP-Interest list message on Complex Event Processing (CEP) as a marketing device with Intelligent Enterprise readers. Posted by a long-time member of the event-processing community, Hans Gilde, it's an objective, refreshing market positioning/messaging analysis. (I don't completely agree with Hans of course, but I do think his views are insightful. They echo points I wrote about back in 2007, and some are points I puzzled out in writing a sponsored CEP-BI white paper for Coral8.) With Hans' permission, the rest of the words in this article are his --

For software vendors, CEP is a marketing device and nothing else. Notice that no two people will agree on what CEP is, but everyone claims to be more CEP than the next guy. It's like asking to define "cool." The only two consistent attributes across all "CEP" products are (1) they are in some way used for soft real-time processing and (2) they are general purpose, rather than coming pre-customized for a very specific purpose.

So the question of the CEP marketplace has two parts: The marketplace for the brand (really a "brand attribute" or whatever) that is the acronym CEP and the marketplace for products with the above two attributes.

HP Says It's 'All in' On BI and NeoviewJanuary 5

In case you missed the front-page story in the New York Times business section last week, HP wants the world to know that it's serious about business intelligence and that it's standing behind Neoview as a cornerstone of its future in that business. The Times spun it as a story about HP CEO Mark Hurd taking on his old employer, NCR-Teradata, along with the other leaders of data warehousing, but that's old news to those in the BI and data warehousing industry. The new news is that HP has reorganized the formerly separate Neoview product organization and the business intelligence services group that had its roots in the acquired Knightsbridge consulting business.

HP Business Intelligence Solutions is the newly unified, worldwide business dedicated to BI and data warehousing, and to underscore its importance to the company, HP has put executive Kristina Robinson, a Teradata veteran, in charge. Her bio is impressive:

New Year Meanderings...January 2

Searching for BI. MDM is for real. Multi-flavored data warehouses. It's why we love Google. As the title suggests, these are truly meanderings...

Searching for BI

Sitting in on a Cognos event recently, the speaker, a Cognos global marketing manager, asked the attendants how many people used the Go! Search feature (which lets users search up, down and across BI content and other corporate information). Nobody seemed to raise their hand which had the presenter scratching his head: "Maybe we need to look into the pricing," he quipped...

Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?December 18 2008

The gist of Ambuj Goyal's message in this Q&A interview is that predictive and statistical modeling key offerings for the likes of SAS and SPSS are overrated. IBM has what Goyal describes as better, cheaper alternatives in a mix of techniques developed for industry- and domain-specific challenges. Okay, I'm fine with challenging conventional wisdom and seeking the simplest possible solutions, but I also believe there's good reason SAS, SPSS, and a few other analytics specialists have grown large and stable businesses. What's more, I won't be surprised if and when IBM acquires one of these analytics vendors.

The True End User Experience for BIDecember 15 2008

This video will help you understand the essence of the end-user experience for business intelligence, and the message is delivered in ten seconds. Keep it in mind as you deploy BI more broadly.