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I was speaking at a conference last week (Heliview BI, in Holland) and my theme, as is pretty usual now, was the place of the data warehouse in a big data strategy. I had a packed room, but I suspect, it was the title not my reputation that filled it. It went well, as it usually does. I think that’s because I pitch it from the business benefit angle and spend more time on the use cases, than the technology.
2011 finished with the European leg of the 2011 Global Netezza Roadshow. We shared product updates, customer case studies and just got together with our community in Paris, London, Milan and Frankfurt. A year ago I wrote about a great restaurant in Milan that I visited when I was there for the Netezza roadshow in 2010 and, true to form, I ate well there on this trip too - especially the place that has a chocolate board as well as a cheese board!
This year was my first IOD. I hope it won’t be the last because it was a really good conference. These big shows are always difficult, despite the mobile apps, the maps, the schedules, the signage and many helpful show guides. I still have difficulty getting to the sessions I want to see or being frustrated that I want to see two clashing sessions, never mind the miles you walk at these events; I suppose that’s some contribution to exercise.
It’s a question that came up in Ray Tacoma and Phil Francisco’s Q&A session at IOD and it’s a question I’ve answered at the IBM Netezza booth in the exhibition. Smart Consolidation demands an answer, just as every workload optimized platform in the Smart Consolidation portfolio needs to be applied to the right analytics use cases that an organization is addressing.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time recently learning about InfoSphere Streams and BigInsights, as I’ve been working on the Smart Consolidation story.
For a while now at IBM Netezza we’ve been observing that the grail of a unified Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is often not achieved. It still remains an ideal - all your data, cleansed, de-duplicated, governed, in one single place - but in reality not all organizations that attempt it, have achieved it and plenty have abandoned it as a goal - preferring a core EDW with a proliferation of application-specific data marts surrounding it.
One month ago today began Enzee Universe, Netezza’s big annual user conference in Boston. This was the first one since acquisition so I think we had something to prove to ourselves and to our community.
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When I talk about the machine being ‘create table ready’ in less than 24 hour and about having existing applications up and running on production data in 3 days going 100 times faster with no tuning and no configuration, it’s time for the second wave of skepticism. But once again our customers come to my rescue – I just tell their stories in their own words. Though there’s an interesting wrinkle this time – best expressed by the guy who said, ‘If it takes 24 hours or 24 days to get up and running, who cares, I’m going to be running it for years?’ Now, would I raise that objection unless I had a really good answer? It’s my “I’m glad you asked that question” moment.
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It seems a lifetime ago now, but since this is my first post of the new year i will allow myself a little backward look to the best bit of Christmas: watching 3 family films on Christmas day (with family): Bartok the Magnificent, Cabaret & A Night in Casablanca.
You’re supposed to enter the new year serene, focused, positive, filled with plans and schemes. Well that’s all very well but first to purge a little irritant from 2010. Now far be it from me to describe Oracle as a little irritant, but a thought did occur to me when i read about Oracle’s $10m challenge. (it’s expired now so don’t bother following the onward link). It expired pretty quickly after it was launched; maybe people were getting close to succeeding.
I wrote the first draft of this was on the the plane returning from our Roadshow event in Milan a couple of weeks ago, slightly regretting getting up so early to visit the Duomo before heading for the airport. The event - technical briefings and education for customers and prospects, together with presentations of case studies from customers - went very well. I know i’m supposed to be full of marketing hyperbole about how it was possibly the greatest show on Italian soil since the world cup final of 1990, but i’ll settle for very well. The poor weather on Tuesday morning meant we had a fair few drop outs from the registered delegates, which was just as well ‘cos we had a fair few drop-ins, especially of IBM staff, coming to see the cool new box they’ve added to their portfolio.
