Found a great post by Paul Weinberg observing a recent survey report by Taneja Group, storage and server industry analysts. They surveyed 238 IT decision-makers in North America and Great Britain around different industries. To give you an idea about the audience, I’d quote that “53 percent of users had 11 terabytes or more of unstructured data in their environments”.

So, what’s the state of corporate information in today’s enterprises? 62 percent of the respondents reported that the unstructured data within their companies was growing between 16 and 75 percent per year. Despite the fact that the dispersion in this result is definitely too wide, this seems to be true.

Taneja discovered that the major drivers for unstructured data growth among survey respondents are Microsoft Office (78 percent), e-mail attachments (66 percent), and backup and archival (81 percent combined).

As you can see, enterprises are still sufering from files disintegration. For them, it is still a challenge to manage e-mail attachments and MS Excel spreadsheets as a part of one-view structure or SOA.

Furthermore, Steve Norall, senior analyst at the Taneja Group, is inclined to think that people are not going to move all of the data into a single storage space. Why?.. Due to huge expenses. (Yep, yep, the open source middleware is a Joker here.) So, he predicts that file management and integration companies will benefit from this and “should prosper”.

Finally, the majority of respondents expected their file management and control budgets would grow by up to 20 percent in the next 12 months […]

This means the problem is really a headache and the executives are ready to pay for a solution. Besides the adoption of open source data integration and file management software, I expect that any related services are going to be on the rise, as well. One of the probable solutions is to take an open source toolset and allocate a budget for customizing this software to your unique integration needs.

In this case, the unstructured data management costs may stay far below the 20 percent level expected by the executives.

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David Van Couvering’s post undergirds the idea that Wiki integration will become the next data integration trend soon. Incompatibility between heterogeneous Wiki formats is an issue, definitely. As a result, a number of software vendors are already developing some integrators between Wikis, blogs, e-mails, and so on.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will surely accelerate this future trend. The more enterprises, as well as their departments, consolidate with 3^rd parties, the more they need data-and-knowledge integration. As an “Enterprise 2.0” essential element, Wiki can be seen as a “service” inside enterprise’s SOA model, too. Therefore, some integration tools will be needed to weave Wiki-based data between either sources, or applications.

And you know what? Since Wiki is a collaborative-based effort, open source will be a winner in this game, sooner or later.

Filed under: Open Source, Business Intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Data Integration, SOA | No Comments »

There are some briefly described pre-requirements and useful considerations for a ‘real-time enterprise’ in this recent William McKnight’s post. To achieve real-time data warehouses, William also suggests rescheduling ‘batch’ ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) to run more frequently.

I’d add that it’s not about rescheduling frequency only; it’s about rescheduling the very moments of ETL operations. Sometimes it is not enough to increase the frequency, it even may be in vain. First, there’s a challenge of increased queue contentions. Second, there’s no use updating data, if there were no changes in it.

Some EAI advisors recommend using alert notifications instead. It is about defining the moments of updating as well as transforming data on an event basis, rather than according to a fixed schedule. However, it is clear that the real-time event model is more complicated, while developing. But as we see, EAI/ETL/EII vendors are already being forced to aiming at it, anyway.   

Filed under: Business Intelligence, Data Quality, Data Integration | No Comments »

‘Software as a Service’ gurus Zoli Erdos and David Linthicum commented on a new study by Nucleus Research. According to the report, companies of all sizes are shifting to project management and content management initiatives, while implementing SaaS technologies. Here’s how Zoli put it:

A new study by Nucleus Research confirms these findings:  63% of companies with over 1000 employees adopted some On-Demand solution, vs. 46% of those with less then 1000 employees.  The study turned up a few more “surprises”, perhaps the most striking one being the market-share of particular types of applications.  Salesforce.com is the poster-boy of SaaS, in fact many would argue they created this market, yet CRM appears to have a relatively low adoption rate amongst SaaS customers, only 32%.  Project Management comes close, 23% of the responding organizations deployed PM solutions.

So, Content Management and Project Management are currently the new growth areas in SaaS world. “Rapid implementation and ease of use were the two reasons cited most often for adoption,” Nucleus reported.

This survey shows how Software as a Service technology is evolving. WikiPedia has already become a standard, as we know. On the other hand, the need for effective collaboration is overwhelming, so it is not a surprise that enterprise CMS is moving towards SaaS.

A number of benefits explain why software vendors adopt SaaS model to improve their project management, too. Process integration is one of the main trends for this year, according to multiple researches.

As a result, one trend produces others.
 

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The hype around Google Apps is on the rise. With the recent launch of this service, analysts are talking about Software as a Service (SaaS) pros and cons. Again. And security is being discussed, either. I liked this excerpt by Phil Wainewright about the fight between on-premise and on-demand advocates:

“So here is a selection of news stories culled from the past few months that allow us to objectively evaluate what happens when users “have total control over things like privacy and security” as Ryan puts it:

·         U.K. company fined over laptop theft
·         Hard drive vanishes from VA facility
·         Stolen Boeing laptop held ID data on 382,000
·         Commerce Department counts 1,100 missing laptops
·         Theft of laptop puts thousands of identities at risk 

And how likely is it that Google will be so lax as to allow any unauthorized access to its servers? As Talkback regular Donnieboy noted in a comment to my post on Google Apps last night, Google doesn’t even hand over search data to Federal investigators.”

Well, it seems to me that the more SaaS is being adopted, the more it is being criticized. It’s natural. However, if SaaS technology were as vulnerable as the skeptics say, then it wouldn’t be so popular. And don’t forget, SaaS popularity is increasing.

To make a forecast, I’d say that the market will surely put everything in its right place. There will be a robust niche for on-demand packages, and there will be other niches for on-premise applications. We’ll see how these niches will shape the portrait of a devoted SaaS optimist.

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David S. Linthicum has recently written a comprehensive article about Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). He claims four reasons to move toward RIA:

1. Leverage dynamic behavior at the user interface
2. Loosely couple the presentation layer and logic layer
3. Provide both connected and unconnected modes of usage
4. Improve integration for data residing locally and remotely.

And then, later in the text, he adds:

“The reasons you use RIAs are many, but most find that the ability to get the value of software without having to go through an installation procedure to be a huge benefit. You always have the best and most current version of the software, and you don’t have to update or maintain the software through its lifecycle. This is the value of SaaS as well as RIA.”

In other words, RIA intersects Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology and brings all its benefits.

However, I would lay the emphasis on another important reason, ‘Saving costs and increasing revenues’, which is not obvious sometimes. Technical benefits result in reduced bandwidth usage and so on, but the main point here is interoperability. RIAs allow vendors, customers and partners to collaborate in more effective way.

First, RIA integrates heterogeneous interfaces and reduces iterations in business processes, which increases productivity. Data integration provided by RIA technology enables users to interact with distributed applications no matter where they are located.

Second, RIA provides end-users with enhanced interfaces, which allows embedding more features and capabilities for company’s customers. For instance, RIAs help e-commerce clients control the steps of their orders, as well as simultaneously calculate shopping costs and make more informed decisions. These features allow businesses to add value to their services, reduce process abandonment and improve competitiveness or loyalty.

“The reasons are many”, but it’s all about the money, in the end. Anyway, David S. Linthicum is right, “What you see in your browsers will change forever, and more enterprise applications will be Rich Internet Applications.”

Filed under: Rich Internet Applications, Business Intelligence | No Comments »