Philip Howard on IT-Director.com

Calling a spade a spade

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:00:00 +0100

I've been to a couple of analyst events in the last two weeks focused on analytics: with SAS and IBM. One of the things I am interested in right now is the Internet of Things and one of the important... [Read More...]

ISV survey

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:00:00 +0100

We recently completed a survey of the ISV market and I thought it might useful to summarise our findings. Perhaps the most interesting statistic was that 75% of ISVs were still just concentrating on... [Read More...]

Informatica World

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 08:00:00 +0100

As usual with any major vendor conference there are various new product releases and announcements. The most interesting from Informatica World are the release of new Informatica PowerCenter Express... [Read More...]

The Internet of Things

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 31 May 2013 08:00:00 +0100

The Internet of Things is starting to get almost as much hype as big data although in this case I am not sure that it is misplaced. The Internet of Things was first described by Kevin Ashton in 1999.... [Read More...]

Data Migration 2013

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:00:00 +0100

Readers will know that our last survey into the data migration market, along with the best practices we recommended, was published in 2011. The big result from this survey was the extent to which the... [Read More...]

IBM JSON

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:00:00 +0100

Readers will be aware that there has been some confusion about the support for JSON (JavaScript Object notation) documents in the latest release of DB2. I had originally understood - when I was... [Read More...]

Busy bees at MapR

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 03 May 2013 06:00:00 +0100

MapR has been very busy recently. Since closing a new round of funding in mid-March it has announced a partnership with Onepoint IQ to provide certified MapR training across Europe, it has opened an... [Read More...]

BLU Acceleration

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:00:00 +0100

BLU Acceleration has been introduced with the latest version of IBM DB2 (10.5), for Linux, UNIX and Windows and some elements of the technology have also been included in the Informix Data Warehouse... [Read More...]

What is Actian actually doing?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0100

Actian, previously Ingres, is beginning to act like its erstwhile parent CA. Or, at least, how CA was acting back in the 90s, when it was acquiring everything in sight. Back in December, Actian... [Read More...]

IBM boo-boo on big data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:00:00 +0100

On April 3rd IBM put out a press release called IBM Announces New Innovations to Help Organizations Benefit from the Next Natural Resource: Big Data. It discussed the introduction of the IBM PureData... [Read More...]

Big data storage options

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 07:00:00 +0100

Classically when you think about Hadoop you think about HDFS and MapReduce. Together they define Hadoop. But there are a growing number of extensions and replacements which means that you need to... [Read More...]

De-duplication in a graph database

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0100

An interesting discussion arose during the TDWI conference in London this week. The question was posed: could you use a graph database to do matching and de-duplication? The answer must be yes. If... [Read More...]

SQL and NoSQL

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:00:00 +0100

It is apparent that there is significant demand for SQL in the NoSQL world. Whether it is HQL (the Hive version of SQL) or CQL (the Cassandra version) there are clearly people who like a declarative... [Read More...]

Now here's a thought

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0100

One of the major factors behind the rise of big data is the whole social media analysis thing. It helps you to decide what best offer you can make to customers or to understand how and why they are... [Read More...]

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0100

Kudos if you recognise the lyric. It already seems that the buzz around big data never ends and I've only been writing about it for 2 years! Anyway, what do you think of appliance-based approaches to... [Read More...]

If I haven't heard of it it's probably NoSQL!

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0100

There are a huge and ridiculous number of NoSQL databases on the market and the truth is that there is not enough market out there to sustain them all. This means that a bunch of them will eventually... [Read More...]

IBM adds new Netezza model

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:00:00 +0100

IBM has announced a new model in its PureData for Analytics (previously Netezza) range. The previously existing model is now designated the N1001 and the new model the N2001. The big difference... [Read More...]

Is IMS a NoSQL database?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:00:00 +0100

For my Christmas Jollity this year I thought I would address the question of whether IMS is a NoSQL database. And, for that matter, whether the same applies to IDMS and Adabas. In order to answer... [Read More...]

DB2: a relational epithet is no longer enough

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 07:00:00 +0100

IBM's Information on Demand conference was, as usual, informative though it's sometimes difficult to keep track of all the new releases unless you attend the press conference (which I don't) and even... [Read More...]

It's a busy time of year

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Every mother's son seems to be announcing new products or versions of their products at this time of the year. As I write this we can expect new announcements from both Oracle and IBM in the next... [Read More...]

Greenplum update

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 06:00:00 +0100

It's now a couple of years since EMC acquired Greenplum. I have to say that when the acquisition was first announced I was concerned that EMC might turn out to be too much like HP and that Greenplum... [Read More...]

Why you should license Excel 2013: and it's not because of the BI

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 06:00:00 +0100

As a general rule I do not outright recommend any particular product from any particular vendor but I am going to make an exception in the case of Excel 2013 and the accompanying release of... [Read More...]

Informatica positions itself in the security space

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Informatica has been trying to establish itself in the security space for some time. It exhibited at InfoSec this year, for example, and it will be at the RSA conference in London in October.... [Read More...]

Agile development and change management: are they mutually exclusive?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Further to my recent article about change management for business applications I want to discuss a similar issue with respect to agile development. First, let's be clear about what we mean by agile... [Read More...]

Federating Big Data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 06:00:00 +0100

The data federation and virtualisation vendors like Composite Software, Denodo and, to a lesser extent, Informatica, have had it all their own way for some time but now there's a new kid on the... [Read More...]

QlikTech acquires expressor

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 06:00:00 +0100

QlikTech has announced that it is acquiring expressor. In other words, a BI vendor is acquiring an ETL tool. However, this doesn't appear to be a play equivalent to SAS acquiring DataFlux or Business... [Read More...]

HPCC: a Hadoop competitor or a data warehouse in its own right?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Let's start out with some figures comparing HPCC with Hadoop (yes, yes, I know you don't know who/what HPCC is - I'll come to that in a moment). Specifically, let's talk about the TeraSort benchmark,... [Read More...]

Objectivity and InfiniteGraph

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 31 May 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Objectivity has been around for a long time: since 1988. It's one of only two survivors (along with Versant) from the big hype about object-oriented databases in the mid 90s that are still... [Read More...]

HP reverts to type

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 30 May 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Last week Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, resigned from HP. We should have seen it coming. Not for nothing is HP often considered to be the company where software goes to die, primarily because... [Read More...]

Big Data bias

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Varonis has just published some interesting research into big data. Now, Varonis specialises in data governance and not just regular data governance but the governance (and security) of unstructured... [Read More...]