The Business Intelligence Blog

From Informatica Press Release, this is an important win for Informatica.

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading independent provider of data integration software and services, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders’ quadrant in the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools report.

Ted Friedman and Andreas Bitterer, authors of the report state, “leaders in the market demonstrate strength across a complete range of data quality functionality, including profiling, parsing, standardization, matching, validation and enrichment. They exhibit a clear understanding and vision of where the market is headed, including recognition of noncustomer data quality issues and the delivery of enterprise-level data quality implementations. Leaders have an established market presence, significant size and a multinational presence.”

According to the report, “growth, innovation and volatility (via mergers and acquisitions) continue to shape the market for data quality tools. Investment on the part of buyers and vendors is increasing as organizations recognize the value of these tools in master data management and information governance initiatives.” The complete report, including the quadrant graphic, is available on the Informatica web site at http://www.informatica.com/dq_mq/.

From the Press Release -

Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA), the leading independent provider of data integration software, today announced that SmartStream Technologies, a leading provider of software to the financial services industry, is OEMing the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform as part of its flagship Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM) solutions.

In making Informatica PowerCenter the foundation of its SmartStream TLM Business Integration (TLM BI) offering, SmartStream is empowering those customers with complex data environments to accelerate the return on investment of their TLM deployments through the high-performance and cost-effective integration of data involved in transaction cycles.

“The increasing drive to streamline global banking practices means our software needs to manage highly complex and rapid transactions across platforms and different banks. By using Informatica, rather than continually creating bespoke data interfaces, we can enable a faster ROI while freeing our professional services teams to provide more value to customers,” said Neil
Vernon, head of SmartStream’s Product Management Group. “We selected Informatica to power TLM BI following an evaluation where they scored highest against our key criteria of usability, reusability and performance. In addition, it was critical that TLM BI have the focus and support of a recognized best-of-breed vendor such as Informatica.”

By Anshu Shrivastava of TMCNet, an article on the new Teradata Warehouse Miner.

The technology of data mining discovers patterns in customer, financial and operational data that can provide valuable business insights, according to Teradata.

The newest enhancements to Teradata Warehouse Miner are supported by the recently announced SAS (News - Alert) Scoring Accelerator for Teradata. Keith Collins, CTO at SAS, said that Teradata’s new functionality, and the recently released SAS Scoring Accelerator, are integrated and complementary solutions.

Teradata’s officials pointed out that the an initial benchmark of the SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata demonstrated the ability to process the number of records “45 times faster” than the traditional scoring method.

Moreover, the SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata also eliminates the need for manual translation of the SAS scoring code into SQL, or structured query language.

From the Press Release -

Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for business intelligence, and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that Reliance Communications is using Greenplum Database, running on the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance, to power a range of applications, from legal and regulatory compliance to call detail record analysis.

Greenplum Database is the world’s fastest, most cost-effective solution for analyzing the massive amounts of information generated by surging worldwide usage of wireless and broadband services. The Data Warehouse Appliance powered by Sun and Greenplum is the industry’s first cost-effective, high-performance super-capacity data warehouse appliance. Purpose-built for high-performance, large-scale data warehousing, the solution integrates best-in-class database, server, and storage components into one easy-to-use, plug-and-play system.

“The Sun Data Warehouse Appliance running Greenplum Database is helping Reliance meet its goal of superior responsiveness in a challenging data environment — one that is characterized by rapid growth and increasing user demand,” said Raj Joshi, VP and Head (Decision Support Systems) at Reliance Communications Limited. “Deploying the joint Greenplum and Sun solution improved our response times and enabled Reliance Communications to improve our data management.”

Reliance Communications Limited is the telecommunications company of Reliance ADA Group which is one of India’s largest industrial groups. Reliance Communications is known for its innovative market offerings and practices. As Reliance has grown to more than 40 million subscribers, providing accurate and timely data support and analytics to all parts of the business has been a challenge. Turning an ad hoc request from historical records could take multiple hours; even loading a day’s worth of data into the system could take up to three hours.

From TDWI Article -

To start down this path, you will obviously need to take a more holistic view of your organization’s information and technology architecture to learn what data is available to your end users. You also need to spend time learning what is missing today from the BI environment. Don’t be surprised if people at first cannot articulate their needs in this arena — most people do not believe current tools can support this analysis!

In conjunction with this internal fact-finding, stay abreast of the evolution of “unstructured” content software and service solutions. Although these concepts have been around for some time, some technological developments have emerged only recently to allow some of the more interesting analysis and integration opportunities in this area.

Finally, keep experimenting! The BI market has grown and matured substantially in the last several years, and this is an exciting new area where we can all stretch and investigate. As famous engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller once quipped, “There is no such thing as a failed experiment — only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”

One Petabyte of mixed relational and unstructure data. That’s neat.

More from the Sybase Press Release -

Sybase, Inc. (NYSE: SY), the largest enterprise software and services company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information, today announced that the Sybase® IQ analytics server has set a new Guinness World Record™ by powering the world’s largest data warehouse on a Sun™ SPARC® Enterprise M9000 server. This accomplishment was achieved using Sybase IQ, BMMsoft ServerSM and the Sun Microsystems® Data Warehouse Reference Architecture. This winning combination enables more data to be stored in less space, searched and analyzed in less time, while consuming 91 percent less energy and generating less heat and carbon dioxide than conventional solutions.

Powered by the category-leading column-oriented database Sybase IQ, the data warehouse is certified to support a record-breaking one petabyte of mixed relational and unstructured data—more than 34 times larger than the largest industry standard benchmark1 and twice the size of the largest commercial data warehouse known to date2. In total, the data warehouse contains six trillion rows of transactional data and more than 185 million content-searchable documents, such as emails, reports, spreadsheets and other multimedia objects.
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Designed from the ground up as an analytics server, Sybase IQ produces its impressive results because of a unique architecture combining a column-oriented data structure with patented indexing and a scalable grid. Sybase IQ offers extraordinarily high performance at a lower cost than a traditional, row-oriented database. And, unlike traditional row-based data warehouses, the stored data in Sybase IQ is compressed by up to 70 percent of its input size, creating the most optimal and elegant analytics solutions.

“The results of this benchmark showcase Sybase IQ’s capabilities to handle real-world scenarios, querying vast amounts of data representing the transactions processed across the worldwide financial trading networks over multiple years.” said Francois Raab, president, InfoSizing, the consulting firm that oversaw the benchmarking of the record. “Sybase IQ has proven its production strength in handling the volume of multimedia documents representative of the electronic communication between half a million financial traders.”

Teradata Corporation has introduced a new family of platforms from entry-level to active enterprise data warehouses that addresses many customer needs (especially of Indian and other similar markets). Powered by the Teradata 12.0 database engine, the family includes Teradata 550 SMP (symmetric multiprocessing), Teradata 2500, and Teradata 5550.

Teradata 550 SMP is a departmental data warehouse, designed to meet customers’ need for a smaller, less expensive system. It is simple to set up and can use the Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system or Windows. In addition, customers can license and run the Teradata 12 database on their choice of Intel-based platforms, starting at $40,000. Teradata Express Edition, a free developer version of Teradata 12, is available to work on Windows servers and laptops for development, testing and learning.

From EFY News article.

TDWI is running a series on developing and deploying Data Warehousing, frugally. It’s a 3 part series. Read Part 1 and 2.

Although seemingly difficult, you can make choices, which allow for the beneficial realization of data warehousing while also minimizing costs. By balancing technology and carefully positioning your business, your organization can quickly create cost-effective solutions using data warehousing technologies.

There are a few simple rules to help you develop a data warehouse on a shoestring budget:

* Use what you have
* Use what you know
* Use what is free
* Buy only what you have to
* Think small and build in phases
* Use each phase to finance or justify the remainder of the projects

It’s also a must read for businesses which have enough business sponsorship and enormous resources. Tough times in the marketplace like these call for an economical way of staying ahead on the business curve. And that’s exactly the point of this series.

I like the detailed approach Nathan Rawling towards this topic.

Press Release - Protegrity and Teradata today announce unmatched data warehouse encryption performance

Protegrity Corporation, the leading provider of Data Security Management solutions, and Teradata, the global leader in Enterprise Data Warehousing today announced new cryptography performance of over 6 million decryptions and over 9 million encryptions per second, enabling customers to maximize data protection while minimizing impact on business operations.

“Our research shows that businesses worry that data protection may impact application performance. These test results show that the partnership between Teradata and Protegrity delivers proven enterprise solutions that help customers protect data and achieve regulatory compliance with industry-leading system performance,” said Gordon Rapkin, president and chief executive officer of Protegrity.

The Protegrity Defiance® Defiance DPS uses Teradata User Defined Functions (UDFs) to embed encryption/decryption functionality in the database. Teradata’s high performance UDF implementation and parallel architecture provides highly efficient execution, and then scales that performance linearly as the system grows in size.

“High performance data protection enables our customers to confidently meet their privacy and compliance obligations,” said Randy Lea, vice president, Teradata products and services. “The efficiency of this data protection solution frees our customers from the technical challenges to focus on the value of business analytics. This data, rich with insight, provides a better understanding of consumers.”

The test included the Defiance® Data Protection System utilizing industry standard strong Advanced Encryption Standard and Teradata 12 on a six-node (12 Intel® Xeon® processors) Teradata 5550 Platform.

Since 2004, Protegrity and Teradata have collaborated on enterprise-level data encryption and management. In June 2005, the companies announced a global partnership to deliver database security for Teradata customers.

ABOUT TERADATA
Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is the world’s largest company solely focused on raising intelligence through data warehousing and enterprise analytics. Teradata is in more than 60 countries and on the Web at www.teradata.com.

ABOUT PROTEGRITY
Protegrity delivers centralized data security management solutions that protect sensitive information from acquisition to deletion across the enterprise. Protegrity’s customers maintain complete protection over their data and business by employing software and solutions specifically designed to encrypt data, safeguard web applications, and manage and report on security policy.

The company’s singular focus is on developing solutions that protect data. Protegrity employees are security technology specialists with deep expertise in encryption, key management, web application firewalls and security policy in distributed environments. Maximize security with minimal business impact with Protegrity’s Defiance® Suite, the high performance, transparent solution optimized for the dynamic enterprise.

To learn more, visit www.protegrity.com or call 203.326.7200

That’s really a great news to the BI world during these dull days of business. I’m sure other companies will start becoming confident on the never understood phenomenon of ROI. Makes a day !!

According to research presented in a new report, “Data Management for Business Intelligence,” 77% of Best-in-Class companies are able to automate the integration of data from multiple sources, compared to 54% of Industry Average companies, and only 22% of Laggards. This capability was identified by respondents as being critical for solving the top business pressure — the need to reduce the time-to-information for non-technical end-users.

Best-in-Class companies are making investments in technology enablers to alleviate this pressure. 82% of Best-in-Class companies are currently utilizing data warehousing software solutions, versus 56% of all other respondents. 80% of Best-in-Class companies are currently deploying Business Intelligence query and reporting tools, versus 47% of all other respondents. Finally, 68% of Best-in-Class companies are currently implementing data warehouse appliance technology (packaged hardware and software solutions) versus only half that number (34%) of all other respondents.