What's Microsoft's strategic direction with Business Intelligence? What does the Microsoft BI stack really look like and how will it evolve. These questions and many more were recently answered in a seminar hosted by Microsoft and Collective Intelligence Inc.

The seminar was delivered on March 18th, 2009 at the Radison Hotel in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. The conference was Sponsored by Microsoft and Collective Intelligence Inc.

Michael Murphy, Microsoft Business Development Manager, spoke about the strategic nature of business intelligence and charted the path Microsoft BI would take over the coming months.

Chuck Russell, Senior Partner of Collective Intelligence presented the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform and provided a deep dive demonstration of several Microsoft BI tools and also provided insight into how Microsoft BI is integrated within Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007.

Presentation materials are available in PDF format after the break:

Salesforce.com has changed the way we think about application development in the era of  Business Web 2.0. Generally available since late last year, AppExchange the on-demand application deployment platform, now hosts hundreds of thousand of users and is the home for dozens of vertically oriented utilities solving real-world business problems.

AppExchange is a sandbox where application developers (and power users) can extend the functionality of the core features of Salesforce.com. AppExchange applications can be deployed to the enterprise and are made available to users via the sophisticated salesforce.com provisioning subsystem. AppExchange applications can be purchased in an on-demand fashion from their authors and can be rapidly integrated within a preexisting Salesforce.com instance.

Open Source Projects share one thing in common: they've focused on heavily treaded areas of enterprise computing like the OS or the RDBMS. Linux, MySQL and Apache arose from communities that replatformed a set of commmoditized services and licensed them as open source. What services are next?

Is it time to open source the Business Intelligence stack (RDBMS, ETL, OLAP, Reporting & Visualization)? Well the Eclipse Foundation and two new names plan to make it so.

In May of this year Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley presented at the Hua Yuan Annual Conference. We highly recommend that you review this presentation as it provides some interesting prespective into the impact of the Internet and the role that the Chinese economy will play in the world Internet economy. Poignant and insightful.

View the Presentation Here

Are open source communities a new source of free intellectual capital for commercial software companies?

Recently Jaspersoft announced their acquisition of all copyrights to the most popular open sourced reporting tool: Jasper Reports. Jasper Reports is consistently in the top 30 software products on SourceForge.net. The software product was licensed under the GNU LPL. Jasper Reports version 0.6.6 has been available since April 6, 2005.

Can an open-sourced project be taken private? Let’s take a look at a few of the issues related to the acquisition of the copyrights and the Jasper Reports open source license.

The OSI (Open Source Initiative) board earlier this month issued a statement condemning open-source license proliferation as "a significant barrier to open-source deployment." For its part, Intel requested in late March that OSI withdraw one of Intel's patents from future use. Meta Group analyst Charlie Garry is predicting that through 2010, enterprises will flee from the steep fees of database software licensing and into the embrace of open source.

That's great, say the founders of the open-source MySQL database—David Axmark and Michael "Monty" Widenius—now take it a step further and kill all the software patents, and we'd be getting somewhere.

We've always felt that the next open source beach head would be in the commoditized database market. As MySQL moves to version 5.0 it nears Enterprise level performance in functionality, scaleability and speed. Read this in-depth interview on eWeek.

FEW DOUBT THE LINKAGE BETWEEN BASIC RESEARCH and technological innovation. Historically the US government has funded the majority of basic research done in the US. However, government spending on basic research as a percentage of GDP has been declining for the last 20 years. What is the future of innovation in America?

We're all familiar with the term research and development (R&D). It’s a phrase measuring the amount of money a corporation invests in gathering new knowledge or creating new products. Investors use a corporation’s expenditures on R&D as one factor in determining its potential for growth and competitiveness. But let's dig a little deeper into the macroeconomic view of R&D.

It is hard to deny the momentum attained by the various open source communities throughout the world. And so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that an enterprise web portal is available via an open-source license. That product is called JAHIA and is under the control and management of jahia.org.

We've built several web portals using Jahia in the last year. After quite a bit of research we determined that the Jahia product is currently the most powerful and affordable integrated midrange Java Content Management and Corporate Portal Server on the market. That's right...it isn't free; however the source code is delivered with the product.

The trend in business intelligence these days is performance management and digital dashboards. Real time business performance monitoring (zero latency) requires dashboarding tools that can get the 'message out' by graphically articulating the measurment managers need to run their business.

Recently, Data Jungle, a company staffed with business intelligence industry veterans, has released several new products that knock the cover off the EIS ball: Matrix, Annotator and Reporter...

Grand Central Communications delivers Integration On Demand™ at a fraction of the cost that enterprises currently spend on software-based integration projects. Grand Central’s Network represents a new and far better model for companies to integrate with customers, partners and internal business units. Delivered as a subscription-based service built on top of the Internet, Grand Central lets businesses pay for usage, not software and hardware.

Database professionals can count on being involved in a database migration at least once – and probably more than once – in their careers. Unless the migration involves a small, trivial system, such operations are not insignificant to say the least. Why do migrations occur? While there can be many reasons for performing a database migration, the motivation behind such a thing usually boils down to one of three issues:

• Scale — the current database configuration cannot support the current or upcoming workload and so a new database platform must be acquired.
  
• Cost — the current system has become cost prohibitive given its contribution to the overall business, so a more cost effective database platform must be found.
  
• Integration — for business reasons such as a corporate acquisition, the current database needs to be consolidated and integrated into another system that is not the same (but can be the same) database platform.

The movement to and from even similar platforms can be challenging, but when a dissimilar database platform move is attempted (like Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server)or a new operating system is utilized, then things can quickly become complex. This paper discusses the issues surrounding database migrations and focuses on how data lifecycle solutions from Embarcadero Technologies can take the bite out of such endeavors.

Composite applications and service-oriented integration enable the development of new solutions from existing applications. In short, they allow companies to do more with what they already have. Additionally, the supporting service-oriented architecture promises to deliver to enterprises the capacity for unprecedented agility. Read this important White Paper from Above All Software

While J2SE 5.0 has added many new features Sun Microsystems has also been working to continue to improve scalability and performance, with a new emphasis on startup time and memory footprint. This guide gives an overview of the performance and scalability improvements made in the J2SE 5.0 release along with various benchmarks to demonstrate the impact of these improvements.

With the Sun deal, Oracle now has a hardware business, a cloud computing/data center business and a firmer hold on the DBMS market due to Sun’s ownership of MySQL.

The Oracle portal strategy gets a little murkier with the acquisition. Oracle now has it's own legacy portal, the Aqualogic portal acquired from BEA and the Sun web portal. It's anyone's guess which one get the R&D buck from Oracle.

In the deal Oracle acquires all of Sun’s JAVA intellectual property and that has to have IBM a bit scrambling to assess the impact; not because of Oracle controlling the Java standard, but because Oracle will have a stronger hold on the evolution of the Java application server market. This ought to enable Oracle to compete more aggressively with IBM and MQ everything.

Sun/Oracle may consider bundling hardware & software. For example selling massively scalable database appliances that could compete with IBM, Netezza and other DBMS appliance vendors.

Oracle might decide to leverage the Sun Data Center / Cloud Computing solutions to create appliance bundles delivering Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft or Seibel on a software as service or as a rack based all-in-one solution.

Lastly, the acquisition lays the foundation for an Oracle cloud computing infrastructure that positions it to compete with Microsoft, not only on the .Net versus Java front, but with Microsoft, Google, Amazon EC2, Salesforce.com et al.

Moreover, it leaves IBM struggling to figure our how they'll play in the cloud; perhaps forcing them to acquire EMC and it's child company VMware.

It's no surprise that Microsoft has its eye on the cloud. Cloud computing, that is.

What is surprising is the news that the Microsoft planns to build 20 datacenters at a cost of about $1 billion each in hopes of dominating the cloud.

Now that's chump change compared to the TARP, but in a more rational world $20 billion is still real money, and there aren't that many techs out their with pockets that deep. Google is in that financial league, and it's clear that Microsoft is hoping to "out Google" Google.

"Google has done a great job of hyping its prowess. But we're neck and neck with them," Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's vice president for Global Foundation Service, told Burrows.

I'm not so sure about neck and neck Maybe from a technology perspective, but Google seems way ahead in the mindshare game. Microsoft, the organization, is not structured efficiently to dominate the architecture of the cloud. There are several negatives that Microsoft will need to overcome.

You've automated your business processes and invested in CRM, ERP and other operational systems. Yet, you feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of data residing within these systems. Isn’t it time to monetize your operational investments and transform this data into a strategic asset that your key stakeholders can leverage?

Review this presentation to discover how to use your data as a competitive weapon and facilitate companywide adoption of cutting edge tools and techniques. Learn how other organizations have successfully capitalized on Business Intelligence to identify and achieve corporate objectives while overcoming the three key informational challenges surrounding: data integrity and trust, consolidation and automation of performance metrics and user adoption of business intelligence technology.

This presentation was delivered on March 6th, 2008 at the Holiday Inn, Harrisburg Pennsylvania. The conference was Sponsored by Business Objects and Collective Intelligence Inc.

Tiny fuel cell might replace batteries in laptop computers, portable electronics from PhysOrg.com

If you're frustrated by frequently losing battery power in your laptop computer, digital camera or portable music player, then take heart: A better source of "juice" is in the works. Chemists at Arizona State University in Tempe have created a tiny hydrogen-gas generator that they say can be developed into a compact fuel cell package that can power these and other electronic devices -- from three to five times longer than conventional batteries of the same size and weight.
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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., announced that it has developed the industry’s first 40-nanometer (nm) memory device. The new 32 Gigabit (Gb) NAND flash device is the first memory to incorporate a Charge Trap Flash (CTF) architecture, a revolutionary new approach to further increase manufacturing efficiency while greatly improving performance.

The new CTF-based NAND flash memory increases the reliability of the memory by sharply reducing inter-cell noise levels. Its surprisingly simple structure also enables higher scalability which will eventually improve manufacturing process technology from 40 nm to 30 and even 20nm.

I’ve been browsing the CRM space lately and was surprised at the number of ‘software as service’ (SAS) startups.

The SAS-CRM vendors are beginning to move into the verticals. There is CiviCRM for non-profits and politicos. Sugar-CRM aims to lower the cost of CRM by delivering a widely deployed, open source solution for the mid-market. Microsoft has produced a viable solution with Microsoft Dynamics 3.0.  Of course there is the big gorilla, Salesforce.com, which has the most mature SAS CRM platform.

Vendors like LinkedIn, Ryze, Friendster and firms like Plaxo have functionality that rests on the periphery of CRM. These folks manage and mine the interconnected web of connections contained within the CRM adding value to data collected via sales and marketing activities. MovingOn is experimenting with CRM integration by providing Salesforce.com functionality within the blogging network.

All of the firms mentioned share one thing in common; each provides a web service framework so that it can be easily integrated with other services and functions. Web services are, of course, a trademark of Web 2.0. 

Web services may be the soul of Web 2.0. but CRM is the heart. Web 2 is about relationships and, after all, that is the CRM ‘suite spot’.

Yesterday, Oracle announced their intention to rip out the IBM back end powering Siebel on Demand (SOS).  Many analysts cautioned against customers choosing SOD for this reason.  This decision will impact customers because SOD relies on IBM technology to provide:

1. Database: SOD has been designed and tuned to run on IBM DB2 for performance and scale
2. WebSphere: migration will require porting to Fusion middleware
3. Search: IBM was deeply involved with the development of this intellectual property, which Oracle will have to re-write
4. Hosting: Siebel once claimed having “secure web hosting leader” IBM as their hosting partner was best for customers, now Oracle is a “cheaper” strategy per Phillips?

This migration will require significant time and resources.  It should alarm existing SOD customers, who ma now be treated as second class citizens running on a retired architecture.

It is hard to deny the momentum attained by the various open source communities throughout the world. And so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that an enterprise web portal is available via an open-source license. That product is called JAHIA and is under the control and management of jahia.org.

We've built several web portals using Jahia in the last year. After quite a bit of research we determined that the Jahia product is currently the most powerful and affordable integrated midrange Java Content Management and Corporate Portal Server on the market. That's right...it isn't free; however the source code is delivered with the product.

I've always admired Steve Jobs. He's one part visionary, two parts rebel. In his commencement speach to the students of Stanford he tells three stories from his life. He speaks from his past, connects the dots to the present and then speaks from his heart. His perspective is refreshing and makes many of us nostalgic for the early days of personal computing.

Read the Commencement Speach Here