Jeff Kelly, News Editor

Solution Search:
You've said DB2 comes in three distinct forms. What are they and how are they holding up in the current market?

There's the z/OS form, which is the original DB2, the mainframe version if you will. That one seems to be chugging along fine. Its fortunes are more or less tied to the mainframe and to the large application systems that run on it.

Then you have DB2 More...

Feb 28, 2008
SearchDataManagement.com: A big theme of this year's summit has been extending business intelligence to business users -- that is, non-power users. Why is that such an important goal for Business Objects?

We're very focused on business intelligence for all users. There have been enterprise employee surveys asking, 'Do you have the information you need to More...
Aug 18, 2008

When executives at Corporate Express began looking at ways to improve efficiency, they expected to find at least a few redundant servers or applications. What they discovered were more than two dozen separate customer data systems running throughout the company.

A subsidiary of Corporate Express NV in the Netherlands, the Broomfield, Colo.-based More...

Jan 29, 2008

CHICAGO -- When she noticed the shoreline receding and the waves subsiding into a frothy stew, 10-year-old Tilly Smith, vacationing with her parents in Thailand in December 2004, recognized the signs. She alerted authorities, who quickly cleared the beaches. Not long after, a mammoth tsunami slammed onto shore.

Smith, a British national who learned about More...

Apr 1, 2008

Business intelligence and data warehousing salaries continued to rise in 2007, nearing an average of $100,000 annually, according to a recent report from The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI).

The average business intelligence/data warehousing (BI/DW) salary rose 4% in 2007 to $98,418, up from $94,615 in 2006, the report said. By comparison, the IT industry as a More...

May 5, 2008

The business intelligence market underwent some major changes in 2007: A slew of big-time acquisitions altered the vendor landscape dramatically; Microsoft claimed it was "changing the economics" of BI; and one city police department even used BI to fight crime. Here, our experts make sense of all the recent BI market action and predict what 2008 More...

Dec 19, 2007

Enterprise data mashups may not have made their way to most organizations yet, but they're coming, and IT had better be prepared.

The enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million within the next five years thanks in part to mashups' ease of use, according to Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. Mashups allow business users to integrate More...

May 12, 2008

Thanks to the promise of quick deployments with little to no customization, data warehouse appliances are making their way into the mainstream data center, according to a recent Forrester Research report.

Companies are increasingly turning to preconfigured data warehouse appliances for specific data management and analytic functions, such More...

Apr 17, 2008

When it comes to high-level, potentially enterprise-changing strategic decisions, C-level executives and departmental managers usually rely on, or at least consult, mountains of structured data, often in the form of imposing three-ring binders weighing down one end of the conference room table.

However, they often miss out on equally important More...

May 8, 2008

For Intuit Inc., maker of the popular TurboTax software, customer feedback that was once hidden amidst the flood of customer emails, comments and forum responses ultimately saved the company millions of dollars once it implemented text analytics.

Like many, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company solicits customer feedback via email, surveys and More...

Jun 19, 2008

Though Enron, WorldCom and other disgraced companies that helped bring about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) are long gone, their legacy is hardly forgotten.

When it was enacted in 2002, many feared complying with SOX would prove too great an expense, putting U.S. public companies at a disadvantage and maybe even driving many smaller companies out of More...

Jul 21, 2008

Last fall, with an Oracle ERP implementation in full swing, Welch's Foods Inc. began a search for a business intelligence (BI) system to help manage its shipping and transportation operations.

"The entire company was tied up with this gigantic ERP system, so we didn't want to devote any internal resources to doing transportation reporting [and More...

Jul 24, 2008

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted last week in favor of a proposal that would require U.S. companies to submit earnings reports and other financial filings in extensible business reporting language (XBRL).

Filing financial reports in XBRL will make it easier for investors and analysts to find relevant data through Internet More...

May 20, 2008

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Executives at Cambridge, Mass.-based Cambridge Interactive Development Corporation (CIDC) can't even agree what a download is. So before beginning its master data management (MDM) project, the online gaming software company is first setting out to standardize metadata definitions.

CIDC's dilemma is a common one, according to Rick More...
Jun 5, 2008

SPSS Inc. and SAS Institute Inc. stand alone atop a transitioning customer data mining market, according to Gartner's recent Magic Quadrant report.

The two vendors lead a market that is moving away from complex data mining workbenches, which can do a wide variety of customer data analysis, to packaged applications that use some of the same analytical More...

Jul 14, 2008

Ultradent Products Inc., a dental equipment manufacturer based in South Jordan, Utah, is cutting its business intelligence (BI) tool spending significantly this year.

Ultradent, which has budgeted just $100,000 for BI and performance management (PM) spending in 2008, mirrors the spending and adoption patterns of many organizations that invested More...

May 22, 2008

When it comes to evaluating master data management (MDM) vendors, confusion reigns.

According to a recent report from analyst firm Forrester Research, customer data integration (CDI) vendors and other data integration specialists are rushing to brand themselves MDM vendors even when their focus is just one data domain, leaving many customers More...

Jul 8, 2008

Open source technologies continue to make headway in the enterprise, and none more so, perhaps, than open source database management systems (DBMS).

According to a new Forrester Research report, the open source database market stands at $850 million and is expected to grow by more than 40%, to $1.2 billion, by 2010. Though small in comparison with the $16 More...

Jul 30, 2008

A number of up-and-comers have joined market-leading stalwarts in Gartner Inc.'s recent integration service providers (ISP) Magic Quadrant report, offering customers a wide selection of viable vendors to assist with business-to-business (B2B) integration projects.

Further good news for customers: Increased competition among ISPs is also bringing More...

Jun 23, 2008

Most companies strive to analyze corporate data to improve the bottom line. But how many companies put the same time and effort into ensuring that corporate data is disposed of properly when it is no longer needed? Not nearly enough, according to a recent report from research firm Gartner Inc.

In 2006, for example, an American electronics retailer More...

Jun 3, 2008

When it comes to customer data, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Gartner Inc. now refers to customer data integration (CDI) software, which helps companies consolidate data from disparate sources to gain a "single view of the truth" about customers, as master data management (MDM) for customer data.

But, whatever you call it, the recent More...

Aug 6, 2008

Lest chaos ensue, companies had better get a handle on unstructured content, according to a recent analyst report.

There's certainly plenty of it. Experts estimate that up to 80% of an organization's information typically takes the form of unstructured content.

Luckily, there is a slew of both mature and up-and-coming enterprise content management (ECM) More...

Jul 10, 2008

When a merger tripled the number of facilities Fernando Gallegos was sending business intelligence (BI) reports to, the director of IT at SA Recycling (SAR) knew the scrap metal firm needed a better way to share information with its employees.

The Anaheim, Calif.-based company -- the result of a merger of Sims Metal Management and Adams Steel in September More...

Jun 11, 2008

Spending in emerging markets and in Western Europe helped the worldwide business intelligence (BI) software market grow to $5.1 billion last year, an increase of 13% from 2006, according to Gartner Inc.

But BI spending in the U.S. slowed "drastically" to 5% in 2007, thanks in part to a looming recession and a weak dollar, according to the Stamford, Conn.-based More...

Jun 24, 2008

Just over a year old, digital-content-archiving vendor Sonian Inc.'s infrastructure is almost entirely cloud-based. No in-house servers, data centers or storage. So when its data warehouse provider, Andover, Mass.-based Vertica Systems, made its analytic database available on-demand earlier this month, Sonian executives didn't think twice, quickly More...

May 29, 2008
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