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James Kobielus

Above the Cloud

By James Kobielus

Kobielus is a senior analyst at Forrester Research in Alexandria, Va. The opinions expressed are his own. E-mail him.

OLAP's cube is crumbling around the edges
06/24/08
Business intelligence is essentially a set of best practices for building models to answer business questions. However, today's BI best practices may be suboptimal for many enterprises' decision-support requirements
Data warehouse 2.0
04/30/08
Analytic databases are the principal engines driving business intelligence, delivering operational data into reports, dashboards and ad-hoc queries.
Recession fears put focus on business intelligence
03/04/08
In the past few months, we've all been encouraged to scout the economic horizon for signs of the dreaded "R" word -- a malady so dire, apparently, that its very name may not be uttered in polite company. Throughout the IT world, we've been scrambling to put together contingency plans for dealing with a down economy, if and when it materializes. Everyone -- IT vendors and users alike -- has been hedging their bets and watching their pocketbooks, just in case.
Business intelligence becomes the jewel in SOA's crown
01/23/08
High-tech vendor consolidations often take place in waves. Sometimes, consolidations are just a matter of too much restless capital searching for the next big score, regardless of whether there’s a sound business rationale. Other times, however, a sudden storm of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) signals the coming of a new industry order, with far-reaching consequences for business users everywhere.
Business analytics sharpen vertical edge
10/16/07
Corporate performance management — sometimes called “business analytics” — is a segment of the business intelligence (BI) market that is undergoing rapid consolidation.
Complex event processing: still on the launch pad
08/16/07
Complex event processing has a sleek, shiny, space-age allure. CEP has been blinking on the IT industry’s “next big thing” radar for quite a while, promising business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams.
Semantic Web: Stuck in neutral
06/19/07
Ubiquitous semantic interoperability is like world peace: It's a goal so grandiose, nebulous and contrary to the fractious realities of distributed networking that it hardly seems worth waiting for.
Welcome to the appliance wars
04/19/07
Over the past few years, enterprise software vendors have ventured well beyond their traditional focus on licensed software packages. Many have begun to offer solutions that incorporate such diverse approaches as open source software, service-oriented architecture and software-as-a-service.
Compliance platforms emerging, maturing
03/06/07
Compliance has been one of the dominant themes in the post-Enron age of corporate IT. Many software providers tout their offerings as solutions for complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and every other regulatory mandate, industry best-practices framework and corporate internal policy.
Business intelligence gets collaborative
01/11/07
Collective intelligence is an organization's most precious asset.
Spreadsheet governance is a must
11/09/06
Spreadsheets are a wild card in the master-data management equation.
Real-time needs drive data retooling
09/18/06
Real-time needs drive data retooling
Collaboration key to distributed data oversight
07/24/06
Everyone agrees that data is a precious corporate resource. Everyone also agrees that corporations should keep this resource clean, current and fit for business. Some in the data management industry have stressed the need for a new corporate role, the data steward, who manages data in keeping with a broad business perspective and an eye toward organizationwide quality and standardization.
Master data management is key to compliance
06/05/06
Companies cook the books at their own peril. That's the principal lesson we've learned from Enron and other corporate scandals these past few years. Even when thievery's not the issue, the messier your official system of records is, the more likely you are to incur the wrath of regulators, litigators and the financial community in general.
DRM will prevail, like it or not
04/17/06
Before long, we'll see the anti-DRM hysteria die down and be replaced by grudging widespread acceptance of the technology. Many open source developers will become fervent DRM supporters. They will deploy the technology to ensure that their authorship of software components is always and everywhere visible, even if they never make a dime from their work.
SOA platform vendors will own ESB market
02/13/06
By the end of this decade, ESB functionality will be common-denominator functionality implemented on all platforms, leveraging the industry's common denominator interoperability stack: the WS-* stack. As ESB functionality becomes ubiquitous in application platforms, pure-play ESB middleware vendors will find the going tough.
Applications: Clients virtualize beyond recognition
11/28/05
Vendors are avidly exploring ways to virtualize client environments. Take Microsoft Windows Vista, for example.
Cisco's AON: A me-too strategy
10/03/05
Cisco is not the first mover in the content-filtering appliance niche - not by a long stretch. But you wouldn't know that by reading its marketing materials.
Identity theft threatens federation
08/08/05
The stakes couldn't be higher. What's most worrisome is the growing prevalence of phishing, pharming and other social-engineering ploys to steal user information. These frauds strike at the very heart of the federation: users' trust in the authenticity of identity providers.
Microsoft's ill-conceived ID plan
05/30/05
It's good to see Microsoft recognizes where it went astray in its previous identity management visions. But its new strategy is too narrowly focused to serve as the basis for a truly universal, general-purpose, federated identity management environment.
The new old enriched browser
04/25/05
Ajax represents a different and potentially more ubiquitous approach that's well within the capabilities of most of today's baseline browsers.
FUD muddies platform wars
02/28/05
All these platforms - Windows, J2EE and LAMP - will survive. All will continue to evolve. But none of them will overcome the flood of FUD that cramps their respective futures.
Taming the XML beast
01/10/05
Traditionally, XML's biggest disadvantage has been its bloated, ASCII-text-based encoding, which requires that you send considerably more bits than in non-XML binary data transfers. Companies can't address XML's bandwidth consumption issues effectively without universal standards that describe how this content can be encoded in binary formats. Fortunately, the industry has made notable progress in this area.
New buzzword, same old mess
11/01/04
Middleware is spaghetti that just keeps looping and layering new approaches over old. The industry keeps ladling more sauce over the mess, in terms of such nebulous nomenclature as enterprise application integration, enterprise information integration, business process management and message-oriented middleware.
SOA and the death of platforms
09/06/04
Welcome to the dizzying new world of SOA. Platforms are dissolving, new concepts are taking over, and Web services will become everywhere shareable and reusable.

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