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Stephen Swoyer at TDWI wrote an interesting take on Gartner Inc’s latest Data Warehousing Magic Quadrant. Stephen talks about the smaller players in the report. Good read. You can read it at http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8712.
I attended the Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco last week. It was very interesting. I had not realized just how big Oracle had gotten and this conference really opened up my eyes. The conference took up the entire Moscone Center – North, South, and West – as well as about 5 or 6 hotels.
Oracle has made many acquisitions and now has a very large number of products in the enterprise space. It was interesting to hear Oracle President Charles Phillips speak. Phillips is an ex-marine and he walked and spoke with tremendous authority. One comment he made was that today Oracle is the IPO market for enterprise software companies. Basically, Phillips was inviting enterprise software companies who felt they had an interesting value proposition and who were interested in going the IPO route to instead come show their stuff to Oracle. If the enterprise software or technology was any good, Oracle would buy the company. Phillips claimed this is good for Oracle customers because Oracle gets to see everything out there and have a good shot at buying anything that is good. This was a very interesting take to things that I had never realized before. Oracle is positioning themselves as a willing and able buyer. Strong positioning indeed.
I also attended a keynote by Andy Mendelsohn – another very interesting keynote. I did not realize that the Oracle database has a 47% market share – ahead of the next two competitors combined (IBM – 21% and Microsoft 17%). Very powerful indeed.
Oracle’s strategy seems similar to Microsoft’s. Dominate one or two businesses and use that to build/buy market share so you can dominate another business. Reminds me of Jack Welch at GE. Be the dominant player in a particular industry and earn high profits. If you are not the dominant player, the profits will be low, so exit the particular line of business and deploy the capital where you can be dominant.
One other interesting theme at OpenWorld was that Oracle is doing lots of good in the world. Oracle went out of its way to show off many of the company’s philanthropic efforts. I do applaud these.
Of course, I cannot mention Oracle OpenWorld without mentioning Larry Ellison. Mr. Ellison was the keynote on opening night and did a lot of reminiscing about the start-up days at Oracle. It definitely takes a different kind of player to be an entrepreneur and work in a start-up. It also takes a very good player to build a company from start-up to one as successful as Oracle. Congratulations to Mr. Ellison and Oracle on your 30 year anniversary.
I was reading the Gartner Report on “Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems, 2007,” and I wanted to share some thoughts. You can refer to the report here: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/article19/article19.html. I found this report interesting in that there are four companies in the Leaders quadrant – Teradata, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. All of these companies are major players, and it is great to see Gartner recognize them. It is also interesting to see so many visionary companies like Sybase, Netezza, Greenplum and DATAllegro also highlighted.
If you look at the leaders, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft all have OLAP within their database. IBM and Microsoft support MDX. Oracle supports SQL for its OLAP option and Oracle also has a proprietary OLAP interface. It is interesting to note that Teradata, who ranks highest in this report, does not have OLAP capabilities. Of course, Teradata does have its AJI’s. When reading Teradata’s marketing literature and looking at its strategy, you see it has partnered with Microsoft for OLAP capabilities. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Teradata had OLAP capabilities built right into the Teradata database?
I may be over-simplifying here, but if you look at Oracle and IBM, it looks like both of these vendors have OLAP built right into the database. With Microsoft SQL Server, you get Analysis Services, which is an add-on to the database. Recent versions of Analysis Services have the ROLAP option, which allows you to leave the data in SQL Server rather than pull it out and build MOLAP cubes. Historically, OLAP databases were of the MOLAP style, like Hyperion (now Oracle) Essbase. Now, there seems to be more of a push to integrating OLAP into the database like Oracle and IBM, and Microsoft with the ROLAP capabilities in Analysis Services.
If Teradata were to build OLAP capabilities into its database, the result would be very interesting. Teradata has a very unique and powerful multi-processor architecture that it has refined over more than 27 years. Imagine if you were to take the idea of building OLAP into the database and, in Teradata’s case, engineer OLAP capabilities into this multi-processor architecture, you would now have OLAP capabilities that could rival, or beat those of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. If Teradata had an OLAP option and if Teradata followed Microsoft’s lead and included the OLAP component as part of the database licensing, think of the win for Teradata customers.
I read the article entitled “ODBC Rocks” on the CoDe Magazine website and I wanted to comment on it. The full article is at “http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=990712172&page=1”. This is a very good article written by Chris Lee who is a Program Manager at Microsoft. Chris made some very good points:
If you read my blog post of September 24th, “http://blogs.simba.com/simba_technologies_ceo_co/odbc/index.html”, I discussed why an ISV would want to build an ODBC Driver. Chris says that “for the data source owner ODBC, is a must,” and I could not agree more. If you build an ODBC driver for whatever data source you have, the data source is now open to the widest set of applications possible. This is the biggest win for any data source owner. The more applications that your data source is exposed to, the more valuable your data source. The business case for an ODBC driver is irrefutable.
