Last time I mentioned GoodData, it was in passing, as I discussed YouCalc
and other SaaS BI players. In the ensuing year, many other toes have
been dipped into the water. I sat down with GoodData CEO and founder
Roman Stanek and Marketing VP Sam Boonin this week to catch up on how
it's all going, and from where they sit, the news seems to look pretty
good. With 40 employees, 25 customers since last November, and a funding
round from the likes of Marc Andreesen and Tim O'Reilly, GoodData seems
to be off to a GoodStart. And now it has a new initiative: free
analytics for other SaaS players to expand its presence.

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One of the more philosophical questions analysts like to ask is "What is Big Data?" It's relative - it begs the question, "what's big?" And that is a constantly moving number, and always assessed by comparison to the ridiculous amounts some companies work with. But Big Data as a concept in IT parlance today tends to mean something fairly specific, not just about size but also about composition and the nature of the processing. So I considered a serious attempt at a fairly rigorous discussion about the nature of the workload, structure of the data and the kinds of analytics that comprise what people think of as Big Data....and then I thought of Steve Martin, who would have considered this carefully and then looked into the camera and said "Naaaahh." So I determined to emulate him and have a bit of fun instead, by crowdsourcing some help completing the sentence "You know you have Big Data when..." Here's what some Twitter folks said. Some are funny, some more serious ...

You know you have Big Data when....

... you get a call from the utility company asking you not to run 'that brownout query' again. (@aristippus303 at Datawatch)

... your IT spends more time purchasing storage capacity than making sure the business has the data they need - @judyiko (Informatica)

.,. EMC name a new product after you (@aristippus303 at Datawatch)

...  it piles up so high that it disappears into the clouds (@evertlammerts - I assume pun was intended?)

...  the SAN undergoes gravitational collapse and you get cited by OSHA for an unlicensed singularity. (@datamartist)

...  a query is long enough to require a couple of DBA generations to see it returning first data. (@Stray_Cat)

...  your datacenter manager divides time between installing a new NAS in the kitchen and googling for vacant aircraft hangars. (@alanjharrison)

And a few of mine:

...  you conduct an audit, including external files, and add more in to the databases than you take out.

...  you think Flomax is a new ETL product.

...  the first item on your bucket list is "finish data model."

...  you've never gotten to the "Reduce" part.

...  your Dad won't let you have the keys to the table you want to join to because he's still doing the schema update he started on your birthday. No, your BIRTH day.

OK - that's way more than enough. Don't you have a schema to update? Get back to work. If you get bored, send me some more.

Oracle's newest BI release is massive, spans multiple
product categories, and raises the bar for competitors in dramatic
fashion. In my prior post I focused on its rollout and competitive
posture. The market has waited a long time as the reconciliation of
many moving parts was accomplished - most notably the convergence of the
Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) offering and Oracle
Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). Hyperion integration
with its Essbase acquisition was not complete. In 2007, OBI's newest
release (10.1.3) was most notable in many eyes for its new Microsoft
Office support. PeopleSoft and Siebel had been acquired some two years
before that, and Master Data Management was already a topic of
discussion then (2005). There was a long way to go. And analysts? Well,
think of us as the kids in the back: "Are we there yet?"

More - warning - it's quite long.

Tibco, fresh from a Q2 with license revenue up 23%
over last year's, continuing a two year run of beating consensus
earnings estimates, has stepped up and out ahead to pursue the
long-coveted mid-market customers who don't use BI but find that
spreadsheets don't do enough.  Tibco believes, like Microsoft, that many
are social technology users: they have blogs and use other channels
available to them, and they will build and share reports given the
chance. So, says Tibco, here it is: building on the Silver
cloud platform it's had in beta for about a year, Tibco is
introducing Silver Spotfire, with an offer tuned to the cloud user - a
no-cost, no-obligation, no-risk 1-year trial of a Spotfire play in the cloud requiring no IT
involvement. "All you need is a browser," is the pitch, and this is not
from a new company you don't know, but an established  player with a
sizable roster of enterprise BI customers.
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Oracle is not first in BI, and wants to change that - that was the clear
message of a well executed, multi-site "real plus virtual" event with
top executives showing off the result of a multi-year effort to
rationalize and integrate a set of leading but overlapping components
into a seamless suite. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
11g (OBIEE) deserves the accolades it has already received from analysts
who welcomed its announcement - it makes bold and serious bets on
effective centralized metadata administration, data integration/
unification and optimized analytic architecture, collaboration,
globalization, mobile device support, and a powerful link to action that
will be most effective (unsurprisingly) with its own business
applications. While it misses some pieces - fully integrated in-memory
processing, SaaS and cloud support among them - these will be
forthcoming, and Oracle is clearly committed to a quicker release cycle
now that the thorny internal politics around legacy products seem to be
resolved. But its competitive focus may be misdirected; while SAP is
still ahead in market share, IBM is the bigger threat in the
marketplace.

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EMC's acquisition of Greenplum, announced today as a cash transaction, reaffirms the obvious: the Big Data tsunami upends conventional wisdom. It has already reshaped the market, spawning the most ferment in the RDBMS (and non-R DBMS via the noSQL players) space in years. When I first posted on Greenplum over a year ago, I said that

"Open source + capital has created an intriguing new model of rapid innovation in "mature" markets, and the database space - like BI - is not a done deal. It is indeed possible to escape the gravity well, if you execute. Greenplum is getting it done, and is among the new stars to watch."

Why the open source reference? Greenplum uses a parallelization layer atop PostgreSQL (like Aster, another of the new breed of ADBMS.)

Now EMC has written the next chapter in that story. In the process, it adds a new piece (after literally dozens of others in the past few years) to its own portfolio, which already includes unstructured data (via Documentum) and virtualization (via VMWare), layered in among the industry-leading storage and information management pieces. Disruptive? You bet. Is EMC finished? I doubt it. Candidates? BI tools, ETL, MDM, data integration come to mind. Losers? At least one big one. Read on.

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In my coverage of SAP's Sybase acquisition, I noted
that SQL Anywhere is a best kept secret among more than 20,000
developers who relish its ease of embedding and minimal database
administration. Now Sybase is about to release its next version, SQL
Anywhere 12, with ambitions to add to its claimed ten million users
worldwide using SQL Anywhere-powered applications. Geospatial features,
key to mobile applications, will feature prominently.
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