What do lame blogs, weight gain and low golf handicaps have in common?

It struck me today as I was purusing SAP SDN that SAP's stock price moves inversely proportional to the number of Shai Aggasi's blogs posting (sign-on required). Of his 8 blog postings, the first of which was in Dec. 04 and the last Sept. 11th 06, 6 of the posting occured during a period when the stock price was essentialy flat. Once he stopped posting regularly (get me some creative license on the definition or regular) SAP's stock price has risen.  *smiles

There was once a consultant who worked for me that commented the more weight I put on the more secure he felt working for me. His observation was the more meals I was eating out and the less time I had for working out in the gym the larger our sales pipeline must be. He was indeed correct.

I recall readind about Jeff Raikes of Microsoft some years back. While it wasn't this Business Week article it was something similiar that pointed out the fact that the lower his golf handicap the higher MSFT stock price. The thought being he must be on the golf course to close deals- not on the golf course then he must not be with customers.

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Oracle to Pay $99 Million Settlement

Check out the settlement this ORCL whistle blower is recieving from the government. Makes me want to join an in-house compliance or accounting team.

"Hicks will receive $17.7 million -- 18 percent of the settlement -- for his complaint as allowed under federal whistle-blower provisions."

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Interesting debate raging on Jeff Nolan's blog. Do East coast VCs get web 2.0? While this site doesn't highlite the money flow it is interesting to see where in the world Web 2.0 companies are based.

http://www.fourio.com/web20map/

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Enterprise Software After-market for Excess Licenses

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In somewhat of a 'dah!' moment it struck me: Why are we seeing the enterprise software vendors coming out with appliances? Well the marketing literature touts the ROI and TCO of pre-installed, preconfigured software on commodity hardware but I doubt the software vendors are acting with this motivation alone.  One reason very well might be the way existing software maintenance contracts are written.  After all these new 'appliances' are not just software.

One example is the Business Intelligence Accelerator from SAP (BI-A).  Once you get past the eye popping query performance improvements you'll notice that the aggregation engine is the same TREX search engine found in NetWeaver only repurposed for BI and put on commodity hardware.

Naeem Hashmi debunked some of the misconceptions spawned by comments from SAP's Shai Agassi.  Enjoy the paper. 

The SAP marketing lit makes mention of collaboration with Intel on this technology development. Anybody out there hacked through TREX and repurposed it for BI aggregates without collaborating with Intel?  Let me know...

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Time to get serious about blogging

In an attempt to seperate my personal meanderings from my professional POV I've created a new blog to accompany my book Mastering the SAP Business Information Warehouse: Leaveraging the Business Intelligence Capabilities of SAP NetWeaver (WIley 2006). In this new blog there will be a section called perspectives where posts on the Business Intelligence industry will be made. In this 'Happenings...' blog I'll continue to add posts about SAP and technology related issues as long as they are not BI specific (or at least that is the current thinking).

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More questions than answers 

 http://edmblog.fairisaac.com/weblog/2006/07/decision_yield_.html

James Taylor and the folks at FairIssac are asking the right questions regarding measuring the quality of decisions one makes. Interesting reading but leaves me with more questions than answers. Definately worth the read.

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Open Source Business Intelligence: Free or Bait?

I just finished some interesting reading on Open Source software in the Business Intelligence space.

http://www.ventanaresearch.com/oseabi/oseabi.aspx?id=1327

Ventana Research had conducted a survey and the results surprised me a bit-- Open Source BI is being taken seriously by enterprises.  Since the RedHat IPO (Aug. 99 if memory serves me) I have been expecting such adoption in the BI space but I targeted it out a decade. While not mentioned in Ventana's analysis my suspicion is that the adoption is gaining velocity and will hit early majority within three years.

So, I decided to check out Pentaho arguably the Open Source BI leader. The download was pretty straightforword. The install smooth with the exception of needed to reconfigure port 8080 (which I put IIS on after installing Ruby on Rails a few weeks ago) and the sample reports and analytics provided a good sense of the products capabilities.

Two things surprised me: One, the open source license was not a straight MPL (not a big deal but interesting) and two, the software was referred to as 'demo' software.  Having built many a demo  or two when I worked for SAP and knowing a few tricks of that trade....I have to wonder what isn't in the demo that is in the indemnified version?

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Happenings of the UnderEmployed by Kevin McDonald

Mastering SAP Business Information Warehouse Second Edition Nears Completion

The past six months have been an interesting dive back down into the bowels of SAP software. My co-authors and I have been updating Mastering the SAP Business Information Warehouse (Wiley) for the publication of a second edition.  The book is expected to ship from Amazon on or around Aug. 28th 2006. 

I must give SAP credit. They have come a long way in pulling together NetWeaver. While there are two distinct technology stacks and a few installs needed to realize the so-called refrigerator slide; it can be done. Download evaluation software https://www.sdn.sap.com/ and check it out.

While we focused our research on the core Business Intelligence offering there were some really cool options for embedding analytics into business processes via guided procedures and the Visual Composer. The opportunities are numerous and it has me inspired to create a company servicing this space once my non-compete runs out...

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