Forrester reports open source database market at the point $850 million and predicts it a 40% growth (to $1.2 billion) by 2010.
Doesn’t compare to a $16 billion commercial database market, of course, but considering the absence of licensing costs, it’s still quite an number.
“More enterprises are deploying open source databases than ever before,” the report states. “Enterprises are mainly looking to open source databases to support new applications such as Web 2.0, Web-based applications, small portal applications, radio frequency identification (RFID), and other new workloads.”
The report continues: “Every enterprise should now consider open source databases as part of its overall DBMS strategy, as doing this will deliver cost savings, especially when supporting small to midsized applications.”
Forrester also estimates open source databases to be quite capable of supporting 80% of business applications market. The factors backing up this estimation include:
1) Price. Obviously, open source is more cost-effective that commercial. Forrester estimates cost savings ranging from 20% to 55%.
“IT costs themselves have gone up quite significantly over the years, and database management costs have also grown over the years,” said Noel Yuhanna, a Forrester analyst and the report’s author. “[Companies] are looking to contain these costs, and they’re looking for alternative database options, including open source.”
2) Flexibility in use and deployment, which again substracts from the general cost.
3) The large number of independent software vendors and partners, providing a 24/7 support.
That doesn’t mean, however, that companies currently using comercial databases should switch to open source momentarily. The migration process can get complicated, so much thought should be given to a decision like that.
“Migrations are complex, and no one actually has a solution where you can do a 100% migration from an Oracle database or DB2 to an open source database so easily,” Yuhanna said. “It takes a lot of effort, and basically no one wants to spend a million dollars to save a million dollars.”
For more info and to get open source DBMS deployment advice, see .
Apatar just enhanced it’s SFDC connector to process Sandbox’s data using the connector for Salesforce.com.
Sandbox is commonly used by Salesforce.com customers for testing new customizations or features before rolling them out to users, trying out applications from the AppExchange directory, creating a development environment for building applications, and providing a training environment for employees.
One of the at the Always On Summit at Stanford was called on ‘’. The name already speaks for itself, the crporate world is desperate to see something new and groundbreaking, a business solution of the next generation. But what’s the point of moving on to something new, or, for that matter, even looking into something new, if you haven’t taken the best out of what’s already there?
During the discussion, Managing Director Lisa Lambert from Intel Capital said she still finds the broad acceptance of SaaS reasonable.
“I think the real reason is fundamentally that the value proposition really appeals to small businesses. At the end of the day small businesses were excluded from enterprise software … fundamentally, SaaS answered that question. It made a lot more sense for small businesses to buy software as a service.”
The gets to the core of Data Warehousing and explores what you need to enhance your ROI. Here are some extracts:
Having most granular (or detailed) transaction level data is core to broad-basing the Data Warehouse applications.
There reasons for using Data Warehouse as a single reference information source are:
1. Maintain consistency
2. If your production data needs an offline fix (like standardizing customer and product IDs), its better to do that data-fix in one place. If you have separate enterprise reporting and analysis platforms, you will need to do that data transformation at two places, instead of one.
3. Data Auditability: A single information reference point having detailed data will provide a good audit-trail of your summary transactions/analysis.
4. ETL synergy: If you have diverse systems, and you want to have some level of information integration, its better to do it at one place. Doing ETL for summary data warehouse and a detailed reporting database, will almost double your efforts.
5. Overall platform ease: You maintain only one information infrastructure (administration, scheduling, publishing, performance tuning…).
6. Ease of Change Management: Any change in your information requirements, or changes in your source systems will be managed and done at one place.
So then with all these benefits, why is there so much fuss about granular data in data-warehouse? Perhaps because it’s better? That’s how:
1. Brings forth the real issues with transactional data: In summary data warehouses, you can ignore some of the transaction level data issues and do some patch-work to ensure that aggregated data has a level of acceptable quality. Bringing in granular data, will need more incisive surgery on your data issues. This will extend the time of implementation.
2. ETL efforts go up: This is related to the first point. Your key plumbing task in DW will become larger and more complex.
3. Existing robust and stable reporting and querying platforms: Why to fix, which ain’t broken? etc…
The Sourceforge Community Choice Awards were yesterday, and here they are:
* Best Project: OpenOffice.org
* Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org
* Best Project for Education: OpenOffice.org
* Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin
* Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
* Best Project for Gamers: XBMC
* Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
* Best New Project: Magento
* Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation: WINE
* Most Likely to Get Users Sued: eMule
* Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
* Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++
Some are quite unexpected. But then again, these are result of community voting.
Regardless of the nomination, poeple love WINE and its convenience. Too bad the nomination. =)
posted a to a webinar on Operational Data Integration: The Growing Practice of ETL Outside of Data Warehousing that will be held on the 13th of August by TDWI Research Sr. Manager, Philip Russom.
Webinar Abstract
TDWI Research shows that data integration usage – especially in the form of ETL – is growing overall, but growing fastest outside of data warehousing. This is because ETL tools and techniques are increasingly applied to operational data integration projects within and beyond the enterprise, like database and application consolidations, migrations, upgrades, synchronizations, and B2B data exchange. The number of these technical projects is driven up by business events, like mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations, and sharing data with partners.
By attending the webinar you will learn why ETL usage is growing outside of data warehousing, what kind of technology requirements this involves, including new ones like SOA and software as a service (SaaS), how requirements for tools, techniques, and teams for ETL vary between warehousing and non-warehousing projects, which approaches help accommodate non-warehouse ETL without raiding resources of the data warehouse team.
Though quite costly ($3,000 to $4,000 for ), the certification will result in a job classification and will definitely add status to those achieving it.
With Salesforce.com topping the , there should be quite an audience for the certificaion exam.
Here’re some extracts from a very favourable , one more time confirming the program’s value. Intuit’s accounting software can be even better than maintaining at accountant
The software, which ever version the merchant selects, allows him to automatically reconcile banking statements, download transactions and match them to accounts the merchant has set up. He can also transfer funds between eligible accounts as well as pay bills through it.
QuickBooks is also advantageous in that the merchant has complete control over his accounts and he can catch up on the position of his business whenever he wishes to. It helps him organize his work better and keep it current.
Your entire accounting department won’t be able to get customer reportw ready for you as quick as QuickBooks will on its own.
QuickBooks guarantees secrecy about the merchant’s work as only authorized persons, decided by him, can access business accounts. Depending on which version he has decided to use, there are different access levels and a number of users (decided by the merchant, again) can be assigned to access different accounting levels.
So, all you need to do is:
1) enroll for online banking through Quickbooks
2) set up online ebanking with the help of his Quickbooks software
3) wait to receive a PIN number a few days after signing up
4) Use the PIN number to get information about your account whenever you need it.
Philip Howard of Bloor Research is speaking about ETL (extract, transform and load) technologies market in his latest on how to evaluate ETL software tools. Listen to it to learn how to navigate the ETL tools market, evaluate ETL software tools and justify the cost of an ETL tool to management.
There’s no shortage of extract, transform and load (ETL) technology available today — from large data integration platforms to specialized software to free, open-source tools. In fact, there are over 40 tools on the market, according to Philip Howard, research director with U.K.-based Bloor Research. But while all these tools may bear the ETL moniker, they each have different features, functions and sweet spots. So, which one is right for your organization’s needs?
You are sure to get a clearer idea of what ETL technologies can do for your organization after listening to this 10-minute podcast.
Salesforce.com that its “CRM applications and partner solutions from the AppExchange are being used by IDeaS Revenue Optimization to run an entire business.”
The power and benefits of SaaS are widely used by employees across sales, marketing, service and support, client services, product management, company officials say.
IDeaS is an enterprise revenue management and optimization solutions provider that helps hotels, airlines, car parks, and transportation management companies understand, anticipate, and react to consumer behavior. IDeaS is one amongst the 43,600 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the Salesforce.com customer base, according to the companies.
IDeaS has used Salesforce.com’s platform and applications to run their entire business and customize those applications with Force.com platform, according to the company. Among various applications, tracking integration development with their many hospitality solution partners, is one, company officials say.
The Force.com platform is also used for integrating Salesforce CRM with a number of internal business applications, including WebEx and IDeaS’ client and partner portals. IDeaS’ 24/7 call center in India leverages on Salesforce Call Center – using case assignment, escalation, Web-to-case, and auto-response email functionality. Importantly, IDeaS also uses Salesforce Partners for a partner portal to manage relationships with their distributors.
