I just stumbled upon this article by Ajay Bhargava on BeyeNetworks. The article explores the recent trend of closer alliance between enterprise data management (EDM) and data warehousing/business intelligence. I quite liked the way Mr. Bhargava doesn’t leave out such fundamental components of enterprise data as data quality, metadata, data security, data governance, etc.

Here’s his vision of the key component that make up EDM and the fields that benefit from them:

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 this article.

Here’re some extracts from a very favourable review of QuickBooks by Barbara Laporte, 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.

Oracle’s latest release says the company has extended support for its key database feature, Real Application Testing. The company says the enhancement should help companies switch to the latest version of its database, Oracle 11g, although, the feature is available in the earlier versions of Oracle database (10g and 9i Release 2) as well.

“The challenge every IT organization has — be it upgrading an operating system, a database, moving from single server to clustered or from non-partitioned to partitioned — is how do you rigorously test those changes you made,” said Willie Hardie, vice president of database product marketing for Oracle.

Oracle with its 230,000 database customers seems to be making an effort to please all of them by providing them with this feature. What’s more, Oracle is addressing some major issues by releasing 45 security fixes as part of its coming Critical Patch pdate.

The quote is from an interview with Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. Continuing to follow SFDC’s progress, I came across this interview with him and here’re some highlights that I thought sounded quite fresh.

According to Harris, in the consumer world, everyone must think not only on one level, but on several. Salesforce.com thought about software, scale and the Internet; questioning what it would take to build this ‘thing’ they were thinking about.

“When we met Marc [Benioff], he had a vision and had written a two page e-mail detailing that we need to make this as easy as buying a book on Amazon,’ Harris says. At the time, there was Amazon, Google and E-bay.

It turns out Salesforce.com was not first concieved as a platform, rather as a number of abstract layers to help sales people.

…we quickly realized the need to unify them. We continued adding layers in response to our customers; columns, end user interface. At that point we realized it could be a platform; we didn’t consciously do that.

The future of platforms like SFDC?

Databases have evolved. Today you don’t really go into business to write it, you find one. I see platforms heading in the same direction.

Mr. Harris is rather frank in admitting to the mistakes the company has made:

We made two big mistakes: we changed everything all at once, which is a big risk for any business, and moved onto large scale systems. Pushing scale in a vertical sense created a complexity that was just too hard. Then we hired the guy from eBay to make sure it never happened again.

You can read the full interview here.

Intuit, the creator of QuickBooks accounting software, has recently showcased a new product Intuit Document Management System for QuickBooks Accounting.

Intuit research studies show a huge paper overload in the accounting industry. Around 65 % of accountants’ time is spent on documents, filing, retrieving, and sharing files. On average, a four-drawer filing cabinet can cost $25,000 to fill and $2,000 a year to maintain – 80 percent of which is cost for labor. Plus, misfiled documents can cost up to $120 to replace.

With the Intuit Document Management System (DMS) for QuickBooks Accounting, accounting professionals and small business owners using QuickBooks can store files electronically and access them instantly from their PCs. By moving to a “less paper” office, they can help reduce operating costs, improve service, and help protect their firms from risk and drastically increase productivity.

A database, the core of your enterprise data management. How do you know which one you need? With the choice of applications on the market today, selecting the database that fits your needs can be quite a challenge. So let’s see, here’s a few things that could make your list of priorities when selecting which database to use:

* Budget (obviously, first make up your mind on how much you wanna spend)

*Size and scalability

*Speed and optimization capacities

*Performance and reliability

*Security (access rights)

*Integration possibilities

If totally lost, you could check out Oracle Database 11g and IBM DB2 for starters.