Dilbert on Cloud Computing

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Dilbert by Scott Adams-Dilbert ©2011, United Feature Syndicate,Inc.
Published at January 7, 2011 in dilbert.com

Tibco announces Tibco Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based BI/analytics

Tibco announced today Tibco Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based BI/analytics. According the press release: "Tibco Silver Spotfire is a fully functional on-demand offering designed to enable anyone to create, publish and share custom dashboards or reports for business analytics and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud. TIBCO Silver Spotfire is more than traditional BI in a SaaS offering; it is essentially a “social BI” offering that enables business teams to easily build and share reports, dashboards, charts, and other visualization and calculations in order to grow a corporate analytics knowledge base. TIBCO Silver Spotfire can be integrated with social media, allowing users to embed live dashboards into their business blogs and online articles, thereby distributing their analytic knowledge base more broadly than is possible with traditional BI tools. "

The good news is: You can use one-year free trial, with no cost or obligation. That is an interesting initiative by Tibco.


I read several comments on blogs and on Twitter about the Tibco's announcement, I would like to highlight:

Sandy Kemsley commented in her blog:"This shouldn’t be a huge surprise to those watching TIBCO announcements to date: at their conference in May, “Silver Analytics” was mentioned in the general session as an upcoming product release, and they’ve made much ado about moving all of their other products onto the Silver cloud platform that this seems inevitable."

Merv Adrian commented in his blog: "Spotfire has had a “visionary” reputation for some time now (Gartner has recognized it as such in Magic Quadrant research), and Tibco has steadily grown its market share, though like other portfolio software vendors, it is unwilling to break individual product numbers out for a clear comparison. Its strong visualization, powerful statistical engine, and in-memory performance focus (with load balancing in the server in its latest release) have extended its reputation. Spotfire also leverages Tibco’s long experience with event processing to provide context-aware features that have driven continued expansion. Silver Spotfire confirms its preference for the visionary play with an authoring client, andweb-based sharing and hosting that will be available for a monthly fee after the trial."


You can register for use the free software trial through the Tibco Silver Spotfire website.

BI: one of fastest-growing cloud SaaS solutions

The Business Intelligence is one of the kind of applications with a greater growth potential to move into the cloud-based computing, according a new study, from research company IDC, entitled Worldwide Business Analytics Software-as-a-Service Forecast, 2008-2013. Search CIO published today an article commenting about this study. The study finds that the number of business analytics SaaS users will grow rapidly from a small base, however market revenue will remain low relative to on-premise software throughout the forecast period. According the study, over the next five years, the business analytics software-as-a service (SaaS) market will grow more than three times as fast as the total business analytics software market with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013.

According the SearchCIO's article, of all the apps moving into the cloud - email, customer relationship management, disaster recovery (DR) and so forth - BI is the one causing the most commotion. That's because traditional BI vendors got too comfy with their six-digit contracts and forgot to innovate, experts say. Meanwhile, upstart BI SaaS solution vendors are coming out with on-demand services that combine BI with data integration. The article mentions several examples of companies that are using BI SaaS solutions.

The article also mentions another recent IDC study: Improving Organizational Decision-Making Through Pervasive Business Intelligence: The Five Key Factors That Lead to Business Intelligence Diffusion. According this study, the evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence and analytics solutions is growing. Business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytic application, collectively business analytics, technology and processes are being deployed to support decision-making. The study included in-depth interviews with 22 companies and a survey of more than 1,100 additional organizations in 11 countries. It found that making BI available throughout an organization means much more than distributing reports to all stakeholders. In some cases, BI solutions are deployed to automate an existing way of making decisions; in others, BI solutions are deployed to change the way decisions are made - on the basis of fact, rather than opinion.

Ten things a CEO should know about cloud computing

Deloitte published a press release in their Press Office South Africa Site, where they listed 10 interesting topics about cloud computing. They said that according to their report on cloud computing, there are 10 things every CEO should know about cloud computing:

1. Characteristics of cloud computing

The cloud is a collection of Internet-based or private-network services providing users with scalable, abstracted IT capabilities including software, development platforms and virtualised servers and storage.

The exact location of cloud resources is of no concern to users, while those resources offer virtually endless opportunities for improving productivity and cutting down IT costs. There are four key characteristics:

* Highly abstracted
* Variable expense
* Multi-tenant
* Immediately scalable

2. Cloud computing should be part of the corporate strategy

Cloud computing enables companies to concentrate on their core business and relinquish operational control and ownership of their IT resources. Multinational companies such as VISA and General Electric have already outsourced large parts of their IT operations to countries such as India and China, which gives more reason why CEOs should not be too cautious about making the move to cloud computing.

3. Cloud computing allows for channelling IT spending through operational budgets

Cloud computing has been able to eliminate initial capital investments and other upfront costs. For most companies, IT is a business support function and not a revenue generation stream, but usually accounts for a huge portion of the company's capital expense. Cloud can help to reduce IT spending.

4. Business agility and IT flexibility

The cloud enables organisations to use technology when they need it and for as long as they need it - scalability is one of its foremost benefits. As business cycles accelerate, many organisations need almost immediate deployment, adaptation or decommissioning of applications. Cloud computing enables accelerated deployment and greater flexibility.

5. Business users are put into the IT driver's seat

If cloud computing delivers on every aspect of the business needs, business users will select and arrange services as required and avoid the traditional reliance on the IT department whose task is to allocate IT resources and manage technical constraints. As much as 10% to 20% of IT spending occurs outside the IT department in business unit budgets. These expenses basically relate to maintenance and upgrade of the IT infrastructure, which businesses would not have to worry about if they are hosted on the cloud.

6. The market is not yet mature

Important providers of cloud computing services are still entering the market and evolutions are yet to be seen. Gartner estimates that the current market for cloud services accounts for approximately R348 billion globally and that it will reach R1125.75 billion by 2013. Analysts also estimate a compound annual growth rate of 26.5% in cloud investment during the 2008-2013 period.

7. Uptime

Cloud computing providers currently provide less uptime guarantees than a number of critical business applications require. For example, Amazon's cloud-based Simple Storage Service only promises 99.9% uptime. But analysts believe that the period of time when cloud computing service is functioning and available for use will improve from the 99% and exceed what businesses can provide for themselves.

8. Integration with the cloud

According to Forrester, integration is one of the top concerns people have about cloud computing. Therefore it is going to be one of the main drivers of user adoption of the cloud. Integration cost and duration, integrating software as a service (SaaS) and traditional applications and managing and monitoring interfaces are key challenges around integration.

To respond to the integration challenges underlying most implementations, cloud vendors are now proposing SaaS integration solutions that offer an easy way to integrate systems compared to traditional approaches.

9. Considerable security and audit challenges

Compared to the standard model of service provision, cloud computing raises strong security concerns, namely:

* Is data safely stored and handled by cloud providers?
* How are reliability and availability guaranteed?
* Are cloud providers sufficiently protected against cyber-attacks?

10. Cloud computing puts privacy compliance at risk

The cross-border nature of cloud computing complicates the control over data location and therefore the compliance with local legal requirements. Overall, it is important for cloud users to request evidence from service providers of their compliance with prevailing regulations.

Informatica Launches On Demand Data Synchronization Service For Cloud Computing

Yesterday Informatica announced Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service for salesforce.com, the newest addition to its family of On Demand Data Integration Services. According Informatica, The new service automates the steps required to ensure that on-premise data is kept consistent and current with data in Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform. Now, business users can easily synchronize all their Salesforce CRM information, including customer, product, opportunity and sales data.

Key capabilities of the new Service include:

- Powerful mapping framework for designing multi-object transformations
- Intuitive web-based wizard with over 100 built-in functions for building transformation rules
- Flexible job orchestration for managing complex transformation rules involving multiple Salesforce CRM Orgs, files and databases.
- Simple web-based management console for monitoring all data synchronization jobs
- Support for Salesforce CRM and Force.com

With no software, hardware or cumbersome appliance to install or maintain, Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service is a Software-as-a-Service offering that provides a compelling and familiar value proposition to business users. It helps Salesforce CRM administrators improve their operational efficiency by automating and expediting the deployment of common data integration tasks.

You can see further product information, in www.informaticaondemand.com.