Monday, June 15. 2009

InformationWeek Reports BI Business Grows 22% in '08; Will LI follow?

Citing studies by Gartner, the market research firm, InformationWeek reports that business intelligence (BI) software solutions grew 22% in 2008 to $8.8 billion with only six vendors comprising 75% of the market: SAP/Business Objects, Oracle, IBM/Cognos, SAS, Microsoft, and Microstrategy. SAP/Business Objects own 24% of the market outright with $2.1 billion in revenue. Gartner suggested some bifurcation of the market with IT departments either purchasing "stack-centric" solutions (e.g. IBM, Oracle, etc.) or targeted solutions for specific departments thus leaving mid-tier BI players with decreasing revenue.

It got me thinking about two issues:

1. Are location intelligent (LI) solutions following the same trend: Will the larger, "stack centric" LI providers like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP be the leaders in the LI space? Are they already?

2. Will LI be absorbed into BI as just another weapon for the BI solution vendors?

Tuesday, June 9. 2009

Podcast: Spatial Databases: A Commodity?

This week's question: Is the spatial database a commodity? With all the big database players storing and querying spatial data and several open source offerings in the market, is spatial no longer special when in comes to the database world? Is it time to "stop getting excited" about the addition of spatial support and simply use the technology?


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Thursday, April 30. 2009

SAP, Teradata Team on BI, Data Warehousing

InformationWeek is reporting that a teaming agreement between SAP and Teradata looks to confront Oracle and IBM in the BI and data warehouse business. According to the story, "The SAP/Teradata deal calls for the companies to provide SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on Teradatadatabase, and to integrate NetWeaver BW, SAP Business Objects, and the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, an existing software-hardware combo."

Tuesday, April 14. 2009

Podcast: The State of GeoData Formats

This week we look at geodata formats - what's new, what's needed, what's working and what's not. Among our topics: Google's newly announced Map Data API, the Shapefile 2.0 Manifesto, SpatiaLite and the state of KML in the wild.


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Wednesday, March 4. 2009

Netezza by the numbers for 2008...a good year...and 2009 may be better

Netezza (NZ), a new player in the geospatial market with their Netezza Spatial warehouse appliance, reported yearly results yesterday. The company reported revenue of $188 Million for a 48% year over year gain. Their fourth quarter revenue was $54.8 Million for a 28% year over year increase.

Netezza competes with Oracle head-to-head in the data warehouse appliance space and this sector appears headed for a good 2009. Jim Baum, CEO, stated, "First, regarding our market, it continues to be robust. While many sectors of the IT industry have experienced significant downturns, the data warehousing and analytics market continues to grow. In fact Gardner, IDC and Forester have been revising their IT spending forecast downward for 2009, yet they do state that business intelligence and data warehousing appear to be holding steady or poised for growth." Patrick Scannell, senior vice president and CFO, added, "First, the traditional solutions in the market like IBM and Oracle. We win because of performance, cost, simplicity and time to value, and in this market at this time, those propositions become that much more important in allowing our customers to deploy leading edge technology fast, simply, seamlessly while also reducing their IT spend."

The company noted to analysts that it began operation during the recession of 2001-2003 where its clients were looking for a quick ROI.  Directions recently hosted a webinar with Netezza that provides more detail on Netezza Spatial.

Wednesday, February 4. 2009

MySQL Spatial...Finally Some News

It always amazed me that more attention was not given to the spatial functionality of MySQL. Every time a newsletter arrived from the MySQL folks I looked for recent functionality updates. Finally, some mention of what's going on was provided in a recent note about the upcoming MySQL Conference in Santa Clara in April. A session on by John Powell of eMapSite entitled "Spatial SQL-Who needs a traditional GIS?" will be on the conference program.

For a closer look at some of the new MySQL Spatial features, see the MySQL Forge website.