Microsoft to Acquire DATAllegro
Prompting some speculation as to whether a consolidation in the data warehouse appliance sector might start to occur, Microsoft Corp. last week announced that it intends to snap up DATAllegro. Microsoft said the acquisition will extend the capabilities of its mission-critical data platform, making it easier and more cost-effective for customers of all sizes to manage and gain insight from data.
Because DATAllegro is one of the few data warehouse appliances built on a non-proprietary hardware platform including Dell and Bull servers and EMC storage, Microsoft said DATAllegro's architecture makes it “ideally suited” to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server.
After completing the acquisition, Microsoft will retain most of DATAllegro's team as well as its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, CA, making it a Center of Excellence for data warehousing. Existing DATAllegro customers will continue to be supported.
"DATAllegro is a tremendously innovative company that has started to redefine the data warehouse market," said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft, in making the announcement. "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers enterprise-class capabilities in business intelligence and data warehousing, and the addition of the DATAllegro team and its technology will take our data platform to the highest scale of data warehousing." For more information, go here.
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Quest Software Releases Predictive Technology for Oracle Databases
Quest Software has announced the addition of predictive diagnostics to its Spotlight on Oracle product, which is used to find and fix database performance bottlenecks in real time. The new predictive capabilities allow users to predict the future performance of SQL statements.
With the new capability, Spotlight on Oracle analyzes SQL performance to determine which statements will have the most performance degradation given trends in execution rates and overall database load. Spotlight reports the anticipated growth in resource consumption and the percentage of the total load a particular statement will consume. By finding problematic SQL statements before performance is impacted, corrective actions can be taken without disrupting end-users and organizations can more effectively meet end-user service level agreements.
“The motivation in my mind is business continuity above all other things,” Guy Harrison, Oracle expert at Quest Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. Getting advance notice of problems, and dealing with them while they are still manageable and before they have had a business impact is the goal. Whatever the mechanism of dealing with a problem, “the business impact gets greater the longer you leave the problem” and if an organization waits until the problem is critical, then there is little choice about about when to incur the business impact of fixing it, Harrison explained. Typically, he added, “SQL nightmares” tend to appear in peak processing, “so everything points to being motivated to detect the trend early and rectify it before it becomes a serious problem.”
Spotlight on Oracle also has expanded diagnostic capabilities for Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) environments. Increasingly, organizations running RAC use services to define and control how workload is distributed across the cluster. With new RAC service diagnostics in Spotlight, DBAs can clearly see how each service is distributed across the cluster’s nodes and what resources are being consumed on each node by the various services. For more information about Spotlight on Oracle, including a technical brief and white paper on predictive diagnostics, go here.
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EnterpriseDB Launches Postgres Plus Certification Program
EnterpriseDB, an enterprise open source database company, has created the Postgres Plus Certification Program, to provide training, assessment, and certification for database professionals on the PostgreSQL and Postgres Plus platforms. The program offers separate tracks for developers and DBAs, focusing on the particular expertise and job skills required by each position. “We believe that it is our responsibility to help those companies that are adopting PostgreSQL,” and having certification program will help employers seeking experts with validation, Bob Zurek, CTO of EnterpriseDB, told 5 Minute Briefing.
For each track, three levels of certification are available: Postgres Plus Certified Associate, Postgres Plus Certified Professional, and Postgres Plus Certified Master. Certification is awarded to those receiving a passing score on EnterpriseDB's certification exam. Three- and four-day preparation classes are available prior to each exam. Classes and exams will be held throughout the United States and in London beginning in August 2008.
Lack of in-house knowledge is a key barrier for companies not adopting open source databases, Bob Zurek, said Zurek, explaining the need for training and certification. At the same time, he said, demand continues for database professionals with hands-on experience with PostgreSQL - “and we want to help database professionals get really sharp and smart on the topic of PostgreSQL and Postgres Plus.” Other factors contributing to the development of the certification program he said are an appreciation in the market for data as companies' most important asset, and the accompanying demand and higher payscales for well-experienced database administrators. According to Zurek, “It was about time that PostgreSQL had a model for further educating and training experts.” For more information and to register, go here
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Magic Software Announces Availability of uniPaaS Comprehensive Application Platform
Magic Software Enterprises Ltd. has announced the availability of uniPaaS (previously code-named G5), the next generation of the company's eDeveloper series. “This is a development capability for platform-as-a-service with rich Internet applications capability and software-as-a-service capability,” Glenn Johnson, senior vice president of Magic Software, told 5 Minute Briefing.
UniPaaS, according to the vendor, offers customers the power to choose how they deploy their applications, whether full client, or Web; on-premise or on-demand; software or software-as-a-service; global or local deployment. By offering technology transparency, uniPaaS aims to allow customers to focus on their business requirements rather than technological means.
For RIA (rich Internet application), uniPaaS uses a single development paradigm and automatically handles all client and server partitioning, thus reducing the time and costs associated with the development and deployment of rich Internet applications. In addition, application owners can leverage their initial investment when moving from full client mode to RIA and SaaS and back again.
“There is great demand today for extensibility of applications - for the ability to run enterprise applications from any location - all you need is an Internet connection, through mobile handheld devices and so forth,” said Johnson. There is also tremendous interest by both ISVs and enterprise customers for the capability of software-as-a-service, he said. “We are finding that many larger enterprises are very interested in the ability to have their own application platform-as-a-service solutions for various enterprises within their organization,” Johnson noted. “And so having a unified development environment that combines both the ability for rich Internet applications and automatically controls the client/server logic and provides the capabilities for multi-tenant databases - is very interesting to that type of customer.”
Separately, Magic announced an alliance with Blat-Lapidot, one of salesforce.com’s partners in Europe. Both companies will work together to implement Magic Software’s iBOLT for salesforce.com’s CRM applications and Force.com platform in a variety of projects beginning initially in EMEA with plans to expand to North America and Asia Pacific. Both companies report that together they have already won three projects.
For more information, go here.
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Business Objects Unveils Enhanced Offerings for Mid-Size Market
Business Objects, an SAP company, has announced two enhanced solutions, BusinessObjects Edge 3.0 and Crystal Reports Server 2008, that are intended to address the needs of small and mid-size companies. BusinessObjects Edge 3.0 is an updated release in the Edge Series suite of mid-market business intelligence (BI) products and offers an open, end-to-end BI platform for mid-size companies. Crystal Reports Server 2008 is a simplified and improved reporting platform release based on Crystal Reports.The new releases reflect Business Objects' “continued product innovation for not only small- and medium-size companies with Edge but also product innovation for anybody who uses Crystal Reports,” Todd Rowe, group vice president and general manager, Volume Business Unit, Business Objects, told 5 Minute Briefing.
There are three key elements to the new Edge release, said Rowe. Addressing the need for mobile business intelligence, now an end-user can access reports, dashboards, any business intelligence from a PDA, a table, or BlackBerry. “Business intelligence is now in a much more mobile environment and is not just for big enterprise companies but is for small and mid-size companies.” In addition to JD Edwards, Oracle and PeopleSoft environments, the new release also includes “SAP rapid mart or data mart functionality,” said Rowe. “Mid-market customers who work on SAP environments can integrate the Edge 3.0 with SAP environments.” And finally, he said, Edge 3.0 “now is on the current version of the enterprise code set.”
In Crystal Report Server 2008, there are three major improvements as well. Crystal Reports Server 2008 enables users to integrate with BusinessObjects Live Office to access the latest information right from Microsoft Office documents. Especially at small and mid-size companies, most of the business users in marketing sales and finance are most comfortable with MS Office, Rowe observed. “We have given Crystal Reports Server 2008 the ability to embed dynamic reports into an environment that they are more comfortable with - in essence embedding that into Microsoft Office, Word or Excel.” Additionally with the release of Crystal Reports Server 2008, customers can access information from a range of data sources including the Web, email, and corporate portals in addition to MS Office. The new release also includes better administrative support for IT with a “command and control dashboard,” said Rowe, making it easier and more efficient to manage file creation and distribution.
Both BusinessObjects Edge 3.0 and Crystal Reports Server 2008 are currently generally available in 12 languages from Business Objects and its certified partner community. For more information, go here.
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