Visual Numerics is a 100 person, privately held company that’s been around for a while - nearly 40 years - and yet is largely under the radar thanks to the size of other “analytics” companies. As the business world moves from BI to analytics it is sometimes finding that BI tools are really focused on [...]

Greg Olsen from Coghead presented how they are using Intalio’s BPMS. Greg is a believer in “small BPM” - something to extend and enhance something else. Greg’s experience led him to conclude that some basic database/process capabilities could be very useful to non-developers. Coghead was a platform as a service play from the beginning and [...]

Joe McKendrick in his Eye on the Enterprise blog had a post on legacy modernization - Time to Cut COBOL from Life Support in which he referenced a post by James McGovern The mainframe is not evil, but COBOL is… in which James says
that there’s no reason why aging COBOL apps can’t be replaced with [...]

Mike Gilpin and Noel Yuhanna gave a presentation on how informaton-as-a-service can help your projects and applications. Many SOA implementations were focused on transactional solutions but Forrester found that many used the same service infrastructure to expose information - e.g. a customer update service which exposes the current address also. Theme: Information-as-a-service (IaaS) offers to [...]

Neil and I caught up with Joe Foley, Chief Architect and Kirsten Chapman, VP Global Marketing and Alliances from i-lluminate this week. illuminate (www.i-lluminate.com) is a Spanish company that has recently begun to expand in the US.
illuminate is trying to tackle what it sees as the unsolved performance problem of ad-hoc analysis in companies who [...]

The folks at Kognitio gave me a quick overview of their WX2 product recently. WX2 is aimed at three distinct areas:

Software platform for high performance analytics
Data as a Service - it is being offered hosted to SMBs for instance
Data Warehouse Appliances

WX2 came out of the UK and is the end result of [...]

Darren from ASG presented next on Metadata enabled Business/IT Integration. Business metadata can be contained in all sorts of things like data models, XML and database schemas, process definitions, ERP/CRM etc. Not clear who created what or which ones are “right” and things like mergers and acquisitions may create new problems. There is no “right” [...]

Terry from Pinnacle Entertainment (a gaming company) was up after lunch on The Business Drivers Behind Creating an Enterprise Data Architecture in the Gaming Industry. Pinnacle has 12 properties, none in Vegas, and competes with the likes of Harrah’s (used as a case study by Stephen Brobst yesterday). Pinnacle started with a marketing data warehouse, [...]