SAP wakes up to what every search developer knows, if you want speed be in memory, never touch the HD

WSJ has an article on SAP's radical new SW.  The data access is all in memory.  OOh.

In-memory computing could be crucial for cloud computing, because offering services online requires companies to rapidly process large volumes of data. In December, SAP said it would pay $3.4 billion to acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based SuccessFactors Inc., which offers online services that help manage employees and carry out performance reviews. The company also paid $5.8 billion in 2010 to acquire Sybase Inc., which makes software that can send business information securely to mobile workers on their devices, easing a potential concern with HANA.

I wonder if the Google and Facebook developers look at this and say this is innovative?

SAP convinced Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a large university hospital, to drop its Oracle software and switch to HANA. Together SAP and Charité developed a prototype of an iPad software application that uses the HANA machine to analyze three million data points for 140,000 admitted patients annually and determine if they are a fit for a clinical trial. Using the application, the hospital said it reduced the time it takes to find patients from weeks to less than one second.

"We need all this data in real time," says Martin Peuker, deputy chief information officer for the hospital.

Sounds like a problem has solved over and over.  Now that would be scary to SAP if Google instead of Oracle said we can find the patients in your data.

Or Facebook could say this is a social networking problem, we can find the people you should connect with.

 

 

Big Data Innovation Opportunity: McKinsey study

I am at Fujitsu Technology Forum at the Santa Clara Convention center.

One presentation that you can look at the PDF of is McKinsey's Michael Chui discussing Big Data as a new Frontier.

Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity

May. 2011 | by James Manyika, Michael Chui, Brad Brown, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, Angela Hung Byers
Contributing Practices: Business Technology
Download

The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office. Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bottom line value of interest I saw in the PDF is as  follows.

1. Creating transparency

2. Enabling experimentation to discover needs, expose variability, and improve performance

3. Segmenting populations to customize actions

4. Replacing/supporting human decision making with automated algorithms

5. Innovating new business models, products and services

NewImage

 

Zynga's IPO not so hot, we'll see how Zynga's data center build out goes in 2012

With all this bad news on the stock, it will be interesting if there is an affect on Zynga's aggressive data center capacity expansion.

I was going to write this post on Saturday, but waiting one more work day, Zynga is down another 5%.

Zynga stock falls again, down nearly 10 percent from IPO price

Zynga went IPO yesterday, and closed down 5% from its opening.  WSJ reports on the Zynga offering.


Zynga IPO Fizzles as Stock Falls 5%

By SHAYNDI RAICE And RANDALL SMITH


Zynga Inc. bombed on its first day of trading Friday, closing down 5% in a signal that the appetite for new issues of fast-growing technology companies may be waning.

The San Francisco social-game maker's shares finished trading at $9.50, a day after the company priced its initial public offering at $10 a share. Zynga opened at about $11 a share on the Nasdaq Stock Market, but fell below its IPO price within the first 10 minutes of trading.



Cynical Gartner view of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP

Business Insider reports on a Gartner talk in Australia.  Warning: this is a bit of cynical view that you would guess Gartner did not want to spin in this particular way as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP are clients of Gartner research.

So, what does the reporter say?

Microsoft is all about Windows and Office.

Microsoft mainly wants to protect Windows and Office. Microsoft is a platform company, and its main goal is to protect its highly lucrative Windows and Office monopolies, while establishing other platforms that will be hard for customers to break away from later. New functionality is "drip fed" to users of those core platforms, but new products exist to protect the core. He advised extreme caution before moving to Office 365, and said not to slip into an "all-Microsoft" mentality

Oracle products don't work together as advertised.

Oracle products don't really work well together. Oracle's sales force is extremely aggressive about pushing a suite of products, but has much fewer integration points than SAP. In fact, integration is usually left entirely up to the customer. Oracle is also very reluctant to talk about product roadmaps for fear that future products will cannibalize existing ones. The company makes more than 90% of its profits through maintenance fees, and will do whatever it takes to keep those fees flowing in. Gaughan also expressed some surprise that so many customers keep working with Oracle despite reporting that Oracle is "the most difficult vendor to deal with.

IBM wants to own your IT strategy.

IBM wants to take over your IT strategy. IBM bills itself as a thought leader, but its real business is selling consulting services. To thrive, IBM account managers try to take control of a company's IT strategy so they can keep pushing new products. Gaughan recommends taking a collaborative or partner approach

SAP confuses users with its pricing.

SAP confuses customers with pricing. A lot of SAP customers ask Gartner for help figuring out SAP's pricing and licensing, as SAP has unusual terms for billing data going into and out of systems. Gaughan also said that a big technology transition that was driving SAP revenue for the last few years -- moving existing customers from the old R/3 system to the newer Business Suite -- is almost done, which means SAP will have to be more aggressive with maintenance fees. He recommended locking in maintenance prices now.

And, the author closes with

Overall, Gaughan said that most of the innovation being done in these companies is in their research arms. Their real goal is protecting the status quo for as long as possible.

claiming the companies want to protect the status quo.

Map of Portland Startups, Tech Wizards of the Silicon Forest

Willamette Week has an article on the Portland startup companies and their CEOs.  I was born, raised and worked in Silicon Valley, but moved to Seattle to see what was different going on at a company called Microsoft.  Portland is a 3hr train ride away and I have been taking trips to Portland to chat with the companies who have some interesting software for data centers.

What kind of companies?  Look at this map prepared by one of the companies.

This image is taken from an interactive map of Portland software startups, created on Thetus Corp.'s Savanna multidimensional analysis software.
Credits: Courtesy of Thetus Corp.

PuppetLabs is one of the better known companies.

Credits: vivianjohnson.com

 

The Success Story

Name: Luke Kanies

Age: 35

Title: CEO, Puppet Labs

Venture capital funding: $7.25 million

What colleagues say: “[Puppet Labs is] in a leadership position. I don’t know that they’ve figured out how to grow that as a business.”

“He’s a Reedie. He’s totally a Reedie.”

 

Puppet Labs is the kind of company open-source developers have dreamed of: a startup that lures investor dollars while giving away the guts of its software for anyone to use and improve.

Thetus I visit regularly.


Credits: vivianjohnson.com

 

The State Secret

Name: Danielle Forsyth

Age: 51

Title: CEO, Thetus Corporation

Venture capital funding: $4.6 million

What colleagues say: “She’s a dork, like all great CEOs are dorks. And she is just killing it. Knocking it out of the park.”

 

Danielle Forsyth likes to say that Thetus Corporation makes Internet software for “people who don’t know what they don’t know.”

That Rumsfeldian phrase is fitting: Few people in Portland have any idea that a woman CEO—a rare sight on the tech landscape—is helming one of the city’s fastest-growing software startups, a company that’s been profitable for five years mostly thanks to federal government contracts.

Thetus has intentionally maintained a low profile locally. “We don’t have clients here,” Forsyth says, “and we’re really focused on growth.”

Both of these companies have dogs at work policies.

NewImage

NewImage

RNA one of the Portland startups I visited got bought by Dell.

Dell snaps up RNA Networks

A veritable cluster for PowerEdgies

By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Get more from this author

Posted in Virtualization, 20th June 2011 06:30 GMT

Dell has quietly acquired Portland, Oregon-based RNA Networks, one of a handful of innovative startups that have been launched in the past couple of years to glue multiple x64-based servers together and allow them to look like a single, monster server to specific workloads.