SalesForce.com Journal on Ulitzer
I was lucky enough to be at Dreamforce 2009 last week and wanted to pen down
a few thoughts while the event is still fresh in my mind. I don’t think
there was any earth-shattering news there, and I got the feeling (both onsite
and online) that a lot of people didn’t really grasp the value of
Benioff’s announcement (or strategy) about “socializing” the platform
with Chatter.
I, for one, certainly couldn’t make sense of Colin Powell’s presence at
one of the keynotes (not sure what he can possibly offer the world of SaaS
but maybe I missed something). But overall it was an enlightening
conference and here are some of my impressions (and they pertain mostly to
the SaaS BI realm).
First, the sheer number of bodies at the event was impressive. I understand
18,000 people took part and that is quite a large crowd given how undersold
(to p... (more)
Chuck Hollis just penned another interested blog post about the economics
behind private clouds for the enterprise. There is a lot of talk about
on-premise versus on-demand SaaS these days in the BI community (and when I
say SaaS I mean either private or public).
From a financial standpoint, the two models are fairly well established.
Basically, on-premise is budgeted as capital expenditure, while on-demand is
budgeted as operational expenditure. Much like the difference between buying
your TV and paying for your electric bill on a monthly basis, or the
difference between buy... (more)
Every so often I’ll be talking to someone implementing our solution at a
customer or POC site and the question comes up “what’s so special about
your database anyway?” and “So, is it really different from MySQL, SQL
Server or Oracle?” or “I don’t understand why your database talks SQL
since it’s not a normal database like Oracle”. Better yet: “What else
do I need to do after installation to get this working?” Usually these
questions come from non-LOB folks who are tasked with implementing a
particular solution using our product. Typically these people tend to be
experienced sof... (more)
I’m a glutton for BI information to the point of addiction. Aday rarely
goes by without my “scanning” three hundred or so feeds, blogs,
twits,websites and other news and information sources pertaining to
businessintelligence. I did the same thing whenI was on the software
development side, mind you, but using significantly less onlinesources and
way more books. I find BI to be so dynamic an industry that by thetime most
books are published, the information is already obsolete. And that’s just
on the technical side. On the business front, things change andevolve even
faster.
... (more)
In my last post, I mentioned I was going to do a "trial & error" run on a
recent concept of providing weekly BI tidbits (news items) for people on the
go. Having had some time to reflect on this endeavor a little further over
the weekend, and after consulting with some key people, I've decided to try
another tack. Fact is, I prefer keeping my main blog for "deeper" less
frequent posts.
So instead, I've decided to create another way to dessiminate this
information. Additionally, I'm giving up on the idea of posting items on a
weekly basis. Why cover weekly periods when in fact, ... (more)
Twenty years of extensive hands-on software development, application engineering, customer interaction, management and consulting experience spanning a diverse array of industries and business models.
Scott Sellers
David M. Adler
Anthony Franco
Daniel Morris
Wayne Walls
Niki Acosta
Jereme Hancock
Oren Michels
Marvin Wheeler
Douglas Kim
Ken Guiberson
