Free Your Data!

Much has been written in the blogosphere recently of Oracle's Public Cloud announcement at the recent Oracle OpenWorld, and what (according to Larry) it means for data portability and the integration industry in general.

Quoting Larry from his keynote, comparing with Salesforce.com:  "Our cloud's a little bit different ... our cloud is based on industry standards and supported full interoperability with other clouds. ... you can take any existing Oracle database you have and move it to our cloud.  Just move it across and it runs unchanged.  Oh by the way, you can move it back if you want to."  He went on to say that Force.com is the "roach model of cloud services" due to its use of custom/proprietary programming languages like APEX.  "You can check in, but you can't check out."





 This makes for entertaining press, but the subtext here is that all one needs for data integration is some open standard APIs and the ability to run an Oracle database instance anywhere.  In other words, it's all about portability.

Perhaps.  If you have chosen to delegate all of your data to an Oracle-only software stack, then knowing you are "free" to run that database pretty much anywhere you want may feel liberating, freeing you from the dark forces of vendor lockin.  In other words, avoid data lockin by ... wait for it ... consenting to lock in your data to one vendor's database?   Really? And this coming from one of the great industry consolidators of  the last decade, a strategy whose success depends on the maintenance revenue of customers keeping their data right where it is.

2012 Predictions Season already starting - Big Data front and center

2012 predictions season seems to be starting early this year, and not surprisingly Big Data is showing up on everybody's lists. The top 10 list from Nucleus Research caught my eye, not because of the obligatory Big Data listing (it showed up as #5), but because of how relevant Big Data is to several other trends that were listed.

As frequent readers of this blog will soon recognize as a common theme here - the real value in Big Data is in the opportunities it creates, far beyond solving its "big mess" management problems. In other words, maximizing the return on data.

Without going into the details of Nucleus' report (free download can be found here) specific areas that seem particularly ripe for Big Data related opportunity include:

The Real Value of Big Data

So you're an IT manager (or an architect, or a business analyst, ...), and a vendor tells you that the amount of data in your org is exploding, and unless you buy from them RIGHT NOW, then you'll be left with an unmanageable Big Mess. By now you have probably heard it often enough that you're not sure whether to believe it. You've gotten this far without the latest newfangled tool from company X, you're not yet up to your eyeballs in messes, so why the urgency? Why not just keep doing what you're doing?

Good question. Actually, any vendor that tries to sell this way is missing the point. I've heard the same pitches - enough times to wonder if they are all just copying the same script. "You're drowning in data, blah blah." Where's the imagination? Instead the point should be about the opportunities to be seized, not the problems to solve. It should be about the business value of that data - and helping you understand how you can benefit from it. For example:

Big Data Integration with Informatica's Ash Kulkarni