Stories by James Kobielus

Ellison hypes Oracle's data warehouse appliance

The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.

Data warehouse 2.0

Analytic databases are the principal engines driving business intelligence, delivering operational data into reports, dashboards and ad-hoc queries.

US recession fears put focus on business intelligence

Modern economies are hypochondriacs of the highest order. They check their own pulses at obsessive intervals, searching for symptoms of weakness, ever ready to fend off decline through stimulants that may or may not help the situation.

Complex event processing: still on the launch pad

Complex event processing has a sleek, shiny, space-age allure. CEP has been blinking on the IT industry's "next big thing" radar for quite a while, promising business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams.

Semantic Web: Stuck in neutral

Ubiquitous semantic interoperability is like world peace: It's a goal so grandiose, nebulous and contrary to the fractious realities of distributed networking that it hardly seems worth waiting for.

Business intelligence gets collaborative

Collective intelligence is an organization's most precious asset. It's what makes the difference between a successful enterprise, one that can pool its expertise to address common opportunities and threats, and a competitive also-ran.

Real-time needs drive data retooling

Business battles are fought in real time, and IS must keep pace. Real-time business intelligence infrastructures promise a never-ending stream of fresh information, insight and decision support to frontline knowledge workers.

SOA platform vendors will own ESB market

Enterprise service bus is the most promising new middleware approach. ESB generally refers to integration software that supports simple, expedited, loosely coupled, standards-based, service-oriented integration. It also refers to a segment of the middleware market that converges the best features of message-oriented middleware, integration brokers and Web services.

The ROI of SOA

Fundamentally, SOA is a development methodology that encourages sharing of remotely invocable application functions throughout networks. It's a way of doing more with less, where applications can be built more quickly and incrementally, with fewer lines of original code.

New buzzword, same old mess

Middleware is spaghetti that just keeps looping and layering new approaches over old. The industry keeps ladling more sauce over the mess, in terms of such nebulous nomenclature as enterprise application integration, enterprise information integration, business process management and message-oriented middleware.

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