Business information august final by Obrien Uzoechi

Turnaround Artist Makes Sense Out of Tech Dollars

The Trouble With HANA

Wayne Eckerson: Where’s the Team Spirit?

Managing Mobile Now Takes a Look Ahead

Joshua Greenbaum: The Big Idea Behind the Internet of Things

AUGUST 2013, VOLUME 1, NUMBER 4

Business Information INSIGHT ON MANAGING AND USING DATA

Making Bigger Better The right technology helps in scoring big with big data—but it takes equal doses of creativity, planning and focus to set up a gimme putt. PAGE 12 PLUS: THE ILLUMINATING POWER OF DARK DATA BIG DATA CONSULTANTS— WHO NEEDS THEM?

EDITOR’S NOTE | SCOT PETERSEN

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Revolution Is Inevitable

EDITOR’S NOTE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD VERBATIM TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING THE TROUBLE WITH HANA WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT? TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

conventional wisdom held that it was OK to throw technology at a people problem. It was the PC revolution: Business users loosened the shackles that bound them to glasshouse mainframe operators. Productivity skyrocketed, profits soared—and it was good. We are going through another revolution now, the revolution of the cloud and nearly limitless computing power. And that has also turned conventional wisdom on its head. Today, businesses are realizing that they have to throw people at a technology problem. That underlying issue is big data: How to glean information from 1 billion documents a month—that’s what David Mytton, CEO and founder of software company Boxed Ice, says his company processes for his clients at companies like EA, Intel and The New York Times. The demand for information is at an all-time high, and so is the demand for people who can manage data, think about data and act on data. The New York Times recently reported research from The McKinsey Global Institute, which projects that the United States will need “140,000 to 190,000 more workers with ‘deep analytical’ expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired, by 2020.” Already you are seeing companies starting to adapt, as news director Mark Brunelli reports in this issue of NOT LONG AGO,

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

Business Information. Zions Bancorporation manages 1.2 petabytes of data in a Hadoop repository, but without expertise managing it, that 1.2 petabytes is so many ones and zeros. “Big data equals big noise,” said Michael Fowkes, senior vice president for fraud prevention and security analytics at Zions. “People see all the advertisements and think big data can even clean your house for you. But I believe that we’ve had success because we’ve approached this as a team.” Analyst Joshua Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting echoes this in his column on the Internet of Things. For most organizations, he said, making the most of the big data opportunity “will take a change in business culture and a change in technology to make good on the promise that comes from blending two disconnected environments”—those being the machine-data world and the user-data world. Sometimes it’s hard to see a revolution for what it is while it’s going on all around you. Smart businesses are taking steps now to ensure that they are ahead of the curve when everybody starts catching on. n is editorial director of TechTarget’s Business Applications and Architecture Media Group. Email him at spetersen@techtarget.com. SCOT PETERSEN

TREND SPOTTER | EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD

HOME EDITOR’S NOTE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD VERBATIM TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING THE TROUBLE WITH HANA WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT? TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

Chain Gang Gartner each year ranks companies that are on top of their game in its Supply Chain Top 25. This year, Dell fell out of the top 10, and McDonald’s stepped up from No. 3 but has yet to take a bite out of Apple. 1. Apple 2. McDonald’s 3. Amazon.com 4. Unilever 5. Intel 6. Procter & Gamble 7. Cisco Systems 8. Samsung Electronics 9. Coca-Cola 10. Colgate-Palmolive 11. Dell 12. Inditex 13. Wal-Mart Stores 14. Nike 15. Starbucks 16. PepsiCo 17. H&M 18. Caterpillar 19. 3M 20. Lenovo Group 21. Nestlé 22. Ford 23. Cummins 24. Qualcomm 25. Johnson & Johnson SOURCE: GARTNER

1 billion

people worldwide will have “pocket computing power,” such as smartphones and tablet computers, by 2016.

Percentage increase per year in processing power of the average smartphone over the past five years

SOURCE: FORRESTER RESEARCH

SOURCE: MCKINSEY GLOBAL INSTITUTE

$7.6 billion

is what organizations will spend annually on creating or adapting business processes for mobile users by 2015.

Percentage decrease in Oracle hardware revenues between fiscal years 2012 and 2013

SOURCE: GARTNER

SOURCE: ORACLE FINANCIAL FILINGS WITH THE U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

All Things Must PaaS Worldwide Platform as a Service global revenue is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.

$900 million

$1.2 billion

Projected $1.5 billion

Projected $2.9 billion

2011

2012

2013

2016

SOURCE: GARTNER

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

Percentage of businesses that say the challenge of architectural integration is a top obstacle in the move from data culling to predictive analytics SOURCE: VENTANA RESEARCH

TREND SPOTTER | VERBATIM

HOME EDITOR’S NOTE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD VERBATIM TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS

“ BAM is fundamentally real-time instrumentation for businesses that tells you when to step on the gas and when you are about to crash.” MIKE GUALTIERI,

Forrester Research analyst, describing the value of business activity monitoring

A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING THE TROUBLE WITH HANA WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT? TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

“If you try using Hadoop ... good luck to you.” GERRY COHEN,

CEO of Information Builders, at the Summit 2013 User Conference in Orlando, Fla.

“ People who think ‘This is great! I’ve made it!’ are in big danger of failing. Rock stars think ‘This is great, but how am I going to get better?’ They’re thinking five steps ahead.” DAYNA STEELE,

business process consultant and former disc jockey, on who makes it and who doesn’t in business and rock ‘n’ roll

“ Forget the BI and analytics labels—senior execs need that as much as they need a hole in the head. They need business results. BI and analytics are means to that end. Focus on the end.” WILLIAM McKNIGHT,

president of McKnight Consulting Group, on selling corporate executives on the business benefits of BI projects

“ We’re not Big Brother-ish in any respect. We try to enable our employees and respect them to make the right decisions. But we do take information and content security very seriously.” BENJAMIN DOYLE,

vice president of sales enablement and analytics at Enterasys Networks, on the networking technology vendor’s cloud collaboration system 4

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

“ These are ballsy sales reps that are doing this.” R. “RAY” WANG,

analyst at Constellation Research, on the questionable methods some enterprise resource planning vendors are using to extract software licensing dollars from customers

TREND SPOTTER | MEETING ROOM

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Turnaround Artist Makes Sense Out of Tech Dollars

and IT departments have struggled to form even awkward partnerships, the two cultures reside in harmonious balance in the person of Shyam Desigan. In a 17-year health care and human services career, the India native has shown a knack for exploiting technology to cure financial trouble. And like any good chief financial officer, he drives a hard bargain with IT. In just a year as CFO and vice president of IT at the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) in Alexandria, Va., Desigan has led data consolidation, analytics and mobility projects designed to set up the organization for a bright, 21st-century future. He also found $2 million in revenue by renegotiating royalty, IT and service contracts while cutting $1 million from operating expenses, nearly erasing a $2.5 million loss. And Desigan’s dual expertise is not only unique; it’s key to his success, said Beth Bush, AAPA’s senior vice president of member value and research. She credited him for buying good technology—at a low cost. “You can almost see him switch his hats. It’s kind of funny. He almost argues with himself,” Bush said. Desigan has always had an interest in technology, but he began his career in budgeting—two facts the CFO points to when asked to explain his split focus. “I do split my time, depending on the needs of the project,” he said. WHILE MANY FINANCE

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“I come in more from a strategic direction and rather than look at numbers, we really look to drill down deep and really see what the core drivers are.” Each side pulls on the other. “I do take on a little more risk than the traditional CFO,” he said. “I’m not at the bleeding edge, but I know I’m at the leading edge.” Desigan, 40, came to the U.S. in 2000 to get a master’s in business administration at Indiana University. He soon got involved in his proudest achievement: helping to found Monroe Hospital in Bloomington, Ind. As CFO,

NAME:

Shyam Desigan

TITLE: Chief financial

officer and vice president of IT ORGANIZATION:

HEADQUARTERS:

American Academy of Physician Assistants Alexandria, Va.

TREND SPOTTER | MEETING ROOM

Desigan did the market and feasibility studies and secured the financing, including $35 million for real estate. After leaving the hospital, Desigan had senior finance roles at two tech startups. The first, NearMed, a telemedicine service, was acquired by a health care provider. A Fortune 50 company bought the intellectual property of the second, Medella Systems, which sold health care technology. Then came Desigan’s first turnaround. As CFO and CIO of Volunteers of America Chesapeake, a Lanham, Md., nonprofit that places volunteers in human services, Desigan turned big losses the previous two years into a healthy operating surplus by collecting $6 million in accounts receivable and reducing expenses by $1 million. “IT acts as the lens to look at the problem,” Desigan said. “Then you execute the business model for change.” Desigan said he used the budgeting and planning capabilities of Adaptive Planning’s corporate performance management software to help get the job done. Before buying the software, “we did not have a budgeting tool other than Excel,” he said. The organization was “hemorrhaging money” somewhere in its five service lines and 40 government contracts. “We really had to drill back to the actual transactions to identify which parts of the organization were causing the overages.” At AAPA, Desigan uses IBM’s SPSS analytics software and Qlik Technologies’ QlikView business intelligence tools to identify categories of members who are less likely to renew, so marketing can design packages to 6

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

retain them. SPSS analytical models help predict the membership boost from recruiting drives. Budgeting and forecasting happens in Adaptive Planning, which connects to Microsoft’s Dynamics SL accounting software, letting users view transactions in 100,000 invoices.

“ IT ACTS AS THE LENS TO LOOK AT THE PROBLEM. THEN YOU EXECUTE THE BUSINESS MODEL FOR CHANGE.” —Shyam Desigan But Desigan’s most important IT project has been consolidating membership databases so they can be better managed and analyzed. He also helped develop a mobile app for members, and a portal designed to attract new members and serve the needs of existing ones will go online this year. Now Desigan is working on a Platform as a Service initiative that will help standardize the application integration process and cut costs. This steady stream of ideas is typical, said Bush. “He is astonishingly creative.” n is an executive editor in TechTarget’s Business Applications and Architecture Media Group. Email him at dessex@techtarget.com.

DAVID ESSEX

TREND SPOTTER | WHAT’S THE BUZZ?

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A New Side to Manufacturing: 3-D Printing

THREE-DIMENSIONAL PRINTING,

or additive manufacturing, is an emerging technology for turning computer-aided design models into 3-D objects. The printer stacks thin layers of material according to dimensions dictated by the model. Materials include paper, plastic and metal. It can take hours or days to finish an object. THE BUZZ New uses seem to be popping up daily. At the Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo in New York in April, a whole range of companies shared how the technology is changing their business. Fashion designers showed off 3-D-printed shoes and jewelry—even bikinis. Defense manufacturers displayed airplane parts alongside firearms. In health care, additive manufacturing is building prosthetics. NASA is even funding a project to concoct a printed pizza. THE REALITY It’s pie-in-the-sky for most companies. Printers start at well over $10,000 for a home model and reach into the hundreds of thousands for industrial models. It could be years before prices are low enough for small businesses or consumers. For manufacturers, 3-D printing technology could prove a blessing or a curse. It could reshape 7

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

production, outsourcing it to customers. Whether this will kill or create jobs remains to be seen, but one thing is certain—3-D printing has opened up a whole new dimension. n

—BRENDA COLE ,

SearchManufacturingERP.com

Make and Model Three-dimensional printing vendors showed off their products and their products’ products at the Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo in New York in April. Printers churned out 3-D models ranging from combat vehicle parts and action figures to game pieces.

CREDIT: BRENDA COLE/TECHTARGET

$75,000 The cost of an average industrial 3-D printer SOURCE: MCKINSEY GLOBAL INSTITUTE

TREND SPOTTER | ON THE BEAT

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The Trouble With HANA

AG’s SapphireNow conference in May heard about little else but HANA, the in-memory database platform unveiled three years ago. With so much of the company’s efforts focused on HANA, where does that leave the older, enterprise resource planning systems that run most SAP customers’ businesses? Where does HANA fit in SAP’s ERP roadmap and, more important, the long-term plans of its customers? To hear SAP tell it, the ERP platform’s migration to HANA is coming along nicely, thanks to the recent porting of the flagship, Business Suite. Consultants who are helping SAP users draft their HANA plans—and who have an interest in talking up the platform’s complexity without bashing SAP—describe a mosaic that pieces narrowly focused HANA analytics apps into hybrid on-premises and cloud ERP systems. That’s hardly a wholesale move of Business Suite to HANA, but it is a major change, forcing SAP users to reassess their enterprise systems. Most SAP customers are assessing HANA and need a framework for deciding which processes to move—and then whether to run HANA in the cloud. “Clients will start migrating bits and pieces to HANA,” said Nicola Morini Bianzino, managing director of SAP analytics at Accenture. “But they have to keep their business running.” ATTENDEES AT SAP

Leading companies in highly competitive markets are showing the most interest in predictive analytics—HANA’s poster child. Morini Bianzino expects smaller companies to follow eventually, as HANA Enteprise Cloud and similar options make the move more affordable. The no-brainer is SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA. “Usually, BW systems are not massive, so it’s not

HASSO PLATTNER, SAP co-founder, speaks about the benefits of HANA, the company’s in-memory database platform, at the SapphireNow conference in Orlando, Fla.

CREDIT: SAP

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

TREND SPOTTER | ON THE BEAT

HOME EDITOR’S NOTE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD

a lot of investment up front,” Morini Bianzino said. Others aren’t ready to fully “re-platform” their ERP systems and are looking first at batch processes, such as the financial close, which can quickly benefit from the performance boost HANA promises.

VERBATIM TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING THE TROUBLE WITH HANA WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT? TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

SOME SAY SAP’S NEED FOR A FRESH REVENUE STREAM IS A MAJOR DRIVER OF ITS HANA ONSLAUGHT. Some observers point to SAP’s need for a fresh revenue stream as a major driver of its HANA onslaught. “The big ERP deals just aren’t out there today,” said Mike Price, a consultant at Capgemini. The HANA push is nevertheless forcing SAP to reinvest in its ERP platform, including rewriting its core program. “I can’t imagine how many people they have writing code right now.” SAP claims Business Suite works the same on HANA, and some experts agree. “It’s not a different version; it’s sort of an enhancement to the package,” said Paul Hamerman, an analyst at Forrester Research. “They are really able to get some significant performance gains with some of these processes,” he said, citing tests that show a 1,000-times boost for a financial close. But speed isn’t the only boon. Multinational companies, in particular, are slowed down when ERP-based processes are batched together for processing over 9

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

several hours at night. For them, “there’s no night anywhere,” Morini Bianzino noted. The ones that can finish processes in real time can jump on opportunities that would otherwise evaporate. One example: complex pricing schemes that salespeople can offer on the spot to customers, using mobile data downloaded from the Salesforce.com cloud. Combined HANA and cloud offerings will make it easier for SAP to offer ERP in the cloud, but only in single-tenant environments, Hamerman said. “That’s not [multi-tenant] Software as a Service,” but HANA running in data centers with single-instance ERP. In any case, HANA deployments are happening in the broader context of whether to move on-premises ERP to the cloud, Morini Bianzino said. “I don’t see those companies in the next three to five years making a bold decision of moving everything to the cloud.” Morini Bianzino said finance could be the first major piece that large companies move to the cloud, HANA or otherwise—which is ironic. Many companies have been nervous about storing sensitive financial data off-site, though that dam has shown signs of breaching. Morini Bianzino thinks of it this way: By moving financials to the cloud, companies can get away from overly customized on-premises systems and take advantage of the onesize-fits-all standardization provided by SaaS. And that kind of predictability is what drove companies to ERP in the first place. n is an executive editor in TechTarget’s Business Applications and Architecture Media Group. Email him at dessex@techtarget.com. DAVID ESSEX

BI FOCUS WAYNE ECKERSON

Where’s the Team Spirit? As big data technologies make it big, the business intelligence and data warehousing teams that deliver insight are, oddly, taking a backseat in making important decisions.

has entered the mainstream and gets airtime on network news shows, the people who manage data and deliver insights are enjoying no new celebrity. In many organizations, they’ve become nearly invisible. I’m talking about business intelligence and data warehousing teams. Although Hadoop and NoSQL are sexy and new, the bread and butter of big data still is—and in many cases will always be—served up by BI teams. So why do so many teams remain powerless to move BI forward? In most cases, it’s a lack of vision and resources. Most companies today view BI managers as glorified report writers. Executives consider the team a tactical resource that provides information required to keep the lights on. They don’t see it as a strategic partner that can WHILE BIG DATA

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BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

advise on leveraging information and innovative technology to get closer to customers, streamline business processes or evaluate the business impact of a new initiative. These same execs might say things like “Data is a corporate asset” and “We are a data-driven company.” Of course, talk is cheap; real action is hard and usually costs money. When it comes to BI and data warehousing, most executives spend just enough to keep a program limping along but not enough to make a difference. So how can a BI team weave itself into the fabric of the business? Here are 10 things you can do to tweak executives’ perceptions and turn BI and data warehousing from a tactical resource into a strategic asset. 1. Sell it to the business. Compare your company’s

efforts with your top rivals’. If it’s obvious the competition is gaining an advantage through BI and data warehousing, executives will get serious about bankrolling a program. 2. Create internal competition. Show how much the

company invests in other corporate assets compared with data and analytics. Comparing the numbers of employees in finance and human resources with those in data management and analysis jobs often drives home the need for greater investments.

BI FOCUS | WAYNE ECKERSON

3. Get an outside voice. Executives rarely listen to the

advice given by their own people. So hire a consultant to evaluate your BI program and map out a strategy to take it to the next level. 4. Pull BI out of IT. Businesspeople will never view the BI

and data warehousing team as a strategic partner if it’s embedded in the IT department. So take it out. And put a businessperson in charge. The new director should steer the overall strategy and maintain strong relationships with business units and the IT department. 5. Rebrand the program. Instead of pushing BI and data

warehousing, push analytics, combining BI processes with the likes of predictive analytics, data mining and— yes—big data analytics. Collaborate with your business analysts and advanced analytics team and get them to start petitioning for better data.

from key functional areas. Get people excited about the potential for harnessing and analyzing data. 8. Jump on the bandwagon. IT is a fashion industry.

Technologies get hot, get adopted and then get boring. Align your BI and data warehousing initiative with the technologies that are in vogue and you’ll get a second look from executives. Today, push big data, analytics, visualization and mobile dashboards. 9. Do a demo. Better yet, build a prototype system that

demonstrates what those new technologies can do with your company’s data. If it’s blindingly fast, visually compelling or incredibly interactive, you’ll gain converts. 10. Deliver a quick win. Take that prototype system and

6. Advocate for a chief data officer. Change comes

implement it in a showcase application to prove your team can deliver business value quickly. Once you show success, businesspeople will overwhelm you with requests to partner with them.

with strong leadership, so lobby for a new role that will champion data and analytics. This is politically dicey, especially if your chief information officer feels that a CDO intrudes on his domain. But there are no rewards without risks. Shaking the tree will cause some fruit to drop.

Today, with data the fuel of the new economy, there is no reason BI and data warehousing teams should work in the backwaters of the IT department. BI directors need to take center stage and provide the vision and energy to move their organizations into the information age. n

7. Throw a party (call it a conference). Hold an event

WAYNE ECKERSON

with internal and external speakers who can testify to the value of data, BI and analytics. Bring in top executives 11

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is the director of TechTarget’s BI Leadership Research unit and president of BI Leader Consulting. Email him at weckerson@bileadership.com and visit his blog, Wayne’s World.

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA

Big data is not only huge—it’s also hugely complex and varied, and it will take more than just technology to mine the useful bits. Smart companies are turning to another resource—people.

Zions Bancorporation gathers huge

amounts of data each day—customer details and information about online deposits and withdrawals, for example—then feeds it all into a 1.2-petabyte-and-growing Hadoop-based repository. The records are then analyzed to uncover anomalous patterns that may indicate fraud, theft or other criminal activity. But it takes a lot more than headline-grabbing technology like Hadoop—the Apache Software Foundation’s popular distributed processing framework—and related software to turn vast amounts of structured and unstructured data into insight, and that insight into action. The problem begins with big data itself. In many cases, it is in fact big—vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big, as sci-fi writer Douglas Adams might put it. And it often consists of more than conventional transaction data—system and network logs, sensor data from

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BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

industrial equipment, social network posts and other text data. Then comes the challenge of spotting glimmers of useful info amid that enormous space and sprawl. It’s one thing to collect big data; finding business value in it is a much bigger undertaking—one that could burn a hole in your organization’s budget (see “What’s in a Definition?”). Contrary to what many technology ads would have buyers believe, achieving a great return on investment is also about creating the right team, putting a solid business strategy in place, being agile and testing—lots and lots of testing, according to Zions and others who use Hadoop, NoSQL databases and similar tools that have come to define the burgeoning era of big data computing. At Zions, which first launched its fraud analytics program nine years ago, cracking the big data code is a moving target that requires both advanced technology and keen intellect. Finding needles of useful information in haystacks of data has become more formidable as data volumes have exploded over the past decade. But Zions’ bank fraud and security analytics team has worked continually to build and refine statistical models that have repeatedly helped bank executives predict, identify, evaluate and—when necessary—react to suspicious activity. “People see all the advertisements and think big data can even clean your house for you,” said Michael Fowkes, senior vice president for fraud prevention and security analytics at Zions. “But I believe that we’ve had success because we’ve approached this as a team.” 13

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What’s in a Definition? EVERYONE HAS BIG DATA

on the brain lately, and with

deep thoughts comes the desire to ascribe a meaning to the phenomenon, to pin it down once and for all. Here are some attempts at defining big data: Computing data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant logistical challenges; the branch of computing involving such data. SOURCE: OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, JUNE 2013

The frontier of a firm’s ability to store, process, and access all the data it needs to operate effectively, make decisions, reduce risks and serve customers. SOURCE: FORRESTER RESEARCH

High-volume, -velocity and -variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making. SOURCE: GARTNER

The modern-day version of Big Brother. Online searches, store purchases, Facebook posts, tweets or Foursquare check-ins, cell phone usage, et cetera, is creating a flood of data that, when organized and categorized and analyzed, reveals trends and habits about ourselves and society at large. SOURCE: URBAN DICTIONARY

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

Making the Team Salt Lake City-based Zions owns banks and financial services firms and uses an open source Hadoop package provided by MapR Technologies—though according to Fowkes, the company’s experience with data warehouse appliances and other, more traditional tools for crunching large and complex data sets goes back much further. Zions uses Hadoop primarily as a data store for server, database, antivirus and firewall logs and transaction data related to online banking systems, wire systems and customer databases. Fowkes believes that building the right team is the key to turning a morass of information into clear insights that can be acted upon. At Zions, a small squad of data scientists was assembled and tasked with building algorithms and statistical analyses that help Fowkes’ security crew discover unusual trends or outliers in the data that point to criminality. The data scientists also work to cancel out the noise— or the useless data—that usually exists in large and complex data sets of varying types. “Big data equals big noise,”

50 14

Percentage of businesses that were doing big data projects in 2012 SOURCE: TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

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he said. “The data science folks filter out all of that stuff to figure out what is really interesting.” But putting together a data science team was no easy task. The company wanted to begin small and expand the program gradually, building on successes over time. That meant resources had to be allocated wisely, so many open slots were filled with members of the Zions security crew. The bank also made additional investments to increase its data analytics skills (see “Big Data Systems Shine Light on ‘Dark Data,’ ” page 15). Then Zions recruited data scientists with backgrounds in statistics and advanced mathematical modeling. A Big, Big Market As pools of sensor, social media and other Web data expand, so does the big data product market, so businesses need to be open to new possibilities. Zions has no immediate plans to move off of MapR but continues to keep pace with new developments just the same. “With Hadoop specifically, we constantly take a look at what is out there and what is available,” he said. “We’re not against swapping out the technology stack we’re using if there is a compelling reason to do so.” MapR’s main competitors in the big data technology market are Cloudera and Hortonworks, which also offer commercial versions of the open source Hadoop file system. But customers can expect more vendors to throw their hats into the Hadoop ring as the market evolves. One that already (Continued on page 16)

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

Big Data Systems Shine Light on ‘Dark Data’

HOME EDITOR’S NOTE

THE NOTION OF

“dark data” lurking in the shadows of

Edmunds.com has accelerated that process and

EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD

IT systems has been around for years. But with the

opened up new views of data that are helping the

increasing adoption of Hadoop and other highly scal-

company reduce operating costs, said Paddy Hannon,

VERBATIM

able big data technologies, more of that data is poised

vice president of architecture at the online publisher

to come out into the open.

of car-shopping information in Santa Monica, Calif.

TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS

Gartner marks dark data as “information assets

A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING THE TROUBLE WITH HANA WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT?

that organizations collect, process and store in the

said. For example, the new system lets the workers

course of their regular business activity, but generally

who manage keyword acquisition for the company’s

fail to use for other purposes.” Now, the ability of Ha-

paid-search and online advertising efforts quickly

doop clusters and NoSQL databases to process large

assess how changes in buying tactics will affect mar-

volumes of data makes it feasible to incorporate such

keting initiatives. “That saved a significant amount

long-neglected information into big data analytics ap-

of money,” Hannon said—more than $1.7 million as of

plications—and unlock its business value.

mid-June, according to a blog post by Philip Potloff,

As a result, archived data has become a potential gold mine. It is no longer simply information organiza-

TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD

purposes, explained Aashish Chandra, vice president

that he expects more and more companies to begin

of application modernization at Sears Holdings Corp.

auditing their archives of data to identify dark bits

in Hoffman Estates, Ill.

and try to map them to possible business uses. “Much of what we’re doing with big data is resto-

dra. “People were using backup tapes for archiving.

ration of context,” Adrian said. Expanding on Gart-

Now you can put that data in Hadoop and query the

ner’s definition, he described data darkness as a state

data in real time.”

where “you know the transaction happened, but you don’t know what went on around it”—something that

too old to be useful by the time it was made avail-

needs to be illuminated in order to turn dark data into

able to business users for analysis. A Hadoop-based

business gold. n

data warehouse put into production in February by

Gartner analyst Merv Adrian told attendees at the Hadoop Summit 2013, held in June in San Jose, Calif.,

In the past, some data was left dark because it was ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

chief information officer at Edmunds.

tions were obliged to keep for regulatory compliance

“This is a different world we’re living in,” said Chan-

THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS

“We’ve had some eureka data moments,” Hannon

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

—Jack Vaughan

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

(Continued from page 14) has is microprocessor giant Intel, which surprised customers recently with its own Hadoop distribution. Storage vendor EMC has also released a commercial Hadoop distribution; IBM and Microsoft offer ones as well. IT industry analysts and Hadoop users say they expect the technology to grow even more popular as related software tools like Hive—Apache’s data warehousing application that’s used to query Hadoop data stores—start to look more and more like traditional SQL-based data management tools. At Zions, the advent of Hive made a major difference to the security team’s operations. “I wouldn’t say the learning curve was real steep, especially because we decided to use Hive,” Fowkes explained. “The previous systems we’ve had used a SQL-like front end, and that is what Hive gives you— relational database type of access to Hadoop and big data.” Put to the Test Boxed Ice is another company that’s doing big things with big data technology—in this case a NoSQL database called MongoDB. Headquartered in London, Boxed Ice offers a hosted software product called Server Density that monitors the health of cloud computing deployments, servers and websites for about 1,000 clients around the globe—a task that requires copious amounts of data processing. “We monitor quite a few websites and servers for 16

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

MICHAEL FOWKES, senior vice president for fraud prevention and security analytics at Zions Bancorporation, said the key to pulling useful information from big data is putting together the right team.

customers like EA, Intel and The New York Times,” said David Mytton, Boxed Ice’s CEO and founder. “We are processing about 12 terabytes of data every month with MongoDB, and that equates to about 1 billion documents each month.” The decision to use big data technology has given Boxed Ice’s small staff the freedom to focus on what it does best—troubleshoot servers and websites—without having to worry so much about storage capacity and data processing issues that take up valuable time (see “Internal Big Data Skills Trump Consulting Help,” page 18). “We don’t really have to think much about how much data we’re now storing. We can just put it all into MongoDB,” Mytton said. “For the most part, MongoDB handles it, as long as we understand the data and create indexes to make sure that queries are fast and that we’ve got the necessary capacity. It means that we can concentrate on building our product without having to deal with operational issues.”

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

Mytton originally built Server Density on top of the open source MySQL relational database but switched to MongoDB in 2009 when data volumes handled by the monitoring service grew unwieldy. MySQL simply couldn’t keep up. The problem worsened when Boxed Ice began deploying its software on multiple servers. “[The data] was all being pressed into MySQL and we were having problems, particularly with replication,” Mytton said. “We were at an early stage and we wanted to make sure that if one of our servers failed we could continue to provide service, and it was really difficult to get that set up with MySQL.” As with many big data technologies, MongoDB is still a new product, and though it has some high-profile customers—MTV Networks, Craigslist and Foursquare among them—its user base is relatively small. Getting it to work properly was largely a matter of testing, tuning, keeping up with documentation and paying attention to what the open source community has to say. “We had quite a few problems in the first year and a half or so using MongoDB, whether that was just bugs or general problems, [and] we had to work with the engineers to get these things fixed,” said Mytton, who added that 10gen, which makes MongoDB, has been drafting detailed documentation for the database. Since Version 1.8 of MongoDB was released in March 2011, “everything has been incredibly stable and we’ve had very few problems at all.” Mytton said organizations evaluating big data technologies should remember to test them in conjunction with 17

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

their own data sets or applications, as opposed to using some arbitrary data set or app a salesperson has on hand. A Big Selling Point With the right team and strategy in place, big data technologies like Hadoop, Hive, Pig, Cassandra, Mahout and others can open up a world of predictive possibilities for companies, according to Jeffrey Kelly, an analyst at Wikibon, an IT research and advisory group. One common reason to get started with Hadoop has as much to

Big Data, Bigger Backing More organizations are showing a lot more interest in big data technologies, according to Gartner. Industries seeing the biggest adoption are media and communications, banking, service and education.

27%

30%

2012 2013

19% 15%

Have invested in big data technology

Plan to within next year

BASED ON A GARTNER RESEARCH CIRCLE SURVEY OF 720 IT PROS AND ANALYSTS

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

HOME EDITOR’S NOTE

do with inexpensive data storage as improved analytics capabilities. IT professionals seeking a solid business case for

Hadoop, for example, could start by demonstrating to company decision makers that the technologies that make up the open source big data ecosystem can

EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD VERBATIM

Internal Big Data Skills Trump Consulting Help

TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS

BIG DATA PROJECTS

A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING THE TROUBLE WITH HANA

rely on skill sets that are in short

Hannon, its vice president of architecture, said the

opening for consultants. For example, research

online publisher of automobile pricing data hasn’t

group Wikibon estimates that worldwide professional

used outside consultants on a Hadoop deployment

services revenue from big data deployments will vault

that began in 2011. Instead, a team of Java developers

from $3.87 billion last year to $15.38 billion in 2017.

learned how to use a slew of new open source tech-

But ensuring that your organization has ample big

WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT? TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

nologies to drive the Santa Monica, Calif., company’s

data skills is important to the success of big data

efforts to tap Hadoop and related big data tools as an

applications, said Neeraj Kumar, vice president of en-

alternative to an existing relational data warehouse

terprise architecture at Cardinal Health, a distributor

that was running out of steam on scalability.

of pharmaceuticals and medical products in Dublin,

In a June blog post, Edmunds chief information

Ohio, that’s working with Hadoop. “Innovation does

officer Philip Potloff wrote that the early months of

not happen via consultants,” explained Kumar. “It

the initiative were slow going, as team members mas-

happens when you have skin in the game, when you

tered the intricacies of the Hadoop Distributed File

have people working with [the data] who understand

System, MapReduce, HBase, Oozie, Hive and Pig—all

the business and understand the problems.”

tools in the Hadoop ecosystem. But he said the com-

Kumar sees bringing in consultants to help train in-

pany made the switch to the new Hadoop-based data

ternal staffers on big data management and analytics

warehouse system last February and now is support-

technologies as a valid way to get started on projects.

ing all of its reporting operations with information

After that, though, “you need people in-house who can

from the new setup. n

take the project forward.”

That’s the approach taken by Edmunds.com. Paddy

supply in many organizations. That might be a big

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

—Jack Vaughan

MANAGEMENT | MARK BRUNELLI

lead to huge savings on data storage and analysis. Hadoop and other open source big data implementations offer a far less expensive alternative to traditional, proprietary data warehouses provided by large software companies like Oracle and IBM. As a result, a growing number of organizations today are “offloading,” keeping only recent transactional data in a data warehouse and moving the rest to a Hadoop cluster. The benefits of offloading are plentiful, said Kelly, who focuses on big data and business analytics market research. For starters, offloading helps organizations stabilize the amount of money spent each year on data warehouse capacity, licensing and support. That’s because the amount of data stored in the traditional warehouse remains the same over time. “With data volumes growing, you’re going to have to invest more and more into your Oracle data warehouse or your Teradata data warehouse, and that is quite expensive,” Kelly said. “So, what some early adopters are doing is leaving, for example, the most recent six months of data in a Teradata or Oracle data warehouse, and everything older than that is offloaded into Hadoop.” At Zions, the decision to use Hadoop has given the company much more than a centralized location for conducting data forensics, predictive analytics and risk management activities—it has also led to significantly lowered storage and capacity planning costs. “Hadoop gives us a place where we can store data at a

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

Banking on Big Data

Percentage of banks that say the business driver for embracing big data is to enhance customer engagement, retention and loyalty

Percentage of banks that say that to increase their revenue, they need to better understand customers and big data will help them do so

Percentage of banks that say that having a real-time view of data provides a significant competitive advantage and believe that batch mode data is ineffective

BASED ON A SURVEY OF 183 BANKERS WORLDWIDE; SOURCE: NGDATA IN CONJUNCTION WITH FINEXTRA AND CLEAR2PAY

reasonable cost, and some of these data sets that we have are quite large,” Fowkes said. “With other technologies you could still report against them but it might take you hours up to a day to get a result set back. With a reasonably sized Hadoop cluster you can get an answer back maybe in 20 minutes.” n is news director of TechTarget’s Business Applications and Architecture Media Group. Email him at mbrunelli@techtarget. com and follow him on Twitter: @Brunola88. MARK BRUNELLI

TRENDS | STEPHANIE NEIL

MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD

Companies are struggling to cope with the myriad apps that employees now bring to work. Mobile lifecycle management may make sense of the madness.

HOME

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

Just five years ago, BlackBerry ruled

the enterprise. It was easy back then—the vendor took care of security, leaving the IT department to worry only about the care and cost of the device. Fast-forward to the present, and it’s an entirely different story. The “bring your own device,” or BYOD, phenomenon has introduced dozens of personally owned mobile devices into the workplace—and Apple’s iPhone has unseated the BlackBerry as the smartphone of choice, but without the built-in security service. Meanwhile, the Android operating system is gaining fans, and users might even consider Windows-based phones. Of course, the BlackBerry could make a comeback, too. In the uncharted expanse of the new mobile universe, you can’t take anything for granted. But what’s an adventure for business users is a real headache for the IT department. BYOD poses an enormous management problem that introduces security risks, could increase carrier costs and creates a strain on network operations.

TRENDS | STEPHANIE NEIL

And that’s not the end of it. BYOD has morphed into BYOA, or bring your own app—in which employees download third-party apps and tap into cloud services over the corporate network. By bypassing IT, users can introduce myriad problems into the enterprise, from security breaches to unmanaged data flowing in—and out—of the organization. All that may compromise compliance and regulatory directives. If You Can’t Beat ’Em … For IT, though, there’s little else to do but deal with the influx of new applications. “I think the days of trying to control [BYOA] are over,” said Jason O’Sullivan, vice president of corporate technology at Classified Ventures LLC, the Chicago-based parent of Cars.com and Apartments.com. “Now, it is more about corralling it and riding the wave through,” he noted, pointing out that trying to block users from downloading apps on their devices is a losing battle. “We have to manage the trend, as opposed to saying, ‘No, you are not doing this.’ Those days are gone.” Answering the IT department’s prayers is a new technology trend that pulls together the various management products into a mobile lifecycle management (MLM) platform. And the MLM market is poised to take off. According to an IDC study released in mid-2013, worldwide MLM software revenue totaled nearly $800 million in 2012. Over the next few years, that number is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 21.9%, resulting in total revenue of $2.1 billion by 2017. 21

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

Wireless Expense Management Mobile Device Management

Virtualization Mobile Lifecycle Management

Mobile Application Management

Network Management Document & Information Management

ENTERPRISE MOBILITY is all about strategy. Nucleus Research suggests six software elements of mobile lifecycle management (See “Managing the Mobile Lifecycle,” page 22).

The idea behind MLM—also known as enterprise mobility management—is this: Mobile applications and devices are an extension of the enterprise. So, just like other IT resources, they need to be subject to specialized processes and policies. “The core foundation is how data is stored, transmitted and represented, and how security is built around the applications,” said John Marshall, CEO of AirWatch, a mobility management vendor based in Atlanta. (Continued on page 23)

TRENDS | STEPHANIE NEIL

HOME

Managing the Mobile Lifecycle

EDITOR’S NOTE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD

ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MUST

be approached strategically and holistically to facilitate cost management, support and

security and policies. Nucleus Research suggested six software elements of mobile lifecycle management (MLM):

VERBATIM

TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS

W ireless expense management. WEM allows companies to track inventory, service orders and invoices associated with direct mobility costs. It should be implemented on a company-liable account in order to consolidate and optimize rate plans, consolidate the number of devices being used, control international roaming, support bulk purchases and negotiate contracts.

A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING

M obile device management. The “bring your own device,” or BYOD, trend has introduced many different devices into the enterprise, which means companies need a multiplatform approach to support current deployments as well as to future-proof their efforts as new operating environments are inevitably introduced. MDM automation

THE TROUBLE WITH HANA

can reduce the support labor associated with devices by more than 75%.

WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT?

M obile application management. Enterprise mobility extends beyond the device. Companies must also track application usage, antivirus protection and identity management. Companies that fail to protect all these aspects

TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA

of mobile applications risk noncompliance for governance, risk management and compliance, or GRC, measures. n

MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD

D ocument and information management. Companies must consider how documents and other types of corporate information are being managed in a mobile environment. Traditional, consumer-grade technologies that have been adopted may lack the software APIs, security and compliance features associated with mobile enterprise needs.

THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS

N etwork management. To support remote employees and reduce data costs, companies can use virtual private networks and protected Wi-Fi access.

ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

V irtualization. The popularity of BYOD has prompted IT to support “dual persona” devices, meaning one area of the device provides either sandboxed or virtualized access to the enterprise. The tools separate corporate apps, data and documents from personal mobile assets, thereby reducing compliance and security concerns. n

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

TRENDS | STEPHANIE NEIL

The Future Is Now But this holistic approach to enterprise mobility didn’t evolve overnight, and companies have tried lots of tricks to get their mobile houses in order. For Classified Ventures, building an enterprise app store—in which company-approved applications are housed and allowed to be downloaded on-demand—has been the best way to deal with BYOA. Enterprise app stores are still a Band-Aid for IT pros in the trenches, though, because they don’t solve the long list of problems that are associated with a mobile workforce. Another emerging trend comes close: future-proofing mobile applications by managing them at a granular level. That addresses deployment, security, analytics, data synchronization, storage, version control and the ability to remotely debug a problem on a mobile device halfway across the world—or wipe it clean if a device is lost. “Companies have to think about this from a proactive standpoint,” said Stacy Crook, an analyst at IDC specializing in mobile enterprise research. “They need to have

30 23

Estimated percentage of Web browsing in the U.S. done on mobile devices SOURCE: MCKINSEY GLOBAL INSTITUTE

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

JASON O’SULLIVAN, vice president of corporate technology at Classified Ventures LLC, the Chicago-based parent of Cars .com and Apartments.com, has embraced mobile lifecycle management as a way to deal with the avalanche of user-downloaded apps.

a ‘mobile first’ mentality to figure out how to build these processes into their applications.” More important, they need to create a roadmap in order to understand what is needed—and establish a flexible foundation on which to build. When companies are considering mobile enterprise apps, industry watchers say, certain pillars of the mobile lifecycle need to be included—or at least considered—as part of the foundation. “Companies have to look at expense management, wireless network management, device management,

Estimated percentage of social media use in the U.S. done on mobile devices SOURCE: MCKINSEY GLOBAL INSTITUTE

TRENDS | STEPHANIE NEIL

application management, document and content management, as well as their virtualization strategy,” said Hyoun Park, an analyst at Nucleus Research. “All of these are now part of the mobile strategy, and yet they represent several different functional areas within IT.” At Classified Ventures, O’Sullivan began outlining a mobile strategy that defines policies and procedures for enterprise-enabled applications, shaping the contours of an MLM project. His team is working on ways to monitor, manage and govern smartphones and tablets that run on different operating systems and require specially developed mobile apps, yet need to become an extension of the established systems environment. Still, there are a lot of moving parts, so Park suggests that companies create a steering committee made up of business leaders from the various functional areas to guide the technology roadmap. “Over time, you may see companies establishing a specific mobility department, but I don’t think that will move out of the traditional IT or network services environment.” Indeed, once mobile devices are given access to the

150 24

Percentage increase in app downloads worldwide in 2012 SOURCE: MCKINSEY GLOBAL INSTITUTE

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

corporate network, they become a part of the IT infrastructure, whether you like it or not, Park noted. That’s why mapping out a plan is so important. “We see that 75% of companies are allowing BYOD, but only about a quarter of them have a formal effort in place. Most are just winging it,” he said. That’s a Wrap Winging a mobile strategy isn’t smart policy. But “wrapping” up mobile apps is. Today, mobile applications are being designed in a whole new way. In the old, container model, functionality was configured up front, leaving no room to address security or data management issues, for example, as applications are upgraded. Under the new approach, mobile apps are wrapped—that is, additional functionality can be layered over the application’s native capabilities as needed. Regardless of the approach, “the important thing is how the mobile lifecycle is managed, secured and supported,” said Senthil Krishnapillai, SAP’s vice president of product management for mobile security. SAP recently partnered with Mocana, a mobile security platform provider, to enable the addition of fine-grained usage and security policies to Apple iOS and Android applications without requiring the developer to write any code. Mocana’s wrapping product is called Mobile App Protection, or MAP. Once SAP’s Afaria suite of mobile device, content and app management software is wrapped with MAP, corporate data in an app can be protected

TRENDS | STEPHANIE NEIL

by a range of policies, including authentication, government-standard encryption and per-app virtual private networking, to provide comprehensive protection for different uses and contexts, the company said. Similarly, Classified Ventures’ O’Sullivan, who has used the App47 mobile application management platform since January, takes advantage of the tool’s ability to enforce version control on applications developed in-house. For example, an app designed for the Cars.com team runs on the iPad, allowing salespeople in the field to show dealers a secure demo of new products. When a new version of the application is rolled out, the system is set up so a user can ignore the alert to upgrade only a certain number of times before the app becomes unusable. Through an App47 management dashboard, the IT department can shut down an old version of the app, ensuring that everyone is on the latest version and there’s no need to maintain backward compatibility or worry about security holes. “We provide the updates we want them to consume, and when everyone sees the latest version, they go get it,” O’Sullivan said. “For corporate applications, that is a win for us.”

ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

Moving On O’Sullivan has learned that it’s best to embrace change rather than resist it. When the Cars.com and Apartments .com sales teams asked for tablets to use in the field, the company bought more than 500 iPads. The sales teams standardized on the company-owned tablets, although IT also supports a BYOD policy—simply because it’s necessary to give employees the tools they need to do their jobs. “We would essentially be hobbling ourselves if we didn’t support our sales force who want to use the kind of equipment needed to show the dealer how their customers are using [our products],” O’Sullivan said. In addition, tools are now available to make the transition to enterprise mobile apps easy—and successful, said O’Sullivan, who struggled early in the process to oversee mobile device management and to keep the applications relevant. “I thought, ‘There has to be an easier way to do this,’ he said. “And then I Googled ‘mobile application management tools.’ ” n is a freelance writer and a correspondent for Business Information. Email her at stephanieneil@comcast.net. STEPHANIE NEIL

CONNECT IT JOSHUA GREENBAUM

The Big Idea Behind the Internet of Things Connecting all the world’s devices and then analyzing the data they produce is a lot for company execs to wrap their heads around. But they’d better—and soon.

been such big news that one important point has been lost amid all the hype: Machine-generated and sensor-based data have been around for decades. Outside the comparatively new worlds of e-commerce and enterprise resource planning lies a massive amount of machine technology. From robots and machine vision systems on the shop floor to enormous assets like gas turbines, windmills and jet engines, machines drive essential business processes and create huge amounts of complex, real-time data. And such data sources are suddenly pushing the socalled Internet of Things—which refers to connecting all devices to the Internet—into the limelight. The C-level suite has long ignored the value of machine data and relegated its use to the plants and field assets such as BIG DATA HAS

HOME

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

pipelines and heavy vehicles where the data originated. But execs are finally waking up, realizing that there’s analytical gold buried deep in machine data—and to mine it they’ll need to mix traditional e-commerce and ERPbased big data sources. So how can companies put the Internet of Things into operation, blending disparate data sources to create the hybrid analytics of the future? The People Factor The challenge is made even more complex by the massive technological divide between big data in the Internet of Things and big data on the enterprise software side. The standards, uses and tools are different, as are the frequency and quantity of data. There is a cultural barrier, too. In most companies, particularly in manufacturing, the assembly workers, mechanics and electrical engineers who work with shop floor and Internet of Things data never talk to enterprise app users or share data with them. They don’t work together, they don’t read the same publications and they don’t attend the same conferences. That makes it harder to take full advantage of a pan-enterprise big data opportunity. For most companies, it will take a change in business culture and in technology to make good on the promise that comes from

CONNECT IT | JOSHUA GREENBAUM

blending two disconnected environments. And it’s anyone’s guess which realm will be the hardest to reform. Putting It All Together The technology side itself is daunting enough. The ocean of data generated by “things that spin,” to use a term coined by industrial data pioneer GE Software, are massive—a single aircraft engine can churn out a terabyte of data in a single flight. The uses for this data, and therefore the sampling rates, data integration challenges and analytical models, are also variable. Some of the data must be analyzed in real time at the point of origin—for example, an anomaly in the engine that signals an impending fire must prompt an immediate alert—while other data might be used to build a complex predictive model that analyzes a subset of the engine’s sensor data over a month. Creating a platform for collecting, integrating and analyzing heaps of unstructured machine data is a colossal undertaking. To date, the body of standards needed is still more dream than reality. Companies like GE Software, Cisco and Texas Instruments are in hot pursuit, but it won’t be easy. A new platform has to make the most of the opportunity that comes from blending industrial data with back-office ERP and e-commerce data. If a company sees data that says it needs to repair expensive assets like jet engines and uses that information to order parts in its ERP system and schedule maintenance in its human resources system, it can reach whole new levels of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. 27

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

Seizing such opportunities requires blending corporate culture as well. Pioneering companies are already bringing the two sides together to strategize on what the next-generation analytics and predictive models they’ll be able to build should look like. These conversations are taking place well ahead of laying the necessary technological foundations—and for all the right reasons.

EXECUTIVES ARE FINALLY WAKING UP, REALIZING THAT THERE’S ANALYTICAL GOLD BURIED DEEP IN MACHINE DATA. Getting to the point where the Internet of Things blends seamlessly with enterprise big data will be an arduous journey, but it’s one that should start now. The good news is part of it will be easy: Existing business intelligence tools will adapt readily, building the new reports that this hybrid data environment will require. Bridging cultural and data infrastructures will take more time and investment in people and technology. The results will be worth waiting for. n is an independent industry analyst and founder of Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley, Calif. Email him at josh@eaconsult.com or follow him on Twitter: @josheac. JOSHUA GREENBAUM

HINDSIGHT MARK FONTECCHIO

Oracle’s Friendly Turn Could Do Users Good The company is getting buddy-buddy with longtime rivals—and that’s fodder for the tech press. But the new partnerships will make a lot of people happy.

press conference in which CEOs Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff elaborated on the recently announced Oracle-Salesforce partnership, one IT journalist piped up with a question. From his tone of voice, I think he was wearing the sadclown face. The journalist asked if the nine-year deal between the two IT giants—which encompasses everything from big iron to cloud apps—means the end of jabs between the two. You see, most IT journalists revel in public feuds like the years-long battle between Ellison and Benioff. It gives us something to tweet about. It takes our attention off duller (though more important) subjects such as server specs and application user interface upgrades. IN A MIDYEAR

HOME

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

True Bromance But for users, feuds usually aren’t helpful. Most companies run applications, middleware and hardware from a variety of vendors and would rather have all the pieces talk to one another nicely. You know the words: integration, interoperability. Whatever you call it, such cooperation becomes less likely when tech company leaders are telling the IT equivalent of yo-mama jokes. Take Ellison and Benioff. At one point, they each called the other’s products a false cloud. In their press conference, however, their complimentary language for each other was downright flowery. “It’s really the best database company in the world,” Benioff said of Oracle. “We’re very proud of this new partnership with Salesforce.com and personally, I’m looking forward to working with Salesforce and Mark for years to come,” Ellison added. Most stories I’ve seen on the press conference focus on the Oracle-Salesforce rivalry dying, making fun of Ellison and Benioff being so friendly with each other now. A secondary focus has been on how the new deal will allow Oracle and Salesforce to sell more as partners than as pure competitors. But the most important result is how this affects users, and most likely it will affect them in a good way. One of the biggest infrastructure and database

HINDSIGHT | MARK FONTECCHIO

HOME EDITOR’S NOTE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD

companies working with the biggest cloud customer relationship management company: There are plenty of customers running both that will be happy to see whatever fruits might come from the Oracle-Salesforce partnership.

Oracle Spies Opportunity The Oracle-Salesforce deal is just one of several Oracle is making with giants in the IT industry, all in a move to get back to its roots. Oracle started as a database company, with its database running on anything, unlike competitors at the time, whose products could run only on proprietary hardware. First there was the announcement with Dell, a partnership that will see Dell bundle and resell Oracle Database and applications on its own x86 servers. Some called the move confusing, saying that it doesn’t make much sense for Oracle to be partnering with a hardware partner when it already sells its own hardware. The truth is more nuanced. Oracle has no interest in the x86, commodity server business. It has annihilated that part of its hardware division since acquiring Sun Microsystems, opting instead to focus on Sparc-based, “engineered” systems such as Exadata, in part because they have better

profit margins. But Oracle still wants to sell its other products—database and applications software—anywhere and everywhere. Partnering with Dell gives the company the best of both worlds: It doesn’t have to sell the low-margin commodity hardware but can still profit from the high-margin software. Meanwhile, users running commodity Dell hardware can get Oracle products bundled in, which may make them easier to deploy. Staying Relevant Other partnership announcements—one with Microsoft and the other with NetSuite—were very much about cloud computing, a sphere that Ellison has been quick to criticize in the past. Constellation Research analyst R. “Ray” Wang was spot-on when he said that Oracle has been a laggard in the cloud and “woke up and realized they weren’t going to be relevant.” That said, let’s not pretend Oracle isn’t getting anything out of those deals. With the Microsoft partnership, Oracle gets its database into the Windows Azure cloud, a curious development considering that Microsoft has its own competing database in SQL Server. With the NetSuite deal, Oracle may be able to sell to more midsize

MOST IT JOURNALISTS REVEL IN PUBLIC FEUDS LIKE THE YEARS-LONG BATTLE BETWEEN ELLISON AND BENIOFF. IT GIVES US SOMETHING TO TWEET ABOUT. 29

BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013

HINDSIGHT | MARK FONTECCHIO

HOME EDITOR’S NOTE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARD VERBATIM TURNAROUND ARTIST MAKES SENSE OUT OF TECH DOLLARS A NEW SIDE TO MANUFACTURING: 3-D PRINTING

companies, where it has sometimes struggled in the past. In the end, the Oracle-Salesforce deal, as well as those with Microsoft and NetSuite, indicate that while Oracle isn’t pushing too hard to become a public cloud provider, it does want to be the main provider of hardware and database infrastructure for those public cloud providers.

“ ORACLE ‘WOKE UP AND REALIZED THEY WEREN’T GOING TO BE RELEVANT.’” —R. “Ray” Wang, analyst, Constellation Research

THE TROUBLE WITH HANA

MANAGING MOBILE NOW TAKES A LOOK AHEAD THE BIG IDEA BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS ORACLE’S FRIENDLY TURN COULD DO USERS GOOD

Scot Petersen, Editorial Director Jason Sparapani, Managing Editor, E-Publications Joe Hebert, Associate Managing Editor, E-Publications Mark Brunelli, News Director Craig Stedman, Executive Editor David Essex, Executive Editor Lauren Horwitz, Executive Editor

WHERE’S THE TEAM SPIRIT? TECHNOLOGY NOT ENOUGH TO CRACK BIG DATA

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This might help them make more deals down the road with big enterprise customers, as you can imagine the following line from an Oracle salesperson: “Well, Salesforce.com runs on Oracle Database and Exadata. Why aren’t you?” n

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design Neva Maniscalco, Graphic Designer Doug Olender, Publisher, dolender@techtarget.com Annie Matthews, Director of Sales,

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is news and site editor of TechTarget’s Search Oracle.com and site editor of SearchSQLServer.com. Email him at mfontecchio@techtarget.com.

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BUSINESS INFORMATION • AUGUST 2013