2015 Roundup Of Analytics, Big Data & Business Intelligence Forecasts And Market Estimates

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) estimates adding analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) applications will increase their Total Addressable Market (TAM) by $13B in FY2014.

89% of business leaders believe Big Data will revolutionize business operations in the same way the Internet did.

83% have pursued Big Data projects in order to seize a competitive edge.

Despite the varying methodologies used in the studies mentioned in this roundup, many share a common set of conclusions. The high priority in gaining greater insights into customers and their unmet needs, more precise information on how to best manage and simplify sales cycles, and how to streamline service are common themes.

The most successful Big Data uses cases revolve around enterprises’ need to get beyond the constraints that hold them back from being more attentive and responsive to customers.

Presented below is a roundup of recent forecasts and estimates:

Wikibon projects the Big Data market will top $84B in 2026, attaining a 17% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for the forecast period 2011 to 2026. The Big Data market reached $27.36B in 2014, up from $19.6B in 2013. These and other insights are from Wikibon’s excellent research of Big Data market adoption and growth. The graphic below provides an overview of their Big Data Market Forecast. Source: Executive Summary: Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast, 2011-2026.

IBM and SAS are the leaders of the Big Data predictive analytics market according to the latest Forrester Wave™: Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions, Q2 2015. The latest Forrester Wave is based on an analysis of 13 different big data predictive analytics providers including Alpine Data Labs, Alteryx, Angoss Software, Dell, FICO, IBM, KNIME.com, Microsoft, Oracle, Predixion Software, RapidMiner, SAP, and SAS. Forrester specifically called out Microsoft Azure Learning is an impressive new entrant that shows the potential for Microsoft to be a significant player in this market. Gregory Piatetsky (@KDNuggets) has done an excellent analysis of the Forrester Wave Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions Q2 2015 report here. Source: Courtesy of Predixion Software: The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions, Q2 2015 (free, no opt-in).

IBM, KNIME, RapidMiner and SAS are leading the advanced analytics platform market according to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant. Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for advanced analytics evaluated 16 leading providers of advanced analytics platforms that are used to building solutions from scratch. The following vendors were included in Gartner’s analysis: Alpine Data Labs, Alteryx, Angoss, Dell, FICO, IBM, KNIME, Microsoft, Predixion, Prognoz, RapidMiner, Revolution Analytics, Salford Systems, SAP, SAS and Tibco Software, Gregory Piatetsky (@KDNuggets) provides excellent insights into shifts in Magic Quadrant for Advanced Platform rankings here. Source: Courtesy of RapidMiner: Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms Published: 19 February 2015 Analyst(s): Gareth Herschel, Alexander Linden, Lisa Kart (reprint; free, no opt-in).

Salesforce estimates adding analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) applications will increase their Total Addressable Market (TAM) by $13B in FY2014. Adding new apps in analytics is projected to increase their TAM to $82B for calendar year (CY) 2018, fueling an 11% CAGR in their total addressable market from CY 2013 to 2018. Source: Building on Fifteen Years of Customer Success Salesforce Analyst Day 2014 Presentation (free, no opt in).

89% of business leaders believe big data will revolutionize business operations in the same way the Internet did. 85% believe that big data will dramatically change the way they do business. 79% agree that ‘companies that do not embrace Big Data will lose their competitive position and may even face extinction.’ 83% have pursued big data projects in order to seize a competitive edge. The top three areas where big data will make an impact in their operations include: impacting customer relationships (37%); redefining product development (26%); and changing the way operations is organized (15%).The following graphic compares the top six areas where big data is projected to have the greatest impact in organizations over the next five years. Source: Accenture, Big Success with Big Data: Executive Summary (free, no opt in).

The global Big Data market is projected reach $122B in revenue by 2025. Frost & Sullivan also forecasts the global data traffic will cross 100 Zettabytes annually by 2025. Source: World’s Top Global Mega Trends To 2025 and Implications to Business, Society and Cultures.

The global text analytics market has a potential to reach $6.5B by 2020, attaining a CAGR of 25.2% from 2014 to 2020. Customer Relationship Management (CRM), predictive analytics and brand reputation are the top three projected applications. The following graphic provides an overview of key findings from the report. Source: Global Text Analytics Market: Text Analytics, Visualizing and Analyzing Open-Ended Text Data.

Customer analytics (48%), operational analytics (21%), and fraud & compliance (21%) are the top three use cases for Big Data. Datameer’s analysis of the market also found that the global Hadoop market will grow from $1.5B in 2012 to $50.2B in 2020, and financial services, technology and telecommunications are the leading industries using big data solutions today. Source: Big Data: A Competitive Weapon for the Enterprise.

37% of Asia Pacific manufacturers are using Big Data and analytics technologies to improve production quality management. IDC found manufacturers in this region are relying on these technologies to reduce costs, increase productivity, and attract new customers. Source: Big Data and Analytics Core to Nex-Gen Manufacturing.

Supply chain visibility (56%), geo-location and mapping data (47%) and product traceability data (42%) are the top three potential areas of Big Data opportunity for supply chain management. Transport management, supply chain planning, & network modeling and optimization are the three most popular applications of Big Data in supply chain initiatives. Source: Supply Chain Report, February 2015.

Finding correlations across multiple disparate data sources (48%), predicting customer behavior (46%) and predicting product or services sales (40%) are the three factors driving interest in Big Data analytics. These and other fascinating findings from InformationWeek’s 2015 Analytics & BI Survey provide a glimpse into how enterprises are selecting analytics applications and platforms. Source: Information Week 2015 Analytics & BI Survey.

Banking, communications, media, utilities and wholesale trade increased their use of Big Data analytics the most in the last twelve months. Gartner’s latest survey of big data adoption completed in the 4^th quarter of 2014 found that columnar/in-memory databases, high-capacity data warehouses, search-based indexes and log data analytics all experienced greater than 5% growth in references reporting active use. Source: Survey Analysis: BI and Analytics Spending Intentions, 2015, 13 May 2015, Report G00274741 Analyst(s): Josh Parenteau & Rita L. Sallam (client access).

IDC predicts the global Big Data and Analytics market will reach $125B in hardware, software and services revenue this year. The professional services-to-technology ratio will also increase 25% this year, due to increasingly complex system configurations and enterprise-wide solutions. IDC also predicts the Internet of Things (IoT) market will also attain a 30% CAGR from 2014 to 2019. Source: IDC Predictions 2015: Accelerating Innovation — and Growth — on the 3rd Platform by Frank Gens & IDC Predictions 2015 Team (free, no opt-in courtesy of SAP).

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Progress Report - Teradata is alive and kicking and shows some good 'paranoid' practices

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

We had the opportunity to attend the Teradata Influencer Summit held at the beautiful L’Auberge Del Mar in northern San Diego. When mentioning to other influencers that I would be en route for that meeting earlier in the week, I mostly gathered incredulous stares and comments like ‘are they still around and interesting’? I missed the first half day, but the next one and a half days gave a good insight into where Teradata is and where they want to be in the next years.

So here are my top 3 takeaways from the event

A compelling vision – In recent times Teradata had been blamed for a lack of vision and / or a lack of sense of realism. I followed the Summit two years ago from the fences and back then an executive had an elaborate presentation to show why Hadoop would be a failure – or only a temporary fashion that would disappear as fast as it showed up. But quickly afterwards (and some colleagues say the Summit helped) Teradata reversed course, changed from a ‘struggle to snuggle’ approach vis a vis Hadoop, embracing more of Hadoop, partnering e.g. with MongoDB already a year ago (and again was a key sponsor of this year’s MongoDB World – also this week, event report here). All slides at the summit had Teradata, Aster and Hadoop based offerings. As a matter of fact the Teradata UDA includes all three database paradigms.

The vision of the 'Sentient' Enterprise

And along these capabilities Teradata is using its by now proven Querygrid capabilities, following the ‘co-existence’ route with Hadoop, or ‘federated query’ strategy all vendors with an age of 5+ years pursue. As part of that Teradata sees the world separated into three categories of systems – tightly coupled (Teradata), loosely coupled (Aster) and non-coupled (Hadoop). An interesting approach to the system landscape, that Ratzesberger used to explain the vision of the ‘sentient enterprise’. There are pros and cons with federation, see MyPOV section below.

It’s coming together – Not sure when Teradata came up with the vision, but obviously work needs to be done here. Teradata needs to write the endpoint to execute queries on the Hadoop side, and it currently supports Hive for that. But Hive has known benefits and challenges, and Teradata will address the challenges soon, stay tuned on that topic. The other piece critical is that a tool that can transport data back and forward, extract as needed from a variety of data sources as desired, transform information, can apply rules ‘in flight’ etc. Teradata calls it a Listener, but it is much more. In the old times one could call it a bona fide ETL tool, only that today it scales to the 21st century requirements with streaming data, humungous data volumes, BAM and CEP like support etc. – a key product / tool to make the Teradata UDA fly.

The Analytical Application Platform

Self-disruption built in – All successful technology companies struggle with disrupting themselves. It’s a price of success and harvesting the benefits of maturation of technology that create the potential for technology disruption. Co-President Wimmer remarked that all successful database companies, the 30+ year olds are setup for disruption today. Usually technology players react to disruption risks with acquisitions, try to insert knew product capabilities and employee talent and these approaches are usually less successful than intended for a variety of reason.

Teradata has taken a unique approach here, allowing the acquisition of ThinkBigA to keep operating independently, and even taking a step further, funding its global expansion. Unique, because ThinkBigA does pure best of breed BigData projects, with complete independence of choosing technologies customer’s desire. As such ThinkBigA cannibalizes Teradata customers to a certain extent, and remarkably Teradata does nothing to stop that.

The Teradata free ThinkBigA architecture

So kudos to the Teradata management, that coming of a close to death experience in regards of the Hadoop phenomena, now has a built in disruptor with ThinkBigA. Quite a gutsy move, coming close to e.g. an enterprise ERP vendor allowing a subsidiary services company to sell services on competitor products to its customers. What? Granted the ThinkBigA case is not that drastic, as the provider ‘only’ uses open source, but the disruption is on hand. The benefits for Teradata are twofold: The vendor learns about real customer demands and quality of open source BigData products, that it can use for its own R&D strategy and effort. Secondly Teradata has a way to remain relevant (and extract revenues) from customers it otherwise would have lost to BigData / Opensource players anyway.

ThinkBigA BigData Project recommendations, notice bullet #5 - emphasis added

MyPOV

Teradata is alive and well, with solid product plans for the immediate future. The three tiered vision of federated queries and data is common for vendors with existing, substantial business. It resonates well with enterprises that are more conservative both in regards of technology adoption and security needs.

On the concern side, the verdict is out if enterprises operating with a federated storage and query approach will end up missing insights, or only getting served sub optimal insights. Conceptually one can make the case that every insight can only be caught with a single source storage, one place to be queried etc. but if the difference between the two is substantial for the success of a business, remains to be seen.

So a key 2nd half for Teradata on the product side, with a number of substantial announcements to come, key capabilities in the pipeline. Teradata may have been down, but it’s back on its feet and throwing punches. Only the paranoid survive and Teradata has gotten a litte more paranoid - in a positive way. Good to see for prospects, customers and the overall ecosystem as nothing fuels innovation better than competition. We will be watching.

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Collaboration Around Files - A Case Study On Working With Clients

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

I recently had the opportunity to speak with one of the world's largest advertising agencies about how they collaborate with their clients. Details of their solution are covered in the Constellation Research case study "Powering Global Client Collaboration with Secure File Sharing, How a Leading Ad Agency Used Egnyte Adaptive Enterprise File Services to Work with Clients". Constellation clients can download the full report here.

Here are a few highlights:

One of the main tasks of a digital agency is working with clients to create the multimedia assets used in their sales and marketing campaigns. The process is very collaborative, starting with gathering requirements, then brainstorming, multiple rounds of drafts and edits, followed by review, approval and production. Before Egnyte, it was difficult to share files and discuss changes via email.
The CIO along with other department leads started a multi-year technology refresh that focused on platforms with strong cloud-based and mobile features. The project began by replacing their legacy email system with Google’s productivity suite, Google Apps for Work. Google Apps was used not only for email and calendar, but also word processing, spreadsheets, file-sharing and internal web-conferencing all via a single integrated offering.
By switching to Fuze for real-time collaboration with clients, the Agency is able to easily share files from Egnyte into a Fuze video conference, where anyone can participate from his/her computer, phone or tablet. In these meetings, designs are reviewed and improved onscreen, eliminating the typical back and forth exchanges that lead to confusion and costly mistakes.

Constellation clients can download the full report Powering Global Client Collaboration with Secure File Sharing to learn more about the challenges, solutions, benefits, takeaways and recommendations.

Future of Work Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Google Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Revenue Officer

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Teradata Influencer Summit Highlights

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

Herman Wimmer, Co-President kicks off the event. Herman says that the guiding priorities of Teradata are:

Key Principle #1: Analytic ecosystem: Teradata, DB, UDA, Real-time, Fabric Architecture

Key Principle #2: Big Data Technologies: Aster, Hadoop, Bid Data Apps, Apps Center, Open Source Contribution and leverage

Key Principle#3: Cloud for Analytics

Key Principle #4: Enterprise Class Production Analytics, Hybrid Implementations (Pubic/ Private), Broader Market Penetration

Key Principle #5: Consulting, Big Data Consulting, Analytics Consulting, Managed Services

Key Principle #6: Future Markets: Healthcare, Government, Innovation, People, Passion….

In a digital world, where business models are changing very fast (note not everyone agrees with this or sees it) business will need real-time data to make better decisions to make the customer experience the best it can be. Companies that used to compete on selling cars are really COMPETING ON THE “experience or what it feels like to drive/ own the car.” Engineers, marketers, Customer Service Professionals can guess what is making the customer happy- DRIVING THAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE or they can use these technologies available to drive better business. It is not easy, but Teradata definitely simplifying it. And it takes investment of people, process, time, and the technology and PASSION.

My POV: Where is your company with respect to going beyond the conversations of “big data” for “big data” sake and are truly embracing the data in the business, where it can make a difference. Who should lead this? CEOs that “get the value of data” are looking to someone in their organization to do it – CIO, CTO, CMO, Customer Service Professional to lead data revelations. And if one of those “titles” doesn’t step-up and lead or co-lead with other executives, CEOs will find and hire Chief Digital Officers or Chief Customer Officers to make it happen. It is an opportunity, but it is not without risk. Done well, it bring huge financial rewards to the company that master it. And probably most likely help that person’s career. If you are in a position that isn’t data-centric – then it’s up to you to turn it into that.

@drnatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Covering Marketing, Sales, Marketing and Customer Service using Big Data Analytics to Deliver Amazing Customer Experiences

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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Cisco announces intent to acquire Piston Cloud

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Continuing the trend toward managed cloud services Cisco announced its intent to acquire Piston Cloud. This announcement comes after the announcements that EMC acquired Virtustream (my take here), and IBM acquired Blue Box (my take here).

Let’s dissect the Cisco blog (it can be found here) about the announcement:

Cloud computing has fundamentally altered the IT landscape: dramatically boosting IT agility, while lowering costs. To realize the business advantages of cloud, organizations are shifting to a hybrid IT model—blending private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications.

MyPOV – It looks like the demand for hybrid cloud has gotten much stronger, considering this announcement.

To help customers maintain control and compliance in this hyper-connected, hyper-distributed IT environment, Cisco and its partners are building the Intercloud—a globally connected network of clouds. Today, Cisco is taking another important step towards realizing our ambitious Intercloud vision.

MyPOV – Good for Cisco to connect the intended acquisition with Intercloud – my analysis of the original announcement is here.

We are pleased to announce our intent to acquire Piston Cloud Computing, which will help accelerate the product, delivery, and operational capabilities of Cisco Intercloud Services.

Paired with our recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance our capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale.

MyPOV – Piston Cloud’s product delivers a ‘cloud os’ that can ‘plug in’ a number of cloud services. As such Piston Cloud gives a large number of using different technologies, something that enterprises care about as they do not know for sure which technologies they want to use for their next generation application projects. Being able to run these from the same platform is a significant value proposition that Piston Cloud has delivered. Given the heterogeneous nature of the environments traditional Cisco customers operate, certainly a good move. My analysis of the mentioned Metacloud acquisition is here.

The acquisition of Piston will complement our Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud.

MyPOV – So Piston Cloud will become part of the Cisco OpenStack offering – no surprise here. Good to have the clarity.

Additionally, Piston’s deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance our delivery capabilities for customers and partners.

MyPOV – Fair for Cisco to admit that Piston Cloud has some serious chops bringing together such diverse technologies like e.g. Docker or Spark.

To bring the world of standalone clouds together, Cisco and our partners are building the Intercloud. The Intercloud is designed to deliver secure cloud services everywhere in the world. Our enterprise-class portfolio of technology and cloud services gives customers the choice to build their own private clouds or consume cloud services from a trusted Intercloud Provider. The Intercloud provides choice of services, all with compliance and control. In a nutshell: we’re delivering cloud the way our customers need it.

MyPOV – The marketing line for Cisco Intercloud. But the intended acquisition of Piston Cloud certainly gives more credibility and more crucially more capability into this direction. One can only speculate why only now these two have come together.

Piston will join our Cloud Services team under the leadership of Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president, Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Organization.

MyPOV – Always good to hear where acquisitions are going to be anchored organizationally. I have shared my concerns in regards of services leadership building products, but that is a general concern and happy to give Shapurwala and the team the benefit of the doubt. The future will tell.

Overall POV

It can’t be coincidence of EMC, IBM and Cisco are all completing acquisitions in the managed cloud / hybrid cloud space. It makes sense for all three vendors to push the hybrid agenda, as all three of them have existing sales channels into local data centers. To a certain point this movement indicates a failure of the ‘public only' cloud vendors (e.g. AWS and Google).

Nothing that can be held e.g. against Cisco, who by itself tries to differentiate itself by ‘playing nice’ to the demands, needs (and maybe angst) of CIOs in regards of the public cloud. The interesting development is, that CIOs seem to be comfortable letting 3rd parties do the management of their private cloud infrastructure, but still want to see their data center being utilized. Write down time frames may play a role here, but overall an interesting development that I will spend more time analyzing going forward.

On the concern side, it is another acquisition and Cisco will have to hold on to the Piston Cloud team talent. But Cisco is an experienced acquirer and knows how to make sure that the key people stay around.

So overall a good move by Cisco, the flexibility of Piston Cloud is something that has the potential to be a differentiator for Cisco InterCloud. Congratulations.

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Market Move - IBM gets into private cloud (services) with Blue Box acqusition

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

The need to manage private clouds seems to be really heating up on the demand side – last week EMC announced plans to acquire Virtustream (see analysis here), today both IBM and Cisco announced the respective purchases / intent to purchase of BlueBox and PistonCloud.

Let’s dissect the IBM press release (it can be found here):

ARMONK, N.Y - 03 Jun 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has acquired Blue Box Group, Inc., a managed private cloud provider built on OpenStack.
Blue Box is a privately held company based in Seattle that provides businesses with a simple, private cloud as a service platform, based on OpenStack. Customers benefit from the ability to more easily deploy workloads across hybrid cloud environments. Financial details were not disclosed.
MyPOV – Another acquisition in Seattle, Blue Box originally started as a website hosting provider and has evolved to a OpenStack managed private cloud provider.

Enterprises are seeking ways to embrace all types of cloud to address a wide range of workloads. Today’s announcement reinforces IBM’s commitment to deliver flexible cloud computing models that make it easier for customers to move to data and applications across clouds and meets their needs across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. With Gartner forecasting that 72 percent of enterprises will be pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy this year [1], it is increasingly important for companies to leverage multiple models while maintaining consistent management across their cloud platforms.
MyPOV – For the longest time the race was about getting public cloud capabilities going. It looks like by mid of 2015 enterprises are ready to move to cloud, albeit in a more conservative fashion, with more private cloud aspects than ever before. With the bare metal of SoftLayer IBM is able to give customers more confidence levels than most competitors, but it seems that this was not enough, hence the Blue Box acquisition.

Through Blue Box, IBM will help businesses rapidly integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premises systems into OpenStack-based managed cloud. Blue Box also strengthens IBM Cloud’s existing OpenStack portfolio, with the introduction of a remotely managed OpenStack offering to provide clients with a local cloud and increased visibility, control and security.
MyPOV – This paragraph unveils the ‘crown jewels’ – the capability to manage a Openstack system deployed remotely. Enterprises may still want to utilize their data centers and see their servers, but are more open to have them managed remotely.

This move further accelerates IBM’s commitment to open technologies and OpenStack. IBM has 500 developers dedicated to working on open cloud projects to bring new cloud innovations to market. With Forrester Research recently finding that more than twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM Cloud as their primary hosted private cloud platform than the next closest vendor [2], Blue Box is a strategic fit into the IBM Cloud portfolio.
MyPOV – No surprise – OpenStack compatibility is important and makes Blue Box a good fit.

Blue Box can enhance and complement developer productivity by:

· Speeding delivery of applications and data through simplified and consistent access to public, dedicated and local cloud infrastructures

· Supporting managed infrastructure services across hybrid cloud environments and IBM’s digital innovation platform, Bluemix

· Offering a single management tool for OpenStack-based private clouds regardless of location
MyPOV – Good summary of the BlueBox capabilities. Blue Box partnered with small PaaS vendor Mendix, the mention here of Bluemix may make those deployments uncertain – but we are not aware of a statement in these regards. In our view it maybe well worth for IBM to look at the Mendix capabilities.

This acquisition will enable IBM to deliver a public cloud-like experience within the client’s own data center, relieving organizations of the burden of traditional private cloud deployments.
MyPOV – Underlines the value prop – the customer keeps the data center the management goes to IBM. The acquisition reminds me of Cisco’s recent acquisition of MetaCloud (see here), which also had a significant service aspect.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM General Manager of Cloud Services Jim Comfort. “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments."

“No brand is more respected in IT than IBM,” said Blue Box Founder and CTO Jesse Proudman. “Blue Box is building a similarly respected brand in OpenStack. Together, we will deliver the technology and products businesses need to give their application developers an agile, responsive infrastructure across public and private clouds. This acquisition signals the beginning of new OpenStack options delivered by IBM. Now is the time to arm customers with more efficient development, delivery and lower cost solutions than they've seen thus far in the market.”
MyPOV – The usual quotes – no comment needed.

IBM currently plans to continue to support Blue Box clients and enhance their technologies while allowing these organizations to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio. […]
MyPOV – Key statement. Blue Box customers should contact IBM asap to make sure they can keep the services that matter to them.

Overall MyPOV

A good move for IBM, opens new service offerings to the IBM Cloud portfolio. Given the recent acquisition at EMC and Cisco, it looks like the private cloud is alive and well. To a certain point that is a failure of ‘pure’ public cloud players like AWS and Google, it looks like they have not been able to convince CIOs to move all their load to a public cloud setup. Will be interesting how the mix of private cloud – e.g. the ones managed with BlueBox – vs public cloud will end up in a few years. And IBM listens to customers, wants more cloud revenue, so as much as it can get that running private clouds, IBM will of course do that…

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Couchbase unveils N1QL and updates the NoSQL Performance Wars

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

A number of press releases by Couchbase crossed the wires and the may have a deep impact on the No SQL / BigData market – so let’s look at them quickly.

The press releases can be found here

A new programming language – N1QL – I have been critical on attempts to create new programming languages in the past (see e.g. on SAP River here). In general the world does not need more programming languages, unless they can clearly produce benefits to programmers and application architecture. In the case of N1QL (pronounced Nickel), Couchbase tries to bring SQL to document /JSON formats. That is new and addresses a pain point / tradeoff that had to be made in the past when choosing a database for a next generation application. As N1QL is SQL compatible, Couchbase wants to tap into the large SQL developer ecosystem. The question will be how much understanding of document formats will the SQL developer need to acquire to build performing applications, and how much of that can be automated by the Couchbase framework for the programming language. From the endorsements that Couchbase has garnered in the press release it is clear that there is certainly value being created by N1QL.

I should learn later in San Jose today how Couchbase can show efficiency gains with N1QL and will keep you posted.

Performance Wars – Round 2 – Earlier this week MongoDB published a performance report done by a 3rd party that showed superior performance of MongoDB over Cassandra and Couchbase (see Event Report here). No surprise Couchbase has shot back claiming that performance report is not fully transparent on all aspects of the test and more importantly, that tests show superior performance and TCO for Couchbase. We will be at Couchbase’s user conference later today and certainly learn more on the topic.

From these spats we can learn that performance really matters for NoSQL databases, which again shows that enterprises are moving their next generation applications into more mission and performance critical use cases than before. And that’s a good sign for enterprises and the industry.

And finally: As useful and important performance tests are – they always struggle on the comparison side. And every customer situation is different, so we recommend to take them as one measurement point, but strongly recommend customers to run their own benchmarks for critical performance pieces.