Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search to Ride Out the Recession (Strategic Focus)

The global recession will further compound business problems in 2009. Datamonitor believes that this is the right time for customers to derive value out of existing investments, capitalizing on the convergence between business intelligence (BI) and enterprise search and retrieval (ESR). This report focuses on converging BI and ESR technologies and highlights growth opportunities and user needs.

Driving Better Business Intelligence Through Streamlined Analytics

Analytic processes are failing to keep pace with demanding analytic requirements because they cannot enable timely data integration. Geographic BI technology provides a single, seamless data development and processing environment. Our research reports span the global software and IT services domain covering: strategic issues, technology and services, companies and markets. Ovum's research has, for over 20 years been focused at the junction of the technical and commercial domains. Our strategic issues agenda addresses the major disruptions that are affecting both the software and IT services suppliers, and their customers that they serve.

Open Sesame: Why Open Source BI and Data Warehousing Solutions are Gaining in Acceptance

In the beginning, open source solutions were the shiny play things of the techno crowd. After all, they were fun, new, and most importantly, free. No one would have considered using them in any real world corporate IT shops…

My, how times have changed. Today, open source solutions are not only being considered, they are being implemented by large and small enterprises -- at rates that are mind-boggling. This paper examines the challenges faced by organizations today regarding their BI/data warehousing environments, why traditional solutions fall short, and the rise of upstart open source companies.

Lowering Mainframe TCO through zIIP Specialty Engine Exploitation

Mainframe infrastructures of today bear little resemblance to the rigid, monolithic systems of the past. Industry standards and integration tools have matured to provide increased flexibility and intuitive integrated development environments to simplify reusing legacy data sources in new application development initiatives. As this report has shown, utilizing zIIP specialty engines as part of your SOA enablement strategy can significantly lower mainframe TCO. However, without software to exploit the zIIP across multiple data and applications environments for Web services, SOA or data connectivity, its true potential cannot be realized. DataDirect Shadow is a single unified-platform, built exclusively for integration with IBM System z mainframes. It uses patent-pending technology to deliver broad exploitation of zIIP engines and enabling customers to deliver business systems that involve the System z platform in a timely manner and with a material reduction in overall TCO. DataDirect Shadow provides a new benchmark in mainframe integration, one that not only allows the mainframe to be a full participant within an SOA, but extends the value of the platform to business by enabling it take on new workloads with dramatically reduced costs.

Best Practices in Analytics, Business Intelligence and Performance Management

Beginning in June 2009, each issue of DBTA will incorporate a new themed "Best Practices" section designed to deliver relevant case studies, customer references and technology overview/benefits in a clearly defined area of information management. The editorial team at DBTA has chosen the area of analytics, business intelligence and performance management as the first to be covered. According to DBTA research, 42% of our subscribers spend more than five hours per week on BI reporting while 15% of our readers spend more than half of their time every week preparing BI reports. With all of that work and evaluation going into BI within our reading audience, this is a highly relevant topic for you and a great place for DBTA to start providing deeper background information on solutions.

Best of Breed Mainframe Integration and SOA Tools A buyer's guide for tools to help with mainframe integration leveraging SOA

In today's IT marketplace it is easy to think that mainframes are being marginalised more and more in companies across the world. Indeed, not so long ago the story was that the mainframe was the dinosaur, headed towards global extinction. The forecast has, of course, been thoroughly disproved, as many companies continue to gain great business benefit from their mainframe investments.

This paper considers the topic of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and identifies the best-of-breed characteristics to look for in evaluating any mainframe SOA toolest, in order to help companies make the decision that will best suit their business needs.

The High Performance DBA: Optimizing Databases for High Performance

The database administrators job continues to grow more challenging and complex - new platforms, more data, more databases, and less help seems to be the norm. To keep key database systems available and optimized for high performance the DBA must put a strategy in place that focuses on the key areas of database management:

• Storage management
• Performance Management
• Capacity Management
  

This paper outlines techniques you can use to streamline and automate the management of these critical areas so you can deliver high levels of availability and performance. Get the White Paper now and learn more.