In a move that could boost its fortunes in the open-source database space, EnterpriseDB this week said it received a third round of financing valued at $19 million led by Red Hat.
EnterpriseDB is the key sponsor of the PostgreSQL open source database. The company offers a standard and advanced edition with tools to migrate from Oracle databases and more recently from MySQL. While the companies are not saying how much of a share Red Hat will hold in the company, IBM, NTT and Sony Online Entertainment are also strategic investors in the company.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 28, 20090 comments
MySQL founder Michael 'Monty' Widenius is trying to convince the European Union that Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems should come with a caveat: that Oracle must sell off the MySQL business.
In a statement issued on his blog Monday, Widenius said: "MySQL needs a different home than Oracle, a home where there will be no conflicts of interest concerning how, or if, MySQL should be developed further."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 20, 20093 comments
Of course that's a question critics have been asking since Sun Microsystems agreed to be acquired by Oracle earlier this year for $7.4 billion. Sun founder and chairman Scott McNealy looked to reassure his faith that Oracle will be good for Java. Speaking in a keynote address at this week's Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference in San Francisco, McNealy gave his blessing and then called on VP and Sun Fellow James Gosling, known as the "father of Java" to give his take.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 13, 20091 comments
The Industry Association of Software Architects conference is set to take place later this month in New York.
As I reported last month, this month's IASA IT Architect Regional Conference is being billed as the largest gathering of IT architects because such luminaries as Grady Booch, Len Bass, John Zachman, Eric Evans, Rob High and Angela Yochem are slated to speak.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 1, 20095 comments
The fate of MySQL has been top of mind since Oracle agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems earlier this year for $7.4 billion. Will Oracle spin it off, treat it as a strategic asset or let it die a slow death?
Well, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison this week finally shed some light on that question during an interview by none other than Ed Zander, who was once president and COO of Sun. Ellison made his remarks during the interview, at The Churchill Club, a non-profit Silicon Valley forum.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 25, 20091 comments
When Microsoft announced that it is seeding the new CodePlex Foundation, as reported last week, many critics began questioning the real intentions in Redmond.
Two key questions: why did Microsoft need to go out and establish yet another foundation in the open source world, when there are numerous ones such as Open Source Initiative, Free Software Foundation, SourceForge or even the Apache Foundation, among others?
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 15, 20090 comments
The United States Department of Justice has given the green light for Oracle to proceed with its $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, Oracle announced Thursday. The European Commission is expected to make its ruling by September 3.
Apparently DOJ brushed aside concerns over the fate of the Java Community Process (JCP), despite inquiring about it last month. That inquiry was not expected to be a deal breaker, noted Burton Group analyst Ann Thomas Mannes at the time.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 21, 20091 comments
I attended an event for analysts and media on Tuesday at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., where the company launched its Smart Analytics System.
However the news of its new offering and future roadmap was drowned out when IBM announced that it has agreed to acquire SPSS, a leading provider of real time predictive analytics software, for $1.2 billion (see original story here). Pending shareholder and regulatory approval, the deal is slated to close by year's end.
Chicago based SPSS is regarded as the leading provider of real-time predictive analytics software. With 1,200 employees, its technology is widely used by enterprises worldwide. During the event, I sat down with Forrester analyst James Kobielus, who said this is a significant move by IBM. "The SPSS acquisition is strategic for IBM," Kobielus said.
While IBM last year gained a leading business intelligence and analytics portfolio via its $4.9 billion acquisition of Cognos, the key component IBM lacked in its Information on Demand (IOD) offering was a best of breed data minding offering. "This fills out the portfolio," Kobielus said. In a blog posting, he described the deal as a "bold move has already sent shockwaves throughout the analytics market." You can read his entire reaction to the SPSS deal here.
SPSS is the second largest provider of predictive analytics data mining statistical analytics tools, he noted. The largest is SAS Institute. He pointed to few overlaps with SPSS such as IBM's DB2 Intelligent Miner within the InfoSphere portfolio, though he predicts that will be phased out as IBM builds out the SPSS brand within its IOD portfolio.
"Fundamentally their technology is componentized so we can embed it anywhere," said Amuj Goyal, general manager of IBM Software’s information management software organization.
It remains to be seen whether IBM will continue SPSS integration with other data warehouse providers including Oracle, Microsoft, Sybase, and Teradata. "I doubt IBM will rock the boat," Kobielus told me, saying its in its interest to keep SPSS offerings heterogeneous.
Meanwhile, the news that got drowned out by the deal was the launch of the IBM Smart Analytics System (IAS).
The system consists of an IBM pSeries server based running AIX, that includes storage, networking, various other services and a suite of IBM’s data mining tools including its DB2 database, Cognos BI and InfoSphere Warehouse. It will be available in September with a starting configuration of 4 terabytes and up to 200 Tbytes. Pricing was not disclosed.
Kobielus said IAS extends IBM's existing portfolio of data warehousing appliances. "What it adds is pre-integrated business content geared to particular vertical and horizontal markets. So it includes DB2, the data warehouse appliance, IBM Information Server, data integration and design tools plus the application specific or vertical specific dashboards and workflows and meta data and cleansing tools."
What does IAS mean if you're a developer? "IBM is very much turning its data warehouse portfolio into an application server in that they are pre bundling all of these solution components and providing application development interfaces to allow ISVs to build targeted applications on top of IAS," Kobielus said. "It's really a development platform, and ties into a services oriented architecture. IBM hasn't really called out that theme but it's undoubtedly part of their road map."
IBM said it will release by year's end technology it calls an Analytics Optimizer, which combines hardware and software to perform even faster analytic queries. "We are doing in-memory exploitation, we are exploiting vector processing inside this predictive optimizer, we are evaluating predicates in parallel using new scanning technologies," Goyal explained.
The goal, said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Software Group, is much faster queries with the target of real time business automation "One hour queries for many people don’t cut it," Mills said. "Five second queries all of a sudden start to open up the aperture to more creative thinking."
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 30, 20090 comments
When Oracle late last month said the Department of Justice wanted more information on how Java is licensed before signing off on its agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems, it mainly went under the radar.
Oracle indicated in its disclosure that it doesn't see the inquiry as a barrier to closing the deal later this summer. Burton Group analyst Ann Thomas Manes agrees. "It just means they are not on the fast path, it will just delay things -- that's all," she said.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 13, 20090 comments
When a reporter accosted Bill Gates last week at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Idaho to solicit his reaction to the Google's announcement that it will launch an operating system targeted at netbooks, he said "no comment."
At that moment, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was just a few feet away from Gates, said, "it would be better if you didn't make that comment." While that widely reported sidebar described the two as laughing following the awkward encounter, the main story has generated some serious questions and debate.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on July 12, 20093 comments