http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html
Pour some sugar on the cloud, and wish you could ask aloud-
can I be small, cut my costs and still have a CRM – The Answer is Ahem-
SUGARCRM
Coming up (Technical Review)
Category: Analytics
An open source and better Search Engine
Search Engines are difficult subjects to talk about – there are multiple experts and there are multiple vendors from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Cuil and there are newer innovations like Cosmix -Blended Search and there are Wiki Search (Including the Digg bar and same features introduced in Google now). Content itself has exploded from websites in 1999 to websites, blog posts, RSS feeds, tweets, Facebook profiles, online communities, voice, podcast and video. Quantitative measures to measure, index and rank the new types of content require that the algorithms behind search be made open source but with strict creative commons licensing and using third party developers to create search algorithm extensions.
This idea seems difficulty to implement but it has been there and done before. No one creates Palo Alto like research labs anymore- all scientist and researchers have to first sign away “copy"cat”rights before beginning their research.
The year 2009 is different from the year 1999, and PageRank is no longer a maths based algol- it is a marketing brand. Time for the Stanford dropouts to go back to school and get some more math and some less marketing (and less pranks on Wolfram please) in their search engine. And Paul Allen who created the building in Stanford where the Google algol was first thought, he needs to spend some Bills and venture fund a new wave of innovation in search engines. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe. I just need a better search engine than Google right now.- Perhaps Herr Schmidt take some time from viewing mountains in Mountain View and measure customer satisfaction instead of just measuring market share in non competitive and likely to face anti trust scrutiny in US and Europe very soon. So better give some of the ranking algol features open so all websites implement the SEO tactics magically revealed and create a better world wide web- thus negating the information asymmetry in a closed source search engine.
iBi – Business Intelligence Applications on the iPhone
From the press release at QlikTech at http://www.qlikview.com/Contents.aspx?id=9836
They actually end up promoting Oracle’s mobile BI app even though they are trying to bash it up.
QlikTech, the world’s fastest-growing Business Intelligence (BI) company, today announced the immediate availability of QlikView for iPhone, the very first truly interactive mobile BI app built specifically for the iPhone. Unlike Oracle’s mobile BI offering that features a rigid interface and limited functionality, QlikView for iPhone fully leverages iPhone’s multitouch and GPS features to deliver QlikView’s renowned, industry-defining interactive capabilities. The result is a groundbreaking app that puts the power of sophisticated, real-time business answers in the hands of mobile users worldwide. It can be downloaded for free from Apple’s Mobile App Store on iTunes.
Product Highlights:
- Interactive – click through line items on a list box or chart to get to answers, going deep into regional or product data.
- Coverflow –flip through relevant business analysis, make a new selection and those changes are instantly reflected throughout.
- GPS-enabled – automatically delivers local customer sales, service or inventory data as reps approach a customer or supplier facility.
- Feature-rich – use Search, Bookmark and Shake to Erase
Smarter, Faster, Real-Time Interactive Analysis
Mobile professionals need access to comprehensive, real-time information, not static reports that lack detail from offerings like Oracle’s mobile BI tool. With QlikView for iPhone, salespeople can drill deep into accounts and get granular, up-to-the minute answers and analysis that help them do their job better. From specific customer or product data, down to a single SKU or employee name, QlikView for iPhone gets users what they need, the moment they need it.“We comprehensively surveyed the BI mobile landscape and it was clear all previous attempts at addressing user needs failed miserably,” said Anthony Deighton, SVP Product, QlikTech. “Just posting a static report on a mobile screen, as Oracle’s solution does, may be marginally helpful, but creates a tremendously frustrating user experience, leaving no opportunity to interact with the data. With QlikView for iPhone, users get a mobile view of a relevant data subset, as well as access to the specific answers they seek. This interactive dynamic is the only way to truly fulfill the promise of mobile BI.”
The Only Mobile BI Tool with Multitouch, Coverflow and GPS Integration
QlikView for iPhone takes full advantage of the iPhone’s native interface. The entire application is multitouch driven with complete implementation of the iPhone finger gestures users are accustomed to. Simple finger-swipes and finger-pinches enable users to select, interact and drill down into data. And to clear selections, all users have to do is shake the device. Apple’s popular 3-D Coverflow feature is also enabled, allowing users to “flip” through analyses in the same way they would through album covers and artists in iTunes. Real-time data changes are also instantly reflected in every Coverflow chart.
And here is the actual Oracle application
http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/business-indicators.html
Enhance Productivity for Mobile Business Users
Oracle Business Indicators is the first in a series of business applications for delivering Oracle business information to the Apple iPhone. The application provides mobile business users with real-time, secure access to business performance information on one of the industry’s most exciting and engaging mobile devices – Apple iPhone.Oracle Business Indicators allows users to view and interact with Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications that include financial, human resources, supply chain, and customer relationship management analytics, as well as analytical alerts generated by Oracle Delivers, an integrated component of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE). Leveraging full advantage of the Apple iPhone mobile platform, Oracle Business Indicators is built as a native application to offer highly intuitive and flexible features including browse, search, and favorites for a superior overall end user experience.
BENEFITS
* Pre-defined business indicators-Pre-built metrics and reports include financial, human resources, supply chain, and customer relationship management analytics.
* Timely alerts on exception conditions-Enables the mobile user to review alerts generated by conditions pre-defined in Oracle Delivers. A user can select an alert entry and immediately review an associated analytic report.
* Superior user experience-Offers a highly intuitive user interface for browsing, searching, and locating business performance metrics.
* Robust security-Based on the same user security model as Oracle BI Applications. Also supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption technology.
SAS commits $70 million to Cloud Computing
From the official SAS website
http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/CCF2009.html
SAS to build $70 million cloud computing facility
New cloud computing facility will support needed data-intensive customer solutions
CARY, NC (Mar. 19, 2009) – SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, announces today it is building a 38,000-square-foot cloud computing facility to provide the additional data-handling capacity needed to expand SAS’ OnDemand offerings and hosted solutions.
As the need for hosted solutions grows, new research and development jobs will be generated at SAS’ Cary, N.C., world headquarters, where the majority of R&D employees (more than 1,400) are located.
“This project is proof that, despite the down economy, SAS continues to grow and innovate,” said Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. “The growing demand by our customers for hosted solutions has given us this opportunity to invest even further in North Carolina and the Cary community.”
In keeping with SAS’ commitment to protecting the environment, the facility will be built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for water and energy conservation. The sustainable construction methods encourage recycling of materials, similar to the Executive Briefing Center under construction on the Cary campus. SAS’ first LEED building, SAS Canada’s headquarters in Toronto, opened in April 2006.
In keeping with LEED standards, about 60 percent of the project’s construction and equipment spending will be in North Carolina. Approximately 1,000 people will be involved in its design and construction.
The facility will include two 10,000-square-foot server farms. Server Farm 1 is anticipated to be on-line mid-2010 and support growth for three to five years. Server Farm 2 will be constructed as a shell and will be populated with mechanical and electrical infrastructure once Server Farm 1 reaches 80 percent capacity. The facility will be built on SAS’ Cary campus.
Apparently SAS Institute believes in creating jobs ( and thousands of them) during the recession ! Jim clearly is in top intellectual shape despite his err vintage. Imagine with just a browser and you could be crunching billions of bytes of data sitting from a beach in Goa! Thankfully they did not believe the hot air that McKinsey put out on cloud computing (read here http://smartdatacollective.com/Home/17942 )
McKinsey attacks Cloud Computing having no sense
McKinsey, that fine think tank of intellectuals recently dubbed cloud computing as not making sense -thus trying to throttle in its infancy a paradigm that could make companies across the world more competitive than they are today by helping cut costs precisely when they need it the most. The attempt to paint virtualization rather than remote computing is another attempt to cloud the air rather than clear the air on cloud computing. Most consulting companies would have pointed out industry affiliations and disclaimers on which companies they are representing or have represented.
Read other comments at the NYT article
Its study uses Amazon.com’s Web service offering as the price of outsourced cloud computing, since its service is the best-known and it publishes its costs. On that basis, according to McKinsey, the total cost of the data center functions would be $366 a month per unit of computing output, compared with $150 a month for the conventional data center. “The industry has assumed the financial benefits of cloud computing and, in our view, that’s a faulty assumption,” said Will Forrest, a principal at McKinsey, who led the study.
My take on this is here-
Cloud computing will have lower costs as economies of scale kick in, as they did for nearly all technologies. McKinsey partners must be having a hard time to meet their annual bonuses if they have not factored this basic assumption in their cost projections. Cloud computing just converts this to a mass infrastructure from the present scenario where you pay annual licenses for software that you use for less than 60 % in a day, and hardware that you find obsolete in 3-4 years, which is off course gives accountants a reason to help you with depreciation and tax benefits. Rent a computer in the sky is simpler – and you would not need any consultant to help advise what configuration you need.
Mckinsey has deep touches with the outsourcing industry in India from their seminal paper in 1999, to their first concept Knowledge center that helped start it, to their alumni across the outsourcing sector which satisfy a mutual symbiotic relationship particularly in business research. Cloud computing actually help with virtual teams – no need for server farms, IT bureaucracies and Indian outsourcing can actually reduce a lot of costs along with American direct users. The intermediaries and consultants would be affected the most.
Indeed I am speaking on the Cloud Slam 09, precisely on how cloud computing can help lower the digital divide by giving high power computing to anyone having a thin shell laptop with a browser. Developing countries need access to HPC to better plan their resources and growth in an environmentally optimized manner.
Cloud say hello to R. R say hello to Cloud.
Here is a terrific project from Biocep which I have covered before in January at http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/01/r-and-cloud-computing/
But with some exciting steps ahead at http://biocep-distrib.r-forge.r-project.org/
Basically add open source R , create a user friendly GUI, host it on a cloud computer to better crunch data, and save hardware costs as well. Basically upload, crunch data, download.
Save hardware costs and software costs in recession. Before your boss decides to save his staffing costs.
Biocep combines the capabilities of R and the flexibility of a Java based distributed system to create a tool of considerable power and utility. A Biocep based R virtualization infrastructure has been successfully deployed on the British National Grid Service, demonstrating its usability and usefulness for researchers.
The virtual workbench enhances the user experience and the productivity of anyone working with R.
A lovely presentation on it is here
and I am taking an extract
What is missing now
•High Level Java API for Accessing R
•Stateful, Resuable, Remotable R Components
•Scalable, Distributed, R Based Infrastructure
•Safe multiple clients framework for components usage as a pool of indistinguishable Remote Resources
•User friendly Interface for the remote resources creation, tracking and debugging
- Citation: Karim Chine, "Biocep, Towards a Federative, Collaborative, User-Centric,Grid-Enabled and Cloud-Ready Computational Open Platform,"
escience,pp.321-322, 2008 Fourth IEEE International Conference on eScience, 2008
Ajay- With thanks to Bob Marcus for pointing this out from an older post of mine. I did write on this in August on the Ohri framework but that was before recession moved me out from cloud computing to blog computing.
What is Cloud Computing
Here is nice video on ‘What is Cloud Computing‘ . It was created by Joyent http://joyent.com/. It basically shows you the perspectives on how cloud computing is without getting into jargon, technical gab or semantics.
Enjoy!
It is also available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q
DECISION STATS 