On Demand Business Intelligence has picked up traction in the past year as both SMB’s and their larger brethren turn to hosted BI solutions to deploy BI projects faster with less risk and at lower cost. Initially reserved for analyzing excel files and for small departmental projects, BI in the cloud is now being utilized for extremely large data sets and data warehousing projects.
GoodData is one of the first firms to offer BI in the cloud and just recently won the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. GoodData offers standard BI functionality and tools for Analytics, and Dashboard and Report creation but due to its Cloud architecture offers scalability and collaboration ability not available with on premise BI tools.
A few of GoodData’s competitors include SAP Business Objects, Swirrl, and SQLStream. Expect to see more competitors jump into the space as both computing cycle costs come down and as more companies make the transition to the cloud for BI projects.
Cloud Wars Begin
Amazon also announced a 15% drop in pricing for all EC2 instance families and sizes. This is significant due to the fact that one can expect EC2 competitors like GoGrid and Softlayer to follow suit and lower pricing as well.
Stephen Baker Researches Enterprise 2.0 Consulting
Over on BusinessWeek; Stephen Baker is creating a few articles on Enterprise 2.0 Consulting. Will be interesting to see whether his research indicates that Enterprise 2.0 consulting is a viable industry or more of the sometimes dubious Social Media consulting with an Enterprise twist.
W3C announces OWL2
The Semantic Web group within W3C released the OWL2 recommendation. OWL2 is part of the W3C’s Semantic Web Toolkit and is a standard for representing knowledge on the Web.
GSA launches Apps.Gov
The General Services Administration has launched the long awaited Apps.Gov site. Intended as a one stop shop for US government agencies keen on getting into the cloud, the site lists vendor provided Social Media, Business, Productivity and IT Services applications.
Are Washington Post’s Policies A Sign of The Future?
The Washington Post’s draconian Social Media Policy for its staffers has raised the question of whether strict Social Media Guidelines will become the norm in corporate America.
Is this the Best Enterprise 2.0 Definition?
Bill Ives has posted what is probably the best Enterprise 2.0 definition I have seen to date. Now it will be up to a vendor to actually sell Enterprise 2.0 solutions to a customer with this definition.
