October 28, 2009
SAND Technology CEO, Arthur Ritchie to Retire; Tom O’Donnell to Replace Him
Montreal, October 28, 2009: Co-Founder and the Chief Executive of SAND Technology, Arthur Ritchie, announced today that on reaching the age of 65, he plans to retire and step down as CEO by the end of October. He has agreed to remain as the company’s Chairman working in an advisory capacity. Additionally he will focus on assisting the CEO’s smooth transition including strengthening existing customer and partner relationships.
October 26, 2009
Evolving the “Humpty Dumpty Warehouse” Into a “Phoenix”
In my last blog post, I responded to Wayne Eckerson Wayne’s World Blog for TDWI, which revisited the dilemma of the “Humpty Dumpty Warehouse”. I suggested that the “Phoenix” might be a better model for modern enterprise data warehouses. Wayne continued the discussion in comments:
Arthur, you are right to suggest that the BI team needs to adapt to changes Phoenix-like rather than pick up the pieces every time the organization changes. I guess the Humpty Dumpty metaphor is not the best–albeit a lot of fun–unless the king’s men are using superglue to get Humpty back together again. Certainly, I’m a big advocate of adaptable DW and BI architectures. That’s a given I should have noted!
Rather than superglue — though that sounds like fun! — last time I mentioned several key breakthroughs in information technologies that have matured to the point where a viable, flexible, Phoenix-like EDW can be created without taking a “rip and replace” strategy that would discard what has already been accomplished within the organization.
Because it maximizes existing investments both in products and people, this represents a much more secure and cost-effective route than trading a well understood set of problems for a replacement technology that may well solve some problems, but will inevitably replace them with a variety of altogether new. These breakthroughs include the following:
- Enhanced data base federation capabilities from all the major RDBMS providers, as well as from many Business Intelligence tool vendors like Business Objects.
- Very high-performance, storage-efficient and massively scalable software-based Nearline 2.0 storage systems that can house the entirety of an organization’s structured detail data, federated with the primary RDBMS.
- Very high-performance Column-Based Analytic Technology (CBAT) systems to support analytics for power users
- Very inexpensive and powerful desktop computers with adequate storage
- Relatively inexpensive blade servers
- Very high performance, efficient, automated ETL tools that can be used by the organization to set up and control the flow of data over time (including Disaster Recovery support using the Nearline 2.0 storage architecture).
It is now possible to integrate all of these subsystems into a single EDW architecture, resulting in a Scalable Corporate Information Factory (SCIF), to adapt Bill Inmon’s terminology). With this model in place, key BI analysts no longer need to focus primarily on transforming data to achieve a single version of “the truth” — in reality, an unattainable goal — to enable adequate performance, and more on on helping users derive real business value from corporate information by maximizing accessibility to “the facts” for the users who can provide essential business insights.
In subsequent posts I will explore this architecture in more detail.
October 20, 2009
ASUG California – Northern Chapter Meeting
Friday, November 6, 2009
- Keynote Presentation – 1:45 p.m.
Best Practices for a Nearline Solution in SAP Business Information Warehouse – SAND Technology
Crowne Plaza Hotel 777 Bellew Drive Milpitas, CA 95035
October 13, 2009
SAND Technology and TG-Energy Extend Reseller Relationship with Multi-Year, Multi-Million Dollar Contract
Montreal, Canada – October 13, 2009, SAND Technology Inc. (OTCBB: SNDTF.OB), an international provider of intelligent information management software and best practices, announced today that South Korean communications and IT services company TG-Energy, Inc (formerly known as Freesat) has signed a multi-million dollar, multi-year contract extending their agreement to act as the exclusive reseller of SAND products in South Korea. Read more…
September 29, 2009
One of the World’s Leading Chemical Companies Uses SAND/DNA Nearline for SAP NetWeaver BW to Optimize Storage Efficiency, Improve Operational Performance and Reduce Costs
Montreal, Canada — September 29, 2009 — SAND Technology Inc. (OTCBB: SNDTF.OB), an international provider of data management software and best practices, announced today that a leading global chemical company has adopted the SAND/DNA Nearline solution for SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) as part of a project to maintain the efficiency, performance and cost-effectiveness of the company’s SAP NetWeaver BW data warehouse in the face of rapid data growth. Implemented as an extension to the existing system, SAND/DNA will substantially reduce the storage requirements for steadily growing volumes of SAP NetWeaver BW data, enabling more efficient performance of standard data management operations while helping to keep operational and maintenance costs at a manageable level.
September 26, 2009
Regarding the Humpty Dumpty Data Warehouse Dilemma
Wayne Eckerson, on his Wayne’s World Blog for TDWI, revisits the dilemma of the “Humpty Dumpty Warehouse”:
Most organizations are like Humpty Dumpty teetering and tottering on top of a big wall. With the slightest gust of wind, Humpty crashes and breaks into dozens of pieces. And DW teams are “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” who are charged with putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Whether we’re talking about “Humpty Dumpty” in terms of the enterprise as a whole, or the data within a given warehouse, agreed — DW teams are doing the best they can with what they have. But often so are the CEOs, who are facing battles in the boardroom, battles between the shareholders, the company’s bankers, the boards of directors, the various C-Levels within the organizations and some of their powerful subordinates. Never mind vacuums created when key executives leave, or when mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, etc. change the nature of the business.
Unfortunately, most current Data Warehouses are built in such a way that this Humpty Dumpty dilemma will repeat itself over and over again. The real dirty little secret is that the same tricks used to make DWs efficient for reporting purposes (aggregation, indexing, and the subsequent discarding of underlying details) are the ones that make them difficult — and expensive — to change and update.
So what’s the answer? First, we must realize that there is no such thing as a “single version of the truth” but merely a convenient and workable one. Next, we must break out of the “Humpty Dumpty” dilemma and its tragic ending and find a better story — a better model, like the “Phoenix” that can “rise from the ashes” overnight to meet all the new KPI’s to support the business needs.
The good news is that technological developments in Nearline 2.0, RDBMS federation capabilities and high-performance ETL tools offer a way for companies to transition from “Humpty Dumpty” to the new “Phoenix”-like approach — without resorting to a “rip and replace” strategy.
My next post will explore these ideas further.
September 1, 2009
IT Services Group Chooses SAND/DNA Nearline to Optimize Storage and Management of Data in SAP NetWeaver BW
Montreal — September 01, 2009—SAND Technology, Inc. (OTCBB: SNDTF.OB), an international provider of data management software and best practices, announced today that an outsourced IT services group has adopted the SAND/DNA nearline solution for SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW). The SAND/DNA solution has been implemented as part of a project to more efficiently and cost-effectively manage growing amounts of data in the company’s SAP NetWeaver BW data warehouse and optimize operational performance. It will allow the company to reduce the amount of storage required to house steadily growing amounts of data, while keeping operational and maintenance costs under control.
August 14, 2009
XAM Plugfest, Santa Clara USA
September 14 to 17, 2009
The XAM standard features a framework for extensible metadata associated with stored objects, which supports retention/disposition and electronic discovery (e-discovery) capabilities and facilitates implementation of information life cycle management strategies. SAND/DNA’s XAM support enables enterprises to implement a single basic storage architecture and a single set of data governance policies for both unstructured and structured data, and to achieve better compliance with governance requirements at a lower cost.
XAM Plugfests and XAM Hands on Labs (HOL) assist application and storage vendors in developing and implementing XAM based products, testing and validating interoperability across XAM-compliant storage devices, and demonstrating prototypes of XAM-enabled applications and devices.
August 14, 2009
SAND and P&G at SAP TechED 2009 Phoenix, USA
October 13-16, 2009, Booth 610
One of the harsh realities of data warehousing today is the urgent need to make more data more available, for more applications with more users – and to do so without causing a disruptive “revolution” in existing systems and staying within budget.
At SAP TechEd, you will have the opportunity to meet with SAND and our customers to discuss how you can implement a flexible Intelligent Information Management architecture as an evolution of your current SAP BW environment. SAND/DNA Nearline for SAP BW leverages the existing infrastructure into which you have put years of effort and financial investment, providing you an environment that allows you to keep massive and ever-growing amounts of data available at a greatly reduced TCO.
Attend Proctor & Gamble’s session (BI119: 10/14/2009 2:00:00 PM – 3:00:00 PM, Room: L13) on Best Practices for Nearline Storage in SAP Business Information Warehouse by implementing SAND/DNA Nearline for SAP and find out how SAND enables:
- Better management of larger amounts of information
- More efficient satisfaction of SLAs and business analysis requirements using a flexible and agile data framework
- Reduced backup and recovery times
- Accelerated data loading and query processing for reporting and analytics
- Enriched analytic functionality
- Better compliance with regulatory requirements.
August 4, 2009
Thomas Cook Gains Four-Fold Performance Improvement for Complex Queries with SAND/DNA on Sun Microsystems Blade Servers
Thomas Cook Group UK & Ireland, part of one of the world’s leading travel groups, gains four fold performance improvement for complex queries and near linear scalability using the SAND/DNA software solution on Sun hardware.
Montreal, Canada August 4, 2009 — SAND Technology Inc. (OTCBB:SNDTF), an international provider of data management software and best practices, today announced that Thomas Cook Group UK & Ireland, part of one of the world’s leading travel groups, has successfully migrated its holiday search engine application based on SAND/DNA technology to a new Sun blade server environment. The system went live during a peak usage period, and immediately delivered a four-fold performance improvement for complex searches and heavy real-time update processes of the company’s holiday database.