DBMS2.com is broken (Update: Fixed!)
Edit: It’s fixed!
A spectacularly failed upgrade has brought down DBMS2.com. I’m going to try to reproduce the error — or hopefully not — and also work toward a fix by messing with my other blogs. Please forgive any chaos that ensues.
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Updating our disclosures
From time to time a blogger should make disclosures about sources of income and other potential influences. Fortunately, I’ve covered most of them in the past.
- The generalities I posted a few years ago still apply (and, I think, are a good read in any case about the realities of analyst coverage).
- The updates a year and a half ago are still very accurate, although I might name different specific clients today.
- The partial client list from half a year ago is still pretty accurate, although Microsoft and Kognitio have dropped off, Clearpace changed its name to RainStor, and non-RDBMS analytic data management/analysis contenders Cloudera and Splunk have been added.
- While I have user clients, I have nothing to disclose about them.
One new development is that for the first time since 2001, I’ve taken stock in a private company. It’s Petascan, a seed/stealth-stage outfit with some very innovative ideas about how to use Flash memory in support of analytic data processing. I’d like to do more of this, with conflicts evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For example, I bet I could bring a lot of value to vertically-oriented analytics start-ups, who would at worst compete with only a small fraction each of the business of the more horizontally-oriented companies I generally write about.
| Categories: About this blog, Hardware | 2 Comments |
Should we include my blog A World of Bytes in our general feed?
As is pointed out in the right-most column of this and every other blog page, we publish five blogs, all written by me. As per the boilerplate:
- DBMS2 covers database management, analytics, and related technologies.
- Text Technologies covers text mining, search, and social software.
- Strategic Messaging analyzes marketing and messaging strategy.
- The Monash Report examines technology and public policy issues.
- Software Memories recounts the history of the software industry.
But I actually write a sixth blog too, which has taken over much of the role previously filled by The Monash Report. It also overlaps coverage of internet technologies with Text Technologies.
That is A World of Bytes, which I write for Network World. Read more
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Our blog redesign
If you’re reading this (and not just in your feed reader), you’ve probably noticed that the five Monash Research blogs have undergone a major redesign. We had two main goals in mind:
- Help visitors find information that may be of interest to them
- Keep the blogs easy to read and pleasant to look at
I hope you will agree that we’ve met those goals with — as it were — flying colors.
Most aspects of the redesign are pretty obvious, but here’s a biggie you might at first overlook. On most category pages on DBMS2, Text Technologies, and Software Memories, there are now brief category descriptions and, crucially, suggested links. Hopefully, these will help you find research that is interesting to you, but which you may have missed the first time around. If you want to check out some examples, you could start with:
- (in DBMS2) Business intelligence
- (in DBMS2) SAP
- (in Text Technologies) Google
Also — if you’re wondering why we added that super-prominent sign-up box for our complete feed, the reason is simple: Only about a third of our feed subscribers take the integrated feed. (The others typically take just Text Technologies or just DBMS2.) Given how my interests and subjects connect to each other, I think my readers are much better off if they get at least the headlines to everything.
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Updating my standards and disclosures
In early 2006, I wrote a pair of posts in which I discussed my general standards for analytic credibility, and disclosed some of my own relationships and biases. I have nothing to add to the generalities, but maybe it’s time to update some specifics.
- The title of “my biggest customer” has no clear winner these days. Most of the contenders are small DBMS vendors such as Netezza, DATAllegro, and EnterpriseDB. Generally, I’m closer to small companies these days than to big ones.
- That wasn’t always the case. For example, In other years my biggest customers have been Oracle (several times), SAP, Computer Associates, Microsoft (I think — if not so, then close to it), and AOL.
- I’ve had a falling-out with SAP, who flat-out cheated me in some business dealings. Multiple execs from the VP level on up seem to have been OK with that. If you think that SAP is more ethical than, say, Oracle or Microsoft, I strongly beg to differ.
- Every white paper and webcast I do is “sponsored”; i.e., money changes hands. (There may be occasional exceptions to that rule in the future, but it’s usually the case.) Sponsorship is clearly disclosed.
- I cannot commit to promptly or completely disclosing who my consulting clients are. Sometimes they want to be served in confidence. However, I always have disclosed — and in the future always will disclose — any kind of relationship in which I am paid to promote companies in any way.
- I do spot consulting for both public-equity and private-equity/venture capital investors. In other years I’ve also had a small number of retainer relationships with public-equity investors, but there don’t happen to be any at the moment.
| Categories: About this blog, Monash Research highlights, SAP | 3 Comments |
We’re having a bit of a rocky server transition
I’m moving servers this morning. The result, I am told by my web host Dimension Servers, should be better response times and more stability. But my domain registrar NameCheap got weird when I retargeted the DNS, which may have contributed to difficulties. Anyhow, various of our sites have been briefly down in whole or part.
dbms2.com email — which is what most of you use — is down at the moment. monash.com email, which is hosted by Google, seems just fine.
I’ll get this all sorted out soon. And then I’ll catch up on some monashadvantage.com access I owe.
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Oh great — two of my domains are listed as expired
Text Technologies and Software Memories are down until I get this sorted out. And I’m on a plane to Orlando in a few hours …
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(Crosspost) New ways to read our research!
We’ve finally redesigned the Monash Information Services website. In particular, we’ve created two great new ways to read our research. First, there’s a new, Google-based integrated search engine. (And it really works well, the one glitch being that it brings back feeds and pages interchangeably. Try it out!) Also – and I really encourage you all to subscribe to this — there’s a new integrated research feed.
The reason you should care about these is in both cases the same: Our research is actually spread across multiple sites and feeds. I write about Google both in the Monash Report and on Text Technologies. I write about enterprise text management both on Text Technologies and on DBMS2. I write about computing appliances both on DBMS2 and in the Monash Report. I write about data mining in all three places. And now that there’s an integrated, industry history relevant to any of the other subject areas may find its way onto Software Memories. Your view of my views simply isn’t complete unless you have access to all of those sites.
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My blogs stopped working through IE!
EDIT: Now they seem to be working again, with no action on my part and no known software updates through the whole process. Go figure. I do not know WordPress well enough to guess just exactly what had to have been broken and then fixed at my hosting provider to have caused these effects.
As of this writing, my blogs (DBMS2, the Monash Report, Text Technologies, and Software Memories) are all working in Firefox, and the top page of each is working in IE, but the rest of the pages/links are NOT working in IE. (But www.monash.com, a non-Wordpress site on the same host, is still working through IE.) Naturallly, I’m addressing this problem as fast as I can. I imagine the fix will involve some sort of a reinstall and/or theme change, which could alter the blogs’ look-and-feel, maybe not for the better (especially at first). I apologize for the inconvenience!
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Why I feel qualified to pontificate about public policy
Maybe I should explain why I feel motivated and qualified to hold forth at such length about public policy issues such as net neutrality, free-world privacy, authoritarian censorship, economic development, and so on.
If you’re reading here, you’re probably familiar with my software industry credentials — top-ranked stock analyst, top-tier product analyst, sometime entrepreneur, etc. If not, there’s always my official bio. But I also have some non-trivial public policy and economics chops. I spent two years at the Kennedy School of Government after getting my Ph.D. Then, turning down an assistant professorship at the Kellogg School of Management as well as research jobs at RAND and IDA, I went to Wall Street — which is, if one chooses to make it such, one heck of a further education in economics. And then in the mid/late 90s, Linda and I actually got active in the internet services market, analyzing, consulting, etc. Indeed, we even (re)wrote a few speeches for Steve Case of AOL, including some Congressional testimony.
Bottom line: Yes, I actually have some idea what I’m talking about. 🙂