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Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The curse of 'Proprietary'

"From frustration inspiration flows..."

Having worked with a number of different IT systems and architectures in my time I have never 'fully' understood the accepted rhetoric around 'open' and 'proprietary' systems.

So thought I would take a look at the dictionary websites

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/proprietary

The wisdom is that the origin of the phrase comes from ownership of title in property terms.

Working as I do in the mainframe space, the term proprietary is a word often associated with the platform.  Of late this association has become a source of frustration for me... Let me explain...

As the IT industry consolidates and the appliance and vertically integrated stacks once more become the vogue, the concept of Open and Proprietary systems again becomes the centre of the debate.  Lets look at Oracle as a case in point, once a Database company that partnered with most every IT hardware vendor they were the very definition of the Open software company.  How times have changed...

If you look at Oracle's strategy now, and I can claim only a passing knowledge, it appears to be to build integrated systems, tuned and optimised to run Oracle software in as performant a way as possible.  This compounded with the very public spat with HP and that they don't support VM Ware as a hypervisor must surely put them firmly in the closed camp???

So to the mainframe... whilst I fully acknowledge that no other IT hardware runs z/OS, to call the box 'proprietary' is surely a historical view at best.  If you look at the modern mainframe then it is a server that runs 4 o/s one of which is Open source.  Surely given this the mainframe should be claiming to be the most 'Open' server on the market...

Monday, March 12, 2012

Deploy and Expand Your Analytics Solutions Faster on System z

Implemented quickly and correctly, business-analytics and data-warehousing solutions can help organizations identify new opportunities, respond to business situations faster and ultimately increase competitive advantage. Therefore, it’s now a necessity for IT organizations to be able to quickly deploy and expand their business-analytics and data warehousing-infrastructure. They need the agility for providing the most current functionality and applications while keeping up with growing user adoption and enterprise-wide data volume expansion.
A common barrier to this agility is the fact that many business-analytics and data-warehousing projects are implemented at the departmental level. Each business group is therefore responsible for assessing their current capacity rather than expanding requirements. Likewise, each group procures, acquires, installs, manages and trains an expanding user base on new hardware and software on their own.
All of this takes time, and in most cases, it also requires additional staff and funding for any real value to be derived from the solution. And, because individual departments and units implement these solutions, it’s difficult for them to take advantage of the experiences and best practices of other departments.
Meanwhile individuals in every business role, especially those on the front lines, are relying on business analytics and data warehousing to help them make more informed business decisions and improve business performance. Having to wait days, weeks or even months for business information adversely affects their ability to do their jobs. And, the longer it takes to meet their requirements, the more it costs your organization overall in unattained business advantage.
Fortunately, there’s a solution for these issues. It’s time to consider deploying your data-warehousing and business-analytics solution on an IBM System z platform.
Immediate Business Value
Today, organizations are successfully meeting and exceeding the expectations of a growing user base in a timeframe that can aggressively optimize business performance by deploying IBM Business Analytics and Data Warehousing offerings on the System z platform. This complete portfolio of business and technology solutions helps executives, data analysts and front-line employees gain insight and foresight.
Real-time monitoring, reporting, analysis, dashboards and a robust set of predictive analytics enable everyone in your company to make smart, proactive business decisions when and where they’re needed. With an enterprise-data-warehouse infrastructure as the foundation for your business-analytics investment, your users are ensured consistent, secure access to accurate and timely business information.
Because of the underlying System z platform, a staged implementation for immediate business value is possible. With proven System z virtualization capabilities, you can reconfigure and adjust your solution to meet changing business needs without disruptive server software and hardware acquisition or reconfiguration. To ensure rapid deployment and expansion, the solution also provides:
Turnkey, optimized and integrated hardware, software and services so you are up and running quickly
A portfolio of services and education to help your organization quickly, easily and efficiently implement and execute

Rapid ROI
With IBM Business Analytics and Data Warehousing on System z, you can start with your most critical issues and then position your solution to grow and evolve as your business and the market demands. The rapid deployment and expansion capabilities help ensure that your business-analytics and data-warehousing solution keeps pace with growing user demands by:
Minimizing time-intensive reengineering of your entire solution when deployment demands grow or change, which enables you to start with your final architecture
Implementing and expanding without time-consuming hardware acquisitions, software installations, network configurations, testing, training and administration
Enabling teams to learn from the experiences of other departments using the same solution
Facilitating staff proficiency in business analytics and data warehousing as their areas of expertise
Centralizing your administration staff so you can collect business requirements and implement them effectively
The result? IT can quickly provide the scalability, availability and performance your business needs because the solution can quickly scale to accommodate growing batches of data and increases in business users without performance degradation. Because the solution can support more users and more frequent and sophisticated queries of larger volumes of data successfully, a domino effect kicks in. More and more users adopt the business-analytics and data-warehousing solution, which further improves ROI.
by Rebecca Wormleighton