Dashboards Can Steer Users in Wrong ...

July 5, 2004 (Computerworld) ... direction without "taking a painful exploration of underlying business processes." Sober thoughts, especially given that they come from Colin Dover, product marketing manager at Hyperion Solutions Corp., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based business intelligence concern that supplies BI dashboards. "The technology is the easy part," he says. Dover estimates that 60% of the success or failure of dashboard implementations depends on "getting to the nub of what your business truly is." That may sound like a cinch, but "common points of alignment" among various business units aren't that easy to quantify in ways that are useful for dashboard users, he says. In other words, prepare for a truckload of meetings between your various dashboard constituencies to create meaningful business metrics. Drive carefully.
No Need for James Bond ...
... with SpyCatcher 3.0, available later this month in retail outlets. But don't let the commercial release deter you from evaluating the spyware elimination tool. "It was designed with corporations in mind," says CEO Joshua Blanchfield of Tenebril Inc. in Boston, which created the software. It uses a remote console so an administrator can manage thousands of clients. SpyCatcher comes with a library of "spyware fingerprints" that's regularly updated. And if you work in a place that discourages fun, you can suppress unwanted applications, such as games, by adding them to its database. SpyCatcher 3.0 uses an aggressive reinstall-prevention shield that keeps the malware from returning to the PC. Cost? Depends on how many copies you get. A recent contract for 40,000 users went for $2 a copy, says Blanchfield.
Discipline Application Behavior ...

nLayers' InSight

... with new appliance. This week a San Jose start-up, nLayers Inc., ships its first product, InSight, which creates an "application behavior model through deep packet analysis," says CEO Gili Raanan. He argues that most performance management tools are devoted to watching infrastructure activity such as routers and switches and not the applications, which Forrester Research Inc. estimates cause 54% of unscheduled downtime. Raanan theorizes that in a world of Web services and distributed software, "questions like, 'What is my application?' and 'Where is my application?' have become metaphysical questions and not engineering ones." To know the health of a given application means knowing more about the condition of a machine or even a set of machines. You need to look at the overall behavior of the application. That, he says, is what InSight does, by passively detecting and then observing packaged and custom applications on your network. InSight displays the complex interdependencies and behavior of programs, then simplifies the view so managers can, say, streamline their distribution to improve performance. You can buy a subscription for $2,438 per month or get a perpetual license for $45,000.

Control Batch Jobs in Mixed ...
... environment from Windows console. ActiveBatch from Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. in Parsippany, N.J., lets you queue jobs on Linux, OpenVMS, Unix and Windows machines to run at any time and in the correct order, establishing triggers between the successful completion of one job before another kicks off. Version 5 is expected to be ready for delivery the first week of September. It will add Kerberos security and let you create a "job plan" that coordinates numerous jobs into a single entity for easier management. The upgrade will also add new job types, such as customized e-mail messages. Pricing has not yet been determined.
Appliance Boosts Data Warehouse ...
... performance while cutting costs. A tenfold performance jump at half the price. That's the boast from Jit Saxena, CEO of Netezza Corp. in Framingham, Mass., whose Netezza Performance Server (NPS) runs a fast proprietary database on what he calls "commodity hardware." The trick, though, is to push low-cost Intel processors down to disk drives on the appliance for faster response time "so the data is processed where it's being stored," says vice president of marketing Ellen Rubin. Saxena adds that tuning the database specifically for ODBC, JDBC and SQL business intelligence queries improves performance. General-purpose, high-end Unix machines running Oracle, DB2 and even Teradata databases can't compete, he claims. Because it's an appliance, Saxena says, it's "plug-and-play and doesn't require much of that DBA stuff," saving money on operations costs. An NPS appliance can handle up to 10TB of data, but before the end of the year, Netezza plans to double or triple that. Pricing starts at $700,000 for a 2TB machine.

Netezza Performance Server