Peter Christy

TechEd in the Recession

As usual, I spent a couple of days at Microsoft's TechEd, this year back in the LA Convention Center. The technical program didn't disappoint, but the economic downturn could be felt (Microsoft got hit by the double whammy of the economy and then Swine Flu!). The keynotes had no celebrity glitter for the first time in my memory, and most notable was the much smaller perpetual feeding trough that normally characterizes a MS programmer event (programmers run on the bellies augmented by caffeine). There was a lot of interesting product tidbits as always.

Laptop Analytics

MS "Gemini:" I had heard about Gemini before. At the BI Conference Keynote last year Gemini was demoed — a user with a laptop running Excel with 100 million rows of data. My mistaken understanding at the time was that this clever parlor trick had a large, server-based in-memory database system network connected. Au contraire Mon Ami! This was a more or less standard 4GB laptop running Vista and Excel with an interesting Excel plug in ("Gemini")! The magic is columnar compression — the category of technology also used by the log file tool vendors use for fast log file analysis. When a data set is imported into Gemini this columnar compression occurs, but after that, all the processing is on the laptop (MS also demonstrated Gemini on a Netbook, admitting you probably couldn't get 100M rows on a 1GB machine, but you could get 20M!). Gemini also remembers where all the data came from with XML metadata, solving the traditional problem of ad hoc spreadsheets when the creator is no longer around ("where the hell did this data come from?!!"). The Gemini team is in the under-commit mode for now (smart) but I think this kind of tool could have a profound impact on business analytics over time.

Exchange 14 and Data Loss Prevention

Microsoft also talked about how new features in Exchange help solve data loss problems (the speaker calls it "leakage" noting humorously that every use of "leakage" he could think of is bad). Microsoft believes, as do we, that the primary causality of leakage is inadvertent — unintended consequences of a well-meaning employee just trying to do their job. Microsoft points out that with a little filtering and scripting the mail system can be an enormous help. Exchange/Outlook 14 has nice features of "Mail Tips" that pop up to give you some commentary about what you're doing, like forwarding an internal email to someone outside of the organization, or using a big distribution list. I think that these features will go a long way to solve many of the common aspects of leakage where email is the vector; perhaps proving along the way that by and large this is more a feature category than a product category. The early DLP systems lead to awareness of the value of whole disk encryption and looking for sensitive data in storage, so there are still interesting aspects to work on

SQL Server Scales Out

Microsoft also made clear what they are doing with their DATAllegro acquisition from 2008.  Even Microsoft agrees that the "share everything" SQL Server architecture runs out of gas before 10TB and like the other vendors are looking at "share nothing" scale out architectures for very large scale data warehousing and analytics. DATAllegro is another Michael Stonebreaker (UC Berkeley) spawn. When they started in 2004 they were going to build custom hardware and software for a scale out system, but it evolved to Ingres on Linux with the ensemble control code (the master optimizer) written in Java.  Within Microsoft it's turned understandably into SQL Server on Windows Server nodes, with the Java code rewritten into C#.  From the discussion at TechEd it would seem that "Madison" — Microsoft's project name for what DATAllegro turned into — is very much a Version 1 product. Microsoft has a long history of not really getting things right until V3, but then more or less killing the competition.

InterOp and the Recession

For years Cisco has been an avid supporter of InterOp because of the interoperability testing that has always been a part of the show. As part of that support, Cisco has had an analyst dinner and executive mingle at InterOp. That event has been on the wane since Sue Bostrom took over for James Richardson as CMO (Sue herself never made the dinner) and this year with the economic overlay they cancelled the dinner. Traditions die hard. The exhibition was still BIG and had traffic, but our friends with booths said the crowds were down significantly (InterOp management assured them that the percentage of "qualified" buyers was up! J ) and the vendor to civilian ratio was up as well. My old friend Alistair Croll had signed me up to lead a Cloud and Data panel. It was the last time slot on the last day which made me apprehensive, but the turnout was good and the discussion interesting. All of the speakers on my panel really understood both IT and the Cloud (Greenplum and Vertica — scale out data base providers, Aspera — large file data transfer technology — and Cisco), but in some of the earlier Cloud panels some of the speakers knew large scale web systems but were clueless about enterprise IT. That seems important because a key Cloud issue is how you extend existing IT with Cloud based services — a truism about enterprise IT is that applications don't get rewritten until you literally can't buy parts for the computers they run on. Data makes the point clearly: it's one thing to wax eloquently about "Cloudbursting"  -- using the Cloud to deal with peak loads. It gets uglier if the application depends on use of a 5 TB database and you can't do that over the Internet (Amazon just announced that you can ship them data in disks via FedEx as an alternative to networking — harkens back to discussions of the bandwidth of a freight car moving at 50 MPH full of floppy disks!).

Microsoft and Google Square Off

Google's I/O developer conference last week was much better done and much more interesting than a year ago, starting with the fact that they had abundant registration capacity (last year they had to let everyone into the keynotes and morning sessions because registration was so slow). Google is much more articulate about how their "HTML 5" Web/browser architecture now comes much closer to what they derisively call "native applications" so they don't have to use the devil word "Windows." Microsoft is visibly not yet on the HTML 5 bandwagon, but on the other hand, Microsoft in IE 8 has really toed the standards line, even to the degree of making problems for earlier MS HTML variants. So you can't really complain about Microsoft's behavior, nor is it reasonable to assume that IE will support these additional features for some time to come, making it hard to imagine "killer" applications that can't run on IE given the market share. So how this sorts out is anything but clear with the exception of the mobile space where Microsoft's impact is much more limited. Even there it's a complicated story. Google wanted to build a first class Gmail client for the iPhone, but that is explicitly prohibited by the iPhone SDK license, since it creates a directly competitive product. But the iPhone browser has enough capability that Google accomplished their goal with browser code which of course can't be restricted on an application specific basis by Apple. And just to keep everything interesting, this week Microsoft formally announced "Bing" — the new and more competitive search service. Some industry observers accuse of Microsoft of changing the definitions, but that is only fair since HTML 5 isn't really just browser code. Game certainly on, one more time.