IBM lawsuit reveals plans to take fight to AWS: Former IBM CIO Jeff Smith is trying to take a job with rival Amazon Web Services, but a lawsuit filed by Big Blue this week is tryiing to put the kibosh on his move.
IBM says Smith is in violation of his noncompete agreement, which would prevent him from working for a direct competitor until May 2018. The suit argues that Smith was far from merely in charge of internal IT at IBM. Rather, he was a high-level executive who spent ample time meeting with customers and marketing IBM products, while being privy to secret details of the company's product strategy—in particular, a next-generation cloud computing service set for delivery in the near term.
Smith's knowledge of the infrastructure, speed, security and cost of IBM's forthcoming IaaS would be extremely valuable to AWS, the suit argues. Without giving specifics, the suit suggests that IBM intends the new service to be highly competitive with AWS on cost. IBM is asking the court to enact an injunction against Smith barring him from working for AWS until May 2018, along with assorted damages.
POV: The full text of the lawsuit goes into much more detail and is well worth a read. (Huge tip of the hat to the Register, which spotted and posted the document.)
As for the competitive implications it spells out, AWS is probably not too worried about IBM's upcoming cloud service, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "But IBM has enterprise access, something that AWS wants more of," he says. "If AWS hired 100 of the best IBM salespeople and they then succeeded in selling AWS, the damage would be big."
Tableau gains NLP with ClearGraph buy: Data-visualization specialist Tableau is adding natural language processing capabilities with the acquisition of ClearGraph. The move will give Tablea users a familiar and easy way to interact with data, the company says:
ClearGraph makes it easy to analyze data using natural language. It brings a consumer-like experience to users by connecting disparate data sources and making them accessible and intelligible through simple conversational style search. ClearGraph’s unique natural language query technology stores semantic data in knowledge graphs that can expand and learn over time. Accessing and analyzing data using ClearGraph requires no technical training, as the system can infer users’ intent through natural language. For example, people could ask questions such as, “Total sales by customers who purchased staples in New York,” then filter to, “orders in the last 30 days,” then group by, “project owner’s department.”
POV: Buying ClearGraph ties into Tableau's goal of making data analysis more accessible to everyone, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "Business intelligence and analytics vendors have been experimenting with natural language querying for years, but with advances in NLP and voice-to-text translation, we're seeing big advances in human-to-machine interaction, as demonstrated by popular consumer services such as Amazon Alexa and Google Now," he says.
Querying is often a multi-step process of refinement, and ClearGraph appears to have made progress in retaining the context of an initial query to support drill-down analysis, Henschen adds. Its capabilities will benefit a coming wave of smart recommendation and analysis features Tableau has in the works.
Legacy Watch: Larry Ellison's best-of-breed screed, revisited: The 2004 book Softwar by Economist writer Matthew Symonds was and remains a must-read for anyone interested in knowing the inner workings of industry legend Larry Ellison and Oracle. One of its many remarkable passages contains the following comments from Ellison, who was discussing the release of E-Business Suite 11i:
It was, Ellison boasted, the only integrated suite that could do everything that most business customers would ever need it to do.
The consequence, Ellison argued, was that it was no longer necessary to hire expensive systems integrators from IBM or Accenture to glue together market-leading applications from different software vendors—the practice known as bringing together best-of-breed. "Building an integrated system out of several different software products that were never designed to work together is a very difficult task. At Oracle, we used to sell and deliver these best-of-breed systems; selliing was easy, delivering was hard. IBM has thousands of consultants eager to help you make it work. The more complex the integration project the more likely it will be late and over budget. It may even fail completely.
The best-of-breed software product assembly approach is absolutely unique to the computer industry. If Detroit ran like Silicon Valley, nobody would sell cars—just parts. Customers would have to figure out which were the 'best' parts—a Honda engine, a Ford transmission, a BMW chassis, GM electrical system—and buy them and try to assemble them into a working car. Good luck. I know it sounds crazy, but that's how companies put together business systems today.
POV: The best-of-breed vs. integrated suite question is a bit different today, given the rise of SaaS, dedicated integration players such as Dell Boomi and SnapLogic, and the consolidation of smaller SaaS vendors by large vendors including Oracle. Still, Ellison's comments have a resonance that still sustains nearly 14 years after he made them.