April 27th, 2009 The Open Source Data Warehouse Revolution
After IBM researchers delivered the first data warehouse in the late 1980s, businesses looked forward to finally being able to store critical data in easy-to-find, centralized locations. Employees at all levels would be able to tap that rich data to make decisions based on concrete, analytical facts instead of gathering scattered information from different sources or using plain intuition.
Like many sweeping technology promises, the vision sounded grand, but sadly didn’t become the reality for many companies throughout the 1990s. The problem, however, was never the lack of capabilities with the technology. Rather, big commercial data warehouses were so expensive that they largely remained the luxury of very big organizations with the budgets to buy the systems and the staff to implement and maintain them. Aside from the steep cost, some of these data warehouses had critics who claimed the systems delivered big IT headaches, with little return on investment.
Data warehousing, however, is changing quickly to meet the demands of companies with large volumes of data that require fast answers to complex, unpredictable questions. What’s providing the answers today - in a more affordable, simpler way - is the two-word IT revolution called open source, which is providing the building blocks required to create a whole new data warehouse.
Tags: Data Warehouse, IBM, International Business Machines Corporation, technology promises
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April 15th, 2009 Email – Victim of its own success?
Electronic mail aka email, is a great communications tool that benefits from extreme ease-of-use and near ubiquity. It’s the ‘Killer application’ of the century. Like the telephone, email is used to easily connect people across organizational and geographic boundaries. Individuals from multitudes of organizations use email to work together to create and review content, consider options, make decisions, and coordinate all types of business processes. Email is being used by governments to discuss how to bring about world peace and by scientists searching for a cure for cancer. Thus email has become the de facto standard for collaboration
Yet email has become a victim of its own success. Unmanageable volumes of business- and non business-related email are hampering worker productivity and increasing email storage and maintenance costs. We end up spending a good portion of our days in managing, sorting, filtering and organizing our emails
Just because people have started using emails extensively for all possible reasons does not mean that it is suited best for handling all possible collaboration requirements. Email was designed, in all its simplicity and grace to transfer text messages between two points of communication.
The Issues Within:
a) Fundamentally Unstructured, Unorganized and Uncategorized data:
The context of an email is in its body. Thus the importance or value of the email for its users is in what it holds in its body. Yet the data in the body of the email is unstructured, unorganized and uncategorized. Such data leads to loss of information with no ability to retrieve it easily and meaningfully at a later date.
b) Does a poor job of enabling a group of people to Share and Discuss information and arrive at a decision in a short period of time:
Document attachments and sharing is one of the prime reasons for the widespread use and success of email. But it is difficult to compile and keep track of revisions to attachments and comments.
c) Creates a huge Security Risk as multiple copies of attached documents are made for every recipient:
Senders of email have no control over these local copies of their documents shared with their email’s recipients.
d) Creates Spotty Conversation Threads:
It’s difficult for any person in a particular conversation thread to get the whole picture with the history of changes made by everybody involved.
e) Encourages Occupational Spam:
Within enterprises, well-intended individuals sending a business or personal email may without any extra effort copy or “cc” more people than necessary.
When the email carries a huge attachment, such as slides or an audio or video file, this action wastes precious time, storage, and network resources.
f) Cannot have real time knowledge of the recipient’s Email Behavior:
Senders of email have no clue as to what really happened with their emails once they have reached their recipients or as to what the recipient is doing with it without again sending out a bunch of emails or making phone calls to know about the statues of their first email!
g) No Integration with backend business applications and systems:
Users have to be content with ‘Cut, Copy, Paste’ to transfer data between their emails and their business application systems
So, has email become a victim of its own success? Are people over stretching and abusing the email system? Is there a solution to this mess?
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April 15th, 2009 Email Attachments – Much more attached then just the attachments…
One of the main reasons for the unprecedented adoption of email has been its ability to attach documents. In one simple action, any one can send any document in any format to anyone in any part of the world. This is just beautiful!
As users increasingly start using emails as a medium for collaboration and document exchange, they don’t realize the underlying cost associated with their actions! Steadily and surely, emails are getting expensive to maintain as administration, bandwidth, and storage costs rise. Based on a ‘Messaging Total Cost of Ownership’ survey performed by the Radicati Group, it was found in an enterprise, email costs an average of $159/user/year to maintain, beyond the original purchase price of hardware and software. A major cause of this cost is email attachments which make up more than 85% of all email data. In fact 20% of all emails contain attachments, but as much as 92% of email resources are consumed by attachments.
Attachments are costly to transmit, process, and administer as email storage. Research shows that the average corporate email user sends and receives over 4MB of email attachments per day. For a company with 5,000 email users, that adds up to about 22 GB per day, 109GB per week, or approximately 435GB per month. When translated into cost, these figures become much more tangible. Assuming that an average company sets mailbox quotas at 40MB per user, with the average “loaded” cost of storage being about $2/MB, it costs approximately $80 per user, per year, to store email messages-most of which are attachments. One of the main reasons in the increase in attachments sizes is the proliferation of all kinds of digital files in our daily lives. Incoming Faxes, Scanned Images, Audio and Video clips, Presentations, Photographs all add up to the average attachment size.
Thus enterprises are facing a daunting list of challenges which can be enumerated and summarized as follows:
1. Server Load Levels:
As emails with attachments pass through the email servers, tests results using the MAPI Messaging Benchmark 2 (MMB2) demonstrate that the average processing loads on email servers like Microsoft Exchange is substantially higher by 350% for emails with attachments than for emails without attachments. And these server load levels are only going to increase as more emails with bigger attachments are sent out by users
2. Multiple Versions and Duplicates of an Attachment:
Interestingly, in a typical organization, out of the total number of email attachments, only 22% of them are original documents while the rest of them are either revisions or duplicates.
The numerous versions of an attachment created by all its recipients represent a greater challenge to the sender to collate all the changes together and form the final version, thereby resulting in more time and effort spent at lower productivity levels.
At any given time, none of the recipients are guaranteed to have the latest version of the attachment. This leads to confusion and misunderstandings among the recipients, resulting in longer decision making times and slowing down the corporate business process.
The duplicates of an attachment hoard up additional storage space while increasing network traffic leading to higher network administration and maintenance costs.
3. Security Issues with Attachments:
In today’s world of a heightened sense of security, email attachments represent the single most point of vulnerability for corporate document security plans. Once shared, these attachments become public property with their recipients being completely free to do whatever they please to do with it. There is no way to stop a wayward employee to just walk away with sensitive attachments sitting neatly on his/her computer hard disk as local copies. Senders have no control over the access rights of their attachments neither can ever know what their recipients are doing with it.
So the next time, you have the urge to send out that cool animation file of 3 MB size to all your friends, pause and think about the costs associated with your action. There is a price to pay for this. Someone somewhere is paying for it, if not you directly!
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April 7th, 2009 Hanna, Brophy, MacLean, McAleer & Jensen
Email and data security ensured for prestigious law firm
Third Eye helped Hanna Brophy secure their email systems, ensuring data security and client confidentiality. They achieved this by securing the servers and network involved in the email system. The data was also encrypted during transmission, thus minimizing any chances of interception.
Tags: Architect, California, California United States, email systems, Hanna Brophy, legal services, Scanning Systems
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April 2nd, 2009 Cisco Systems
Cisco System overcomes its Enterprise Information Architecture challenges
Cisco faced enterprise information architecture challenges in cross-agency collaboration, information sharing, and consolidation of IT infrastructure - particularly among IT respondents. Third Eye helped them to increase intra-divisions transparency and fluidity of information, with optimized use of application resources.
Tags: Applications Migration Strategy, BI, cisco, Cisco Systems, Cisco Systems Inc., disparate systems, Enterprise Information Architecture, Information Architecture, Internet solutions, Migration Strategy, monolithic applications, Oracle, Oracle ERP, Oracle ERP Customization, web analytics
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April 1st, 2009 MySpace Music
Mission Critical Data warehousing redefined for Myspace Music
MySpace Music’s Data Warehouse and Data Marts are built using Aster Data System’s nCluster front line Data warehousing system. Third Eye built data models, designed ETL scripts, and tuned up the data-marts. This enhanced the value of the datawarehouse system while providing unprecedented scalability at much reduced costs.
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