James Kobielus is a senior analyst for data warehousing at Forrester Research.

Social Media Analytics Revolutionizing Marketing Campaign Management
January 4, 2012 This ubiquitous social-centric culture has opened a new world of open-source customer intelligence that is there for the...

The Year Ahead in Next Best Action? Here’s the Next Best Thing to a Crystal Ball!
December 24, 2011 The next best action market is emerging and is becoming aware of itself as a substantial new niche, much the same way that the...

The Year Ahead in Advanced Analytics? Advances on All Fronts!
December 21, 2011 Business investments in advanced analytics will continue to deepen in 2012. Here are some of the highlights that Forrester...

The Year Ahead In Big Data? Big, Cool, New Stuff Looms Large!
December 19, 2011 The hype around big data has been relentless, but it’s been driven by substantial innovations on many fronts

Data Scientist: Is This Really Science or Just Pretension?
November 22, 2011 A BI professional or business analyst must upgrade their skills and make statistics-based interactive data exploration their...

Data Scientist: Do You Truly Need Big Data?
November 21, 2011 Few data scientists have had the luxury of being able amass petabytes of data on every relevant variable of every entity in...

Data Scientist: Which Adjacent Roles Are Central?
November 18, 2011 Whether they work with particle accelerators or linear regression models, scientists know they don’t need to be their own...

Data Scientist: What Skills Does It Require?
November 16, 2011 Data scientists are a curious breed. The term encompasses a wide range of specialties, all of which rely on statistical...

Data Scientist: Important New Role or Trendy Job-title Inflation?
November 15, 2011 Don’t fool yourselves into thinking data scientists live in ivory towers; far more work in the business world than in the...

The ROI Of Next Best Action: Measuring The Lift From Improved Customer Experience
August 25, 2011 If you make quality of experience the centerpiece of your CRM strategy, you will be creating a sustainable business asset of...

Hadoop: When Will The Inevitable Backlash Begin?
June 9, 2011 Hadoop is no fad, but it is definitely getting set up for a sober reappraisal, possibly by this time next year or as soon as a...

Hadoop: What is it Good For? Absolutely … Something
June 6, 2011 In order to promote itself into the enterprise primetime, the Hadoop industry needs to focus on what their up-and-coming...

HP Acquiring Vertica, Ramping Steadily Back Into Enterprise Data Warehousing Market
February 14, 2011 So you thought Neoview’s demise signaled HP’s exit from the EDW market? You could not have been more mistaken

An Enterprise Data Warehouse Without A Database — Is That Even Conceivable?
December 22, 2010 The various perspectives on the enterprise data warehouse all hint at the rapid evolution of the EDW into something more...

Advance Your Analytics Strategies
November 30, 2010 Blog-ahead thoughts regarding upcoming Forrester TweetJam

IBM Buying Netezza, Sending Clear Shot Across Oracle’s Bow
September 21, 2010 The acquisition was a must for both vendors if they wish to grow their shares of the data warehousing market

Interdictive Analytics: Catching Baddies at the Pass and in the Nick of Time
July 30, 2010 If you can see the nasty things that might happen far enough in advance, you have a better chance of neutralizing or...

Social Business Intelligence: The Knowledge Management Connection
July 26, 2010 Business intelligence has always had a “pipeline” orientation, but we all know that this orientation doesn’t...

Social Media Analytics: You Will Still Need Actual Analysts in the Loop
July 16, 2010 Listening and engaging via social media involves much more than business intelligence dashboards to monitor mentions on...

Those Nasty “Hairball” Analytics Projects: Usually There’s A Data Warehouse At The Core
July 12, 2010 Quite often, a little quality time with your friendly neighborhood data warehouse analyst is just what the doctor ordered

EMC Acquiring Greenplum, Paving the Way to Emergence of Virtualized Cloud Data Warehousing
July 7, 2010 The EMC/Greenplum deal signals that the data warehousing market is probably moving into a new round of consolidations

Commercializing Enterprise-Grade Hadoop: Tools for Harnessing Petabyte Analytics
July 6, 2010 If you’re slightly bewildered by all the buzz over this new technology with the funny-sounding moniker, you’re not...

SAP Acquiring Sybase, Rocking the Analytics Market with Deep Synergies
May 14, 2010 SAP’s acquisition of Sybase was one of those deals that just makes sense on so many levels for both parties

What’s Not BI? Oh, Don’t Get Me Started ... Oops Too Late ... Here Goes ...
May 3, 2010 One of the favorite pastimes of business intelligence analysts everywhere — not just at Forrester — is defining and...

Social CRM — Don’t Make It a Silo in Your Multichannel Strategy
April 29, 2010 If you want to see how truly hot social media are in CRM, follow the upward trajectory of the social media monitoring platform...

No No No: The Curiously Absent Architecture of Postmodern Analytic Databases
March 26, 2010 Some say architecture is destiny. But it seems as if the world of analytic databases is moving on many fronts in all...

Number of People Using Advanced Analytics
March 23, 2010 Guesstimates are often essential for market sizing and trending. To be useful, especially where primary data are lacking, they...

Social CRM: Yes, It’s The Real Deal, But That Hand’s Still Being Dealt
March 22, 2010 In the continuous hype cycle that is all things tech, “social” has become the latest flavor of everything

If Queries are King in the Realm of the Analytic Database, Does that Make Columnar Heir Apparent?
March 22, 2010 What’s the perfect database management system architecture, where analytics is concerned?

Self-Service Predictive Modeling: Vendors Still Have Far To Go
March 18, 2010 The core problem with today’s predictive analytics and data mining offerings is that many of them are power tools, not...

Social, Spatial and Temporal: The Coordinates of Community in the Cloud
March 18, 2010 Social networks have their foundations in the space-time continuum — you know, the funky coordinate system that Einstein...

Social CRM Thrives On Powerful Dashboards And Process Analytics
March 16, 2010 What the business world needs now is a bigger, badder, more powerful social media dashboard for customer relationship management

Predictive Processes Demand Unified BAM And BSM Stack
March 15, 2010 Business processes don’t execute only at the application layer. Just as thought processes aren’t entirely divorced...

The Appliance Wars Drag On And On
March 15, 2010 Where last year was the year that appliances entered the data warehousing mainstream, I expect that next year is when we will...

The ROI of High-Quality Decision-Driving Gut Feel
February 22, 2010 Decisions are a very human investment of attention to a problem, and gut feel is the impetus driving every decision that...

The ROI of High-Quality Decision Management Practices
February 15, 2010 Here is the broader conceptual model I promised in my last blog. I built conceptual hooks in my decision support ROI model to...

The ROI of High-Quality Decision Support Infrastructure
February 8, 2010 I’m developing a return on investment calculator for data warehousing appliances, using the Forrester Total Economic...

How Much Intelligence Can You Pack Into a Tweet?
January 15, 2010 The intelligence value of any individual tweet in isolation is negligible. Then again, what’s the intrinsic value of a...

Mining the Cloud? Are You Allowed?
January 14, 2010 I came across an article with the headline “Mining the Cloud.” The cynic in me immediately issued a silent scoff:...

Next Best Models: The Process Agility Equation
January 14, 2010 You never know what’s coming at you next, which is why process agility is so important

Razor, Blades and 10x: Key to Value-Based Pricing in the Data Warehousing Appliance Market
January 12, 2010 Price-performance is everything in data warehousing (DW), and it’s become the leading battleground for competitive...

Process Mining: Because Your Company’s Workflow Issues Aren’t Always Obvious
January 11, 2010 The more complex business processes are the more difficult it is to find the magic blend that distinguishes a well-tuned...

Conversation as a Complex Event
January 7, 2010 Your customers are spending more time — and venting more of their true feelings — in social networks, so it only...

Social Network Analysis: The Fuse Igniting Enterprise Data Warehouse Growth. It’s Planet Petabyte or Bust!
January 7, 2010 Social networks have always been with us, of course, but now they’ve gained concrete reality in the online fabric of...

The New Decade of Advanced Analytics: Roll Over Rocket Scientists!
January 5, 2010 The core problem with today’s CEP offerings is that many of them are power tools, not solutions suitable for the mass...

Whither Data Warehousing in the Teens?
January 4, 2010 In data warehousing, the most likely casualty of the Teens will be the very notion of a data warehouse

Advanced Analytics Predictions For 2010
December 15, 2009 Here are some quick thoughts on the trends that will shape advanced analytics in the year to come

Social Network Analysis: Going to Become Too Ubiquitous for Its Own Good
December 8, 2009 From an enterprise perspective, social networks are the “buzz” that can spell the difference between success and...

Instrumenting Your Enterprise for Maximum Predictive Power
November 23, 2009 Business is all about placing bets and knowing if the odds are in your favor

Service-Oriented Analytics: Tapping into the Predictive Smarts of Your Entire Organization
October 13, 2009 To become truly future-focused, organizations must build out their predictive muscles through deepening commitment to these...

HP and Informatica’s Expanded Relationship: Portent of Bigger Deals to Come?
September 10, 2009 This relationship long predates this announcement, but it could be the start of a relationship of considerable strategic...

Is BAM Relevant In The Age Of Lean Processes?
August 28, 2009 In any dynamic business environment, the last thing you want is to indulge in navel-gazing. If you’re not adept at...

IBM Goes Deeply Predictive, Announces Acquisition of SPSS
July 28, 2009 IBM’s bold move has already sent shockwaves throughout the analytics market

BI, Analytics, and CEP: Some Fruitful Potential Follow-Ons from Software AG’s Acquisition of IDS Scheer
July 14, 2009 Bet you didn’t realize that IDS Scheer has ARIS solutions in the fast growing markets of BI, analytics and complex event...

BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!
June 10, 2009 Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business...

Database Religions Dissolve Into The Big Billowing Virtual Data Cloud
May 28, 2009 Virtualization is a venerable old computing concept that has achieved new life in recent years

Self-Service Business Intelligence Depends On Automated Data Discovery
May 6, 2009 The ball’s in IBM’s rivals’ courts regarding whether, when and how they plan to add automated source discovery...

Oracle’s Sun Acquisition Accelerates Push Into Data Warehousing Appliances
April 22, 2009 Oracle is acquiring longtime partner Sun Microsystems, putting the software powerhouse fully into the hardware business - and...

Dislocation Intelligence in a Brutal Economy
April 13, 2009 We as a country should try to smooth over these economic dislocations so that they don’t completely wipe some places off...

Inmon’s Vitriolic Slap At “Virtual Data Warehousing” Does Not Withstand Scrutiny
April 3, 2009 Bill Inmon treats data federation as mutually exclusive from enterprise data warehousing, when in fact they are highly...

After So Many Years Of Ballyhoo, Semantic Web Still Searching For Killer App
March 23, 2009 Cynics might call Semantic Web a technology looking for a solution. And they might have a point

Lean Information Management Strategies for Lean Times
March 20, 2009 When the going gets tough, the tough get lean, focused, and flexible. To help organizations survive the bad times and thrive...

Yawn! Business Process Visions Consistent Over The Years
March 11, 2009 A couple of nights ago, I found my handwritten notes from 1997, summarizing a literature search I was doing at that time while...

Whatever Happened To EII?
February 18, 2009 Some integration approaches developed into multibillion dollar standalone markets. But others, while valuable, haven't...

What, If Anything, Is A "Niche Vendor," Where Enterprise Data Warehousing Is Concerned?
February 18, 2009 No matter how carefully one words a report, there is always the potential for misunderstanding