Starview Technology has introduced the latest version of its Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform. Until recently, Starview has kept somewhat of a low profile and didn't always immediately appear on the radar when it came to CEP software vendors. This is unfortunate, because Starview has been shipping products since 2003.

Back in April, I discussed MapReduce and its open source implementation, Hadoop (see "Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloudera, EC2, and BI," 14 April 2009). At that time, I said that I thought Hadoop offered exciting possibilities for enterprises to carry out large-scale data analysis and mining.

I am spending a fair amount of my time doing business process modeling (BPM) on either BPM or EA projects. BPM is becoming more and more important as organizations are increasingly committed to improving the way they do business.

Believe it or not, IBM has developed an internal, private cloud-based BI analytics environment -- called "Blue Insight" -- designed to support its overall corporate sales, marketing, and product development needs. Moreover, IBM is now marketing and producing a version of this tool.

Cloud computing is another iteration of a trend that began 40-plus years ago. In the beginning of the computer age, only large, wealthy enterprises and governments had computers. Early mainframe computers were huge power hogs and, by modern standards, impossibly slow; but for large numbers of tasks, they were much faster and economical than the way organizations were doing business.

I have been talking with friends and colleagues about how data integration requirements and ensuring data integrity can pose problems for organizations implementing business performance management initiatives. I found this discussion so interesting that I decided to use the topic for this week's Advisor.

As an EA and SOA consultant and authority, I get a lot of questions about architecture, its value, how to implement it, and how to roll it out to an organization. Occasionally (like last week), the questions are so off base that they amaze me. Are managers really this out of touch (no need to answer that)?

Enterprise data warehousing specialist Teradata Corporation is the latest analytics database vendor to join the cloud movement. Last week, Teradata introduced its first product offerings targeted at organizations wanting to take advantage of virtualization and cloud technologies for data warehousing and BI applications.

From a certain perspective, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software architecture is just plain silly.

In my last Advisor ("How EA Shapes Urban/Transportation Planning," 7 October 2009), I restated some of the reasons that my colleagues and I have chosen urban (and transportation) planning as the model for thinking about EA while developing the Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM) methodology.

I've said for some time now that the use of mashups in the enterprise would increase, especially when it comes to their use for BI and other applications that support decisions. One reason for this is that the technology has been evolving rapidly and vendors focusing on mashups have been growing in number. End-user organizations have also expressed a definite interest in using mashups.

I've been seeing an increasing interest by organizations in master data management (MDM) for the past nine months or so.

In his book Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World, Michael Hugos, who is also a columnist for CIO magazine, talks about two fundamental business strategies: responsiveness and efficiency.

I live in the state of New Hampshire, in the Northeast corner of the US. It's a major pumpkin-growing region of the country, and October is harvest season. Truckloads of pumpkins head south and west, and local farm stands are bursting with the orange globes. But what do you do with all the misshaped or leftover pumpkins? Chuck 'em, what else?

Back in June, I discussed how, after almost four years, BI software as a service (SaaS) provider LucidEra was considering calling it quits (see "As SaaS Provider Quits, What Happens to Its Data?" 30 June 2009).

Counting by numbers, Scrum is currently the leading agile methodology.

Increasingly, we find business processes that are offered in alternative ways using different channels. For example, purchasing vehicle highway tax in the UK over the counter or online over the Internet. At the same time, as well as offering a process in its entirety over one channel, the same process can be supported by different channels at different points in the process.

In a recent interview, Mike Culver, the cloud computing evangelist for Amazon.com, clearly stated the cloud computing value statement for his company: "Amazon's goal is to take the fixed cost out of computing!" That's pretty simple. There has been a great deal of discussion of the TCO of one thing or another over the years, but rarely is the entirety of the operational overhead really factored in. We can learn what the TCO is for a desktop or a server or an Oracle product, for instance, but nobody goes to the trouble to include all of the factors involved.

Enterprise mashups increasingly are becoming part of companies' toolkits when it comes to integrating data for BI and other decision-support applications.

Like most agile-lean enthusiasts, I regularly attend interest group meetings in my area. When discussing test-driven development (TDD) at some recent gatherings, some folks commented that they have very senior developers within their teams who claim to have become so proficient with TDD that they can actually skip the test-coding step. These developers go straight to implementing the feature because the discipline is so well imprinted in their heads that they can do it all mentally.

Como muchos entusiastas en agile-lean con frecuencia atiendo juntas de grupos de interés no lejos de casa. En algunas de las juntas recientes hubo discusiones sobre TDD (del Inglés test-driven development: desarrollo basado en pruebas), donde algunas personas comentaron que sus equipos cuentan con desarrolladores tan expertos en TDD que hasta pueden saltarse el paso de escribir pruebas primero y en su lugar programar la característica directamente porque tienen la disciplina bien metida en su cabeza y pueden hacerlo mentalmente.

Enterprise architects often ask me why the Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM) EA approach is based on an "urban/transportation model" rather than the "building architecture model" favored by many organizations and groups. The short answer has to do with the similarity of the model to actual enterprise architecture in both change and complexity.

The use of open source BI and data warehousing tools continues to gain increasing acceptance by end-user organizations. But one of the big questions on a lot of people's minds is: what effect is open source BI adoption having on traditional BI software licensing?

With significant input from fellow Cutter Consultant Ken Collier, I recently wrote an article called "The Agile Triathlete" that discussed how becoming skilled at test-driven development (TDD) was analogous to becoming a skilled triathlete.

In my previous Advisor ("Defining Architectures for the Cloud, Part I," 23 September 2009), I looked at the enterprise architecture domains of business, information, and application and how cloud computing would affect those areas.