A while ago I decided that it would be cool to jump on the podcasting bandwagon, and here’s my first attempt. I was very lucky to get Nigel Pendse to chat with me about the impact that SQL2005/AS2005 will have on the BI market as a whole; if you don’t know who Nigel is he’s the man behind the OLAP Report and the OLAP Survey, both of which are great sources of competitive intelligence if you’re a software vendor or consultancy, and also a very popular speaker at conferences and seminars. He has a lot of interesting and intelligent observations to make in my opinion.
Anyway, here’s where to get the podcast (it’s about 25 minutes long and in mp3 form):
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/108782
Apologies for the rather amateurish production…
If you think this is a worthwhile undertaking, I’ll start thinking of people to ask to interview for future podcasts. Let me know what you think!
Chris, Nigel\’s a great guest to kick off with – but is there any way (broadband Voice-over-IP maybe) to improve the audio quality of the interviewee (it sounds about the same as some BBC World Service interviews, so some of us are used to it!)? You didn\’t toss any UDM "red meat" out Nigel\’s way, but I would have liked to hear his thoughts on the promise of combining OLAP and relational reporting.As for future guests, Bill Baker always has lots to say – or how about George Spofford (who\’s worked in depth with both the leading MOLAP server platforms)?
Yes, I promise any future podcasts will be better quality! I didn\’t have time to get recording from Skype working on my home PC before this one.Suggestions for future guests are well taken. Some people are unable to participate in this kind of thing because of the constraints imposed by their employers, unfortunately, but I\’m sure it won\’t be hard to find someone. I think my next podcast will be a bit more techie…
Chris, excellent, very good podcast, well done for getting Nigel to do an interview. Very interesting perspectives from Nigel, not quite what I expected him to say actually, he was a lot more sceptical of the market impact of SS2005 than I expected. As Deepak says, it\’d be interesting to get his views on the UDM, I think this (and intellicube) will have the biggest impact on the BI market – it\’ll come down to whether you use MDX for all your data warehousing queries, or (in Oracle\’s case) SQL, and that\’s for both OLAP and relational queries.Anyway, just thought I\’d congratulate you, very interesting. Like the noise of the laptop fan starting up by the way ;-)cheersMarkp.s. I made a few notes on the podcast here : http://www.rittman.net/archives/001386.html
Thanks Chris – very interesting podcast indeed. Nigel\’s opinions are always worth to listen to, although I do disagree with him on few points. Unfortunatelly the quality on the last piece about the Microsoft strategy in BI was too low so I couldn\’t understand it very well (and it is on top of yours British accent 🙂 – this probably was the most interesting question for me. Any chance of getting a transcript perhaps ?Mosha.
Have you ever got so bored that you\’ve googled your own name? I\’ve already found an Artist, Musician, Boxer, Actor and a guy who wrote an episode of the bill called Chris Webb, and then i ended up here. If you haven\’t already guessed my names Chris Webb but I\’m not you… and I\’m incredibly bored. 🙂
Mark: Nice to hear from you! I\’ve been a reader of your blog for a while (btw congrats on the \’Best BI Blog\’ award); maybe we should get together sometime for a few posts which compare Oracle and Microsoft\’s respective BI offerings?Mosha: I\’ll try to do a transcript if I have the time. Wrt Nigel\’s comments on future BI strategy, his opinion was that it would be software vendors like SAP and Oracle (through their Seibel acquisition) that would provide the most competition for MS in the future – not on technical grounds, but based on the experience that SAP can sell BW for a lot of money to its customers despite the fact that it\’s nowhere near as good as the other tools out there. I have to say that this tallies with what I saw when I was working as a consultant: in one case a very successful MS-based data warehouse/AS installation was junked in favour of SAP BW because the board had decided to use SAP for everything, despite the fact that this made no technical sense and would have involved several years of development and investment just to reach the level of functionality they already had. The other challenge that Nigel saw was from open source, although again not on technical grounds but purely on price/ideology.Other Chris Webb: Yes, I\’ve Googled my name plenty of times when I\’ve been bored. In fact I got an email from the artist Chris Webb in Canada a few months back when he did the same thing. It\’s a more common name than I realised.
Possibly in response to some of the comments here asking about Nigel\’s opinion on the UDM and MDX vs SQL question, a new commentary which covers all these questions (and more) has appeared on the OLAP Report site:http://www.olapreport.com/Comment_Synchronicity.htm