Computerworld, February 10, 2003 | Written by Mark Hall

... in a consolidation program. And Oracle Corp. has taken a bit of revenge. Teradata, a division of Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp., this week is announcing that it has successfully migrated more than 400 data marts into a few dozen Teradata data warehouses. And "more than 75% of the data marts are Oracle," crows Vickie Farrell, vice president of Teradata warehouse marketing. Her company has put Oracle data marts in its crosshairs, developing technology training programs for Oracle users and specific data migration tools for Oracle 11i and wooing Oracle users at the annual conference run by the International Oracle Users Group (IOUG) for the past two years. Farrell said Teradata had already paid for booth space at this coming April's event, but just last week heard that Oracle had asked the IOUG to refund its competitor's money and to ban it from the exhibitor's arena. That's money from Oracle's users that Teradata would rather not get.
While on the subject of money and consolidation, by late March, Nexsan Technologies Inc. will be shipping its ATABeast disk vault system with plenty of capacity and cheap enough to replace all of your tape backup, nearline and online storage systems. According to Diamond Lauffin, senior executive vice president of the Woodland Hills, Calif.-based company, the 4U-high device comes packed with 42 256GB ATA disk drives. The fully configured machine gets you 10.5TB of capacity for a mere $42,000—that's less than four-tenths of 1 cent per megabyte. Lauffin argues that disk-to-disk (D2D) products from his company and others will kill tape backup technology sooner rather than later. According to Steve Kenniston, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., "Nexsan is right on the sweet spot of disk-to-disk backup." Kenniston figures that two factors keep tape backup systems alive against the incursion of D2D. First, he says, is the high comfort level of aging systems administrators with tape technology. Second, government regulations and company policies about storing critical data off-site. In five years, he thinks, any technology, political or company issue will disappear. Along with tape.

But will your browser vanish in the future as well? Not in five years, but if more vendors follow the path being beaten by SRC Software Inc. in Portland, Ore., you'll probably be using it a lot less. Now in its 20th year, SRC sells budget planning and forecasting tools. Its I-Net Budgeting 9.2 product combines proprietary software with Microsoft Excel and SQL Server or Oracle databases. Right now, says co-founder and Executive Vice President Andrew Ferguson, remote users access the application through a browser running a Java client. But when the next version ships sometime in the second quarter, users can skip the browser and go right to the Web in Excel. So, will bean counters soon be surfing the Web in Excel? Don't count on it, says Ferguson. But you know they'll want to.

E-commerce sites may want to entice you to browse their sites using avatar technology from YaPanda Software Corp. The recently funded start-up is touting that your avatar will make you immortal because it can use your image and soon, your own voice coupled with a detailed knowledge base of your likes, dislikes, desires and phobias that can be shared when visiting any YaPanda-enabled site. While the value of having Steve Ballmer's and Larry Ellison's avatars scurrying around the Web forever is debatable, Anthony Carson, CTO and founder of the Chickasha, Okla.-based company, claims that e-commerce companies will be able to exploit the knowledge bases in each avatar for "extremely effective personalization."

A less-unnerving way to get close to your customers is through CRM. But deciding which CRM software is best for your company has always been an issue. On Feb. 19, Bethesda, Md.-based ISM Inc. will announce on its Web site the top 15 CRM packages. In case you didn't know, there are 171 to choose from. Up from 166 last year. Now where's consolidation when you need it?

Customers Just Do It

EGain Communications Corp. tomorrow will announce eGain Service 6 for call center operations. The upgrade adds knowledge-guided self-service functions for Web customers, improved analytics, a full software development kit and other goodies.

CRM service provider SalesForce.com Inc. bolsters its Enterprise Edition today with support for all wireless browsers and devices, added marketing campaign templates and new management tools for its self-service customer-service portal.