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AT THE CENTER
The electronic newsletter of the
Silicon Valley World Internet Center

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

 

Past copies of Newsletters and Directions to the Center are available on the Web site.

All programs are held at the Center unless otherwise noted.

To join our community, click on this link: http://center.infopoint.com/join.php

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POWER PUB TOMORROW!!!: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2004
"THE FUTURE OF ANALYTICS"

Pub Master: Mr. Richard Probst, Senior Consultant, SAP
5:00 - 7:00 p.m. Open to the Public.
Fee: $15 (cash or check, payable at the door). No fee for Corporate Sponsors.
Pre-registration is highly recommended. Registration information below.
This Power Pub will be held in the Cyprus Room at the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel, 4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto.

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SUMMARY: POWER PUB: TUESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2004
"AUTONOMIC DATA MANAGEMENT: ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYHOW….IS IT A REALISTIC EXPECTATION, EVEN TODAY?"
Pub Master: Mr. Collin Bruce, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Solid Information Technology
Summary and links below.

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POWER PUB: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2004
"THE FUTURE OF ANALYTICS"
Pub Master: Mr. Richard Probst, Senior Consultant, SAP
5:00 - 7:00 p.m. Open to the Public.
Fee: $15 (cash or check, payable at the door). No fee for Corporate Sponsors.
Pre-registration is highly recommended. Registration information below.
This Power Pub will be held in the Cyprus Room at the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel, 4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto.

Business analytics have been providing tangible benefits to companies for a number of years. But not all approaches to achieving true business intelligence are created equal. In fact, despite the relative maturity of the industry there continues to be significant debate on a number of fundamental issues - everything from technology standards to best practices for implementation to measuring return on investment. What most can agree on, however, is that analytics, done well, enable companies to unlock the insight hidden away in back-end systems. Done really well, they can help companies prepare smarter business strategies well ahead of the competition and in anticipation of changing conditions.

But if analytics are so strategic and mission-critical, why has the business intelligence (B.I.) market failed to meet bullish growth projections over the years? Why has the market not kept pace with the growth in transaction systems? Why is there no clear leader today in the business analytics space? And what of the state of the technology? Is there anything new on the horizon from a technology standpoint, or has BI innovation hit a wall?

What role, if any, should large enterprise players like SAP play as the analytics market evolves? Since launching its business information warehouse (SAP BW) in 1998, the company has achieved more than 3,500 production installations. With the recent introduction of the SAP NetWeaver platform, SAP has added significant heft to its analytical foundation, which now includes a planning engine, dashboards, OLAP and advanced reporting.

As SAP plots its BI future, it seeks a lively industry dialogue during this Power Pub around several key questions:

  • What are the differences - if there are differences - between business intelligence, balanced score card and analytics?
  • Is the real-time enterprise really achievable and what role do analytics play?
  • Who should be using analytics? (Are they just for the king, or can the common man play too?)

ABOUT RICHARD PROBST

Before joining SAP in 2004, Mr. Probst spent 9 years driving product strategy for three venture-backed startups. Calico Commerce pioneered online product configurators, with Cisco and Dell as customers, leading to a $2 billion IPO in 1999; Calico was later acquired by PeopleSoft. Ejasent invented utility computing for transactional web sites, for Charles Schwab and other surge-prone sites, and was acquired by Veritas for $59 million. Nominum is developing a new generation of name management infrastructure, led by the inventor of DNS. Mr. Probst was founding VP of Marketing for Ejasent and VP of Product Marketing for Nominum.

Prior to his startup experience, Mr. Probst was at Sun Microsystems for 10 years. From 1985 to 1990, he managed development of Sun's user interfaces, including SunView, XView, and Open Look. Over the next 5 years, he helped bring CORBA into existence, as program manager for Sun's Project DOE, as business development for Sun NEO products, and as a member of the board of directors of the Object Management Group. In 1991, Mr. Probst coined the acronym "CORBA".

Mr. Probst has an MS in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a PhD candidate until he left to join Sun. His undergraduate degree in psychology is from Yale University.

ABOUT SAP LABS

Headquartered in Silicon Valley and started in 1996, SAP Labs North America (http://www.sap.com) is the company's first development lab established outside of Germany and is designed to take advantage of Silicon Valley's rich culture of innovation and entrepreneurialism-to infuse "start-up" thinking and business practices into a multi-billion dollar global enterprise. The Lab, which pioneered SAP's efforts to globalize development, employs more than 750 tech professionals at its main campus in Palo Alto, Calif., and another 500 via a network of 11 offices located across the United States. Labs' field offices are strategically situated to better learn from and serve the needs of SAP's customers by delivering industry-specific and customized solutions. The alignment of development resources around industry and customer needs is indicative of the unique approach Labs employs to drive innovation where it can have the most impact. SAP Labs is responsible for several major tec! hnology developments, including SAP NetWeaver, the company's core technology platform that now serves as the foundation for SAP's overall enterprise software and services strategy and SAP xApps, a family of packaged, composite applications.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Pre-registration is highly recommended. There is a $15 fee (cash or check only), which will be collected at the door. Please make checks payable to Silicon Valley World Internet Center. To pre-register, please send your name, title, company name, telephone number, and email address to:

Ms. Claire Kahrobaie
Manager, Client Services
T: 650.565.8070
E: kahrobaie@worldinternetcenter.com

DIRECTIONS TO THE CROWNE PLAZA CABANA HOTEL
Address: 4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, California
General Hotel Number: 650.857.0787

>From Highway 101 - North or South

  • Take Highway 101 to San Antonio Road/Los Altos exit.
  • Proceed on San Antonio west, approximately 2 miles.
  • Turn right on El Camino Real and proceed 1/2 mile.
  • Turn left at Dinah's Court stoplight into the Crowne Plaza Cabana hotel entrance.
  • Parking is available in the front and back of the hotel. Ask for the Cyprus Room.

>From Highway 280 - North or South

  • Take Highway 280 to the Page Mill Road exit.
  • Proceed on Page Mill east, approximately 3 miles.
  • Turn right onto El Camino Real.
  • Continue for 1 mile to Dinah's Court stoplight.
  • Turn right into the Crowne Plaza Cabana hotel entrance.
  • Parking is available in the front and back of the hotel. Ask for the Cyprus Room.

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SUMMARY: POWER PUB: TUESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2004
"AUTONOMIC DATA MANAGEMENT: ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYHOW….IS IT A REALISTIC EXPECTATION, EVEN TODAY?"
Pub Master: Mr. Collin Bruce, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Solid Information Technology

To access Collin Bruce's Power Pub presentation on the Center's Web site:

  • Click Here.
  • Scroll down to the "*August 17, 2004, Power Pub" and select.
  • You will see a link to the presentation in PDF format.

The Power Pub on August 17 around autonomic data management drew a diverse group of Valley executives, technology experts and telecom folks from SAP, HP, IBM, Hitachi, British Telecom, DeTeCon, CommerceNet and many others. As with all the Power Pubs, the discussion opened up to the group after Collin Bruce's initial presentation on the current reality of autonomic data management. Here is a summary of the key questions asked by Power Pub participants:

  • Who owns the data?
  • Does there need to be a trade-off between the device and the network? What really should be "smart" in this autonomic ecosystem?
  • What are we going to do to assure data integrity in a self-configuring, self-healing system?
  • What should we, as consumers, be choosing: 100% data integrity or high performance?
  • When the system is handling data from machine to machine, how does the network deal with that?
  • How much customization is required for our own application (e.g., CRM) to work with the Solid Tech data management solution?

We have become accustomed to picking up the telephone and always having a dial tone, whether we are at home or on the road. Turning on a radio and hearing a traffic report or having it pushed down to the DVD player in our car. Switching on the TV and seeing our favorite show or start our TiVo and watch at our leisure . . . without all the advertising! Clicking on an icon and always getting access to the Website we want.

The original Guiding Questions for the Pub Exchange were:

  • Data management is at the heart of today's "soft switched" infrastructures/environments. But how do we manage them for high availability -- 99.999% and better -- and still cover every device from the data center with its terra bytes of data to diskless mobile devices (your cell phone or Blackberry)?
  • As I develop my distributed application, how do I keep all parts synchronized as I move from device to device or place to place?
  • How do I recoup development time if I have to manage the infrastructure or the fundamental processes required for a complex multi-media application?

ABOUT COLLIN BRUCE

Collin Bruce is the Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Solid Information Technology headquartered in Mountain View, California. He recently joined Solid after a time back in sales for CIC where he focused on selling to major financial institutions like Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Prudential Insurance, HSBC and F500 institutions. Prior to that, he held various executive positions at Chordiant Software, Amdahl, SCO and Memorex.

ABOUT SOLID INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Solid Information Technology Corp (http://www.solidtech.com) is the first provider of an Autonomic Data Management Platform that supports the development of applications that are self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting.

Solid provides a data management foundation for embedded and distributed applications that ensure that the data takes care of itself. This dramatically reduces development time and cost, reduces time to market, reduces total cost of system ownership, and provides a robust and flexible foundation for the development of new products and features.

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SUMMARY & HIGHLIGHTS OF ARCHSTONE CONSULTING'S 2004 INNOVATOR'S FORUM: THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 2004
Summary and links below.

More than sixty executives and supply chain management experts gathered at historic Villa Montalvo in Silicon Valley recently to explore strategies to better utilize their supply chains to drive value for their organizations.

The event, "Make Your Supply Chain an Engine for Driving Value," was hosted by management consulting firm, Archstone Consulting, in partnership with the Silicon Valley World Internet Center.

Archstone Consulting suggests that companies that outperform their peers in this economy will do so through innovative management of their supply chains. The afternoon of dialogue at the 2004 Innovators Forum, the first in an ongoing series of industry-focused events, was designed to share insights on using the supply chain as a sales and growth engine for competitive advantage.

Please access the complete summary of the June 24, 2004 Innovators Forum session on the Center's site:

  • Click Here.
  • Scroll down to the "June 24, 2004 Special Session" and select.
  • You will see a link to the summary in PDF format.

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The Silicon Valley World Internet Center thanks its Corporate Sponsors and Knowledge Network Partners for their continuing support:

CORPORATE SPONSORS
SAP http://www.sap.com/
Archstone Consulting http://www.archstoneconsulting.com/

KNOWLEDGE NETWORK PARTNERS
• Halleck http://www.halleck.com
• IC Growth, Inc. http://www.icgrowth.com
• Market Wire http://www.marketwire.com
• Incucomm http://www.incucomm.com

Xterprise http://www.xterprise.com

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To join our community, click on this link: http://center.infopoint.com/join.php

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