When we published our 2008 report on the impact of open source on the database market the overall conclusion was that adoption had been widespread but shallow.

Since then we’ve seen increased adoption of open source software, as well as the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle. Perhaps the most significant shift in the market since early 2008 has been the explosion in the number of open source database and data management projects, including the various NoSQL data stores, and of course Hadoop and its associated projects.

On Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 11:00 am EST I’ll be joining Robin Schumacher, Director of Product Strategy from EnterpriseDB to present a webinar on navigating the changing landscape of open source databases.

Among the topics to be discussed are:

· the needs of organizations with hybrid mixed-workload environments

· how to choose the right tool for the job

· the involvement of user corporations (for better or for worse) in open source projects today.

You can find further details about the event and register here.

Katey and I are doing a few webinars at the moment and I’m also speaking at a conference this week, so I just wanted to round them all up here:

One webinar is already in the bag, which Katey did with Digital Reef & legal service provider Precise-Law, entitled ‘The challenges of a  reactive vs. proactive EDRM in the Enterprise.’ A replay is available here.

I’m speaking at Search Solutions 2010 this week  on Oct 21. It’s a one-day event organized by the British Computer Society, which I attended last year as a non-speaker and it was very good, so I hope to be able to contribute to maintaining that high standard! I’m speaking at 11.45 am on ‘The trends shaping the future of enterprise search 2010-2013’ and then I’m participating on a panel at the end of the day on what search will look like in 2015. As I’m already making predictions through 2013, I’m three-fifths of the way there! Oct 21 is also the day of Autonomy’s Q3 results call so the place should be full of lively discussion regarding that.

Come November I’m doing a couple more webinars:

On Nov 11 I’m participating on one with Zylab, the focus of which will be litigation-readiness, moving beyond just eDiscovery to insuring organizations have their information in a state such that it can be easily searched, accessed, locked down, deleted or produced to an opposing party.

Also in November I’ll be participating in a webinar with Attensity Group, which will be focused on social media and the application of text analytics to that space. Date TBC and links to follow, most likely on my Twitter feed.

Some of the best-kept secrets in e-discovery are not the kind revealed in a courtroom.  We all know about legal confidentiality, but the IT side has its own code of silence – call it “analyst-client privilege.”

It’s not that users and customers won’t talk about their vendors and methods – especially if they’re unhappy with those vendors, or have a horror story to share, which many do.  But users rarely go on-the-record with specifics in e-discovery.

So this year we introduce our first annual user survey.  It’s available as part of our just-released E-discovery and E-disclosure report for 2010, or you can access a copy through Applied Discovery here.  It will also be featured in our upcoming BrightTALK webinar on Thursday, May 27th at 12 noon ET, presented by Research Director Nick Patience.  Register here to attend.

And what did we learn?

Users report that corporate litigants still overwhelmingly use existing in-house resources and employees to fulfill discovery requests.  In spite of vendors’ claims that the market demands one throat to choke, customers still purchase tactically depending on their requirements.  About half perform e-discovery on an ad-hoc basis with no repeatable business process or dedicated staff.

What they are buying is even more revealing – our data gives the distribution of usage between 50+ vendors, with purchasing broken down by product or step in the EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model), and whether customers choose software, services, law firms or in-house systems for each function.  Cross-tabbing by industry, company size, volume of litigation and legal budget shows even more granular trends and hot spots in what remains a highly fragmented market.

Beyond a snapshot of current holdings, half our respondents have shopping plans for 2010, showing shifts in vendor traction and product purchasing.  Users have strong predictions of their own for the market as well.  They are clear on pain points in the process and vendor selection criteria.  That said, future purchasing plans show little critical mass on vendor selection – it’s still anybody’s game in e-discovery.

And what about the cloud?  Or information governance?  Is cost still king for everyone?

Join us for a thorough run down of the state of the market in 2010 – a view from the front lines of e-discovery.  Register here to attend.

I’m going to be presenting the introductory session at a BrightTalk virtual conference on March 25 on the role and impact of the virtual server revolution on the storage infrastructure. Although it’s been evident for some time that the emergence of server virtualization has had — and continues to have — a meaningful impact on the storage world, the sheer pace of change here makes this a worthwhile topic to revisit. As the first presenter of the event — the conference runs all day — it’s my job to set the scene; as well as introducing the topic within the context of the challenges that IT and storage managers face, I’ll outline a few issues that will hopefully serve as discussion points throughout the day.

Deciding on which issues to focus on is actually a lot harder than it sounds — I only have 45 minutes — because, when you start digging into it, the impact of virtualization on storage is profound on just about every level; performance, capacity (and more importantly, capacity utilization), data protection and reliability, and management.

I’ll aim to touch on as many of these points as time allows, as well as provide some thoughts on the questions that IT and storage managers should be asking when considering how to improve their storage infrastructure to get the most out of an increasingly virtualized datacenter.

The idea is to make this a thought-provoking and interactive session. Register for the live presentation here: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/6907.  After registering you will receive a confirmation email as well as a 24-hour reminder email.  As a live attendee you will be able to interact with me by posing questions which I will be able to answer on air.  If you are unable to watch live, the presentation will remain available via the link above for on-demand participation.

Early case assessment – the most prevalent buzzword in e-Discovery int he past 12 months, I’d wager – is the subject of a webinar I’m doing this week with StoredIQ.

The main point I’ll be making that in order for ECA to be useful then it truly needs to be early; there is little point in waiting until the review stage, when high-fee lawyers are busy plowing through the information.

At that point you’re already incurring the costs of full review, so if you’re still in the process of culling .exe or .dll files from the stack then you’re wasting a lot of money, while also increasing your risk exposure of sensitive information leaving the enterprise when it doesn’t have to.

Webinar Title: Early Case Assessment – When Earlier Really Matters
Date: January 27, 2010
Time: 3:00 PM (ET)

You can register for the webinar here.

In addition to the 451 Group’s own data warehousing webinar on Thursday I will also be taking part in a webinar on Wednesday with EnterpriseDB on the subject of open source database adoption in the enterprise.

During the webinar we will provide recommendations for how organizations can effectively leverage open source software. Attendees will learn about open source software trends for 2010, top considerations when using open source databases, and best practices for successful deployments of open source software.

I’ll be providing some data points from our recent surveys on database adoption and open source adoption while EnterpriseDB’s Larry Alston will also showcase successful enterprise deployments of Postgres Plus.

The open source database webinar is Wednesday, December 16, at 1 pm ET. To register, visit this link.

The data warehousing webinar is Thursday, December 17th, at 1 pm ET. To register, visit this link.

Following the recent publication of our special report, Warehouse Optimization – Ten considerations for choosing/building a data warehouse, I will be presenting an overview of some of the key findings in a webinar on December 17.

The report provides an overview of the data-warehousing vendor landscape, as tracked by The 451 Group, and examines the business and technology trends driving this market. It identifies 10 key technology trends in data warehousing and assesses how they can be used to choose the technologies and vendors that are best suited to a would-be customer and its specific application.

During the webinar I will present some details of those ten key trends and how we see consensus forming around some technologies that have previous divided the industry, enabling the conversation to move on to business-oriented issues. As the market continues to mature, differentiation among vendors will shift from a focus on specific technologies to a reflection of various business processes.

The webinar is scheduled for Thursday, December 17th, at 1 pm ET. I will present for about 30 minutes, followed by Q&A.

If you are interested you can register for the event, and download an executive summary of the report, here.