From Where I Sit: Twenty-Seven Julys

By Larry Eiss

It was July of 1978 when I met my bride at the front of the church to exchange promises and vow to remain partners come what may. I little understood the benefits at the time.

The early days were euphoric. We were two kids who got to play at being adults in a full-size home with real dishes and a stove. As engaging as it was, after a while that game got boring. It turned out that to pay the rent it was necessary to remain gainfully employed.

Being an astute and ambitious young man I instinctively knew that to get ahead I needed to build my network and that the best way to do that was to hang out with "the guys" after work. I also assumed my wife would surmise from my failure to arrive at the usual time that I was out and she should continue on by herself as she had done all those years before meeting me.

This, of course, led to friction; and friction, as we all learned in elementary science, causes heat. There were days when each of us wished we had never made such rash promises, but we had determined to be true to our word, so we somehow stuck it out.

The years passed quickly. The children were born. They grew and went to school, while we moved around from place to place. Then there were graduations from high school and college. Looking back I see that all this took but a few days. During lean years and fat, laundry and groceries, school years and summer vacations, birthdays and funerals, Easters and Christmases, my bride and I grew closer.

These days we live in a house with no kids (at the present moment at least) and in a sense we are back where we started: she and I in a full-size home with real dishes and a stove. What's more, the game is fun again. There is little undesirable heat these days. The two of us fit one another quite well. There have been changes over the years. It was a big revelation to me, but I have come to learn that I am not good at everything. Therefore, when we travel, she navigates. When we eat in, she cooks. When numbers are involved, she's in charge.

Even more amazing to me is my discovery that she isn't good at everything either! Therefore, when we travel I make the arrangements. When we need something lifted, I have the job. When words are involved, the floor is mine. Bonded together we are much better than the two of us in simple partnership.

Twenty-seven Julys have taught me that much.

From where I sit, there is really nothing quite like a system in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. WebFOCUS 7 is such a system. Business Intelligence (BI) has delivered provable ROI at the department and division level in many enterprises. Operational IT has done the same across the enterprise.

The recent economic slowdown forced many organizations to look for new ways to compete effectively. Implementing BI across the enterprise held great promise. Leading enterprises found that significant returns were available, but most BI solutions were not ready for the rigor of organized IT oversight. They were not scalable enough to be deployed in such environments. They did not have the sophisticated load-balancing and failover features required. Worse, they did not handle application and data integration well at all. In fact, Gartner Group found that 70 percent of the cost of implementing an enterprise BI solution was consumed by integration issues.

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