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 MicroStrategy presents today with Dan Kerzner, Senior VP for Mobile, and Doug Chope, Director of Product Management, as a business and technology strategies. Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy has been in the top vendors of enterprise BI tool suites. However, they have maintained their independence, having over a million business users of their product, 2,100 employees of which 20% are R&D. FY2009 revenue was $337M. $200M in cash with no debt. Several slides gave an overview of their customer base, which is quite extensive and worldwide. We had an interesting discussion as to why MicroStrategy does not want to be acquired. Dan and Doug stressed their open systems strategy is best for their customers, since it gives customers the choice to move among a variety of alternative vendors for database, security, browsers, etc. An example of a customer who transitioned from Oracle to Teradata and was able to move several thousand MicroStrategy reports in three days. However, the bottom line is that Michael Saylor, Founder and CEO, owns 60% of the stock. So like SAS with Dr. Goodnight, MicroStrategy future will be determined by its founder, rather than a diverse Board of Directors.  Doug outlined the dimensions that their product line spans, across user scale, security, BI styles, data scale, distributed teams, and application quantity. Click on figure to the right to enlarge. Note the five styles of BI as: enterprise reporting, OLAP analysis, scorecards/dashboards, advanced analysis, and alerts/proactive notification ...all from a single unified architecture. Doug continued with mobile BI apps as a new paradigm for BI analytics. They are seeing rapid transformation of using mobile apps in their customers. I downloaded the iPhone app for MicroStrategy - free with several nice demos. Doug made the point that there is one billion persons having PCs but there is five billion persons...implying that there is a huge leverage to drive costs down for smart phones. As BI display device, future value will come from integrating new functionality like: GPS location-aware, multi-touch (tap, pinch, swipe), sensors (accelerometer, speech, barcodes), and data capture via photos. Good discussion on collaborative BI relative to MicroStrategy. And good demos of dashboards. See this set of demos here.
My Take... MicroStrategy is an oldie and a goodie! It is amazing that for 22 years they have endured and prospered and remained in the top 5 BI analytic vendors. They continue to be strong on innovation with cool technologies relevant to large corporations.
Today MicroStrategy joined us at #BBBT.
Present were Douglas Hope - Director Product Management and Dan kerzner - Sr.
Vice President.
Some context as to this blog post; I have been
working a lot with MicroStrategy in the years 1998 - 2001 with a big retailer
in the Netherlands. We selected them, implemented it and worked with the
software extensively. I was and still am deeply impressed with the software as
well as the company which is still independent and where the software is
integrated by design, not by acquisition (which I like I lot).
Independence is something that seems to be
embedded into the DNA of the company; ‘We wanna control our own destiny’.
MicroStrategy and SAS, companies that seem to have found their market,
partnering and integrating witch their environment.
MicroStrategy is especially dominant in
retail, but other branches are growing as well. And - to my suprise -
MicroStrategy is also used as an embedded application in many commercial
software packages.
Technically MicroStrategy made (in my opinion)
a huge jump the moment their server products supported 64 bit OS’s with great
variety (Linux, AIX, Windows). MicroStrategy always believed that the query
processing should be executed as close with the data as possible; being the
database. This makes a lot of sense to me. Sophisticated SQL generation which is certified to specific environments like Oracle, Teradata, Netezza
differentiates them from their competitors.
However, the real differentiator in my opinion
is ‘scale’. MicroStrategy is able to support large, complex
environment/organizations; security, mutltiple development teams, complex
business processes, 1000’s of users, large volumes of data and different types of
use.
Claudia stipulated some challenges; there is not really a solid
argument for MicroStrategy not to focus a bit more on SMB environments, but the
marketing of MicroStrategy needs to realize this. MicroStrategy seems to also
lack a bit in offering functionality regarding un-structured information as
well as collaboration. The latter MicroStrategy is working hard on. Ok...what I like (summarized): - Integrated metadata, integrated architecture; develop once, distribute many times to many different devices
- Object orientation / modularization / metadata driven development of reports, dashboard and even mobile apps!
- Uniformity in GUI for all different types of BI
- Large libraries of statistical and data mining functions (or import predictive algorithms in PMML)
- Deployment offerings that make centralized governance a real possibility (huge differentiator)
- Near-database query processing with certified SQL for a lot of vendors combined with in-memory stuff
Now, the new stuff of course was pitched; MicroStrategy Mobile. MicroStrategy is pushing the Mobile agenda hard and is making a pretty solid case. Apple devices like Ipad and Iphone, together with 3G/4G/Wifi communications and the 'apps' explosion opened up the Mobile BI market according to MicroStrategy. Interestingly, MicroStrategy is offering the Mobile suite versions for 25 users for free. Just download the Iphone App and there you go. So where is this mobile functionality used? Mainly by consumers of information, not producers. So Mobile BI will not replace the functionality offered on desktops. So - analytics on your mobile is just plain stupid, the outcomes of these analyses are however published to your mobile. To me that sounds extremely realistic. By using prompts as well as sophisticated drilling in the apps, the Mobile user has the possibility to get his hand on a lot of data. I have seen the apps and I gotta say; damn, they are hot! I really think this kind of functionality could really speed up data management/data quality/warehousing adoption big time. Furthermore, integrating Mobile BI functionality with other apps and technology like GPS, accelerometer, compass and camera makes it a disruptive cocktail. I really see this mobile BI technology making a difference to the peeps doing the day-to-day important work (police, teachers, health care personnel, ..) as well as the top executives. And these are the groups BI is traditionally struggling with. New business models will emerge.... Exciting times to come!
 Pervasive Software is presenting with Mike Hoskins, CTO, Pervasive Software and General Manager, Integration Products, and Alison Raffalovich, Director of  Corporate Marketing and Communications.Not a classic DW vendor, but they have been a data integration vendor for 27 years. They started with Btrieve (now called Pervasive PSQL) and Data Junction (now called Pervasive Data Integrator) product. The company employs 240 persons with $47M revenue in 2010, 38 profitable quarters, and $40M in cash. Pervasive is shifting its business model from perpetual licenses to subscriptions. In the recent (November 2009) magic quadrant for Data Integration, Pervasive rubs shoulder with many of the big vendors. Click on figure for larger image.  Mike started with their data integration. As noted by @Rick345, Mike argued that "Pervasive has the ability
to design and deploy anywhere... connect to everything and solve for
every integration pattern". There is an explosion of data sources, such as Amazon Relational Data, plus application interfaces, such as SAS. See the figure for the spectrum of their universal connectivity. Mike continued with overview of their Data Profiler, Integration Hub, Data MatchMerge, and Data Quality. Mike mused, "The pending data avalanche is going to kill many of the traditional data integration infrastructures".  Under NDA, Mike outlined their future plans as a "complete redesign and recoding" of the current offerings. The new business development areas are Data Rush, Business Xchange, DataSolutions, and the Pervasive DataCloud. The Pervasive Data Rush is targeting the Big Data problem, such as those in a Hadoop environment. The architecture for Data Rush has a rich assortment of analytic modules, as shown in the figure. Mike sketches the future as "aggressive use of parallelism to leverage multi-core servers with in-the-small thread-level coding." When discussing their cloud solutions, Mike is hearing from Pervasive customers, "Our internal IT group is terrible, hard to work with, unresponsive and unsympathetic to our problems". Hence, ease to deploy solutions, like the Pervasive DataCloud, would be of value. My Take...Pervasive has come a long way over 28 years since the Btrieve days. They have low visibility in the BI/DW market primarily because of the traditional OEM embedded product channel. As a financial stable company, they are moving ahead into new independent business ventures, capitalizing on the global business needs for data integration.
 Aster Data Systems is presenting with Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, EVP of Marketing, and Stephanie McReynolds, Director of Product Marketing. Their slogan is "More Data and Big Insight" to e Aster Data was at BBBT in January 2009 as summarized with a blog here. . Their annual revenue has doubled over last two years. They have scaled up their staffing across the company with an emphasis in sales, marketing and management. Customers were initially digital media and Internal-based firms,
but now represent financial services, national retailers, telecomm, with companies like Barnes
& Noble, LinkedIn, and Intuit. Many customers have Aster Data servers that co-exist with
Teradata, Oracle and IBM DB2. In one customer example, Full-Tilt Poker, a leading online poker site, is using Aster Data for fraud detection. Reports generation was reduced from once per week to just 15 minutes. Further, the fraud detection
can check 140,000 electronic poker hands per second and can react to fraud situations within 90 seconds. Partners are SAS with joint development for
in-DB analytics and go-to-market program, Carahsoft in federal sector, Dell with cloud services and PowerEdge
C-Series hardware, Microstrategy, Terremark, and Informatica. Dell will provide full integration
of Aster systems on PowerEdge C servers, doing the assembly, test, and delivery as a Dell order. Current competitors tend to be Vertica on the east coast and Greenplum on the west coast. Sharmila remarked that 70% of the big data
problem relates to data that lives outside of the primary data
warehouse. The current use case focus upon understanding customers, decide/act situations, and complex systems monitoring. We had a deep discussion on evolving definition for a data warehouse and the unique capabilities of MapReduce. The principle is to run analytics as close to the data as possible, eliminating data movement. Sharmila defined Advanced Analytics as iterative analytics that start with a few dimensions and expand to more dimensions. It should be easy to explore the data. Advanced analysis implies a more complex processing involving the reading data from the database, doing the analysis, and then writing the results back to the database. Aster Data is now offering an Eclipse-based visual development studio plus a large library of functions for common analytics. We ended with an NDA discussion of their future product roadmap. My Take...Aster Data is gaining traction among early technology adopters. However, broader acceptance is limited by general industry acceptance of database paradigm shift. It seems that many BI professionals are sitting on
the sideline waiting for others to mature and prove MapReduce technology. However, their current customers are impressive and number in the thirties. These customers are implementing innovative applications that enhance key business strategies, with use cases that are more varied. Aster Data's future products plans intend to enable further analytic innovation. My advice is: Watch this company, and understand their technology.
 Infobright with Don DeLoach, CEO, Bob Zurek, CTO and VP Product Mgt, and Susan Davis, VP Marketing is presenting their open-source analytic database. Infobright was founded in 2006 with headquarters in Toronto and offices
is Chicago (for sales) and Warsaw (for development). Product
introduction was in late 2007 with 120 customers with enterprise edition
and 40,000 downloads of community edition (called ICE). Usage is gauged
as activity in the community forums, which has 8,927 registered users (as of today) of whom are 4,000 are
active users. Don started with thoughts about recently joining Infobright in May. The company positions itself as "a high performance analytic database that delivers fast query performance against large volumes of data with minimal IT effort". Later, Don emphasized "simple, fast, low cost with small footprint".  As a customer of Infobright, Tim Moss, Chief Data Officer, from Bango, . When compared with Microsoft SQL Server, Infobright provided several orders-of-magnitude performance increase for queries. The data was compressed, in one example, from 450 GB to 10 GB for a month of data. Susan shared the use cases for their 120 customers of the enterprise edition, as shown in the figure. Web analytics and data marts are the dominate use cases. C  Bob went into the Infobright technology, which is based on Rough Set mathematics. Their competitive advantage comes from deep intelligence within the data. There are . For more details, there is an informative 18-page technology whitepaper that is available as part of the ICE Documentation Pack. Also there is a section listing whitepapers on the website. Bob ended on future directions and product roadmap. Some exciting developments are planned over the coming year! My Take... Infobright's positioning is based on: low cost, performance, scalability, lower effort - which is not bad but assumes that potential customers have existing problems of cost and performance. I feel that they need to move up the food chain in information value by focusing on the business value of 'analytics'. They have packages in which Infobright is combined with Pentho, The internals for Infobright reminds me of fractal compression that squeezes all redundancy from the data by deducing all the rules buried within the data. In other words, they "pre-analyze" the data. If this observation is valid, then Infobright's strategy is backwards. Instead of focusing on performance, they should focus on deep data analysis. I am willing to pay $100 to double my query performance, but I am willing to pay $1,000 if you tell me what my data really tells me of my business. I wonder what an analysis/visualization tool that surfaces the information embedded within the knowledge grid/nodes.
 At the wonderful new offices of ISI, Balanced Insight presented their story about collaborative BI as offered in their Consensus product. Tom Hammergren, Founder/CEO, and Mike Venerable, Board Member, lead the discussion. Mike and Tom are both long time BI/DW industry folks. Mike wrote a book with Chris Adamson and was the leader of Talus, who was acquired by Sagent, who was acquired by Pitney Bose, etc. Tom was also on the founding team at Cognos when they created PowerPlay and Impromptu and the developer of the Sybase Warehouse Studio. Tom has three DW books out there, including the latest update of Data Warehousing for Dummies. Balanced Insights was founded in 2003 by several BI veterans (like Tom) with seed funding. They have been profitable with cash flow positive. They have a 20-25 notable customers, such as Fidelity Investments, Nationwide Insurance, T-Moble, AT&T, Nike, and Subway. Tom noted that their target is the leader of BI within the IT group. However, the motivation comes mainly from the business users who have clear business problems and are aware of the potential of BI/DW to solve those problems. Their vision is combining social software with BI delivery software to increase our customer’s fact based decision making capabilities by providing a collaborative BI ecosystem. Tom argues... Current BI delivery is challenged by being inefficient and labor intensive, with business users disconnecting when dealing with the technical issues. As the business demands bigger information, the need for higher project velocity requires Agile BI Development. Tom summarized, "How our Consensus product engages people is wildly different than other Agile BI tools." " The Consensus tool interfaces (builds upon) BI suites (Business Objects, Cognos, etc.) with OLAP tools (Cognos DMR, Microsoft SSAS, etc.) and data warehouses (IBM DB2, MySQL, Oracle, Netezza, etc.).  As far as engaging users, Tom went over an example of Consensus’ collaborative approval workflow process. This capability is engineered into the agile development activities so that each BI deliverable can be reviewed by a broad set of distributed users with all feedback recorded for future reference within the Consensus Repository. A Forrester report reviewed several related vendors according to a variety of criteria. Tom argued that many of these vendors do not overlap on their core functions. Going through customer examples, Tom summarized their value proposition as: Fast with half the time, Productive with half the cost, and Engaging with continuous feedback. Cindi Howson asked about integration among the various BI tools through the development steps. Tom gave several examples of how the data structures of one tool in migrated into another stage to be use by another tools. Tom ended with their future plans (which is confidential). My Take...Balanced Insight is focusing on a very important aspect of BI/DW - effective collaborative BI, amid typical infrastructures composed of diverse fragmented tools. This is quite a challenge! Their vision is to do end-to-end collaborative BI; however, at this stage, they are doing collaborative BI delivery. Tom mentions agile development, but they need to clearly link into the framework and terminology of agile development process. The challenge for Balanced Insight to provide the full BI ecosystem is the definition of the BI function layer that sits over various technical layers, such as user access, target data, data movement, data quality, and source data. What is the business value proposal behind providing this BI layer? Digging into this question should reveal the chaos (and inefficiencies and risk) in the ad hoc activities that characterize most BI projects. Balanced Insights need to make that messy situation vividly clear in their market positioning and then leverage it.
 Teradata presented several areas where they are pushing the limits, such as multi-temperature, temporal extensions, and the like. Todd Walter, CTO, did the honors. He started with hardware stuff, because hardware will change the basic assumptions of BI professionals about what they can do. As data ages, its access frequency declines...in general. There are exceptions with seasonal analysis, fraud cases, etc.  Todd shows real data on data access frequency, as shown in the figure. 43% of IO processing concentrated on only 1% of the data (as measured by storage allocation units). Several hardware developments will impact DW architectures, such as 2.5" SFF disks, in-drive encryption, 6 Gb/s SAS drives, and enterprise Solid State Drives (SSD).  As shown to the left, there is a g. SSD will provide performance that will rebalanced this performance gap.  An interesting aspect is that DW architects have had to buy excess storage to maintain IO performance so that part
of each spindle has to be left unused if all the data is hot. NOTE: Todd checked the ratio of SSD-HDD and said, " Believe it or not, it is not a math error. HDDs are at the
high end of 10**2 and SSDs are at the low end of 10**5 and the diff is
roughly
150x." So, my correction to this figure is wrong. Please disregard! :)An analogy is like a delivery truck. If you fill it up, the truck goes at
only half speed. So, you only fill it half way. However, the implication is that very light stuff can go FREE in
back of the truck. As a result, Teradata is moving toward multi-temperature storage
hierarchies where the layers are seamless. This is an old story but with some new twists. In the second half, Todd covered the new enhancements to the new version (due out in September) in compression, geospatial, and temporal. Fascinating discussion. I tried to listen more and type less. Teradata has p. Tn. Geospatial extensions has lots of potential new applications. A discussion of the privacy issue
emerged focusing on applications that locate and track customers.Todd flew . My Take... Once the new storage developments settle, the DBMS
landscape will change dramatically! For many vendors, traditional DB data access layer will be obsoleted. Shawn Rogers put is aptly, " This is an asteroid...a dinosaur killer!"
We should have had geospatial and temporal extensions to DW ten years ago. Todd agreed, "It is way overdue!" A
 opment. In the early 1990's, River Logic founded by Dr. Robert Whitehair, an expert in mathematically modeling of complex business processes. Teaming with a group of special Russian mathematicians, hundreds of models in a variety of industries, such as chemical, manufacturing, etc. Gradually shifting from services to products as their offering. Currently they are at 55% to 45% for service to product. backbone of our Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions: Integrated Business Planner, Trade
Promotion Optimization (TPO) Planner, and Integrated Delivery System (IDS) Planner..  Shan explained a simple example of a manufacturing firm, showing the process linking into financial variables. Good discussion of the 'semantics' under the icons. For instance, the BUY object contains a set of tables that can be linked into the data warehouse tables. When the SOLVE button is invoked, current data is imported into the model processing. Philip elaborated on six specialization packages of Enterprise Optimizer. The first was a medical delivery model. A live demo showed various optimization scenarios for a paper mill operation. An interesting outcome was to reduce production to increase revenue, since the efficient capacity limits were exceed. Philip summarized their value proposition as: "For the first time, you can represent a business problem realistically without sacrificing complexity, run scenarios very quickly with low cost of ownership, and identify actions that maximize value to the organization with fact-based support across all functional silos." My Take... River Logic is pushing a contemporary marriage of Operation Research with Business Intelligence. Although the approach has a long legacy, their claims are innovative: reduction of requirements of deep modeling skills for business analysts, increase of the analytic power to solve large problems, and reduction of development time to days. The issue is how to clearly demonstrate the business value of constraint-based modeling to enhancing the current corporate BI/DW infrastructure and applications. They have tricky decisions ahead about strategies to leverage a value-add partner network. Several options are possible, such as enhancements to popular ERP modules and extension major analytic suites.
 Information Builders Inc (IBI) is presenting with Kevin Quinn, VP of Product Marketing, and Mitchell Nitzan, Director of Analyst Relations. Mike Corcoran, SVP & CMO, was not able to attend.  Tasserted that Kevin showed a couple of This allows widespread dissemination of rich analytics. Later a demo of Visual Discovery tool showed simple clicking can surface complex relationships quickly. IBI has released a version of RStat as part of WebFOCUS, as described here. A developer studio license is required; however, the RStat software is free. When an application is deployed, a fee is also required. Kevin ended with an overview of WebFOCUS 8, which is shipping in this summer with portal enhancement in December. New features include data profiler, data quality, master data management, customizable portal, better dash-boarding, in-memory visualizations, R-based predictive analytics, etc. I had to smile when seeing 8 cartoons about "when you need a better BI". Great content (with attribution) for your next talk. My Take... IBI is a long-term, established vendor in the BI market. The FOCUS lineage is impressive, having solid global customer communities. The product continues to evolve, expanding its features into a full BI suite...a long way from simple reporting on tape files. IBI tends to be omitted from discussions of BI suites. You would be smart of include them on the list.
I gotta say that I was surprised listening to the BBBT meeting with Information Builders. I tend to think of myself as somebody who is reasonable knowledgeable about tooling in the BI realm. Either I was wrong (nahh ;-)) or there is something going on with the message that is not conveyed properly.
To name a few with regard to IBI and WebFOCUS;
- IBI was founded in 1975 (35 years old - that almost as old as I am!)
- 12000 major customer sites, lots of vertical market propositions
- Coupling heterogenous sources
- Data integrity tooling (profiler, etc..)
- Complex Event Processing
- Realtime dashboard
- Performance Management (strategy maps, key metrics, etc..)
- Collaboration functionality
- RIA based BI application development (with AJAX controls)
- Predictive analytics (based on the OS R system)
- A platform for making apps (they seem to offer a lot of embedded functionality)
- Enterprise Search (very impressive stuff btw)
- Visual Discovery
- Active Reports (cool......offline HTML/PDF reports with embedded functionality)
- One unified metadata layer - also integrated with there Data Integration software (iWay)
- ....
And I am not even incorporating iWay stuff.....
IBI is offering a platform and in my opinion they are trying to sell this platform. Selling platforms makes selecting IBI a very high profile investment within any organization, in that realm the competition is tough as well as internal opposition. Why not break the platform marketing-wise into several functionalities? One example would be the Data Integrity tooling, it can easily be a separate functionality, separately marketed and priced. As I said I am not very familiar with IBI software, but I like the angle of WebFOCUS being some kind of informational development platform where you can develop and distribute data-oriented apps very quickly. It is certainly an angle that would differentiate IBI from its competitors!
Do not get me wrong; I enjoyed the session with Information Builders, a proud and independent company with solid software and a proven track record. They got some great functionality under the hood and I would like the see this software shine more often.
Thx IBI, thx Kevin for a great session. Learned a lot.
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