Boulder BI Brain Trust Blog

Greenplum (GP) has launched an initiative on the Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) that "virtualizes the analytic infrastructure over a pool of resources and giving users the power, through self-service, to instantiate their own database instances, without affecting other users." Presenting their strategies behind this initiative are: Paul Salazar, VP of Corporate Marketing and Ben Werther, Director of Product Management.

Paul summarizes their direction as pursuing EDC, wherever that might lead! Currently GP has 100 employees, $28M in funding, and 65 customers, such as NYSE, Fox Interactive Media, iCrossing, Bakrie Telecom, Reliance Communications. Since Oracle now owns Sun and Sun is an investor in GP, the issue of Oracle's control of GP was raised. Ben's answer is that the investment is minor and without Board seat, so that Oracle is not involved in confidential matters.

Ben gave an overview into scalable DBMS. Greenplum positioning is that they are unique in commodity everything for the hardware.

GP supports MapReduce, scalable MPP analytics defined by Google. A recent study by Stonebraker and DeWitt showed that MapReduce did not provide performance advantages over current SQL database engines. Ben confirmed this but added that MapReduce is a different paradigm that cater to analytic programmers. To perform similar functionality in SQL is difficult and time-consuming, even though equivalent performance is possible.

Finally we focused on the new EDC initiative, which addresses two problems: handling the ever-exploding scale of data, and the limitations of one big data warehouse. The key to this EDC approach is self-service, which is a shift of power and control to business users. GP asserts that EDW can not move at the speed of the business and actually fosters fragmented data silos. EDC allows the quick and easy provisioning of a new data marts/warehouses, all under IT control. Support the physical consolidation of data and allow its logical unification occur over time. GP is initially focusing on data mart consolidation and project sandboxes, both of which are commanding the attention of corporate IT.

My Take... GP is naive in positioning their EDC as a replacement to the traditional EDW, as a new view of corporate data. Ben countered that GP's goal was not to displace EDW but instead manage the other 90% of data that will not be incorporated into the EDW. This then surfaces issues about the nature of that 90% and benefits/costs of its incorporation (or not) into the EDW. Further, what really is the business justification for "consistent views of business reality" as embodied in the traditional EDW, as opposed to a "single integrated view" or "various divergent views". 

GP is correct in a sense of urgency to extend the scale and usage of corporate data. However, they are currently addressing only a limited solution for advanced analytical users, who are a HUGE important force but in a small segment of progressive corporations. Claudia remarked, "Their current message on EDC was making IT the arms dealer and giving guns to untrained users."

Absent is a vision for the enterprise data architecture that builds upon EDW investment by allowing the unification of information across many sources of data and many degrees of validity. EDC should be positioned as an enhancement or extension to EDW, not its replacement. GP needs to provide unification facilities to balance those provisioning facilities.

EDC is the proper direction, given business challenges and technology advances. However, GP is prematurely launching this direction as a marketing initiative. GP needs the story for IT so that IT will "jump all over it" as Ben stated.

Toward the end of our discussion, Ben presented the technical stack for EDC, as shown in this figure. Note the middle layer for EDC Platform Services...which are the unification facilities needed. Unfortunately GP is not supporting all these components currently but has a roadmap to do so in the future. My feeling is that we are seeing the beginning of a long journey. EDW and Cloud Computing are desirable dancing partners; however, the dance is yet to be choreographed.

Bottom line is that Greenplum is positioning themselves in an exciting new direction. With its heavy technical abilities and progressive leading-edge customers, Greenplum is definitely a player to follow.

Arthur Ritchie President and CEO of Sand Technology along with Linda Ahrens VP Global Alliances and Marketing are here in Boulder this morning. Sand is a software solution that is designed to keep ALL OF YOUR DATA in an instant near line, high-performance system that allows highly scalable analytics.

Arthur kicked things off discussing the The "Humpty Dumpty" enterprise data warehouse and challenging us with new ways to look at BI. Anyone who believes in a single version of the truth is crazy dictator according to Art and the point he makes is that the believing in the notion of "Single Version of the Truth" is the core of what restricts us from learning and deriving value from business intelligence. Art believes that what you really have is a series of boundary conditions and this is where the value can be found. The challenge is building a system that gives you comprehensive view and access to these boundary conditions. Along with preconceived ideas around the single version of the truth analytics are generally throttled or disabled because systems can't support exploratory business intelligence the IT team steps in to stop long queries or at best backlogs them. Sand sees these two areas as the niche where they can deliver great value to the enterprise.The ability to drill to the detail level on any and all data.

Sand/DNA solution sits between the Operating Systems collecting atomic level data before its transformed and loaded into the EDW. The DNA product also denormalizes the atomic data so that a user can understand and see what is available. The Sand/DNA Access solution sits on the top side of the EDW providing a platform to access the atomic level information that normally can't be retrieved from and EDW. This supports data mining, predictive analytics. As I listen to Art I was starting to think they are much like an analytic appliance but the difference is that the appliances can't or don't crunch atomic level data and can't support 100's of users at one time.

The ability to store atomic level information not only supports interesting BI and predictive analytic opportunities but it also severs as a great source for the auditing and data governance initiatives that many companies are attempting to solve. Additionally the ability not to load detail/atomic data in the EDW will reduce the cost involved with the system and eliminate some of the strain power users are already putting on the system.

It was a fun session, Thanks Art and Linda for joining us today!

Visible Technologies (VT) is a provider of online brand management solutions for the new Web 2.0 media environment, giving clients insights in consumers' attitudes and intents. Presenting their strategies and directions are Bill Baker, CTO and Blake Cahill, VP of Marketing. The focus is on social data integration with existing platforms and on the creation of the Social XML standard.

Social media is exploding...without substance? Watching the conversations surrounding your business. 75% persons engaging in social conversation. They are categorized into five types. The blogsphere has grown with steadily decreasing cycle time. Twitter has 15M. Facebook has 200M users spending 2.6 billion minutes per day. Brands are no longer in control of their destiny because social media has hijacked.

The company... VT founded in 2005 They have 83 employees in Bellevue WA and offers products that track, measure and engage in social media conversations (TruCast) and online reputation management (TruView). Bill said, "This is BI - it's the data we always wanted. ...Twitter is the world's biggest focus group."

Demo... TruCast for a large tech firm. Showing Topic Manager. Gut tells me that this stuff is tough! Garbage-to-signal ratio is huge. Structuring this networking data into something meaningful to VT clients is a continual challenge. Slide on "Why can't you use Google?" To do it properly, need to do hundreds of searches, and content is multi-topic.

Yes, you can generate a cute dashboard. But what do you do with this information?

Engagement Manager... neat! Asks my questions about actionable. consistent message from company. can have templates to answer popular issues. Leading to engagement with positive folks (to encourage) or negative folks (change attitudes.

Where are the conversations going on? ...the ecosystem shows the connections with blog sites to individuals. Colored in green/red to indicate opinions. Can browse around, expanding branches of the network structure.

Content pipeline... has three stages: filter/validate, categorize/enrich, score...as shown below. Off to the left side is a traditional data warehouse that strips off the good data from the 3 stages. Bill said, "One persons spam is another person's ham!" when asked about what data to save. 

Scoring can be done automated but to do it properly, use people who are properly trained.

BrandCloud... neat! left=neg, right=pos, top=your-brand, bottom=competitor-brand, middle=generic-brand.

An example was a client was about to launch a campaign, but discovered that product was not in stock. Duh... A disconnection between marketing and manufacturing. The uses for TruCast range beyond sales and marketing into product design and product life cycle.

My Take... VT is focusing on a tough problem that has potential to enable traditional companies to be smart about new social media. My primary concern was about what you do with social analytics. The discussion about engagement was very insightful. VT is doing good work and is a company that I will track.

Post-Script... That afternoon I received the June 1 issue of BusinessWeek that contained an article What's A Friend Worth? by Stephen Baker. I would recommend this article as background reading on Visible Technologies and their business focus.

Bill Baker, CTO and Blake Cahill, SVP Marketing are here bright and early this morning to present Visible Technologies to a packed house here at the Boulder BI Brain Trust. At its simplest Visible is a SaaS based listening tool for companies to monitor the world of social networking to watch brand and gauge sentiment towards topics. The value is how a company then forms a strategy around the ability so see this conversation. Visible has collected 230M conversations and it grows by 1M a day they are running over 13 terabytes today with dramatic growth. I write a lot about my frustration with companies like United and Sears if these companies were actually dedicated to customer service and success they would engage solutions like Visible offers to learn how we all feel about them.

The technology side of Visible is interesting from the unstructured to structured side of things. I wonder when these types of solutions will be integrated into the world of conventional business intelligence solutions. They would add a ton of value to just about any business. The Visible SaaS platform offers a great feature called a response vault allowing a company to create approved and consistent response to issues uncovered in the social world. The solution is a comprehensive suite of solutions that provide layers of tools that enable a company to effectively manage and participate in the social graph of their brand. They focus on four main areas - Listen & Learn, Analyze & Understand, Engage, Integrate as mentioned it covers all the needs around this business challenge.

The suite is user friendly, well designed and seems to offer a deep array of the tools needed to help create success around the challenge of hearing and participating in the social conversation.

Kalido shares their insights into metadata, master data management, and data governance. Leading the discussion were: Bill Hewitt, president and CEO, Winston Chen, VP of Strategy and Business Development and Stephen Pace, Senior Pre-Sales Consultant.

Corporate Overview: This is a company with a long heritage as a spin-out from Shell Oil in 1985. Their approach is 'generic data modeling' which resulted in the standard ISO 10303 to define product data throughout the life cycle of a product. Currently the company has 85 enterprise customers, 275 installations in 100 countries, and 100 employees in Burlington MA and in London development center. Pricing ranges from $5,000 per month subscription to several million dollars for a global enterprise project.

Corporate Vision: Kalido have merged all their previous products into Information Engine, which includes Kalido DW and Kalido Master Data Mgt. Bill summarized their vision in this cartoon. "In future, info delivered as a service and consume in realtime."

Kalido is refocusing on data governance (DG), which they define as "high level policies and enforcement". Part of this is the Master Data Management (MDM), which is a major part of DG. Kalido provides a way for non-IT business people owe, control, and drive the IT architecture. Setting and enforcing rules and policies.

They claim that they are the only vendor that provides a fully governed BI infrastructure. It seems that the validity is based on your definition of DG. Since this is not my area of expertise, I am struggling about where the boundaries for DG are.

Go-To-Market Strategy: Points cited are:

• industry-specific solutions in pharma, insurance, CPG
• port to the Netezza platform
• subscription pricing for Microsoft mid-market
• partnership with Accenture
  

Solutions: Kalido offers pre-built solutions that provide 80-90% of the business requirements for a particular industry, such as Pharmaceutical, Insurance, and Sustainability Reporting. In addition, the remaining 10-20% can be customized using their extensible modeling framework.

Demonstration: Stephen rocked! Cover a lot of ground on data quality in an insurance company. By the way, the Information Modeler product is free! But the free version can not publish the model changes to the database.

Thoughts: Kalido faces a tough sell process requiring an internal champion who really understands the technical issues with enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and can effectively argue their implications to the business. Partnerships with management consulting firms like Accenture could be pivotal to Kalido's future.However, I have  no doubt that the issues that Kalido is solving with their current products are critical to the adaptability of the EDW (and the entire IT infrastructure in many ways) to the business changes in the global economy.

Postscript: Over lunch (see pic) we discuss the situations in which DG would be critical. My take-away over lunch is that DG becomes more critical and more difficult as a company diverges from traditional EDW architectures. In particular, multiple data sets that are maintain outside the data center for outsourcing services (call centers and various SaaS suppliers) require extra oversight as to data quality and other data-related SLA.

Bill Hewitt, President & CEO, Winston Chen, VP Strategy & Business Development and Stephen Pace, Sales Solutions Engineer joined us here in Boulder today to brief the "brain trust" on Kalido. Good news from them company at 100+ employees, 275+ implementations in 100 countries.

One of the Kalido value propositions is that they help IT and Business bridge the gap when it comes to the traditional IT driven model building. Their modeling tool does a solid job of speeding up what would otherwise be a long and arduous task. The interface makes it easier for both sides to address the governance issues, collaborate, and automate the overall process.

Its great to see that Kalido has made investments into domain specific features and expertise.  They have specialized features in place for Consumer Packaged Goods, Pharmaceutical, Insurance and Financial Services,
Manufacturing & Heavy Assets.

I've been briefed by Kalido many times and I still have to say that the best part is the demonstration of the software. I think they should lead with it and then follow up with the PowerPoint details. The biggest value that jumps out every time is how easy it is to use. The modeling tool is very easy to understand even if your a business person. You can clearly see the way it bridges the gap between the geeks and the executives.

Overall my impression of Kalido remains very positive. The core competencies include dual focus on the Data Warehouse with Governed DW and BI solutions along with Master Data Management solutions that focus on Master data and reference data governance solutions. The data modeling tool is a great cornerstone to these and really makes Kalido different from many others in the market.

expressor software presented with John Russell, chief scientist & co-founder and Dr. Michael Waclawiczek, VP of Marketing. Their focus is on high-end Data Integration (DI) product. Launched company in May of last year. Raised $10 M in August along with an additional $6 M. Shipped expressor 1.2 in November. Headquarter in Burlington. 28 employees. Busy little company in its 11 months from its launch.

Their pricing based on 'channels' (units of data parallelism) at $20 K per channel, implying low-cost sales process targeting SI. If they are successful, they can shift the paradigm for the DI marketplace, lowing the usually huge price for large DW shops and providing a nice entry point for smaller shops. Market opportunity with 70% in DI custom-coding, to where they are migrating. Nice set of partners from large DW vendors, DW appliance, resellers, and a few SIs. Still confused about the initial rationalization of metadata, especially from external source.

Shown at right, expressor tools range form initial definition to execution parameters: constructor, initiator, administrator, illustrator, and communicator. In several cases, they did a nice use of Microsoft Office plug-ins with Excel & Visio. Using Lua open-source scripting inside.

We discussed parallel processing models: SIMD vs MIMD. They use a hybrid similar to MIMD but more lightweight...threaded. Unique cache-locality processing because it is written in low-level C, not in C++ or Java.

Unofficial data rates range 3-10 TB/hour with 64 parallel channels, with data compression and encryption.

New versions coming! Sorry, details under NDA.

Despite my confusion on several issues, I would recommend taking a close look at expressor if DI is your pain spot. First, view the demo on their website. Second, read their literature. Third, buy a 6-mo license for one channel and apply it to your data as a proof of concept. Fourth, construct your business justification and project plans. Finally, circulate your RFP to the SI partners of expressor software. If you do this, please share with me your experiences.

Bitam came to discuss EPM products in a Software as a Service model, BI industry in a bad economy, and the future of EPM in US and globally. Leading the discussion is Manuel Lopez, COO and Professional Services and Consulting.

Bitam's mission is “To improve business performance transforming valuable information into better business decisions" focusing on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). I like taglines... Bitam's tagline is "intelligent knowledge you drive." With 57% of their employees in the research area, Bitam has a high emphasis on research rather than sales.

They became globally oriented about five years ago and placed an emphasis on the US about three years ago. Privately held and conservative financially. Privately held. 30+ consecutive quarters of profitability. When asked about 1Q09, Manuel said that this quarter 'should be' profitable. Headquarters in Reston, VA, Tampico, Mex, and Madrid, Spain, with their origin from Tampico.

They have 1,500 customer, with 100+ of them in SaaS. View customers. 97% loyalty rate based on maintenance renewals. 20% switch from other BI products. Most customers in Latin America from Mexico to Brazil, along with Spain. When asked how they have some many customers, Manuel said, "We are easy to do business with. We take the risk from the customer by doing more up front." It is impressive that 75% of their customers are small-medium businesses (with annual revenue less than $500M).

Manuel was asked about their uniqueness of their offerings, "Bitam started with the business problem, formulated a business strategy, designed a complementary methodology, and then developed homegrown products to support that methodology."

The biggest competitor was characterized as 'ignorance'. When pressed about major BI tool vendor, like Cognos, they has an 80% win rate when the customer is deciding whether to buy Bitam or the other vendor. When pressed further about customers already having a major BI tool, Manuel said that most customer are stuck in reporting and are 'ignorant' of dashboards and other EPM areas. Claudia asked who is your typical customer, business or IT. Manuel responded that it is usually the business where their value for EPM is more apparent.

Manuel argued that Bitam's value proposition is:

• High user adoption rate
• Up to 50% reduced implementation time
• Up to 75% reduced Support cost
• Up to 75% lower TCO
• Easy to do business with
• Open technology for seamless integration

Merv made the point that most of this value proposition is not a value proposition from the customer's perspective.

Covered a case study for Home Depot. Reduction of IT support from 4 dedicated to Cognos to 1 at 50% for Bitam. 100+ stores track sales, shipments.

Bitam recently acquired KPI Online, an OEM customer who took Bitam into SaaS delivery to 100+ subscribers.

After the break, we got into Bitam's notions of Knowledge Intelligence. Then, Manuel demo-ed their product set, starting with strategic planning using Stratego. From the strategy, Bitam can monitor performance. From performance to scoring individual's performance to those strategic objectives. Can then display as dashboards. By right-clicking on any KPI, the user can bring up the Knowledge Intelligence component that will display the Probable Causes. Under each cause, are suggestions for possible solutions. Next to the solution is a button to Add Initative, which creates a project to execute on that solution.

Founded in 2000 and already in 25 countries with 125 employees and 11 offices worldwide. Bitam is enjoying fast growth and expansion. They serve 1500 customers with more than 100 of them utilizing SaaS based solutions. 75% of their clients are $500 Mil or less they have great success in the middle market.

A few financial highlights of Bitam's recent successes:
30+ consecutive quarters of profit with (1st Qtr. 2009 looking strong)
28% rev growth in 07
56% rev growth in 08

They specialize in delivering the EPM Cycle, strategic planning, financial planning and business intelligence. Bitam finds most of its traction when helping the business side of the company. They tend to see the value in utilizing the information to drive the company versus the IT angle of platforms, software and cost concerns. The solution line up includes 3 central products Strategic = Stratego, Planning = Ektos and for Monitoring = Artus.

Its interesting that Bitam doesn't so much aim at the middle market but has found very solid traction within it. I think this is a trend we will see from more and more companies. Smaller firms need and want the same tools as the big guys. Often times its probably more important to them to survive. Implementation times from Bitam vary but the average is 3-6 weeks. They leverage both tools and service to help their clients.

Bitam built out an acquired solution (purchased in 2009) call KPI Online to provide analytical models. The system has 1000 free subscribers who get access to a couple different KPI's while the 100+ paying customers have full access to all the information on the site. Originally KPI Online was a customer of Bitam technology and they used it to build the KPI Online site.

I have to admit I wasn't too informed on Bitam prior to today and it was great to learn about the company and I also enjoyed meeting Manuel Lopez COO.

ChartSearch presented an overview of their company and product, with Chris Modzelewski, founder and CEO presiding. Chris summed up his product as the "Google for Data". Tagline is "better leverage available data throughout the enterprise". Chris has been working on product for three years and started in April to talk with clients. He has eight beta customers in pilot projects, some of which are close to production applications with ChartSearch.

The company is targeting enterprise IT shops and OEM partnerships with data providers and software analysis vendors. He is currently focusing on the latter with the ability to brand ChartSearch for those providers/vendors using Java web services.

Chris emphasized that his product complements (not replaces) traditional BI tools by extending data analytics to nontechnical business users.

Depending on data complexity, installation requires anywhere from two days to two weeks. In collaboration with the IT group, the relevant metadata is specified in the Data Search Markup Language (DSML) and is used to drive the search procedures and chart generation.

Chris gave a great demo of ChartSearch. It has nice features for translating confusing requests from a business user into precise queries to the database. It generates multiple interpretations, ranked in order of relevance, according to a confidential algorithm .
They are working with eight beta customers in pilot projects. The challenge will be to move them from pilot to production and start some revenue flowing to ChartSearch.

We ended with an in-dpeth discussion of business strategies about whether Chris should focus on partnering with SaaS vendors. Since these vendors already have defined the metadata level, the ChartSearch could be an easy enhancement for those SaaS tools.

ChartSearch is a company to watch as it matures its product and grows its customer base. It is a likely evolutionary step for traditional BI tools in furthering the pervasiveness of analytics throughout the enterprise.