Brain Trust Blog

The BBBT pondered the past and future of the British firm, Kognitio, which has deep roots into the database community. In 1992 ex-Teradata people formed WhiteCross Systems, which merged with Kognitio in 2005. It currently employs over 70 persons at Bracknell, UK, building a group in Chicago to serve the US market, and has over 30 customers across several industries, like finance, retail, and telecom. We were briefed by Sean Jackson, VP Marketing, John Thompson, EVP and General Manager of US, and Roger Gaskell, Chief Technology Officer.

The focus is high-performance analytics at a low cost. The scalable MMP architecture executes on any collection of x86 blade servers under Linux interconnected with TCP/IP. There is no indexing and no materialized aggregations. The system is said to perform well with high data volumes and high workload concurrency.

A distinctive of Kognitio is that they have a full SQL functional row-oriented database engine that achieves good performance with complex query processing. This runs contrary to industry wisdom that only column-oriented engines can achieve such performance. The magic comes from: spreading data evenly across many nodes, extensive use of in-memory processing, generation of x86 machine code for query processing, mature cost-based optimizer, and smart pipelining of temp data among the nodes. The pipelining reminded me of the old Y-bus unleashed.

Another distinctive of Kognitio is that they have three ways of delivering their product/service. First, they licence their database as a normal software product. Second, they will sell a complete appliance as a hardware/software bundle. And third, they offer data warehousing as a service, hosted in their own data center and third-party data centers.

Now that is flexibility! Check them out! These brits have more to offer than Newcastle Brown.

I've blogged about HP's business intelligence strategies over at my blog at the Business Intelligence Network. My impression a year ago was that HP was serious about being a major player in the business intelligence and performance management space and should probably be on your short list when investigating solution providers. It seems that things are continuing on the right path. Rod Walker, John Santaferraro and Greg Battas all joined us for the meeting today and covered the business intelligence portfolio, whats new in the group and where they plan to go in the future.

Notable announcements in 2007 included the Knightsbridge Solutions acquisition, the addition of Ben Barnes to the executive ranks, the Neoview launch, new research from HP's labs. This year staffing on the Neoview side has been doubled, marque clients are in place in many verticals and solution upgrades on Neoview continue. Sales force development and service build up are key to their progress going forward with Neoview as well as developing the partner ecosystem.

HP continues to move its solutions along the following track, Tactical - Strategic - Operational - Transformational while most clients are still jumping the chasm between strategic and operational business intelligence HP is focusing on solutions to assist along the entire journey with a focus on the operational side of things.

HP Decision Center  for IT Analytics is now being used by over 30 clients and is a solid example of their commitment to performance management.

Overall things at HP are steaming ahead, often times when I visit with big companies on an annual basis the story changes along with the focus. I have to say that HP has been transparent with their overall roadmap and plan to for the business intelligence and performance management sector and the strategy has stayed consistent.


Tags: HP, business Intelligence,operational business Intelligence, performance management

Ken Rudin, CEO and co-founder of LucidEra, subjected himself and his company to the scrutiny of BBBT. In my humble opinion, all emerged from this experience fill of insights into an emerging market segment called BI-as-a-Service.  

I was impressed with the focus and depth that Rudin has instilled into his company. This is a market for which it is so easy to deal with the superficial, with making the next sale, without struggling with the larger issues. Rudin stressed that their service provides solutions with simplicity, innovation and a time-to-value of days. Further, Rudin aptly argued that LucidEra is not selling a data warehousing service that generates fancy reports. They are selling access to the best business practices in key business processes, which they call ‘analytic applications’. The reports are the means, but they are not the ends.

For example, current focus of LucidEra is to leverage the data from SalesForce.com with analytics about sales pipeline performance. The reports vary across sales pipeline evolution, closed revenue comparison, sales KPI, trends in new/repeat business and lead sources. One usually gawks at these reports and thinks: “if we only had that information for our company. Where do I sign?”

The wise manager realizes that their way of doing business must incorporate the best practices embedded in LucidEra’s services. This implies that the individuals involved must think deeply about key issues and surface the false assumptions that they have carried for years. The best information only has value if it is utilized in a critical business process. That utilization is dependent on individuals who must understand the information, connect its significance to the business, and execute the necessary changes to the business.

An exciting future for BI-as-a-Service is the opportunity for continuous incremental improvement of those best business practices. SaaS offerings often change in small increments every day. LucidEra can evolve their service easily because the software is managed within their data center. Further, the application of social networking to the LucidEra customer base can build a community that shares their ideas for better business practices. The existence of such a community will become a major decision criteria whether to adopt a vendor’s solutions. This is a development to watch, particularly with LucidEra and the other BI-as-a-Service vendors.

Finally, is BI-as-a-Service complimentary to or disruptive of enterprise IT? See another blog for some thoughts.

Ken Rudin, the CEO of LucidEra, presented to the Boulder BI Brain Trust last Friday, May 2, and what a presentatin it was. I certainly learned a lot about Software as a Service (SaaS) or the on-demand model for business intelligence. Is this fact or fiction? There can be no doubt that the on-demand model is alive and well. Good customer traction, funding from the VC community, innovative offerings -- all spell a good business model.

Some interesting tidbits from the presentation:

1. Ken emphasized that LucidEra is NOT a BI company. Sounds strange at first but he went on to explain that his customers are not IT implementers - they are sales or marketing VPs, directors, managers -- business users in other words. If his sales people comes in waving the BI flag, talking about data, reports, queries, etc., they would immediately get shuttled off to the IT department. Instead, their conversations focus on managing performance, tracking sales effectiveness, or monitoring revenue generation activities - these are what is important to the business, not terabytes of storage or whether the solution is MPP or not...

2. The core values of LucidEra come from this new way of thinking. The first one is Simplicity. Most BI environments are quite complex. Ken likens them (tongue firmly in cheek of course) to building a nuclear reactor just to get electricity. The on demand model removes all the complexity of gathering the data, integerating it, cleaning it up, and storing it from the customer. Now they can simply focus on the analysis of their buisness. The second value is Customer Adoption. The on-demand model by its nature must be very sensitive to the adoption of their services in the customer's business community. If the business community is not using their services, then they will not resubscribe to them - end of story. LucidEra works hard to demonstrate to their customers how they can benefit by usng more of the capabilities. Since they know exactly what services are being used, by whom, and how often, they have great insight into the customer's adoption of them. They also get immediate feedback regarding how easy their services are to use, what features are useful, and what features are not. The third value for LucidEra is Analytic Innovation - their sales model as mentioned is very different from the traditional on-premises one. Rather than focus on a complex and tool-based IT sale, LucidEra emphasizes a simple and solutions-based sale. The final value they embrace is Customer Success -- the bottom line is that they get immediate feedback in terms of the successful usage of their products by their customers. No usage equates to no subscrition. Hence their sensitivity and focus on customer success.

3. This lead to the last topic I wanted to cover -- Ken is very excited about LucidEra developing an online community of users so they can help each other. He commented that people don't know what they don't know. A community that discusses how they use their analytic services can educate each other and overcome this lack of knowledge. Ken wants LucidEra to be the catalyst for this. A worthy ideal indeed.

 If you want to hear more about these and other topics, please listen to the podcast I did with Ken. You can find it here.

 

Until next time... this is Claudia Imhoff.

Goodbye and good business!

IBM hosted a great dinner last night for Boulder BI Brain Trust members at Brasserie Ten Ten in Boulder. It was a great way to kick off the meeting and carried over to a full house here this morning. Arrive early or you have to stand in the corner. 15 people attending today a great turnout from IBM and the Brain Trust.

The first theme is that IBM has been strategic in their M&A process. I think this is important to point out because I saw a lot of comments out there prior to the Cognos acquisition that IBM wasn't doing solid deals or enough deals. I think the following image does a good job of illustrating how well they have done.

Skip ahead 90 minutes.....

So the image and paragraph above I wrote over an hour ago since then I've been listening as Bill O’Connell, Ph.D. and Distinguished Engineer & Data Warehousing CTO for IBM Information Management Software walk us through a good portion of the IBM Data Warehouse Stack. I have to admit my mind has melted a bit but in a good way. I have always been a champion of the little guy especially those who deliver innovative solutions and generally I don't see a lot of innovation when talking to companies that are dragging around a ton of legacy solutions wrapped into a monster stack. Bill has done a great job of showing exactly how IBM isn't a lumbering giant.

The acquisitions listed above along with innovations from IBM labs have provided just about everything you might need for your organization. The blend of features, solutions and platforms are designed to fit just about every business challenge. Also they have the ability to serve smaller companies so don't think your too small to have IBM help you. I think the underlying theme for me is every time Bill talks about a new section of the solution stack he is able to highlight recent innovations, upgrades and increased integration of features.

I enjoy these deep dives it allows a level of detail that I can't get during a 30 minute update style briefing.

BI Brain Trust members in attendance today: Claudia Imhoff, Colin White, John Myers, Bonnie O'Neil, Lu Kroeger, Dan Linstedt, Richard Hackathorn, Myself, Ron Powell, James Donnellan, Kym Wootton.

Tags: Business Intelligence, IBM, InfoSphere Warehouse, Cognos

I too attended Vertica, and I must say: this appears to be the FIRST column based database vendor to _get it right_.

For those of you who don't know me: I'll tell you this, ask my friends - I will tear up the marketing material and look for all the pieces to be in good working order, and technically sound/stable before I give my word on something.  It's just who I am.

Vertica has got me excited, the first database engine to actually get me excited since the 1980's... ok... the early 90's...  Anyhow, it was a pleasure to see that Vertica has thought about the loading performance, right along side the query performance, right along side the ability to query DEEP OR WIDE at the same time.  Through some proprietary technology, and internals that I cannot discuss - they've managed to overcome many of the achillies heels that have struck the other VLDB/MPP solutions in the past.  Like Shawn, I too was _very_ impressed that they already had 50 customers (big names) when they came to present.

I hope to see more on Vertica as they grow.

Andy Palmer Co-Founder and Omer Trajman Field Engineer are here this morning. I've been waiting a long time for this one. Vertica has gotten lots of mainstream press from the weekly tech publications to the Wall Street Journal. They have taken their time coming to market but get tons of attention because Michael Stonebraker is a Co-Founder along with Andy.

They have put a very strong executive team together past Oracle, Ingres, DB2, Informix and Teradata executives. Vertica is an Analytic Database, has shared nothing column architecture, can be deployed in an appliance configuration, software only or in a cloud. My first surprise, today they have 50 paying clients that include Verizon, Tick-Store, JPMorgan, Comcast and Vonage. I'd love to give you performance details but so far I can't mention any due to NDA restrictions. They have been so quite with their marketing I wasn't aware they had such good traction.

Surprise number two is they are positioning themselves as a cost leader in the space and believe they are much less expensive than other companies offering solutions in the space. One of the other areas they are bringing value is time to implement where they feel they are much faster to production than others. Much of the technology behind the system was built from scratch and brings together features that have been in the market for a long time. Column Store Architecture, Compression, Query Optimized storage, high Availability, Concurrent load and query, simple DB design, scalable hardware. The value point here is that unlike others who add these features along the way the Vertica system was designed from the ground up to incorporate all of them.

Surprise number three, performance is not what they hang their hat on they focus more on solving the specific issues presented by the customer. Surprise number four, they have extremely cool technology built in at the record level that does make them different than other columnar database vendors.

This was a fun BBBT, Claudia Imhoff, Richard Hackathorn, Dan Linstedt, John Myers, Kym Wootton and Lu Kroeger were all in attendance. Thanks Andy and Omer.

Lesley Proctor Marketing & Communications Manager and Alan Winters Senior Product Manager presented at the Boulder BI Brain Trust today and helped us understand the driving force behind why Corda does what it does. We always get to hear what a company does but its not often we get insight into the roots or motivations of a company. CEO John Purvis understands customer service and guides the company based on the lessons found within the Harvard Business Review articles by James Heskett, Earl Sasser and Leonard Schlesinger titled The Service Profit Chain. You should add the book to your business reading list so you can get the whole story I think this approach to the market is the secret behind the success of Corda.

Corda brings four solid solutions to the market all centric to Decisions with Performance Dashboards. PopChart a real-time, interactive, drill down enabled charts and graphs solution capable of getting data from any source. OptiMap a mapping dashboard solution, Highwire a solution that takes output and generates PDF documents from HTML pages for printing, archiving, portability email etc. And CenterView which offers all the above plus data aggregation and collection, portal support, data snapshots, collaboration alerting and a lot more.

A great feature of the Corda Dashboard solutions is a feature called best image fall back which allows the Corda server to read your client and send the best possible image supported. For instance if you access information from a cell phone the system is smart enough to decide that you would be best served by supply a *.jpg and if you access the same information with your desktop browser the system will deliver the same information but in flash.

Corda includes a builder application included inside all the solutions allows you to design and create custom views and dashboards.

To sum up, Corda is independently owned, 13 years old, profitable and unencumbered by VC's. The 60 employee firm has a culture around it that support enthusiasm and innovation. The focus of doing one thing and doing it well is paying off for them.

Tags: Corda, Dashboard, Performance Management, Service Profit Chain

Kim Stanick VP Marketing and Barry Zane CTO of Paracell are briefing the group today. The underlying theme is "its about time". I agree it is all about the time, time is what drives the need for analytics and time is critical to the value of analytics. The days of waiting 60 hours for a query result are well past us now. ParAccel is addressing the issue and sees the value in solving the time problem. ParAccel bring the following architectural highlights to the time problem.

• Fully Transactional DBMS
• Columnar Orientation
• Adaptive compression
• Shared-nothing, MPP design
• Parallel Loader
• High Availability w/performance
• CPU-based optimization
• tightly-coupled grid protocol

Interesting news from the briefing include their recent success with TPC-H benchmarks. Hitting the top of the list in runs for 100GB, 300GB and 1TB this past October. The interesting part for me isn't just the speed but the cost factor, further proof that appliances can impact your analytics from a hard cost perspective. The result of the benchmark puts the scaled queries per hour cost at $4.57 with the ParAccel solution versus the previous records from other companies that cost between $25 to as high as $60 per query hour.

Another great session today with a large turn out from the Boulder BI Brain Trust members.In attendance Ron Powell, Claudia Imhoff, Hans Hultgren, Richard Hackathorn, Lowell Fryman, Holli Arnett, Mike Brooks, Joyce Montanari, Lu Kroeger, John Myers, Steve Dine.

Bob Eve Vice President Marketing and David Besemer CTO at Composite visited the Brain Trust today to talk about the world of Data Integration and how their company brings value to the marketplace. For those of you not up to speed on Composite they integrate data between the top layer of Dashboards, reporting and applications and the data layer.  Composite creates a Virtual data layer for the top layer to utilize. A core value to the solution according to David is the "easy stuff should be easy and the hard stuff should be possible".

What I like best about the Composite story is that its elegant and simple. They hang their hat on the important and simple things. Query optimization gives you the data fast, they have the right type of security in place, caching, clustering technology, management tools, strong and simple design platform and it works with just about every technology.

I like to distill things down to a basic value proposition. So here goes, if you use ETL to move what you need around to applications, reporting systems and struggle with timeliness issues and the costs involved. Composite can provide you access to the same data easier faster and has a much lower TCO. While providing real-time on demand data integration.

I appreciate the time Bob and David spent today, I have walked away with a much deeper knowledge of the company and the value they bring to the market. For more information on their solutions check out Composite Software.

Tags: Composite Software, Data Integration,